The Broken (28 page)

She missed her, Hannah realized suddenly. With Sasha around all the time, it hadn’t been necessary to make any other close friends among the playground parents. Sasha was inclined to monopolize, to demand your complete and undivided attention. Now Hannah regretted having put all her eggs in one basket. Now there was no one to go to for advice about what had happened between Lily and September, no one to roll their eyes and say
Don’t you hate it when that happens?
and make it normalized and all right.

‘Here you are, Mummy. I mean, Madam.’ Lily had appeared on the platform and was holding out an invisible cup through the wooden bars.

Hannah reached up and took it, her heart inflating with love at the mixture of pride and anxiety on her daughter’s face. As if this was a real drink she was waiting to hear the verdict on.

It was an hour or so later when she finally let them in through the door of the flat. By this time, her pleasure at having spent proper time with her daughter was already vying with her guilt at having neglected her work. As usual, the guilt was winning. The first sign of everything not being as it should was the small pink-and-yellow flowery backpack in the hallway. Not Lily’s. The second sign was a stifled giggle from the living room.

‘Thank God you’ve arrived. We can stop posing. My arm has practically fallen off.’

Sasha and September were sitting on the sofa, beaming, September holding an extravagant bouquet of flowers so large it practically obscured her face, and her mother proffering a bag of cakes from that expensive bakery on the Broadway.

‘But how . . .?’

‘We waited outside for ages. Practically days. Then I remembered that you’d given me your spare key, so we let ourselves in to wait. We thought you’d spontaneously combusted or something, you took so long.’

Hannah was too surprised to react. True, she did remember giving Sasha and Dan a set of keys before they went away on holiday a couple of years back, in that nonsensical way you do, as if having a keyholder a few streets away rather than a time zone away will somehow guard against anything bad happening. But surely they’d asked for the keys back afterwards? She tried to think, to reach back in time to pluck the memory from the air – the act of reclaiming the spare keys. But it eluded her. Maybe they’d forgotten to ask for them. Maybe by the time they needed them again they could no longer remember who they’d left them with and went to get another set cut, Josh complaining – as he was bound to do – about the cost. It was possible. But this? Letting herself in? Taking possession of the sofa? Hannah noticed that September was wearing a daisy-chain headband of Lily’s. Then she remembered how bereft she’d felt in the playground, wishing Sasha was there, and her anger stalled.

‘Don’t be cross, Hans.’ Sasha had dropped the brittle frosted-on smile and was gazing at her anxiously as if everything depended on her reaction. Her eyes seemed sunken into her head, as if they were drowning. ‘Please let’s not fall out. I can’t bear it. Look, I brought you these peace offerings.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her tiny hand, indicating the cakes and the flowers.

Hannah tried to smile at September, whose pretty little face was poking out between the blooms.

‘Why don’t you two girls go into the kitchen and get a biscuit?’ she suggested over-brightly. ‘I think there are some of those chocolate dinosaurs.’

There was a pause while Lily and September eyed each other cautiously. Hannah could almost see the teeth-shaped bruise on Lily’s arm burning through the wool of her jumper. Then September laid the flowers on the table and jumped up, grinning at Lily, and they made their way out of the room.

They’d hardly set foot through the door before Sasha started.

‘I’m sorry I upset you the other day. I know it sounded like I wasn’t taking it seriously, what September did, but I was. It’s just I was so freaked out by what happened at Brent Cross. And finding out you were pregnant came as such a shock.’

Again that instinctive blow to the guts.
Pregnant.

‘I’m happy for you, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it brought home to me how disastrously wrong everything has gone in my life. I mean, we used to talk about doing it together, do you remember? We’d get pregnant at the same time so that our younger kids could grow up together, just like Lil and September. And now here you are going ahead and having another baby, while my husband is living with someone else and may well be trying to fucking kill me.’

Her voice wavered on the last two words, but she visibly fought against crying. ‘I promised myself I wasn’t going to get upset. I know I’m like a stuck record and it must be so boring to be around me.’ Hannah could hardly bring herself to look at Sasha. Clearly she didn’t know yet about Sienna being pregnant. She imagined how it must feel for her, having her future yanked out from under her like a magician’s tablecloth. The family she thought she’d have, the home she imagined she’d built.

‘Did you talk to the police again?’ she asked, to change the subject. ‘About what happened on the escalator? Did they look at the CCTV footage?’

Sasha gave a dismissive snort. ‘The police made it pretty obvious they think I’m some mad rich bitch with an overactive imagination. They came round to the house, two of them, and they didn’t stop staring at my things. They kept saying things like, “Nice sofa. Could fit my whole flat into that sofa,” and, “Lovely views. I look out on to the Dixi Chicken.” You know, it was like they were judging my suitability as a victim based on all the
stuff
I have.’

Sasha’s violet-shadowed eyes were momentarily wide with remembered outrage. Hannah could imagine it all too clearly. The police officers silently noting the velvet chaise longue, the French crystal chandelier, the Bang & Olufsen sound system. Sasha brittle enough to snap.

‘Do you know something, Hannah? They
hated
me. No, really, they did. I suddenly realized it, and it was such a shock, I can’t tell you. Do you remember after 9/11 when Americans were saying,
But we didn’t realize anyone hated us
?’ Here Sasha put on a fake American drawl. ‘Do you remember how thunderstruck they were? Well, that’s how I felt when those policemen were there. They were very polite, but I knew they hated me. And they knew I knew. When I asked about the CCTV, they almost laughed. They asked me how many people I thought went up and down those escalators every day. They said even if they could find me on the camera, all we’d see would be a crowd of people, and then one of them tripping over. That was their exact phrase.
Tripping over
.’

Hannah sighed. Behind Sasha’s head, she could see her laptop open on the table, surrounded by papers and newspaper cuttings and notebooks. The work she wasn’t doing formed a tight ligature around her chest. And still she couldn’t shake off the uneasy feeling she’d had since coming in and finding Sasha installed in her home. She couldn’t help feeling
violated
.

‘Shall I make us some tea?’ she asked, realizing that the chances of getting back to work were non-existent.

Sasha didn’t reply. She looked so frail, dwarfed by the huge sofa, gazing intently off into space as if listening to some inner voice.

‘Sasha? Tea?’

Sasha turned her newly dulled eyes towards Hannah. ‘Haven’t you got anything stronger? Gin and tonic? Wine? Oh, come on, Hans, don’t look so disapproving. Remember when the girls were little and we used to reward ourselves with a drink at teatime, just because it was all so fucking stressful? Don’t you think I deserve it now?’

Hannah smiled, although uneasiness still prickled at the back of her neck. Even though she’d been reminiscing herself just an hour before, she couldn’t help feeling manipulated by Sasha reminding her of their shared past, forcing intimacy on her like a once-favourite jumper now shrunk in the wash.

She was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Stepping back into the hall, she heard muffled voices coming from behind Lily’s emphatically closed bedroom door.
Good
, she told herself.
It’s all behind them.
Amazing how quickly children could move on from things, rifts that had seemed irreparable forgotten in the blink of an eye. But still she hesitated, not liking that flat expanse of white wood door. Even the gaily decorated letter ‘L’ seemed somehow forbidding.

Back in the kitchen, she opened the fridge, her heart sinking as ever with the knowledge that somehow, in a couple of hours, she was going to have to concoct some semblance of dinner from the sad assortment of aged vegetables and half-empty tins – they’d stopped telling you not to keep tins in the fridge, hadn’t they? – messily arranged on the smudged plastic shelves. The endless repetition of domestic life seemed suddenly overwhelming. There was an open bottle of white Sauvignon in the fridge door. Thank God for screw tops. What did people
do
when it was all corks – wine turning vinegary overnight? She poured a glass for Sasha and, after a momentary hesitation, a tiny one for herself, too.

Back in the living room, Sasha took a long gulp from her glass, then leaned forward, her eyes intense, the fingers of her left hand plucking savagely at the skin of the right. She clearly had something she wanted to say, and Hannah knew with complete certainty that whatever it was, she wasn’t going to like it.

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Hans. I don’t know who else to turn to. Something awful has happened. I don’t even know how to say it.’

‘What, more awful than someone trying to kill you?’

Hannah was trying to make a joke of it, to lighten the atmosphere and head off whatever it was Sasha was about to tell her, but Sasha didn’t smile. Instead her eyes filmed over with tears.

‘In a way, yes. Hannah, I found porn on the family computer.’ Hannah tried to maintain a concerned expression, but her stomach was fizzing with relief. Porn. That was distasteful, but manageable.

‘I know it’s horrible, Sash. But Dan wouldn’t be the first man to download porn. You’ve got to keep it in persp—’

‘This is hardcore porn, Hannah! Obscene pictures of women doing the most degrading things. Disgusting, sado-masochistic violent stuff. Rape, even. Oh Hannah, I can’t tell you.’

The tears were spilling out now. Hannah’s head was reeling. She didn’t believe it, not really. She knew you could never tell what turned people on, but even so, if someone was into something like that you’d know, wouldn’t you? There’d be something that gave it away. Yet Sasha seemed genuinely distraught. If she was making it up, she was a lot more damaged than Hannah thought. A hard lump formed in her stomach. Then she had a thought.

‘If these are saved images, they’ll be dated, won’t they?’

If for any twisted reason Sasha had planted those pictures there herself, the dates wouldn’t tally. They’d be after Dan left home.

Sasha was staring at her as if she had gone crazy.

‘I didn’t
leave
them on there, Hannah! Christ, you’ve got to be joking. September uses that computer. What if she’d found them? They were
vile
, you need to understand. Disgusting. I deleted them and then I emptied the trash and then I went and had a shower because I felt so grubby.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Sasha, but this is enough now. You need to see someone. Surely you can see how insane this all is. This is Dan we’re talking about, the man you loved, September’s father. I know he’s hurt you horribly, but he’s not this monster you’re trying to turn him into.’

‘You think I’m making this up? You think I’d actually want people to know my husband is secretly a sick pervert?’

Hannah’s certainty started to waver.

‘Could you have misinterpreted what you saw? Might the pictures have been to do with some photographic assignment Dan was doing? You know how blurry the line is between art and porn sometimes.’

Sasha was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No way. I know what I saw, Hannah. This was porn, and the very worst kind of porn.’

The two women exchanged a long look and it was Hannah who broke away first, taking a gulp of her wine, trying to make sense of the thoughts flying around her head.

Sasha’s ringtone – a customized recording of September shouting, ‘Mummy – pick up your phone!’ – eventually broke the silence.

‘Oh God,’ muttered Sasha, taking it out of her bag and glancing at the screen. ‘I’d better take this. Hello?’

Hannah was relieved to have a break from the conversation they’d just been having, even if it was only momentary.

‘I don’t understand,’ Sasha was saying into her phone. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

Whatever the other person was saying, it was clearly nothing Sasha wanted to hear.

When the call had ended, she cradled the phone in her hand, as if unwilling to believe the conversation was over. Then she lifted her eyes to Hannah.

‘That was Caroline, my lawyer,’ she said. ‘She says Dan is going for full custody. Apparently Josh has made a written statement confirming I’m an unfit mother.’

23

‘It’s not my fault.’

Josh was well aware that a whine had crept into his voice, but he was just so sick of justifying himself. And why did he have to do that anyway? Hannah should automatically be on his side.

‘That email was private. I had no idea he’d give it to his lawyer.’

‘Yes, but why were you saying things like that to him in the first place? You know we said we’d stay neutral.’

‘Yes, but that was before Sasha went off the rails so spectacularly. You know perfectly well she’s not capable of looking after September in the state she’s in. No wonder the poor child is going around biting people. She’s all over the place.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks to you, Sasha will probably never speak to us again.’

‘You know, I’m starting to think that might actually be a relief.’

Hannah’s nostrils flared. She picked up her fork to spear the last new potato on her plate, then thought better of it. ‘That’s typical. It might be a relief for you, but what about me? She’s my friend, Josh. She helps me out. Don’t forget all the times she’s looked after Lily when I’ve had to go off and do an interview and you’re at work. I need that support. It’s OK for you – you just swan into school in the morning and come home at night and there’s never any question of it being any different, whereas I’m the one who has to sort out all the childcare and make excuses if I miss deadlines because Lily’s sick or there’s an inset day.’