by Tamar Cohen
Someone had spent a long time doing this. Setting up new accounts wasn’t hard, but it was time-consuming – selecting backgrounds, choosing monikers.
She was still staring at her screen when the doorbell sounded, startling her and causing Toby to erupt in a frenzy of barking.
The intercom was on the blink (again), so she left the door to her flat open while she crossed the communal hallway and drew back the heavy cast-iron catch on the main front door. Her eyes widened in shock when she saw the slight, hunched figure standing there.
Sasha looked terrible. In just a few days she seemed to have shrunk to nothing; her skin had a curious yellowish tinge and seemed to mould itself like wax over her nose and forehead. Though it was briskly cold – hard to believe it was already nearly Christmas – Sasha wasn’t wearing a coat, just a gunmetal-grey top with long sleeves that flared slightly at the wrists. Hannah had been with her when she bought that top – the two of them on a rare shopping trip together, finishing off laden with bags (well, Sasha anyway) and sipping mojitos in a Regent Street hotel bar, crying with laughter just because they were out and child-free and feeling young. Could that really have been just a few months ago? Now the top was at least two sizes too big, hanging off Sasha’s tiny frame like a scarecrow’s clothes. Without even thinking, Hannah stepped forward and folded her arms around her friend.
After a while, she pulled away and half walked, half carried Sasha through to her flat. She was still too shocked to speak as she deposited her on the sofa.
‘I look revolting, don’t I?’ Sasha’s voice was gravelly, as if it hadn’t been used for a while.
Hannah couldn’t respond.
‘What’s happening to me? I feel I’ve gone completely mad. Sometimes I imagine people are outside the house watching me, waiting for me to spin totally off the edge. Everything I thought I knew about my life has turned out to be not true, or not there. Like it was built out of sand. Oh, you can’t understand what I mean.’
‘I think I probably can.’
Sasha glanced at her and Hannah saw a flash of the old Sasha – amusement and scorn mixed together.
‘How could you understand, Hannah? You have Josh, Lily, your home, your job, your new baby.’ Was she imagining it or did Sasha’s voice wobble on that last word? ‘Everything is secure in your life. It’s not going anywhere, whereas my whole world has disintegrated. You know Dan is trying to force me out of my home, don’t you? He wants to live there with his slut and September and airbrush me out as if I never existed.’
Sasha was gesticulating in her anger, and the sleeve of her top shifted slightly back. Hannah felt her stomach twist at the sight of the scratches scored into her arm. She’d almost forgotten about them, and this sudden reminder made her feel queasy. What’s more, she might be wrong, but they looked strangely fresh. The dried blood was red rather than brown and coagulated into raised welts. Sasha pulled down on her sleeve and Hannah tore her eyes away.
‘You know he introduced September to her – to that bitch. After all those promises he made.’
Hannah clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘But how? I thought you were only letting him see her with you there?’
Sasha’s dull sunken eyes fixed on Hannah’s. ‘My lawyer convinced me to do it. She said it would show a judge that I’ve tried to be reasonable. He said he’d take her swimming. He didn’t tell me that she’d be there too. So now September thinks the sun shines out of her fucking arse. Says she looks like a princess with lovely long hair and why don’t I try to grow my hair long and then maybe Daddy will love me again.’
Hannah felt her own eyes filming over with tears. ‘Oh Sasha, that must be so hard. But surely a court won’t let him get his own way? He can’t just take your house and your daughter away from you.’
‘My solicitor says there’s a very good chance he’ll get what he wants, thanks in part to Josh’s email.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Sasha shrugged, then she shot Hannah another look that Hannah found hard to gauge. ‘Actually it was quite interesting. Caroline, my solicitor, sent me the whole email that Josh’s so-called testimony had been taken from.’
There was something about the way she stressed the word ‘whole’ that Hannah didn’t like.
‘Turns out it wasn’t just my parenting skills Josh slagged off. He said some pretty choice things about your sex life, too. Or lack of it.’
‘He wouldn’t . . .’
The words came out before Hannah had even thought about them, but immediately she realized that of course he would. And he obviously had. She felt sick.
‘Don’t worry, I know he was exaggerating. If you’d been that frigid you wouldn’t be up the duff right now!’
Hannah felt her face burning.
‘Oh Hans, I didn’t mean to upset you. I guess I want everyone to be as miserable as me. I’ve turned into the most horrible person. My mother always used to tell me I was, when she . . . Oh Hannah, please forget I said anything.’
Hannah nodded, but they both knew there were some things that couldn’t be forgotten.
‘The truth is I’m jealous of you. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s true. I want what you’ve got, what I used to have.’
Sitting on the other end of the sofa, Hannah couldn’t find the words to tell Sasha how wrong she was about her so-called perfect life.
‘Oh God,’ she said, suddenly aware of the time. ‘I’ve got to go. It’s pick-up time. Is September at nursery?’
September hadn’t been at nursery since the last time Hannah had seen Sasha. Hannah had assumed it was because Sasha didn’t want to risk bumping into her and Josh. She felt guilty now at how relieved she’d been that Lily was having a break from her.
Sasha, who’d been staring off into the middle distance, nodded. ‘It’s OK. I’ve got the car. We’ll make it.’
But on the way to nursery, Sasha seemed to sink further into herself. Inside the car, their breath came out in clouds and Hannah waited for her to put the heating on, but Sasha didn’t seem to notice the cold, staring fixedly ahead with her strange, empty eyes. Once she shook her head fiercely as though categorically denying something to herself, but when Hannah asked her what she was thinking about she just shrugged.
At the nursery, September came running up to Hannah and flung her arms dramatically around her as if they’d been parted for months. ‘Please can I come to your house to play? Please, please, please.’ The little girl’s grip around her waist was tight as a belt.
Lily appeared by her side, gazing at Hannah wordlessly, but she couldn’t read the expression on her daughter’s round, serious face.
‘I’m not sure,’ she wavered. September responded by tightening her hold. There was a sense of desperation about her that Hannah found unsettling. She glanced at Sasha for some sort of support, but Sasha was staring off into the distance as she had done in the car.
‘Please,’ September begged into Hannah’s stomach.
Hannah didn’t have the energy for a scene. Something told her that a tantrum from September at this point might just send Sasha – or her, for that matter – over the edge. And besides, there was something about September’s naked need that worried her.
‘OK,’ she said weakly. ‘You can come back with us. Both of you, of course,’ she added looking at Sasha, who merely shrugged again, as if it was all the same to her where they went.
On the way to the car Hannah cursed herself for saying yes. From the rigid way Lily was holding herself Hannah could tell she wasn’t happy, and Sasha didn’t seem too delighted either. She kept clenching and unclenching her tiny, crab-like hands in a way Hannah found quite disconcerting. She tried to remember if there was anything in the fridge she could possibly knock up into a semblance of lunch, but her mind was blank. Shopping hadn’t been at the top of her to-do list recently. She tried not to think about the work she wasn’t doing, or those abusive tweets lined up one on top of the other in a scroll of bile.
S
eptember was gripping her hand tightly, as if scared she might run off.
Lily normally liked going in the back of Sasha’s SUV. It was so high off the ground and you could tell from her shy smile that she felt a sense of grandeur driving around looking down on passers-by and people in other cars. Today, however, there was no trace of a smile as Hannah got her belted into the back seat. ‘You OK, Liliput?’ she murmured into the wisps of fine baby hair that still framed her daughter’s face, much to Lily’s distress. (The other day Hannah had come into the bathroom and found Lily arching backwards so that her hair touched her shoulder blades. ‘Look, Mummy,’ she’d said excitedly. ‘I got long hair now!’) But Lily didn’t reply, just stared stonily ahead.
Sasha started the engine before Hannah even had a chance to get into the passenger seat. She kept revving on the accelerator rhythmically as Hannah buckled up her seatbelt, as if she was tapping her foot in time to a beat only she could hear.
‘Are you sure you’re OK, Sash?’
But Sasha seemed not to hear.
As they pulled off into the traffic, Sasha started drumming her hands insistently on the wheel. Hannah kept glancing over nervously. There was something disturbing about the rhythmic thud of Sasha’s bitten fingers hitting the hard leather again and again. She wanted to tell her to stop.
‘Well, this is fun, isn’t it?’ she said loudly to the girls in the back. ‘Just like old times!’ She was babbling just so there wouldn’t be silence, but she knew immediately that it had been the wrong thing to say. It wasn’t the slightest bit like old times.
‘Sorry,’ she mouthed at Sasha, then she stopped as a noise came involuntarily from her that was partly a gasp and partly a cry. Everything in her froze except the blood pounding insanely in her ears. Sasha turned to her and caught her expression and immediately tugged down the left sleeve of her too-baggy top that had slipped right back, exposing a frighteningly frail arm. But it was too late. Hannah had already seen it, and she knew it was an image that would be etched into her memory for ever.
Scored into the flesh of Sasha’s arm in gobs of congealed blood, shocking against the sallow skin, was a word.
HELP.
‘Oh my God, Sasha!’
Sasha shot her a look so full of silent appeal that Hannah felt as if little bits of her heart were splintering off and lodging like shrapnel inside her.
‘I just can’t,’ Sasha whispered, and Hannah knew she was telling her something important, but she couldn’t work out what. Everything seemed to be going round and round in her head – the Twitter abuse, Josh, frigid, the horrible thing on Sasha’s arm. Her brain was churning with unthinkable thoughts. She was so lost in them that at first she wasn’t aware that Sasha was trembling all over, her fingers shaking on the wheel, the knuckles blue-white.
‘Sasha?’ she ventured when at last she noticed her friend’s strange, fixed expression. ‘Sasha!’ she shouted as she glanced through the windscreen and saw the T-junction up ahead that they were approaching much too fast, the car veering across the road from left to right and back again. Not again. Please God, not again. The jolt of déjà vu from that earlier teenage accident was sharp and savage. She grabbed the wheel, but there was nothing she could do. She tried to twist round to look at Lily, but just got a flash of September’s terrified face. Then there was a scream she only vaguely recognized as her own, and the gut-wrenching jolt of impact.
And then nothing.
27
Dan sounded almost euphoric. ‘I told you she was dangerous – to herself and to other people!’
He’d jumped up from the grey chaise longue he’d briefly been sitting on and was pacing around the huge living room that he’d always claimed to dislike, insisting that Sasha had made all the design decisions and his only involvement was the signing of the cheques. Every now and then he stopped to pick up this ornament or that photograph, examining it intently then returning it and moving on. It was as if he was rediscovering his house, Josh decided, reclaiming his territory for his own.
‘You don’t know it was her fault.’ Josh was weary, speaking almost without thinking. They’d been over this so many times during the course of that awful, endless day, it was as if they were stuck in a loop, doomed to repeat the same conversation over and over again until the meaning had all but drained out of the words.
‘You saw her arm.’ Sienna was curled up in the wide white armchair. She’d had a shower and was wearing a grey towelling dressing gown Josh guessed must belong to Dan, and her wet hair was combed back from her face. She looked tired, and terribly young. ‘And Hannah said she was acting really strange. She needs help.’
‘She couldn’t have made that any clearer.’ Dan shook his head.
‘But the police guy did say he found a nail in the front tyre – the tyre that blew.’
‘Yes, and he also said it was unusual for a nail to get embedded in a front tyre – usually it’s the back tyres that it happens to. If there’s a nail in the road, the front tyre will flick it upright and it’s the back tyre that gets punctured when it rolls over it.’ Dan sounded like a salesman reciting a carefully prepared spiel. ‘And don’t forget he also said it was strange for the nail to be embedded in the sidewall of the tyre rather than the tread.’
‘You really think she’d have done that herself? It doesn’t make sense,’ said Josh.
‘Another thing to blame on me!’ This time the triumph in Dan’s voice was clear. ‘She probably wanted to claim I did it. You know she was about to accuse me of being addicted to hardcore porn, don’t you? Her and that charlatan lawyer of hers.’
Sienna, probably aware how paranoid Dan sounded, chimed in, ‘Whether or not she put the nail there herself, I think it’s pretty obvious she could have controlled that car if she’d wanted to. They weren’t even going that fast.’
Dan, who was now absently riffling through his vinyl collection, housed in custom-built shelves along the back wall of the living room, nodded his head vigorously. ‘Thank God this will show everyone just how crazy she really is. She could have killed them all. It’s a miracle no one was seriously hurt.’
‘Dan!’ Sienna warned.
‘Oh fuck. Sorry, mate. I didn’t mean . . . I forgot . . .’
He was waiting for Josh to absolve him, but he didn’t oblige. Dan had hardly seemed to register the news that Hannah had lost the baby – no, how did the doctor put it? The baby had died in the womb. They’d all been at the hospital where Hannah and Sasha and the girls had been taken after the accident. When Hannah had whispered to him that she was bleeding, at first Josh had scanned her head anxiously for wounds, before realizing what she actually meant. Then the registrar with the sad eyes and cold-blocked nose had said it might be nothing but they should run a scan on Hannah while she was there, just to make sure everything was as it should be. Right from the start it had been obvious there was something very wrong. She kept passing the electronic thing over Hannah’s belly, and then doing it again. And again. And all the time not saying anything at all, just staring intently at the monitor.
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she’d said after a few long, silent minutes, and Hannah had made a noise that sounded as if it had been ripped from her, and Josh had held her hand uselessly and watched her tears form a damp patch on the hospital sheet. He felt nothing. Wrung out. Empty.
It had completely done for him – first the phone call from Dan to say there’d been an accident, while he and Sienna were out walking on the Heath. Then the mad dash to the hospital and the visceral relief of seeing Lily sitting up gazing with proud awe at the large plaster on her knee, and Hannah, pale and shadow-eyed but still managing to smile weakly at something a nurse was saying to her. For a short while he’d thought everything would be OK, that they’d survived unscathed. On the way to the hospital, he’d made all sorts of promises to all sorts of gods he didn’t believe in. He’d never begrudge Hannah anything again. She could visit her mother whenever she liked, for however long she liked. They could set up
camp in the bloody graveyard if that’s what she wanted. And he’d tell her everything that had been going on at work. He’d be a better husband, better father, better provider, if only they were OK. And for that short period there in the hospital, he had believed his prayers had been answered.
Then came that scan, just to be sure, and that awful silence stretching on and on, and that ‘I’m terribly sorry’, and he realized he hadn’t been listened to, after all. How could he ever have believed otherwise?
And now this. This curious emptiness.
Dan, on the other hand, seemed full to bursting, to the point where he just couldn’t seem to stay still. He’d been in this same supercharged mood when Josh first saw him at the hospital. He’d appeared with September clinging to his arm as Josh and Lily were waiting for Hannah to have an X-ray on her wrist to make sure it wasn’t broken. This was before the scan and the silence that came after it. Sasha was in a different ward, he told them. She might not be out for a couple of days. Psychological assessment, Josh learned later, when September and Lily wandered off to the vending machine to ogle the chocolate. The doctors were taking the wounds to Sasha’s arm as a cry for help. Not to mention the circumstances of the accident, where Sasha had failed to slow down at a T-junction, ending up smashing into the car parked on the opposite side of the intersection. A blow-out, she insisted. She’d had no chance of controlling the car. And there was the nail and the burst tyre to prove it. The nail that might or might not have been hammered in there on purpose.
‘You see?’ Dan kept saying. ‘You see how things are?’
With Sasha being detained on the general ward, ostensibly for a bump on her head, but really so that staff could find out whether she presented a threat to herself or anyone else, it was obvious that Dan should move back home to look after his traumatized daughter. September had pleaded for Sienna to come too and had spent the evening curled up on her lap in the same armchair Sienna was now sitting in. Now the two girls were asleep upstairs. Josh had been in such shock following the scan he hadn’t had the energy to protest when Dan insisted he and Lily come back with them rather than stay by themselves, and he docilely strapped his quiet daughter into the back of the Golf and followed Dan’s unmistakeable red car back to the very house he’d been lurking outside just the night before. Saying goodbye to Hannah at the hospital had been both a nightmare and – he hated himself for thinking it – a relief. After the scan, they’d been given the option of going home and letting the miscarriage happen naturally or Hannah staying overnight and having an ERPC procedure in the morning to eliminate what the sad-eyed registrar called ‘the products of conception’. ‘Products of conception? She meant our baby,’ Hannah had sobbed afterwards. The registrar had told them that the baby was smaller than they’d have expected at this stage, which could mean it had died up to ten days before, but Hannah had refused to listen. ‘It was the crash,’ she repeated stubbornly, and then, ‘It was Sasha.’