The Fallout (27 page)

“The truth is I'm jealous of you. That's a terrible thing to say, isn't it, but it's true. I want what you've got, what I used to have.”

Sitting on the other end of the sofa, Hannah couldn't find the words to tell Sasha how wrong she was about her so-called perfect life.

“Oh, God,” she said, suddenly aware of the time. “I've got to go. It's pickup time. Is that where September is?”

September hadn't been at preschool since the last time Hannah saw Sasha. She felt guilty now at how relieved she'd been that Lily was going to have a break from her.

Sasha, who'd been staring off into the middle distance, nodded.

“It's okay. I've got the car. We'll make it.”

But on the way to the school, Sasha seemed to sink further into herself. Inside the car, their breath came out in clouds and Hannah waited for her to put on the heat, but she didn't seem to be aware of the cold, staring fixedly ahead with her strange, empty eyes. Once, she shook her head fiercely as though categorically denying something, but when Hannah asked her what she was thinking about she just shrugged. At the preschool, September came running up to Hannah and flung her arms dramatically around her as if they'd been parted for months. “Please, can I come to your house to play? Please, please, please?”

The little girl's grip around her waist was tight as a belt.

Lily appeared by her side, gazing at Hannah wordlessly, but she couldn't read the expression on her daughter's round, serious face.

“I'm not sure,” she hedged. September responded by tightening her hold. There was a sense of desperation about her that Hannah found unsettling. She glanced at Sasha for some sort of support, but Sasha was again staring off into the distance.

“Please,” September begged into Hannah's stomach.

Hannah didn't have the energy for a scene. Something told her that a tantrum from September at this point might just send Sasha, or her for that matter, over the edge. And besides, there was something about September's naked need that worried her.

“Okay,” she said weakly. “You can come back with us. Both of you, of course,” she added, looking at Sasha, who merely shrugged again, as if it was all the same to her.

On the way to the car she was cursing herself for saying yes. From the rigid way Lily was holding herself she could tell she wasn't happy, and Sasha didn't seem too delighted, either. She kept clenching and unclenching her tiny, crablike hands in a way Hannah found quite disconcerting. She tried to think whether there was anything in the fridge she could throw together into a semblance of lunch, but her mind was a blank. Shopping hadn't been on the top of her to-do list recently. She tried not to think about her computer or the work she wasn't doing, or those abusive tweets lined up one on top of the other in a scroll of bile.

September was gripping her hand, as if scared she might run off.

Lily normally liked sitting in the back of Sasha's MPV. It was so high off the ground and you could tell from her shy smile that she felt a sense of grandeur looking down on passersby and people in other cars. Today, however, there was no trace of a smile as Hannah got her belted into the backseat.

“You okay, Lily-put?” she murmured into the wisps of fine baby hair that still framed her daughter's face, much to Lily's distress. (The other day she'd come into the bathroom and found Lily arching backward so that her hair touched her shoulder blades. “Look, Mummy,” she'd said excitedly. “I got long hair now!”) But Lily didn't reply, just stared stonily ahead.

Sasha started the engine before Hannah even had a chance to get into the passenger seat. She kept revving on the accelerator rhythmically as Hannah buckled up her seat belt, as if she was tapping her foot in time to a beat only she could hear.

“Are you sure you're okay, Sash?”

But Sasha seemed not to hear.

As they pulled off into the traffic, Sasha started drumming her hands insistently on the wheel. Hannah kept glancing over nervously. There was something disturbing about the rhythmic thud of Sasha's bitten fingers hitting the hard leather again and again. She wanted to tell her to stop.

“Well, this is fun, isn't it?” Hannah said loudly to the girls in the back. “Just like old times!”

She was babbling just so there wouldn't be a silence but she knew immediately that it had been the wrong thing to say. It wasn't the slightest bit like old times.

She started to apologize to Sasha, but then stopped, as a noise came involuntarily from her that was partly a gasp and partly a cry. Everything in her froze except the blood pounding insanely in her ears. Sasha turned to her and caught her expression and immediately tugged down the left sleeve of her too-baggy top that had slipped back, exposing a frighteningly frail arm. But it was too late. Hannah had already seen it, and she knew it was an image that would be etched into her memory forever.

Scored into the flesh of Sasha's arm in gobs of congealed blood, shocking against the sallow skin, was a word.

HELP.

“Oh, my God, Sasha!”

Sasha shot her a look so full of silent appeal that Hannah felt as if little bits of her heart were splintering off and lodging like shrapnel inside her.

“I just can't,” Sasha whispered, and Hannah knew she was telling her something important but she couldn't work out what. Everything seemed to be going around and around in her head—the Twitter abuse, Josh, frigid, the horrible thing on Sasha's arm. Her brain was a churning washing machine of unthinkable thoughts. She was so lost in them that at first she wasn't aware that Sasha was trembling all over, her fingers on the wheel shaking, the knuckles blue-white.

“Sasha?” she ventured when at last she noticed her friend's strange, fixed expression. “Sasha!” she shouted as she glanced through the windshield and saw the T-junction up ahead that they were approaching much too fast, the car veering across the road from left to right and back again.
Not again. Please, God, not again.
The jolt of déjà vu from that earlier teenaged accident was sharp and savage.
She grabbed at the wheel, but there was nothing she could do. She tried to twist around to look at Lily, but got only a flash of September's terrified face. Then there was a scream she only vaguely recognized as her own, and the gut-wrenching jolt of impact.

And then nothing.

Chapter 27

Dan sounded almost euphoric.

“I told you she was dangerous—to herself and to other people!”

He'd jumped up from the chaise longue he'd briefly been occupying and was pacing around the huge living room he'd always claimed to dislike, insisting that Sasha had made all the design decisions, and the only involvement he'd been allowed was in the signing of the checks. Every now and then he stopped to pick up this ornament or that photograph, examining it intently then returning it and moving on. It was as if he was rediscovering his house, Josh decided, reclaiming his territory for his own.

“You don't know it was her fault.”

Josh was weary, speaking almost without thinking. They'd been over this so many times during the course of this awful, endless day, it was like they were stuck in some kind of loop, doomed to repeat the same conversation over and over again until the meaning had all but drained out of the words.

“You saw her arm.” Sienna was curled up in the wide white armchair. She'd had a shower and was wearing a grey terry cloth robe Josh guessed must belong to Dan, and her wet hair was combed back from her face. She looked tired, and terribly young.

“And Hannah said she was acting really strange. She needs help.”

“She couldn't have made that any clearer.” Dan shook his head.

“But the police officer did say he found a nail in the back tire—the tire that blew.”

“Yes, and he also said it was unusual for one to be embedded so deep and so straight.”

“You really think she'd have done that herself? It doesn't make sense,” Josh persisted.

“Another thing to blame on me!” No doubt this time about the triumph in Dan's voice. “You know she was about to accuse me of being addicted to hard-core porn, don't you? Her and that charlatan lawyer of hers. Thank God this will show everyone just how crazy she really is. She could have killed them all. It's a miracle no one was seriously hurt.”

“Dan!” Sienna's warning brought the intended realization.

“Oh, fuck. Sorry, mate. I didn't mean... I forgot...”

He was waiting for Josh to absolve him, but Josh didn't oblige. Dan had hardly seemed to register the news that Hannah had lost the baby—no, what was the way that doctor had phrased it? The baby had died in the womb. They'd all been at the hospital where Hannah and Sasha and the girls had been taken after the accident. When Hannah had whispered to him that she was bleeding, Josh had scanned her scalp anxiously for head wounds before he realized what she actually meant. Then the registrar with the sad eyes and stuffed-up nose had said it might be nothing, but they should run a scan on Hannah while she was there, just to make sure everything was as it should be. Right from the start it had been obvious there was something very wrong. The technician kept passing the electronic thing over Hannah's belly, and then doing it again. And again, not saying anything at all, just staring intently at the monitor.

“I'm terribly sorry,” she'd said after a few, long, silent minutes, and Hannah had made a noise that sounded like it had been ripped from her stomach, and Josh had held her hand uselessly and watched her tears form a damp patch on the hospital sheet. He felt nothing. Wrung out. Empty. It had completely done him in—first the phone call from Dan to say there'd been an accident while he and Sienna were out walking on the Heath. Then the mad dash to the hospital and the visceral relief of seeing Lily, sitting up and gazing with proud awe at the large plaster on her knee; and Hannah, pale and shadow-eyed but still managing to smile weakly at something a nurse was saying to her. For a short while he'd thought everything would be okay, that they'd survived unscathed. On the way to the hospital, he'd made all sorts of promises to all sorts of gods he didn't believe in. He'd never grudge Hannah anything again. She could visit her mum whenever she liked, for however long she liked. They could set up camp in the bloody graveyard if that's what she wanted. And he'd tell her everything that had been going on at work. He'd be a better husband, better father, better provider. And for that short period there in the hospital, he believed his prayers had been answered.

Then came that scan “just to be sure” and that awful silence stretching on and on until something inside him snapped like an elastic band. And that “I'm terribly sorry” that made him realize he hadn't been listened to after all. How could he have believed otherwise?

And now this. This curious emptiness.

Dan, on the other hand, seemed full to bursting, to the point that he couldn't seem to stay still. He'd been in this same supercharged mood when Josh first saw him at the hospital. He'd appeared with September clinging to his arm as Josh and Lily were waiting for Hannah to have an X-ray on her wrist to make sure it wasn't broken. This was before the scan and the silence that came after it. Sasha was in a different ward, he told them. She might not be out for a couple of days. Psychological assessment, Josh learned, when September and Lily wandered off to the vending machine to ogle the chocolate. The doctors were taking the wounds to Sasha's arm as a literal cry for help. Not to mention the mystery surrounding the circumstances of the accident where Sasha had failed to slow at the junction, ending up smashing into the car parked on the opposite side of the intersection. A blow-out, she insisted. She'd had no chance of controlling the car. And there was the nail and the burst tire to prove it. The nail that might or might not have been put there on purpose.

“You see,” Dan kept saying. “You see how things are?”

With Sasha being detained on the general ward, ostensibly for a bump on her head, but really so that staff could find out whether she presented a threat to herself or anyone else, it was obvious that Dan should move back into the house to look after his traumatized daughter. September had pleaded for Sienna to come, too, and had spent the evening curled up in her lap on the same armchair Sienna was sitting in now. The two girls were asleep upstairs. Josh had been in such shock following the scan he hadn't had the energy to protest when Dan insisted he and Lily come back with them rather than stay by themselves, even arranging for Toby to go to the neighbor who looked after him whenever Josh and Hannah went on holiday. Josh docilely strapped his very quiet daughter into the back of the Golf and followed Dan's unmistakable red car back to the very house he'd been lurking outside just the night before. Saying goodbye to Hannah at the hospital had been both a nightmare and—he hated himself for thinking it—a relief. After the scan, they'd been given the option of going home and letting the miscarriage happen naturally, or Hannah staying overnight and having a procedure in the morning to eliminate once and for all what the sad-eyed consultant called “the products of conception.”

“Products of conception? She meant our baby,” Hannah had sobbed afterward. The consultant had told them the baby was smaller than might have been expected at this stage, which could mean it had died up to ten days before, but Hannah had refused to listen. “It was the crash,” she repeated stubbornly, and then... “It was Sasha.”

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 crying—fat, round tears that bubbled up, unbidden, from the vast empty space inside him as if summoned by someone else. Or maybe she noticed but didn't comment.

“Just go,” she'd said, closing her eyes. Her hair on the pillow was the color 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 low-stakes poker and drinking cocktails they took turns inventing, Sunday lunchtimes that bled softly into evenings, sitting so long around the round white 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 okay. 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, and she was still so young, 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 tire 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 there last night, outside Sasha's house in his usual spot, and all these thoughts had been crowding around 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, with a strange, hungover feeling.

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 granulated. “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 months. 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 seconds 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 off and smashed, leaving discolored rectangles of paint on the wall. 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 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 into my own house
, I might add, and stolen! The bitch. 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. The phone calls to his headmaster—his stomach lurched involuntarily at the thought.

Then the doubts came again. But the nail... 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 take another look in on September,” 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 three and a half months ago, waking up to each other every morning, using a bathroom still warm and damp with the other person's smell, hearing the private noises they made in their sleep. And yet she'd done all this, faked robberies, lied, cut words into her arm so deeply that doctors doubted the scars would ever fully heal.

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 like she was glued there, following him from room to room as if 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 package 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 remnants of various loaves all covered in green powdery mold. The smell was atrocious. Only the cereal cupboard was well stocked, although the packages were all open, the contents mostly stale.

“The poor child must have been living on 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 that Dan's clothes were all over the place, many of them in pieces, jagged scraps of material lying in multicolored heaps around the floor. Sasha's underwear, much of it dirty from the looks of it, was similarly strewn about, as was her makeup, both here and in the en suite bathroom, where there was also a box of razor blades beside the sink 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 all the devastation as anything out of the ordinary.

The little girl shrugged. “Katia stopped coming after Mummy hit her.”