The Broken (3 page)

‘No, Lily. You need to finish. Just that little bit on your plate.’

‘But September didn’t.’

‘No, but September is a guest, and you’re not. Which is why I’m telling you to finish up. Tell you what. If you eat four more forkfuls, you can get down.’

Hannah sighed inwardly as Lily loaded her spoon with the minimum amount of food possible and raised it to her mouth four times, counting in whispers under her breath, before throwing it down triumphantly and scooting off to find her friend. ‘Thank you for the lovely dinner,’ she called over her shoulder in a sing-song voice.

Hannah got up and started clearing away the plates. The incident with September had done nothing to improve her mood. It wasn’t the first time Sasha had talked over Hannah. Sometimes she felt as if nothing she said actually mattered. Am I here, she wanted to say. Can you even see me? She kept forgetting about what Josh had told her about Dan, and then suddenly it would come flooding back to her, as shocking now as it was when she first heard it. In the kitchen, she angrily scraped food off the plates into the plastic container they used for collecting compost, perversely enjoying the harsh, grating noise of metal on china.

‘You OK there?’

Dan had appeared in the doorway carrying the big white earthenware dish that had held the lasagne and the salad bowl, still half full.

Hannah said she was fine.

She couldn’t look at him, focusing instead on the chrome bin that took up half the floor space in the cramped kitchen. Josh had told her it was too big, but she’d insisted on getting it after seeing the same one in Sasha’s old kitchen. She’d never admitted he’d been right.

‘You just seem a bit on edge, that’s all.’

‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like what do you think, Dan?’

She looked at him then. A look that saw him react first with surprise, then, after a second’s delay, anger.

‘He told you. The fucker told you.’

Dan was whispering, but his voice still hissed loudly around the compact room.

‘Course he told me. We’re married. We don’t have secrets from each other.’

‘He shouldn’t have. He promised.’

Dan’s face, normally so open and placid, was dark with rage, but Hannah pretended not to notice.

‘Look, Dan. I want to ask you, beg you, to think again. Look at everything you have to lose. Sasha, September. You’ll break their hearts. And for what? For a fling.’

‘It’s not a fling.’ Hannah had never heard Dan sound so hard, despite the whispering. He was always so charming, so ready to see everyone else’s point of view. ‘Listen, I know how you feel, but you don’t have a clue about how things are at home between me and Sash. And now I’ve met someone who makes me feel good about myself for the first time in years. And I’d be grateful if you and Josh would just butt out.’

‘Dan!’ Sasha’s voice came wafting from the next room. ‘Bring another bottle of red in, would you?’

Dan glared at Hannah before snatching up the bottle they’d brought round, still wrapped in its off-licence tissue paper, and stalking out.

‘Coming, my little lush!’

Alone in the kitchen, Hannah leaned back against the cooker and put her head in her hands. She and Sasha had had their moments over the four years they’d been friends. She could remember a handful of times when they’d snapped at each other over one thing or another (although, if she remembered rightly, she was pretty sure most of the snapping had come from Sasha), but she’d never once had a cross word with Dan. He was always the laid-back one. Always the one to smooth out tensions with a joke or a well-placed compliment.

For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to picture how life might be dividing their time between a separated Sasha and Dan.

It didn’t bear thinking about.

‘G’way!’

Hannah had been dreaming about
that night
again for the first time in ages. Battling into consciousness, her heart racing, her mind still filled with images of Gemma’s battered head and her mum’s twisted, angry mouth, her airways as always stoppered up with dread, it took her a while to calm down enough to translate the indistinct noise Josh had made into proper words.

‘Go away,’ he said again, more distinctly this time.

Both of them raised themselves on to their elbows and listened as the doorbell of their ground-floor flat sounded a second time, prompting a half-hearted bark from the vicinity of Toby’s basket in the hall.

Hannah staggered to her feet.

She had always been better at getting up than Josh. Even before her skills in that area were honed by months and years of night feeds and bad dreams and brutal dawn risings, she’d never struggled like him with that middle dimension between sleep and wakefulness. She liked to be up and getting on with things. Lying awake in that dead early morning was when you had time to think, and there were things that Hannah really didn’t like to think about. Anyway, life was already so short. Why wouldn’t you make the most of what time you had?

Dragging on her old purple towelling dressing gown, and regretting as she always did that she’d not yet got around to replacing it, she made her way into the hallway. At least living in such a compact space meant you were never very far from the front door if you needed to open it.

‘All right already,’ she muttered as the bell rang a third time, a long desperate buzz.

‘Mummy?’ Lily’s voice from her little bedroom across the hall was still soaked in sleep. With any luck she wouldn’t wake up properly.

‘It’s all right, Lil. Go back to sleep.’

Up until this point, Hannah had been too focused on getting up and making sure Lily wasn’t disturbed to think about what a ring on the door in the middle of the night might mean. But in the split second when she pressed the buzzer on the intercom, she remembered what had happened the previous day.

‘It’s me. Sasha.’ If Hannah hadn’t already known who to expect, she’d never have recognized the voice that crackled through the intercom, deep and croaky and full of lumps.

Hannah buzzed her in and by the time she’d slid open both bolts and unchained the door that led from their flat into the communal lobby, Sasha was already there. She fell into Hannah’s arms, her wraith-like body shaking violently under her thin denim jacket.

‘Oh my God, Hannah,’ she said in that same choked, un-Sasha-like voice.

Hannah held her friend tight. ‘Come on, Sash,’ she murmured, aware that they were still standing in the open doorway, letting a cool draught into the flat. ‘Let’s go into the living room, hey?’

Sasha allowed herself to be led through the door at the far end of the hallway, where Hannah deposited her on the sofa.

‘I’ll make us some tea, shall I?’

If Sasha wondered why Hannah wasn’t quizzing her about what had brought her to their door in the middle of the night, she didn’t say. Instead she merely nodded. Her normally elfin features had puffed up so that her slanted hazel eyes, with their thick black lashes, were practically swollen shut.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, Hannah leaned her forehead against the cool fridge door, trying not to hear the gulping sobs coming from the next room. She felt guilty now for the times over the last few years when she’d wished Sasha ill. No, not ill, just for something in Sasha’s Sunday-supplement life not to go to plan for once, just something to make her life slightly less shiny and bring it more in line with Hannah’s own.

She’d never had a friend like Sasha before. If their babies hadn’t brought them together she probably still wouldn’t have a friend like Sasha. The two women led such different lives they’d never normally have crossed paths, like a Venn diagram where the two circles bobbed about completely independently with no point of intersection. Unlike Hannah, Sasha hadn’t gone to university but had had a series of glamorous temporary jobs instead in small boutique galleries and country-house retreats in exotic locations. She always seemed to know someone who could fix her up with something, and if not, the trust set up by her wealthy father could usually be relied on to come to her aid. After she met Dan, she’d stopped working altogether, even long before September came along, and, here’s the thing, she never felt guilty about it. She spent her time on ‘projects’ to do with the house (a simple bathroom refit could easily turn into a four-month full-time job involving mood boards and teams of designers and builders) or arranging holidays or, after September was born, taking her daughter to art and music classes, even French classes, where young women with chunky, brightly coloured jewellery sat cross-legged on the floor and showed fractious toddlers pictures of smiley faces or suns or books and made exaggerated movements with their mouths as they pronounced each syllable. Hannah knew other women who didn’t work, but none had that same sense of entitlement that Sasha did. ‘Just till the kids start school,’ they’d say, these other apologetic mothers. ‘Childcare costs are so astronomical.’ But Sasha would look at Hannah like a sleek Siamese cat and say, ‘Why would I work if I don’t have to?’ And it would be Hannah who felt short-changed, as if something was lacking.

Hannah, on the other hand, was all about the guilt. Sometimes she wondered if it would be such an integral part of her if it hadn’t been for what happened as a teenager, but at other times she felt that guilt was just woven into the thread of her DNA. She felt bad for the decisions she made, and the ones she didn’t – for all the people she imagined she’d let down. An ambitious girl from a largely unambitious background, she’d worked hard to get to university in London, switching from French to Journalism in her second year when her sister Gemma finally convinced her it was OK to do a subject she liked, rather than one she thought might be useful, and had worked harder still to gain her first staff job on a magazine for teenagers. She’d always imagined she’d take the minimum maternity leave and be straight back to the nine to five (or in her case more like ten to eight), but when Lily came along she realized how unsuited babies were to be slotted in around work like superfluous padding. Reluctantly she’d resigned from the magazine and gone freelance and now spent her days wildly oscillating between feeling guilt-ridden at spending too little time on her child, and guilt-ridden at spending too little time on badly paid freelance work. Even when she
was
with her daughter, she was feeling guilty at how boring she often found it, the whole monotonous routine of feeding and washing and playing and filling in those endless hours with repetitive games that had to be played again and again, and books you’d read so many times you thought you might explode at the sight of them. Nobody ever talked about the boredom – it was as though if you admitted it, you were admitting you didn’t love your child.

Until she had Lily, Hannah had never even held a baby before. When friends from the office arrived in the hospital ward on their designer heels, bearing cellophane-crinkling bouquets of flowers that failed to fit into any of the yellowing plastic water jugs on offer, they squealed with laughter and horror at the sight of Hannah attempting to change a nappy.

In a panic she’d tried to make friends with other new mothers in the neighbourhood by joining a postnatal mother-and-baby group run by the local NCT. The first meeting had been a disaster. She hadn’t been able to work out how to put up Lily’s new all-singing, all-dancing pushchair and had ended up, an hour and a half late, practically in tears, having run the half-mile to the hostess’s house with Lily in her arms, arriving red-faced and out of breath with a screaming baby and aches in every muscle in her body. She’d had no idea a newborn could be so heavy – how had she carried this thing around inside her for the last nine months? The other women, or so it seemed at the time, had viewed her with suspicion, pulling their own babies a little bit tighter to them, smiling politely. On the second meeting, though, she’d met Sasha.

‘I knew we were going to be friends for life when Hannah changed Lily’s nappy right there in front of us and found a bright-red rubber band in her poo,’ Sasha always liked to tell people. It was a funny story but it mortified Hannah still, the memory of that public exposure of her maternal inadequacy. The rubber-band incident, and a mutual wariness of the Proper Mums, as they soon christened the others, cemented their friendship. There’s nothing like having babies of the same age to intensify and accelerate a bond. Though Hannah and Josh’s two-bedroom flat could have fitted a million times into Sasha and Dan’s three-storey pile it was still only a few streets away, in that mad schizophrenic way of London neighbourhoods. Soon they were in and out of each other’s homes, introducing husbands, dogs, neighbours, becoming intertwined in each other’s lives at a speed that would have been unthinkable in the past pre-Lily world.

When Hannah went back into the living room, bearing two mugs of steaming tea, she found Sasha curled up on the sofa in a foetal position, sobbing gently. Her tan leather bag that Hannah had been shocked to discover cost more than she earned in a fortnight was flung on the bottom end of the sofa, contents strewn, leaving no room for anyone else, so Hannah dropped a cushion on to the floor next to the coffee table and knelt on it, drawing her feet under her bottom to keep them warm. Taking a sip from her scalding tea, she surveyed her friend in silence for a moment. She looked just like a child lying there, with her hair all over the place. Hannah’s heart constricted as she watched Sasha’s narrow shoulders shaking. How could Dan do this? Sasha had her moments, she could be controlling as hell and exasperatingly overdramatic. But she had a huge heart and was capable of impulsive acts of jaw-dropping generosity. And she was the mother of his child.

‘Come on,’ Hannah said, when she could bear the muffled sobbing no longer. ‘Drink your tea and tell me.’

Sasha’s eyes opened – well, as much as they could in their present puffy state. She looked a bit startled, as if she’d forgotten Hannah was even there. She heaved herself up into a sitting position and brought her knees up to her chin, pulling the faded Ramones T-shirt she had on under her denim jacket down over her legs as little boys sometimes do to give themselves freakishly large fake breasts.