by Tamar Cohen
Hannah hadn’t noticed September coming up to join Sasha behind her.
‘Lily’s my friend. Not fair if she goes to Sarah’s house.’
‘But September . . .’
‘No!’ September was shouting now. ‘Lily’s my friend. I want Lily to come to my house.’ She broke off to fling herself at her mother’s legs.
‘Don’t you think, in view of the circumstances, it might be kinder if you and Lily came to ours?’ Sasha was smiling, but her voice was tight, as if someone had pulled a thread through the middle of it.
‘But I—’
‘September has had a lot to deal with over the last few weeks, Hannah – as you well know – and I just think you might be a little more sensitive. Lily’s her best friend. She needs her right now.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ A vivid pink stain had spread across Marcia’s pleasant face. ‘We can make it another time, Hannah, if it’s a problem.’
Hannah felt her own cheeks burning in sympathy. ‘Sorry, Marcia,’ she mumbled. ‘Maybe we should leave it for today.’
‘But Mummy,’ Lily was tugging on her arm, ‘I want to go to—’
Her words were cut short by Sasha bending down and pulling her in for a hug. ‘We’ll pick up jam doughnuts on the way home, and then you and September can play on her new Wii game. You know, the one you two were going on about all last week. Won’t that be fun?’
She stood up and turned to Marcia, smiling at her without quite meeting her eyes. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that Lily and September are so close – inseparable, really – and September is going through a bit of a hard time at the moment. I’m sure Sarah will find someone else to play with.’
As they made their way out of the classroom, past the wall of colourful self-portraits with their goggling round eyes and red, U-shaped mouths, and emerged into the playground, Sasha’s mood seemed to lighten.
‘You owe me,’ she whispered, leaning in towards Hannah. ‘I saved you from an afternoon of drinking herbal tea and swapping wholemeal-pizza recipes, followed by a nutritious tea of brown rice and veg from our own allotment.’
She did a very good imitation of Marcia’s soft, tentative voice and Hannah smiled in spite of herself – and then was mortified to realize that Marcia was walking a few paces behind them.
‘She’s nice actually, Sasha. I like her. You really should give people a chance.’
‘Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize Pollyanna was in the house!’
Standing on the wooden deck in front of Sasha and Dan’s dazzling white modernist house, set back from the road and up a flight of wide stone steps, Hannah for once didn’t feel the usual shameful stab of resentment that Sasha, who hadn’t worked in years, should have all this, while she and Josh seemed at times to be running on a hamster wheel just to hang on to a flat they’d long since outgrown. Instead she imagined how Sasha and September must rattle around in there, now it was just the two of them in those huge white rooms with their gleaming white floorboards. What would happen to the house if Sasha and Dan divorced, Hannah wondered? Dan earned good money, but he was self-employed and had a lot of outgoings, and as far as Hannah could tell he hadn’t had a big job for quite a while.
‘Blimey,’ she said as Sasha casually threw open the solid-oak front door, ‘what’s been going on in here?’
The normally pristine house was in disarray. Jackets and jumpers seemed to have been dropped wherever they were removed, lying in brightly coloured heaps on the white floors and ivory-coloured furniture, like so many exotic blooms. The glass coffee table in the cavernous living room was crowded with wine glasses and half-filled coffee cups and everywhere was littered with September’s toys, including a long row of mutilated plastic dolls with toilet-paper bandages tied around them in various inventive ways.
‘September was making a hospital,’ said Sasha, as if that explained the empty pizza box on the arm of the sofa or the photographs strewn across the cream-coloured deep-pile rug. ‘And Katia’s off sick again. Honestly, that woman is ill more days than she’s here. She’s going to have to go.’
Sasha’s inability to hold on to a cleaner for more than a few months was a running joke. Over the years Hannah had known her, she’d had cleaners who stole her underwear, cleaners who made passes at her husband and one cleaner who, when caught red-handed trying on one of Sasha’s favourite dresses, looked puzzled at the furore, insisting, ‘But I have alvays done zis.’ Sometimes Hannah wondered whether Sasha exaggerated the stories for comic effect. A couple of times, having met and liked the pale-faced girls with their dyed-blonde hair scraped back into high ponytails and their tight stone-washed jeans and the shiny pink slippers they swapped for their towering platforms at the door, she’d found herself doubting whether they could really have committed whatever infringement Sasha was accusing them of, and worrying about how they’d make ends meet without Sasha and Dan’s house to clean two days a week.
‘Last week she reached up to pull a Monopoly board down from the shelf in September’s room and the corner stabbed her in the eye and she reeled around the room screeching, “I blind! I blind!”’
Sasha did an imitation of the poor, afflicted Katia, staggering around with her hands clapped to her face, and Hannah giggled despite herself. But the smile died on her face as she watched Sasha collapse suddenly on to a dove-grey velvet chaise longue, shoulders sagging, face staved in by grief.
Sitting down next to her friend, grateful that September and Lily seemed to have taken themselves upstairs to September’s room, Hannah put her arms around Sasha’s frighteningly thin frame, feeling how the breath was being pulled out from a place deep inside her, like handkerchieves from a magician’s hat.
‘How could he, Han? How could he do this to me? I think I’m going crazy. I lie awake at night and it’s like I’ve swallowed acid or something and it’s burning through me, eating me alive. Oh, you wouldn’t understand, but I lie there and everything hurts so much and I can’t think of any way to get the pain to stop except to take a fucking axe and smash it all to bits – Dan, me, this home we built together, my stupid hurting heart, all of it, just smash it all to pieces.’
Hannah gazed at her. Did Sasha really think she had a monopoly on hurting hearts? ‘You’re bound to feel like this, Sasha. It’s horrible, what’s happened to you. But you know you have to keep strong, for September’s sake. You’re all she has right now.’
‘I know, but it’s so unfair, Hannah. How does it work out like this? How does he get to do all this damage and just move on to the next woman as if I didn’t count for anything, as if I was no one. After all the things he said to me, all the promises he made me. How does that happen?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Sash.’
Suddenly Sasha’s delicate features contorted, her skin stretched out like pizza dough over her sharp cheekbones, her mouth twisting horribly at the corners. ‘He won’t get away with it. He thinks he will, but he won’t.’
Her voice was harsh, grating, and Hannah had to stop herself from recoiling.
‘I’m going to see a lawyer.’ Sasha was nodding to herself, as if she’d forgotten Hannah was even there. ‘I’m going to get that bastard.’
‘Don’t you think, for September’s sake, you should hold fire a while? Far better to try to sort things out amicably . . .’
‘Amicably? Really? While he’s fucking some under-age bimbo? I don’t think so. Do you reckon he’s thinking about what’s best for September, huh?’
Hannah shook her head. Glancing down, she noticed that Sasha had scraped the skin from around her thumb and was digging a sharp fingernail deep into the exposed flesh. Hannah watched transfixed as a bead of blood ballooned out from around the nail before dropping, squat and fat, on to the pale fabric of the chaise longue.
Lucie, aged seven
Yesterday it was my birthday. Daddy gave me a bike with pink glittery streamers on the handlebars and it has stabilizers but I mustn’t worry about them because soon I’ll be able to ride it
and they’ll be off quick as a flash. Mummy didn’t come downstairs and Daddy said she’s tired but I know it’s because of Eloise. Sometimes I hate Eloise, but I can’t say that because it’s bad. I went creeping upstairs to see Mummy even though Daddy said I shouldn’t. She was lying in her bed like a princess with her hair all around the pillow, but when she saw me she told me to go out because she couldn’t bear the sight of me. It’s because I had that bad thought about Eloise. Mummy knows. She knows everything.
7
‘I’m going to give her whatever she wants. Anything. I know that scene last night was hideous and she hates my guts at the moment, but she adores September just as much as I do. Once she calms down a bit she’ll want to do what’s best for her.’
‘Like having two parents living together? That’d be best, wouldn’t it? Isn’t that what all the studies say?’
Dan frowned over the top of his strawberry-and-passion-fruit smoothie. ‘Not helpful, Josh man.’
‘Sorry.’
Josh wished he didn’t feel quite so awkward. They were in the café at Dan’s fancy gym in the shadow of Alexandra Palace and, as always, Josh felt he was being judged. It wasn’t that he was in bad shape exactly, but compared with Dan and the other blokes in there he felt flabby and poorly defined. It wasn’t his fault they didn’t have a spare few grand knocking about to spend on gym membership and state-of-the-art Lycra work-out gear. And yes, he supposed he could do as Hannah was always suggesting and go running or cycle to work or whatever, but she had no real clue how much teaching took out of you. People always assumed it was a sedentary, physically undemanding job, but he was always on his feet to illustrate a point, or pacing around the classroom looking at individual students’ work. And there was the psychological stress. It’d take more than a few pull-ups on one of those fancy weights machines they had here, followed by a sauna or a session in the jacuzzi, to sort out the knots in his brain after eight hours of teaching.
‘Look,’ Dan put on his sincere face just as obviously as if he were pulling on a hat, ‘I don’t know how many times I can apologize for last night. I know I made you and Hannah a promise, and I broke it. I feel like I abused your hospitality. But, hand on heart, it was the first time me and Sienna had met up. I just had to see her.’
‘So it’s serious then?’
Dan’s face slackened and he cast his eyes downwards like a lovestruck teenager. ‘We have . . . strong feelings for each other.’
‘Right. So that was all bullshit then, that stuff about Sasha not having to know about you and Sienna because it was such early days and it could go nowhere?’
Dan looked as close to shamefaced as he ever got. ‘I just wanted to keep her out of it. I was being protective, I suppose.’
‘Protective of who? Your wife or your mistress?’
Dan glared at him. Clearly the word ‘mistress’ grated. Well, good. Dan was so infuriatingly sure of himself, always bending the truth until it fitted the image he’d created of himself in his own head. He needed to see how this looked from the outside, just how grubby the whole thing was.
‘Hey, Dan.’ The woman standing by their table was the colour of a newly minted penny and dressed head to toe in electric-blue Lycra, her highlighted blonde hair pulled up into a high ponytail. ‘You coming to circuit training later?’
At first Josh took her to be in her late twenties, but closer inspection put her nearer her mid-forties, the fine lines next to her eyes and the crêpey swell of her unavoidable cleavage giving her away. He watched, impressed despite himself, as Dan slipped effortlessly into flirty mode.
‘Not today, doll. Things to do, people to see. You know how it is.’
She shrugged prettily. ‘Well, you’d better make it next week. We can’t have you going to seed now, can we? Not after all your hard work.’
Even though she was looking at Dan, Josh couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was referring to him when she said ‘going to seed’. It was always like this when he went out with Dan, that feeling of suffering from comparison.
‘Doll?’ Josh enquired as the woman moved off, her ponytail swinging behind her.
Dan smirked. ‘I’m using it in a post-ironic way, naturally.’
‘Course you are. So go on. Back to your mistress. I don’t suppose you slept at her place last night?’
Dan pressed his lips together. ‘No offence, but I think the less you and Hannah know about where I am, the better. I don’t want to put you two in an awkward position.’
‘Bit late for that! So you are with her then?’
‘I didn’t say that. I just think it’s best Sasha doesn’t know where I am at the moment, and if I tell you you’ll either feel obliged to tell her, or you’ll feel bad about not telling her. Either way it’s shit.’
Josh had to agree it was shit. ‘I still can’t believe you’re splitting up. I always thought you were so together, you and Sasha. All those I love yous.’
‘Yeah, well, that was Sasha’s doing really. She is very needy emotionally, if you know what I mean. If I texted her and didn’t put a kiss or a love you, she’d act like it was the end of the fucking world.’
‘Aren’t you worried, then, about what this is going to do to her?’
Dan shook his head. ‘Underneath the neediness and that fragile Touch me and I’ll break exterior, Sasha has a rod of steel running through her. I’m not even joking. She’s the hardest person I know.’
Seeing Josh’s expression, he held up his hand defensively. ‘That’s not a criticism. I’m still really fond of her.’
‘Fond? She’s your wife, for God’s sake, not your granny!’
The whole conversation was making Josh feel uncomfortable. How was it possible to go from love to fond in just two weeks? And if it could happen to Dan and Sasha, couldn’t it also happen to him and Hannah?
‘Well, she’s not going to be my wife for much longer,’ Dan pointed out matter-of-factly.
‘You’ve already seen a lawyer?’
‘No. Course I haven’t. We don’t need lawyers, Josh. It’s not going to be that sort of break-up. I’m not out to shaft Sasha. She’s the mother of my daughter, for fuck’s sake. I’m going to be more than generous. She can have half the money from the house, even though I put up most of the deposit and have paid the entire mortgage and every single bill since we got it. If we split the equity, she’ll have more than enough to buy a two-bedroom garden flat in the same area – the same street even – without a mortgage. Something like you’ve got, only a bit flashier, if you know what I mean.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you know what Sasha’s like, everything has to be perfect. Then I could buy my own place nearby so that when she’s a bit older September can walk between the two. I was even thinking I might get somewhere near that new secondary school, so that she’d definitely be in the catchment.’
‘Blimey, Dan, they’re not even at primary school yet. Anyway, you know Sasha will insist on private school.’
‘Yeah, well, whatever, but I just want you to see I’m thinking long term about this.’
‘And what about custody?’
Dan looked blank.
‘Of September. Are you going to ask for half and half?’
Josh took savage enjoyment from the expression of horror that flickered across Dan’s face. ‘Well, that wouldn’t make any sense, would it, seeing as I’m the one who has to go out to work to fund everything? No, I think it’ll be a much less formal arrangement – when I’m not working I’ll have September 24/7, other times less. We’ll have to come to some sort of flexible agreement.’
‘Good luck with that.’
Dan sighed deeply and rubbed a hand across his eyes. The whites were pinkish in the corners, which Josh had at first attributed to Dan being fresh from fifty lengths of the gym’s ozone-cleaned pool, but now he wondered if it might just be stress. Dan was putting up a good front, but it couldn’t be easy, breaking up a family. Josh wondered h
ow much he was sleeping – with or without the added complication of a twenty-four-year-old model in his bed. The sudden mental image that accompanied this thought left him feeling momentarily hot with guilt.
‘Look, I know this initial bit is going to be difficult,’ said Dan, still rubbing his eyes. ‘Sasha’s furious and she has every right to be. I’ve been a fucking twat. But once she realizes it really is over and I’m not about to be a complete bastard about money and stuff, she’ll have to accept it, won’t she?’
‘Whatever you say.’
8
‘I want the house, full custody of our daughter, of course, and at least £50,000 a year.’
‘Um, I did ask for the bottom line of what you’d be prepared to accept, Mrs Fisher.’
‘That is the bottom line.’
Sasha was dressed in full executive gear – fitted black jacket, black trousers and soft suede high-heeled black boots – and was clearly not about to be cowed either by the lawyer with her silk shirt and thick-framed Prada glasses, or by the plush wood-panelled office in High Holborn.
‘I can quite see why you’d be tempted to go for the jugular, Mrs Fisher, but in cases like this a certain degree of compromise is inevitable, and if you could just indicate in which areas you’re prepared to be flexible I—’
‘No compromises.’
Hannah winced. This was what she’d been afraid of when Sasha asked her to accompany her to her first meeting with Caroline Briscoe, the highly recommended divorce lawyer whose hourly fee had made Hannah choke on her digestive biscuit when Sasha dropped it casually into the conversation over tea the day before.
‘Blimey, Sasha. Does she charge by the breath?’
‘What do I care? I won’t be paying for it.’
Useless to point out that even if the money came from Dan, it was still part of the same pot she’d be relying on to live. Now Sasha was glaring at Caroline Briscoe with unblinking intensity and it was the hardened lawyer who looked away first.