The Broken

by Tamar Cohen

  Weirdly, the only person he’d really confided in was Sienna. He hadn’t intended to at all. He’d called Dan about football one evening, and Sienna had answered. Dan was at the gym and had left his phone on charge. Josh still couldn’t quite work out how it had happened, but Sienna had been so easy to talk to, and suddenly he’d been telling her about what was going on – opening up to her in a way he wasn’t able to do with his own wife. She had a way of listening without passing judgement as Hannah would have done, or trying to minimize what he was going through as Dan might have attempted.

  ‘Hello, stranger.’

  Pat Hennessey’s ginger hair seemed more orange than ever today. Funny how other days it could seem almost blond. Unlike Hannah’s, which was always red.

  Josh was relieved to see him. It seemed like years since he’d talked to someone who wasn’t having some sort of crisis. Pat was so reassuringly uncomplicated.

  ‘I’m lying low, as you can see,’ he admitted.

  ‘Not because of that thing with Kelly Kavanagh, surely? You know none of us believes a word of it.’

  Josh nodded. ‘Thanks. I do know that, but it’s still good to hear. It’s just my own stupid paranoia. I hate this bit of the job. Plus we’ve got this situation going on at home where a couple we’re very good friends with have split up and it’s all got very messy very quickly and we’re kind of caught in the middle, even Lily.’

  He had a brief vision of Lily’s arm, teethmarks stamped into the flesh like branding on a piece of steak.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Pat, who had by now come into the room and was leaning against a table at the front of the classroom. ‘That’s tough. The same thing happened when one of my sisters got divorced from the guy who’d been her childhood sweetheart. We’d all known him for years – he was like another brother to us. When they first split up we were all so sure we could stay friends with him, but you know, you can’t reason with love, and you especially can’t reason with love gone wrong.’

  Josh sighed. ‘The problem is, we’re so involved now, it’s proving really hard to extricate ourselves. We just wish—’

  His sentence was interrupted by the sound of his own ringtone. He’d switched his phone on for once at the beginning of the lunch break, just in case Hannah had been trying to call him. She’d been so down last night, hardly able to raise her head up when he’d come back through the door after taking Sasha home. Now that had been an awkward journey. Sasha had been hysterical, sobbing about how no one believed her and she had no one and she didn’t understand why everyone had deserted her. He’d been so relieved when Katia came to the door of the house, he’d practically thrust Sasha at her and scuttled straight back to the car, calling something over his shoulder about needing to get back. When he’d arrived back home, desperate to talk over the bizarre events of the day, he’d found Hannah droop-headed and uncommunicative.

  He snatched up his phone without looking at the caller display, mouthing ‘Sorry’ to Pat as he did so. But instead of Hannah’s voice, it was Dan, in a belligerent mood.

  ‘Right, Josh. This has gone too far now. First September and Lily have that set-to.’ Josh winced. ‘And now Sasha’s fucking bitch of a solicitor has got on to my solicitor to say her client has been assaulted and is considering pressing charges. Against me! She has totally lost it now, and I can’t stand by and see September suffer any more. I need you and Hannah to make a written statement for my lawyer.’

  ‘What?’ Josh glanced up and was startled to meet Pat Hennessey’s eyes. He hadn’t realized the other man was still in the room. He put his hand over his phone and angled it away from his mouth. ‘Sorry, Pat,’ he whispered. ‘This is going to take a while.’

  The other man blushed, turning the skin around his freckles pink. ‘No problem,’ he mouthed, heading for the door with a brief wave.

  Josh felt a tug of guilt. He liked Pat, but it seemed as if he was constantly turning him away. He turned back to the phone. ‘What do you mean, written statement? Written statement saying what?’

  ‘What do you think? That Sasha is unfit to be in charge of a young child. Just the stuff you already said in that email where you told me about the happy pills. I’m not asking you to lie, just tell the truth about what’s been going on. I need written evidence so that I can start looking after September properly. Come on, you know it’s the right thing to do. How would you feel if it was Hannah out of control and Lily at risk?’

  But Josh couldn’t imagine Hannah out of control, although he couldn’t say that to Dan. His stomach felt tight and uncomfortable. He wished he’d checked who was calling before taking the call.

  ‘We can’t put anything in writing,’ he said, and his added mate sounded contrived and false – which it was. ‘We told you right at the start that we wouldn’t take sides.’

  ‘Yes, but that was before. Look, Josh, you have to help me. I’d do it for you in a heartbeat.’

  The tightness in his stomach worsened. There was something in Dan’s voice he didn’t like, a kind of wildness or desperation he hadn’t heard before.

  ‘I can’t, Dan. You’re putting me in an impossible position. I want to help you, but I just can’t.’

  There was a silence then. The kind of loaded silence that makes you dig your fingers into the palms of your hands and pray for it to be over.

  ‘Thanks, Josh. Thanks a lot.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, sure. We’re all fucking sorry.’

  After the phone clicked off, Josh sat with it in his hand, until the Year Tens started trickling in for afternoon registration.

  ‘You trying to hatch that, Sir?’ asked Jake Eldridge.

  Josh swallowed hard and got on with the afternoon.

  When Josh got home, Hannah was finally in the mood to talk. She was sitting at the table sorting through Lily’s school bag, which she did every Friday. Amazing the amount of stuff one small girl could accumulate over the course of a week – drawings on rough paper with printed writing on the back, collages made from dried pasta covered with glitter and glue, notes from the nursery staff about the upcoming inset day. While she sifted through, Hannah quizzed him about what he thought of Sasha’s bizarre claims yesterday. Josh was surprised to find he’d almost forgotten about the whole escalator story.

  ‘It’s typical Sasha,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t deal with the fact that someone else was in the limelight for once, that it wasn’t all about her. Think about it: not only are you pregnant and she didn’t even know about it, but your daughter had just been badly hurt. She was looking for attention.’

  ‘And how do you explain that mark on her leg?’

  ‘That could be anything. Or maybe she really did trip on the escalator and decided to concoct this whole story around it. Maybe she really is crazy enough to think we’ll believe that Dan is following her around Brent Cross, trying to bump her off.’

  Hannah sighed. She was looking through a pile of rough paper with scribbles on she’d taken from Lily’s bag, and started smoothing out a picture Lily had drawn of a house, complete with chimney and smoke and a neat front path. ‘Well, what do we do? If she really is cracking up, shouldn’t we talk to someone about it? Mrs Mackenzie, maybe?’

  Josh shook his head. ‘We don’t get involved, remember? Neutral? . . . Hannah?’ Now he was staring at her with concern. ‘What’s up? Darling?’

  But Hannah didn’t answer him. She was staring down at the piece of paper in front of her, one from the stack she’d removed from Lily’s bag, and all the colour seemed to leach out of her face as he watched. Josh went over to stand next to her and followed her gaze.

  In place of the normal childish drawings on the other sheets of rough paper, there was a message scrawled across the page in capital letters in angry red felt pen.

  YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE

  Long after Hannah had gone to bed, Josh remained in the living room looking at the note on his lap. They’d asked Lily if she knew how it had got there, but she didn’t unde
rstand what they were talking about. ‘What’s it say?’ she’d wanted to know. ‘Oh, nothing really.’ And in truth, what did it say?

  Hannah had wanted to call the police. The fact that someone had put a note in their daughter’s backpack felt grotesque. If they could get to Lily’s backpack while she was supposedly safe at school, didn’t it stand to reason that they could get to her, too?

  And yet, really, what did the note say? It wasn’t threatening. It didn’t mention anyone by name. It might even have been meant for someone else, or have been brought in by mistake by whoever had donated the rough paper to school. Josh was sure the police wouldn’t be able to do much.

  Hannah said she’d go into school first thing on Monday to quiz the staff about how the note could have got into Lily’s bag. The trouble was that as the grand sorting-out of the bag was only done weekly, there was no way of knowing what day it had been put in there.

  Josh felt a tidal wave of inadequacy sweep over him at his failure to keep his family safe. His wife was walking around like a ghost, and now his daughter was exposed to God knew what potential danger. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t provide the security they both needed?

  Hannah had been unnerved when he told her about the conversation with Dan about writing a formal statement for his lawyer, and said that Sasha had asked her a similar favour just a few days before. ‘But we have to keep neutral. We can’t get drawn in.’

  ‘Don’t worry, that’s what I told him.’

  But still she’d seemed anxious, and when he’d tried to put his arms around her to comfort her, she’d jumped up almost immediately. Later, while they were watching a mindless Friday-night chat show, she’d asked him, ‘Are we doing the right thing by keeping this baby? Maybe it’s not the right time.’

  ‘Don’t say that. This is the most positive thing to happen in our lives for ages. It’s a fresh start. This is about us, and Lily. Our family.’

  But now he found the weight of responsibility hanging on him very heavily indeed. How could he protect this new life if he couldn’t even protect himself from the likes of Kelly Kavanagh? Just thinking about her and her allegation brought a sick taste to his mouth. He ought to tell Hannah. He knew that the secret he was keeping was a part of the barrier that was building between them. But he couldn’t find the words. He’d wait until the investigation was over and he’d been formally cleared, and then he’d let her know.

  Now Kelly Kavanagh was in his head, he couldn’t get her out. She was a heavy-set girl of fifteen. One of those – and there were a few in every year group – who’d developed months, even years ahead of her peers, and had spent the first few years of secondary school sitting in assembly looking like a freakish adult in a sea of children, her back rounded, her arms permanently wrapped around her well-developed chest. There’d been older siblings before her – three or four as far as he could remember – all with that same slack-jawed stare. It was ludicrous, what she was suggesting he had done in a thirty-second gap between the end of one class and the beginning of the next, while he kept her behind to explain that she would have to stay in one lunch hour to retake the test she’d cheated on. That he would put his hand . . . there . . . with people passing the classroom and the door ajar . . . A kind of nauseous excitement stirred inside him as he allowed his mind to play out the malicious fantasy Kelly Kavanagh had invented to try to ruin his life. He knew even thinking about it was wrong. It was disgusting. She was a child. He wasn’t remotely attracted to her. But it had been so long since he’d had any kind of sexual activity. He blurred her face in his mind so she could be anyone, put his hand to his groin and let out a groan.

  Afterwards he felt grubby and sticky with shame. As he mopped himself up in the bathroom, he couldn’t meet his own eyes in the mirror. A dull dread cramped inside him. Who on earth was he? A father who couldn’t protect his child. A teacher who fantasized about his own pupils. He rested his head against the cool bathroom tiles and, with the tap running full blast, he cried for the first time in years.

  22

  ‘I’m not being funny, but there’s no way one of us put that there.’

  Nikki, one of the nursery helpers, flicked her straggly platinum-blonde hair extensions out of her eyes and glared at Hannah as if she was being accused of something. Hannah tried not to look at the metal stud in her nose that seemed to have gone septic, the flesh around it puckered and purple.

  ‘No, I’m not saying that it came from anyone who worked here.’

  Hannah wished she didn’t always feel as if she had to be so over-friendly, even obsequious to the nursery staff, some of whom looked hardly more than children themselves. It was as if their role as guardians of her daughter put her helplessly in their debt, as if any bad feeling between them and her might somehow affect their treatment of Lily.

  ‘I’m just wondering who else might have been in the nursery during the week, who might have been able to slip something into one of the kids’ bags.’

  As soon as she said it, she realized the futility of it. The cloakroom area was in almost constant use. Hadn’t she been there just a couple of days ago herself, talking to Mrs Mackenzie?

  Nikki gave her a blank stare. ‘No disrespect, but if we was to keep tabs on everyone who goes in and out of the cloakroom, we wouldn’t be able to do our job. Practically everyone who works here or has a child here is there at some time in the day.’

  ‘Yes, I see that,’ Hannah said, feeling hopeless. She sent her daughter, the most precious person in her world, to nursery believing her to be safe, but it seemed anyone could gain access to her.

  ‘Anyway, how is Lily after that little ding-dong with September?’

  Hannah felt herself prickling. Little ding-dong?

  ‘She was a bit shaken, as you’d expect.’ Her tone was cold and hard. ‘It’s always a bit of a shock when something like that happens out of the blue.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine. Though I wouldn’t exactly say out of the blue.’

  ‘Really? What do you mean?’

  Nikki caught the ends of her hair extensions between the second and third fingers of her right hand and started absently combing her fingers through them, her long, electric-blue nails shimmering like beetle shells in the sun.

  ‘Well, you know how kids are. She was laying it on a bit thick about having a new baby sister. In’t it funny how she’s already decided it’s a girl? I’m not defending September or nothing, but it can’t have been easy to hear all that, not with things as they are at home.’

  Here Nikki shot Hannah a glance that was half complicit, half hopeful, as if Hannah might take this opportunity to discuss the salacious details of September’s home life.

  ‘I’m sure Lily didn’t mean to be unkind,’ said Hannah. ‘She’s not that sort of girl. She was just excited. It’s only natural.’

  Hannah was expecting Nikki to jump straight in to reinforce her defence of her daughter, but to her surprise, she hesitated.

  ‘It’s not unkind though, is it, at that age?’ she said eventually. ‘They don’t know any better.’

  ‘But I know my daughter.’ Hannah didn’t even try to disguise her outrage. ‘She’s the last person to ever want to hurt anyone’s feelings.’

  Nikki went back to examining her hair extensions and her ham-fisted efforts at tact enraged Hannah even further.

  ‘Isn’t she?’ she prompted, determined to get some kind of confirmation.

  Nikki sighed. ‘Lily’s just a normal little girl,’ she said, and all of a sudden Hannah found herself loathing the way she pronounced girl as gel. ‘And unfortunately little girls can be quite mean sometimes. It doesn’t mean they’re not lovely on the whole. And of course they’re different here to at home – they’re learning to be their own little people. You know, some parents would be quite shocked at the way their kids act when they’re not around.’

  After Nikki had gone, Hannah stood by the door waiting for the session to be over, churning with rage. She was realistic about Lily,
it was just that she knew her daughter wouldn’t have taunted September like that. She knew it.

  While she waited, trying to calm down, she watched the kids playing. Lily was at one of the nearby tables, her head bent over some colouring, concentrating intently to make sure she stayed within the lines. A shout from the Wendy house in the far corner was followed by a squeal of laughter and September’s head poked out, making a funny face, with her eyes crossed and her tongue out. Mrs Mackenzie had called Hannah yesterday to tell her they’d talked to September and she recognized that what she’d done was wrong, and they were happy to take her back into the nursery if Hannah was OK with that. Well, what could she say apart from ‘Fine’? September caught Hannah’s eye and smiled. Hannah tried not to stare at her teeth, imagining them pressed into Lily’s skin like tiny stones set into a pebbledashed wall.

  ‘How are you holding up?’

  Marcia had appeared at her elbow. Hannah felt her face grow hotter. She hadn’t really spoken to Marcia since the mix-up on the day when Sasha had picked Lily up when she was supposed to be having lunch with Marcia’s daughter, Sarah.

  ‘Oh, you know.’ Hannah rolled her eyes and made the kind of face you make when you want to imply that unpleasant things have been happening, without actually spelling them out.

  ‘I still feel awful about the other day, Marcia. I had no idea Sasha was planning to pick Lily up.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. These things happen.’

  Marcia was so solid, so calming. Hannah almost told her what Nikki had just said about Lily, so that they could laugh about it together, but something held her back. What if Marcia didn’t jump in to defend Lily? What if she shifted about and looked uncomfortable? Anyway, Marcia had moved on to talking about the snowflakes the children had been making which had just been stuck up on the windows, even though Christmas was still weeks away, and the moment had passed.