The Broken Read Online Free Page B

teenagers. She’d always imagined she’d take the minimum maternity leave and be straight back to the nine to five (or in her case more like ten to eight), but when Lily came along she realized how unsuited babies were to be slotted in around work like superfluous padding. Reluctantly she’d resigned from the magazine and gone freelance and now spent her days wildly oscillating between feeling guilt-ridden at spending too little time on her child, and guilt-ridden at spending too little time on badly paid freelance work. Even when she was with her daughter, she was feeling guilty at how boring she often found it, the whole monotonous routine of feeding and washing and playing and filling in those endless hours with repetitive games that had to be played again and again, and books you’d read so many times you thought you might explode at the sight of them. Nobody ever talked about the boredom – it was as though if you admitted it, you were admitting you didn’t love your child.
    Until she had Lily, Hannah had never even held a baby before. 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 sight of Hannah attempting to change a nappy.
    In a panic she’d tried to make friends with other new mothers in the neighbourhood by joining a postnatal mother-and-baby group run by the local NCT. The first meeting had been a disaster. She hadn’t been able to work out how to put up Lily’s new all-singing, all-dancing pushchair and had ended up, an hour and a half late, practically in tears, having run the half-mile to the hostess’s house with Lily in her arms, arriving red-faced and out of breath with a screaming baby and 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 the last 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, smiling 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 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 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 fitted a million times into Sasha and Dan’s three-storey pile it was still only a few streets away, in that mad schizophrenic way of London neighbourhoods. Soon they were in and out of each other’s homes, introducing husbands, dogs, neighbours, 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 foetal position, sobbing gently. Her tan leather bag that Hannah had been shocked to discover cost more than she earned in a fortnight was flung on the bottom end of the sofa, contents strewn, leaving no room for anyone else, so Hannah dropped a cushion on to the floor next to the coffee table and knelt on it, drawing her 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 Sasha’s narrow shoulders shaking. How could Dan do this? Sasha had her moments, she could be controlling as hell and exasperatingly