The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

  For a second or two they stayed like that, eyes closed, gently swaying. Josh knew he should look at Hannah, maybe share a complicit What are they like? raising of the eyebrows, but he couldn’t, for fear of what she would see written on his face.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Hannah announced on the way home. They’d left soon after the window incident. Even though they’d bolted the wooden shutters, the awareness of that terrible jagged hole in the pane stifled their attempts at conversation. But now Hannah wanted to talk, to tell him how awful she felt. What if it had been Sasha? She knew it wasn’t, of course. Yet what if it was? Should she say something to her? Admit they’d been to Sienna’s flat, just in case?

  Josh didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to think about the possibility of Sasha outside in the dark square, looking in on the four of them cosying up together in that comfortable, fire-warmed living room. He could just imagine how she might have felt. But then again, if it was her, shouldn’t they be more worried about her state of mind than about her feelings? If she’d come out in the night, perhaps even bringing September with her, to spy through the windows, and then picked up a rock and hurled it at the glass, wasn’t that dangerously unhinged?

  ‘I think we should back off from both of them for a while,’ he said finally, as they waited at a traffic light by Tufnell Park tube. ‘This whole situation is getting too intense. I think we should leave them to it for a bit.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. The tried-and-tested Josh formula for when things get tough – walk away.’

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair. Whose idea was it to go tonight and show some solidarity?’

  ‘Yeah, and look where that got us!’

  The lights changed and Josh pulled away, gears grating. How had this suddenly become his fault, he’d like to know.

  ‘Oh God, I hate this,’ said Hannah. ‘I hate that we’ve ended up in this position. I’d be mortified if Sasha found out where we’ve been. But you know the worst thing?’

  Josh shook his head.

  ‘I actually quite liked Sienna! I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. What did you think?’

  Josh batted away the image of Sienna leaning forward into the fireplace.

  ‘She was OK,’ he shrugged.

  18

  Hannah held her breath, waiting for Sasha’s response. She’d hardly slept, worrying about whether to say anything about their dinner at Sienna’s the night before, and having decided that she would, she’d blurted it out as soon as they were alone together.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really want to, but you know, Dan is still Josh’s best friend. His only friend, in many ways.’

  She’d expected Sasha to explode, and would even have half welcomed a scene, if only to offload some of the guilt she’d been feeling ever since they accepted Dan’s invitation. But in the event, Sasha seemed curiously unconcerned.

  ‘I’m not exactly thrilled, but there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? Just don’t tell me about it. The less I know about that woman, the better.’

  Hannah studied her face. They were in the café on the high street. Well, one of the hundreds of cafés, to be accurate. Sometimes it seemed Crouch End was just one big café full of women with buggies and baby-carriers and expensive tote bags stuffed with crayons and rice crackers. Women in many respects just like the two of them.

  Hannah hadn’t really wanted to come. She was all too aware of the unfinished feature on her laptop, but the scene last night with the smashed window kept coming back to her – the sickening crack, the glass, that awful jagged hole.

  ‘Something weird happened while we were there.’

  ‘I told you.’ Sasha was drinking her cappuccino from a bowl, as all the customers were, and it had given her a ring of froth around her mouth like a clown. ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’

  ‘Yes, but this was odd. Someone threw a rock at the window. Smashed the whole thing.’

  Sasha’s clown mouth turned up at the corners. ‘Ha! That’s brilliant. Serves you all right.’

  Hannah smiled tightly, but in her head she heard that cracking sound, and something cold shifted inside her.

  ‘We even wondered for a moment if it could have been you!’

  Now Sasha’s face set hard, the smile fading to a fissure. ‘What do you mean, you thought it was me?’

  ‘Oh, don’t take it like that, we didn’t really think—’

  ‘No. I don’t believe this. Not only do you go behind my back to cosy up with the woman who has destroyed my life, but then when some yob lobs a brick through the window, you try to blame it on me.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t like that. Sit down, Sash. Please?’

  Sasha had half risen, propelled by her fury.

  ‘I was joking. Please sit down.’

  Hannah’s voice wobbled as she reached out to detain her friend, and after a brief pause, Sasha slumped back down in her seat. Seemingly unable or unwilling to look at Hannah, she sat forward with her elbow on the table, one hand up to her head. The nub of her wrist bone jutted through her paper-thin skin and Hannah found herself thinking how easily it would snap clean in two.

  ‘Sorry,’ Sasha mumbled. ‘I know I’m over-sensitive, it’s just that this is so hard. Parents shouldn’t split up. Parents should stay together. Terrible things happen when parents separate. It’s not right.’

  ‘I know.’

  Sasha now raised the other hand to her temple, so that her head was resting in her hands. As she did so, the sleeve of her mushroom-coloured cashmere jumper rode up, and Hannah was horrified to see a long, deep, red scratch scored widthways into her flesh. Another similar scratch intersected it halfway up, but disappeared under the jumper’s cuff. The dried blood had beaded in places, thick and dark. She tried to think of an innocent explanation, but there was none.

  Hannah knew she ought to say something. Yet the words lodged in her mouth like boiled eggs, impossible to get out.

  Sasha put her hands down, and instantly the scratches were gone – and with them the opportunity to raise concerns, to be a good friend. Hannah sipped her coffee and tried to forget. Perhaps she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. She was prone to exaggerate things in her head – wasn’t Josh always telling her that? – liable to leap to wrong conclusions.

  ‘It’s Dan’s night to see September, isn’t it?’ She was deliberately changing the subject, trying to get things back to normal.

  ‘Yeah. We’re meeting at the pizza place at seven.’

  ‘Why won’t you let him see her on their own?’

  Sasha put down her coffee so heavily that some of it sloshed over the side of the bowl and on to the weathered wooden table. ‘I’ve told you before. He’s violent. And he’s a thief. He’s not to be trusted.’

  All the way home, Hannah kept thinking about the coincidence that both Dan and Sasha should use the same phrase – that the other was not to be trusted. Impossible to believe that just weeks ago they were living together, sleeping in the same bed.

  Back in her flat, she struggled to concentrate. The conversation with Sasha had unnerved her, not to mention the ugly red cut in Sasha’s childlike arm. She tried to focus on her article, on what pay-off she could use to end it, but nothing came. Instead her head was full of Sasha and Dan and Sienna – and the thing hidden away in the back of her wardrobe.

  She should leave it alone. She should just forget about it. But once she’d let it into her mind, she couldn’t get rid of it.

  Abandoning the dining table, she made her way through the hallway and into the bedroom she and Josh shared at the rear of the flat. Once it would have been a dining room – in the days before the houses were all carved up into poky, badly soundproofed conversions. There was a big window looking out on to their section of garden and a plain cast-iron fireplace through which a pigeon had fallen the winter before last, arriving dazed and sheepish in the grate. Hannah didn’t look at the bed, with its white duvet cover and four white pillows. She was always trying to re
-create the beds in the Sunday supplements with their plumped-up covers and scattering of welcoming cushions and throws, but instead the duvet was bunched up at one end, leaving the other end limp and flat like an empty sac, and the pillowcase on Josh’s side had a faint yellowish stain in the middle. By her side of the bed was a teetering pile of books, some abandoned halfway through, others long since finished but unable to be accommodated on the already over-stuffed shelves.

  She opened the door of the old pine wardrobe, taken aback as always by the jumble of clothes and shoes and bags and general junk that was crammed inside. Where was it that other people, with their lovely minimalist flats, managed to store old bottles of suntan lotion and beach towels and winter hats and scarves?

  Feeling around behind a box of photographs, she withdrew the small plastic bag. Kneeling on the floor with the bag in her hand, something unpleasant and bitter came up inside her and jumped clear into her throat. She fought it down.

  Clutching the bag to her chest, she crossed the hallway with purpose into the bathroom, bolting the door behind her, even though she was alone in the flat.

  The bathroom was the one room they’d never got around to decorating. Long and narrow, with a bath running along the side and a sink crammed down the far end, it resembled a dingy corridor and normally she couldn’t go in there without feeling depressed. Now she sat down, oblivious, on the toilet and took out the package from its plastic bag. She and Josh had had sex just once in the last four months, after that night out with Sasha, and though she’d been far too drunk to think clearly about contraception it had been nearly time for her next period so she’d assumed it was safe. But her period had never come. For days, weeks even, she’d been ignoring the tenderness in her breasts and the great weariness that made her limbs feel leaden and her bed so inviting at two or three in the afternoon. She couldn’t have another baby. Everything was so weird at the moment. Things weren’t right between her and Josh. They didn’t have enough money. She needed to keep working. Lily was still such a baby herself. Sure, they’d talked about giving their daughter a brother or sister, but only in abstract terms. Not as an actual thing. Not now.

  If not now, when? The phrase came back to her as she held the white plastic stick in her hand and stared at the window, watching with a growing feeling of nausea as the blue line worked its way slowly across, as she’d known, deep down, it would.

  The sound of her stupid birdsong ringtone caught her by surprise. Stick in hand, she burst out of the bathroom. Picking up her phone from the dining table, her heart still hammering from shock, she was surprised to see Dan’s name flashing up. Dan always rang Josh, that was the way it worked, and Sasha rang her. She supposed that was just one more thing that would be different from now on.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  For one surreal moment Hannah thought he was talking about the baby, and stared at the plastic stick as if it might turn out to have supernatural powers.

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘That Sasha has lost her fucking mind. That she’s on mega doses of happy pills?’

  ‘I didn’t think I needed to.’

  Hannah couldn’t understand where this sudden outburst had come from.

  ‘Don’t give me that, Hannah. That woman is in sole charge of my daughter. She’s been acting totally fucking insane lately – the spying, the keying of the car, the smashing of the window. Don’t tell me that’s normal. And now I find out she’s sufficiently nuts to be put on major medication – and no one thought that maybe I had the right to know?’

  Hannah’s head was churning. She hadn’t even started to absorb the shock of the baby thing, and now here she was being harangued about something that wasn’t anything to do with her. She thought about the angry red cut on Sasha’s arm and doubt wound itself like wire around her heart. Could she really be putting September at risk by remaining loyal to Sasha?

  ‘Who told you?’ Her voice was uncharacteristically combative to mask the doubt.

  ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘I think Sasha deserves to know who has been passing on private information.’ How prissy she sounded. How prim. ‘Have you stopped to think it might be someone with an axe to grind? Sasha’s a bit like Marmite – you know that. People either love her or hate her.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I found out from Josh.’

  Hannah fell silent.

  ‘Don’t be so shocked. We do speak to each other. And email too. At least one person believes fathers should have rights, at least one person has got September’s best interests at heart. Hannah, if Sasha is having some sort of nervous breakdown, don’t you think I need to know about it?’

  ‘She’s not having a breakdown.’ Hannah, her emotions already churned up by the pregnancy test, felt herself quivering with rage. ‘She’s just trying to cope with having been thrown to the kerb by her own husband. Dumped for a younger model – literally, in this case – the oldest story in the book. You have no right to use this against her, Dan. And Josh had no right to tell you.’

  ‘I have every right. My daughter needs a stable home life. I’m going to go for full custody.’

  Hannah was so surprised that for a moment she doubted she had heard correctly. ‘What? You can’t. Where would September live? In your little love nest with you and Sienna?’

  ‘No. She can stay in the house for now. She needs stability and consistency. I’ll move back there. I fucking pay enough for it. And Sasha can rent a place nearby until she sorts herself out and becomes a fit mother again.’

  Hannah shook her head. Dan was totally unlike his normal, laid-back self. He seemed almost possessed. ‘I don’t want to talk to you about this any longer, Dan,’ she said, trying to force her voice to be neutral. ‘It challenges . . . my integrity.’

  ‘Your integrity?’ Dan barked. ‘Tell you what, Hannah. If anything happens to September because you withhold information I need to know in order to protect my daughter, I’m holding you and your integrity responsible.’

  After the phone went dead, Hannah remained at the table, fighting a wave of nausea that came out of nowhere. What was happening to her life? A few months ago, everything had seemed so . . . under control. Sure, she and Josh had had their differences, but they were manageable, predictable even for pressurized working parents of a young child. But recently she seemed to exist in a permanent state of tension, out of sync with everyone, including her own husband. And now there was to be a baby.

  Hannah put her head in her hands and cried until the tears and snot formed a mask that dried on her face.

  And then she cried some more.

  Lucie/Eloise, aged thirteen

  Maman came to school today for the prizegiving. I was so excited because the prize for All-Round Excellence is pretty much the biggest deal EVER and Juliette said her parents would literally drop dead from pride if she ever won anything like that. And at first it was great. Maman looked amazing and Binky from the year above actually asked if she was on telly because she thought she’d seen her in Casualty or something. And Daddy was so pleased with me. And we all had lunch in the dining room and Maman was being very funny and had lots more silly English phrases that she’d learned from her book. Like Lickety-split. And we kept saying ‘Lickety-split’ and laughing and laughing. And I could see the other girls were looking at me and wishing they had parents like mine and my heart was just EXPLODING, but at the same time I couldn’t eat because my tummy was churning like something bad was about to happen. And later on, when Mrs Winn-Parry gave the speech to introduce my prize and said, ‘This is for Lucie, or as she’s known to us in our Archminster family, Eloise,’ I knew what that something bad was. I was sitting on the stage in a row of chairs with the other prizewinners and I heard the scream and I stayed in my chair as if my bum had been superglued to it while there was a big commotion in the audience. And when Mrs Winn-Parry started talking again and gave me my prize, I didn’t look at the empty seats where Maman and Daddy had been sitting. I already kn
ew they were long gone. Lickety-split.

  19

  Josh gazed at the white plastic stick on the table as if it might turn out to be some sort of trick. While he gazed, neither of them spoke, their silence a concrete presence in the room. He reached out and picked it up, turning it over in his hands as if looking for some other meaning.

  ‘You’re not going to find any answers hidden on the back, you know.’ Hannah snatched it back from him and threw it to the other end of the table. ‘Well?’ she said.

  Shock had wiped Josh’s mind clean. He blinked at her, opening his mouth and then closing it again when he realized there were no words to come out.

  ‘I knew it. It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’

  Josh now became conscious of thoughts returning to his brain as if back from a minibreak. He probed them cautiously. Another baby. How did he feel? Slowly the thoughts took shape and he was astounded to find he felt . . . ecstatic.

  Let Pat Hennessey keep the promotion, let Dan keep his gorgeous new girlfriend. This would show them both. Josh had what they didn’t. He was virile, dynamic, the founder of a dynasty. Babies were something Josh could do. They were something he was good at. And a new baby would sort out whatever had been going wrong between him and Hannah. He wouldn’t need to worry about her going off him – or secretly lusting after Dan. A new baby, he couldn’t help but feel, would restore him to himself. It was something clean and pure to counterbalance that ugly business at school.

  He got up and walked around the table so he could put his arms around Hannah. ‘I’m thrilled,’ he whispered. For a moment, she slumped into him and they swayed together wordlessly. Then she pulled away.

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Sod the money.’

  Hannah made a strange noise then, halfway between a sob and a snort, and Josh tried to pull her back towards him.