The Fallout (17 page)

They were all trying hard to make it work, to keep things bright and breezy and reassuringly superficial, painting a hard shell over the things that weren't being said. And for a while they were successful. They chatted about work, about the latest viral dance craze, about whether Toby the dachshund had Munchausen syndrome because he kept limping for no reason. They sat around the long, dark, Gothic wood dinner table and ate the gingerless stir-fry, declaring it a triumph. They drank the midprice white wine, and Hannah made them all laugh with a story about doing a phone interview with a television personality while Lily was at home ill, and the rising hysteria as she fed biscuit after biscuit into the surprised child's mouth to keep her from making a sound. Sienna countered with an amusing anecdote about arriving to shoot a skin-care commercial sporting a “blemish the size of Brazil” on her forehead, stylists squealing in horror and attacking the monster with paints and potions.

Josh concentrated on the food and the chatter, and tried not to look at Sienna's hand resting in Dan's lap, or notice the way his eyes followed her greedily when she got up and left the room.

They were drinking coffee from the most enormous French press Josh had ever seen when the crash came. One minute he was sitting with both hands around a chipped mug that read I
❤
New York, feeling absurdly rebellious to be drinking coffee so late in the evening, and the next there came a noise so violent, he thought someone had been shot. When he turned his head, one of the panes in the enormous living room window had been smashed, a jagged crack running from the bottom left-hand corner up to a hole in the middle, framed by the still-open wooden shutters. Josh was too stunned to move, but Dan jumped up and ran for the front door, wrenching it open. They heard the creaking of the heavy communal door right before a car started up outside and pulled away.

“Did you see anyone?” Sienna sounded like a small, frightened child and Josh had an insane urge to pull her onto his lap, hold her and stroke her hair.

Dan, reappearing in the living room, shook his head. His face was noticeably paler. He glanced over at Hannah. She was sitting stiffly upright, not saying anything. One of her long fingers worried away at the eczema patch, which stood out raw and red on her forehead.

“She's gone too far this time.”

Dan was staring down at the stone he'd picked up from among the shards of glass on the wooden floor.

“Who?”

Hannah's voice was sharp. Dan looked up, frowning. A dark groove ran from his forehead down between his eyes.

“Sasha, of course. Who else would throw a fucking rock through the window? How many other psychos do we know?”

“That psycho is still your wife.” Hannah was half-standing, as if unsure whether to walk out. “There is nothing at all to say that was Sasha. It could easily have been local kids.”

“Local kids? In Notting Hill?” Josh wasn't sure if he was trying to make a joke, but it was obvious it didn't go down well. Hannah turned on him.

“Don't you start. I can't believe you're jumping to conclusions about Sasha. She had no idea we were coming here tonight. There'd be no reason for her to turn up.”

“Oh, don't be naive, Hannah.” Dan sounded angry. “You know she's been spying on us. What about that text she sent?”

“That text didn't prove anything—except that you're paranoid!”

“Hannah's right.” Sienna had crossed the room and looped her toned brown arm around Dan's waist. “We don't know it's Sasha. It could be anyone.”

Dan shook his head. “Too much of a coincidence,” he muttered.

Sienna put a gentle hand on his cheek to hold his head still. Eventually he shrugged and held up his hands.

“Okay, okay. We'll chalk it up to coincidence if you insist.”

For a second or two, they stayed like that, eyes closed, gently swaying. Josh knew he should look at Hannah, maybe share a complicit 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 how to answer. He didn't want to think about the possibility of Sasha outside in the dark square, looking in on the four of them cozying 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, as they waited at a traffic light by Tufnell Park. “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 sped off, 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 okay,” he said, and shrugged.

Chapter 18

Hannah held her breath waiting for Sasha's response. She'd hardly slept for two nights worrying about whether to say anything about their dinner at Sienna's on Monday night, and having decided that she would, she'd blurted it out practically the second 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'd 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 man, the better.”

Hannah studied her face. They were in one of the hundreds of cafés on the high street. 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 much like the two of them.

Hannah hadn't really wanted to come. She was all too aware of the unfinished article on her laptop, but the scene 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, like many of the other customers, was drinking her cappuccino from a bowl, 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...”

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

“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 cracked 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 protruded 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 oversensitive, it's just that this is so hard. Parents shouldn't split up. They should be forced to 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-colored cashmere sweater rode up, and Hannah was horrified to see a long, deep, red scratch scored widthwise into her flesh. Another similar scratch intersected it halfway up but disappeared under the sweater's cuff. The dried blood, thick and dark, had beaded in places.

Hannah tried to think of an innocent explanation, but there was none. She knew she ought to say something. Yet the words lodged in her mouth like boiled eggs, impossible to get out.

Sasha put down her hands and instantly the scratches were gone. And with them, the opportunity to raise concern, 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?—and liable to leap to the 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 his own?”

Sasha put down her coffee so heavily that some of it sloshed over the side of the bowl and onto 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 against each other, 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. She tried to focus on her story, on what payoff 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 the bedroom cupboard.

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 down 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 flats. There was a big window looking out into 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'd been trying to re-create the beds in the décor magazines, with their plumped-up covers and scattering of cushions and throws, but instead the duvet bunched up at one end, leaving the other limp and flat like an empty sack, and the pillowcase on Josh's side had a 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 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 lovely minimalist homes, 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, an unpleasant and grisly sensation 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 house.

The bathroom was the one room in the flat they'd never got around to decorating. Long and narrow, with a bathtub 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 worry about contraception it was nearly time for her next period. It should have been 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?
She held the white plastic stick in her hand and stared at the window in its center, watching with a growing feeling of nausea as the blue line worked its way slowly across.

The sound of her stupid birdsong ringtone caught her by surprise. Stick in hand, she burst out of the bathroom. She picked up her phone from the dining table and was surprised to see Dan's name flashing up. Dan always called Josh, that was the way it worked, and Sasha called 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, and now here she was being harangued about something that had nothing 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 ax 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's 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, still reeling from the pregnancy test, felt herself quivering with rage. “She's just trying to cope with having been thrown to the curb by her own husband. Dumped for a younger model, literally. 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 her own understanding of the phrase.

“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 like a different person from 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 almost 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. What was happening to her life? A few months ago, everything had seemed so...under control. Sure, she and Josh 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.