The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

  Hannah, on the other hand, was all about the guilt. Sometimes she wondered if it would be such an integral part of her if it hadn’t been for what happened as a teenager, but at other times she felt that guilt was just woven into the thread of her DNA. She felt bad for the decisions she made, and the ones she didn’t – for all the people she imagined she’d let down. An ambitious girl from a largely unambitious background, she’d worked hard to get to university in London, switching from French to Journalism in her second year when her sister Gemma finally convinced her it was OK to do a subject she liked, rather than one she thought might be useful, and had worked harder still to gain her first staff job on a magazine for teenagers. She’d always imagined she’d take the minimum maternity leave and be straight back to the nine to five (or in her case more like ten to eight), but when Lily came along she realized how unsuited babies were to be slotted in around work like superfluous padding. Reluctantly she’d resigned from the magazine and gone freelance and now spent her days wildly oscillating between feeling guilt-ridden at spending too little time on her child, and guilt-ridden at spending too little time on badly paid freelance work. Even when she was with her daughter, she was feeling guilty at how boring she often found it, the whole monotonous routine of feeding and washing and playing and filling in those endless hours with repetitive games that had to be played again and again, and books you’d read so many times you thought you might explode at the sight of them. Nobody ever talked about the boredom – it was as though if you admitted it, you were admitting you didn’t love your child.

  Until she had Lily, Hannah had never even held a baby before. When friends from the office arrived in the hospital ward on their designer heels, bearing cellophane-crinkling bouquets of flowers that failed to fit into any of the yellowing plastic water jugs on offer, they squealed with laughter and horror at the sight of Hannah attempting to change a nappy.

  In a panic she’d tried to make friends with other new mothers in the neighbourhood by joining a postnatal mother-and-baby group run by the local NCT. The first meeting had been a disaster. She hadn’t been able to work out how to put up Lily’s new all-singing, all-dancing pushchair and had ended up, an hour and a half late, practically in tears, having run the half-mile to the hostess’s house with Lily in her arms, arriving red-faced and out of breath with a screaming baby and aches in every muscle in her body. She’d had no idea a newborn could be so heavy – how had she carried this thing around inside her for the last nine months? The other women, or so it seemed at the time, had viewed her with suspicion, pulling their own babies a little bit tighter to them, smiling politely. On the second meeting, though, she’d met Sasha.

  ‘I knew we were going to be friends for life when Hannah changed Lily’s nappy right there in front of us and found a bright-red rubber band in her poo,’ Sasha always liked to tell people. It was a funny story but it mortified Hannah still, the memory of that public exposure of her maternal inadequacy. The rubber-band incident, and a mutual wariness of the Proper Mums, as they soon christened the others, cemented their friendship. There’s nothing like having babies of the same age to intensify and accelerate a bond. Though Hannah and Josh’s two-bedroom flat could have fitted a million times into Sasha and Dan’s three-storey pile it was still only a few streets away, in that mad schizophrenic way of London neighbourhoods. Soon they were in and out of each other’s homes, introducing husbands, dogs, neighbours, becoming intertwined in each other’s lives at a speed that would have been unthinkable in the past pre-Lily world.

  When Hannah went back into the living room, bearing two mugs of steaming tea, she found Sasha curled up on the sofa in a foetal position, sobbing gently. Her tan leather bag that Hannah had been shocked to discover cost more than she earned in a fortnight was flung on the bottom end of the sofa, contents strewn, leaving no room for anyone else, so Hannah dropped a cushion on to the floor next to the coffee table and knelt on it, drawing her feet under her bottom to keep them warm. Taking a sip from her scalding tea, she surveyed her friend in silence for a moment. She looked just like a child lying there, with her hair all over the place. Hannah’s heart constricted as she watched Sasha’s narrow shoulders shaking. How could Dan do this? Sasha had her moments, she could be controlling as hell and exasperatingly overdramatic. But she had a huge heart and was capable of impulsive acts of jaw-dropping generosity. And she was the mother of his child.

  ‘Come on,’ Hannah said, when she could bear the muffled sobbing no longer. ‘Drink your tea and tell me.’

  Sasha’s eyes opened – well, as much as they could in their present puffy state. She looked a bit startled, as if she’d forgotten Hannah was even there. She heaved herself up into a sitting position and brought her knees up to her chin, pulling the faded Ramones T-shirt she had on under her denim jacket down over her legs as little boys sometimes do to give themselves freakishly large fake breasts.

  ‘Oh Hannah. He doesn’t love me.’

  The words were pieces of broken glass, so painful that Sasha had to spit them out one at a time.

  Instinctively Hannah leaned forward and flung her arms around her friend. ‘I’m sure you’re wrong,’ she found herself saying.

  ‘He told me,’ Sasha continued, oblivious to the lack of surprise in Hannah’s voice. ‘He says he doesn’t think he’s in love with me any more. He says he needs to go away for a while, to have some space to work out what to do.’

  Hannah’s hand, which had been rhythmically stroking Sasha’s shoulder, froze. He hadn’t told her. The cowardly shit. He hadn’t told her there was someone else.

  ‘What am I going to do? I love him so much. I can’t lose him. I just can’t. September is not going to come from a broken home. She is going to have a proper family.’

  Sasha’s voice had become increasingly shrill and Hannah felt suddenly chilled. Obviously she was upset, but there was something unnerving about her intensity. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know anyone else who had split up – half the kids at the nursery were from single-parent households. Besides, she was almost shouting now, and Hannah was worried the noise might wake Lily.

  Too late.

  ‘Mummy!’ The little voice sounded frightened.

  ‘I’d better go,’ Hannah tried to get up, but Sasha had her hand on her arm.

  ‘I can’t live without him,’ she said, staring at Hannah. Her eyes looked wild. ‘He can’t do this to us. I can’t be divorced. I won’t be divorced.’

  ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

  ‘I need to go. Lil’s calling me. She needs me.’

  Sasha’s fingers tightened, vicelike. ‘She’s fine, for God’s sake. She’ll never stop being such a baby unless you stop mollycoddling her.’

  Hannah tore herself away. Her heart was hammering. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  In Lily’s room, she held her sniffling child in her arms and tried to calm her down. ‘Hush now, everything’s fine. I’m with Auntie Sash.’ Sasha hadn’t meant to be nasty about Lily, she told herself, she was just so overwrought.

  By the time Lily had finally got back to sleep, Hannah had put Sasha’s words from her mind and she was relieved, when she slipped back into the living room, to see that Sasha clearly had too. Her friend was sitting much straighter on the sofa, sipping from her surely stone-cold tea. She seemed more alert.

  ‘I’m sorry, Hannah, I’ve been a complete idiot, haven’t I?’ Sasha scrunched up her face in an abject expression.

  Hannah tried to insist that she hadn’t.

  ‘I have. I’m a total idiot. I’m completely overreacting, as usual. Dan’s just having some kind of mid-life crisis, isn’t he? All he needs to do is go whizzing around Goa on a motorbike for a few weeks and he’ll be sorted. Don’t you think?’

  Hannah looked into Sasha’s hopeful, pink-rimmed eyes and found herself saying: ‘Yeah, that’s probably it. A mid-life crisis.’

  Instantly Sasha brightened up, sniffing back the dregs of her tears and opening her eyes a little wider. ‘Thank
s, Hannah. I knew you’d help. You’re always so good at putting things in perspective.’

  Guilt tugged at Hannah’s heart. ‘You don’t think he could have . . . found somebody else?’

  Sasha’s eyes narrowed. ‘No.’ The word practically snapped out. ‘What I mean is, I asked him that. It was the very first thing I asked him, but he swore there wasn’t. And one thing about me and Dan is we never, ever lie to each other. He knows that if he ever started lying to me, that’d be the end.’

  For a second, Hannah almost said it. Then the moment passed.

  ‘More tea?’

  3

  Josh experienced mixed feelings when he finally got to sit down during his lunch break and noticed the three ‘missed call’ messages. While he was relieved that Dan had got in touch after all these days of unnerving silence, he couldn’t help being irritated by his friend’s unfailing inability to grasp the fact that not everyone could take personal phone calls at any time of day. Some people had actual proper jobs that meant their mobile phones remained in their bags, switched to silent, and quite often weren’t looked at from one end of the day to the other.

  ‘Want to go for a coffee?’

  Pat Hennessey flopped down heavily in the empty chair opposite Josh in the uninspiring staff room. The school management was forever promising to make improvements – new carpet, a decent coffee machine – but something else always came along that took priority. The five-a-side pitch needed resurfacing. The security system had to be updated. In a large inner-city state secondary, where resources were always stretched to the maximum, the state of the staff’s soft furnishings was always going to come way down the shopping list.

  Pat’s cheeks, always flushed with colour, were looking particularly pink, as if he’d been rushing, and there was an unspoken appeal in his puppy-like brown eyes. Josh had always got on well with Pat since he’d transferred there three years before from a much smaller school in Merseyside. But since Pat had been made Head of English, things had become a little awkward. Josh always told him he didn’t mind, and that he’d only gone for the promotion himself because Hannah had pushed him into it. He was glad not to have the extra responsibility, he insisted, particularly with Lily still being so young. Which was true – in fact, it was Hannah who was more upset, accusing him of ‘a failure of self-belief’. But still, their friendship had never completely returned to normal.

  ‘Love to, but I have to make a call and I think it might be quite an epic one.’

  Pat looked hurt. He had one of those open faces that betray every emotion. ‘Another time then.’

  Outside the bottom gate, Josh pushed his way past throngs of sixth-formers and Year Elevens.

  ‘Hi, Sir. Are you going to meet your girlfriend, Sir?’

  The kids found it endlessly amusing to quiz him about his private life, as if it was an inconceivable joke that he might actually have a life outside of them and this school.

  ‘That’s right,’ he humoured them. ‘One of my huge harem of women.’

  Before they could ask him what a harem was, he moved off across the main road and into the little park opposite. There were a few knots of school children eating crisps and swigging from cans of fizzy drinks, but he ignored them and made for an unoccupied bench under the trees. Finally he was ready to call Dan back. Yet still he hesitated, his finger hovering over the keypad.

  Josh was nervous about talking to Dan. Since Sasha had turned up in the middle of the night and had a nervous breakdown in their living room the previous weekend, things had gone eerily quiet. Hannah had tried calling a few times and left messages, but Sasha hadn’t called her back. She’d been nagging him to call Dan, too, but he’d put it off. They needed a bit of time on their own to sort things out, he’d told her. Coward, she’d said. Hannah still didn’t really get how men dealt with each other. Dan and Josh spoke on the phone to make arrangements for meeting up, or swapped the occasional email when they heard a joke they thought the other might enjoy. Josh would have been embarrassed to call Dan out of the blue and quiz him about his relationship. That wasn’t the kind of friendship they had. It wasn’t the kind of friendship he’d ever had.

  There was always the chance, he supposed, that they’d patched things up, Dan and Sasha. Maybe the crisis had passed and they were holed up dealing with the aftermath. Certainly Sasha had seemed fairly positive by the time she finally left their house last Monday morning. She’d convinced herself it was some kind of phase Dan was going through. By the time Josh had got up, she’d been sitting on the sofa waiting for Hannah to bring her pancakes, only her swollen eyes signalling that anything had ever been wrong. Josh had been amazed after she’d left when Hannah told him about the scene he’d missed.

  ‘Thank God it was you who answered the door,’ he’d said fervently, without thinking.

  ‘Charming!’

  He hadn’t meant it to sound unsympathetic. He liked Sasha. When she was on form, there was no one more entertaining. It was just that she could be so high maintenance. So inclined to histrionics. Too much Sasha always left him feeling tired.

  Still, she didn’t deserve to be treated how Dan was treating her. Josh liked to think he was a fairly unjudgemental type. He knew the world wasn’t black and white and that good people sometimes did bad things. But Dan was acting in a pretty shabby way.

  ‘Dan?’

  The phone had been answered on the third ring, which was unusual for Dan, who was normally dashing about, answering belatedly with a slight edge to his voice so that you always felt you were interrupting.

  ‘Josh. Mate. Thank fuck for that!’

  If Josh had been expecting to find Dan sounding subdued or chastened, he was very mistaken. The younger man sounded almost ebullient, as if he was bursting to announce some good news that he was supposed to be keeping to himself.

  ‘Listen, I’ve got a favour to ask you. Can I stay at yours for a few days?’

  Immediately Josh felt wrong-footed. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

  ‘Er, but we haven’t got a spare—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll sleep on the sofa. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘But Sasha—’

  ‘Sasha was the one who suggested it. She’s been absolutely brilliant. Since Sunday we’ve been talking and talking, more than we’ve ever done before, and she totally gets it. About me needing some space and everything. I was talking about moving out and renting a studio flat, and she just said, “Why don’t you stay with Josh and Hannah for a little bit? Just as a first step?”’

  Alone on his park bench, Josh frowned. From the corner of his eye, he could see Jake Eldridge from Year Ten loitering behind a tree, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘So what do you say?’

  There was a hint of impatience in Dan’s voice that grated a bit. Dan was so used to getting his way and charming everyone he met that he tended to get quite childish if things didn’t immediately go to plan. Josh had noticed it before. But this wasn’t an argument over whether to go to the Railway or the King’s Head.

  ‘Look, Dan, I want to help you. But you obviously haven’t told Sasha that you’re seeing someone else, and I just don’t want to be party to it. You understand, don’t you?’

  A pause.

  ‘I haven’t told her because it’s not an issue. I told you, the thing with Sienna is a result of the situation with Sasha, not a cause of it. Anyway, I’ve put it on hold for now. I want to put all my focus on Sasha and September during this critical time.’

  Dan sounded as if he was reading a prepared statement.

  ‘So you promise you’re not going to be running off to see your girlfriend as soon as Sasha’s back is turned, using me and Hannah as a smokescreen?’

  ‘What? Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence.’

  Typical. Dan was the one getting outraged, and Josh was left feeling guilty.

  ‘Listen. Breaking up a family is never easy, it’s not something you do on a whim. I’ve really thought abou
t this. I don’t want September to be caught in the middle of two warring parents. I want her to see that it’s possible for two people to go on loving and respecting each other, even if they’re not together any more.’

  ‘And Sasha sees it the same way, does she?’

  ‘Absolutely. Like I say, she’s been amazing. That’s why I want to come and stay at yours. It’s a kind of halfway-house thing to get us all used to the idea of being apart. It’ll be easier for her. Baby steps and all that.’

  You had to hand it to Dan. There he was, about to destroy two people’s lives, and yet he could leave you feeling like he was the selfless one.

  ‘Look, I’ll talk to Hannah. But you’d have to promise not to be in touch with this Sienna, OK?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And when would you be wanting to avail yourself of our deluxe sofa facilities?’

  ‘Tomorrow. It’s Saturday and we could come around with September and make a big deal of me going on a sleepover at your house, and September could sort of settle me in, so it would seem like an adventure, not like me sneaking away in the night with my suitcases.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her. That’s all I can do.’

  ‘I still don’t like it.’

  Hannah was going around the living room effecting a grudging and superficial tidy-up – she’d already wiped a damp J cloth over the coffee table, going around the pile of magazines and books, leaving a narrow ring of dust around the bottom like an extra frill, and now she was picking up odd bits of jigsaw and old lidless felt pens and cramming them all into the bottom drawer of the low table where the telly sat, which had become the home for all odds and ends that didn’t fit anywhere else. Josh held back from asking why she was keeping pens that clearly didn’t work.