The Fallout (22 page)

“We waited outside for ages. Practically days. Then I remembered that you'd given me your spare key, so we let ourselves in to wait. We thought you'd spontaneously combusted or something, you took so long.”

Hannah was too surprised to react. True, she did remember giving Sasha and Dan a set of keys before they went away on holiday a couple of years back in that nonsensical way you do, as if having a key holder a few streets away rather than a time zone away will somehow guard against anything bad happening. But surely they'd asked for the keys back afterward? She tried to think, to reach back in time to pluck the memory from the air—the act of reclaiming the spare keys. But it eluded her. Maybe they'd forgotten. It was possible. But this? Letting herself in? Taking possession of the sofa? Even, if the smell was anything to go by, sneaking a cigarette—here, in
her
living room. Hannah noticed that September was wearing a daisy-chain headband of Lily's. Then she remembered how bereft she'd felt in the playground, wishing Sasha was there, and her anger stalled.

“Don't be cross, Hans.” Sasha had dropped the frosted-on smile and was gazing at her as if everything depended on her reaction. Sasha's eyes seemed sunken into her head, as if they were drowning. “Please, let's not fight. I can't bear it. Look, I brought you all these peace offerings.” She made a sweeping gesture with her tiny hand, indicating the cake and the flowers.

Hannah tried to smile at September, whose pretty little face was poking out between the blooms.

“Why don't you two girls go into the kitchen and get a biscuit?” she suggested overbrightly. “I think there are some of those chocolate dinosaurs.”

There was a pause while Lily and September eyed each other cautiously. Hannah could almost see the teeth-shaped bruise on Lily's arm burning through the wool of her sweater. Then September laid the flowers on the table and jumped up, grinning at Lily, and the two made their way out of the room.

They'd hardly set foot through to the hallway before Sasha started.

“I'm sorry I upset you the other day. I know it sounded like I wasn't taking it seriously, what September did, but I was. It's just I was so freaked out by what happened at Brent Cross. And finding out you were pregnant came as such a shock.”

Again that imagined blow to the gut.
Pregnant.

“I'm happy for you, don't get me wrong. It's just that it brought home to me how disastrously wrong everything has gone in my life. I mean, we used to talk about doing it together, do you remember? We'd get pregnant at the same time so that our younger kids could grow up together just like Lil and September. And now here you are going ahead and having another baby while my husband is living with someone else, and may well be trying to fucking kill me.”

Her voice wavered on the last two words, but she visibly fought against crying.

“I promised myself I wasn't going to get upset. I know I'm like a broken record and it must be so boring.” Hannah could hardly bring herself to look at Sasha. Clearly she didn't know yet, about Sienna being pregnant. She imagined how it must feel for Sasha, having her future yanked out from under her like a magician's tablecloth trick. The family she thought she'd have, the home she imagined she'd built.

“Did you talk to the police again?” she asked, to change the subject. “About what happened on the escalator? Did they look at the security footage?”

Sasha made a sound that was half snort, half laugh.

“The police made it pretty obvious they think I'm some mad rich bitch with an overactive imagination. They came over to the house, two of them, and they didn't stop staring at my things. They kept saying things like ‘Nice sofa—I could fit my whole flat into that sofa' and ‘Lovely views. I look out onto a fast-food joint.' It was like they were judging my suitability as a victim based on all the
stuff
I have.”

Sasha's violet-shadowed eyes were momentarily wide with remembered outrage. Hannah could imagine it all too clearly. The police officers silently noting the velvet chaise longue, the French crystal chandelier, the Bang & Olufsen sound system. Sasha brittle enough to snap.

“Hannah, they
hated
me. No, really, they did. I suddenly realized it, and it was such a shock, I can't tell you. Do you remember after 9/11 when Americans were saying ‘but we didn't realize anyone hated us?' Do you remember how thunderstruck they were? Well, that's how I felt when those police were there. They were very polite, but I knew they hated me. And they knew I knew. When I asked about security footage they almost laughed. They asked me how many people I thought went up and down those escalators every day. They said even if they could find me on the camera, all we'd see would be a crowd of people, and then one of them tripping. Not ‘being pushed.' ‘Tripping.'”

Hannah sighed. Behind Sasha's head, she could see her laptop open on the table, surrounded by papers and newspaper cuttings and doodled-on notebooks. The work she wasn't doing formed a tight ligature around her chest. And still she couldn't shake off the uneasy feeling she'd had since coming in and finding Sasha installed in her home. She couldn't help feeling
violated.

“Shall I make us some tea?” she asked Sasha, realizing that the chances of getting back to work were nonexistent.

Sasha didn't reply. She looked so frail, dwarfed by the huge sofa, gazing intently off into space as if listening to some inner voice.

“Sasha? Tea?”

Sasha turned her newly dulled eyes toward Hannah.

“Have you got anything stronger? Gin and tonic? Wine? Oh, come on, Hans, don't look so disapproving. Remember when the girls were little and we used to reward ourselves with a drink at teatime, just because it was all so fucking stressful? Don't you think I deserve it now?”

Hannah smiled, although uneasiness prickled on the back of her neck. Even though she'd been reminiscing herself just an hour before, she couldn't help feeling manipulated by Sasha reminding her of their shared past, forcing intimacy on her like a once-favorite sweater now shrunk in the wash.

She was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Stepping back into the hall, she heard muffled girlie voices coming from behind Lily's emphatically closed bedroom door.
Good
, she told herself.
It's all behind them
. Amazing how quickly children could move on from things, rifts that seemed irreparable forgotten in the blink of an eye. But still she hesitated, not liking the way the flat expanse of white wood door, even with its gaily decorated letter
L
, seemed somehow forbidding.

Back in the kitchen, she opened the fridge, her heart sinking as ever with the knowledge that somehow, in a couple of hours, she was going to have to concoct some semblance of dinner from the sad assortment of aged vegetables and half-opened tins messily arranged on the smudged plastic shelves. The endless repetition of domestic life seemed suddenly overwhelming. There was an open bottle of white sauvignon in the fridge door. Thank God for screw tops. She poured a glass for Sasha and, after a momentary hesitation, a tiny one for herself, too.

Back in the living room, Sasha took a long gulp from her glass, then leaned forward, eyes intense, fingers of her left hand plucking savagely at the skin of the fingers on the right. She clearly had something she wanted to say, and Hannah knew with complete certainty that whatever it was, she wasn't going to like it.

“I've got to talk to you, Hans. I don't know who else to turn to. Something awful has happened. I don't even know how to say it.”

“What, more awful than someone trying to kill you?”

Hannah was trying to make a joke of it, to lighten the atmosphere and head off whatever it was Sasha was about to tell her, but Sasha didn't smile. Instead her eyes filmed over with tears.

“I found porn on the family computer.”

Hannah tried to maintain a concerned expression, but her stomach was fizzing with relief. Porn. That was distasteful but manageable.

“I know it's horrible, Sash. But Dan wouldn't be the first man to download porn. You've got to keep it in persp—”

“This is hardcore porn! Obscene pictures of women doing the most degrading things. Disgusting, violent, sadomasochistic stuff. Oh, Hannah, I can't tell you.”

The tears were spilling out now. Hannah's head was reeling. She didn't believe it, not really. She knew you could never tell what turned people on, but even so, if someone was into something like that you'd know, wouldn't you? There'd be something that gave it away. Yet Sasha seemed genuinely distraught. If she was making it up, she was a lot more damaged than Hannah thought. A hard lump of something nasty formed in her stomach. Then she had a thought.

“If there were saved images, they'd be dated, wouldn't they?”

If Sasha had done it herself, the dates wouldn't tally. They'd be after Dan left home.

Sasha was staring at her as if she had gone crazy.

“I didn't
leave
them on there, Hannah. Christ, you've got to be joking. September uses that computer. What if she'd found them? They were
vile
, you need to understand. Disgusting. I deleted them, emptied the trash file and then I went and had a shower because I felt so grubby.”

Hannah shook her head.

“I'm sorry, Sasha, but this is enough now. You need to see someone. Surely you can see how insane this all is. This is Dan we're talking about, the man you loved, September's father. I know he's hurt you horribly but he's not this monster you're trying to turn him into.”

“You think I'm making this up?”

Incredulity stretched Sasha's face out into a mask.

“You think I'd actually want people to know my husband is secretly a sick pervert?”

Hannah's certainty started to waver.

“Could you have misinterpreted what you saw? Might the pictures have been to do with some photographic assignment Dan was doing? You know how blurry the line is between art and porn sometimes.”

Sasha was shaking her head vehemently. “No way. I know what I saw. This was porn, and the very worst kind.”

The two women exchanged a long look and it was Hannah who broke away first, taking a gulp of her wine, trying to make sense of the thoughts flying around her head.

Sasha's ringtone—a customized recording of September shouting “Mummy, pick up your phone!”—eventually broke the silence.

“Oh, God,” muttered Sasha, taking it out of her bag and glancing at the screen. “I'd better take this. Hello?”

Hannah was relieved to have a break from the conversation, even if it was only momentary.

“I don't understand,” Sasha was saying into her phone. “I don't understand what you're saying.”

Whatever it was, it was clearly nothing Sasha wanted to hear.

When the phone call had ended, she retained the handset in her hand, as if unwilling to believe what she'd heard. Then she lifted her eyes to Hannah.

“That was Caroline, my lawyer,” she said. “She says Dan is going for full custody. Apparently Josh has made a written statement confirming I'm an unfit mother.”

Chapter 23

“It's not my fault.”

Josh was well aware that a whine had crept into his voice, but he was sick of justifying himself. And why did he have to, anyway? Hannah should automatically be on his side.

“That email was private. I had no idea he'd give it to his lawyer.”

“Yes, but why were you saying things like that to him in the first place? We said we'd stay neutral.”

“That was before Sasha went off the rails so spectacularly. You know perfectly well she's not capable of looking after September in the state she's in. No wonder the poor child is going around biting people. She's all over the place.”

“Yeah, well maybe there's more to that biting thing than you realize.”

“Meaning what?”

For a moment, it looked as if Hannah was about to say something. Her lips parted slightly, then shut again. When she spoke it was about something completely different.

“Well, thanks to you, Sasha will probably never speak to us again.”

“You know, I'm starting to think that might actually be a relief.”

Hannah's nostrils flared as if he'd said something completely idiotic. She picked up her fork to spear the last potato on her plate, then seemed to think better of it.

“That's typical. It might be a relief for you, but what about me? She's my friend, Josh. She helps me out. Don't forget all the times she's looked after Lily when I've had to go off and do an interview. I need that support. It's okay for you—you just swan into work in the morning and come home at night and there's never any question of it being any different, whereas I'm the one who has to sort out all the child care and make excuses if I miss deadlines because Lily's sick or there's a school holiday.”

Josh sighed internally, although he knew better than to let it show. So this, too, would turn out to be his fault? If he didn't have a full-time job he'd be able to help with the child care and maybe she wouldn't be so reliant on Sasha. Was that the subtext here? That old unwinnable argument. If he earned more, she wouldn't need to work or scrabble around for child care, or, conversely, if he had a worse job, she'd be the main breadwinner and he'd have to go part-time to take up the slack in looking after Lily. But this middle-of-the-road job, neither one thing nor the other, was somehow a failing. Shouldn't she be happy that he worked at all? Plenty of women would jump at the chance of having a partner with a steady, reliable income. He pushed his chair violently back from the dinner table, the legs making a grating sound on the wooden floorboards. Hannah flashed a warning look at him. Lily hadn't been in bed for long.

“Well, that's it with Dan,” he said. “I told him very clearly that I wouldn't put anything in writing for his solicitor. He knew what my feelings were. Then he went and took something I wrote in a private email to use against his wife. It's really underhanded.”

The more he thought about it, the more furious he was. Such a violation of their friendship. But there was something else, as well. Something that made him feel cold. Hadn't he said something about Hannah in that email? Something about her going off sex? Hadn't he made a comment about Siberia, maybe even used the word
frigid
? He'd been joking, of course. But she'd never forgive him—not for sharing something so personal. Surely Dan wouldn't have given that bit to the lawyer. But then maybe he'd have to include the entire email intact, just to prove it hadn't been edited.

“Dan's changed,” Hannah said. “The old Dan would never have done anything like this. Do you think it's her doing? Sienna?”

Josh felt a ridiculous surge of protectiveness. Sienna had been so nice about that whole Kelly Kavanagh thing, so understanding. Hannah shouldn't be criticizing her. She didn't even know her!

“It seems to me,” Hannah went on, “we don't know the first thing about Dan anymore, or what he would or wouldn't do.”

“Oh, come off it, Hans. You're not talking about that allegation of Sasha's, are you? You know she'll say anything to get back at him. It's such a cheap shot. You can't seriously be considering it?” They looked at each other, then immediately looked away.

But still Josh was uneasy. This was all too close to home. Since Kelly Kavanagh had made her allegation against him at school, he'd felt sick with fear at the thought of Hannah finding out. Of course, he told himself, she wouldn't believe it for a second. But now, seeing her face, he wondered whether his confidence was misplaced. He could see that she didn't really believe Dan was capable of what Sasha was saying—Dan wasn't the sort to get his kicks from seeing hideous things done to women, the idea was preposterous—and yet there was that awful, infinitesimal wisp of doubt. And once doubt entered into your head, did it ever really go away?

“Dan's always been such an open book, I just don't think he would have shared our private emails with his lawyer without someone pressuring him. I think Sienna must have something to do with it. Ever since he's been with her he's been different—probably because he's been thinking with his dick.”

The sound of Hannah's familiar, clipped voice enunciating the word
dick
echoed around Josh's head, thrilling and disturbing him in equal measure.

“I just
hate
all this, you know?”

To Josh's consternation, Hannah's eyes filled with tears as she spoke. He remembered then about her being pregnant. Here he was thinking about himself and what this all meant to him, while she was coping with a pregnancy, as well. He got up from his seat and moved around the table so he was sitting next to Hannah, and put his arm around her. He was surprised at the shape of her shoulders under his fingers. How long had it been since they properly held each other? Wasn't there something terribly wrong that his wife's body should feel like a stranger's?

She leaned against him, her forehead nuzzling against the hollow in the base of his throat.

“What's happening to us, Josh?”

He tightened his grip around her shoulders.

“Nothing's happening to us, darling. It's everyone around us who's falling apart. We're fine. We're strong. You and me and Lily and now this new little person. We'll be okay.”

Was he imagining the way she stiffened when he referred to the new baby?

“Look. This thing with Dan and Sasha has been a nightmare, but it's over now—at least our part of it. Sasha says she can't be in contact with you now that my bloody email is being used against her, and Dan must know he's burned his bridges with me. I mean, he asked me to make a statement and I refused. He knew exactly where I stood, but he went ahead and involved me anyway. I can't stay friends with someone who'd do that. So now it's just us, which is a massive relief, to be frank. Let's have the weekend to ourselves and stay in the flat, just the three of us, and eat lovely food and drink fine wine and watch TV. Doesn't that sound perfect?”

But Hannah had pulled away from him and was glaring at him.

“I don't believe you. You've forgotten, haven't you?”

“Forgotten what?”

“Forgotten that we're going to see Mum this weekend.”

Josh's heart plummeted. He hadn't really forgotten what she'd said about visiting her mother, but he'd been hoping that if he didn't mention it, she might lose interest in the whole thing. These visits to her mother always took their toll on Hannah, leaving her in a strange, distracted mood. At the best of times, she'd be hard to reach afterward, and the way things stood between them at that moment, it was the very last thing they needed.

“Are you sure...?” he asked.

Hannah was shaking her head. “Don't try to wriggle out of it now. I had to put up with your parents for a weekend, with your mum insinuating there was something up with Lily, like I was a neglectful mother for not noticing.”

“I don't think she...”

“So don't you try to get out of going to Oxford.”

Josh stared at the flaming pink patch of dry skin on Hannah's forehead and swallowed back the words he had been about to say, aware that this had now passed beyond what made sense and into that hazy territory of loyalty and love and duty and doing what the other person wants just because it's what they want.

“Fine. We'll go.”

* * *

The thought of Oxford and about what had happened with the lawyer sat heavy in Josh's stomach overnight like undigested meat, making sleep almost impossible. At one point he even got up and dashed off an angry email to Dan. Thinking about it in the light of day, he realized he probably shouldn't have sent it, or at least should have tempered it. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said, but he knew he'd let rip about friendship and betrayal and—the memory came into his head with a sickening thud—even threatened to write a statement for Sasha instead, a formal one this time.

He shouldn't have sent it.

The thought made him uncomfortable as he drove to school the next morning, shifting around in the driver's seat. He'd call Dan at lunchtime, he decided, in a total U-turn from yesterday's adamant position of noncommunication. He'd clear the air, give him a chance to explain himself. And then, he'd tell him that he and Hannah were stepping back from the whole mess, before they got swallowed up in it themselves.

The heaviness of Josh's mood transferred itself to his surroundings. North London had never looked so gloomy. The normally leafy streets appeared grey and barren in the dim light of the November morning, bare branches of trees clutching at the air like gnarled fingers. The garbage collectors, or “refuse technicians,” as they were called now, hadn't been in a while. Since collections had gone from weekly to biweekly, garbage seemed to be constantly piling up outside shops and blocks of flats, black plastic bags spilling out of bins. The cold made everyone appear hunched and awkward, shoulders in their uniformly dark overcoats high and impenetrable, pale faces pinched and serious.

There was a giant billboard next to the set of traffic lights where Josh waited impatiently, his feet determinedly balancing between clutch and accelerator, refusing to admit defeat and go into Neutral as if this small act of defiance could force the lights to change faster. The billboard featured an ad for perfume—all the ads were for perfume this time of year, celebrities in gold body paint spouting nonsensical snatches of poetry as they rolled around on satin sheets. The model was wearing a long string of beads and high heels and very little else. He wondered if Sienna had ever posed like that.

Pulling into the staff parking lot, his depression deepened. With the exception of a gleaming 4x4 belonging to one of the receptionists who was married to a property developer and worked part-time to “keep herself busy,” the rest of the cars were similar to his—ten years old, self-consciously low-key. Golfs, Renaults, Hondas and Toyotas in varying shades of silver, navy and black.

He was late, so the cramped lot was already nearly full apart from the corner spaces, which were notoriously difficult to maneuver into and, once in, next to impossible to get out of. Hurrying into school, having spent a long time inching his way into the space, Josh hoped no one had been watching from the classroom windows on the first floor. When it came to all things motor-related there was no more critical audience than a class full of Year Elevens who had yet to take a driving lesson and still believed there was nothing to it.

The bell was already sounding as he hurried along the corridor to his first class and he was mentally rehearsing the order of the lesson he was about to teach, so at first he didn't hear the Head calling softly to him from the open door to his office. When he finally turned and retraced his steps, he struggled to hide his irritation. Now he would be late, and as any teacher knew, being late meant you immediately relinquished the upper hand, and had to spend half the lesson trying to recover it.

“Josh, will you come in for a minute, please?”

The Head had sandy hair and nonexistent eyelashes against which the severe black frames of his glasses appeared cartoonishly exaggerated.

“I've actually got a class...”

Josh gave an apologetic shrug and made as if to walk off.

“Ah, yes. Well that's the thing, Josh. You've been relieved of the particular joy of drumming
Macbeth
into 9E.”

He smiled at his little joke, but the smile was forced and awkward, and a pink stain was appearing on his neck above the collar of his pale blue shirt.

“I don't understand.”

“Well. Miss Stokes—Marisa—has kindly stepped in to cover so that you and I can have a little chat.”

The pink stain had crawled up over his jaw now, and Josh's heart was hammering. This had to be about Kelly Kavanagh. What had she been saying now? Suddenly the unfairness of it all hit him like a slap to the face and he thought for a horrible moment that he might burst into tears. The Head, whose name was Ian (although no one ever referred to him as anything except “the Head”), indicated a padded chair across the L-shaped desk from him, and Josh sank heavily down into it, only now becoming aware that there was another person in the room—one of the PE teachers, Sean Silverman, a broad, compact man with a swarthy complexion and thick black chest hair protruding from the top of his white T-shirt. Sean was leaning against the back wall and gave Josh an apologetic shrug. Josh was mystified. What on earth was Sean Silverman doing here? He hardly knew the guy.

Then all of a sudden it came to him with a sickening jolt of realization. Sean was the school union representative.

“Josh, there are times when I really hate my job.” The Head gave Josh a rueful smile, and for one wild instant Josh imagined he might be about to confess something, as if getting someone in to cover his class might turn out to be an elaborate way of facilitating an unburdening that only he, Josh, could possibly understand.