The Fallout (25 page)

“Oh, yes. I found that in my stuff the last time I came back from your place. I've been using it as a bookmark. You can have it back if you like, but don't lose my page or I might have to kill you.”

Gemma sounded so casual, totally unperturbed. Immediately Hannah second-guessed herself. Could it have been an accident? Such things did happen. Particularly to her disorganized sister. One time she'd come back from the airport with someone else's bag entirely. Hannah remembered shrieking with laughter when Gemma opened the case and withdrew a pair of men's boxers emblazoned with the slogan Lucky Pants.

She dropped the photo onto the severely creased sheet and put her head in her hands. Instantly Gemma was beside her, arms around her.

“Hey, hey! What's up, Hans? What's going on?”

Hannah couldn't look at her, knowing that if she did she'd be completely lost—now that the hairband was gone, the scar was covered up, but Hannah was as aware of it as if it were lit up in neon. So she stared at her hands instead, the bitten nails still bearing the flaky blue varnish from Lily's last beauty session. Would she ever be the kind of woman who had properly shaped nails with pared-down cuticles and glossy, hard surfaces that shone like the inside of a shell?

“Is it the pregnancy? Aren't you happy about the new baby?”

“Yes! No! Oh, I don't know. Everything's so weird.”

Gemma tightened her arms around her shoulders.

“What's weird? What is it, Hans?”

Hannah tried to think of how to explain it all. The wall that had come up between her and Josh, the situation with Dan and Sasha, and how despite all their good intentions they'd got caught up in the middle of it and sucked right down with them. And Lily? The bruises on her arm were now fading to green, but still Hannah could hear Nikki's words in her head. Could there be a chance she didn't know her own daughter as thoroughly as she thought she did? In which case, what kind of mother was she? And how could she even contemplate having another baby?

Her shoulders slumped under the weight of Gemma's arm.

“Oh, God,” she sobbed. “I miss Mum!”

For a moment, the two sisters sat side by side, holding each other without speaking, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Gemma spoke.

“You know, I miss her, too, but you mustn't let your rose-tinted glasses make her something she wasn't. You mustn't forget that she could be awful sometimes. Don't you remember when—”

Her speech was cut short by a blast of birdsong. Hannah's phone. She had forgotten she'd turned the volume up to high. She darted out of the bedroom to pick up her bag—still on the floor where she'd dropped it.

“Sasha,” she said, reading the screen.

“Can't that bloody woman leave you alone?” Gemma asked. She had followed her out of the bedroom and was standing in the doorway.

“You tell her,” said Josh from his position on the sofa, watching cartoons with Lily curled up next to him.

Hannah made a face.

“She wouldn't be trying to get hold of me if it wasn't for you,” she said, reproaching her husband.

Then, of course, she had to fill in Gemma on what had been happening, and Josh's email being appropriated by Dan's lawyer and used against Sasha.

“She shakes all the time, and she's convinced people are robbing her and trying to kill her. And I think—”

She hesitated, remembering that Lily was in the room. But her daughter was engrossed in the television, laughing at SpongeBob—a program Hannah had never managed to grasp.

“You think what?” Gemma was looking at her expectantly, so Hannah went on, keeping her voice low.

“I think she's self-harming. She has all these awful scratches on her arm. I haven't seen them properly. She pulls her sleeve down when she sees me looking, but they look pretty bad.”

“Sounds like Dan's right then, Hans. As much as you feel sorry for Sasha, it doesn't seem like she's in any state to look after a child. In fact it sounds like she needs help herself. You can't let yourself get drawn into her shit.”

Hannah thought about those scratches, and Sasha's tearstained face in the nightclub, and something tightened inside her painfully as if it was about to snap.

“That's just it, though. I'm already drawn into it.”

Not Lucie/Not Eloise, age eighteen

Now that Mother is dead, Lucie is dead, too. RIP Lucie! RIP Mother! And Eloise? Well, survival never was Eloise's forte. RIP Eloise! That has meant saying goodbye to some friendships. Juliette and her family, who were so kind. Lucie was the one who ended that. They'd never met Lucie before. I don't think they'll want to meet her again. I'm feeling kind of bad about that.

I don't think anyone was surprised when Mother died. As far as I know her little book of sayings never taught her to say “I'll never make old bones,” which is a shame. I think she'd have enjoyed it. When she hung herself, just eighteen months after Daddy died and six months after I left school to look after her, Valerie and Michel tried to make a fuss. They said she'd never have done anything so violent. I had a good laugh about that. About their definition of violent. But they're wrong. She wanted to go, all right. Her number was up. She couldn't do it on her own, of course. She couldn't do much on her own by the end, but what are daughters for?

And things will be different now. I feel lighter. I sense new beginnings. I'm looking for a new name. I think it might help to think of myself as a brand. Like a tin of beans or a laundry powder. What's the best name for Brand Me? Plus, I'm loaded. Well, not loaded, but I've got some money. Money can't buy you love, isn't that right, Mother? But it can buy you a home. A place to rest your bones. And that'll be novelty enough!

Chapter 25

Pat Hennessey couldn't have looked less at ease. His wet brown eyes were wide and unblinking as he gazed around the crowded gastropub. Not for the first time that evening, Josh wished he'd chosen somewhere else. He'd only picked this place because he'd been here before with Hannah and Sasha and Dan and because, being in Archway, it was convenient for both him in Crouch End and Pat's flat in Holloway. But he could tell Pat felt intimidated by the prices and the trendy staff—like the barman, with his waxed mustache and pointed beard and sideburns—and the fact that when they ordered chips they were served a few slices of home-cooked fried plantain and sweet potato on a heavy wooden board.

“Will you gentlemen be eating?” The waitress's dyed red hair was long on one side and shaved on the other, and she had a Maori-type tattoo etched into her scalp. “I can recommend the jellied pig's head.”

Josh found he couldn't look at his companion for fear of the horror he'd see on his face.

“Sorry,” he mumbled when the waitress had left, jamming her pencil behind her multipierced ear. “We should have gone somewhere else.”

“No, no, this is grand. All the pubs around my way have great big TV screens everywhere and you can't hear yourself think, so this is a real treat.”

“But you won't be trying a jellied pig's head, I'm guessing.”

“No, probably not.”

They sat for a few seconds in silence, squinting at the blackboard, where the menu was written in curly-lettered chalk.

“Should have brought my specs,” said Pat. “I keep forgetting that I'm now a person who wears glasses. I wonder how old I have to be before I'll come to terms with it? Anyway, what does that third one say, under the rabbit dish?”

“Beer-battered cod with thick-cut skin-on potato wedges.”

Pat's face visibly relaxed.

“Fish and chips,” he said.

While they waited for their food, the headache that had been thrumming in Josh's brain all day started to build. He knew it was stress, but knowing that didn't help him deal with it any better. He turned over in his mind ways to broach the subject of Kelly Kavanagh and his suspension to Pat. He assumed that's why Pat had called to suggest a drink, but now that they were here, his erstwhile colleague seemed in no rush to get to the point. And the longer they went without talking about it, the more nervous Josh became. It wasn't so much the elephant in the room as the great blue whale. At last Pat pressed his lips together as if considering what he was about to say, and then opened his mouth to speak.

“I can't tell you how sorry I am, Josh, about what's happened to you.”

There. It was out. Josh felt some of the pressure that had been building inside his head escape like a mini gas leak.
Pffffffff.

“It's what we're all afraid of, isn't it? All of us men? There but for the grace of God and all that!”
Pffff.
“How are you holding up?”

Josh thought about telling Pat about the pressure in his head, and the way his heart occasionally raced for no reason, convincing him he was about to go into cardiac arrest. Or how he lay awake during the early hours of the morning, listening to Hannah's rhythmic breathing while panic burned through him like acid, until it was all he could do not to grab on to her like a drowning man would grab a piece of driftwood. He could tell him about the walks he took with Toby through the dark streets when lying in bed became too unbearable, his footsteps echoing on the deserted sidewalk, how whenever he saw another person going about their business in the dim light, he'd be seized by a mad impulse to tell them who he was—a man accused of pedophilia, an abuser of innocence—just to watch their expression change. How it felt to be on the outside of life, when he'd always done everything he could to fit snugly in. He could tell him how more often than not, those walks led him to Sasha's street, where he stood looking up at her house, his thoughts poisoned darts that shot around his brain, each one aimed at her.

“Oh, you know. It's pretty shit really, as you might expect.”

Pat nodded, his Adam's apple bobbing furiously in his throat. Josh noticed he was wearing exactly the same sort of clothes he wore to school, a checked shirt under a pale blue crewneck sweater, a pair of brown cords. It was as if Pat didn't have a private side—he was “sir” in his personal life, just like at school.

“How has Hannah taken it? It must be a big worry for her, especially with her being pregnant.”

Josh stared into his pint, concentrating on the surface where the bubbles popped. There was a dog on the floor by the next table, a little grey shaggy thing, lying on its side with a look of resignation. He always forgot that there were places you could bring dogs, and had a momentary pang of remorse for Toby, cooped up in the flat.

“I haven't told her.”

Pat, who'd been making a checkerboard pattern out of square coasters, looked up, his mouth open, eyes wide. Then he sucked the air in through his teeth in a long, loud inward breath.

“Wow. I mean I can see why you wouldn't want to say anything, but, Josh, it's been nearly a week. You don't want to be carrying this on your own. It's too much.”

Josh pressed his lips together, enjoying the sharp pressure of teeth against flesh.

“I keep meaning to tell her, but I lose my nerve. And then I convince myself that it won't last long, this suspension. They'll finish their investigation—which has to be cursory at best, I mean, what evidence do they have?—and then I'll be back at work and Hannah will never need to know anything about it.”

Pat was still staring at him, stricken, so he continued.

“Maybe I'll tell her later on, when everything isn't so stressful.”

The red-haired waitress materialized by his side, bearing oversized white plates, which she'd somehow managed to balance on her skinny, birdlike arms. He'd asked for his steak medium rare and it was bleeding watery pink across the expanse of white china. Revulsion heaved suddenly inside him, and he swallowed it back down.

“So what have you been doing during the days, while Hannah thinks you're at work?” Pat asked.

Josh sighed.

“Just hanging out with friends mostly. Outstaying my welcome, probably.”

This was almost true. He had been hanging out with one friend in particular. Dan. Or rather not Dan, as Dan was nearly always at work. Sienna. He'd been hanging out with Sienna. He hadn't intended to, he told himself. It had just kind of happened organically.

He'd started off on the first day driving around aimlessly, circumventing the high-congestion areas, then on the second day, he had found himself in West London and decided to call in on impulse. He still hadn't completely forgiven Dan for sending his email to his lawyer, but he could sort of understand how it had happened. Anyway, he needed to find out exactly how much of that email he'd sent. He hoped to God he'd deleted that bit about Hannah avoiding sex. So he'd called in and found Sienna, home alone and bored. And again he'd ended up telling her everything—about the new allegation at work, about Hannah, even Lily. She had a way of listening with her whole body—leaning toward you, fixing you with those green flecked eyes—that made him feel for the first time in a long time like he was actually being heard. He'd left feeling lighter, less like he was being flattened slowly in one of those car-crushing machines. Since then they'd met a few times, mostly at the Notting Hill flat, but once in Regent's Park and a couple of times, when it was too cold to be outdoors, at the Tate Modern gallery. Josh would drive off as if heading to work and park the car a few streets away, catching the bus to Finsbury Park and then the tube on from there. Sometimes he felt a twinge of guilt about these meetings—with a gorgeous woman, no less—since he'd failed to mention them to Hannah. Mostly he justified it to himself. They were keeping each other company. And Sienna was keeping him sane. She was so refreshingly nonjudgmental, so unfazed by things. He'd found himself confiding stuff he'd never even verbalized to himself, let alone anyone else. Things about his childhood, about his disappointment that the two women he loved most in the world—his mother and his wife—had never bonded, about how moody Hannah was now that she was pregnant.

Sienna, on the other hand, seemed to be taking pregnancy completely in her stride, hardly registering it at all. He knew it was unfair to compare a twenty-four-year-old to a thirty-four-year-old who'd already given birth once before, but Sienna seemed not to be subject to any of the same problems Hannah was always complaining about—the tiredness, the floods of tears for no reason, the way her favorite food suddenly tasted all wrong. Sometimes he thought Hannah was actually losing it, like when she suddenly started quizzing him about Gemma and whether he'd ever fancied her. Gemma was her sister, for goodness' sake.

In her turn, Sienna had opened up to him. Dan was taking it very badly, she told him. About not being able to see September. He was tearing his hair out with worry about her. Sasha wasn't stable. Something ought to be done—for her sake as much as anything. Sienna felt awful about what had happened to Sasha, and couldn't sleep some nights for the guilt of having taken Dan away. It seemed wrong to build your happiness on someone else's misery, she told Josh (weren't those the exact words he'd used himself?). But then equally you couldn't help whom you fell in love with. Sasha was still relatively young, and quite attractive, Sienna said earnestly. She could find someone else. But she had to move on with her life—it had been months, for God's sake—and to do that she had to get some help. And while she was getting that help they were all going to have to accept that there'd be some changes. She and Dan couldn't possibly look after a child in her one-bedroom flat, so they'd have to move into the house, at least until it could be sold. It wasn't what
she
wanted. Sienna was scathing about Crouch End with its Yummy Mummies and artisan bread shops and supermarkets that grew their own vegetables on the roof. She referred to it disparagingly as suburbia, until she remembered that Josh lived there, too. But Josh thought she was probably right. It was pretty suburban. It had been Hannah who'd wanted to live there in the first place, if he remembered right. He'd have been happy somewhere cheaper and more convenient.

“I just wish things hadn't gotten so bitter,” Sienna said to him, as they sat huddled on a bench outside the Tate, watching the muddy river churn past, and the crowds surge over the steel ribbon that was the Millennium Bridge. “I'm absolutely hopeless at confrontation, but when I see what she's doing to him, keeping him from his daughter, it makes me so angry.”

Josh had smiled then—he couldn't help it—at the notion of this girl/woman with her soft eyes and the freckles over the bridge of her nose getting angry.

Across the table, Pat was gingerly probing the emerald-green mushy peas that had arrived in a small bowl of their own. He kept clearing his throat as though he were about to say something. Eventually he lowered his fork.

“Listen, Josh. I have to tell you, I think it might take longer than you're imagining. The investigation, I mean.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Everyone seems to be taking it very seriously. It's bad timing, that's all. With all those high-profile cases that have been in the news, I think they're using you to prove how tough they are on any kind of...impropriety, and how willing they are to listen to supposed victims.”

“But I haven't done anything!” The lump of meat on Josh's tongue felt suddenly monstrous, filling his mouth.

“I know that. I think everyone knows it, really. It's just that they've got to be seen to be taking action. It would help if you could find whoever made that second hoax call and get them to withdraw it. Any ideas?”

Josh swallowed down the insufficiently chewed meat and felt it lodge painfully in his throat before sliding down to his stomach, where it mixed uncomfortably with the bile already churning around inside him.

Sasha had done this. His whole life reduced to nothing. His marriage hanging by a thread. Killing time during the day when he ought to be at work, hours lost that would never come back.

Hatred spread black like ink through his bloodstream.

* * *

Sasha's house loomed ahead. It was one in a row of three wide white three-story modernist homes that had been built in the 1950s, on the road that joined Crouch End to its more established neighbor, Highgate. This road was cut into what originally would have been a hill, so that the houses on one side dropped down toward the cricket club and, farther on, a secondary school, while the houses on Sasha's side were set back from the street, accessed by steep steps. Their width made them look extra imposing from sidewalk level, where Josh was standing. He'd driven here straight from the pub, imagining Sasha inside her beautiful house, with her white floorboards and her distressed furniture, getting on with her life.

Anger was a band tightening around his chest, leaving him short of breath.

The steps were in full view of the street, but one side, out of range of the light by the front door, was in shadow. That was the side Josh kept to. That was the side he always used now, even in daylight. He'd been here a few times during the past week. On this very sidewalk, keeping an eye on things. Watching. Waiting.

On each side of the steps was a row of Japanese plants, staggered down to the road like the neatest of green waterfalls. Josh fought the urge to seize them by the stems and rip them from the earth by the roots.

Damage. He wanted to do damage.

At the top of the steps there was a polished hardwood deck running the entire width of the house. In the middle was the front door and to either side, wide windows that made the most of the spectacular views, one looking into the room Sasha referred to as her “office” (although as far as Josh could tell she'd never done a day's work in her life), the other the guest bedroom. When they'd moved into the house the entire ground floor had been a kitchen, but they'd changed all that with the help of a team of architects, moving the kitchen to the top floor and dividing up the lower space. Dan had once told him the renovations—or Sasha's kitchen project, as it became known—had cost almost as much as the actual house. He'd looked a little sick when he said that, Josh remembered. It was the office Josh was interested in tonight. He could see Sasha sitting at the vast desk that the designer had had made from concrete poured into a giant mold and then polished to a sheen. Dan had said it must be like working on the hard shoulder of the M25, but Sasha had been exultant because it was unique. Sitting on her own at the far end of the concrete runway, staring intently at something on her iPad, Sasha looked dwarfed by the monolithic surroundings she'd created, and for a moment, Josh felt sorry for her. Alone, in this huge gallery of a house. Then he remembered what she'd done, and his hatred returned, sliding down over the pity like a shutter.