The Fallout (21 page)

A kind of nauseous excitement stirred inside him as he helplessly watched the malicious fantasy Kelly Kavanagh had invented play out in his head. He knew it was wrong. She was a child. He wasn't remotely attracted to her. But it had been so long since he'd had any kind of sexual activity. He put his hand to his groin and let out a groan.

Afterward he felt grubby and sticky with shame. As he mopped himself up in the bathroom, he couldn't meet his own eyes in the mirror. A dull dread cramped inside him. Who on earth was he? A father who couldn't protect his child. A teacher who fantasized about his own pupils. He rested his head against the cool bathroom tiles and, with the tap running full blast, he cried for the first time in years.

Chapter 22

“There's no way one of us put that there.”

Nikki, one of the preschool helpers, flicked her straggly platinum-blond hair extensions out of her eyes and glared at Hannah as if she was being accused of something. Hannah tried not to look at the metal stud in her nose, which seemed to have caused an infection. The flesh around it was puckered and purple.

“I'm not saying at all that it came from anyone who worked here,” Hannah assured her.

She wished she didn't feel like she had to be overfriendly and even obsequious to the preschool staff, most of whom didn't look more than twelve years old. It was as if their role as guardians of her daughter put her helplessly in their debt, as if any bad feeling between them and her might somehow affect their treatment of the child.

“I'm just wondering who else might have been in the building during the week, who might have been able to slip something into one of the kids' bags.”

As soon as she said it, she realized the futility of it. The cloakroom area—the only semiprivate part of the school—was in almost constant use. Hadn't she herself been there just a couple of days ago, talking to Mrs. Mackenzie? Nikki gave her a blank stare.

“No disrespect, but if we was to keep tabs on everyone who goes in and out of the cloakroom, we wouldn't be able to do our jobs. Practically everyone who works here or has a child here is in that room at some time in the day.”

“Yes. I see that,” Hannah said, feeling hopeless. She sent her daughter, the most precious person in her world, to the preschool believing her to be safe, but it seemed anyone could gain access to her.

“Anyway, how is Lily after that little squabble with September?” Nikki inquired.

Hannah felt herself prickling.
Squabble?

“She was a bit shaken, as you'd expect.” Her tone was cold, hard. “It's always a bit of a shock when something like that happens out of the blue.”

“Yes, I can imagine. Though I wouldn't exactly say ‘out of the blue.'”

“Really? What do you mean?”

Nikki caught the ends of her hair extensions between the second and third fingers of her right hand and started absently combing her fingers through them, her long, electric blue nails shimmering like beetle shells in the sun.

“Well. You know how kids are. She was laying it on a bit thick about having a new baby sister. Isn't it funny how she's already decided it's a girl? I'm not defending September or nothing, but it can't have been easy to hear all that, not with things as they are at home.”

Here Nikki shot Hannah a glance that was half complicit, half hopeful, as if Hannah might take this opportunity to discuss the salacious details of September's parental separation.

“I'm sure Lily wouldn't have meant to be unkind,” Hannah said instead. “She's not that sort of girl. She was just excited. It's natural.”

Hannah was expecting Nikki to jump straight in to reinforce her defense of her daughter, but to her surprise, she hesitated.

“It's not unkind, though, is it, at that age?” Nikki said eventually. “They don't know any better.”

“But I know my daughter.” Hannah didn't even try to disguise her outrage. “She's the last person to ever want to hurt anyone's feelings.”

Nikki went back to examining her hair extensions and her ham-fisted efforts at tact enraged Hannah even further.

“Isn't she?” Hannah prompted, determined to get some kind of confirmation. Nikki sighed.

“Lily's just a normal little girl,” she said. Hannah found herself loathing the younger woman's unrefined manner of speaking, pronouncing
girl
as
gell
. “And unfortunately little girls can be quite mean sometimes. It doesn't mean they're not lovely on the whole. And of course they're different here to at home—they're learning to be their own little people. You know, some parents would be quite shocked at the way their kids act when they're not around.”

* * *

After Nikki had gone, Hannah stood by the door waiting for the session to be over, churning with rage. She was realistic about Lily, but she knew her daughter wouldn't have taunted September like that. She
knew
it.

While she waited, trying to calm down, she watched the kids playing. Lily was at one of the tables nearby, head bent over some coloring, concentrating intently to make sure she stayed within the lines. A shout from the playhouse in the far corner was followed by a squeal of laughter and September's head poked out, making a funny face, with her eyes crossed and tongue protruding. Mrs. Mackenzie had called Hannah yesterday to tell her they'd talked to September and she recognized what she'd done was wrong, and they were happy to take her back into the preschool if Hannah was okay with it. What could she say apart from “fine”? September caught Hannah's eye and smiled. Hannah tried not to stare at her teeth, imagining them pressed into Lily's skin like tiny stones set into a pebbledash wall.

“How are you holding up?”

Marcia had appeared at her elbow. Hannah felt her face grow hotter. She hadn't really spoken to Marcia since the playdate mix-up.

“Oh, you know.” Hannah rolled her eyes and made the kind of face that implied unpleasant things had been happening, without actually spelling them out. “I still feel awful about the other day, Marcia. I had no idea Sasha was planning to pick Lily up.”

“Don't worry about it. These things happen.”

Marcia was so solid, so calming. Hannah almost told her about the things Nikki had just said about Lily so that they could laugh about it together, but something held her back. What if Marcia didn't jump in to defend Lily? What if she shifted about and looked uncomfortable? Anyway, by then Marcia was talking about how she'd almost been mown down in the park on her way to school by a Mums on the Run fitness class—a group of thirty-something women joggers with their three-wheeled buggies—and the moment had passed.

Hannah was hoping that as she was there so early, she could collect Lily before Sasha arrived. Sasha was often late, arriving in a whir of motion and excuses. With any luck, Hannah wouldn't have to see her at all. She had to start putting her family first, particularly now there was a new baby to think of.

The thought of the new baby was like a punch to the stomach. She ought to be excited about it, but all she could think of was the tiredness, the claustrophobia, the smell of sour milk.

All the way home from school, Hannah fought off a creeping feeling of despondency. She fretted about the baby and what it meant. Doubt was building up inside her like plaque. During the days she'd drag her body around like an oversized bag, hardly able to lift her head, but at night, she'd be awake, lying in the dark counting worries instead of sheep. Money, work, Josh, Lily, Sasha and Dan—all churning around in her brain, adding to the low-level nausea that now permeated everything she did. And when she did eventually drop off, her sleep was patchy and restless, punctuated by stumbling trips to the toilet or dreams so vivid that when she awoke she had the disquieting sense of being unable to tell which was the dream world and which the real.

Too often, she dreamed of that night when she was a teenager. Her mother's face, purple and ugly with rage. Gemma's swollen, bashed-in head. The fear, the guilt. She should have stopped it. Why didn't she stop it? Later, of course, her mum had dissolved into a puddle of self-loathing. “What have I done?” she'd sobbed, hitting her own head again and again. “I'll never forgive myself.” Her distress had been harder to bear than her anger.

For years after it had happened, Hannah dreamed of it often. But after Lily was born, it had stopped for a while. She was always so exhausted, so burned out with child care and work, she hadn't time to get caught up in the nightmares of her past. She'd even started to think that Lily had somehow wiped the slate clean. Her daughter was so pure, so utterly blameless, perhaps that mitigated what had gone before.

But now, once again, she was waking up drenched in sweat and panic, with her mother's twisted face etched on her eyelids and the horrible, leaden, guilt-soaked reality of it all lodged in her gut.

“It's just a dream,” Josh had told her, his eyes still half-shut, his body clinging to sleep even while his hand absently stroked her back. “Be better in the morning.”

But Josh didn't understand how some dreams come from the inside, not the outside, how they hunker down in the darkness and wait.

“Can we go to the park, Mummy?”

Usually Hannah was in such a hurry to get home, back to whatever deadline she was chasing, counting the seconds until she could stick Lily in front of a DVD and get back to work, that she'd have dismissed Lily's habitual request out of hand, but today something stopped her. Though she didn't like to admit it, the conversation with Nikki had gotten to her. She didn't believe for a minute that Lily had been deliberately mean to September, but still she felt a nagging worry that she'd somehow let her daughter slip out of her grasp. When was the last time she spent proper quality one-on-one time with Lily without secretly calculating how much longer before she could break away?

What was more pressing than her own child?

“Why not?” she said, and her daughter's wide beam of surprise caught in her throat.

In the playground, Lily wanted to play “café.” She climbed the ladder up to the little wooden house attached to the play structure, her eyes doggedly fixed on the top, hands clutching tight to the sides as if she was scaling a great height, rather than just six or seven feet above the ground.

At the top, she peered through the bars of the fence.

“What would you like, madam?”

Hannah pretended to consider an invisible menu.

“Do you have any hot chocolate?”

Lily smiled.

“Yes.”

“I'll have one hot chocolate, please.”

Lily pretended to write the order down. It tugged at Hannah's heart to see how she held her invisible pencil so carefully.

“With swirly whipped cream?” she asked shyly.

Hannah thought for a moment, as if deliberating.

“Yes. And I'd like chocolate sprinkles in it, please.”

“Of course, madam.”

“And a banana.”

Lily exploded into giggles.

“You can't have a banana in your hot chocolate, silly.”

Hannah looked mock-stern.

“Yes, I can, because I'm the customer, and the customer is always right.”

While Lily disappeared into the wooden house to make the hot chocolate, Hannah looked around the playground. There were a couple of other younger mothers sitting on a bench by the sandpit, their heads bent together, giggling, oblivious to their two boys who were having a sand fight that was bound to end in tears. From nowhere, Hannah was seized by a wrenching sense of loss. How many times had she and Sasha sat on that very bench over the years? Winter mornings when their breath came out in clouds of white steam and they warmed their hands on take-out cappuccinos, summer evenings when it was too nice to go home, and they'd buy the girls mini portions of pasta and pesto and let them play until their shadows were long ribbons of darkness against the grass and one or the other fell on the ground crying with exhaustion.

They'd been so close then, her and Sasha, swapping complaints about broken nights and temper tantrums, about Dan's antisocial work hours and Josh's lack of direction. Or had they? Had they really been close? Maybe it was just convenience that threw them together, a shared need for company during those lonely baby and toddler years, for someone with whom to navigate the perplexing new world of routines and naps and a life lived in miniature within the stunted triangle of home, park and school?

One of the women threw back her head and roared with laughter, her hand on her friend's arm as if to stop her rolling clean off the bench with mirth. Hannah watched. It
was
real, her friendship with Sasha. They had sat like that, too, helpless with laughter. She remembered now, how Sasha could laugh at herself, making a joke of her own need to be in control. “Have you disinfected in there?” she'd call up to September and Lily ensconced in the little house. “Have you brought the rubber gloves? Are you wearing hairnets? I'll be up to inspect.”

She missed her, Hannah realized suddenly. With Sasha around all the time, it hadn't been necessary to make any other close friends of the playground parents. Sasha was inclined to monopolize, to demand your complete and undivided attention. Now she regretted having put all her eggs in one basket. Now there was no one to go to for advice about what had happened between Lily and September, no one to roll their eyes and say “Don't you hate it when that happens?” making it normalized and all right.

“Here you are, Mummy...I mean madam.” Lily had appeared on the platform and was holding out an invisible cup through the wooden bars.

Hannah reached up and took it, her heart inflating with love at the mixture of pride and anxiety on her daughter's face. As if this was a real drink she was waiting to hear the verdict on.

It was an hour or so later when she finally let Lily and herself into the flat. By this time, her pleasure at having spent proper time with her daughter was vying with her guilt at having neglected her work, and the guilt was winning. The first sign of everything not being as it should was the small pink-and-yellow flowery backpack in the hallway. Not Lily's. The second sign was a telltale hint of smoke snaking in from the living room.

“Thank God you've arrived. We can stop posing. My arm has practically fallen off.”

Sasha and September were sitting on the sofa, stifling giggles, September holding an extravagant bouquet of flowers so large it practically obscured her face and her mother proffering a large chocolate cake from that expensive bakery on the Broadway.

“But how...”