The Fallout (3 page)

Until she had Lily, Hannah had never even held a baby. When friends from the office arrived in the hospital ward on their designer heels, bearing cellophane-crinkling bouquets of flowers that failed to fit into any of the yellowing plastic water jugs on offer, they squealed with laughter and horror at the thought of Hannah attempting to change a diaper.

In a panic she'd tried to make friends with other new mothers in the neighborhood by joining a postnatal mother-and-baby group. The first meeting had been a disaster. She hadn't been able to work out how to unfold Lily's new state-of-the-art stroller and had ended up running the half mile to the hostess's house with her screaming baby in her arms, arriving half an hour late, red-faced and out of breath with aches in every muscle in her body. She'd had no idea a newborn could be so heavy—how had she carried this thing around inside her for nine months? The other women, or so it seemed at the time, had viewed her with suspicion, pulling their own babies a little bit tighter to them as they smiled politely. On the second meeting, though, she'd met Sasha.

“I knew we were going to be friends for life when Hannah changed Lily's nappy right there in front of us because the bathroom was busy and found a bright red rubber band in her poo,” Sasha always liked to tell people. It was a funny story but it mortified Hannah still, the memory of that public exposure of her maternal inadequacy. The rubber-band incident, and a soon-after-discovered mutual wariness of the Proper Mums, as they soon christened the others, cemented their friendship. There's nothing like having babies of the same age to intensify and accelerate a bond. Though Hannah and Josh's two-bedroom flat could have fit a million times into Sasha and Dan's three-floor home it was still only a few streets away, in that mad schizophrenic way of London neighborhoods. Soon they were in and out of each other's houses, introducing husbands, dogs, neighbors, becoming intertwined in each other's lives at a speed that would have been unthinkable in the past, pre-Lily world.

When Hannah went back into the living room, bearing two mugs of steaming tea, she found Sasha curled up on the sofa in a fetal position, sobbing gently. Her tan leather bag. which Hannah had been shocked to discover cost almost as much as she earned in a month, was flung on the far end of the sofa, contents strewn, leaving no room for anyone else, so Hannah dropped a cushion onto the floor next to the coffee table and kneeled on it, drawing her nearly frozen feet under her bottom to keep them warm. Taking a sip from her scalding tea, she surveyed her friend in silence for a moment. She looked just like a child lying there, with her hair all over the place. Hannah's heart constricted as she watched the narrow shoulders shaking. How could Dan do this? Sasha had her moments; she could be controlling as hell and exasperatingly overdramatic. But she had a huge heart and was capable of impulsive acts of jaw-dropping generosity. And she was the mother of his child.

“Come on,” Hannah said, when she could bear the muffled sobbing no longer. “Drink your tea and tell me.”

Sasha's eyes opened as much as they could in their present puffy state. She looked a bit startled, as if she'd forgotten Hannah was even there. She heaved herself up into a sitting position and brought her knees up to her chin, pulling the faded Ramones T-shirt she had on under the denim jacket down over her legs.

“Oh, Hannah. He doesn't love me.”

The words were pieces of broken glass, so painful that Sasha had to spit them out one at a time. Instinctively Hannah leaned forward and flung her arms around her friend.

“I'm sure you're wrong,” she found herself saying.

“He told me,” Sasha continued, oblivious to the lack of surprise in Hannah's voice. “He says he doesn't think he's in love with me anymore. He says he needs to go away for a while, to have some space to work out what to do.”

Hannah's hand, which had been rhythmically stroking Sasha's shoulder, froze. He hadn't told her. The cowardly shit. He hadn't told her there was someone else.

“Hannah, what am I going to do? I love him so much. I can't lose him. I just can't. September is not going to come from a broken home. She is going to have a proper family.”

Sasha's voice had become increasingly shrill and Hannah tensed in case the noise woke Lily. Too late.

“Mummy...” The little voice sounded frightened.

“I'd better go.” Hannah tried to get up but Sasha had her hand on her arm.

“I can't live without him,” she said, staring at Hannah. Her eyes looked wild. “He can't do this to us. I can't be divorced. I
won't
be divorced.”

“Mummy! Mummy!”

“I need to go. Lil's calling me. She needs me.”

Sasha's fingers tightened, viselike.

“She's fine, for God's sake. She'll never stop being such a baby unless you stop mollycoddling her.”

Hannah tore herself away. Her heart was hammering.

“I'll be back in a minute.”

In Lily's room, she held her sniffling child in her arms and tried to calm her down. “Hush now, everything's fine. It's just Auntie Sash.”

By the time Lily had finally gotten back to sleep, Hannah had put the incident from her mind and she was relieved, when she slipped back into the living room, to see that Sasha clearly had, too. Her friend was sitting much straighter on the sofa, sipping from her surely stone-cold tea. She seemed more alert.

“I'm sorry, Hannah, I've been a complete idiot, haven't I?” Sasha scrunched up her face in an abject expression.

Hannah tried to insist that she hadn't.

“I have. I'm completely overreacting as usual. Dan's just having some kind of midlife crisis, isn't he? All he needs to do is go whizzing around Goa on a motorbike for a few weeks and he'll be sorted. Don't you think?”

Hannah looked into Sasha's hopeful, pink-rimmed eyes and said, “Yeah, that's probably it. A midlife crisis.”

Instantly Sasha brightened up, sniffing back the dregs of her tears and opening her eyes a little wider.

“Thanks, Hannah. I knew you'd help. You're always so good at putting things in perspective.”

Guilt tugged at Hannah's heart.

“You don't think he could have...found somebody else?”

Sasha's eyes narrowed.

“No.” The word practically snapped out. “What I mean is, I asked him that. It was the very first thing I asked, but he swore there was no one. And one thing about Dan and me is that we never, ever lie to each other. He knows that if he ever started lying to me, that'd be the end.”

For a second, Hannah almost said it. Then the moment passed.

“More tea?”

Chapter 3

Josh experienced mixed feelings when he finally got a chance to sit down on his lunch break and noticed the three missed-call messages. While he was relieved Dan had got in touch after all these days of unnerving silence, he couldn't help being irritated by his friend's inability to grasp the fact that not everyone could take personal phone calls any time of day. Some people had jobs that required leaving their mobile phones in their bags, switched to silent, quite often not looking at them from one end of the day to the other.

“Want to go for a coffee?”

Pat Hennessey flopped down heavily in the empty chair opposite Josh in the uninspiring staff room. The school management was forever promising to make improvements—new carpet, a decent coffee machine—but something else always came along that took priority. The basketball court needed resurfacing. The security system had to be updated. In a large inner-city secondary school, where resources were always stretched to the maximum, the state of the teachers' lounge was always going to come way down the shopping list.

Pat's cheeks were looking particularly pink, as if he'd been rushing, and there was an unspoken appeal in his puppy-like brown eyes. Josh had got on well with Pat when he'd transferred in three years earlier from a smaller school in Merseyside. But since Pat had been made head of the English department, things had become a little awkward. Josh always told him, truthfully, that he didn't mind, and that he'd only gone for the promotion himself because Hannah had pushed him into it. She'd been upset, accusing him of a “failure of self-belief,” but he was glad not to have the extra responsibility, particularly with Lily still being so young. But still, his friendship with Pat had never completely returned to normal.

“Love to, but I have to make a call and I think it might be quite an epic one.”

Pat looked hurt. “Another time, then.”

Outside, Josh pushed his way past the throngs of students.

“Mr. Hetherington? Sir? Are you going to meet your girlfriend, sir?”

The kids found it endlessly amusing to quiz him about his private life, as if it was an inconceivable joke that he might have a life outside of them and the school.

“That's right,” he said, humoring them. “One of my huge harem of women.”

Before they could ask him what a harem was, he moved off across the main road and into the little park opposite. There were a few knots of schoolchildren eating chips and swigging from cans of fizzy drinks, but he ignored them and made for an unoccupied bench under the trees. Finally he was ready to call back Dan. Yet still he hesitated, his finger hovering over his phone's keypad.

Josh was nervous about talking to Dan. Since Sasha had turned up in the middle of the night and fallen apart in their living room the previous weekend, things had gone eerily quiet. Hannah had tried calling a few times and left messages, but Sasha hadn't called her back. She'd been nagging him to call Dan, too, but he'd put it off. They needed a bit of time on their own to sort things out, he'd told her. “Coward,” she'd said. Hannah still didn't really get how men dealt with each other. Dan and Josh spoke on the phone to make arrangements for meeting up, or swapped the occasional email when they heard a joke they thought the other might enjoy. Josh would have been embarrassed to call Dan out of the blue and quiz him about his relationship. That wasn't the kind of friendship they had. It wasn't the kind of friendship he'd
ever
had.

There was always the chance, he supposed now, that they'd patched things up, Dan and Sasha. Maybe the crisis had passed and they were holed up dealing with the aftermath. Certainly Sasha had seemed fairly positive by the time she finally left their house last Sunday morning. When Josh had gotten up, she'd been sitting on the sofa waiting for Hannah to bring her pancakes, only her swollen eyes signaling that anything had ever been wrong. Josh had been amazed after she'd left when Hannah told him about the scene he'd missed.

“Thank God it was you who answered the door,” he'd said fervently, without thinking.

“Charming!”

He hadn't meant it to sound unsympathetic. He liked Sasha. When she was on form, there was no one more entertaining. It's just she could be so high-maintenance. So inclined to histrionics. Too much Sasha always left him feeling tired.

Still, she didn't deserve to be treated the way Dan was treating her. Josh liked to think he was a fairly nonjudgmental person. He knew the world wasn't black and white and that good people sometimes did bad things. But Dan was acting in a pretty shabby way.

“Dan?”

The phone had been answered on the third ring, which was unusually quick for Dan. When he was working, he tended to answer belatedly with a slightly hurried edge to his voice so that you felt you were interrupting, even if he'd called you first.

“Josh. Mate. Thank fuck for that!”

If Josh had been expecting to find Dan sounding subdued or chastened, he was very mistaken. The younger man sounded almost ebullient, as if he was just bursting to share some good news that he was supposed to be keeping to himself.

“Listen. I've got a favor to ask you. Can I stay at your place for a few days?”

Immediately Josh felt wrong-footed. This wasn't what he'd been expecting.

“Er, but we haven't got a spare...”

“Don't worry about that. I'll sleep on the sofa. It wouldn't be the first time.”

“But Sasha...”

“Sasha was the one who suggested it. She's been absolutely brilliant. Since Sunday we've been talking and talking, more than we've ever done before, and she totally gets it. About me needing some space and everything. I was talking about moving out and renting a studio flat, and she said, ‘Why don't you stay with Josh and Hannah for a little bit? Just as a first step?'”

Alone on his park bench, Josh frowned. From the corner of his eye, he could see Jake Schofield from Year Ten loitering behind a tree, smoking a cigarette.

“So what do you say?”

There was a hint of impatience in Dan's voice that grated a bit. Dan was so used to getting his way and charming everyone he met, that he tended to get quite childish if things didn't immediately go as planned. Josh had noticed it before. But this wasn't an argument over whether to go to the Railway or the King's Head.

“Look, Dan. I want to help you. But you obviously haven't told Sasha that you're seeing someone else, and I just don't want to be party to it. You understand, don't you?”

A pause.

“I haven't told her because it's not an issue. I told you, the thing with Sienna is a
result
of the situation with Sasha, not a cause of it. Anyway, I've put it on hold for now. I want to put all my focus on Sasha and September during this critical time.”

Dan sounded as if he was reading a prepared statement.

“So you promise you're not going to be running off to see your girlfriend as soon as Sasha's back is turned, using Hannah and me as a smoke screen?”

“What? Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence.”

Typical. Dan was the one getting outraged, and Josh was left feeling guilty.

“Listen. Breaking up a family is never easy, it's not something you do on a whim. I've really thought about this. I don't want September to be caught in the middle of two warring parents. I want her to see that it's possible for two people to go on loving and respecting each other, even if they're not together anymore.”

“And Sasha sees it the same way, does she?”

“Absolutely. Like I say, she's been amazing. That's why I want to come and stay with you. It's a kind of halfway-house thing to get us all used to the idea of being apart. It'll be easier for her. Baby steps and all that.”

You had to hand it to Dan. There he was about to destroy two people's lives and yet he could leave you feeling like he was the selfless one.

“I'll talk to Hannah. But you have to promise not to be in touch with this
Sienna
, okay?”

“Sure.”

“And when would you be wanting to avail yourself of our deluxe sofa facilities?”

“Tomorrow. It's Saturday and we could come over with September and make a big deal of me going on a sleepover at your house. September could sort of settle me in, so it would seem like an adventure, not like me sneaking away in the night with my suitcases.”

“I'll talk to her. That's all I can do.”

* * *

“I still don't like it.”

Hannah was going around the living room performing a grudging and superficial tidy-up—she'd already wiped a damp cloth over the coffee table, going around the pile of magazines and books and leaving a narrow ring of dust around the bottom like an extra frill. Now she was picking up odd bits of jigsaw puzzles and old lidless felt pens and cramming them into the bottom drawer of the low table where the television sat, which had become the home for all odds and ends that didn't fit anywhere else. Josh held back from asking why she was keeping pens that clearly didn't work.

“Well, you're the one who spoke to Sasha. It's what she wants.”

“Yes, but she doesn't know the truth.”

“That's not what Dan says. I told you, he said Sienna is out of the picture.”

“For now.”

“Whatever. We can't do anything about it now. They'll be here any minute.”

Hannah sighed. “I know, and just look at this place. Dan's used to living in a house with a stay-at-home wife and a cleaner twice a week. How's he going to cope in a place where you can't even see through the shower door because of the lime scale?”

“That's not lime scale, it's dirt. Anyway, who cares if Dan's appalled by our nonexistent domestic hygiene? In fact it'll be better if he is, in a way. At least it means he won't stay long.”

Josh was feeling very odd about the forthcoming visit. Growing up an only child of much older parents, he'd never really done the whole sleepover thing. His parents' house was the kind of place where the doors had cushioned strips of padding around them to stop them from slamming and there were three sets of slippers neatly lined up in the entrance hall ready to be stepped into the moment you came through the door. As a result he'd never been entirely easy about having people to stay, always fretting about whether they needed a glass of water, or a reading light, or that he might keep them awake with his snoring, even though as far as he knew he only snored when he was extremely drunk.

Hannah was different. She came from a noisy household where just thirteen months separated her from her younger sister, Gemma. Hannah had always shared a room and was therefore accustomed to going to sleep with other people around, waking up with a visiting friend's feet in her face, or covered in a bathrobe because someone else had filched her duvet in the night. Most of the time her mum was the kind of parent who loved her house to be full of extra children, thinking nothing of whipping up an extra boiled egg or two in the mornings. And even when she was having one of her periodic episodes where she'd confine herself to her room, the girls still invited their friends over so she'd know where they were rather than risk triggering her paranoia by venturing out of the house.

Overnight guests didn't usually cause Hannah the same kind of anxiety as Josh, but today she was very definitely stressed. She'd been working until late the night before on a feature about analyzing sex dreams. “Want to hear some of mine?” Josh had asked when she told him the subject, but she hadn't responded. Their sex life, or lack of it, was too sensitive a subject for jokes. Then Lily had gotten up in the night and come into their bed with them, so Hannah was tired and out of sorts, and not in the mood to host this summit meeting, which is what they'd unofficially christened this morning's visit.

“Mummy, Mummy, where's my pink dress?”

Lily appeared in the doorway of the living room wearing only a pair of flowery underpants. Josh's heart turned over at the sight of her still-rounded little belly. She had been such a chubby, happy little thing, sitting on his lap and leaning back so that he could blow raspberries into the soft skin of her tummy. But now she was lengthening out. Already she'd lost the dimples in her knees and elbows, and occasionally he'd seen a worried look he hated on her face in place of the usual shy smile.

“It's in the wash, Lily-put,” Hannah told her. She was busy sweeping up dirt and paperclips and old pencils and batteries from under the sofa cushions with a dustpan and brush so she didn't see their daughter's face crumple.

“But I need it!”

“You've got lots of other lovely dresses, Lil.” Josh got up from the table, where he'd been attempting to mark some essays, and stood in front of her. “Shall we go and find one?”

“No. I want that one. All my other dresses are stupid.”

“Who says that?”

“Tember.”

Lily started crying, great, fat, round tears rolling down her pink cheeks. Josh kneeled down so that he could give her a cuddle.

“September is just jealous,” he said to her. “Remember how she wanted your wizard outfit so much her Mummy and Daddy had to go out and buy her one just like it?”

Lily didn't reply but he felt her head nodding into his shoulder.

“Well, I'm going to have words with Sasha about it.”

Hannah had put down the dustpan and brush and was sitting backward on her heels looking across at them.

“September shouldn't be saying things like that. It's not kind.”

Josh turned to her and made a face.

“I really think we could leave this to the girls to sort out, don't you, sweetheart?”

Hannah raised her eyebrows at him behind Lily's back, but merely said, “Okay, you're right. I keep forgetting Lily's a big girl now.”

Josh took Lily into her room to help her into her Second Best Dress—a scale which was decided, she explained solemnly, by how big a circle the skirt made when she twirled around. She was just demonstrating when the doorbell rang, followed by Toby's answering bark.