The Broken (31 page)

‘What about those episodes?’ he’d demanded, referring to the bouts of black depression her mother had been prone to throughout her life. Not many, but intense and terrifying, even so. A quick flashback to her mother’s venomous face at the hospital – no, she wouldn’t think of that now. That’s why their father had eventually walked out on them – because he couldn’t handle the downs. He’d stayed in periodic contact, but Hannah and Gemma had little respect for him. There was a Marilyn Monroe quote Hannah had once read –
If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best
– and it had made her think of her parents. Her father was long gone by the time Gemma was injured and their mother was finally properly diagnosed and given medication to keep her moods stable. Maybe he’d have stayed if he’d known, but having turned his back on her at her worst, he certainly didn’t deserve her at her best, when she could make you feel like the most loved, cherished person in the world.

But Josh had never really seen that side of her mother, which is why he’d accused Hannah of being ‘ghoulish’ more than once, for insisting on coming here to talk to her. He’d been supportive at first, but his enthusiasm had quickly waned in the face of the long tedious hours he’d spent here waiting for her to finish. ‘You’re always so moody afterwards,’ he complained. ‘It’s not helpful for you.’ As if he had the first clue how to help her! She was being unfair. She knew it. But they had drifted so far apart, she struggled sometimes to imagine them ever being close again. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, but everything he did at the moment irritated her. Yesterday he’d come home from work feigning illness and, after disrupting her work, had just taken himself off to bed, leaving her sitting at the table fuming and unable to focus on the feature she was writing. She was sure he wasn’t really ill at all. In fact, she half suspected it was a ruse to try to get her to drop her plans to come here this weekend. She couldn’t imagine Dan doing that. Dan would just come straight out and say if there was something bothering him, not sneak around inventing illnesses that didn’t exist.

But why was she thinking about Dan all of a sudden?

She knew exactly why she was thinking about Dan. Since their conversation yesterday morning, he’d hardly been off her mind. He’d been so concerned about her, so worried that she’d hold him accountable for his lawyer using Josh’s email. ‘You’re one of my favourite people in the whole world, Hannah, I couldn’t bear you to think badly of me,’ he’d said. She’d got the definite impression the honeymoon might be coming to an end for him and Sienna, now that she was pregnant. ‘She doesn’t really like me leaving her on her own,’ he said. ‘It’s cute in a way, but it makes it a bit difficult to earn any money.’

‘Maybe I should have chosen someone like you, Hannah,’ he said later. ‘Someone used to being independent.’

Lily had stopped picking weeds now and was wandering around aimlessly, running her hands along the tops of the newer headstones with their smooth, shiny marble surfaces. Josh had a face like a wet weekend, as her mother would have said. He’d been in a vile mood since yesterday. Again Hannah found herself comparing him to Dan, whose moods were famously writ large on his open face, impossible to misinterpret. For a second she weakened, allowing herself to remember the thing she’d promised herself to forget.

After listening to what he had said about choosing someone like her next time, Hannah had made some self-deprecating comment, comparing herself unfavourably to Sienna, and he’d said, ‘She’s jealous of you, you know. She knows you mean a lot to me and she’s jealous.’ Hannah had laughed it off, but when she came off the phone her cheeks were burning.

Now Josh had gathered their things together – Lily’s colouring book that she’d been entertaining herself with, the canvas holdall in which Hannah had brought the trowel and secateurs she used to tend her mother’s grave – and was standing waiting, shuffling the bags from hand to hand in a pointed manner. Meanwhile Toby, who had to be kept on his lead in the graveyard for fear that he would start indiscriminately digging, had grown tired of lying at Hannah’s feet and was sitting by a neighbouring grave plaintively whining.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, it’s time to go.’

Even as she said the words, her eyes were filling with tears. It never got any easier. Even all these years after her mother’s death, Hannah still was no closer to coming to terms with losing her.

‘You rushed me,’ she said, once they were in the car and on the way to Gemma’s house. ‘You know how much I was looking forward to seeing Mum, and you just couldn’t let me have that time with her, could you?’

Josh, who was driving, swung around to look at her, then immediately turned his head back, shaking it from side to side as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. ‘We drive for an hour and a half so I can spend a day freezing in a graveyard and it’s still not enough for you.’

‘It wasn’t a day. It wasn’t even a couple of hours. Admit it, you just don’t like me coming here.’

Josh slapped his hand down loudly on the steering wheel. ‘All right, I admit it. I don’t like you coming here. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to spend hours talking to your dead mother. I think you need to move on, Hannah, and maybe start paying a bit more attention to the people around you who are still alive.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Me. Lily. You’re so wrapped up in yourself and your grief and bloody Sasha, you don’t care if your family is falling apart around you.’

Hannah turned to face him. ‘What do you mean,
falling apart
?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, come on, you must have meant something.’

‘Forget it. We’re here now.’

‘Yes, here now,’ sang a little voice from the back seat. Hannah had completely forgotten Lily was even there. She shaped her features into a smile before turning around.

‘Come on, baby. Let’s go and see Auntie Gemma.’

Gemma’s flat was as chaotic as ever. Shoes, bags, clothes, books, ashtrays, all seemed to live in a permanent state of homelessness, migrating their way in piles and clusters around the three cramped rooms.

‘I miss Gem like crazy,’ Hannah’s ex-brother-in-law Sam had said the last time they saw each other, just before the divorce was finalized. ‘But I don’t miss her stuff everywhere, or her last-minute panics, or always being late because she’s left something essential behind.’

Hannah knew what he meant. It was tiring being around so much disorder. She was disorganized, but her sister took clutter to a whole new level. In the end, Sam was effectively saying, it had only been a matter of time before the mess in their lives became the mess of their lives.

‘How was Mum?’

Despite it being mid-afternoon, Gemma was wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms with an old grey T-shirt that looked as if it had shrunk in the wash. No bra, Hannah couldn’t help noticing. And Gemma was not a petite girl.

‘Oh, you know,’ said Hannah uselessly, horrified to find her eyes filling with hot tears.

Josh glanced at her sharply, then looked away. She could read the expression on his face as clearly as if he’d spoken.
I knew it. I knew we shouldn’t have come.

‘What’s up?’ Gemma was lying on the sofa with Lily wrapped around her middle, so she couldn’t move, but she had missed neither the tears nor Josh’s reaction.

‘Nothing,’ said Hannah over-brightly. Gemma’s hair was scraped back with an old, rather grubby pink hairband, and the scar on her forehead that she usually kept hidden was exposed, curved and raised like a fossil under her skin. Hannah’s stomach turned and she quickly looked away. ‘I’m just over-emotional. It’s the hormones, I expect.’

She allowed a moment for the implications of what she’d just said to sink in.

‘Oh my God,’ said Gemma, eventually twigging. ‘You’re not?’

Hannah nodded.

Gemma exclaimed in surprise. Was it Hannah’s imagination or did Gemma sound a little flat when she sad ‘congratulations’?

‘You going to have a little baby brother, sweetpea?’ Gemma asked Lily, nuzzling her face into her hair.

‘Not brother, silly. Sister. But I’m the big girl so I’ll have to look after her.’

Gemma’s face remained buried in her niece’s hair, so Hannah couldn’t see her expression.

‘Actually, I’ve got a bit of a headache,’ Hannah said eventually. ‘Have you got any paracetamol?’

‘Next to the bed,’ said Gemma, waving towards a door that led directly off the living room.

Gemma’s bedroom was in as great a state of disarray as the rest of the flat. Hannah winced as she recognized her own slovenliness magnified in that of her sister. Was this what it was like for Josh, she wondered, sharing a home with her, this sinking feeling walking into a room where nothing was calm?

The bed looked like that Tracey Emin art exhibit – all rumpled sheets and overflowing ashtrays and old screwed-up tissues.

‘Gemma, when was the last time you changed this duvet cover? And what’s this gross stain? Eugh – it
stinks
!’

Hannah thrust the offending cover away from her. Her sister was a slob, no doubt about it. It was quite disgusting how she lived, and yet looking around at the chaos, a part of Hannah felt jealous of Gemma’s freedom to leave yesterday’s knickers on the floor, knowing that no one would notch it up against her in some unspoken war of attrition you didn’t even know you were taking part in until your transgressions were flung at you all at once during some late-night row.

There was no sign of the paracetamol on the crowded bedside table. Hannah nudged aside a teetering pile of books, sending them all crashing down on the wooden floor next to the bed. As she picked them up, she noticed a photograph tucked inside one of them – that giant tome
Wolf Hall
that, to her shame, Hannah had never managed to finish, having become confused about who was who and who was talking. The photograph was of Josh. She suddenly remembered Sasha’s remark about September seeing Gemma take a photo from her flat, which she’d instantly dismissed as troublemaking. She sat on the edge of the unmade bed with the picture in her hand, her mind blank, until there was a squeal from Lily, followed by the thud of something hitting the floor, and then Gemma appeared in the doorway.

‘Did you find them?’

Hannah didn’t look up, just carried on gazing down at the photo of Josh. It was one she’d always loved, slightly over-exposed so his skin was bleached and his smile seemed dazzlingly white as he squinted up into the sun. He was wearing the mustard-coloured jumper he’d owned when they first got together and she’d spent ten years persuading him out of. Funny how she missed it now she saw it again, like seeing a picture of an old friend she’d lost touch with.

‘What’s that?’

Gemma picked her way towards Hannah over the discarded clothes and books that littered the floorboards.

‘It’s a photo,’ said Hannah eventually. ‘Of Josh.’

Gemma, now standing next to her, glanced down at it as she pulled off the pink hairband and shook out her unruly curly hair – brown not red, to Hannah’s lifelong jealousy.

‘Oh, yes, I found that in my stuff the last time I came back from yours. I’ve been using it as a bookmark. You can have it back if you like, but don’t lose my page or I might have to kill you.’

Gemma sounded so casual, totally unperturbed. Immediately Hannah was wrong-footed. Could it have been an accident? Such things did happen. Particularly to her disorganized sister. One time she’d come back from the airport with someone else’s bag. Hannah remembered shrieking with laughter when Gemma opened the case and withdrew a pair of men’s boxers emblazoned with the slogan
Lucky Pants
.

She dropped the photo on to the creased sheet and put her head in her hands. Instantly Gemma was next to her, arms around her.

‘Hey, hey! What’s up, Hans? What’s going on?’

Hannah couldn’t look at her, knowing that if she did she’d be completely lost. Now that the hairband had gone, Gemma’s scar was covered up, but Hannah was as aware of it as if it was lit up in neon. So she stared at her hands instead, the bitten nails still bearing the flaky blue varnish from Lily’s last beauty session. Would she ever be the kind of woman who had properly shaped nails with pared-down cuticles and glossy, hard surfaces that shone like the inside of a shell?

‘Is it the pregnancy? Aren’t you happy about the new baby?’

‘Yes! . . . No! . . . Oh, I don’t know. Everything’s so weird.’

Gemma tightened her arms around her sister’s shoulders. ‘What’s weird? What’s going on, Hans?’

Hannah tried to think how to explain it all. The wall that had come up between her and Josh, the situation with Dan and Sasha, and how despite all their good intentions they’d got caught up in the middle of it and sucked right down with them. And Lily? The bruises on her arm were now fading to green, but Hannah could still hear Nikki’s words in her head. Could there be a chance she didn’t know her own daughter as well as she thought she did? In which case, what kind of mother was she? And how could she even contemplate having another baby?

Her shoulders slumped under the weight of Gemma’s arm. ‘Oh God,’ she sobbed. ‘I miss Mum!’

For a moment, the two sisters sat side by side, holding each other without speaking, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Gemma spoke.

‘You know, I miss her too, but you mustn’t let your rose-tinted glasses make her something she wasn’t, you know. You mustn’t forget that she could be awful sometimes. Don’t you remember when—’

Her speech was cut short by a blast of birdsong. Hannah had forgotten she’d turned the volume on her phone up to high. She darted out of the bedroom to retrieve it from her bag, still on the floor where she’d dropped it.

‘Sasha,’ she announced, reading the screen.

‘Can’t that bloody woman ever leave you alone?’ Gemma had followed her out of the bedroom and was standing in the doorway.

‘You tell her,’ said Josh from his position on the sofa, watching cartoons with Lily curled up next to him.

Hannah made a face. ‘She wouldn’t be trying to get hold of me if it wasn’t for you,’ she said.