The Fallout (30 page)

They would come through this, she decided now as Josh picked up the remote and flicked his way through the channels in a way she was determined not to resent. Their marriage would be one of the lucky ones. She realized now how many threats lurked around the shady edges of their relationship, but they were wiser now, warier. If nothing else, the tragedy of Dan and Sasha had shown them not to rely on anyone else. They were the unit, the two of them, and Lily of course. Everyone else was on the outside.

On y va
, as Sienna would say.

She leaned back into Josh's arm, closed her eyes and allowed herself, finally, to relax.

Lucie/Sienna, age twenty-four

Lucie is back, that
Petit Cochon
. I think it's because of the baby. Before that I hadn't seen her for years. I wish she'd go away again. I'm worried what she'll do. I'm worried what she already has done. Gobble, gobble, gobble. When Lucie and Eloise were in the womb, Lucie ate Eloise. No really, she did! There's a name for it. Vanishing Twin Syndrome, where one twin grows so big it totally absorbs the other. Poof! Now you see it, now you don't. Mother never got over it. Imagine expecting two little babies and ending up with one giant, greedy one! No wonder she cracked. She couldn't get past what Lucie had done, couldn't stop thinking about Poor Fragile Eloise, whom she'd failed to protect.

And now my baby needs protecting, too. Not from Sasha anymore, now that she's locked away merrily self-harming somewhere (that thing on her arm that so shocked them all—amateur time, baby!). It's Hannah and Josh who are the threat now. Lucie doesn't like how they stuck by Sasha and refused to write statements even when they knew she wasn't fit. Mothers should be fit to be mothers. It's a basic maternal requirement. Lucie made the call to Josh's work, and wrote the things on Hannah's Twitter. She popped that note into little Lily's bag. She doesn't like how much influence Hannah and Josh have over Dan. She doesn't like the history they all shared before, the way they keep telling inside jokes that only they understand. Some of us non-Jurassics were still at school when all these oh-so-amusing things happened. But you know what Lucie especially doesn't like? Those two little girls. They're sitting in the back of the car right now. I can see the tops of their heads. From where I'm sitting behind the wheel they could almost be twins. Double trouble!

I love those two girls, really I do, but I'm scared Lucie doesn't understand.

She's been quite a bitch to them, setting one against the other, strongest against weakest. It's survival of the fittest, she says. But then she's insane. All that stuff she did to Sasha—the break-in, the escalator—I'm scared of what will happen when the baby comes. Lucie is such a greedy-guts. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

We're on our way to the seaside for the day, heading down to Sussex for a nice long walk near the cliffs on the South Downs. Me and the two double-trouble girls. I offered. I'm happy to help out. They've all been through so much—Dan and Josh and Hannah—and I feel like it's my fault. If I hadn't fallen in love with Dan none of it would have happened, so this is the least I can do. I just wish Lucie hadn't come, too. Sitting there in the front seat beside me as if she was invited. Cheeky cow! Maybe she'll leave soon. Now that would be a relief. Maybe she'll check her phone and realize she's late for something, unbuckle her belt and go. I'll see her in the rearview mirror—a blur of motion at the edge of my vision. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Lickety-split.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from
WAR OF THE WIVES
by Tamar Cohen.

THE
FALLOUT

TAMAR COHEN

Reader's Guide

Questions for Discussion

1. Why do Hannah and Josh feel so threatened by the breakup of Sasha and Dan's marriage?
   
2. Did your loyalties shift between Sasha and Dan as the narrative progressed, or did you find yourself sticking to one side or the other throughout?
   
3. Do you think
   The Fallout
   presents a convincing depiction of a bitter marriage split?
   
4. What are the difficulties of remaining neutral when close friends split? How could Josh and Hannah have handled things differently?
   
5. What role do Lily and September play in ratcheting up the dramatic tension?
   
6. How much is Dan to blame for Sasha's unraveling? If he'd behaved more sensitively, might the separation have been amicable, or would Sasha have refused to accept it, no matter what?
   
7. What effect do the snippets of Lucie/Eloise have on the pace/mood of the book? Did you guess what they related to?
   
8. Why is Hannah so ambivalent about being pregnant?
   
9. The book alternates between Hannah's point of view and Josh's. Why did the author decide to write it like this? How effective is it?
   
10. Why is Josh unable, or unwilling, to confide in his wife about what's going on at school?
    
11. Do you think Josh and Hannah's relationship is repairable or is it fundamentally flawed?
    
12. A major US study showed that people who have a close friend who gets divorced are 75 percent more likely to get divorced themselves within the next four years. Why does Sasha and Dan's split have repercussions for Josh and Hannah's relationship? Is divorce catching?
    

A Conversation with Tamar Cohen

What was your inspiration for
The Fallout
? Did the story end up the way you first imagined it or did it evolve along the way?

Picture the scene. We are sitting in our closest friends' living room where we have spent so many Saturday nights dancing around the coffee table, and post-Sunday-lunch afternoons splayed out on the sofas listening to our kids playing together outside. Only now there is no playing or dancing as we sit stiffly in between our two friends, trying to intermediate while they rip into each other about which one of them should get the kids on Christmas Day. They are splitting up. And we are slap-bang in the middle. Fifteen years on, I can still recall the particular awfulness of that evening that became the inspiration for my fourth novel,
The Fallout
.

Being stuck in the middle of someone else's relationship is hard. Being stuck in the middle of someone else's unraveling relationship is impossible, yet it's an experience many of us go through. I wanted
The Fallout
to reflect the way being close to one couple's breakup can destabilize your own relationship. And how, no matter how vehemently you swear to remain neutral, sooner or later you're forced to choose sides.

As a starting point, I think
The Fallout
succeeded in portraying that particular hell of being caught up between bitterly warring friends, but as often happens, the characters then took the story off in a direction I hadn't been expecting, and the ending was a total surprise!

Both of the couples in this novel experience relationship strain and extreme emotional stress. How do you develop your characters and what is it like to write about people with such intense stories?

I love to write about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary situations. People in crisis make great subjects because they're pushed to the very extremes of emotions and behavior. When I watched my friends go through their very acrimonious breakup, I was really struck by how they turned, briefly, into people I didn't recognize. Pain and grief and anger made them behave in ways they never would have done normally. They accused one another of terrible things, each trying to win support from friends and family. It was like a kind of temporary insanity where neither could see past their own bitterness, despite the devastating effect on their children. While Dan and Sasha are nothing like my friends in personality or situation, some elements of their real-life behavior are reflected in
The Fallout
(interestingly, they're often the elements the readers find hardest to accept). Having said that, the way Dan and Sasha's story plays out in the book, and the way events so quickly spiral out of control, was totally down to the characters themselves and the unique set of circumstances they find themselves in. While I create the crisis, it's always my characters who dictate what happens next.

Were any of these characters more difficult to write than others? Can you talk about the idea of “likeability” in fictional characters?

I found it hard at first to write from the point of view of Josh. I'd never written from a male perspective before so it took some getting used to. I was constantly asking my partner how he'd react to this situation or that comment. In general, I guess the characters I find hardest to write are those to whom nothing major is happening, so they're not called upon to be emotional or extreme in any way. It's a real knack to write ordinary people going about their ordinary lives and for it not to be boring, and I really admire writers like Ann Tyler, who can do it brilliantly well.

As to likeability, I have to say until my first novel,
The Mistress's Revenge
, came out it hadn't occurred to me that some readers might struggle with a book if they didn't respond positively to the main character. When I read books, all that matters to me is that the main character is believable and interesting enough that you want to find out what happens to them. I have sufficient real-life friends that I don't need to make friends with the characters in books. Are we supposed to “like”
Lolita'
s Humbert Humbert? No. But that doesn't mean we're not compelled to read the book. Similarly, I don't think all of us would “like” Scarlett O'Hara in real life, but we're still fascinated by her story.

The kind of books I write are about people going through extreme situations, and people going through extreme situations are rarely at their best, but they are often at their rawest and therefore at their most interesting. If I tried to write only likeable characters, I'd be bored stiff—and so would the readers.

What was your greatest challenge writing
The Fallout
? Your greatest pleasure?

The greatest challenge was probably depicting the rapid unraveling of Dan and Sasha's relationship in a way that is dramatic, but also convincing. Also,
The Fallout
is primarily about the dynamics between two couples—Dan and Sasha, and Josh and Hannah—so it was also essential to make the reader believe in the friendship between them, even though they're all such different people. The greatest pleasure for me was writing the Lucie/Eloise thread that is interwoven with the main narrative. She's clearly a very disturbed young girl, living with a terrible secret, but she has a very strong voice, with a sardonic wit that I really enjoyed writing.

Can you describe your writing process? Do you create an outline or dive right in? Do you write consecutively or jump around? Do you let anyone read early drafts or do you keep the story private until it's finished?

I usually have an idea for the nub of the book before I begin, that I can often distill into one line—a spurned mistress who stalks her ex-lover, two women who discover at their husbands' funeral that they've been married to the same man, a couple who get unwillingly sucked into their best friends' acrimonious divorce. With that nub in mind, I sit down and start writing. That's when the characters start to appear, and once they're fully formed they dictate the direction the book takes from there. Sometimes I have an ending in mind, but other times, like now, I still don't know where a book is going even when I'm three quarters of the way through, which can be a bit scary!

I always write chronologically from start to finish. I would find it really disruptive to jump to a scene toward the end when I'm still just starting out. Plus I think characters often undergo some kind of journey or transformation throughout a book and if I wrote a later scene too early on, it might not reflect those changes.

I never, ever show anyone a first draft. I'm too easily swayed by other people's reactions and too easily flayed by self-doubt. If someone read my work in progress and didn't rave about it, or even if they tried to make constructive criticisms, I'd probably curl up into a ball and not be able to finish it. Writing 90,000 words is hard enough as it is without having to factor in other people's suggestions, which anyway might turn out to be wildly conflicting.

I have one friend who reads my second or third drafts and then my agent and finally my editor—a small, very select group!

Do you read other fiction while you're working on a book, or do you find it distracting?

I was a reader before I was a writer. Reading novels is the one thing that relaxes me and remains one of my greatest pleasures in life. I wouldn't give it up for anything. In fact it's precisely when I'm working on a book and my stress levels are through the roof that I need the release of reading fiction more than ever.

Very occasionally if I'm reading a book with a very strong style or voice, I'll find myself subconsciously copying it the next time I write. When I read through the finished draft, I can sometimes pinpoint exactly what book was on my nightstand when I wrote a particular scene. And even more occasionally I'll read something so sublime, it'll make me feel there's no point in me bothering to write another word again (take a bow, Kate Atkinson, whose magnificent
A God in Ruins
I'm currently halfway through). More commonly I'll find myself stopping midway through a novel to work out how the writer did something, which doesn't detract from my enjoyment of the book, although it might mean it takes slightly longer to read.

How did you know you wanted to be a writer? Can you describe your first piece of writing and the journey to publishing your first print book?

I always loved writing. I was one of those irritating kids who present their poor parents with endless handmade “books” tied together with string that they dutifully have to find room for on the shelves. But I never imagined I could make a living from writing. After university I did various odd jobs—teaching English in Spain, waitressing—before landing a position as a secretary in a marketing magazine. While (bizarrely) my boss didn't recognize my amazing potential and make me a reporter on day one, working in a magazine environment did lead to an earth-shattering realization—that people who wrote for a living didn't possess some secret qualification the rest of us don't have. Nor are they necessarily any better educated, smarter or funnier. It sounds stupid now, but that realization opened up a door inside my head. I allowed myself to pursue a career in journalism, which I did by bombarding the women's magazine publishing house based around the corner with unsolicited features until they finally gave in and printed one.

During the twenty years I worked as a journalist, I started umpteen novels, but would always get to a point where the doubts hit and I'd give up, convinced I was wasting my time. Even after I started writing nonfiction books on commission from a London publisher, for some reason I couldn't make that leap into full-length fiction.

Then in early 2010, two things happened—the journalism work began to dry up as print magazines and newspapers lost out to free online digital content, and also I experienced a sustained period of insomnia, probably due to worry about the lack of work. Rather than lie in bed angsting, I took to sitting at my computer in the early hours, when there were no distractions, and writing. Within a few weeks I'd written the first ten thousand words of
The Mistress's Revenge
, which is when, as usual, the doubts set in. But this time, instead of shoving the unfinished manuscript in a bottom drawer to fester, I sent it to an agent. She called me in to meet her and told me that the story had commercial potential, but I'd have to finish it before she'd agree to represent me. Three months later, I had a finished draft. Amazingly, that's all it took to get through decades of built-up doubts—just one person telling me it was worth continuing.

Soon after that, a UK publisher made a preemptive offer for the book, and six books later, I'm still with them! In other words, it was an overnight success story—as long as you don't count the forty-seven years that led up to it!