The Broken (32 page)

Then, of course, she had to fill Gemma in on what had been happening, and about Josh’s email being appropriated by Dan’s lawyer and used against Sasha.

‘She shakes all the time, and she’s convinced people are robbing her and trying to kill her. And I think—’

She hesitated, remembering that Lily was in the room. But her daughter was engrossed in the television, laughing at
SpongeBob
– a programme Hannah had never managed to understand.

‘You think what?’ Gemma was looking at her expectantly, so Hannah went on, keeping her voice low.

‘I think she’s self-harming. She has all these awful scratches on her arm. I haven’t seen them properly – she pulls her sleeve down when she sees me looking – but they look pretty bad.’

‘Sounds like Dan’s right then, Hans. However sorry you feel for Sasha, it doesn’t seem like she’s in any state to look after a child. More likely she needs help herself. You can’t let yourself get drawn into her shit.’

Hannah thought about those scratches, and Sasha’s tear-stained face on the floor of the nightclub toilets, and something tightened inside her painfully as if it was about to snap.

‘That’s just it though. I’m already drawn in.’

Not Lucie/Not Eloise, aged eighteen

Now that Mother is dead, Lucie is dead too. RIP Lucie! RIP Mother! And Eloise? Well, survival never was Eloise’s forte. RIP Eloise! That has meant drawing a line under some friendships. Juliette and her family, who were so kind. Lucie was the one who drew that line. They’d never met Lucie before. I don’t think they’ll want to meet her again. I’m feeling kind of bad about that.

I don’t think anyone was surprised when Mother died. As far as I know, her little book of sayings never taught her to say, ‘I’ll never make old bones,’ which is a shame. I think she’d have enjoyed that one. When she hanged herself, just eighteen months after Daddy died and six months after I left school to look after her, Valerie and Michel tried to make a fuss. They said she’d never have done anything so violent. I had a good laugh about that. About their definition of violent. But they’re wrong. She wanted to go, all right. Her number was up. She couldn’t do it on her own, of course. She couldn’t do much on her own by the end, but what else are daughters for?

And things will be different now. I feel lighter. I sense new beginnings. I’m looking for a new name. I think it might help to think of myself as a brand. Like a tin of beans or a washing powder. What’s the best name for Brand Me? Plus I’m loaded. Well, not loaded, but I’ve got some money. Money can’t buy you love, isn’t that right, Mother? But it can buy you a home. A place to call your own. And that’ll be a novelty enough!

25

Pat Hennessey couldn’t have looked less at ease. His wet brown eyes were wide and unblinking as he gazed around the crowded gastropub. Not for the first time that evening, Josh wished he’d chosen somewhere else. He’d only picked this place because he’d been here before with Hannah and Sasha and Dan and because, being in Archway, it was convenient for both him in Crouch End and Pat in Holloway, but he could tell Pat felt intimidated by the prices and the trendy staff – the barman with his waxed ’tache and pointed beard and sideburns – and the fact that the pork scratchings they had ordered were home cooked and came piled like entrails in a large bowl.

‘Will you gentlemen be eating?’ asked a waitress with dyed red hair which was long on one side and shaved on the other with a Maori-type tattoo etched into the scalp. ‘I can recommend the jellied pig’s head.’

Josh couldn’t look at his companion for fear of the horror he’d see on his face.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled when the waitress had left, jamming her pencil behind her multi-pierced ear. ‘We should have gone somewhere else.’

‘No, no, this is grand. All the pubs around my way have great big TV screens everywhere and you can’t hear yourself think, so this is a real treat.’

‘But you won’t be trying the jellied pig’s head, I’m guessing.’

‘No, probably not.’

They sat for a few seconds in silence, squinting at the blackboard where the menu was chalked in curly letters.

‘Should have brought my specs,’ said Pat. ‘I keep forgetting that I’m now a person who wears glasses. I wonder how old I’ll have to be before I come to terms with it. What does that third one say, under the rabbit dish?’

‘Beer-battered cod with thick-cut skin-on potato wedges.’

Pat’s face relaxed. ‘Fish and chips,’ he said.

While they waited for their food, the headache that had been thrumming in Josh’s brain all day started to build. He knew it was stress, but knowing that didn’t help him deal with it any better. He turned over in his mind ways to broach the subject of Kelly Kavanagh and his suspension to Pat. He assumed that’s why Pat had called to suggest a drink, but now they were here, his erstwhile colleague seemed in no rush to get to the point. And the longer they went without talking about it, the more nervous Josh became. It wasn’t so much the elephant in the room as the great blue whale.

At last Pat pressed his lips together as if considering what he was about to say, and then opened his mouth. ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Josh, about what’s happened to you.’

There. It was out. Josh felt some of the pressure that had been building up inside his head escape like a mini gas leak.
Pffff.

‘It’s what we’re all afraid of, isn’t it? All of us men. There but for the grace of God and all that. How are you bearing up?’

Josh thought about telling Pat about the pressure in his head, and the way his heart occasionally raced for no reason, convincing him that he was about to go into cardiac arrest, or how he lay awake during the early hours of the morning, listening to Hannah’s rhythmic breathing and the second hand of the alarm clock softly ticking away, while panic burned through him like acid until it was all he could do not to cling on to her like a drowning man grabbing a piece of driftwood. He could tell him about the walks he took with Toby through the dark streets when lying in bed became too unbearable, his footsteps echoing on the deserted pavements, how whenever he saw another person going about their business in the dim light he was seized by a mad impulse to tell them who he was – a man accused of paedophilia, an abuser of innocence – just to watch their expression change. How it felt to be on the outside of life, when he’d always done everything he could to fit snugly in. He could tell him how, more often than not, those walks led him to Sasha’s road, where he stood looking up at her house, his thoughts poisoned darts, each one aimed at her.

‘Oh, you know. It’s pretty shit really, as you might expect.’

Pat nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously in his throat. Josh noticed he was wearing exactly the same sort of clothes he wore to school – a checked shirt under a pale-blue crew-neck jumper, a pair of brown cords. It was as if Pat didn’t have a private side – he was ‘Sir’ in his personal life, just like at school.

‘How has Hannah taken it? It must be a big worry for her, especially with her being pregnant.’

Josh stared into his pint, concentrating on the surface where the bubbles popped. There was a dog on the floor by the next table, a little grey shaggy thing, lying on its side with a look of resignation. He always forgot there were places you could bring dogs, and had a momentary pang of remorse for Toby, cooped up in the flat.

‘I haven’t told her.’

Pat, who’d been making a chequerboard pattern out of square coasters, looked up then, his mouth open, eyes wide. Then he sucked the air in through his teeth in a long, loud inward breath. ‘Wow. I mean, I can see why you wouldn’t want to say anything, but Josh, it’s been nearly a week. You don’t want to be carrying this on your own. It’s too much.’

Josh pressed his lips together, enjoying the sharp pressure of teeth against flesh. ‘I keep meaning to tell her, but I lose my nerve. And then I convince myself that it won’t last long, this suspension. They’ll finish their investigation – which has to be cursory at best, I mean, what evidence do they have? – and then I’ll be back at work and Hannah need never know anything about it.’

Pat was still staring at him, stricken, so he added, ‘Maybe I’ll tell her later on, when everything isn’t so stressful.’

The red-haired waitress materialized by his side, balancing outsized white plates on her skinny, bird-like arms. He’d asked for his steak medium rare and it was bleeding watery pink across the expanse of white china. Revulsion heaved suddenly inside him, and he swallowed it back down.

‘So what have you been doing during the day, while Hannah thinks you’re at work?’

Josh sighed. ‘Just hanging out with friends mostly. Outstaying my welcome probably.’

This was almost true. He had been hanging out with one friend in particular. Dan. Or rather, not Dan, as Dan was almost always at work. Sienna. He’d been hanging out with Sienna. He hadn’t intended to, he told himself. It had just kind of happened organically.

He’d started off on the first day of his enforced leave driving around aimlessly, circumventing the congestion-charge zone, then on the second day, he had found himself in west London and decided to call in on impulse. He still hadn’t completely forgiven Dan for sending his email to the lawyer, but he could understand how it had happened. So he’d called in, and found Sienna home alone, and bored. And again he’d ended up telling her everything – about the new allegation at work, about Hannah, even Lily. She had a way of listening with her whole body, leaning towards him, fixing him with those green-flecked eyes, that made him feel as if he was actually being heard for the first time in a long time. He’d left feeling lighter, less like he was being crushed slowly in one of those car-cubing machines. Since then they’d met a few times, mostly at the Notting Hill flat, but once in Regent’s Park and a couple of times, when it was too cold to be outdoors, at Tate Modern. Josh would drive off as if heading to work and park the car a few streets away, catching the bus to Finsbury Park and then the tube on from there. Sometimes he felt a twinge of guilt about these meetings, since obviously he couldn’t mention them to Hannah. It didn’t help either that Sienna was gorgeous – he’d seen the way men looked at him when they were out together.
What has he got?
was what those looks were saying. Mostly, though, he justified it to himself. They were keeping each other company. And Sienna was keeping him sane. She was so refreshingly unjudgemental, so unfazed by things. He’d found himself confiding stuff he’d never even verbalized to himself, let alone anyone else – things about his childhood, about his disappointment that the two women he loved most in the world – his mother and his wife – had never bonded, about how moody Hannah was now she was pregnant.

Sienna, on the other hand, seemed to be taking pregnancy completely in her stride, hardly registering it at all. He knew it was unfair to compare a twenty-four-year-old to a woman ten years older who’d already given birth before, but Sienna seemed to have none of the problems Hannah was always complaining about – the tiredness, the floods of tears for no reason, the way her favourite food suddenly tasted all wrong. Sometimes he thought Hannah was actually losing it a bit. Like when she’d suddenly started quizzing him about Gemma and whether he’d ever fancied her. Where had that come from?

In her turn, Sienna had opened up to him. Dan was taking it very badly, she told him. About not being able to see September. He was tearing his hair out with worry. Sasha wasn’t stable. Something ought to be done – for her sake as much as anything. Sienna felt awful about what had happened to Sasha, and couldn’t sleep some nights for the guilt of having taken Dan away. It seemed wrong to build your happiness on someone else’s unhappiness, she told Josh (weren’t those the exact words he’d used himself?). But then equally you couldn’t help who you fell in love with. Sasha was still relatively young – and quite attractive, Sienna said earnestly. She could find someone else. But she had to move on with her life – it had been three months, for God’s sake – and to do that she had to get some help. And while she was getting that help, they were all going to have to accept there’d have to be some changes. She and Dan couldn’t possibly look after a child in Sienna’s one-bedroom flat, so they’d have to move into the house, at least until it could be sold. It wasn’t what
she
wanted. Sienna was scathing about Crouch End with its yummy mummies and artisan bread shops and supermarkets which grew their own vegetables on the roof. She called it suburbia until she remembered Josh lived there too. But Josh thought she was probably right. It
was
pretty suburban. It didn’t even have a tube. It had been Hannah who’d wanted to live there in the first place, if he remembered rightly. He would have been happy somewhere cheaper and more convenient.

‘I just wish things hadn’t got so bitter,’ Sienna said to him, as they sat huddled on a bench outside the Tate, watching the muddy river churn past and the crowds surge over the steel ribbon that was the Millennium Bridge. ‘I’m absolutely hopeless at confrontation, but when I see what she’s doing to him, keeping him from his daughter, it makes me so angry.’

Josh had smiled then, he couldn’t help it – the notion of this girl with her soft eyes and the freckles over the bridge of her nose getting angry.

Across the table, Pat was gingerly probing the emerald-green mushy peas that had arrived in a small bowl of their own. He kept clearing his throat as though he were about to say something. Eventually he lowered his fork. ‘Listen, Josh, I have to tell you, I think it might take longer than you’re imagining. The investigation, I mean.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that everyone seems to be taking it very seriously. It’s bad timing, that’s all. With all those high-profile cases that have been in the news, I think they’re using you to prove how tough they are on any kind of . . . impropriety, and how willing they are to listen to supposed victims.’

‘But I haven’t done anything!’ The lump of meat on his tongue felt suddenly monstrous.