The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

  ‘It’s all right, darling girl. Mummy’s here now.’

  For a second or two there was just the sound of September’s noisy sobs, punctuated by soft sniffs from Lily and whines from Toby outside the bedroom door. Then, still with her back to him, Sasha said, in a cold, hard voice Josh hadn’t heard before, ‘I’d prefer you not to bully my daughter when I’m not here, thank you very much, Josh. Can’t you see how fragile she is?’

  Josh stopped himself just in time before he said something he would regret, remembering only after he’d stalked out of the door that he hadn’t said goodnight to Lily.

  ‘I’ve bloody well had enough,’ he hissed at Hannah when he got back to the living room and saw her sitting at the table. ‘This has got to stop. Do you know what she just said? She said—’

  ‘I’m sorry. Oh God, Josh, I’m so sorry.’

  Sasha had come up behind him and now flung her arms around his neck, draping herself over his back so he had the uncomfortable sensation of wearing her, like a coat. He felt her chest rising and falling rapidly and his heart sank as he realized she must be crying.

  ‘What happened, Sasha?’

  Hannah had got up from her chair and was gazing at her friend with a look of such concern that Josh felt immediately ashamed. That in turn made him irritated at having been made to feel bad, so he was relieved when Sasha finally slid off him and into a heap on the floor.

  ‘He was with her.’ The words sounded as if they’d been squeezed out of her.

  Hannah gasped. ‘No! With Sienna? But he promised us—’

  Sasha’s narrowed eyes flashed back pin-pricks of reflected light. ‘He promised you? What about me? What about what he promised me? I’m his fucking wife!’

  ‘Oh God, I know. Sorry, Sasha. That must have been so awful. Tell me what happened.’

  Sasha put her head in her hands. ‘It was a nightmare. I drove past where Shelly said she’d seen him, but there were too many people around for me to get a good look through the window, so I parked around the corner. Then I walked back and looked in the window, and there they were. The two of them. Oh shit. Oh fucking shit. This is all so fucked up.’

  ‘But how did you know it was her?’ Josh felt he ought at least to try to mount a defence of his absent friend. ‘I mean, it could have been any one of the women Dan works with every day.’

  Sasha’s head whipped up suddenly. ‘Yes, it could . . . except that he was sticking his tongue down her throat.’

  Hannah’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘I don’t believe it. Not at the table!’

  ‘Well, maybe not tongues, but they were all over each other. I almost threw up on the spot, I swear to God.’

  Sasha had pulled her knees up to her bony chest and was rocking backwards and forwards. All of a sudden, to Josh’s great alarm, she started emitting a keening noise.

  ‘Mummy?’

  He’d forgotten about September and Lily. There they both were, two little figures standing in the doorway, eyes wide with shock as they stared at the rocking figure on the floor.

  Instantly, Hannah was on her feet. ‘It’s OK, girls. Mummy’s just a little tired, that’s all, September. We all sometimes need a good cry when we’re tired, don’t we? Come on, I’ll snuggle you both up together in our bedroom. How about that?’

  As she led them away, Josh felt a surge of panic, tinged with resentment. Great. So she got to go off and read stories while he was left to deal with Sasha having a fully fledged meltdown on the living-room floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ she wailed, as if he’d spoken aloud. ‘I just can’t . . . I can’t . . . Oh God, I can’t breathe.’ She was making rapid gulping noises as if she was being starved of oxygen.

  Josh dropped to his knees beside her. ‘Look at me,’ he commanded, seizing her shoulders. ‘Sasha, look at me!’

  She brought her eyes up to his face, her breath still coming out in uneven gasps.

  ‘Now breathe in,’ he said in his best school-teacher’s voice. ‘Come on, breathe in. That’s right. And out again. Good.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Josh. I’m being a nightmare, aren’t I? It’s just . . . it’s just . . . Oh God. He was with her. You can’t imagine what it’s like, seeing the person you love, the father of your child, with someone else. Touching them. Kissing them. Oh, I feel sick.’ She clapped a hand over her mouth, and for a horrible moment Josh thought she might actually vomit, right there on the rug. ‘How could he? Josh, you’re a man. How could he do this?’

  Luckily Josh was saved from answering this unanswerable question by Hannah rushing back into the room.

  ‘All quiet. Shit, Sasha, I don’t know what to say. Did he see you? Dan, I mean?’

  Sasha stared at her. ‘Course he saw me. Obviously he saw me.’

  ‘Not necessarily. It must have been dark outside and he was, erm, distracted. He could easily not have noticed you.’

  ‘Well, seeing as I was standing five centimetres from his face, screaming at him, I think it’s highly unlikely!’

  Josh closed his eyes. Oh dear God. Hannah was still standing by the door, her hands on either side of her face and her mouth open in a long ‘O’ shape in an approximation of that Edvard Munch painting.

  ‘Don’t look so shocked, Hannah. What the fuck did you think I was going to do when I saw my husband feeling up some underage slut? Turn around and walk away?’

  ‘And what hap—’

  Josh’s question was cut short by the sound of a key in the door. He and Hannah locked eyes.

  Dan burst through the living-room door, his face grim. His slightly wild gaze flickered from Josh to Hannah and then to Sasha, still slumped on the floor. Josh felt his own indignation draining from him as he watched his friend’s eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Sash? Sash? I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Get away from me.’

  It was more of a hiss than an actual voice, and in truth Sasha had the look of an angry, feral cat crouched there on the floor, glaring at her husband with such fierce intensity, Josh half expected him to turn tail and run for the hills.

  ‘Look . . . God, I don’t know what to say.’

  Dan ran his hands through his lank-looking hair as if he might find some inspiration there.

  ‘I know that must have been an awful shock for you, but Christ, Sash, what were you thinking? I can’t believe you followed me. And then screaming like that in the middle of that restaurant. It was . . .’ He closed his eyes and shook his head as if trying to shake off a memory too awful to recall. ‘Horrible!’

  ‘Was it?’ Sasha had got to her feet and was looking at him with her eyes dangerously narrowed. ‘Was it horrible for you? Poor Dan. We can’t have that, can we? We can’t have things being horrible. Not when you’ve done nothing to deserve it. Apart from fucking some bimbo while your daughter is at home crying herself to sleep!’

  ‘I wasn’t fucking her.’ Dan’s voice now had an unmistakeable steely edge to it. ‘We were just having dinner. And unless you’ve left our daughter home alone, which I fucking well hope is not the case, she’s right here fast asleep, so don’t try to play the moral card with me. Look . . .’ His tone softened. ‘I know this is difficult for you. It’s difficult for me. I hate not seeing September every day, but it’s for the best in the long run. We’re not good together any more, Sash. We need to let each other go while we’re still friends.’

  Feeling like a voyeur, Josh kept his eyes trained on Hannah, watching as she opened her mouth to say something, then bit down on her lip to stop whatever she had been about to blurt out. He didn’t blame her. Friends. Jesus Christ! Two weeks ago, Sasha thought she was perfectly happily married. Did Dan really expect her to switch to being friends just like that? Clearly he did, because he was now looking at Josh, as if seeking some kind of validation. Josh shook his head, barely perceptibly, but Dan seemed to take that as a signal to press on and Sasha’s silence as some kind of grudging acquiescence.

  ‘Sash, babes, we’ve had eight happy years, haven’t we?
We’ve got a beautiful little girl. Let’s just be thankful for that and move on with the next stage in our lives, shall we?’

  He was moving towards her, his right hand slightly outstretched as if he seriously thought they might shake hands. Stop, Josh commanded in his head. Stop now. Yet at the same time as he was willing Dan to stop, there was a little part of him that was also urging him on towards the inevitable confrontation. He was so infuriatingly sure of himself, so convinced of his entitlement to happiness. So completely unaware.

  Slap.

  Sasha moved so fast, Josh hadn’t even registered her getting up. One minute she was crouching on the floor and the next she’d sprung to her feet and whacked Dan around the face, the sound reverberating in the air.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ she was screeching in a voice that didn’t sound quite human. ‘Don’t you dare imagine I’m going to make this easy for you. I am your wife, Dan. In there’ – she gestured towards the hallway and Josh and Hannah’s bedroom – ‘is your daughter. You do not get to throw us away like so much rubbish. You do not get to slot someone else into our place the minute things get a bit difficult. You know what a divorce will do to me. You might as well take a gun and shoot us both. I won’t let you do this!’

  She streaked past them and straight out of the living room.

  ‘And you do not own me!’ yelled Dan after her, still holding his hand to his cheek where a livid red mark was already mapping out the shape of Sasha’s hand. But his words were cut short by the slamming of the front door and the sound of Toby’s upset barking.

  ‘At least now you have some idea how fucking insane she is.’ Dan was now sitting on the floor, although he kept springing up periodically to check his face, with its stinging handprint, in the mirror over the fireplace.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dan. What did you expect? Did you really think she’d just wish you luck and step aside?’

  Hannah was pacing around the room. Josh hadn’t seen her like this in a long time. There was a raised patch of eczema by her right temple that only ever appeared when she was stressed.

  ‘No. Of course I didn’t expect that. But Christ, you should have seen what she was like at the restaurant. Screaming her head off. So fucking embarrassing. And then hitting me like that. You have to admit that’s bang out of order.’

  ‘You lied! You told us all you weren’t seeing that . . . woman.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But we just had dinner, that’s all. We weren’t doing anything.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You broke your promise. I’m sorry, Dan, but you can’t carry on staying here.’

  Dan’s head shot up. ‘Hang on. You’re supposed to be neutral here. You said. How come you’re siding with her all of a sudden?’

  ‘We’re not siding with anyone.’ Josh’s anger took him by surprise and gave his voice a pompous tone that made him cringe inwardly. ‘We had a deal, Dan. You said as long as you were here you wouldn’t be in contact with Sienna. So you’d have some thinking time, you said.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing but think!’ Dan’s face was dark. ‘Look, I know you guys would love for me and Sasha to get back together and for us to be a cosy little foursome again, but it ain’t gonna happen. OK? I’m not about to start badmouthing my wife, but let’s just say Sasha has problems, right? Big problems. You don’t go through what she went through and come out the other end a completely well-balanced, sane member of society. It’s not her fault and I’ll do whatever I can to support her, but I am not going back to her. End of story. Fine, you want me to leave, I’ll leave, but I am not going home. And the sooner you get used to that idea, the better. Now, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to go and look in on my daughter.’

  ‘Oh, nice of him to remember he has a daughter,’ snapped Hannah after Dan had stalked from the room.

  ‘Come on, that’s not really fair.’ Now that his burst of anger had blown itself out, Josh felt slightly wretched. For all his faults, Dan was pretty much the best friend he had and it felt wrong to be chucking him out. ‘He dotes on September, you know that. The only reason he hasn’t seen her in a few days is because it would just have confused her if he’d been in and out of her life, there one minute and gone the next. It’s better for her to get used to him not being around.’

  ‘Better for him, you mean.’

  Josh frowned. This was a side of Hannah he struggled with – the judgemental side that took a position and refused to budge from it or countenance an alternative, despite any evidence to the contrary. Josh himself was more rational – show him a persuasive argument and he was perfectly prepared to change his stance. That’s what adults did, wasn’t it? Listened to reason?

  ‘We can’t just throw him out. It’s ten-thirty. Anyway it won’t do September any good to wake up and find neither of her parents here. As it is, she’s going to have to top and tail with Lily in Lily’s bed, which won’t exactly be comfortable.’

  ‘Sasha will be back for her. She won’t just leave her here. It’s a school night. She knows September has been upset. She’ll come back just as soon as she’s calmed down.’

  6

  ‘How was Dan after I left? I bet he couldn’t believe he had to look after September. That must have put a bit of a spanner in the works if he was planning a late-night rendezvous with the Child Bitch from Hell!’

  Hannah glanced quickly around. They were standing at the classroom door waiting for story time to finish, and Sasha was talking extremely loudly. ‘I assumed you’d come back, Sash. I didn’t think you’d leave September at ours all night, not after she’d been so upset earlier.’

  Sasha flicked her black hair out of her eyes. ‘I was in no state to do anything, Hannah. After that scene at the restaurant and then seeing Dan back at yours, I just couldn’t have coped with September as well. You can understand that, can’t you? Anyway, I didn’t think it would matter, seeing as her beloved daddy was there to sort her out. Him being so hands-on and all.’

  Her voice rose dangerously as she spoke, so Hannah decided not to mention how, after they’d told Dan he had to leave, he’d insisted on going that very night, despite them then changing their minds in view of September and the lateness of the hour, so they’d ended up feeling like the bad guys. ‘I don’t want to put you both in an impossible position,’ Dan had said as he wheeled his hastily packed suitcase across the communal hallway. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow and let you know where I’m crashing.’

  Neither did Hannah tell Sasha about the three or four times during the night when she’d been woken by the noise of September sobbing through the wall and had gone into Lily’s room to find the little girl curled up with her head on a pillow at the bottom of Lily’s bed, and tears leaking from her tightly shut eyes.

  ‘Are you awake, sweetie?’ she’d asked, kneeling down next to the bed and folding one of September’s clammy little hands in hers. But the tiny figure kept her eyes closed and refused to answer.

  ‘So how was he? After I left? Dan, I mean.’

  Sasha hadn’t lowered her tone at all. A couple of the other mothers glanced over sharply. The children were now singing the goodbye song, where one by one they were bid a musical farewell by the group, usually the cue for their parents to gaze on misty-eyed, and any interruptions were fiercely frowned upon.

  Hannah shrugged. ‘You know, a bit shaken up, I suppose.’

  ‘Did he feel guilty? What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’

  Hannah was grateful when the nursery teacher, Mrs Mackenzie, started singing ‘goodbye Lily, goodbye’, and her daughter got up from where she was sitting cross-legged on the carpet and cast her eyes anxiously around for her mother before making her way over to them, as pinkly self-important as if she was on a stage in front of hundreds of people, not taking leave of twenty-three largely snotty-nosed three- and four-year-olds.

  ‘Hello, Liliput.’ She dropped to her knees to wrap her arms around her daughter, breathing in her hot sweet breath, nuzzling her nose into her poac
hed-egg-soft neck, glad to escape Sasha’s intensity. Sometimes when she held her daughter she felt a rush of love so overpowering she wanted to inhale her wholesale. ‘How was your day?’

  Lily drew back and looked at her solemnly. ‘OK, I s’pose.’

  Hannah’s chest constricted as it always did when she thought about the things that might have happened to her daughter while she wasn’t around to see, the little hurts she might have suffered, the games she might not have been invited to play, the times she might have missed her mother. Mrs Mackenzie always insisted that Lily was ‘happy as Larry’ when she was at nursery, but Hannah couldn’t shake off the nagging doubt that there were things she wasn’t told, or the fear that Lily might be putting on a brave face to mask some deeper unhappiness she didn’t want them to know about.

  ‘Hey, Hannah. Long time no see.’

  The woman who’d materialized by her side, with a tousle-headed child clinging to her leg, was plump, with a doughy face and wispy brown hair. Amid the well-heeled Crouch End mothers with their expensively dressed-down labels, her baggy sweatshirt and long, shapeless skirt and the canvas bag slung over her stooped shoulder stood out. But her shy smile lit up her face, making her almost pretty, and her voice was soft and warm.

  ‘Oh hi, Marcia. I know, I’ve been . . . preoccupied.’

  ‘Don’t I know how that can be! I was just wondering . . . well, Sarah was just wondering,’ she indicated the small child who seemed to be attempting to burrow right into her skin, ‘if Lily wants to come for tea today. You as well, of course.’

  ‘How kind. I’d love to, and I’m sure Lily would too. Lily?’ Hannah felt a kind of giddy relief at the thought of spending time with someone normal, someone who wouldn’t insist on making her listen while she dissected the corpse of her failed marriage. She bent her head to her daughter, who looked up at her and nodded, a closed-lipped smile making rosy apples out of her round cheeks.

  ‘Not fair.’