by Tamar Cohen
Hannah’s voice had risen as if about to take off, and Josh instinctively put his arms around her again to tether her to the ground and to him.
‘You did nothing wrong, Hans. Don’t forget, Gemma’s accident was what finally got your mum to seek help. And this wasn’t your fault. You didn’t make Sasha crash that car.’
At the mention of Sasha’s name, Hannah’s mouth hardened into a tight line. ‘She did it on purpose, you know? She knew exactly what she was doing.’
The rest of the morning was a nightmare. By now Hannah’s bleeding was much worse, and she lay in her bed with tears streaming down her face. The hospital was short-staffed and operating on a note of suppressed panic. At one point a senior doctor they’d never seen before bustled into the cubicle where Hannah lay still waiting to go down to surgery, took one look and called to someone else outside, ‘No, can’t come right now, I’ve got a bleeder.’ Josh had never in his life wanted to hit someone so much.
Hannah was by turns angry and then, barely a minute later, convulsed with sorrow and self-reproach. She raged against Sasha, particularly when Josh explained what they’d found at the house.
‘She’s always been selfish,’ she said. ‘People go through tragedies. That’s life. They don’t have to drag everyone else down with them. They don’t have to have such a public unravelling.’ Then her whole face crumpled. ‘Josh, she could have killed Lily, as well as the baby.’
At other moments, she was almost normal, like when another woman on the ward came out of the loo and remarked conversationally, ‘You should see the size of the blood clots I’m passing. One just fell out on the floor and I thought it was my liver.’ After she’d gone, Hannah and Josh looked at each other and burst out laughing, quite as if they weren’t in a hospital going through one of the most heartbreaking events of their lives. As if, in fact, they might never stop.
Mostly, though, she was wracked with sorrow and guilt, lurching from blaming Sasha to blaming herself. ‘I never made the baby feel loved,’ she sobbed, and Josh stopped contradicting her and instead just held her and tried to absorb some of her pain, because that was all he could think of doing.
After she was finally taken down to surgery, Josh paced the paved area outside the hospital, breathing in great lungfuls of fresh, non-institutional-smelling air. Outside the main entrance with its desultory Christmas tree, patients in dressing gowns or anoraks over their pyjamas, their bare legs purple with cold, dragged desperately on silent, lonely cigarettes, and for the first time in his life, Josh wished he smoked. Just to give him something to do, some distraction. When he returned to the little waiting room off the ward, his mind heavy with thoughts of Hannah and what she was going through, he remembered the bargain he’d struck on the way to the hospital. He would have to tell her, it occurred to him suddenly. After weeks, even months of estrangement, the events of the last twenty-four hours had brought him and Hannah vividly, clashingly back together. And if they were to have any chance of staying that way, he needed to come clean about what had been going on at work. He would have to scrape out the contents of his mind, just as her body was even now being scraped clean. She needed to know.
Later, after it was all over, he pulled a padded chair with yellow sponge poking through a hole in the cushion up to the side of Hannah’s bed and watched her while she slept, overwhelmed with tenderness for her and with grief for the baby they’d lost, and gratitude that at last they felt like a couple again.
When she awoke, he admitted finally, his heart swollen with dread, what had been going on at work – the accusations, the anonymous call he now knew with absolute certainty had been made by Sasha. ‘But where have you been going all day?’ Hannah asked him, too stunned by a mixture of shock and the after-effects of the anaesthetic to react. Then, without waiting for a reply, she held him for a very long time.
It was tea time, while she was sitting up drinking a cup of tea so stewed it looked orange (‘Your tea’s been Tangoed,’ Josh joked weakly, which set them off again, though it wasn’t remotely funny), when she said, ‘I want to see Sasha.’
As soon as she’d spoken the words, Josh realized he’d been waiting for them all along. Throughout that endless morning, awareness of Sasha’s presence just a couple of floors away had been like a constant shadow in the room.
They looked into each other’s eyes and then he nodded.
A text from Dan told them which ward Sasha was on, and after Hannah had been officially discharged they made their way to the lifts.
‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’
Hannah was as pale as Josh had ever seen her as she huddled in the lift, swaddled in an old hoodie of his and baggy sweatpants. She walked slowly and falteringly after the morning’s traumas, holding on to his arm as they made their way towards the ward. At the entrance, the door was being held open by a woman in a pink dressing gown, her skinny legs plunged into outsized furry pink slippers complete with grubby rabbit ears, who was deep in conversation with an awkward-looking young man. ‘You tell him, promise?’ the woman was saying. Her hand, which still had the cannula for a drip taped to it, was clinging to his arm, holding him back. ‘Promise me,’ she repeated as Hannah and Josh shuffled past her.
The nurses’ station was unmanned, but there was a whiteboard up on the wall behind it with a list of patients and corresponding bed numbers. Sasha Fisher, bed 14.
Josh stopped still. Now that they were here, he found his nerve failing him. Over the last few days and weeks, the Sasha of his imagination had passed from troubled, cast-off wife to the very incarnation of evil. He’d spent night after night lurking outside her house, incubating his hatred until he was so full of it, it hurt to breathe. He’d driven himself to the very brink of madness. But now that he was vindicated, he was finding it hard to hold on to that hatred – it turned to dust when he tried to grab on to it. Hannah, however, was as determined as he’d ever seen her, leading the way into the inner ward without hesitating.
‘Oh!’
The sound escaped him before he had a chance to check it. Although he’d been told about the marks on Sasha’s arm, he still wasn’t prepared for this. The ugly weals of blood. The stark undisguisable letters scored into her flesh.
Sasha herself looked terrible. As if someone had opened a valve and let all the air out of her. Standing awkwardly by the side of the bed, Josh found himself thinking of a hologram, wondering whether, if he went just a little too far to the side, she might disappear altogether.
Her eyes filled with tears when she saw them. ‘Oh fuck, I’m so happy to see you two. I’ve been going crazy in here. Well, crazier anyway!’
She reached out a hand towards Hannah, but Hannah refused to take it.
‘Hans, I’m so sorry. About the baby. Dan told me. There was nothing I could do. The car was out of my control.’
‘You did it on purpose.’ Hannah’s voice was unemotional, flat, as if she was passing comment on the weather.
Sasha’s face crumpled.
‘We know, Sasha. OK?’ Sasha’s self-pity had infuriated Josh. ‘We know what’s been going on. We know it was you who did all that stuff – you staged the break-in at your house, you keyed Dan’s car and smashed the window and made up lies about him being violent and into disgusting, sick pornography. That’s your daughter’s father! What were you thinking? And then when we wouldn’t take your side against him, you turned on us, too. You could have ruined my career, you know?’
Sasha was staring at him, her eyes huge in her shrunken face. She was shaking her head slowly, tears silently flowing down her hollow cheeks. ‘No. You’re wrong. I wouldn’t hurt you two. I’d never hurt you. You’re my friends.’
‘Exactly,’ Hannah broke in. ‘We’re your friends. Or rather, we were your friends. Yet you nearly killed me – and Lily – and you did kill the baby. All to try to get back at Dan, to try to make him feel guilty.’
‘Hannah.’ Sasha tried to grab Hannah’s hand, but she moved out of the way. ‘This is me y
ou’re talking to – Sasha. I would never hurt Lily. I love Lily, you know that. Look, I know I’ve been going off the rails these last few months. Dan leaving brought back everything from my childhood and I admit I’ve struggled to cope. I know I’ve done some really stupid things.’ She winced as she swallowed, as if it was painful. ‘You’re right, I did that thing to Dan’s car and smashed the window of that woman’s flat. I couldn’t stand it, don’t you see? I could see the four of you in there laughing and it felt like I’d been completely erased, like I didn’t exist. And Dan never hit me, or left porn on the computer. I shouldn’t have said all that stuff. I’ve just been so crazy with grief.’
She looked at Josh, as if for sympathy, and he felt another twinge of anger.
‘But I didn’t do the other stuff, I swear. Someone did try to kill me, someone did break into the house. And I have no idea about the calls to your work, Josh. I promise.’
‘I saw it, Sasha! I was at your house last night and I saw that painting you claimed had gone missing. It was in the sideboard.’
Now that the anger had finally arrived, he was almost enjoying it. There was something almost righteous about it. Finally, after all these weeks of being powerless to act against all the crap that had been going on, here was his chance to be heard.
‘I don’t understand.’ Sasha was looking at him in total incomprehension.
‘And I suppose you don’t understand about the razor blades in your bathroom either, that September could easily have found, or the marks on her door where she tried to get out after you locked her in her bedroom – probably so you could go out, leaving her all on her own. She’s not even five years old!’
Now Sasha collapsed entirely. ‘Oh God,’ she moaned, raising her hands to her face. ‘Poor Temmy. I can’t explain it. I was sick. I always waited until she was asleep.’ Again that quick glance of appeal. ‘Fuck, I’m a terrible mother. No wonder they’ve taken her away from me. Oh shit, shit, shit, shit.’
Josh clapped his hand to his mouth as Sasha began banging her head rhythmically backwards on the metal hospital bed.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she continued. Clang, clang, clang.
A nurse hurried over, her round face knotted in disapproval. ‘What’s all this noise about, Mrs Fisher?’ she said, grasping Sasha roughly by the shoulders to stop her throwing herself backwards. ‘We don’t want to be upsetting all the other ladies, do we?’
She looked suspiciously at Hannah and Josh. ‘I think Mrs Fisher needs to rest now. You’d better come back another time.’
As they turned and walked away, the soft thud of Sasha’s pitiful body against the bedpost followed them across the room.
28
It was an unseasonably warm day, and Hannah raised her face greedily to the sky, soaking up that sense of wellbeing that always came with feeling the rays on her skin after a long, sun-starved winter.
The excited squeals of laughter coming from the giant trampoline in the corner of the garden mixed with the distant birdsong and the lazy buzzing of not-quite-awake bees, creating a Sounds of Summer soundtrack although it was still only late March. She took a long breath in, enjoying the sensation of filling her body with oxygen and flushing the toxins out of her system.
‘Ta-da!’
Sienna plonked a huge bowl of salad down on the long, silvery teak table. Hannah recognized the bowl as one Sasha had picked out at a souk in Marrakech when the four of them had spent a weekend in a riad – Sasha and Dan’s present for her thirty-second birthday. It seemed like a different life now.
‘Please don’t look too closely,’ Sienna said of the eclectic mixture of leaves and vegetables heaped in the brightly patterned ceramic dish. ‘I just threw everything in together. Douse it in dressing and it’ll be fine.’
‘All the ingredients are edible?’ Dan poked the concoction dubiously with one of those wooden salad servers shaped like a hand. ‘You sure that big thing in the middle isn’t a pan scourer or something?’
‘It’s an avocado, idiot! At least, I think it’s an avocado . . .’
Hannah looked up and smiled, thankful that she could finally look at Sienna’s now visible baby bump without that answering painful lurch in her own abdomen. Now that she and Josh had decided to try for another baby, she felt much calmer about everything. There was an old song lyric that had been constantly lodged in her head in the days after the accident about not knowing what you had till it had gone. She mourned her lost baby with a desperation that shocked her. But she was starting to make peace with herself. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Josh kept telling her with a touching insistence. ‘It wasn’t either of our faults.’ Now, at last, she was starting to believe him.
‘Can we eat on the trampoline?’
September’s transparently fluttery-eyed appeal invoked the usual indulgent capitulation in her father.
‘I think that might just be permissible.’
He’d have to start saying no to her eventually, but for the time being no one begrudged the little girl the chance to be spoilt. Not after what she’d been through. The trampoline had been the biggest gift, entailing the digging up of Sasha’s prize decked Moroccan chill-out area, but there’d been a stream of others. Dan’s way of trying to make it up to September for not having been around to protect her. Lily, as usual, was quieter than her friend.
‘You OK, Liliput?’ Hannah called.
Her daughter nodded slowly. ‘Don’t like salad,’ she said, eyeing the heaped bowl in pride of place on the table.
Sienna breathed in slowly, and for a second Hannah thought she was offended. Then she smiled. ‘Don’t worry, you two can have fishfinger sarnies. How’s that?’
Dan put his hand out and gave Sienna an affectionate pat on the bum and Hannah closed her eyes again. Now that she and Josh had started, very slowly, to rediscover each other sexually, she no longer felt that instinctive recoil at the sight of other people being intimate in public, but it was still a little odd to be sitting in the garden Sasha had designed (well, with the help of an expensive ‘landscape architect’), while her husband, albeit soon-to-be-ex-husband, touched up his pregnant new girlfriend.
On the whole though, it was almost miraculous how fully Sasha had been expunged from their lives over the last three months. The police had examined the tyre but hadn’t found any conclusive evidence that it had been deliberately tampered with, so there were no charges to bring. However, in view of the self-inflicted damage to her arm and her neglect of September, social workers had been involved, and it was agreed Dan should stay in the house to look after his daughter. In the meantime, Sasha had been admitted to an upmarket residential psychiatric clinic often in the headlines for treating celebrity addicts. The money had come from a trust fund her father had set up for the express function, as far as Hannah could tell, of bailing his daughter out when things went disastrously wrong.
Hannah hadn’t seen Sasha, of course. She doubted whether she would ever be able to see her again. So many times in the past she had forgiven her behaviour, made excuses for her, tried to see things from her perspective. But this last thing she found she couldn’t forgive.
It had been a strange time, trying to claw her way out from the pit of her grief without the support of the people she’d normally turn to. Her mother (stupid how her heart still constricted at the thought of her being dead), Sasha. Even Gemma hadn’t been around so much. She’d come to stay the first weekend after it happened, but there had been a stiffness there, an awkwardness that had never existed between them before. Hannah told herself it had nothing to do with the photograph of Josh or what Sasha had told her, nor the car crash that had brought that earlier accident rushing back into her head, but still she found it hard to be natural around her sister, and the next time Gemma had offered to come to stay, she’d found an excuse to say no.
But how weird it was that the woman she’d first perceived as nothing but a threat should turn out to be such a saviour. Since Hannah got back from the hospital, all but paralys
ed by guilt and grief, Sienna had been quietly and unobtrusively present – sorting out the mess of the flat, writing explanatory emails to features editors on her behalf, picking up Lily from school. Just sitting there listening when Hannah needed to vent about what had happened. Now she couldn’t imagine life without her. Gemma hadn’t liked Sienna, of course. But then Gemma hadn’t liked Sasha either. Now Hannah wondered whether her sister might not just be jealous of her friendships. More worryingly, Lily wasn’t too keen on her either, but then, as Josh said, Lily was used to having Hannah to herself. And maybe she and September had outgrown each other. It happened at that age. When she felt stronger, Hannah resolved to widen her social net. Well, big school was already helping with that. But for now, Hannah needed Sienna’s support.
‘How was your first week back at school?’ Sienna was asking Josh now, peering over the top of her eccentric-looking salad.
‘Oh, you know. Interesting.’
Josh liked Sienna – Hannah sometimes worried that he liked her a little too much, but she knew he wasn’t about to go into details about how it really felt to go back to work after you’d had such a big question mark hanging over you. Kelly Kavanagh had withdrawn her allegation – Josh said the supply teacher who’d replaced him had actually given her worse marks than he had, which had led to a rapid change of heart. And when the head had been informed by social workers of what had gone on with Sasha and the likelihood of her being behind the anonymous calls, the governors had agreed there was no case to answer and Josh had been unanimously reinstated. But, as he’d said to Ian at that first meeting, mud sticks. Josh knew some of the kids called him Paedo behind his back, and Hannah could only imagine how awful that must feel. They still hadn’t had a proper, honest discussion about that period when Josh was leaving the house in the morning and going God knows where, because he couldn’t face telling her the truth about what had happened. She’d failed him then, she realized now. And while they were both enjoying their fragile, newly cemented accord, Hannah knew that until they’d really explored what had gone wrong during that time, they wouldn’t completely be able to move on.