The Broken (35 page)

Then came that scan,
just to be sure
, and that awful silence stretching on and on, and that ‘I’m terribly sorry’, and he realized he hadn’t been listened to, after all. How could he ever have believed otherwise?

And now this. This curious emptiness.

Dan, on the other hand, seemed full to bursting, to the point where he just couldn’t seem to stay still. He’d been in this same supercharged mood when Josh first saw him at the hospital. He’d appeared with September clinging to his arm as Josh and Lily were waiting for Hannah to have an X-ray on her wrist to make sure it wasn’t broken. This was before the scan and the silence that came after it. Sasha was in a different ward, he told them. She might not be out for a couple of days. Psychological assessment, Josh learned later, when September and Lily wandered off to the vending machine to ogle the chocolate. The doctors were taking the wounds to Sasha’s arm as a cry for help. Not to mention the circumstances of the accident, where Sasha had failed to slow down at a T-junction, ending up smashing into the car parked on the opposite side of the intersection. A blow-out, she insisted. She’d had no chance of controlling the car. And there was the nail and the burst tyre to prove it. The nail that might or might not have been hammered in there on purpose.

‘You see?’ Dan kept saying. ‘You see how things are?’

With Sasha being detained on the general ward, ostensibly for a bump on her head, but really so that staff could find out whether she presented a threat to herself or anyone else, it was obvious that Dan should move back home to look after his traumatized daughter. September had pleaded for Sienna to come too and had spent the evening curled up on her lap in the same armchair Sienna was now sitting in. Now the two girls were asleep upstairs. Josh had been in such shock following the scan he hadn’t had the energy to protest when Dan insisted he and Lily come back with them rather than stay by themselves, and he docilely strapped his quiet daughter into the back of the Golf and followed Dan’s unmistakeable red car back to the very house he’d been lurking outside just the night before. Saying goodbye to Hannah at the hospital had been both a nightmare and – he hated himself for thinking it – a relief. After the scan, they’d been given the option of going home and letting the miscarriage happen naturally or Hannah staying overnight and having an ERPC procedure in the morning to eliminate what the sad-eyed registrar called ‘the products of conception’. ‘
Products of conception?
She meant our baby,’ Hannah had sobbed afterwards. The registrar had told them that the baby was smaller than they’d have expected at this stage, which could mean it had died up to ten days before, but Hannah had refused to listen. ‘It was the crash,’ she repeated stubbornly, and then, ‘It was Sasha.’

Hannah was in a ward with three others, and had already taken a strong sleeping pill by this time. She’d hardly looked up when he bent over her to kiss her goodbye, so she didn’t notice he was finally crying, fat round tears that bubbled up unbidden. Or maybe she noticed but didn’t comment.

‘Just go,’ she’d said, closing her eyes. Her hair on the pillow was the colour of dried blood.

So now here they were, in this house where he and Hannah had spent so much time – Saturday nights staying up far too late playing poker for a tenner-a-head stake and drinking cocktails they took it in turns to invent; Sunday lunchtimes that bled softly into evenings, sitting so long around the white round retro table that they got hungry all over again and raided the fridge for leftovers.

Where had those people gone?

Now Josh sat in the black leather and chrome 1960s chair that Dan had bought for a small fortune at auction one drunken Saturday afternoon and insisted on putting in pride of place, despite Sasha’s vehement objections, and felt like he was visiting the place for the first time. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar. Like something he’d seen on television.

‘How are you feeling, Josh?’ Sienna’s voice – warm with concern – brought back the treacherous tears pricking his eyes.

‘I’m OK. Dreading tomorrow. Not half as much as Hannah is, of course.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

She’d said it a thousand times over the course of the afternoon. Josh was aware she meant well, but he wished she’d be quiet now. He didn’t want to have to talk or think. What if he’d put the nail in Sasha’s tyre himself? The thought came into his head before he had time to stop it, through the gap that Sienna’s question had opened up. He’d been here last night, outside this house in his usual spot and all these thoughts had been crowding into his head, whirring around and around until it was like an explosion in his brain. And then nothing. One minute he’d been standing in the shadows outside Sasha’s study window, and the next he was waking up back in his bed, with Hannah asleep next to him and a strange hungover feeling. On a rational, logical level, he knew he’d never have done anything like that – wouldn’t even have known how to. But he hated this lapse in his memory, and how the things that were going on in his life were slowly stripping him from the self he’d always known.

He was conscious that Dan and Sienna were exchanging meaningful looks, and then Dan came and perched on the arm of his chair.

‘Sorry, Josh. I’ve been a knob, haven’t I? Going on and on about my stuff when you’re going through . . . Well, you know.’

‘Don’t worry.’ Josh’s voice was unsteady. ‘I’m used to you being a knob.’

But then Dan was off again, moving around the room, opening cupboards and reacquainting himself with all the possessions he hadn’t seen for the last few weeks. He’d been furious when he first saw his study. ‘Babe, come in here!’ he’d called to Sienna. She and Josh had arrived in the upstairs room moments later, to be greeted by a scene of total devastation. Papers were strewn around the floor, many of them crumpled into balls; his prize-winning photographs, which had once been proudly displayed on the wall in heavy black frames, had been taken down and smashed, leaving discoloured rectangles of paint on the wall and glass all over the sofa. His hugely expensive photography books had been pulled off the shelves, their pages ripped to shreds. Everywhere there was carnage. Creepiest of all was that in the middle of all the destruction, a small space had been cleared in which there was a pillow and a duvet.

Sasha had been sleeping there.

Now Dan found something else to focus on.

‘The Blake!’ he exclaimed from the upstairs landing. ‘I don’t fucking believe it!’

When they got there he was squatting in front of a white Scandinavian-style sideboard whose doors he had just slid open. He reached in and withdrew a small, squarish picture in a dark wood frame. Josh knew, even before he opened his mouth, what Dan was going to say.

‘It’s the one she swore had been stolen. The one she said I’d broken in –
to my own house
– and stolen! The crazy, vindictive bitch!’

Josh felt a stab of pure, viscous pleasure. He’d been right then, about Sasha. She
was
dangerous. Evil even, when you thought of all the things she’d done, the lies she’d spread. Telling them Dan had tried to kill her – that he was violent, sadistic even. The phone calls to his headmaster (his stomach lurched involuntarily at the thought).

Then the doubts came again. But the nail . . . And just what did he do last night?

‘At least now there’ll be no more surprises,’ said Sienna. ‘At least everyone will know the truth.’

‘I’m going up to check on September again,’ said Dan. He looked suddenly pale and tired, as if the structure of his face, of which he was so proud, had partly caved in. Josh realized with a start that this couldn’t be easy for Dan. Sasha was the mother of his child. They’d slept together in the same bed until a few months ago, waking up to each other every morning, using a bathroom still warm and damp with each other’s smell, hearing the private noises they made in their sleep. And yet she’d done all this: faked robberies, lied, cut letters into her arm so deeply that doctors doubted the scars would ever completely fade.

Not to mention what she might have done to her own daughter. When they’d first got back from the hospital, September had clung to her father as if she was velcroed there, following him from room to room as if she was frightened that if she let him out of her sight, he’d be gone like a leaf in the wind. ‘I want to live with you, not Mummy,’ she’d said several times.

A cursory tour of the house gave some indication why. There was no food in the fridge, just three bottles of white wine and an out-of-date packet of cheese strings. One cupboard held a couple of tins of coconut milk and one of black beans, all dusty as if they’d been there for a while. The bread bin was rank with various crusts of bread, all covered in powdery green mould. Only the cereal cupboard was well stocked, although the packets were all open, the contents mostly stale.

‘The poor child must have been living on dry cereal!’ Sienna had been horrified, her green eyes wet with pity.

The master bedroom had been in a state. When the thick curtains were pulled back to let in the light, they could see Dan’s clothes were all over the place, many of them in pieces, jagged scraps of material lying in multicoloured heaps around the floor. There were also a couple of Dan’s T-shirts in the bed. Sasha’s underwear was strewn about too, as was her make-up here and in the ensuite bathroom, where there was a box of razor blades on the side of the basin that Josh had tried hard not to look at.

‘When did Katia last come, princess?’ Dan asked September, who was gazing around with blank, unperturbed eyes that had clearly stopped seeing the devastation as out of the ordinary.

The little girl shrugged. ‘Katia stopped coming after Mummy hit her.’

A little muscle at the side of Dan’s mouth twitched as if he was pressing his teeth together to stop any words coming out.

Only September’s room was in some semblance of order, her clothes neatly put away, the duvet pulled up over the pillow.

‘I tidy my room like Mrs Mackenzie says,’ she explained proudly.

‘I think she means when they have tidy-up time at school,’ Josh hazarded.

Sienna had knelt down then, crushing September to her and burying her face in the little girl’s hair.

Meanwhile Dan was puzzling over the cracks in the wood of the door and the dark marks around the bottom. ‘What happened here?’ he asked, running his hand over a patch where the wood had been chipped completely away.

September snuggled in closer to Sienna, and for a moment her eyes looked frightened, as if she was anticipating being told off. ‘I don’t like it when Mummy locks me in,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Sometimes I try to get out.’

No wonder Dan needed to go and check on her, even while she slept. Josh couldn’t imagine the guilt he must be feeling at having left her in Sasha’s care all this time.

‘He’ll never get over it,’ Sienna said now, as if she could read Josh’s mind. She had resumed her position curled up in the white armchair in Dan’s outsized dressing gown, her bare feet tucked under her. Josh felt a stab of pain as he watched her rubbing her belly in that automatic gesture Hannah did too. Or rather, Hannah used to do. He didn’t want to talk any more. Didn’t want to think or feel. Didn’t want to look at Sienna’s hand on her still non-existent bump. Didn’t want to think about Hannah’s voice saying, ‘Just go.’ Didn’t want to think about the blank space in his memory where last night should have been.

‘Aren’t you worried about Hannah?’ Sienna was staring at him fixedly, and Josh felt a rush of confusion.

‘Of course I’m worried about her. She’s lost the baby. We both have. God knows how she’s going to get through tomorrow.’

Sienna frowned. ‘Not because of that,’ she said abruptly. Then she saw his face and immediately modified her voice. ‘I know you’re worried about her because of the baby. We all are, but what I meant is, aren’t you worried about her being in the same hospital as Sasha? The woman nearly killed the lot of them.’

Again that sick feeling. The black hole in his memory.

‘We don’t know for sure she did it deliberately . . .’

Sienna wasn’t having it. ‘Josh, stop being so nice for once.’

‘I’m not being nice. It just seems so far-fetched.’

‘Oh, and claiming to be pushed down an escalator isn’t?’

He dropped his head into his hands. ‘You’re right. It’s just all so fucked up.’

All of a sudden, he was conscious that Sienna had moved and was standing next to his chair. He felt her hands gently stroking his hair.

‘You’ll be all right, Josh.’

He closed his eyes, willing himself to believe her.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said again.

The silk cushion he was clutching was soaked before he even realized he was crying.

Josh slept surprisingly well in the pale-grey-and-white guest room on the ground floor of Sasha and Dan’s house. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t lie awake worrying, or wake up after just one or two hours with violent dreams still crashing around his head.

The rest of the household was still asleep when he awoke, so he got dressed and showered as quietly as he could, grateful that Sasha’s particular brand of crazed housekeeping hadn’t made it as far as the guest bathroom, and then crept upstairs to find Lily. Pushing open the door of September’s room, his eyes fell once again on the cracks in the wood and the horror of yesterday’s discoveries returned. Sasha had locked her daughter in this room for long enough that she had tried to kick her way out. He remembered Hannah’s fear that there had been no babysitter the night she and Sasha had gone out. He’d never found out what happened, but he knew something had gone seriously awry that night. In the dim light he could make out the prints of a small hand on one of the door panels. His stomach clenched imagining Lily in that situation, the terror she would feel.

September had one of those high beds with a sofa underneath that opened up into a spare bed for sleepovers. In the past, both girls had insisted on sleeping together in that sofa bed, keeping each other awake for hours, squealing with pleasure when their toes tickled each other’s legs. But now only September was down there. Lily lay in the top bed, her big eyes wide open.