by Tamar Cohen
‘So what have you been doing during the day, while Hannah thinks you’re at work?’
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 almost 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 of his enforced leave driving around aimlessly, circumventing the congestion-charge zone, 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 the lawyer, but he could understand how it had happened. 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 towards him, fixing him with those green-flecked eyes, that made him feel as if he was actually being heard for the first time in a long time. He’d left feeling lighter, less like he was being crushed slowly in one of those car-cubing 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 Tate Modern. 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, since obviously he couldn’t mention them to Hannah. It didn’t help either that Sienna was gorgeous – he’d seen the way men looked at him when they were out together. What has he got? was what those looks were saying. Mostly, though, he justified it to himself. They were keeping each other company. And Sienna was keeping him sane. She was so refreshingly unjudgemental, 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 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 woman ten years older who’d already given birth before, but Sienna seemed to have none of the problems Hannah was always complaining about – the tiredness, the floods of tears for no reason, the way her favourite food suddenly tasted all wrong. Sometimes he thought Hannah was actually losing it a bit. Like when she’d suddenly started quizzing him about Gemma and whether he’d ever fancied her. Where had that come from?
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. 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 unhappiness, she told Josh (weren’t those the exact words he’d used himself?). But then equally you couldn’t help who 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 three 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 there’d have to be some changes. She and Dan couldn’t possibly look after a child in Sienna’s 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 which grew their own vegetables on the roof. She called it suburbia until she remembered Josh lived there too. But Josh thought she was probably right. It was pretty suburban. It didn’t even have a tube. It had been Hannah who’d wanted to live there in the first place, if he remembered rightly. He would have been happy somewhere cheaper and more convenient.
‘I just wish things hadn’t got 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 – the notion of this girl 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.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just 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 his tongue felt suddenly monstrous.
‘I know that, Josh. 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 anonymous call and get them to withdraw it. Any ideas?’
Josh swallowed the unchewed meat and felt it lodge painfully in his throat before sliding down to his stomach, where it sat uneasily. Sasha had done this. He was convinced of it. 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 as ink through his bloodstream.
Sasha’s house loomed up at the side of the road. It was one of a short terrace of three wide three-storey white modernist houses that had been built in the 1950s, on the road that joined Crouch End to its more established neighbour Highgate. This road was cut into what originally would have been a hill; the houses on one side dropped down towards the allotments and cricket club and, way down below, a secondary school, while the houses on Sasha’s side were set up from the road, accessed by steep steps. Their width made them extra imposing from pavement level, which is 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 tightened like a band around his chest, leaving him short of breath.
The steps were in full view of the road, but one side, out of range of the light by the front door, was in darkness. That was the side Josh kept to. That was the side he always used now, even in daylight when there was little differentiation in shade. He’d been here a few times over the past week. Standing in these very shadows, keeping an eye on things. Watching. Waiting.
On either side of the steps were terraces 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.
He wanted to do damage.
At the top of the steps there was a polished-hardwood decked terrace running the entire width of the house. In the middle was the front door, and on either side were wide windows that made the most of the light, one from 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 the kitchen, but they’d recently changed all that with the help of a team of architects, switching the kitchen to the top floor, along with Dan’s office and September’s bedroom, and dividing up the lower space. Dan had confided that the renovatio
ns – 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 mould 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 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 shop shutter.
He didn’t know how long he watched her. Nor could he have said why. Only that something was drawing him here to lurk in the darkness outside someone else’s house. While his own wife and child waited at home, he drew some sort of perverse satisfaction from watching someone else’s family like a peeping Tom, feeling something inside him crystallizing, becoming hard and blade-sharp. He had no idea what it was, but was content to bide his time until it all became clearer. After all, time was one thing he had plenty of.
26
Could Josh be having an affair?
The idea had never crossed Hannah’s mind before. Not because she felt their relationship to be inviolable, but because she’d always felt she held the balance of power in their marriage. He had so often told her he was lucky to have her that she had long since accepted it as fact. Not that she’d ever put it into so many words, but if it came right down to it, which thankfully it never had, she felt sure she was the beloved in the relationship and Josh the one who loved. Or rather, she always had felt sure of it – until now.
Suddenly, nothing felt certain any more. Josh, a man who normally relished routine to an almost compulsive degree, was acting inconsistently. Since that afternoon when he’d come home early from school with a headache – unusual in itself – there’d been a couple of occasions where he’d arrived back from work late without any real reason. Another time he’d been there when she got home from picking Lily up from school, saying it was an inset afternoon, although previously the staff had always been required to stay on school premises during inset days. Then there were the nights where she’d wake to find him staring glassily at the ceiling or else vanished altogether. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he’d whisper, sliding back into bed later. ‘I took the dog out for a walk.’
Often after these disruptions she’d fall back into a light, fitful sleep and find herself a teenager again, standing in the hospital, looking down on Gemma’s grotesquely swollen face, trying to ignore the large white pad on her forehead that Hannah knew hid a gaping hole, a horrible, black oozing space where there used to be bone, tissue and skin. And always playing in the background on an endless loop, the image of her mother, her features at first distorted by anger, then later by self-reproach. ‘What have I done?’ this dream mother wailed, clutching the metal rail that ran along the side of Gemma’s bed, so her knuckles pressed up white through her skin like teeth through babies’ gums.
Occasionally, in these dreams, Gemma wouldn’t be in bed. Instead she’d be climbing out of the passenger seat of the car and limping down the road towards Hannah, her bleeding head dangling from her neck like a flower on a broken stalk. ‘I’m sorry,’ Hannah would call to her. ‘I couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t my fault.’ But she knew she was lying and would wake up bathed in sweat that, in her panicked, bleary state, she mistook for blood.
She stopped working. Or rather she continued sitting at the table attempting to work, but she stopped producing anything worthwhile. Instead she doodled spirals on the lined paper of her notebook and wrote her name in jagged writing over and over again until the pen tore clear through the page. She made so many excuses to so many people she stopped recognizing what was true and what fiction.
The baby expanded inside her like a balloon. Sometimes she felt it might never stop growing until one or other of them popped like a piñata.
The disrupted sleep and the ongoing worry about unmet deadlines and unpaid bills that buzzed constantly in her head like white noise on a radio made Hannah feel increasingly as if her mind was detaching from her body and floating formlessly above it. Strange memories of her mother’s depressive illness and the devastating effect on their childhood began to surface in her mind for the first time in years.
Even Lily didn’t provide the usual comfort. Now when Hannah looked at her she felt weighed down by the inadequacy of her parenting and the many ways she failed her daughter daily. She looked at other children at the school being whisked off to ballet and gymnastics and private French lessons – all the things she’d always insisted that her tight work schedule wouldn’t allow. She knew other mothers who picked up their children, handbags bulging with magazines and books to fill the long hours that would have to be spent loitering outside piano teachers’ houses and church halls given over twice a week to the teaching of Kumon Maths. Hannah used to eye those mothers, laden with half-size guitars and trumpets, with amusement, but now the sight of those misshapen black cases was like a reproach. When she walked past open windows on Saturday mornings and listened to the tortuous sounds of a child practising scales, sawing away on a violin, she no longer felt relief, but a stabbing guilt. If only she’d been a more attentive mother, would Lily now be less reticent, more confident in social situations? That was the thing no one ever told you about being a parent. How you were constantly getting glimpses of your child’s alternate, idealized selves – which they could have achieved if only you’d been happier, more consistent, less prone to doubt. Better.
For the hundredth time in the last few days, Hannah found herself longing to speak to Sasha. From the little she knew, Sasha had had the very worst example in her own mother, and after the last few weeks could herself hardly qualify for Mother of the Year, but nevertheless she had a way of minimizing Hannah’s maternal neuroses without dismissing them or trivializing them. She had issues with control when it came to how she parented September, but she was always full of praise for how Hannah managed to earn a living as well as look after a young child. In the end you just had to do your best, didn’t you?
Well, didn’t you?
Hannah had covered every inch of her open notebook in biro doodles, so that the scant writing she’d done was all but lost. She pushed it away in disgust and desultorily clicked her laptop into life. Her Twitter account popped up on screen. As usual, she automatically went first to her notifications, to find out if anyone had tweeted her directly. She did this more out of habit and hope than for any other reason. She hardly ever seemed to get any direct interaction these days. Perhaps that was due to her own patchy online attendance, her tendency to lurk rather than to post. She’d originally set up her account for work reasons, because everyone else was doing it, and as a way to publicize pieces she’d written and to promote herself as a freelancer, but some days Twitter made her feel like the loneliest person in the world. So many busy, productive people leading busy, productive lives, going to parties, to book clubs, climbing mountains for charity, winning awards, while she sat at home mired in inactivity, drawing spirals on a pad.
But when she clicked on the Notifications button, there was evidence of recent activity. Lots of it. Immediately she began to feel better. But as she scrolled down, her momentary good humour dissolved, replaced by a growing sense of horror. All of the messages were from accounts she didn’t recognize. And every one was abusive, pouring vitriol on pieces she’d written and even on Hannah herself.
The stalking piece in the Mail by @HHfreelance was the most shoddy piece of journalism I’ve ever read.
Hope @HHfreelance is an intern and isn’t being PAID to turn out the drivel she writes.
And the one that made the blood in her veins ice over:
@HHfreelance wrecks people’s lives.
An inter
net troll, surely, making a random attack? The thought didn’t make her feel any better. The list went on and on. Someone had been very busy. Someone hated her enough to do all that.
Hannah sat back in her chair staring at the screen, her hand held up to her mouth to stopper the scream she could feel building in her throat. Her heart thudded so painfully against her ribcage she felt convinced, for one awful moment, that it might dislodge the baby inside her.
Someone hated her.
Someone really hated her.
For Hannah, who had spent her entire life in the pursuit of being liked, it was a sickening realization. All through her childhood, while Gemma would go barging into situations acting on impulse and not caring what people thought, Hannah had loitered behind, brokering and negotiating her way. It limited what you could get done, and it tended to dilute the passion in life, like the watery squash their mother made them, but at least she could go to bed knowing she hadn’t made an enemy that day – and for her that was the most important thing.
‘Because of an accident that wasn’t even your fault, you feel like you have to be nice to everyone for the rest of your life,’ Gemma had once said accusingly, angered because Hannah had insisted on inviting a couple of girls no one liked, and who clearly didn’t like them either, to a party, just so they couldn’t accuse her of leaving them out. Hannah knew she was right, but she couldn’t help it. Teachers, cashiers at the supermarket till, neighbours, other dog walkers, people who had nothing to do with her life and who she’d never see again: she wanted them all to like her. It was a compulsion. She forced herself to go back through the list of notifications. They were all from brand-new accounts with few followers, and when she clicked to see who those followers were, they turned out to be carpet-cleaning companies and loan agencies – faceless computer-run accounts, on the whole. Those were the only people who’d see these malicious tweets, she told herself, trying to calm herself with logic. Hannah put her hand to her stomach, aware she was still trembling.
