by Tamar Cohen
Hannah was in a ward with three others, and had already taken a strong sleeping pill by this time. She’d hardly looked up when he bent over her to kiss her goodbye, so she didn’t notice he was finally crying, fat round tears that bubbled up unbidden. Or maybe she noticed but didn’t comment.
‘Just go,’ she’d said, closing her eyes. Her hair on the pillow was the colour of dried blood.
So now here they were, in this house where he and Hannah had spent so much time – Saturday nights staying up far too late playing poker for a tenner-a-head stake and drinking cocktails they took it in turns to invent; Sunday lunchtimes that bled softly into evenings, sitting so long around the white round retro table that they got hungry all over again and raided the fridge for leftovers.
Where had those people gone?
Now Josh sat in the black leather and chrome 1960s chair that Dan had bought for a small fortune at auction one drunken Saturday afternoon and insisted on putting in pride of place, despite Sasha’s vehement objections, and felt like he was visiting the place for the first time. It was familiar, yet unfamiliar. Like something he’d seen on television.
‘How are you feeling, Josh?’ Sienna’s voice – warm with concern – brought back the treacherous tears pricking his eyes.
‘I’m OK. Dreading tomorrow. Not half as much as Hannah is, of course.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
She’d said it a thousand times over the course of the afternoon. Josh was aware she meant well, but he wished she’d be quiet now. He didn’t want to have to talk or think. What if he’d put the nail in Sasha’s tyre himself? The thought came into his head before he had time to stop it, through the gap that Sienna’s question had opened up. He’d been here last night, outside this house in his usual spot and all these thoughts had been crowding into his head, whirring around and around until it was like an explosion in his brain. And then nothing. One minute he’d been standing in the shadows outside Sasha’s study window, and the next he was waking up back in his bed, with Hannah asleep next to him and a strange hungover feeling. On a rational, logical level, he knew he’d never have done anything like that – wouldn’t even have known how to. But he hated this lapse in his memory, and how the things that were going on in his life were slowly stripping him from the self he’d always known.
He was conscious that Dan and Sienna were exchanging meaningful looks, and then Dan came and perched on the arm of his chair.
‘Sorry, Josh. I’ve been a knob, haven’t I? Going on and on about my stuff when you’re going through . . . Well, you know.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Josh’s voice was unsteady. ‘I’m used to you being a knob.’
But then Dan was off again, moving around the room, opening cupboards and reacquainting himself with all the possessions he hadn’t seen for the last few weeks. He’d been furious when he first saw his study. ‘Babe, come in here!’ he’d called to Sienna. She and Josh had arrived in the upstairs room moments later, to be greeted by a scene of total devastation. Papers were strewn around the floor, many of them crumpled into balls; his prize-winning photographs, which had once been proudly displayed on the wall in heavy black frames, had been taken down and smashed, leaving discoloured rectangles of paint on the wall and glass all over the sofa. His hugely expensive photography books had been pulled off the shelves, their pages ripped to shreds. Everywhere there was carnage. Creepiest of all was that in the middle of all the destruction, a small space had been cleared in which there was a pillow and a duvet.
Sasha had been sleeping there.
Now Dan found something else to focus on.
‘The Blake!’ he exclaimed from the upstairs landing. ‘I don’t fucking believe it!’
When they got there he was squatting in front of a white Scandinavian-style sideboard whose doors he had just slid open. He reached in and withdrew a small, squarish picture in a dark wood frame. Josh knew, even before he opened his mouth, what Dan was going to say.
‘It’s the one she swore had been stolen. The one she said I’d broken in – to my own house – and stolen! The crazy, vindictive bitch!’
Josh felt a stab of pure, viscous pleasure. He’d been right then, about Sasha. She was dangerous. Evil even, when you thought of all the things she’d done, the lies she’d spread. Telling them Dan had tried to kill her – that he was violent, sadistic even. The phone calls to his headmaster (his stomach lurched involuntarily at the thought).
Then the doubts came again. But the nail . . . And just what did he do last night?
‘At least now there’ll be no more surprises,’ said Sienna. ‘At least everyone will know the truth.’
‘I’m going up to check on September again,’ said Dan. He looked suddenly pale and tired, as if the structure of his face, of which he was so proud, had partly caved in. Josh realized with a start that this couldn’t be easy for Dan. Sasha was the mother of his child. They’d slept together in the same bed until a few months ago, waking up to each other every morning, using a bathroom still warm and damp with each other’s smell, hearing the private noises they made in their sleep. And yet she’d done all this: faked robberies, lied, cut letters into her arm so deeply that doctors doubted the scars would ever completely fade.
Not to mention what she might have done to her own daughter. When they’d first got back from the hospital, September had clung to her father as if she was velcroed there, following him from room to room as if she was frightened that if she let him out of her sight, he’d be gone like a leaf in the wind. ‘I want to live with you, not Mummy,’ she’d said several times.
A cursory tour of the house gave some indication why. There was no food in the fridge, just three bottles of white wine and an out-of-date packet of cheese strings. One cupboard held a couple of tins of coconut milk and one of black beans, all dusty as if they’d been there for a while. The bread bin was rank with various crusts of bread, all covered in powdery green mould. Only the cereal cupboard was well stocked, although the packets were all open, the contents mostly stale.
‘The poor child must have been living on dry cereal!’ Sienna had been horrified, her green eyes wet with pity.
The master bedroom had been in a state. When the thick curtains were pulled back to let in the light, they could see Dan’s clothes were all over the place, many of them in pieces, jagged scraps of material lying in multicoloured heaps around the floor. There were also a couple of Dan’s T-shirts in the bed. Sasha’s underwear was strewn about too, as was her make-up here and in the ensuite bathroom, where there was a box of razor blades on the side of the basin that Josh had tried hard not to look at.
‘When did Katia last come, princess?’ Dan asked September, who was gazing around with blank, unperturbed eyes that had clearly stopped seeing the devastation as out of the ordinary.
The little girl shrugged. ‘Katia stopped coming after Mummy hit her.’
A little muscle at the side of Dan’s mouth twitched as if he was pressing his teeth together to stop any words coming out.
Only September’s room was in some semblance of order, her clothes neatly put away, the duvet pulled up over the pillow.
‘I tidy my room like Mrs Mackenzie says,’ she explained proudly.
‘I think she means when they have tidy-up time at school,’ Josh hazarded.
Sienna had knelt down then, crushing September to her and burying her face in the little girl’s hair.
Meanwhile Dan was puzzling over the cracks in the wood of the door and the dark marks around the bottom. ‘What happened here?’ he asked, running his hand over a patch where the wood had been chipped completely away.
September snuggled in closer to Sienna, and for a moment her eyes looked frightened, as if she was anticipating being told off. ‘I don’t like it when Mummy locks me in,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Sometimes I try to get out.’
No wonder Dan needed to go and check on her, even while she slept. Josh couldn’t imagine the guilt he must be feeling at having left her in Sash
a’s care all this time.
‘He’ll never get over it,’ Sienna said now, as if she could read Josh’s mind. She had resumed her position curled up in the white armchair in Dan’s outsized dressing gown, her bare feet tucked under her. Josh felt a stab of pain as he watched her rubbing her belly in that automatic gesture Hannah did too. Or rather, Hannah used to do. He didn’t want to talk any more. Didn’t want to think or feel. Didn’t want to look at Sienna’s hand on her still non-existent bump. Didn’t want to think about Hannah’s voice saying, ‘Just go.’ Didn’t want to think about the blank space in his memory where last night should have been.
‘Aren’t you worried about Hannah?’ Sienna was staring at him fixedly, and Josh felt a rush of confusion.
‘Of course I’m worried about her. She’s lost the baby. We both have. God knows how she’s going to get through tomorrow.’
Sienna frowned. ‘Not because of that,’ she said abruptly. Then she saw his face and immediately modified her voice. ‘I know you’re worried about her because of the baby. We all are, but what I meant is, aren’t you worried about her being in the same hospital as Sasha? The woman nearly killed the lot of them.’
Again that sick feeling. The black hole in his memory.
‘We don’t know for sure she did it deliberately . . .’
Sienna wasn’t having it. ‘Josh, stop being so nice for once.’
‘I’m not being nice. It just seems so far-fetched.’
‘Oh, and claiming to be pushed down an escalator isn’t?’
He dropped his head into his hands. ‘You’re right. It’s just all so fucked up.’
All of a sudden, he was conscious that Sienna had moved and was standing next to his chair. He felt her hands gently stroking his hair.
‘You’ll be all right, Josh.’
He closed his eyes, willing himself to believe her.
‘You’ll be all right,’ she said again.
The silk cushion he was clutching was soaked before he even realized he was crying.
Josh slept surprisingly well in the pale-grey-and-white guest room on the ground floor of Sasha and Dan’s house. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t lie awake worrying, or wake up after just one or two hours with violent dreams still crashing around his head.
The rest of the household was still asleep when he awoke, so he got dressed and showered as quietly as he could, grateful that Sasha’s particular brand of crazed housekeeping hadn’t made it as far as the guest bathroom, and then crept upstairs to find Lily. Pushing open the door of September’s room, his eyes fell once again on the cracks in the wood and the horror of yesterday’s discoveries returned. Sasha had locked her daughter in this room for long enough that she had tried to kick her way out. He remembered Hannah’s fear that there had been no babysitter the night she and Sasha had gone out. He’d never found out what happened, but he knew something had gone seriously awry that night. In the dim light he could make out the prints of a small hand on one of the door panels. His stomach clenched imagining Lily in that situation, the terror she would feel.
September had one of those high beds with a sofa underneath that opened up into a spare bed for sleepovers. In the past, both girls had insisted on sleeping together in that sofa bed, keeping each other awake for hours, squealing with pleasure when their toes tickled each other’s legs. But now only September was down there. Lily lay in the top bed, her big eyes wide open.
‘Hello, sleepyhead,’ he whispered, out of habit, even though she looked far from sleepy.
She turned her face to him and his heart flooded with love at the quick blast of hot, sweet, small-child breath on his cheek as she put her still-chubby arms around his neck and pulled him in close.
‘Daddy has to go to the hospital to see Mummy now,’ he murmured.
She tightened her grip and shook her head.
For a few seconds, he buried his nose in her soft skin.
‘I have to, Liliput. Mummy isn’t very well. She needs me to cheer her up.’
He prayed she wouldn’t ask about the baby.
Luckily Lily wasn’t in the mood for asking questions. ‘Don’t want you to go,’ she said.
‘I know, sweetheart, but Sienna will be looking after you and September. Won’t that be fun?’
Lily shook her head.
‘She says she’s going to make a gingerbread house with you this morning – for Christmas.’
‘Please, Daddy.’
Josh felt a lump in his throat like a brick. Struggling to keep himself together, he pulled away gently. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
He tried to ignore the agonized ‘Daddy!’ that followed him out of the room. But minutes later, when he started the car, it was still ringing in his ears.
Hannah was awake and – the giddy relief – pleased to see him. Seeing the light go on in her eyes made Josh realize just how long it had been since that happened, since his arrival had produced any reaction other than apathy or mild irritation. The empty, echoey feeling that had dogged the last twenty-four hours was washed away in a sudden wave of love. This was his wife. This was Hannah. The woman he’d loved from their very first weekend together, when they lay in bed reading the papers in silence and there was no awkwardness at all, just a real sense of release – and relief that he’d found her.
‘I’m sorry about the baby,’ she said.
She looked so desolate, he dropped down next to the bed and folded his arms around her. ‘Don’t be daft, Hans,’ he tried to say, although the words struggled to get past the huge lump in his throat. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘But it was. I didn’t want her enough. I thought she’d get in the way. I killed her, just like I nearly killed Gemma.’ Her voice splintered into fragments on the last word.
‘Shush, darling.’ He stroked the hair back from her grief-smudged face as if she was a child – as if she was Lily. Of course, he knew – had known from the beginning – that this car crash would bring back to her that earlier accident, the night that still threaded itself snake-like through the shadows of her mind and dragged her screaming from her dreams.
‘It’s nothing like what happened with Gemma. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t even your fault back then, Hans. You know that.’
But now Hannah was pumped so full of guilt that it just had to escape, like gas through a valve.
‘It was, though. Mum was so ill at that time, you’ve no idea. It was her worst episode ever. She was so down and so paranoid. Every time we set foot out of the door, she thought something would happen to us – we’d get knocked down by a bus or mugged or stabbed by a random crazy person. She wouldn’t let us out of her sight. You can’t imagine what it was like.’
It was as if she was trying to convince him, but Josh had heard this before, so he could imagine it. The two teenage girls going stir-crazy with boredom. The headstrong younger sister pacing the walls of the little terrace house like something caged.
‘But it wasn’t your idea. Gemma thought of it.’
‘Yes, but it was me who was driving. I went along with it.’ Though Hannah was the older sister by thirteen months, she’d always been the appeaser, the one who tried to keep Gemma level. Josh, who’d first heard the story near the beginning of their relationship, when Hannah was spilling her secrets with the zealousness of a condemned man confessing his sins, could see exactly how it had gone. Hannah was seventeen and had been having driving lessons for three months. Gemma, desperate to go to a party in a village just a few miles away, full of pent-up hormones and resentment, somehow persuaded her that they should sneak out, take their mother’s car. She was in bed – well, wasn’t she always? She wouldn’t even know they were gone. And anyway, she was such a bitch at the moment. Their lives were draining away in front of their eyes. And it was all quiet country roads, after all.
‘Gemma can be very persuasive,’ said Josh. ‘No one could blame you.’
‘But they did!’ Hannah’s pale eyes seemed to be dissolving in tears she
had yet to shed. ‘I blamed myself – of course I did. I’d never driven in the dark. I completely misjudged that bend. And Mum blamed me. You should have seen her face, Josh!’
This part of the story was new to him. Always in the past, Hannah had skimmed over her mother’s reaction, so protective was she of her mum’s memory, so determined that he should think only the best of her.
‘She arrived at the hospital just after we were brought in, and it was like she hated me, like she wasn’t even my mother. I kept telling her I couldn’t stop the car, but she was too angry to listen. She kept saying if Gemma died I’d have to live with it for the rest of my life. Then afterwards she went completely the other way, insisting it was all her fault for making our lives so miserable, slapping her own head again and again, asking, “What have I done?” which was way worse than the anger. And now it’s happened all over again.’