The Broken (8 page)

At least it was preferable to listening to her waxing lyrical about Dan and how wonderful he was. The guy had practically been canonized over the course of the last few days. If Josh ever tried to remind her of the little matter of Dan cheating on her, she dismissed it with hardly a second thought. ‘A moment of weakness’ was how she’d decided to classify it. ‘He was flattered. She was available. Oldest story in the book. Course I’ll make him get tested for every STD under the sun before I take him back, but it’d be crazy to throw away a fantastic marriage, with all that history, just because of some little slut who couldn’t keep her knickers on.’

Josh would squirm with discomfort when she talked like this, glancing towards the doorway to make sure it was free of small figures with large flapping ears.

A series of loud bleeps announced the arrival of a text message. Josh glanced at his phone, which sat on the coffee table between him and Sasha, aware that her eyes too were fixed on it. Both of them knew it was Dan, texting to see if Sasha was still there. This was the pattern they’d fallen into, with Dan resolutely refusing to talk to Sasha until their Dan-imposed ‘breathing time’ was up. He’d already threatened to move out to an undisclosed address if Sasha accidentally-on-purpose happened to be there when he got home.

‘We need to give each other this time,’ he stressed. ‘We owe it to each other.’

‘Well?’ Sasha wanted to know.

‘He says he’s going to be home around eleven.’

‘Because he thinks that’s too late for September to be out during the week. Silly man. He knows she doesn’t need a lot of sleep. She’s not that sort of child.’

‘Yes, but Lily does,’ broke in Hannah, much to Josh’s relief.

Sasha frowned. ‘I do think it might be good for Lily not to be quite so regimented,’ she said. ‘Otherwise how is she ever going to learn to cope with change? She’s such a nervous little thing as it is.’

Josh opened his mouth to speak, but Hannah glared at him and instead he counted to ten in his head, waiting for his irritation to subside.

Only after Sasha had left did Josh give vent to his annoyance.

‘Just what was she implying by that “nervous little thing” comment?’ he asked, when Hannah finally surfaced from getting a completely shattered Lily to bed.

‘Take no notice. She’s just overwrought. She’s not thinking about what she’s saying.’

‘Yes, but that’s no excuse for—’

The doorbell cut short what he had been about to say.

‘I thought Dan had a key?’ Josh said.

‘He must have lost it. Or maybe he’s just being discreet in case we’re making mad passionate love on the living-room table.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

An awkward pause.

Hannah went to the door and Josh listened for Dan’s sing-song ‘I’m ho-ome.’ He was surprised to hear just Hannah, sounding fraught.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she was saying. This was followed by an indistinct murmur of voices. Then, ‘OK, OK, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea.’

She reappeared in the doorway with a shape slumped over her shoulder. A September-shaped shape.

‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ groaned Josh.

Hannah raised her eyebrows warningly at him over the top of her charge, who was wrapped in a duvet and clearly pretending to be asleep, with just one slightly raised eyelid giving her away.

‘September, poppet, I’m just going to pop you down on our bed so you can have a nice sleep,’ said Hannah.

‘Wanna go Lily’s room.’ The little girl’s voice was loud, but her eyes stayed firmly shut.

‘No, sweetie. Lily is asleep. You snuggle up in Auntie Hannah and Uncle Josh’s bed. There’s a good girl.’

‘I want my mummy!’

‘September, honey . . .’

‘I WANT MY MUMMY!’

Hannah locked eyes with Josh over September’s head and shrugged as best she could with a recumbent four-year-old on her shoulder, then she turned and walked out of the room. Josh listened to her trying to soothe the fractious child as she made her way along the hallway to their bedroom.

‘I know you do, sweetie, but Mummy will be right back, just as soon as she does this important thing she has to do. And in the meantime, you’re having a sleepover here with us. Isn’t this fun?’

Judging by the muffled protests coming from behind the now closed bedroom door, September clearly didn’t agree that this unlooked-for sleepover in any way constituted fun.

Twenty fraught minutes later, the flat finally fell silent. Twenty-one minutes later, there was the noise of a door being stealthily nudged open and then Hannah reappeared.

‘Well?’ Josh was conscious that he was using his disapproving school-teachery voice, but he was too irritated to do anything about it. Just how much of their lives were going to be taken over by Dan and Sasha and their crisis? Of course he wanted to help – they were their best friends, after all – but surely there was a line to be drawn somewhere? Surely he and Hannah were entitled to some semblance of a life of their own?

‘Sasha’s gone to follow Dan.’

Josh gave a questioning look.

Hannah held up her hands. ‘I know, I know. I told her it was a bad idea, but she wouldn’t listen. Apparently one of her friends was out for a meal in Soho and called her to say she’d just seen Dan having dinner with a woman.’

‘Dan has dinner with lots of women. That’s part of his job.’

‘I know. I said that. Listen, you don’t need to get shirty with me!’

Hannah glared at him. But rather than making him feel guilty, her defensiveness just added to Josh’s sense of grievance. It was all right for her. She was at home all day. She was probably enjoying having all these people around all the time, all this activity, all this
drama
. She ought to try working in a proper job where you went out and spent all day with hundreds of people and looked forward to getting home for a bit of peace and quiet.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘this friend had no idea Sasha and Dan were splitting up. If that’s what they’re doing. She only made a big thing about Dan and this other woman as a joke, apparently, but Sasha was straight round here to drop off September and now she’s off in hot pursuit.’

‘Do you think it’s her?
Sienna?
’

‘God knows. I’ll bloody murder Dan if it is, after all his promises. Sasha says she’s sure it isn’t, but she wants to put her mind at rest. She promises she’s just going to look through the window. She’s not going to make a scene or anything.’

‘Yeah, it’s not as if Sasha’s the making-a-scene type, after all!’

Hannah made a face. ‘She promised me she wasn’t going to anyway. She didn’t even seem that bothered, she just said she knew she was being stupid but she just wanted to see for herself, then she’d come straight back. She’ll probably be here any minute.’

‘Yeah, unless she’s stabbed him through the heart. You did frisk her for sharp implements, I take it?’

‘Look, like you said, Dan works with lots of women and does a lot of business over dinner. Sasha is just overreacting to everything at the moment. Bet you anything she comes through the door in the next half-hour absolutely mortified.’

‘Sasha doesn’t do mortified, Hannah. Sasha only does vindicated or
Now I’ll make this into an amusing story to make myself look cute and quirky
.’

‘Why are you so down on her suddenly? Don’t you think she’s having a hard enough time without her friends turning on her as well?’

Hannah rarely raised her voice, and as Josh gazed at her in surprised reproach, he noticed for the first time how tired she looked. Her blue eyes appeared almost colourless against the dark mauve shadows underneath. This situation was taking its toll on her too.

‘I just wish things could go back to how they were before.’ He sighed, uncomfortably aware he was sounding a bit like his own four-year-old daughter.

As if on cue, from the hallway came the sound of Lily’s panicked voice. ‘Mummy! Daddy!’

Glad of the distraction, he strode off into her room. Nudging open the door with its pink gingham letter ‘L’ interwoven with yellow and white daisies, he was thrown off guard by finding September sitting perched on the top of Lily’s duvet, gazing at him impassively, while a just-woken Lily, eyes still wild and confused from sleep, cowered at the other end, rubbing her arm.

‘’Tember woke me up,’ she gulped. ‘She pinched me.’

September continued gazing levelly at him. ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘Don’t like your bedroom.’

‘But you shouldn’t have woken Lily up, should you, September? And you shouldn’t have pinched her. That wasn’t kind, was it?’

‘
You
’re not kind,’ said September, her voice rising dangerously. ‘You’re mean and I don’t like you!’ Her face crumpled in on itself and she started crying.

‘What the hell is going on in here?’

Josh had no idea how Sasha could have got in so suddenly. He hadn’t been gone for more than a few seconds but here she was, appearing out of nowhere and sweeping past him into Lily’s room, kneeling by the bed so her sobbing child could throw herself into her arms.

‘It’s all right, darling girl. Mummy’s here now.’

For a second or two there was just the sound of September’s noisy sobs, punctuated by soft sniffs from Lily and whines from Toby outside the bedroom door. Then, still with her back to him, Sasha said, in a cold, hard voice Josh hadn’t heard before, ‘I’d prefer you not to bully my daughter when I’m not here, thank you very much, Josh. Can’t you see how fragile she is?’

Josh stopped himself just in time before he said something he would regret, remembering only after he’d stalked out of the door that he hadn’t said goodnight to Lily.

‘I’ve bloody well had enough,’ he hissed at Hannah when he got back to the living room and saw her sitting at the table. ‘This has got to stop. Do you know what she just said? She said—’

‘I’m sorry. Oh God, Josh, I’m so sorry.’

Sasha had come up behind him and now flung her arms around his neck, draping herself over his back so he had the uncomfortable sensation of wearing her, like a coat. He felt her chest rising and falling rapidly and his heart sank as he realized she must be crying.

‘What happened, Sasha?’

Hannah had got up from her chair and was gazing at her friend with a look of such concern that Josh felt immediately ashamed. That in turn made him irritated at having been made to feel bad, so he was relieved when Sasha finally slid off him and into a heap on the floor.

‘He was with
her
.’ The words sounded as if they’d been squeezed out of her.

Hannah gasped. ‘No! With Sienna? But he promised us—’

Sasha’s narrowed eyes flashed back pin-pricks of reflected light. ‘He promised you? What about
me
? What about what he promised
me
? I’m his fucking wife!’

‘Oh God, I know. Sorry, Sasha. That must have been so awful. Tell me what happened.’

Sasha put her head in her hands. ‘It was a nightmare. I drove past where Shelly said she’d seen him, but there were too many people around for me to get a good look through the window, so I parked around the corner. Then I walked back and looked in the window, and there they were. The two of them. Oh shit. Oh fucking shit. This is all so fucked up.’

‘But how did you know it was her?’ Josh felt he ought at least to try to mount a defence of his absent friend. ‘I mean, it could have been any one of the women Dan works with every day.’

Sasha’s head whipped up suddenly. ‘Yes, it could . . . except that he was sticking his tongue down her throat.’

Hannah’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘I don’t believe it. Not at the table!’

‘Well, maybe not tongues, but they were all over each other. I almost threw up on the spot, I swear to God.’

Sasha had pulled her knees up to her bony chest and was rocking backwards and forwards. All of a sudden, to Josh’s great alarm, she started emitting a keening noise.

‘Mummy?’

He’d forgotten about September and Lily. There they both were, two little figures standing in the doorway, eyes wide with shock as they stared at the rocking figure on the floor.

Instantly, Hannah was on her feet. ‘It’s OK, girls. Mummy’s just a little tired, that’s all, September. We all sometimes need a good cry when we’re tired, don’t we? Come on, I’ll snuggle you both up together in our bedroom. How about that?’

As she led them away, Josh felt a surge of panic, tinged with resentment. Great. So she got to go off and read stories while he was left to deal with Sasha having a fully fledged meltdown on the living-room floor.

‘Sorry,’ she wailed, as if he’d spoken aloud. ‘I just can’t . . . I can’t . . . Oh God, I can’t breathe.’ She was making rapid gulping noises as if she was being starved of oxygen.

Josh dropped to his knees beside her. ‘Look at me,’ he commanded, seizing her shoulders. ‘Sasha, look at me!’

She brought her eyes up to his face, her breath still coming out in uneven gasps.

‘Now breathe in,’ he said in his best school-teacher’s voice. ‘Come on, breathe in. That’s right. And out again. Good.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Josh. I’m being a nightmare, aren’t I? It’s just . . . it’s just . . . Oh God. He was with
her.
You can’t imagine what it’s like, seeing the person you love, the father of your child, with someone else. Touching them. Kissing them. Oh, I feel sick.’ She clapped a hand over her mouth, and for a horrible moment Josh thought she might actually vomit, right there on the rug. ‘How could he? Josh, you’re a man. How could he do this?’

Luckily Josh was saved from answering this unanswerable question by Hannah rushing back into the room.

‘All quiet. Shit, Sasha, I don’t know what to say. Did he see you? Dan, I mean?’

Sasha stared at her. ‘Course he saw me. Obviously he saw me.’

‘Not necessarily. It must have been dark outside and he was, erm, distracted. He could easily not have noticed you.’

‘Well, seeing as I was standing five centimetres from his face, screaming at him, I think it’s highly unlikely!’

Josh closed his eyes. Oh dear God. Hannah was still standing by the door, her hands on either side of her face and her mouth open in a long ‘O’ shape in an approximation of that Edvard Munch painting.