The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

  ‘I don’t believe it! She’s trying to make me out to be a fucking thief as well as a wife-beater. The woman is totally insane. Do you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no break-in at all, and she’s just making the whole thing up. Did that ever occur to you?’

  It hadn’t occurred to him, but now the idea had been put into his head, Josh couldn’t help feeling it made sense. Sasha was totally unhinged at the moment. Just thinking back to last weekend, when she’d come round before she and Hannah went out to the club and had been all over him like a horrible rash, made him feel mortified all over again. He hadn’t responded to her. He was sure he hadn’t. But there’d been a moment when she was rubbing her hands all over him when he’d found himself thinking about Hannah and how rarely she touched him these days, and how much he longed for her to be doing what Sasha was doing, and he couldn’t help it, he’d become . . . No, no, no. He couldn’t, wouldn’t think about that. The point was that Sasha wasn’t stable. But was she really crazy enough to invent a break-in, just to get back at Dan?

  ‘This is getting serious, you know, mate,’ Dan was continuing. ‘This is getting fucking serious. I’m beginning to really worry about her state of mind, and whether September is safe with her. Do you know, we’ve been getting a stream of pizza deliveries and cabs turning up at the door that we never ordered. Yesterday, get this, a guy turned up to quote for a conservatory we’d apparently expressed an interest in. We don’t even have a fucking garden.’

  ‘Yeah, but just because she orders a couple of prank pizzas it doesn’t make her a bad mum. She dotes on September, you know that.’

  But even as he was saying it, Josh was remembering what Hannah had said about the guest room being empty and no sign of a babysitter.

  ‘Look, Dan, I’ve been talking to Hannah.’ Josh wasn’t looking at his wife, who was sitting at the kitchen table, but he felt her stir to attention at the mention of her name. ‘Anyway,’ he pushed ahead, ‘we both feel like maybe it would be a good idea for us to meet Sienna now. I mean, she’s clearly a part of your life that isn’t going away.’

  ‘Oh mate, that’s—’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean we’re in favour of what you did or anything, and just because we’re ready to meet her, it doesn’t mean you should introduce her to September or anything.’

  ‘No. Absolutely. I wouldn’t. Not yet, anyway.’

  From the corner of his eye, Josh could see Hannah gesturing angrily, but he ignored it.

  ‘I’ll tell Sienna. She can’t wait to meet you guys. Maybe you could come over for dinner. She makes a wicked Thai curry.’

  After he ended the call, Josh remained staring out into the dark back garden where in a previous life he’d stood for hours alone with a swingball set, hitting the ball backwards and forwards through the dragging afternoons, imagining he was two separate people.

  ‘I can’t believe you just did that.’ Hannah looked up accusingly, her pink cheeks clashing with her red hair.

  ‘Hang on a minute. You said—’

  ‘Yes, I said eventually. I said we’d meet her eventually. Not right now. What am I going to tell Sasha?

  ‘Don’t tell her anything. She doesn’t need to know.’ Josh put out a conciliatory hand to touch Hannah’s arm. ‘Look, Hans, I know Sasha is our friend, but this our life. Yours and mine. We don’t have to place her at the centre of everything we say and do. We’re entitled to be friends with who we want.’

  A shriek went up from the living room.

  ‘Josh!’ came his mother’s agitated voice. ‘Your dog’s just weed on the Flokati!’

  Hannah pulled away. ‘Our life,’ she repeated, as if he’d said something amusing. And again, softly, in a tone he didn’t altogether like, ‘Our life.’

  Lucie/Eloise, aged nine

  Sometimes I miss Mummy so much it gives me a tummy ache. I don’t miss her being cross or making gobbling noises and looking at me with her cold-fish eyes, but I miss the way her voice sounds when she tries to learn all the funny English sayings from her book. When I told her on the phone that I miss her, she said ‘fiddlesticks’. (Except it sounds like this when she says it: feed-el-steecks.) She was in a good mood when I spoke to her on the phone, and I almost told her about being Eloise, but didn’t dare. When we said goodbye and I was crying she told me, ‘Don’t be silly!’ (seeley) and said, ‘Onnyva,’ which I asked Madame LeFeuvre about and she said means ‘Let’s go!’

  16

  Hannah was finally getting down to work. That endless weekend at Josh’s parents’ house, where she’d got no work done at all, had left her really behind and it was such a relief to have a proper child-free stretch to really focus her mind on the feature that was already two days overdue. Lily had jumped at the chance of going to Sarah’s house for lunch, and Marcia had seemed genuinely pleased when Hannah accepted her offer of picking up the two girls from nursery and taking them home for a couple of hours. It would make a refreshing change for both her and Lily to spend a bit of time with people who weren’t in the middle of a domestic crisis.

  She’d been nervous about broaching it with Sasha and had tried to be as casual as she could when explaining why they wouldn’t be able to join her and September in the park straight after school, but in the event Sasha hadn’t seemed bothered. In fact, she hadn’t reacted at all, which was a relief. Sasha’s moods were so hard to judge these days. Hannah didn’t think she could have spent time with Sasha, not without giving herself away. The invitation to dinner at Sienna’s flat this evening was looming so large in her conscience, she was surprised she didn’t have it tattooed across her forehead.

  It was incredible how much you could get done if you knew you had a clear run of time. Hannah had done three phone interviews and sorted out the basic structure of her latest piece. She’d even nailed the introduction, which was always the hardest part. Petra, the features editor on the magazine Hannah wrote for most regularly, was an ambitious, go-getting twenty-nine-year-old who wore Louboutins in the office and worked through lunch eating quinoa salads from little plastic pots. She didn’t understand about childcare or how you felt after a few sleepless nights, or why it was impossible to get anything done if your toddler was at home sick. Hannah had had to blame the lateness of the feature on the fact that one of the interviewees was being difficult, rather than saying she just didn’t have enough hours in the day. With any luck, now she’d got going, she could finish the article before they had to leave for dinner with Sienna and Dan, and it would be in Petra’s inbox first thing in the morning. Just as well – she’d had so little work lately, she and Josh really needed the cash. As it was, it’d be at least a month before her invoice was paid. Most magazines clearly imagined their journalists wrote for love, not money.

  The other thing about burying herself in work was that Hannah hadn’t had time to think about what was hidden in the wardrobe in her bedroom. And as long as she didn’t think about it, she could pretend it wasn’t there and keep that gnawing low-level worry at bay.

  Damn. Twenty past three. She ought to be getting off to Marcia’s now to pick up Lily. Lily was still so young, if Hannah left her too long in a new place she’d be totally exhausted, particularly on a Monday when she was still tired from the weekend.

  Marcia lived a few streets away, in a road where the Victorian terraces on one side had been bombed during the war and replaced by social housing. Most of the houses were now privately owned, but a few still had the council-regulation front doors and the neglected appearance of long-term tenanted properties. On the way there, Hannah rehearsed in her mind the shape the rest of the feature would take, remembering an argument she hadn’t included in her plan and making a note to herself to scribble it down as soon as she got home.

  Marcia’s was one of the former council houses that had been lovingly cared for – the front garden was a cheerful mass of greenery and gravel, with painted window boxes on every sill. Inside the little glassed-in porch, Hannah could make out Sarah’s and her
two older sisters’ flowery wellies lined up in a haphazard row beneath three pegs accommodating an assortment of brightly coloured raincoats and stripy woollen scarves. The effect was one of happy chaos, and Hannah found herself looking forward to going inside and having a cup of tea and a chat with the ever-calm Marcia about subjects that for once didn’t involve cheating husbands and their money-grabbing girlfriends.

  But when Marcia came to the door, she looked uncharacteristically po-faced. Behind her, Hannah could hear the sound of a small girl in the throes of a crying fit.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got your hands full. Is everything OK? That’s not Lily, is it?’

  She was smiling, but uncomfortably aware Marcia wasn’t following suit. In fact, the other woman was frowning at her, seemingly confused.

  ‘Lily’s not here. Surely you knew?’

  Hannah froze. ‘What do you mean, not here? Where is she?’

  ‘When I got to school to pick them up, Mrs Mackenzie said Lily had already left with Sasha. Apparently she turned up early. Said she was collecting both Lily and September.’

  ‘But I told her—’

  ‘Sarah’s pretty upset – as you can probably hear.’ Marcia opened the door wider so Hannah could hear more clearly the steady wailing coming from inside the house.

  ‘Oh, Marcia, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.’

  Hannah felt hot with embarrassment, even though she had no idea how the mix-up could have happened. Hurrying away down the street, her cheeks burning, she rang Sasha’s numbers – mobile and landline – without success. Both went straight to voicemail. Where was she? Hannah knew she’d told Sasha about the arrangement with Marcia, and even if Sasha hadn’t been paying attention, she knew better than to take Lily without consulting Hannah. They’d always been so respectful of each other like that, never presuming something was OK without checking it out first.

  Not knowing what else to do, she went round to Sasha’s house and leaned heavily on the buzzer. No answer. By now Hannah was out of breath and sweaty, her stomach churning uncomfortably. Worry nipped at her insides.

  She rang Josh, letting out a groan of frustration when his phone also went straight to voicemail.

  ‘I can’t find Lily,’ she snapped, deliberately omitting to mention that she was with Sasha. ‘Call me back.’

  Hurrying back home, she tried to ignore the painful stitch in her side, convincing herself that when she turned the corner she’d see Sasha and the girls waiting outside the front door. There’d be some easy explanation. Yet she could see right away that there was no one there and no sign of Sasha’s car outside.

  She started to feel afraid. Sasha had been so erratic recently. If Hannah was honest with herself, she knew Sasha wasn’t really fit to be looking after her own daughter. What had she done with Lily? All sorts of terrifying scenarios passed through her head. Sasha queueing for the ferry with the girls strapped into the back seats of the car, or going out somewhere and forgetting she had them with her, or leaving them on the tube, or in a supermarket car park.

  At home, she paced the floor, phone in hand. No sooner had she ended one futile call to Sasha than she was redialling her number. ‘Please pick up,’ she muttered. ‘Come on, for Christ’s sake, pick up.’

  ‘Sasha, it’s me again. Call me,’ she repeated for the millionth time.

  When her phone finally did ring, she was unreasonably furious to see Josh’s name flashing up on the screen.

  ‘I thought you’d be Sasha.’

  ‘Well, sorry,’ he said. ‘You did call me, don’t forget. I was in a staff meeting.’

  Cutting the conversation short, she checked her phone for missed calls, even though she knew it always made a beeping sound if someone had tried to ring while she was talking. She glanced at the time. Half past four. In just two hours, they were supposed to be making the trek across town to Notting Hill, and in between now and then, she was supposed to be finishing her feature, getting Lily fed and bathed and ready for bed and settling in the babysitter – a sixth-former from three doors down with waist-length hair and eyelashes so weighted with mascara Hannah wondered how she could possibly open her eyes, who always came lugging a backpack full of text books and whom Lily quietly idolized. And that was to say nothing of getting herself ready. Ever since Josh made the dinner arrangement, Hannah had been agonizing about what to wear. She’d been feeling so washed out and tired lately, and nothing seemed to fit her properly. The thought of meeting up with a fresh-faced, twenty-four-year-old model was just depressing.

  Hannah had never really been someone who compared herself to other women, getting a boost when the balance swung in her favour and despairing when it didn’t. She was what she was, she had always believed, and no amount of fretting was going to change that, so she might just as well accept it and move on. Besides, you only really noticed the way people looked in the early stages of meeting them; as soon as you got to know them, looks ceased to matter. Her boyfriend before Josh had been, in her mother’s words, ‘very quirky-looking’, but from the moment he’d first made her laugh, she’d ceased to see his large, hooked nose, or the crisscrossing front teeth.

  Yet something about this meeting with Sienna had got to her. Maybe it was just that she was feeling generally so insecure. She knew things weren’t right with Josh. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone so long without having sex, apart from that drunken, frenzied coupling the night she’d come home from the nightclub with the image of Sasha and Ed in that grubby toilet cubicle playing across her mind. But she didn’t have the energy to address the problem. Easier to ignore it than to have to start thinking about what lay at the heart of it. Funny how the lack of a physical relationship made one feel so insubstantial, so un-vital. A sexless, sapless husk of a person. And she was dreading being around a couple who were so overtly at the honeymoon stage. She couldn’t bear the idea of she and Josh sitting side by side like maiden aunts, while Dan and this woman – this girl, really (in her imagination she was getting younger and younger by the minute) – were all over each other.

  She’d been planning on having a shower before they went and washing her hair, maybe applying a treatment from the hugely expensive tub she’d been persuaded into buying the last time she’d visited the hairdresser. But now all thoughts of clothes and makeup had been swept aside by worry for Lily. Even her anxiety about the thing hidden away in the wardrobe, which had been like a constant buzzing in her ears over the last couple of days, ever since she’d brought it into the house – was pushed out of her head by this new crisis.

  It was nearly six when the doorbell went. Hannah had been standing at the table going through the class list, trying desperately to think of anyone else she could ring for information.

  ‘Hi.’ Sasha stood with an arm around both Lily and September, a broad smile cracking her face. ‘Aren’t I the best friend you ever had? Kept her out of your hair for five and a half hours! Hope you got masses of work done, or I might just have to kill you.’

  Hannah grabbed Lily’s shoulders and pulled her towards her, almost crushing her in her need to feel her warm, solid little body again. She glared at Sasha over the top of Lily’s head. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  Sasha’s smile evaporated.

  ‘You knew Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia’s for lunch. Since when do you take her out of school without telling me?’

  ‘Now hang on a minute. I had no idea Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia’s. And I did tell you. I sent you a text before I picked her up.’

  ‘No you didn’t. That’s a bare-faced lie.’

  Sasha’s face was pinched and dark. ‘Don’t you dare call me a liar. Check your phone. Go on. Check it.’

  ‘I don’t need to check it. I’ve been checking it all afternoon, while I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’

  Even so, Hannah couldn’t help glancing at her phone. Sure enough, there was an alert, showing that a text message had come through.

  ‘I
don’t believe this.’

  Clicking on it, she saw it was indeed from Sasha.

  Am picking up Lil so you can get your head down x.

  ‘But you’ve only just sent this. You must have done. What use is that when I’ve been frantic with worry all afternoon?’

  ‘Hannah, I don’t believe this. First of all, I sent that text hours ago. I don’t know why it took so long to get through – maybe because we were in the park when I sent it and you know how dodgy the signal is there. Secondly, I don’t know why you were so frantic – Mrs Mackenzie would have told you Lily was with me. All I wanted was to do you a bloody favour.’

  Sasha’s face, tilted sharply towards Hannah, was a scrunched-up scowl of indignation. September, meanwhile, looked as if she was about to cry, moving her eyes from one woman to the other and back again, and Hannah felt the anger drain from her like dirty bath water.

  ‘Sorry,’ she grunted. ‘I just panicked, that’s all.’

  ‘Get a grip. This is me, OK? I love Lily like my own daughter, you know that. Anyway, now I’m here, any chance of some tea?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ begged September.

  Hannah froze. She was already so behind schedule. There was no way she could get everything done if Sasha came in.

  ‘Um, it’s not really a terribly good time, Sash. Josh and I are going out tonight and the babysitter is due any minute really.’

  ‘Babysitter? On a school night? You are a dark horse. Going anywhere nice?’

  ‘Not really. We’ll probably just go to a movie or something.’

  Once it was out, she wished she hadn’t said it. It was one thing not to tell Sasha that they were going to meet Sienna, but another entirely to invent an outright lie. For a second she thought about taking it back and telling her the truth, but now she’d missed the chance of dropping it in casually, it would become even more of a big deal.

  Sasha shrugged. ‘Oh well. Have fun,’ she said, turning away.

  ‘But Mummy . . .’ September was resisting being steered in the direction of the car, and Hannah felt even more wretched.