The Broken (2 page)

‘We can still hang out together,’ Dan said, as if he’d read Josh’s mind. ‘You’ll love Sienna when you get to know her.’

‘Dream on, mate.’

‘What?’

‘If you think you can just slot another woman into Sasha’s place and we’ll all be like an episode of bloody
Friends
, you’re living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Hannah would never stand for it. She’s really loyal that way.’

‘I know it wouldn’t happen immediately. Just in time, that’s all I meant. And don’t worry, I’m going to give Sasha whatever she asks for. I don’t want her or September to want for anything. I give you my word this is going to be the most civilized divorce in history.’

Josh gaped at him. ‘So, let’s just recap. You’re leaving your wife of what – eight years? – for a woman a decade younger. And you think she’s going to be happy to sit down over a nice cup of tea and make arrangements about dividing up her home, her
daughter
, for God’s sake. You’re fucking deluded.’

Dan coloured, his skin taking on the purplish hue of under-diluted Ribena. ‘I’m not leaving her for Sienna. I told you, Sasha and I haven’t been right for ages. We’ve never really been right. Living with her is like being on eggshells the whole time. I haven’t been happy in years.’

‘And don’t tell me, you deserve to be happy.’

‘Sure. Everyone does, don’t they?’

Josh shook his head. ‘I’m not going to get caught up in some existential debate about the nature of happiness.’ He was properly angry now. ‘I just don’t happen to think you can build your happiness on the back of someone else’s unhappiness.’ Now who was talking in clichés?

Dan looked miserable, yet defiant. Josh recognized that look from his own teenage pupils.

‘I know Sasha will be in bits at first. Of course she will. But I really believe that in the long run she’ll realize it’s the best thing for her. This way she’s free to find someone who really appreciates her.’

Josh sighed. Now that it was sinking in that Dan actually was serious, he was feeling faintly sick. Until Dan, he’d never really had a close friend, not since school anyway. He was more the type of person who got included in group outings but not intimate gatherings. And once he’d met Hannah, she was the only friend he’d needed. So he’d been pleased – grateful, even – to find himself accepted so readily into Dan’s inner circle. And he was fond of Sasha, too, although she could be prickly sometimes. ‘When are you going to tell her?’

‘Tonight. That’s why it’s really important you don’t tell Hannah anything until I’ve had a chance to talk to Sash properly. I know you two can’t shit without giving each other a full description, but you’ve got to promise me not to say anything. I don’t want Sasha to hear about this from anyone except me.’

Dan’s face wore a noble expression and Josh had an uncharacteristic impulse to punch him in it.

‘Oh, and whatever you do, don’t mention Sienna. I’m not going to tell Sasha about her until she’s got used to the idea of us splitting up. It would just confuse the issue.’

‘What’s there to be confused about? You’re leaving her for another woman. Oldest story in the book.’

Josh’s anger was mounting and Dan put up both his hands in mock surrender.

‘Look, Josh, I get why you’re upset. I’d feel the same if our positions were reversed. And I love you for being so protective of Sash. But the fact is, I
am
leaving her. I’ve made up my mind.’ Dan said this as though making up his mind about something was all it took to make it so. As if he had only to formulate the intent for the deed to be done. His self-assuredness stoked Josh’s fury. ‘And what I really need is for you to help make it as painless as possible – for Sasha’s and September’s sakes. Not for mine. This thing with Sienna is still very early days. It might come to absolutely nothing. It’d be stupid to throw that into the mix now when we all need things to be as clean and simple as possible. I don’t want to hurt Sash any more than necessary.’

‘You’re all heart.’

‘
What?
’

‘I’m not supposed to tell you. I was sworn to secrecy. But seeing as he’s probably telling her as we speak, and there’s a good chance she’ll turn up on the doorstep at any moment in the throes of a nervous breakdown, I thought it was only fair to warn you.’

Hannah had her hand clapped over her mouth, above which her pale-blue eyes appeared almost completely circular. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Oh my
God
. Poor Sash. What a bastard. What a complete and utter bastard.’

‘To be fair, he seemed pretty cut up about it.’ Josh couldn’t understand why he was defending Dan to Hannah. It wasn’t as if he had the slightest bit of sympathy for what he was doing. Still, some intrinsic friend-protection instinct was kicking in and he found himself trying to justify what Dan was doing. ‘You know Sasha isn’t the easiest person.’

‘And that makes it OK, does it, to cheat on her with a twenty-four-year-old and break a little girl’s heart?’

‘Twenty-four isn’t exactly a little girl—’

‘Don’t even joke about it, Josh. You know exactly what I mean. These are our friends, remember? How many Saturday nights have we spent round there? How many holidays have we been on together? He can’t split up over some stupid affair. He just can’t.’

Josh had the oddest idea that Hannah was talking about Dan splitting up with
them
rather than with Sasha. He remembered Dan’s face when he’d talked about Sienna, but this clearly wasn’t the time to suggest to Hannah that this might be more than a ‘stupid affair’.

‘I can’t believe it. I really can’t.’

Josh shifted along the battered wine-coloured velvet sofa Hannah had fallen in love with on eBay, which had required dismantling the door frame to get into the flat. He put a tentative arm around her, half expecting her to wriggle away, as she sometimes did these days. Now that Hannah was always so tired and their sex life had dwindled to almost nothing, all physical contact between them seemed to carry extra weight, with the result that they didn’t touch each other nearly as much – or as naturally – as they used to. He felt her shoulders trembling under his hand.

‘Hey.’ He tilted her face up towards him so he could see her properly, taking in the freckles he adored and she claimed to despise, and the mouth with its mismatched lips – the top one so thin and well defined and the bottom one almost indecently plump. ‘Don’t get so upset. Of course it’s horrible, but we’re still OK.’

Hannah’s eyes, canopied by fine, surprisingly dark eyebrows, peered up at him through a glaze of tears. ‘But they’re our best friends. I thought they were so happy together. All those
I love you
s at the end of every phone conversation. Was that all a show? And if it can happen to them, what’s to stop it happening to us?’

Josh pulled her closer, savouring the contact, and planted a kiss on the top of her head. Despite everything, he allowed himself a little smile. Trust Hannah to jump straight to the worst-case scenario. What was it that therapist had called her? A catastrophist. That’s it. As if you could catch divorce from other people like the flu.

‘Never,’ he whispered into her hair.

After a moment, Hannah pulled away, looking utterly wretched. ‘Oh, but when I think about little September, growing up without her father.’

‘Not according to Dan. He thinks it will be the most amicable split in the world. He’s got it all worked out. He and Sasha will sell the house and buy two flats within walking distance of each other. September will be able to see both of them whenever she wants to. She won’t even notice they’re not together.’

‘What planet does he get this stuff from? He really thinks he’s going to move in down the road with some bloody schoolgirl bimbo and everything’s going to go on just as before?’

Hannah got to her feet and started angrily clearing up the remains of the Indian takeaway which were spread across the coffee table in front of them in a selection of foil containers, all smeared with orange- or ochre-coloured sauce. A tell-tale pink flush was sweeping across her normally pale cheeks, and Josh felt a twinge of alarm, remembering how he’d promised not to say anything to her.

‘You’re not going to call Sasha, are you? Dan made me promise I wouldn’t tell you about any of it, but especially not about her. About Sienna.’

He was nervous now – conscious suddenly of having gone back on a promise, of having been compromised.

Hannah made a snorting noise at the name.

‘No really,’ Josh went on, ignoring it. ‘He doesn’t want it to get out about him seeing someone else. He says it will make things nastier than they need to be.’

‘He should have thought about that before he got his dick out then, shouldn’t he?’

Hannah stalked out of the living room, hands full of dirty plates and silver-foil cartons. Josh heard her clattering around in the tiny kitchen next door, and he tried to still the involuntary leap his thoughts had taken hearing Hannah say the word
dick
.

‘Please, Hannah. Don’t say anything. I should never have told you.’

She reappeared in the doorway and flung herself back on to the sofa, curling her long legs in their black leggings up underneath her. ‘OK. But I just want you to know I hate lying to Sasha. It isn’t right for him to ask you to do this. She deserves to know the truth.’

‘Yes, but not from us. It’s not our place. We have to stay neutral.’

‘But how am I supposed to look her in the eye? Don’t forget they’re coming for lunch tomorrow.’

Josh slung his arm around her once more, emboldened by his previous success, and she snuggled back against him.

‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ he said. ‘Dan says he’s telling her tonight. I can’t imagine they’ll be round here playing happy families tomorrow.’

2

‘My head feels like there’s a marching band inside it clashing cymbals and playing those big curly brass thingies and jumping up and down.’

‘Why would a marching band jump up and down?’

‘Don’t bother trying to provoke me, Dan. I’m too ill to rise to it.’

Sasha was draped across the same sofa where Josh and Hannah had sat up far too late the previous night debating Dan’s shock announcement. Her glossy black hair was fanned out across a threadbare brown faux fur cushion and one of her hands was flung across her eyes, all but obscuring her small neat features. Her legs in their skinny jeans were stretched out and she’d kicked off her Converse trainers so that she could rest her bare, brown, child-sized feet on Dan’s Levi’s-clad thigh. She looked a lot like someone with a hangover. She did not look like someone whose husband had just announced he was going to leave her.

‘He couldn’t tell her,’ Josh whispered to Hannah as they were squeezed into the kitchen together preparing lunch. His cheeks, always rosy, were flushed pink by the heat fanning from the oven into the confined space, and he kept pushing his thick hair, which Hannah liked to point out was the exact colour and texture of a doormat, back from his overheated face. When he glanced at her, his greeny-brown eyes were smudged with worry. ‘He was going to, but then their neighbours turned up unexpectedly.’

‘Brilliant. So now we’ve got to sit across the table from each other pretending everything’s hunky dory, while all the time there’s this . . .
time bomb
waiting to go off.’

‘What else can we do?’

‘I can’t believe he’s just sitting there, stroking her feet. It’s so cruel.’

‘Why are you two whispering in there? Do you hate us? Do you wish we would leave?’

At the sound of Sasha’s voice, Hannah glared at Josh. She could hear September and Lily playing together in Lily’s bedroom, September’s voice loud and clear over Lily’s gentle murmur. How many lazy Sundays had they passed in this way, the six of them? The realization that this might be the last was so savagely painful that Hannah, her hand frozen in the act of chopping up some fresh basil, suddenly felt she couldn’t breathe.

‘Yes. Go away and take your disgusting, unsavoury hangover with you,’ called Josh, making a
Pull yourself together
face at Hannah.

Lunch was, as always, a long-drawn-out affair eaten at the heavy pine dining table which was squashed into the area behind the sofa in the living room, the kitchen in Hannah and Josh’s two-bedroom garden flat being far too small to eat in. The girls joined them for the start of the meal, kneeling up on cushions that they placed over the seats of the wooden chairs and chattering to each other as they tucked into their mini portions of lasagne. September, six weeks older than Lily, led the conversation as usual, lurching from subject to subject seemingly without rhyme or reason. Hannah’s heart pinched a little when she saw how her daughter’s face scrunched up in concentration as she struggled to follow her friend, while at the same time furtively digging out suspicious unidentified vegetable matter from her dish with her spoon and laying it carefully on one side.

‘Is it me or is everyone really flat today?’ Sasha was seated at the head of the table, closest to the French windows that led on to the communal garden, where the late-blooming flowers looked gaudy against the grey September day. Her eyes flickered from face to face expecting a response.

Hannah looked away. ‘We’re not being very good company today, are we? We’re just a bit tired, that’s all.’ She gestured briefly towards Lily with her hand, as if blaming her for them being below par, and then immediately felt guilty. Poor Lily, she was so good. She didn’t deserve to be made a scapegoat.

‘Can we get down now?’ September had finished her lunch and was rocking on her chair, her chocolate-brown curls quivering as she moved.

‘I don’t think Lily’s quite finished yet. Maybe you could just wait a few—’

The rest of Hannah’s gentle entreaty was drowned out by Sasha interrupting, ‘Sure, poppet, you get down.’

Sasha turned to Hannah. ‘Sorry, Hannah. I just didn’t want Temmy to get fidgety. You know how tetchy she can be.’

Hannah smiled and hoped her irritation didn’t show.

‘Can I go too, Mummy? Please?’

Lily still had food on her plate, but she was already gazing after September, her lasagne forgotten, her blue eyes full of longing.