The Broken (37 page)

‘But I didn’t do the other stuff, I swear. Someone
did
try to kill me, someone
did
break into the house. And I have no idea about the calls to your work, Josh. I promise.’

‘I saw it, Sasha! I was at your house last night and I saw that painting you claimed had gone missing. It was in the sideboard.’

Now that the anger had finally arrived, he was almost enjoying it. There was something almost righteous about it. Finally, after all these weeks of being powerless to act against all the crap that had been going on, here was his chance to be heard.

‘I don’t understand.’ Sasha was looking at him in total incomprehension.

‘And I suppose you don’t understand about the razor blades in your bathroom either, that September could easily have found, or the marks on her door where she tried to get out after you locked her in her bedroom – probably so you could go out, leaving her all on her own. She’s not even five years old!’

Now Sasha collapsed entirely. ‘Oh God,’ she moaned, raising her hands to her face. ‘Poor Temmy. I can’t explain it. I was sick. I always waited until she was asleep.’ Again that quick glance of appeal. ‘Fuck, I’m a terrible mother. No wonder they’ve taken her away from me. Oh shit, shit, shit, shit.’

Josh clapped his hand to his mouth as Sasha began banging her head rhythmically backwards on the metal hospital bed.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she continued. Clang, clang, clang.

A nurse hurried over, her round face knotted in disapproval. ‘What’s all this noise about, Mrs Fisher?’ she said, grasping Sasha roughly by the shoulders to stop her throwing herself backwards. ‘We don’t want to be upsetting all the other ladies, do we?’

She looked suspiciously at Hannah and Josh. ‘I think Mrs Fisher needs to rest now. You’d better come back another time.’

As they turned and walked away, the soft thud of Sasha’s pitiful body against the bedpost followed them across the room.

28

It was an unseasonably warm day, and Hannah raised her face greedily to the sky, soaking up that sense of wellbeing that always came with feeling the rays on her skin after a long, sun-starved winter.

The excited squeals of laughter coming from the giant trampoline in the corner of the garden mixed with the distant birdsong and the lazy buzzing of not-quite-awake bees, creating a Sounds of Summer soundtrack although it was still only late March. She took a long breath in, enjoying the sensation of filling her body with oxygen and flushing the toxins out of her system.

‘Ta-da!’

Sienna plonked a huge bowl of salad down on the long, silvery teak table. Hannah recognized the bowl as one Sasha had picked out at a souk in Marrakech when the four of them had spent a weekend in a riad – Sasha and Dan’s present for her thirty-second birthday. It seemed like a different life now.

‘Please don’t look too closely,’ Sienna said of the eclectic mixture of leaves and vegetables heaped in the brightly patterned ceramic dish. ‘I just threw everything in together. Douse it in dressing and it’ll be fine.’

‘All the ingredients are edible?’ Dan poked the concoction dubiously with one of those wooden salad servers shaped like a hand. ‘You sure that big thing in the middle isn’t a pan scourer or something?’

‘It’s an avocado, idiot! At least, I think it’s an avocado . . .’

Hannah looked up and smiled, thankful that she could finally look at Sienna’s now visible baby bump without that answering painful lurch in her own abdomen. Now that she and Josh had decided to try for another baby, she felt much calmer about everything. There was an old song lyric that had been constantly lodged in her head in the days after the accident about not knowing what you had till it had gone. She mourned her lost baby with a desperation that shocked her. But she was starting to make peace with herself. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Josh kept telling her with a touching insistence. ‘It wasn’t either of our faults.’ Now, at last, she was starting to believe him.

‘Can we eat on the trampoline?’

September’s transparently fluttery-eyed appeal invoked the usual indulgent capitulation in her father.

‘I think that might just be permissible.’

He’d have to start saying no to her eventually, but for the time being no one begrudged the little girl the chance to be spoilt. Not after what she’d been through. The trampoline had been the biggest gift, entailing the digging up of Sasha’s prize decked Moroccan chill-out area, but there’d been a stream of others. Dan’s way of trying to make it up to September for not having been around to protect her. Lily, as usual, was quieter than her friend.

‘You OK, Liliput?’ Hannah called.

Her daughter nodded slowly. ‘Don’t like salad,’ she said, eyeing the heaped bowl in pride of place on the table.

Sienna breathed in slowly, and for a second Hannah thought she was offended. Then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, you two can have fishfinger sarnies. How’s that?’

Dan put his hand out and gave Sienna an affectionate pat on the bum and Hannah closed her eyes again. Now that she and Josh had started, very slowly, to rediscover each other sexually, she no longer felt that instinctive recoil at the sight of other people being intimate in public, but it was still a little odd to be sitting in the garden Sasha had designed (well, with the help of an expensive ‘landscape architect’), while her husband, albeit soon-to-be-ex-husband, touched up his pregnant new girlfriend.

On the whole though, it was almost miraculous how fully Sasha had been expunged from their lives over the last three months. The police had examined the tyre but hadn’t found any conclusive evidence that it had been deliberately tampered with, so there were no charges to bring. However, in view of the self-inflicted damage to her arm and her neglect of September, social workers had been involved, and it was agreed Dan should stay in the house to look after his daughter. In the meantime, Sasha had been admitted to an upmarket residential psychiatric clinic often in the headlines for treating celebrity addicts. The money had come from a trust fund her father had set up for the express function, as far as Hannah could tell, of bailing his daughter out when things went disastrously wrong.

Hannah hadn’t seen Sasha, of course. She doubted whether she would ever be able to see her again. So many times in the past she had forgiven her behaviour, made excuses for her, tried to see things from her perspective. But this last thing she found she couldn’t forgive.

It had been a strange time, trying to claw her way out from the pit of her grief without the support of the people she’d normally turn to. Her mother (stupid how her heart still constricted at the thought of her being dead), Sasha. Even Gemma hadn’t been around so much. She’d come to stay the first weekend after it happened, but there had been a stiffness there, an awkwardness that had never existed between them before. Hannah told herself it had nothing to do with the photograph of Josh or what Sasha had told her, nor the car crash that had brought that earlier accident rushing back into her head, but still she found it hard to be natural around her sister, and the next time Gemma had offered to come to stay, she’d found an excuse to say no.

But how weird it was that the woman she’d first perceived as nothing but a threat should turn out to be such a saviour. Since Hannah got back from the hospital, all but paralysed by guilt and grief, Sienna had been quietly and unobtrusively present – sorting out the mess of the flat, writing explanatory emails to features editors on her behalf, picking up Lily from school. Just sitting there listening when Hannah needed to vent about what had happened. Now she couldn’t imagine life without her. Gemma hadn’t liked Sienna, of course. But then Gemma hadn’t liked Sasha either. Now Hannah wondered whether her sister might not just be jealous of her friendships. More worryingly, Lily wasn’t too keen on her either, but then, as Josh said, Lily was used to having Hannah to herself. And maybe she and September had outgrown each other. It happened at that age. When she felt stronger, Hannah resolved to widen her social net. Well, big school was already helping with that. But for now, Hannah needed Sienna’s support.

‘How was your first week back at school?’ Sienna was asking Josh now, peering over the top of her eccentric-looking salad.

‘Oh, you know. Interesting.’

Josh liked Sienna – Hannah sometimes worried that he liked her a little too much, but she knew he wasn’t about to go into details about how it really felt to go back to work after you’d had such a big question mark hanging over you. Kelly Kavanagh had withdrawn her allegation – Josh said the supply teacher who’d replaced him had actually given her worse marks than he had, which had led to a rapid change of heart. And when the head had been informed by social workers of what had gone on with Sasha and the likelihood of her being behind the anonymous calls, the governors had agreed there was no case to answer and Josh had been unanimously reinstated. But, as he’d said to Ian at that first meeting, mud sticks. Josh knew some of the kids called him Paedo behind his back, and Hannah could only imagine how awful that must feel. They still hadn’t had a proper, honest discussion about that period when Josh was leaving the house in the morning and going God knows where, because he couldn’t face telling her the truth about what had happened. She’d failed him then, she realized now. And while they were both enjoying their fragile, newly cemented accord, Hannah knew that until they’d really explored what had gone wrong during that time, they wouldn’t completely be able to move on.

‘I still can’t get over being able to be here, with her,’ Dan said, gazing at September as she and Lily ate their lunch cross-legged on the trampoline, their heads bent together. ‘It’s like being given a second chance, you know.’

‘If you start counting your blessings, I might have to be sick into this most excellent salad,’ said Josh.

‘Oi, less of the sarcasm,’ laughed Sienna, prodding Josh with one of the wooden salad-server hands.

Dan, though, was clearly intent on having a serious moment. ‘I blame myself, you know.’

For a moment Hannah thought Dan might actually be about to take some responsibility for the chain of events he’d set in motion.

‘I should have realized my leaving would set Sasha off. I was just too in love to see it.’

Sienna blew him a kiss across the table, while Josh shuffled awkwardly in his chair next to her.

‘What exactly did happen to Sasha when she was little?’ Hannah had never dared ask this question outright. Sasha’s traumatic childhood was one of those mythical things that everyone knew existed, but not exactly what they were.

Dan glanced over at the trampoline, but September and Lily had now gone back to bouncing again, taking it in turns to perform silly mid-air jumps and grading each other out of ten.

‘Sasha’s mother was a cunt, basically.’ Dan picked up a lettuce leaf from his plate and started tearing it to pieces. ‘She never really got over Sasha’s dad leaving and blamed Sasha, because she couldn’t accept that he just couldn’t stand being married to her. She hardly had anything to do with Sasha if she could help it, and then she married this complete arsehole who got off on little girls, and when Sasha told her mum what was going on, she ignored it. She told Sasha she was making it up to get attention. She accused her – a nine-year-old child – of being jealous of her. She said Sasha had driven her father away by fawning all over him and she wasn’t going to let her drive his replacement away too.’

‘She knew, and she did nothing?’ Hannah felt sick. It was what she’d always suspected from the little snippets that Sasha had let slip over the years, but to hear it spelt out like that, so brutally, was a shock. For a moment all four of them watched the two girls on the trampoline and Hannah knew they were all thinking the same thing – Sasha would have been not much older than September and Lily when the abuse started.

Sienna got up from the table and went inside the house. Hannah wondered whether being pregnant might make her especially sensitive. She was well aware of how the hormones could drive you from one emotional extreme to another. Hers had well and truly disappeared now, but the memory of them had lingered for quite a while after the miscarriage, tricking her trusting body into believing it was still growing something inside it, still expectant, still fruitful.

‘What about her real father?’ she asked Dan.

‘He was a selfish bastard. He’d moved on to wife number two by then, and had another baby and moved to France. Having a child from his first marriage come to stay would have got in the way of his playing happy families.’

Dan seemed oblivious to any irony in what he was saying, to any links between the situation he was describing and his own.

‘But surely he couldn’t just ignore what Sasha was saying?’

‘Yes, but she didn’t say it, did she? Bear in mind she was just a child and she hardly ever saw her dad. They didn’t have the kind of relationship where you just say, “Oh Daddy, by the way, my mother’s husband comes into my room at night and rapes me.” She hinted at it the few times she saw him, but he never picked up on it.’

‘But you think he knew?’

‘I think he wouldn’t let himself know. It would have been too inconvenient for him. I’m sure that’s why he set up the trust fund for her before he died, the one that’s paying for the five-star nut house she’s in now. It’s guilt money.’

For the first time since the accident, Hannah allowed herself to feel pity for Sasha, for the child she’d once been. No wonder she was so totally screwed up. What chance did she have – had she ever had – to lead a normal life, with all that lurking in her past?

‘How long did she put up with it?’

‘Till she was sixteen. That’s when she left home and came to London.’

Seven years. She’d lived with it for seven years. What did that kind of thing do to a child? How did it affect your ability to form relationships? To parent? How did you learn love when you’d never been shown it?

‘Now,’ said Sienna, emerging through the folding glass doors at the back of the house bearing a large cheesecake, ‘it’s time to stop talking and celebrate your fabulous new commission with cake. Double celebration, because I didn’t make it myself!’