by Tamar Cohen
‘And that makes it OK, does it, to cheat on her with a twenty-four-year-old and break a little girl’s heart?’
‘Twenty-four isn’t exactly a little girl—’
‘Don’t even joke about it, Josh. You know exactly what I mean. These are our friends, remember? How many Saturday nights have we spent round there? How many holidays have we been on together? He can’t split up over some stupid affair. He just can’t.’
Josh had the oddest idea that Hannah was talking about Dan splitting up with them rather than with Sasha. He remembered Dan’s face when he’d talked about Sienna, but this clearly wasn’t the time to suggest to Hannah that this might be more than a ‘stupid affair’.
‘I can’t believe it. I really can’t.’
Josh shifted along the battered wine-coloured velvet sofa Hannah had fallen in love with on eBay, which had required dismantling the door frame to get into the flat. He put a tentative arm around her, half expecting her to wriggle away, as she sometimes did these days. Now that Hannah was always so tired and their sex life had dwindled to almost nothing, all physical contact between them seemed to carry extra weight, with the result that they didn’t touch each other nearly as much – or as naturally – as they used to. He felt her shoulders trembling under his hand.
‘Hey.’ He tilted her face up towards him so he could see her properly, taking in the freckles he adored and she claimed to despise, and the mouth with its mismatched lips – the top one so thin and well defined and the bottom one almost indecently plump. ‘Don’t get so upset. Of course it’s horrible, but we’re still OK.’
Hannah’s eyes, canopied by fine, surprisingly dark eyebrows, peered up at him through a glaze of tears. ‘But they’re our best friends. I thought they were so happy together. All those I love yous at the end of every phone conversation. Was that all a show? And if it can happen to them, what’s to stop it happening to us?’
Josh pulled her closer, savouring the contact, and planted a kiss on the top of her head. Despite everything, he allowed himself a little smile. Trust Hannah to jump straight to the worst-case scenario. What was it that therapist had called her? A catastrophist. That’s it. As if you could catch divorce from other people like the flu.
‘Never,’ he whispered into her hair.
After a moment, Hannah pulled away, looking utterly wretched. ‘Oh, but when I think about little September, growing up without her father.’
‘Not according to Dan. He thinks it will be the most amicable split in the world. He’s got it all worked out. He and Sasha will sell the house and buy two flats within walking distance of each other. September will be able to see both of them whenever she wants to. She won’t even notice they’re not together.’
‘What planet does he get this stuff from? He really thinks he’s going to move in down the road with some bloody schoolgirl bimbo and everything’s going to go on just as before?’
Hannah got to her feet and started angrily clearing up the remains of the Indian takeaway which were spread across the coffee table in front of them in a selection of foil containers, all smeared with orange- or ochre-coloured sauce. A tell-tale pink flush was sweeping across her normally pale cheeks, and Josh felt a twinge of alarm, remembering how he’d promised not to say anything to her.
‘You’re not going to call Sasha, are you? Dan made me promise I wouldn’t tell you about any of it, but especially not about her. About Sienna.’
He was nervous now – conscious suddenly of having gone back on a promise, of having been compromised.
Hannah made a snorting noise at the name.
‘No really,’ Josh went on, ignoring it. ‘He doesn’t want it to get out about him seeing someone else. He says it will make things nastier than they need to be.’
‘He should have thought about that before he got his dick out then, shouldn’t he?’
Hannah stalked out of the living room, hands full of dirty plates and silver-foil cartons. Josh heard her clattering around in the tiny kitchen next door, and he tried to still the involuntary leap his thoughts had taken hearing Hannah say the word dick.
‘Please, Hannah. Don’t say anything. I should never have told you.’
She reappeared in the doorway and flung herself back on to the sofa, curling her long legs in their black leggings up underneath her. ‘OK. But I just want you to know I hate lying to Sasha. It isn’t right for him to ask you to do this. She deserves to know the truth.’
‘Yes, but not from us. It’s not our place. We have to stay neutral.’
‘But how am I supposed to look her in the eye? Don’t forget they’re coming for lunch tomorrow.’
Josh slung his arm around her once more, emboldened by his previous success, and she snuggled back against him.
‘I wouldn’t bank on it,’ he said. ‘Dan says he’s telling her tonight. I can’t imagine they’ll be round here playing happy families tomorrow.’
2
‘My head feels like there’s a marching band inside it clashing cymbals and playing those big curly brass thingies and jumping up and down.’
‘Why would a marching band jump up and down?’
‘Don’t bother trying to provoke me, Dan. I’m too ill to rise to it.’
Sasha was draped across the same sofa where Josh and Hannah had sat up far too late the previous night debating Dan’s shock announcement. Her glossy black hair was fanned out across a threadbare brown faux fur cushion and one of her hands was flung across her eyes, all but obscuring her small neat features. Her legs in their skinny jeans were stretched out and she’d kicked off her Converse trainers so that she could rest her bare, brown, child-sized feet on Dan’s Levi’s-clad thigh. She looked a lot like someone with a hangover. She did not look like someone whose husband had just announced he was going to leave her.
‘He couldn’t tell her,’ Josh whispered to Hannah as they were squeezed into the kitchen together preparing lunch. His cheeks, always rosy, were flushed pink by the heat fanning from the oven into the confined space, and he kept pushing his thick hair, which Hannah liked to point out was the exact colour and texture of a doormat, back from his overheated face. When he glanced at her, his greeny-brown eyes were smudged with worry. ‘He was going to, but then their neighbours turned up unexpectedly.’
‘Brilliant. So now we’ve got to sit across the table from each other pretending everything’s hunky dory, while all the time there’s this . . . time bomb waiting to go off.’
‘What else can we do?’
‘I can’t believe he’s just sitting there, stroking her feet. It’s so cruel.’
‘Why are you two whispering in there? Do you hate us? Do you wish we would leave?’
At the sound of Sasha’s voice, Hannah glared at Josh. She could hear September and Lily playing together in Lily’s bedroom, September’s voice loud and clear over Lily’s gentle murmur. How many lazy Sundays had they passed in this way, the six of them? The realization that this might be the last was so savagely painful that Hannah, her hand frozen in the act of chopping up some fresh basil, suddenly felt she couldn’t breathe.
‘Yes. Go away and take your disgusting, unsavoury hangover with you,’ called Josh, making a Pull yourself together face at Hannah.
Lunch was, as always, a long-drawn-out affair eaten at the heavy pine dining table which was squashed into the area behind the sofa in the living room, the kitchen in Hannah and Josh’s two-bedroom garden flat being far too small to eat in. The girls joined them for the start of the meal, kneeling up on cushions that they placed over the seats of the wooden chairs and chattering to each other as they tucked into their mini portions of lasagne. September, six weeks older than Lily, led the conversation as usual, lurching from subject to subject seemingly without rhyme or reason. Hannah’s heart pinched a little when she saw how her daughter’s face scrunched up in concentration as she struggled to follow her friend, while at the same time furtively digging out suspicious unidentified vegetable matter from her dish with her spoon and la
ying it carefully on one side.
‘Is it me or is everyone really flat today?’ Sasha was seated at the head of the table, closest to the French windows that led on to the communal garden, where the late-blooming flowers looked gaudy against the grey September day. Her eyes flickered from face to face expecting a response.
Hannah looked away. ‘We’re not being very good company today, are we? We’re just a bit tired, that’s all.’ She gestured briefly towards Lily with her hand, as if blaming her for them being below par, and then immediately felt guilty. Poor Lily, she was so good. She didn’t deserve to be made a scapegoat.
‘Can we get down now?’ September had finished her lunch and was rocking on her chair, her chocolate-brown curls quivering as she moved.
‘I don’t think Lily’s quite finished yet. Maybe you could just wait a few—’
The rest of Hannah’s gentle entreaty was drowned out by Sasha interrupting, ‘Sure, poppet, you get down.’
Sasha turned to Hannah. ‘Sorry, Hannah. I just didn’t want Temmy to get fidgety. You know how tetchy she can be.’
Hannah smiled and hoped her irritation didn’t show.
‘Can I go too, Mummy? Please?’
Lily still had food on her plate, but she was already gazing after September, her lasagne forgotten, her blue eyes full of longing.
‘No, Lily. You need to finish. Just that little bit on your plate.’
‘But September didn’t.’
‘No, but September is a guest, and you’re not. Which is why I’m telling you to finish up. Tell you what. If you eat four more forkfuls, you can get down.’
Hannah sighed inwardly as Lily loaded her spoon with the minimum amount of food possible and raised it to her mouth four times, counting in whispers under her breath, before throwing it down triumphantly and scooting off to find her friend. ‘Thank you for the lovely dinner,’ she called over her shoulder in a sing-song voice.
Hannah got up and started clearing away the plates. The incident with September had done nothing to improve her mood. It wasn’t the first time Sasha had talked over Hannah. Sometimes she felt as if nothing she said actually mattered. Am I here, she wanted to say. Can you even see me? She kept forgetting about what Josh had told her about Dan, and then suddenly it would come flooding back to her, as shocking now as it was when she first heard it. In the kitchen, she angrily scraped food off the plates into the plastic container they used for collecting compost, perversely enjoying the harsh, grating noise of metal on china.
‘You OK there?’
Dan had appeared in the doorway carrying the big white earthenware dish that had held the lasagne and the salad bowl, still half full.
Hannah said she was fine.
She couldn’t look at him, focusing instead on the chrome bin that took up half the floor space in the cramped kitchen. Josh had told her it was too big, but she’d insisted on getting it after seeing the same one in Sasha’s old kitchen. She’d never admitted he’d been right.
‘You just seem a bit on edge, that’s all.’
‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like what do you think, Dan?’
She looked at him then. A look that saw him react first with surprise, then, after a second’s delay, anger.
‘He told you. The fucker told you.’
Dan was whispering, but his voice still hissed loudly around the compact room.
‘Course he told me. We’re married. We don’t have secrets from each other.’
‘He shouldn’t have. He promised.’
Dan’s face, normally so open and placid, was dark with rage, but Hannah pretended not to notice.
‘Look, Dan. I want to ask you, beg you, to think again. Look at everything you have to lose. Sasha, September. You’ll break their hearts. And for what? For a fling.’
‘It’s not a fling.’ Hannah had never heard Dan sound so hard, despite the whispering. He was always so charming, so ready to see everyone else’s point of view. ‘Listen, I know how you feel, but you don’t have a clue about how things are at home between me and Sash. And now I’ve met someone who makes me feel good about myself for the first time in years. And I’d be grateful if you and Josh would just butt out.’
‘Dan!’ Sasha’s voice came wafting from the next room. ‘Bring another bottle of red in, would you?’
Dan glared at Hannah before snatching up the bottle they’d brought round, still wrapped in its off-licence tissue paper, and stalking out.
‘Coming, my little lush!’
Alone in the kitchen, Hannah leaned back against the cooker and put her head in her hands. She and Sasha had had their moments over the four years they’d been friends. She could remember a handful of times when they’d snapped at each other over one thing or another (although, if she remembered rightly, she was pretty sure most of the snapping had come from Sasha), but she’d never once had a cross word with Dan. He was always the laid-back one. Always the one to smooth out tensions with a joke or a well-placed compliment.
For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to picture how life might be dividing their time between a separated Sasha and Dan.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘G’way!’
Hannah had been dreaming about that night again for the first time in ages. Battling into consciousness, her heart racing, her mind still filled with images of Gemma’s battered head and her mum’s twisted, angry mouth, her airways as always stoppered up with dread, it took her a while to calm down enough to translate the indistinct noise Josh had made into proper words.
‘Go away,’ he said again, more distinctly this time.
Both of them raised themselves on to their elbows and listened as the doorbell of their ground-floor flat sounded a second time, prompting a half-hearted bark from the vicinity of Toby’s basket in the hall.
Hannah staggered to her feet.
She had always been better at getting up than Josh. Even before her skills in that area were honed by months and years of night feeds and bad dreams and brutal dawn risings, she’d never struggled like him with that middle dimension between sleep and wakefulness. She liked to be up and getting on with things. Lying awake in that dead early morning was when you had time to think, and there were things that Hannah really didn’t like to think about. Anyway, life was already so short. Why wouldn’t you make the most of what time you had?
Dragging on her old purple towelling dressing gown, and regretting as she always did that she’d not yet got around to replacing it, she made her way into the hallway. At least living in such a compact space meant you were never very far from the front door if you needed to open it.
‘All right already,’ she muttered as the bell rang a third time, a long desperate buzz.
‘Mummy?’ Lily’s voice from her little bedroom across the hall was still soaked in sleep. With any luck she wouldn’t wake up properly.
‘It’s all right, Lil. Go back to sleep.’
Up until this point, Hannah had been too focused on getting up and making sure Lily wasn’t disturbed to think about what a ring on the door in the middle of the night might mean. But in the split second when she pressed the buzzer on the intercom, she remembered what had happened the previous day.
‘It’s me. Sasha.’ If Hannah hadn’t already known who to expect, she’d never have recognized the voice that crackled through the intercom, deep and croaky and full of lumps.
Hannah buzzed her in and by the time she’d slid open both bolts and unchained the door that led from their flat into the communal lobby, Sasha was already there. She fell into Hannah’s arms, her wraith-like body shaking violently under her thin denim jacket.
‘Oh my God, Hannah,’ she said in that same choked, un-Sasha-like voice.
Hannah held her friend tight. ‘Come on, Sash,’ she murmured, aware that they were still standing in the open doorway, letting a cool draught into the flat. ‘Let’s go into the living room, hey?’
Sasha all
owed herself to be led through the door at the far end of the hallway, where Hannah deposited her on the sofa.
‘I’ll make us some tea, shall I?’
If Sasha wondered why Hannah wasn’t quizzing her about what had brought her to their door in the middle of the night, she didn’t say. Instead she merely nodded. Her normally elfin features had puffed up so that her slanted hazel eyes, with their thick black lashes, were practically swollen shut.
Waiting for the kettle to boil, Hannah leaned her forehead against the cool fridge door, trying not to hear the gulping sobs coming from the next room. She felt guilty now for the times over the last few years when she’d wished Sasha ill. No, not ill, just for something in Sasha’s Sunday-supplement life not to go to plan for once, just something to make her life slightly less shiny and bring it more in line with Hannah’s own.
She’d never had a friend like Sasha before. If their babies hadn’t brought them together she probably still wouldn’t have a friend like Sasha. The two women led such different lives they’d never normally have crossed paths, like a Venn diagram where the two circles bobbed about completely independently with no point of intersection. Unlike Hannah, Sasha hadn’t gone to university but had had a series of glamorous temporary jobs instead in small boutique galleries and country-house retreats in exotic locations. She always seemed to know someone who could fix her up with something, and if not, the trust set up by her wealthy father could usually be relied on to come to her aid. After she met Dan, she’d stopped working altogether, even long before September came along, and, here’s the thing, she never felt guilty about it. She spent her time on ‘projects’ to do with the house (a simple bathroom refit could easily turn into a four-month full-time job involving mood boards and teams of designers and builders) or arranging holidays or, after September was born, taking her daughter to art and music classes, even French classes, where young women with chunky, brightly coloured jewellery sat cross-legged on the floor and showed fractious toddlers pictures of smiley faces or suns or books and made exaggerated movements with their mouths as they pronounced each syllable. Hannah knew other women who didn’t work, but none had that same sense of entitlement that Sasha did. ‘Just till the kids start school,’ they’d say, these other apologetic mothers. ‘Childcare costs are so astronomical.’ But Sasha would look at Hannah like a sleek Siamese cat and say, ‘Why would I work if I don’t have to?’ And it would be Hannah who felt short-changed, as if something was lacking.