The Broken Page 22

  Hannah was hoping that as she was so early, she could collect Lily before Sasha got there. Sasha was always late, arriving in a whirr of motion and excuses. With any luck, Hannah wouldn’t have to see her at all. Josh was right. She needed 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 and not having room to think and that sour-milk smell permanently wafting off her clothes.

  All the way home from school, Hannah fought off a creeping feeling of despondency. She fretted about the baby and what it would mean. Doubt had been building up inside her like plaque. During the daytime 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. She saw her mother’s face once again, purple and ugly with rage, and Gemma’s swollen, bashed-in head, felt fear ripping through her body. And always, mingling with the fear, there was the guilt. She should have stopped it. Why didn’t she stop it?

  Later, of course, her mum had dissolved in a puddle of self-loathing. ‘What have I done?’ she’d sobbed, hitting her own head again and again. ‘I’ll never forgive myself.’ And her distress had been harder to bear than her anger.

  For years after it had happened, Hannah had dreamed of it regularly. But after Lily was born, it had stopped for a while. She was always so exhausted, so burned out with childcare 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 had mitigated against what had gone before?

  But now she was waking up drenched in sweat and panic once again, 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 would tell 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 racing against, 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 to go to the playground out of hand, but today something stopped her. Though she didn’t like to admit it, the conversation with Nikki had got 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 let her daughter somehow slip out of her grasp. When was the last time she had spent proper quality one-on-one time with Lily, without secretly calculating how much longer before she could break away and get on with whatever was more pressing instead?

  What was more pressing than her own child?

  ‘Why not?’ she said, and her daughter’s wide beam of surprise brought a lump to her throat.

  In the playground, Lily wanted to play ‘cafés’. She climbed the ladder up to the little wooden house attached to the climbing frame, her eyes doggedly fixed on the top, her hands clutching tight to the sides as if she were 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.’

  ‘Well, 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 cream?’ she asked shyly.

  Hannah thought for a moment, as if deliberating. ‘Yes. And I’d like chocolate sprinkles on 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, oblivious to their two boys, who were having a sand fight in the corner 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 from the organic café next to the now empty paddling pool; 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 out until their shadows were long ribbons of darkness against the grass, and one or other of them fell over and lay slumped on the ground, crying with exhaustion.

  They’d been so close then, she 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 suddenly lived in miniature, within the stunted and claustrophobic 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. 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 Marigolds? Are you wearing hair nets? 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 among the playground parents. Sasha was inclined to monopolize, to demand your complete and undivided attention. Now Hannah 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? and make 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 them in through the door of the flat. By this time, her pleasure at having spent proper time with her daughter was already vying with her guilt at having neglected her work. As usual, 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 stifled giggle 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, beaming, September holding an extravagant bouquet of flowers so large it practically obscured her face, and h
er mother proffering a bag of cakes from that expensive bakery on the Broadway.

  ‘But how . . .?’

  ‘We waited outside for ages. Practically days. Then I remembered that you’d given me your spare key, so we let ourselves in to wait. We thought you’d spontaneously combusted or something, you took so long.’

  Hannah was too surprised to react. True, she did remember giving Sasha and Dan a set of keys before they went away on holiday a couple of years back, in that nonsensical way you do, as if having a keyholder a few streets away rather than a time zone away will somehow guard against anything bad happening. But surely they’d asked for the keys back afterwards? She tried to think, to reach back in time to pluck the memory from the air – the act of reclaiming the spare keys. But it eluded her. Maybe they’d forgotten to ask for them. Maybe by the time they needed them again they could no longer remember who they’d left them with and went to get another set cut, Josh complaining – as he was bound to do – about the cost. It was possible. But this? Letting herself in? Taking possession of the sofa? Hannah noticed that September was wearing a daisy-chain headband of Lily’s. Then she remembered how bereft she’d felt in the playground, wishing Sasha was there, and her anger stalled.

  ‘Don’t be cross, Hans.’ Sasha had dropped the brittle frosted-on smile and was gazing at her anxiously as if everything depended on her reaction. Her eyes seemed sunken into her head, as if they were drowning. ‘Please let’s not fall out. I can’t bear it. Look, I brought you these peace offerings.’ She made a sweeping gesture with her tiny hand, indicating the cakes and the flowers.

  Hannah tried to smile at September, whose pretty little face was poking out between the blooms.

  ‘Why don’t you two girls go into the kitchen and get a biscuit?’ she suggested over-brightly. ‘I think there are some of those chocolate dinosaurs.’

  There was a pause while Lily and September eyed each other cautiously. Hannah could almost see the teeth-shaped bruise on Lily’s arm burning through the wool of her jumper. Then September laid the flowers on the table and jumped up, grinning at Lily, and they made their way out of the room.

  They’d hardly set foot through the door before Sasha started.

  ‘I’m sorry I upset you the other day. I know it sounded like I wasn’t taking it seriously, what September did, but I was. It’s just I was so freaked out by what happened at Brent Cross. And finding out you were pregnant came as such a shock.’

  Again that instinctive blow to the guts. Pregnant.

  ‘I’m happy for you, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it brought home to me how disastrously wrong everything has gone in my life. I mean, we used to talk about doing it together, do you remember? We’d get pregnant at the same time so that our younger kids could grow up together, just like Lil and September. And now here you are going ahead and having another baby, while my husband is living with someone else and may well be trying to fucking kill me.’

  Her voice wavered on the last two words, but she visibly fought against crying. ‘I promised myself I wasn’t going to get upset. I know I’m like a stuck record and it must be so boring to be around me.’ Hannah could hardly bring herself to look at Sasha. Clearly she didn’t know yet about Sienna being pregnant. She imagined how it must feel for her, having her future yanked out from under her like a magician’s tablecloth. The family she thought she’d have, the home she imagined she’d built.

  ‘Did you talk to the police again?’ she asked, to change the subject. ‘About what happened on the escalator? Did they look at the CCTV footage?’

  Sasha gave a dismissive snort. ‘The police made it pretty obvious they think I’m some mad rich bitch with an overactive imagination. They came round to the house, two of them, and they didn’t stop staring at my things. They kept saying things like, “Nice sofa. Could fit my whole flat into that sofa,” and, “Lovely views. I look out on to the Dixi Chicken.” You know, it was like they were judging my suitability as a victim based on all the stuff I have.’

  Sasha’s violet-shadowed eyes were momentarily wide with remembered outrage. Hannah could imagine it all too clearly. The police officers silently noting the velvet chaise longue, the French crystal chandelier, the Bang & Olufsen sound system. Sasha brittle enough to snap.

  ‘Do you know something, Hannah? They hated me. No, really, they did. I suddenly realized it, and it was such a shock, I can’t tell you. Do you remember after 9/11 when Americans were saying, But we didn’t realize anyone hated us?’ Here Sasha put on a fake American drawl. ‘Do you remember how thunderstruck they were? Well, that’s how I felt when those policemen were there. They were very polite, but I knew they hated me. And they knew I knew. When I asked about the CCTV, they almost laughed. They asked me how many people I thought went up and down those escalators every day. They said even if they could find me on the camera, all we’d see would be a crowd of people, and then one of them tripping over. That was their exact phrase. Tripping over.’

  Hannah sighed. Behind Sasha’s head, she could see her laptop open on the table, surrounded by papers and newspaper cuttings and notebooks. The work she wasn’t doing formed a tight ligature around her chest. And still she couldn’t shake off the uneasy feeling she’d had since coming in and finding Sasha installed in her home. She couldn’t help feeling violated.

  ‘Shall I make us some tea?’ she asked, realizing that the chances of getting back to work were non-existent.

  Sasha didn’t reply. She looked so frail, dwarfed by the huge sofa, gazing intently off into space as if listening to some inner voice.

  ‘Sasha? Tea?’

  Sasha turned her newly dulled eyes towards Hannah. ‘Haven’t you got anything stronger? Gin and tonic? Wine? Oh, come on, Hans, don’t look so disapproving. Remember when the girls were little and we used to reward ourselves with a drink at teatime, just because it was all so fucking stressful? Don’t you think I deserve it now?’

  Hannah smiled, although uneasiness still prickled at the back of her neck. Even though she’d been reminiscing herself just an hour before, she couldn’t help feeling manipulated by Sasha reminding her of their shared past, forcing intimacy on her like a once-favourite jumper now shrunk in the wash.

  She was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Stepping back into the hall, she heard muffled voices coming from behind Lily’s emphatically closed bedroom door. Good, she told herself. It’s all behind them. Amazing how quickly children could move on from things, rifts that had seemed irreparable forgotten in the blink of an eye. But still she hesitated, not liking that flat expanse of white wood door. Even the gaily decorated letter ‘L’ seemed somehow forbidding.

  Back in the kitchen, she opened the fridge, her heart sinking as ever with the knowledge that somehow, in a couple of hours, she was going to have to concoct some semblance of dinner from the sad assortment of aged vegetables and half-empty tins – they’d stopped telling you not to keep tins in the fridge, hadn’t they? – messily arranged on the smudged plastic shelves. The endless repetition of domestic life seemed suddenly overwhelming. There was an open bottle of white Sauvignon in the fridge door. Thank God for screw tops. What did people do when it was all corks – wine turning vinegary overnight? She poured a glass for Sasha and, after a momentary hesitation, a tiny one for herself, too.

  Back in the living room, Sasha took a long gulp from her glass, then leaned forward, her eyes intense, the fingers of her left hand plucking savagely at the skin of the right. She clearly had something she wanted to say, and Hannah knew with complete certainty that whatever it was, she wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘I’ve got to talk to you, Hans. I don’t know who else to turn to. Something awful has happened. I don’t even know how to say it.’

  ‘What, more awful than someone trying to kill you?’

  Hannah was trying to make a joke of it, to lighten the atmosphere and head off whatever it was Sasha was about to tell her, but Sasha didn’t smile. Instead her eyes filmed over with tears.

&nb
sp; ‘In a way, yes. Hannah, I found porn on the family computer.’ Hannah tried to maintain a concerned expression, but her stomach was fizzing with relief. Porn. That was distasteful, but manageable.

  ‘I know it’s horrible, Sash. But Dan wouldn’t be the first man to download porn. You’ve got to keep it in persp—’

  ‘This is hardcore porn, Hannah! Obscene pictures of women doing the most degrading things. Disgusting, sado-masochistic violent stuff. Rape, even. Oh Hannah, I can’t tell you.’

  The tears were spilling out now. Hannah’s head was reeling. She didn’t believe it, not really. She knew you could never tell what turned people on, but even so, if someone was into something like that you’d know, wouldn’t you? There’d be something that gave it away. Yet Sasha seemed genuinely distraught. If she was making it up, she was a lot more damaged than Hannah thought. A hard lump formed in her stomach. Then she had a thought.

  ‘If these are saved images, they’ll be dated, won’t they?’

  If for any twisted reason Sasha had planted those pictures there herself, the dates wouldn’t tally. They’d be after Dan left home.

  Sasha was staring at her as if she had gone crazy.

  ‘I didn’t leave them on there, Hannah! Christ, you’ve got to be joking. September uses that computer. What if she’d found them? They were vile, you need to understand. Disgusting. I deleted them and then I emptied the trash and then I went and had a shower because I felt so grubby.’

  Hannah shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Sasha, but this is enough now. You need to see someone. Surely you can see how insane this all is. This is Dan we’re talking about, the man you loved, September’s father. I know he’s hurt you horribly, but he’s not this monster you’re trying to turn him into.’

  ‘You think I’m making this up? You think I’d actually want people to know my husband is secretly a sick pervert?’

  Hannah’s certainty started to waver.

  ‘Could you have misinterpreted what you saw? Might the pictures have been to do with some photographic assignment Dan was doing? You know how blurry the line is between art and porn sometimes.’