The Broken (23 page)

She should leave it alone. She should just forget about it. But once she’d let it into her mind, she couldn’t get rid of it.

Abandoning the dining table, she made her way through the hallway and into the bedroom she and Josh shared at the rear of the flat. Once it would have been a dining room – in the days before the houses were all carved up into poky, badly soundproofed conversions. There was a big window looking out on to their section of garden and a plain cast-iron fireplace through which a pigeon had fallen the winter before last, arriving dazed and sheepish in the grate. Hannah didn’t look at the bed, with its white duvet cover and four white pillows. She was always trying to re-create the beds in the Sunday supplements with their plumped-up covers and scattering of welcoming cushions and throws, but instead the duvet was bunched up at one end, leaving the other end limp and flat like an empty sac, and the pillowcase on Josh’s side had a faint yellowish stain in the middle. By her side of the bed was a teetering pile of books, some abandoned halfway through, others long since finished but unable to be accommodated on the already over-stuffed shelves.

She opened the door of the old pine wardrobe, taken aback as always by the jumble of clothes and shoes and bags and general junk that was crammed inside. Where was it that other people, with their lovely minimalist flats, managed to store old bottles of suntan lotion and beach towels and winter hats and scarves?

Feeling around behind a box of photographs, she withdrew the small plastic bag. Kneeling on the floor with the bag in her hand, something unpleasant and bitter came up inside her and jumped clear into her throat. She fought it down.

Clutching the bag to her chest, she crossed the hallway with purpose into the bathroom, bolting the door behind her, even though she was alone in the flat.

The bathroom was the one room they’d never got around to decorating. Long and narrow, with a bath running along the side and a sink crammed down the far end, it resembled a dingy corridor and normally she couldn’t go in there without feeling depressed. Now she sat down, oblivious, on the toilet and took out the package from its plastic bag. She and Josh had had sex just once in the last four months, after that night out with Sasha, and though she’d been far too drunk to think clearly about contraception it had been nearly time for her next period so she’d assumed it was safe. But her period had never come. For days, weeks even, she’d been ignoring the tenderness in her breasts and the great weariness that made her limbs feel leaden and her bed so inviting at two or three in the afternoon. She couldn’t have another baby. Everything was so weird at the moment. Things weren’t right between her and Josh. They didn’t have enough money. She needed to keep working. Lily was still such a baby herself. Sure, they’d talked about giving their daughter a brother or sister, but only in abstract terms. Not as an actual thing. Not now.

If not now, when?
The phrase came back to her as she held the white plastic stick in her hand and stared at the window, watching with a growing feeling of nausea as the blue line worked its way slowly across, as she’d known, deep down, it would.

The sound of her stupid birdsong ringtone caught her by surprise. Stick in hand, she burst out of the bathroom. Picking up her phone from the dining table, her heart still hammering from shock, she was surprised to see Dan’s name flashing up. Dan always rang Josh, that was the way it worked, and Sasha rang her. She supposed that was just one more thing that would be different from now on.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

For one surreal moment Hannah thought he was talking about the baby, and stared at the plastic stick as if it might turn out to have supernatural powers.

‘Tell you what?’

‘That Sasha has lost her fucking mind. That she’s on mega doses of happy pills?’

‘I didn’t think I needed to.’

Hannah couldn’t understand where this sudden outburst had come from.

‘Don’t give me that, Hannah. That woman is in sole charge of my daughter. She’s been acting totally fucking insane lately – the spying, the keying of the car, the smashing of the window. Don’t tell me that’s normal. And now I find out she’s sufficiently nuts to be put on major medication – and no one thought that maybe I had the right to know?’

Hannah’s head was churning. She hadn’t even started to absorb the shock of the baby thing, and now here she was being harangued about something that wasn’t anything to do with her. She thought about the angry red cut on Sasha’s arm and doubt wound itself like wire around her heart. Could she really be putting September at risk by remaining loyal to Sasha?

‘Who told you?’ Her voice was uncharacteristically combative to mask the doubt.

‘What does it matter?’

‘I think Sasha deserves to know who has been passing on private information.’ How prissy she sounded. How prim. ‘Have you stopped to think it might be someone with an axe to grind? Sasha’s a bit like Marmite – you know that. People either love her or hate her.’

‘It wasn’t like that. I found out from Josh.’

Hannah fell silent.

‘Don’t be so shocked. We do speak to each other. And email too. At least one person believes fathers should have rights, at least one person has got September’s best interests at heart. Hannah, if Sasha is having some sort of nervous breakdown, don’t you think I need to know about it?’

‘She’s not having a breakdown.’ Hannah, her emotions already churned up by the pregnancy test, felt herself quivering with rage. ‘She’s just trying to cope with having been thrown to the kerb by her own husband. Dumped for a younger model – literally, in this case – the oldest story in the book. You have no right to use this against her, Dan. And Josh had no right to tell you.’

‘I have every right. My daughter needs a stable home life. I’m going to go for full custody.’

Hannah was so surprised that for a moment she doubted she had heard correctly. ‘What? You can’t. Where would September live? In your little love nest with you and Sienna?’

‘No. She can stay in the house for now. She needs stability and consistency. I’ll move back there. I fucking pay enough for it. And Sasha can rent a place nearby until she sorts herself out and becomes a fit mother again.’

Hannah shook her head. Dan was totally unlike his normal, laid-back self. He seemed almost possessed. ‘I don’t want to talk to you about this any longer, Dan,’ she said, trying to force her voice to be neutral. ‘It challenges . . . my integrity.’

‘Your
integrity
?’ Dan barked. ‘Tell you what, Hannah. If anything happens to September because you withhold information I need to know in order to protect my daughter, I’m holding you and your integrity responsible.’

After the phone went dead, Hannah remained at the table, fighting a wave of nausea that came out of nowhere. What was happening to her life? A few months ago, everything had seemed so . . . under control. Sure, she and Josh had had their differences, but they were manageable, predictable even for pressurized working parents of a young child. But recently she seemed to exist in a permanent state of tension, out of sync with everyone, including her own husband. And now there was to be a baby.

Hannah put her head in her hands and cried until the tears and snot formed a mask that dried on her face.

And then she cried some more.

Lucie/Eloise, aged thirteen

Maman came to school today for the prizegiving. I was so excited because the prize for All-Round Excellence is pretty much the biggest deal EVER and Juliette said her parents would literally drop dead from pride if she ever won anything like that. And at first it was great. Maman looked amazing and Binky from the year above actually asked if she was on telly because she thought she’d seen her in
Casualty
or something. And Daddy was so pleased with me. And we all had lunch in the dining room and Maman was being very funny and had lots more silly English phrases that she’d learned from her book. Like Lickety-split. And we kept saying ‘Lickety-split’ and laughing and laughing. And I could see the other girls were looking at me and wishing they had parents like mine and my heart was just EXPLODING, but at the same time I couldn’t eat because my tummy was churning like something bad was about to happen. And later on, when Mrs Winn-Parry gave the speech to introduce my prize and said, ‘This is for Lucie, or as she’s known to us in our Archminster family, Eloise,’ I knew what that something bad was. I was sitting on the stage in a row of chairs with the other prizewinners and I heard the scream and I stayed in my chair as if my bum had been superglued to it while there was a big commotion in the audience. And when Mrs Winn-Parry started talking again and gave me my prize, I didn’t look at the empty seats where Maman and Daddy had been sitting. I already knew they were long gone. Lickety-split.

19

Josh gazed at the white plastic stick on the table as if it might turn out to be some sort of trick. While he gazed, neither of them spoke, their silence a concrete presence in the room. He reached out and picked it up, turning it over in his hands as if looking for some other meaning.

‘You’re not going to find any answers hidden on the back, you know.’ Hannah snatched it back from him and threw it to the other end of the table. ‘Well?’ she said.

Shock had wiped Josh’s mind clean. He blinked at her, opening his mouth and then closing it again when he realized there were no words to come out.

‘I knew it. It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’

Josh now became conscious of thoughts returning to his brain as if back from a minibreak. He probed them cautiously. Another baby. How did he feel? Slowly the thoughts took shape and he was astounded to find he felt . . .
ecstatic.

Let Pat Hennessey keep the promotion, let Dan keep his gorgeous new girlfriend. This would show them both. Josh had what they didn’t. He was virile, dynamic, the founder of a dynasty. Babies were something Josh could do. They were something he was good at. And a new baby would sort out whatever had been going wrong between him and Hannah. He wouldn’t need to worry about her going off him – or secretly lusting after Dan. A new baby, he couldn’t help but feel, would restore him to himself. It was something clean and pure to counterbalance that ugly business at school.

He got up and walked around the table so he could put his arms around Hannah. ‘I’m thrilled,’ he whispered. For a moment, she slumped into him and they swayed together wordlessly. Then she pulled away.

‘We can’t afford it,’ she said flatly.

‘Sod the money.’

Hannah made a strange noise then, halfway between a sob and a snort, and Josh tried to pull her back towards him.

‘We’ll make it work. I’ll look for another job if you want, with more money. Come on, Hannah. We never wanted Lily to be an only child, and isn’t it better to do this now, while they can still play together and enjoy each other? Can you imagine how excited Lily is going to be?’

Hannah nodded slowly. Lily had been begging them for a little brother or sister practically from as soon as she learned to talk. She and September were always pretending to be sisters, desperate for entry into what they fondly imagined to be a twenty-four-hour-a-day sleepover-and-midnight-feast club. ‘We’re like you and Auntie Gemma,’ Lily would tell Hannah happily as she and September were tucked up into her single bed.

‘I just can’t help feeling it’s the wrong time though,’ Hannah said. ‘Not just the money, but also this thing with Sasha and Dan, which – thanks to you – has just got a lot worse!’

Josh sighed. They’d been through all this. He’d acknowledged he shouldn’t have told Dan about the happy pills. He’d tacked it on the end of an email when he’d been feeling particularly fed up with Sasha. He hadn’t thought it through. He didn’t know how many times he could say sorry.

‘We’ve become way too caught up in their shit, and it’s not been healthy,’ he said. ‘This is something that’s just about us – about our little family. It’ll help us get a little bit of distance, re-prioritize.’

Hannah nodded again, but still she didn’t seem convinced, and later that night when he snuggled up to her in bed and laid the flat of his hand on her gently rounded belly, he could have sworn that, just for a second, she flinched.

‘It’s the last fucking straw. I’m not kidding, Josh. This is it. I’m finished with being Mr Nice Guy.’

Dan’s face was so disfigured by his outrage that, for the first time, Josh wondered whether his friend might actually be quite ugly. They were, once more, at the odious gym café, but Dan was a long way from his normal relaxed self. His shoulder-length hair looked unwashed and slightly greasy in the bright downlighters, and the shadows under his eyes were the colour of red onion.

‘It’s got to be crossed wires, Dan. Sasha wouldn’t do that to September deliberately.’

‘Know what? I’m beginning to realize there’s nothing Sasha wouldn’t do. She told me seven o’clock. I wrote it down. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.’

‘Well, maybe she got her times mixed up.’

‘She did it on purpose, Josh. She deliberately got there an hour early, just to make me look bad, and then left before I arrived. How do you think it feels getting a voicemail from your daughter, crying hysterically because she thinks you stood her up? I was in the car, on my way to meet them. At the time we’d agreed.’

‘Didn’t you try to go round to sort it out?’

‘Course I did. Sasha refused to come to the door. I completely lost it, shouting through the letterbox. I think I even threatened to kill her. Then she sent me a text saying I’d upset our daughter enough for one day, and if I didn’t go away she’d call the police and tell them what I’d said.’

Indignation caused Dan’s voice to rise until he was almost shouting, and the woman sitting on the table behind him turned around to frown.

Josh felt his skin prickling with irritation. He’d only agreed to meet Dan here because he couldn’t wait to share his news, and now Dan had hijacked the whole thing with yet more vitriol about Sasha.

‘Well, like I said, it’s the last straw. I’ve already called my lawyers about this, and they’re going to take her to the fucking cleaners.’