Coming to Netflix in May: Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
Now here’s a strange one, coming your way from the people behind The Monster Next Door and The Serial Date Swindler . It’s a podcast within a documentary, a kind of podumentary, if you will. In June 2019, popular podcaster Alix Summer, better known for her All Woman series of podcasts about successful women, branched out into a one-off project, which she called Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! , about a local woman who was born on the same day as her. As the project progressed, Summer started to learn much more about her unassuming neighbour than she could ever have imagined and, within weeks, Summer’s life was in shreds and two people were dead. Absolutely spine-chilling stuff, with some shocking glimpses into the darkest corners of humanity: we guarantee you’ll be bingeing the whole thing in a day.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Screen is dark. Slowly the interior of a recording studio is revealed.
The text on the screen reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 20 June 2019
A woman’s voice fades in slowly. ‘You comfortable there, Josie?’ ‘Yes. I’m fine.’
‘Great. Well. While I’m setting up, why don’t you just tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?’
‘Oh. Erm …’
‘Just so I can test the sound quality.’
‘Right. OK. Well, I had toast. Two slices of toast. One with jam.
One with peanut butter. And a mug of tea. The posh stuff from Marks. In the golden box.’
‘With milk?’
‘Yes. With milk.’
There is a short pause.
The camera pans around the empty recording studio, zooming in on details: the lines going up and down on the monitor, an abandoned pair of headphones, an empty coffee cup.
‘How is it? Is it OK?’
‘Yes. It’s perfect. We’re all set. I’ll count down from three, and then I’ll introduce you. OK?’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘Great. So … three … two … one … Hello, and welcome! My name is Alix Summer and here is something a little different …’
The audio fades and the shot goes back to darkness. The opening credits start to roll.
Saturday, 8 June 2019
Josie can feel her husband’s discomfort as they enter the golden glow of the gastropub. She’s walked past this place a hundred times. Thought: Not for
us . Everyone too young. Food on the chalkboard outside she’s never heard of. What is bottarga? But this year her birthday has fallen on a Saturday and this year she did not say, Oh, a takeaway and a bottle of wine will be fine, when Walter had asked what she wanted to do. This year she thought of the honeyed glow of the Lansdowne, the buzz of chatter, the champagne in ice buckets on outdoor tables on warm summer days, and she thought of the little bit of money her grandmother had left her last month in her will, and she’d looked at herself in the mirror and tried to see herself as the sort of person who celebrated her birthday in a gastropub in Queen’s Park and she’d said, ‘We should go out for dinner.’
‘OK then,’ Walter had said. ‘Anywhere in mind?’
And she’d said, ‘The Lansdowne. You know. On Salusbury Road.’
He’d simply raised an eyebrow at her and said, ‘Your birthday. Your choice.’
He holds the door open for her now and she passes through. They stand marooned for a moment by a sign that says Please wait here to be seated and Josie gazes around at the early-evening diners and drinkers, her handbag pinioned against her stomach by her arms.
‘Fair,’ she says to the young man who appears holding a clipboard. ‘Josie. Table booked for seven thirty.’
He smiles from her to Walter and back again and says, ‘For two, yes?’
They are led to a nice table in a corner. Walter on a banquette, Josie on a velvet chair. Their menus are handed to them clipped to boards. She’d looked up the menu online earlier, so she’d be able to google stuff if she didn’t know what it was, so she already knows what she’s having. And
they’re ordering champagne. She doesn’t care what Walter thinks.
Her attention is caught by a noisy entrance at the pub door. A woman walks in clutching a balloon with the words Birthday Queen printed on it.
Her hair is winter blonde, cut into a shape that makes it move like liquid.
She wears wide-legged trousers and a top made of two pieces of black cloth held together with laces at the sides. Her skin is burnished. Her smile is wide. A group soon follows behind her, other similarly aged people;
someone is holding a bouquet of flowers; another carries a selection of posh gift bags.
‘Alix Summer!’ says the woman in a voice that carries. ‘Table for fourteen.’
‘Look,’ says Walter, nudging her gently. ‘Another birthday girl.’ Josie nods distractedly. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Looks like it.’
The group follows the waiter to a table just across from Josie’s. Josie sees three ice buckets already on the table, each holding two bottles of chilled champagne. They take their seats noisily, shouting about who should sit
where and not wanting to sit next to their husbands for God’s sake, and the woman called Alix Summer directs them all with that big smile while a tall man with red hair who is probably her husband takes the balloon from her hand and ties it to a chair back. Soon they are all seated, and the first bottles of champagne are popped and poured into fourteen glasses held out by fourteen people with tanned arms and gold bracelets and crisp white shirt
sleeves and they all bring their glasses together, those at the furthest ends of the table getting to their feet to reach across the table, and they all say, ‘To Alix! Happy birthday!’
Josie fixes the woman in her gaze. ‘How old do you reckon she is?’ she asks Walter.
‘Christ. I dunno. It’s hard to tell these days. Early forties, maybe?’
Josie nods. Today is her forty-fifth birthday. She finds it hard to believe. Once she’d been young and she’d thought forty-five would come slow and impossible. She’d thought forty-five would be another world. But it came fast and it’s not what she thought it would be. She glances at Walter, at the fading glory of him, and she wonders how different things would be if she hadn’t met him.
She’d been thirteen when they met. He was quite a bit older than her; well, a lot older than her, in fact. Everyone was shocked at the time, except her. Married at nineteen. A baby at twenty-two. Another one at twenty-four. A life lived in fast forward and now, apparently, she should peak and crest and then come slowly, contentedly down the other side, but it doesn’t feel
as if there ever was a peak, rather an abyss formed of trauma that she keeps circling and circling with a knot of dread in the pit of her stomach.
Walter is retired now, his hair has gone and so has a lot of his hearing and his eyesight, and his mid-life peak is somewhere so far back in time and so mired in the white-hot intensity of rearing small children that it’s almost
impossible to remember what he was like at her age.
She orders feta and sundried tomato flatbread, followed by tuna tagliata (‘The word TAGLIATA derives from the verb TAGLIARE, to cut’) with mashed cannellini beans, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot (‘Veuve Clicquot’s Yellow Label is loved for its rich and toasty flavours’) and she grabs Walter’s hand and runs her thumb over the age-spotted skin and asks, ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, of course. I’m fine.’
‘What do you think of this place, then?’ ‘It’s … yeah. It’s fine. I like it.’
Josie beams. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad.’
She lifts her champagne glass and holds it out towards Walter’s. He touches his glass against hers and says, ‘Happy birthday.’
The smile fixes on Josie’s face as she watches Alix Summer and her big group of friends, her red-haired husband with his arm draped loosely across the back of her chair, large platters of meats and breads being brought to their table and placed in front of them as if conjured out of thin air, the sound of them, the noise of them, the way they fill every inch of the space with their voices and their arms and their hands and their words. The energy they give off is effervescent, a swirling, intoxicating aurora borealis of grating, glorious entitlement. And there in the middle of it all is Alix Summer with her big smile and her big teeth, her hair that catches the light, her simple gold chain with something hanging from it that skims her gleaming collarbones whenever she moves.
‘I wonder if today is her actual birthday too?’ she muses. ‘Maybe,’ says Walter. ‘But it’s a Saturday, so who knows.’
Josie’s hand finds the chain she’s worn around her neck since she was thirty; her birthday gift that year from Walter. She thinks maybe she should add a pendant. Something shiny.
At this moment, Walter passes a small gift across the table towards her. ‘It’s nothing much. I know you said you didn’t want anything, but I didn’t
believe you.’ He grins at her and she smiles back. She unpeels the small gift and takes out a bottle of Ted Baker perfume.
‘That’s lovely,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much.’ She leans across and kisses Walter softly on the cheek.
At the table opposite, Alix Summer is opening gift bags and birthday
cards and calling out her thanks to her friends and family. She rests a card on the table and Josie sees that it has the number 45 printed on it. She
nudges Walter. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Forty-five. We’re birthday twins.’
As the words leave her mouth, Josie feels the gnawing sense of grief that she has experienced for most of her life rush through her. She’s never found anything to pin the feeling to before; she never knew what it meant. But
now she knows what it means.
It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right.
She sees Alix getting to her feet and heading towards the toilet, jumps to her own feet and says, ‘I’m going to the ladies.’
Walter looks up in surprise from his Parma ham and melon but doesn’t say anything.
A moment later Josie’s and Alix’s reflections are side by side in the mirror above the sinks.
‘Hi!’ says Josie, her voice coming out higher than she’d imagined. ‘I’m your birthday twin!’
‘Oh!’ says Alix, her expression immediately warm and open. ‘Is it your birthday today too?’
‘Yes. Forty-five today!’
‘Oh, wow!’ says Alix. ‘Me too. Happy birthday!’ ‘And to you!’
‘What time were you born?’ ‘God,’ says Josie. ‘No idea.’ ‘Me neither.’
‘Were you born near here?’ ‘Yes. St Mary’s. You?’
Josie’s heart leaps. ‘St Mary’s too!’
‘Wow!’ Alix says again. ‘This is spooky.’
Alix’s fingertips go to the pendant around her neck and Josie sees that it is a golden bumblebee. She is about to say something else about the
coincidence of their births when the toilet door opens and one of Alix’s friends walks in.
‘There you are!’ says the friend. She’s wearing seventies-style faded jeans with an off-the-shoulder top and huge hoop earrings.
‘Zoe! This lady is my birthday twin! This is my big sister, Zoe.’
Josie smiles at Zoe and says, ‘Born on the same day, in the same hospital.’
‘Wow! That’s amazing,’ says Zoe.
Then Zoe and Alix turn the conversation away from the Huge
Coincidence and immediately Josie sees that it has passed, this strange moment of connection, that it was fleeting and weightless for Alix, but that for some reason it carries import and meaning to Josie, and she wants to grab hold of it and breathe life back into it, but she can’t. She has to go back to her husband and her flatbread and let Alix go back to her friends and her party. She issues a quiet ‘Bye then’ as she turns to leave and Alix beams at her and says, ‘Happy birthday, birthday twin!’
‘You too!’ says Josie.
But Alix doesn’t hear her.
1 a.m.
Alix’s head spins. Tequila slammers at midnight. Too much. Nathan is pouring himself a Scotch and the smell of it makes Alix’s head spin even faster. The house is quiet. Sometimes, when they have a high-energy babysitter, the children will still be up when they get home, restless and annoyingly awake. Sometimes the TV will be on full blast. But not tonight. The softly spoken, fifty-something babysitter left half an hour ago and the house is tidy, the dishwasher hums, the cat is pawing its way meaningfully across the long sofa towards Alix, already purring before Alix’s hand has even found her fur.
‘That woman,’ she calls out to Nathan, pulling one of the cat’s claws out of her trousers. ‘The one who kept staring. She came into the toilet. Turns out it’s her forty-fifth birthday today too. That’s why she was staring.’
‘Ha,’ says Nathan. ‘Birthday twin.’
‘And she was born at St Mary’s, too. Funny, you know I always thought I was meant to be one of two. I always wondered if my mum had left the
other one at the hospital. Maybe it was her?’
Nathan sits heavily next to her and rolls his Scotch around a solitary ice cube, one of the huge cylindrical ones he makes from mineral water. ‘Her?’ he says, dismissively. ‘That is highly unlikely.’
‘Why not!’
‘Because you’re gorgeous and she’s …’
‘What?’ Alix feels righteousness build in her chest. She loves that Nathan thinks she’s pretty, but she also wishes that Nathan could see the beauty in less conventionally attractive women, too. It makes him sound
shallow and misogynistic when he denigrates women’s appearances. And it makes her feel as if she doesn’t really like him. ‘I thought she was very pretty. You know, those eyes that are so brown they’re almost black. And all that wavy hair. Anyway, it’s weird, isn’t it? The idea of two people being born in the same place, at the same time.’
‘Not really. There were probably another ten babies born that day at St Mary’s. Maybe even more.’
‘But to meet one of them. On your birthday.’
The cat is curled neatly in her lap now. She runs her fingertips through the ruff of fur around her neck and closes her eyes. The room spins again. She opens her eyes, slides the cat off her lap and runs to the toilet off the hallway, where she is violently sick.
Sunday, 9 June
Josie awakens suddenly from a shallow puddle of a dream, a dream so close to the surface of her consciousness that she can almost control it. She is in
the Lansdowne. Alix Summer is there and calling her to join her at her table. The table is dressed with extravagant bowls of fruit. Her friends leave. The pub is empty. Alix and Josie sit opposite each other, and Alix says, ‘I need you.’ And then Josie wakes up.
It’s the buses.
The buses always wake her up.
They live right next to a bus stop on a busy, dirty road on the cusp of Kilburn and Paddington. The large Victorian villas on this street were built, according to a local history website, in 1876 for wealthy merchants. The road once led to the spa at Kilburn Priory and would have rumbled with the wheels of carriages and clicked with the hooves of horses. Now every grand villa on the road is split into clunkily converted apartments and the stucco exterior walls are stained the colour of old newspaper by the endless traffic that passes so close. And the buses. There are three on this route and one
passes or stops outside every few minutes. The hiss of the hydraulics as they pull up at the bus stop is so loud that it sometimes sends the dog cowering into the corners.
Josie looks at the time. It is 8.12 a.m. She pulls back the heavy denim curtains and peers into the street. She is a matter of feet from the faces of
people sitting on the bus, all oblivious to the woman spying on them from her bedroom window. The dog joins her, and she cups his skull under her hand. ‘Morning, Fred.’
She has a mild hangover. Half a bottle of champagne last night and then they finished with a Sambuca. Much more than Josie is used to drinking.
She goes to the living room, where Walter sits at the dining table in the window overlooking the street.
‘Morning,’ he says, throwing her a small smile before turning his gaze back to his computer screen.
‘Morning,’ she replies, heading to the kitchen area. ‘Did you feed the dog?’
‘Yes, indeed I did. And I also took him out.’
‘Thank you,’ she says warmly. Fred is her dog. Walter never wanted a dog, least of all a handbag dog like Fred, who is a Pomchi. She takes full responsibility for him and is grateful to Walter whenever he does anything to help her with him.
She makes herself a round of toast and a mug of tea and curls herself into the small sofa in the corner of the room. When she switches on her phone,
she sees that she had been googling Alix Summer late last night. That explained why she’d been dreaming about her when she woke up.
Alix Summer, it appears, is a reasonably well-known podcaster and journalist. She has eight thousand followers on Instagram and the same on Twitter. Her bio says: ‘Mum, journo, feminist, professional busybody & nosey parker, failed yoga fanatic, Queen’s Park dweller/lover.’ Then there is a link to her podcast channel, which is called All Woman , where she
interviews successful women about being successful women. Josie
recognises some of the names: an actress, a newsreader, a sportswoman. She starts listening to one: a woman called Mari le Jeune who runs a global beauty empire. Alix’s voice in the introduction is like velvet and
Josie can see why she’s pursued this particular career path. ‘What’s that you’re listening to?’ she hears Walter ask.
‘Just a podcast thing. It’s that woman, Alix, who I met in the pub last night. My birthday twin. It’s what she does,’ she replies.
She carries on listening for a while. The woman called Mari is talking about her marriage at a young age to a man who controlled her. ‘Everything I did, he controlled, everything I ate, everything I wore. He turned my children against me. He turned my friends against me. My life was so small, like he took it and squeezed every last drop of me out of it. And then, in 2005, he died, quite suddenly. And it was like pressing the “reboot” button on my life. I discovered that all through those dark years with my husband, when I thought I was all alone in the world, there’d been a cast of people waiting in the background for me to come back to them, they’d been there all along. They picked me up and they took me with them.’
Then Alix’s voice is back. ‘And if your husband – and I hope this doesn’t sound like a harsh or unfeeling thing to say – but if he hadn’t passed away at such a young age, what do you think might have been your path? Do you
think you might have found your way to where you are now? Do you think in any way that your success, everything you’ve achieved, that there was maybe some kind of destiny at play? Or do you think that it was only the
tragic passing of your husband that allowed you to follow this path?’ ‘That’s such a good question and, actually, I think about it all the time. I
was thirty-six when my husband passed away. At the time of my husband’s prognosis, I was nowhere near strong enough to leave, I’d been subconsciously waiting until the children were older. But I’d already spent so many years dreaming about the things I would do when I did leave that I had the blueprint for my life without him all drawn up, even if I didn’t
know how I would ever get away. So it’s possible, yes, that I could have followed this path without losing him to cancer. But it just happened sooner, I suppose. Which gave me longer to really build the company, to know it,
nurture it, grow with it. It would have been different if I’d waited. And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no grey areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way. And that proved very helpful to me in terms of negotiating the endless possibilities that opened up to me during those first few years. I would not be where I am at this very moment had he lived.’
Josie presses pause. Her breath has caught slightly; she feels almost winded. Death is a clean break . She glances across the room at Walter, to see if he’s noticed, but he is oblivious. She presses play and listens to the rest of the podcast. The woman called Mari now owns three properties around the world, employs all four of her children in her family business and is the founder of the biggest anti-domestic-violence charity in the UK. At the end of the podcast Josie sits for a moment and lets all she has heard about this woman’s extraordinary life percolate through her. Then she goes back to the Google results and scrolls through Alix’s Instagram feed for a while. She sees, as she’d known she would, a large kitchen with an island, red-headed children on windswept beaches, views from London skyscrapers, cocktails and cats and rose-gold holidays. Alix’s children look young, probably no older than ten, and Josie wonders what Alix was doing for all those years before; what do you do when you’re thirty years old if
you’re not raising children? How do you spend your time?
She pauses at a photograph of Alix and her husband. He is tall, even compared to Alix, who is taller than most, and his thatch of thick red hair looks much redder under the effect of some kind of filter than it looks in
real life. The caption says: ‘Fifteen years today since you came into my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been you and me’, followed by a string of love-heart emojis.
Josie has social media accounts, but she doesn’t post on them. The thought of slapping a photograph of her and Walter on to the internet for people to gawp at and to judge makes her feel queasy. But she’s happy for others to do so. She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.
Sunday dawns hot and sticky. Nathan is not beside her in their bed and Alix tries to pull the fragments of the night before into some semblance of a bigger picture. The pub, the champagne, the tequila, the walk home around the park, talking to the ducks in the petting zoo through the fence, wack
wack , Nathan pouring Scotch, the cat curled on her lap, the smell of the scented reed diffuser in the downstairs toilet mixed with the smell of her vomit, peering into the kids’ rooms, eyelashes touching cheeks, nightlights, pyjamas, Nathan’s face in the mirror next to hers, his mouth against her neck, hands on her hips, wanting sex, NO ARE YOU ACTUALLY MAD, then bed. But the pillow on Nathan’s side of the bed has not been touched. Did they have a row? Where is he sleeping?
She gingerly climbs off the bed and peers into the en suite. He is not there. She takes the stairs down to the hallway and hears the sound of her children. The television is on in the kitchen, and Eliza is lying on the sofa in front of it with the cat lying on her chest. Leon is on the laptop. Breakfast
detritus is scattered across the long cream kitchen counter. ‘Where’s Dad?’
Eliza glances up. She shrugs. ‘Leon. Where’s Dad?’
He removes his headphones and squints at her. ‘What?’ ‘Where’s Dad?’
‘I dunno.’
Alix wanders into the garden. The flagstones on the back terrace are already warm underfoot. Nathan is not in the shed; nor is he in the studio. She pulls her phone out of her pyjama pocket and calls him. It rings out. ‘Did you see him earlier?’ she asks Eliza as she walks back into the
kitchen.
‘Nope. Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can we go to the bookshop today?’ ‘Yes. Of course. Of course we will.’
Alix makes coffee and drinks water and eats toast. She knows what’s happened and she knows what to expect. It hasn’t happened for a few months, but she remembers the shape of it, the awful, grinding nightmare of it. The pleasure of her birthday night lies already in tatters in her memory.
As she sits with her second coffee, she remembers something from the night before.
The woman in the toilets who shared her birthday. What did she say her name was? Or maybe she didn’t.
She wonders what the woman is doing this morning. She wonders if her husband has disappeared silently in the night, leaving her to wake alone.
No, she thinks, no, of course he hasn’t. That’s not what other husbands do. Only hers.
He reappears at 4 p.m. He is wearing the same clothes he was wearing the night before. He brushes past her in the kitchen to get to the fridge, from where he pulls out a Diet Coke and drinks it thirstily.
Alix eyes him, waits for him to talk.
‘You were out cold,’ he says. ‘I was still … buzzing. I just needed to …’ ‘Drink some more?’
‘Yes! Well, no. I mean, I could drink here. But I just wanted to be, you know, out .’
Alix closes her eyes and breathes in hard. ‘We were out all night. All night, from six until midnight. We saw all our friends. We drank for six solid hours. We had fun. We came home. You had whisky. And then you wanted more?’
‘Yeah. I guess. I mean … I was very drunk. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just followed my urges.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Into Soho. Giovanni and Rob were there. Just had a few more drinks with them.’
‘Until four in the afternoon?’ ‘I took a room in a hotel.’
Alix growls gently under her breath. ‘You paid to sleep in a hotel rather than come home?’
‘I wasn’t really capable. It just seemed the best option at the time.’
He looks appalling. She tries to imagine him stumbling around Soho in the middle of the night, tipping drink after drink down his throat. She tries to imagine what he must have looked like reeling into a hotel at four in the
morning, his bright red hair awry, breathing the putrid breath of a long night of alcohol and rich foods into the receptionist’s face, before collapsing into a hotel bed and snoring violently in an empty room.
‘Didn’t they kick you out at midday?’
He rubs at the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and grimaces slightly. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Apparently, they made quite a few attempts to get me up. They, erm, they had to let themselves in in the end. Just to check I wasn’t, you know, dead.’
He smirks as he says this, and Alix realises that twenty years ago this would have been something they would have joked about. It would have been funny, somehow, a grown man drinking for nearly twelve hours, going AWOL in Soho, forcing hotel staff to enter his room because they thought he might be dead, finding him, no doubt, spread-eagled and half-naked on
the bed, oblivious, hungover, revolting.
She would have laughed. But not any more.
Not now she’s forty-five. Not now.
Now she’s simply disgusted.
Josie listens to nearly thirty episodes of Alix’s podcast over the following week. She listens to stories of women bouncing back from a hundred different kinds of crud: from illness, from bad men, from poverty, from war, from mental health issues and from tragedy. They lose children, body parts, autonomy; they are beaten, they are humiliated, they are downtrodden. And then they rise up, each and every one of them, they rise up and find goals they didn’t know they had. The podcast series has won awards and Josie can see why. Not only are the women’s stories inspiring, but Alix’s approach is so empathetic, so intelligent, so human that she would make an interview with anyone she chose to talk to sound moving. Josie tries to uncover more about Alix from the internet, but there’s very little to go on.
She has rarely been interviewed, and when she is, she gives little away. Josie assumes her to be a self-made woman, in control of her life. She
assumes she has a similar tale to tell as the women whom she interviews, and Josie entertains fantasies about crossing paths with Alix again, swapping their own stories, Alix maybe mentoring Josie somehow, showing her how to be the person she thinks she was always meant to be.
Then one afternoon there is a new photo on Alix’s Instagram feed. It’s a birthday party for one of the children. There are balloons with the number eleven on them and the daughter with the red hair is dressed as a punk fairy and the father stands behind her watching proudly as she purses her lips to blow out the candles on a huge pink cake and other people stand behind, their hands cupped halfway to applause, faces set in smiles. And then Josie zooms in to the background at the sight of something familiar. A school photograph on the sideboard behind the group, the two children in crested polo shirts, pale blue with a dark blue logo. And she realises that Alix Summer’s children go to the same school that Roxy and Erin went to when they were small and suddenly she feels it again, that strange wire of connection, that sense that there is something bringing her and Alix Summer together, something in the universe. She pictures Alix Summer in the same playground that she had spent so many years of her life standing in, going into the same overheated office to pay for school trips and dinner money, sitting squashed on the same benches at the back of the same small hall to watch assemblies and nativities, hanging out the same navy and sky- blue uniforms to dry.
Born on the same day. In the same hospital.
Celebrated their forty-fifth birthdays in the same pub, at the same time. And now this.
It means something, she’s sure it does.
Monday, 17 June
Alix watches her husband in the kitchen, his hair still wet from the shower, the back of his shirt stuck to his skin – she’s never understood why he doesn’t dry himself properly before he gets dressed – drinking coffee from his favourite mug and nagging the children to move faster, eat up, get their shoes on. He’s acting as if it’s a normal Monday, but it is not a normal Monday. It is the Monday after his second bender in a row. The Monday after he failed to come home yet again and appeared once more, bedraggled and pitiful, on a Sunday afternoon, stinking of the night before. It is a Monday when Alix has started seriously wondering about the future of their marriage again. If she keeps wondering about the future of their marriage in this way, this could well be the Monday that marks the beginning of the end. Nathan has always been a walking list of pros and cons, from the very first time she met him. She’d even written a list after their third date to help her decide whether or not she should carry on seeing him. His behaviour
these last two weekends has suddenly added a huge weight to the cons column, which is bad because the pros have always been quite slight. Being a good dancer, for example. Great on a second date, but not so important fifteen years down the road with two children, two careers and a future to worry about.
At eight fifteen Nathan leaves. He calls out his goodbyes from the hallway. It’s been a long time since they habitually kissed when leaving the house. Ten minutes after that, Alix walks the children to school. Leon is grumpy. Eliza is hyper.
Alix walks between them, looking at her phone, checking her emails, looking at websites for the puppy she has promised they will get some time this year, an Australian Shepherd that should, ideally, have mismatched
eyes and hence is proving impossible to find, about which Alix is secretly relieved. She hasn’t got space in her head right now for a puppy, as much as she misses having a dog in the house.
She’s just finished recording the thirtieth episode of All Woman ; it’s launching next week and then after that she wants to try something new.
The theme has run its course and she’s ready for a new challenge, but she’s still waiting for inspiration to strike and her diary is empty and an empty diary is as stressful as a full diary when it comes to a career.
The children are gone a few minutes later, sucked into the maelstrom of the playground, and Alix turns to head home. After a cloudy morning, the sun suddenly breaks through and dazzles her. She delves into her handbag, looking for her sunglasses, and then, when she’s found them, she looks up and sees a woman standing very close to her. The woman is immediately familiar. She thinks for a brief moment that she must be a mother from the school and then it hits her.
‘Oh,’ she says, folding down the arms of her glasses. ‘Hello! You’re the woman from the pub. My birthday twin!’
The woman looks surprised, almost theatrically so. ‘Oh, hello!’ she parrots. ‘I thought you looked familiar. Wow!’
‘Are you – do you have children here?’ Alix gestures at the school.
‘No! Well, at least, not any more. They did come here but left a long time ago. They’re twenty-one and twenty-three.’
‘Oh. Proper grown-ups!’ ‘Yes, they certainly are.’ ‘Boys? Girls?’
‘Two girls. Roxy and Erin.’ ‘Do they still live at home?’
‘Erin does, the oldest. She’s a bit of a recluse, I suppose you might call her. And Roxy – well, she left home when she was quite young. Sixteen.’
‘Sixteen. Wow! That is young. I’m Alix, by the way.’ She offers her her hand to shake.
‘Josie,’ the woman replies.
‘Nice to meet you, Josie. And who’s this?’ she asks, noticing a tiny caramel-and-cream-coloured dog on a lead at Josie’s feet.
‘This is Fred.’
‘Oh, he’s adorable! What is he?’
‘He’s a Pomchi. Or at least, that’s what they told me. But I’m not so sure now he’s full-grown. I think he might be more of a mix than that. I do wonder about the place we got him from – I’m not entirely sure they were kosher, you know, now I think back on it. I keep meaning to get one of
those DNA tests. But then, you know, I just look at him and I think, whatever.’
‘Yes,’ Alix agrees. ‘He’s gorgeous whatever he is. I love dogs.’ ‘Do you have one?’
‘No. Not at the moment. We lost our girl three years ago and I haven’t quite been able to get my head around replacing her. But I have been
looking. The kids, you know, they’re at that age where I think having a dog will be really good for them: coming into adolescence, the teenage years.
Teeny was my dog, the dog I had before I had kids. This one would be for them. But we’ll see.’
She reaches down to pet the dog, but it backs away from her. ‘Sorry,’ says Josie, overly apologetically.
‘Oh,’ says Alix, ‘he’s shy. That’s fair enough.’
Alix glances at Josie and sees that she is staring at her meaningfully. It makes her feel uncomfortable for a moment but then Josie’s face breaks into a small smile and Alix sees that she is, as she’d thought on the night they met in the pub, quietly, secretly pretty: neat teeth, rose-petal lips, a small Roman nose that gives her face something extra. Her hair is hazel brown and wavy, parted to the side and tied back. She’s wearing a floral- print T-shirt with a blue denim skirt and has a handbag also made of blue denim. Alix notices that the dog’s collar and lead are blue denim too and senses a theme. Some people have that, she ponders, a repeat motif, some
defining aesthetic tic that somehow makes them feel protected. Her friend’s mother only bought things that were purple, she recalls. Everything. Purple. Even her fridge.
‘Anyway,’ Alix says, unfolding her sunglasses and putting them on. ‘I’d better get on. Nice to see you again.’
She turns to leave, but then Josie says, ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about actually. If you’ve got a minute. Nothing important. Just … to do with us being birthday twins. That’s all.’ She smiles apologetically and Alix smiles back.
‘Oh,’ she replies. ‘Now?’
‘Yes. If you have a minute?’
‘I’m so sorry, I can’t really now. But maybe another time.’ ‘Tomorrow?’
‘No, not tomorrow.’ ‘Wednesday?’
‘Oh God, Josie, I’m sorry, I really am. But I’m busy pretty much the rest of the week, to be honest.’
She starts to leave again but Josie places a hand gently on her arm. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘It would really mean a lot to me.’
There is a sheen of tears across Josie’s eyes; she sounds desperate
somehow, and Alix feels a chill pass through her. But she sighs softly and says, ‘I have a spare hour tomorrow afternoon. Maybe we could grab a quick coffee.’
Josie’s face drops. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I work afternoons.’
Alix feels a sense of relief that maybe she has swerved the commitment.
But then Josie says, ‘Listen. I work at that alterations place, by Kilburn tube. Why don’t you come along tomorrow – we can chat then? It won’t take longer than a few minutes, I promise.’
‘What is it that you want to chat about?’
Josie bites her lip, as if considering sharing a secret. ‘I’ll tell you
tomorrow,’ she replies. ‘And if you’ve got anything that needs altering, bring it along. I can give you a twenty per cent discount.’
She smiles, just once, and then she walks away.
6 p.m.
Josie works part-time: midday to five-thirty, four days a week. She’s worked at Stitch for nearly ten years, ever since it originally opened. It was her first-ever job, at the age of thirty-five. She’d always made clothes for
the girls when they were little, and given that she left school at sixteen with virtually no exams and then spent the next ten years looking after her husband and raising children, she didn’t have many skills to draw on when she finally decided it was time for her to do something outside the house.
She could have worked with children – in a school, maybe. But she’s not great with people and this job is not public-facing. She sits behind her sewing machine next to a huge sash window which overlooks the tube
tracks and rattles in its frame every time a train goes past. She chats with the other women occasionally, but mainly she listens to Heart FM on her
earphones. She spent the whole of today sewing large fake-fur beards on to printed images of a groom’s face on twenty stag night T-shirts. They were all off to Riga apparently. But usually it’s just hems and waistbands.
Walter is sitting at the dining table in the window when she gets home, staring at the laptop. He turns and hits her with a single smile when he hears her. ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘How was work?’
‘Work was fine.’ She thinks about telling him about the fake-fur beards but decides that, really, it would lose in the telling.
‘How was your day?’ she replies, scooping the dog into her arms and kissing his head.
‘Quiet. Did some research into the Lake District.’ ‘Oh, that’s nice. Find anything good?’
‘Not really. Everything seems so expensive. Feels like one big rip-off.’
‘Well, remember, I’ve had my windfall. We could probably stretch it a bit further this year.’
‘It’s not about whether we can afford it,’ he says. ‘Don’t like feeling ripped off.’
Josie nods and puts the dog back on the floor. Half the reason the dog is not a real Pomchi is that Walter refused to pay the going rate for a real Pomchi and was determined he could get a bargain. She’d just gone along with it.
‘What shall we have for dinner?’ she says. ‘There’s loads in the fridge.
Some of those readymade meatballs. I could make a pasta?’
‘Yeah. That’d be great. Put some chilli in it. I fancy something spicy.’
Josie smiles. ‘I’m just going to get changed first,’ she says. ‘Then I’ll start.’
She walks past Erin’s room to get to hers. The door is shut as it always is.
She can hear the squeak of the gaming chair in Erin’s room, the expensive one they bought her for her sixteenth birthday that’s held together with duct
tape these days. Walter puts WD40 on the base every few months, but it still squeaks when she moves. Josie can hear the click of the buttons on the controller, and the muted sound effects leaking from Erin’s headphones.
She thinks about knocking on Erin’s door, saying hi, but she can’t face it. She really can’t face it. The stench in there. The mess. She’ll check in on her tomorrow. Leave her to it for now. She touches the door with her
fingertips and keeps walking. She acknowledges the guilt and lets it pass away like a cloud.
But as soon as the guilt about Erin passes, her concern about Roxy turns up; they always come in a pair. She picks up the photo of Erin and Roxy that sits on top of the chest of drawers in her bedroom, taken when they
were about three and five. Fat cheeks, long eyelashes, cheeky smiles, colourful clothes.
Who would have guessed? she thinks to herself. Who would ever have guessed?
And then she thinks of Alix Summer’s children this morning in their Parkside Primary uniforms: the girl on a snazzy scooter, the boy scuffing his feet against the pavement, their smooth skin, and their hair that she
knows without going anywhere near them will smell of clean pillowcases and children’s shampoo. Young children don’t exude smells. That happens later. The shock of scalpy hair, of acrid armpits, cheesy feet. And that’s just the beginning of it. She sighs at the thought of the sweet children she once had and resets the photo on the chest.
She changes and washes her hands, heads back to the kitchen, opens the fridge, takes the meatballs from the fridge, a can of chopped tomatoes and some dried herbs from the cupboard, chops an onion, watches Walter tapping at the buttons on his laptop in the window, sees a bus pass by,
registers the faces of the passengers on board, thinks about Roxy, thinks about Erin, thinks about the way her life has turned out.
When the meatballs are simmering in their tomato sauce, she covers the pan and opens another cupboard. She pulls out six jars of baby food; they’re the bigger jars for 7 month + babies. They’re mainly meat and vegetable blends. But no peas. Erin will not countenance peas. Josie takes off the lids and microwaves them. When they’re warm, but not hot – Erin will not eat hot food – she stirs them through and places them on a tray with a teaspoon and a piece of kitchen roll. She takes a chocolate Aero mousse from the
fridge and adds that to the tray; then she takes the tray to the hallway and leaves it outside Erin’s room. She doesn’t knock. Erin won’t hear. But at some point between Josie leaving the food and Josie going to bed tonight the baby-food jars will reappear empty outside Erin’s room.
Another bus passes by. It’s empty. Walter closes his laptop and gets to his feet. ‘I’ll take the dog out, before we eat?’
‘Oh! That’s OK, I can do that.’
‘No. It’s good for me. Fresh air. Exercise.’ ‘But are you all right picking up after him?’ ‘Just kick it in the gutter.’
‘You can’t do that, Walter.’
‘Course I can. His shits are like rabbit droppings anyway.’
‘Please pick it up,’ she beseeches. ‘It’s not nice leaving it there.’
‘I’ll see,’ he says, taking the dog’s lead from Josie’s outstretched hand. ‘I’ll see.’
From the front window she watches them leave. Fred stops to sniff the
base of a tree and Walter pulls him along impatiently, his eyes on his phone. Josie wishes she was the one walking Fred instead. Dogs need to sniff things. It’s important.
She stirs the meatballs on the hob and then adds a few flakes of dried chilli. She pours water into a pot and puts it on to boil. She turns on her
phone and goes to the browser and types in ‘Roxy Fair’. Then she goes into ‘Tools’ and sets the timings to ‘Past week’ so that she only sees the most recent results. She does this twice a day, every day. Every time there is nothing. Roxy has most probably changed her name by now, she knows that. But still, you can’t stop looking. You can’t just give up.
At 8 p.m. Walter returns with the dog. ‘Did he poo?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’ ‘Very sure.’
He’s lying, but Josie isn’t going to push it.
They eat their spaghetti and meatballs in front of the TV. Walter makes out it’s really spicy and knocks back his pint of water theatrically and Josie laughs indulgently. They get up to go to bed at ten o’clock. The empty baby-food jars are outside Erin’s room. Josie takes them to the kitchen and rinses them for the recycling. Walter is brushing his teeth in the bathroom, naked from the waist up. He looks like an old man from behind. It’s easy to
forget what he once was. Josie gets into her pyjamas and waits for Walter to finish in the bathroom, then she goes in and brushes her teeth, brushes her hair, washes her face, smooths cream into her skin and on to her hands. In bed she picks up her book, opens it and reads for a while.
At 11 p.m. she turns off her bedside light and says goodnight to Walter. She closes her eyes and pretends to sleep.
So does Walter.
After half an hour she feels him leave the bed. She hears his feet soft against the carpet. Then the creak of the floorboards in the hallway. Then he is gone, and she stretches out across the empty bed, knowing that it is hers for the rest of the night.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows an empty floral armchair in a large open-plan studio.
From the side of the screen a young woman appears.
She wears green dungarees over a cropped black vest top and has tattooed sleeves on her arms.
She sits on the armchair, crosses her legs and smiles at the camera.
The text at the bottom of the screen says:
Amy Jackson, Josie and Walter Fair’s neighbour
Amy, laughing: ‘We called her Double Denim.’
Interviewer, off-screen: ‘And why was that?’
Amy: ‘Because everything she wore was denim. Literally.
Everything.’
Screen switches briefly to a photo of Josie Fair in a denim skirt and jacket.
Interviewer: ‘When did you move into the flat next door to Josie and Walter Fair?’
Amy: ‘I suppose it was late 2008. The same year I had my first baby.’
Interviewer: ‘And what did you think about Josie and Walter, as neighbours?’
Amy: ‘We thought they were really kind of weird. I mean, he was OK. We thought he was her dad, when we first moved in. He always nodded and said hello if we passed him in the hallway. But she was really unfriendly, acted like she was a bit better than anyone? But then sometimes I wondered if maybe she was just being standoffish because she was trying to keep people out of her business, you know? If maybe there was stuff going on, behind closed doors.’
Interviewer: ‘Did you ever meet their daughters?’
Amy: ‘Yes. When we first moved in we used to see both the girls quite a lot. I guess Erin was about twelve, Roxy must have been
about nine, ten? It was a loud household. A lot of shouting. A lot of slammed doors. And then one day, I guess about five or six years ago, it suddenly went really quiet. And we never really knew why. Until all this happened.’
Interviewer: ‘All this?’
Brief pause.
Amy: ‘Yes. All this. All the killings. All the deaths.’
Screen fades to black.
Tuesday, 18 June
Stitch is a lovely bright place, formed inside the skeleton of what was once a Victorian haberdashery. It still has the original curved bow windows at the front and a huge sash window at the back overlooking the tube tracks. In between are six sewing machines in two rows. Alix spots Josie at the
machine nearest the back. She has earphones in, and her hair is tied back into a low ponytail. Alix takes her canvas bag to the desk and smiles.
‘Hi,’ she says, ‘is Josie in today?’
The woman calls over her shoulder to Josie, who looks up and then pulls out her earphones and smiles widely when she sees Alix. She holds up a finger and mouths ‘Just one minute’ and then finishes what she’s doing.
‘Hi, Alix,’ she says, brushing bits of thread and lint off her jeans, ‘you came!’
‘Yes! You reminded me that I had things I’ve been meaning to get altered since literally before I had children.’
She opens the bag and shows Josie two dresses, one of them a maxi dress with straps that are too long, another a maternity dress she’s always wished she could still wear because the print is so pretty.
‘You’ll need to put this one on,’ Josie says, holding out the maxi dress. ‘So we can see how far to take the straps up. Here.’ She pulls back the curtain on a changing cubicle. ‘I’ll just be out here, when you’re ready.’
Alix takes the dress from Josie and steps into the cubicle, slips out of her summer dress and puts on the maxi dress. It’s odd to feel Josie’s hands against the skin on her shoulders and her upper arms as she fiddles with the straps. ‘Strange cut,’ she says. ‘Given that you’re already quite tall. You’d think the straps would be perfect on you. Can’t imagine anyone shorter standing a chance with this dress. It’s like they think all women are meant to be built like giraffes.’
She slides pins into the fabric and then stands back and smiles. ‘That OK?’ she asks, turning Alix towards the mirror.
Alix nods. ‘Perfect.’
Then Alix changes into the maternity dress and she and Josie chat about pregnancy as she pins the waist into shape. Her hands are fluttery around Alix’s midriff, and she smells like dust overlaid with body spray.
Alix redresses and waits while Josie rings the work through the till,
applies the 20 per cent discount with a flourish and presents her with the bill. ‘So,’ Alix says. ‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’
Josie glances quickly about herself, checking that nobody is listening in, and then says, ‘I saw that you’re a podcaster. I mean, I heard you saying your name in the Lansdowne that night and thought it sounded familiar so I googled you and realised why I’d heard of you. I’m not like a stalker or anything. And I listened to some of your podcasts. So inspiring. Those women! I mean, the things they’ve been through. It’s just incredible. And I
…’ She pauses and checks around herself again. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound strange, but I wondered, have you ever thought about doing a podcast about someone who’s about to change their life, rather than someone who already has?’
‘Oh!’ says Alix, in surprise. ‘No. No I haven’t. But I can see how that could be interesting.’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought. You could follow someone’s progress as they break through their barriers and achieve their goals. As they’re doing it.’
‘Yes. Absolutely. But I suppose the problem is that people often don’t
realise that their lives are changing for the better until after the event, when they stop to look back.’
Josie frowns. ‘I’m not sure that’s true. Because listen, it’s happening to me. It’s happening to me, right now. I’ve been living the same life for thirty years. Thirty years. Been with my husband since I was fifteen years old.
Nothing has ever changed. I have worn the same clothes, had the same hairstyle, had the same conversations at the same times, sat on the same
side of the same sofa every single night of my life for thirty years. And the things …’ She pauses, and Alix sees a red flush pass from her collarbones up to her neck and cheeks. ‘The things that have happened to me. Bad things, Alix. Really bad things. My marriage …’
She pauses, takes a breath. ‘My husband is … He’s very complicated. And our family life has been quite traumatic at times and I just … I don’t know, listening to your podcasts, those amazing women – I’m forty-five, if I don’t break free of the past now, then when will I? It’s time. It’s time for
me to change everything and I’m not asking you to help me, Alix, I just want you to …’ She stops as she tries to find the right words.
‘You want me to tell your story?’
‘Yes! That’s exactly what I want. Because I know I look quite ordinary, but my story is extraordinary and it deserves to be heard. What do you think?’
Alix is silent for a moment, not sure how to respond. Her instincts tell her very strongly to walk away, but she came here for a reason. She came here because the journalist inside her couldn’t resist the tantalising essence of the words ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’ She wanted to hear what Josie was going to tell her. And now she’s heard that Josie has an extraordinary story to share, and even though Alix is slightly repelled by Josie’s intensity, she is also sickeningly drawn to the idea of finding out what it is.
‘I think’, she says, ‘that it sounds like a very interesting idea indeed.
What are you doing tomorrow?’
Alix walks home through the back streets between Kilburn High Road and Queen’s Park. The June breeze is cool, and she walks on the sunny side of the street. She has two hours before she has to collect the children from school, and she can’t face going back to work on the edits for the final podcast of the All Woman series. She’s bored of listening to women who made good decisions and ended up exactly where they wanted to be and
feels strongly and sharply that what she wants right now, as dark clouds begin to gather across the light in her own life, is to bear witness to the dark truth of another woman’s marriage. Alix feels the buzz of anticipation build inside her. She’s been doing the same thing for so long. The thought of doing something completely different is stimulating.
She takes a detour to the boutique on Salusbury Road and spends an hour leafing through clothes she doesn’t need before leaving with a pair of
forest-green-framed sunglasses that she also doesn’t need. She goes to a delicatessen and buys expensive antipasti to eat in the garden tonight so that she doesn’t have to cook. She buys brownies from Gail’s and a cactus plant from the trendy florist’s. The money she spends is Nathan’s money;
Nathan’s money that he earns selling leases on glamorous high-rise office space in various corners of the city. He works so hard. He earns so well.
He’s so generous. He never looks at bank statements or makes snidey
comments about clusters of designer carrier bags. His money, he always tells her, is her money. The money she earns is also her money, but he
doesn’t expect her to contribute to family expenses, and as she thinks about these things, she feels the pros and cons list in her head start to shift a little, swinging back towards the pros. The memory of the empty bed on Sunday morning starts to fade away. The thought of him unconscious on a hotel bed diminishes. The hum of low-level anger and resentment mutes. She will open wine tonight. They will eat the expensive food on the terrace and sit and marvel at the way the midsummer sky is still light at ten and let the children stay up past their bedtimes and listen to music on Spotify and have the sort of night that people expect someone like her to have.
Wednesday, 19 June
Josie stares at herself in the mirror the next morning. Her skin looks nice; it’s hereditary, nothing to do with expensive creams or treatments. Her hair needs a trim, it’s far too long and splitting at the ends. She unzips her denim make-up bag and takes out a tube of mascara. She never normally wears make-up to walk the dog, but then she never normally meets a famous podcaster halfway through walking the dog. She colours her face with bronzer using a huge fluffy brush and puts on some tinted lip balm. Then
she pulls on her favourite dress; it’s made of denim and buttons up the front to a shirt collar and ties up at the waist with a matching belt. She wears it with her denim plimsolls and appraises herself in the full-length mirror.
Walter is in the window overlooking the street, staring at his laptop. She tries to avoid his gaze as he will wonder about the make-up and the smart dress, and she doesn’t want to tell him about the meeting with Alix until it has happened and she knows what it means.
She stands in the hallway and puts the dog’s harness on. ‘Taking Fred out now,’ she calls out. ‘See you in an hour or so.’
Walter nods and says, ‘See you soon.’
She turns to leave and pauses for a moment outside Erin’s room. Erin will be sleeping now; she sleeps late, until at least lunchtime. She could open the door a crack, just grab a glimpse of her baby, but she knows what else lies on the other side of that door and she doesn’t have the stomach for it. Not now. Maybe later.
Halfway to Salusbury Road, Fred starts dawdling so she picks him up and tucks him into his dog carrier. She loves the feeling of having him there, close to her chest, it reminds her of carrying her babies in slings – Baby Björns they were called. Walter had thought they were for hippies, sneered at her clipping the babies into them, said, ‘What’s wrong with a pushchair? Worked fine for my other two.’
She spots Alix immediately, by the beacon of her white-blonde hair and angular face and shoulders. She waves and Alix waves back and then they
do a kissing thing that takes Josie by surprise as she never really kisses anyone. She follows Alix to one of the trendy coffee shops on Salusbury Road, the ones she walks past all the time and never stops at, and she tries to insist on buying the drinks but Alix won’t let her, says it’s a business expense, which makes Josie get goosebumps.
‘So,’ says Alix a moment later, pushing her coffee cup to one side and sliding an iPad across in its place. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about your idea. And at first, I wasn’t sure. You’ve listened to my podcasts, so you know the format. They are fully fledged stories with a beginning, middle and end, which means that even before I start recording, I know what the format will be. I’ve done it twenty, thirty times and I know what I’m doing, I know how to get the story on to tape and how to edit it to make it gripping for the listener. But this would be very different. I have no idea how your story is going to end, but you’re promising me it will be worth following and so I’m already kind of hooked. I want to know too. And if I want to know, then
maybe my listeners will want to know. So I think we could give this a bash, you know. It won’t be for my All Woman series, that’s finished now. This will be something completely new and different, a one-off. The interviews would be mainly studio-based but I’d also love to talk to you in various
locations that tie in with your story – where you were brought up, where you went to school, where you met your husband, all that kind of thing. And then we can take it forward into the traumas you mentioned, and what you’re going to do next to escape the trap you’ve found yourself in. I thought I might call it Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! I don’t know if you remember but those were your first words to me in the ladies at the Lansdowne. I feel like it signifies the beginning of a journey that could go in absolutely any direction. The very first moment of me colliding with you. The spark, if you like? How does that sound?’
Josie realises she has stopped breathing and moving. Her teaspoon is still suspended over her Americano, the sugar she’d added still unstirred at the bottom of the cup. She stares at Alix and nods. ‘Yes. It sounds good.’
Alix smiles. ‘Great!’ she says. ‘It would mean spending a fair bit of time together, but you work part-time and your children are fully grown. So
maybe you’d be able to squeeze it in. An hour or two, here and there?’
‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘Yes. Definitely. Where do you do it? Where do you record?’
‘At my house. I have a studio.’ Alix’s fingertips clutch her golden bee pendant and slide it back and forth along the chain. ‘We could make a test episode. Just you and me chatting for an hour, in my studio. I’ll edit it and get something back for you to listen to, no obligation, you’d be totally free to walk away from it if you don’t like how it sounds. I promise.’
Josie thinks of Alix’s eight thousand followers on Instagram. In her mind’s eye she sees a sea of white-blonde women with broad shoulders and oversized sunglasses all listening to her through expensive AirPods as they cook healthy dinners for their red-haired children in open-plan kitchens.
She shakes her head slightly to dislodge it. It’s too much. Instead, she
zooms in on the central pinprick notion of sitting in Alix’s studio for an hour, just the two of them, talking. She has so much she needs to share.
She picks up her coffee cup and takes a sip, then carefully places it back in the saucer. ‘I suppose we could give it a bash,’ she says. ‘We could at least try.’
Walter is in the kitchen when she gets back from coffee with Alix. He’s making tea and offers to make her one too and she says, ‘No thanks, I just had a coffee.’
He raises an eyebrow at her. ‘Oh yeah. On your own?’
‘No!’ she says, taking Fred out of his carrier and putting him down on the floor. ‘No. I—’ She freezes. She can’t. He would be horrified. He would talk her out of it. ‘I bumped into a mum from Erin and Roxy’s old primary school. We just had a quick catch-up.’
She turns away but recovers herself quickly. It wasn’t even a lie. It was true.
‘Nice?’
‘Yes. Very nice. We might meet up again.’
She knows he won’t ask anything else. Walter didn’t really have much to do with the girls’ schooling, especially after all that business with the social services when Erin was in year six.
‘I’m going to get ready for work,’ she says, hanging Fred’s harness back on the coat rack. Walter nods and then does a double take as he comes out from behind the kitchen counter with his tea. ‘You look all dressed up,’ he says, gesturing at her button-down dress.
She looks down at her dress. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘All my other summer stuff needs a wash. And I thought, why not?’
‘You look lovely,’ he says, nodding approvingly. ‘Very slim.’ ‘Thank you,’ she says, touching her stomach. ‘Just a flattering cut, I
suppose.’
He appraises her once more and nods. ‘Lovely.’ He smiles, but there’s no warmth in his voice.
Thursday, 20 June
Alix’s studio is at the bottom of the garden. It was Nathan’s fortieth birthday present for her, in recognition of how well her newly launched podcast was doing. He’d sent her away on a girls’ weekend, had it all professionally fitted, then wrapped the shed in an oversized ribbon and guided her to it blindfolded on her return. Is it any wonder that Alix is so torn about her marriage, when her husband is capable of such acts of generosity and affection, whilst also capable of making her want to die?
She switches on the power for the Nespresso machine at the wall and
places a vase of flowers on the desk. At ten o’clock the doorbell rings and Josie is on her doorstep with her little dog in a shoulder bag.
‘I hope it’s OK to bring Fred,’ says Josie. ‘I should have checked.’ ‘No problem at all,’ Alix replies. ‘I have a cat but as long as he’s in the
studio with us, she won’t bother him. Come on through.’
‘Your house is beautiful,’ says Josie as she follows Alix through the open-plan kitchen at the back of the house and out into the garden.
‘Thank you so much.’
‘My house was probably beautiful once. It’s one of those big stucco villas. You know. But the council chopped them into flats in the seventies and now they’re ugly.’
Alix smiles and says, ‘So sad. London’s full of places like that.’
Josie oohs and aahs about Alix’s studio, runs her hands over the gleaming recording equipment, pats the fat foam head of the microphone. ‘Will I be talking into that?’ she says.
‘Yes.’
Josie nods, her eyes wide.
She lets the little dog out of its dog carrier and it trots around, sniffing everything.
Alix makes Josie a cup of tea and herself an espresso. They pull on their headphones and face each other across the recording desk. Alix does a test
run with Josie, asks her the standard question about what she had for breakfast, and then they begin.
‘Josie, first of all, hello and thank you so much for giving me your time so generously. I cannot tell you how excited I am to start this project. For listeners coming across from my regular podcast series, All Woman ,
welcome and thank you for taking a punt on me doing something new. For new listeners who’ve come upon this podcast from some other angle, welcome. So, let’s kick off with an easy question, Josie. Your name. What is it short for? If it is in fact short for anything?’
Josie shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Just Josie. Not short for anything.’
‘Named after anyone?’
‘No. Not that I know of. My mum is called Pat. Her mum was called Sue.
I think she just wanted to give me a pretty name, you know. Something feminine.’
‘So, just to set up the premise for everyone, the story behind the title of this podcast, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! , is that those were Josie’s first words to me when we met in our local pub the night we both turned forty- five. Josie and I are not just birthday twins but were born in the same hospital too. And now we live less than a mile apart in the same corner of northwest London. So, before we get into your life story, let’s talk about
your birth story. What did your mum tell you about the day you were born?’
Josie blinks. There’s a ponderous silence that Alix already knows she might need to edit out. ‘Well,’ she says, eventually. ‘Nothing much really. Just that it hurt!’
Alix laughs. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘yes. That’s a given. But what did she tell you about the day itself: the weather, the midwife, the first time she saw you?’
There follows another silence. ‘Like I say. Nothing. She never said anything. Just that it hurt so much she knew she’d never do it again.’
‘And she didn’t?’ ‘No, she didn’t.’ ‘So, no siblings?’
‘No siblings. Just me. What about you? Oh.’ Josie stops and puts her hand against her heart. ‘Sorry. Am I allowed to ask you questions?’
‘Yes! Absolutely! And I am one of three girls. The middle.’ ‘Oh, lucky you. I’d’ve loved a sister.’
‘Sisters are the best. I’m very lucky. And tell me about your mum, Pat. Is she still around?’
‘Oh, God, yes. Very much so. She lives on the same estate where I was born, runs the community centre, looks after the old people, shouts at the politicians, works with the anti-gang unit, all of that. Larger than life.
Louder than life. Everyone knows her. It’s like she’s famous.’ ‘What about your father?’
‘Oh, he was never in the picture, my dad. My mum got pregnant by accident and then went off and had me without even telling him. I’ve never met him.’
Alix shuts her eyes and mentally loops back to the man in the pub on her birthday who she had assumed to be Josie’s father. ‘So, in the pub, on the night we met – the man you were dining with. That was your …?’
‘That was my husband. Yes. Not my father. And no, you are not the first person to make that mistake. My husband, Walter, is a lot older than me.
I’ve been with him since I was fifteen.’ Josie pauses and glances up at Alix.
Alix tries to hide her surprise. ‘Fifteen,’ she repeats. ‘And he was …?’ ‘Forty-two.’
Alix falls silent for a moment. ‘Wow. That’s …’
‘Yes. I know. I know how it seems. But it didn’t quite feel like it sounds at the time. It’s hard to explain.’ Josie purses her lips and shrugs. ‘There’s power in being a teenager. I miss that power in some ways. I would like it back.’
‘In what way was there power?’
Josie shrugs again. ‘Just in the way that you have something a lot of
people want. A lot of men want. And a lot of them want it. They want it so much.’
‘It? You mean youth?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. And when you meet someone who is very clear about what they want and you know that the only thing that
stands between what they want and what you have is your consent … Sometimes, as a very young girl, there’s a power in giving that consent. Or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. That’s how they make you feel. But really, it’s not, is it? I can see that now. I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed? But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that
sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.’
Alix leaves a brief silence to play out, to allow Josie’s words the space they need to hit home to her listeners. She maintains her composure, but under the surface her blood races with shock. ‘And you and Walter, how did you meet?’
‘He was a contractor, doing the electricals on our estate. He was the project leader and my mum, of course, made it her business to get involved with it all, so one day, when I was about thirteen, I was sitting in my room and the doorbell rang, and I looked out and he was standing there. Had his high-vis vest on, holding his hard hat in his hand. That was the first time I saw him.’
Alix says, ‘And what did you think?’
Josie issues a small laugh. ‘I was thirteen. He was forty. There wasn’t much more to think really. It wasn’t until my fourteenth birthday that I could tell there was something else going on. He walked into the house when I was blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. I was there with my best friend Helen. And my mum invited him to stay for a slice of cake and he sat next to me and it was …’ Josie exhales and makes a sound like she’s been punched in the throat. ‘It was just there. Like an invisible monster in the room.’
‘A monster?’
‘Yes. That’s what it felt like. His interest in me. It felt like a monster.’ ‘So, you were scared of him?’
‘Not of him. No. He was nice. I was scared of his wanting me. I couldn’t believe that nobody else could see it. Only me. It was so big and so real.
But my mother didn’t see it. Helen didn’t see it. But I saw it. And I was scared of it.’
‘So, it didn’t feel like power then?’
‘Well, no. And yes. It felt like both things at the same time. It was confusing. I became obsessed with the idea of him. But it was another year until anything happened.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen opens with a woman pulling a small suitcase through an airport. She is tall and heavily built, with her dark hair pulled back into a small bun.
The next shot shows her sitting in a café, with a cappuccino on the table in front of her.
The text beneath her reads:
Helen Lloyd, Josie Fair’s schoolfriend
Helen starts to speak.
‘Josie and me were best friends. From when we were about five years old. From primary school.’
Helen pauses.
There is a short silence.
Then she says: ‘She was always a bit odd. Controlling? She didn’t like it when I had other friends. She always wanted to make things about her. “Passive aggressive” is the term these days. She would never just come straight out and tell you what was bothering her.
She made you go all around the houses to get to it. She was a sulker, too. The silent treatment. We’d already started to grow out of each other when she met Walter.’
The interviewer asks a question off-mic: ‘ So what was that like, when she met Walter?’
‘Weird. I mean, he was an old man, virtually. And that was that. From her fourteenth birthday, she just disappeared. Into this other world . With an old man.’
The interviewer interjects: ‘Would you say Walter Fair groomed Josie?’
‘Well, yes. Obviously. But …’
Helen’s eyes go to the interviewer. She touches the rim of her coffee cup.
‘As bad as it sounds. As weird as it sounds. It was a two-way street, you know? She wanted him. She wanted him, and she made him want her.’
***
11 a.m.
Josie walks home from Alix’s house an hour later. Her head spins with all of it.
She thinks of Alix’s home: from the front, a neat, terraced house with a bay window, no different to any other London Victorian terraced house, but inside a different story. A magazine house, ink-blue walls and golden lights and a kitchen that appeared weirdly to be bigger than the whole house with stone-grey cabinets and creamy marble counters and a tap that exuded boiling water at the touch of a button. A wall at one end reserved purely for the children’s art!
She remembers pinning the girls’ artwork to the fridge with magnets and Walter tutting and taking it down because it looked messy.
Then the garden with its fairy lights and winding path and the magical shed at the bottom that contained yet another world of wonder. Even the cat; a cat unlike any she’d seen before. A Siberian, apparently. Tiny and fluffy with the huge green eyes of a cartoon Disney princess.
Her hand goes to the inside pocket of her handbag, where she touches the smooth skin of the Nespresso pod she’d taken when Alix wasn’t looking.
There was a huge jar of them on the shelf behind the recording desk, all different colours, like oversized gemstones. She doesn’t have a Nespresso machine at home, but she just wanted to own a little bit of Alix’s glamour, tuck it into a drawer in her shabby flat, know it was there.
Walter is at his laptop in the window when she gets home. He looks at her curiously, his eyes huge through the strong prescription of his reading glasses. She’d told him she was seeing the school mum again. He’d raised an eyebrow but not said anything. Now he says, ‘What’s really going on?’
A spurt of adrenaline shoots through her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘you’ve been gone ages. You can’t have been drinking coffee all this time.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I went to see my gran after. At the cemetery.’ A pre- planned fib.
‘What for?’
‘I dunno. I just had a really weird dream last night about her and it made me want to go and see her. Anyway, I need to get ready for work. I’ll be back in a tick.’
She walks towards her bedroom, hears the sound of Erin’s gaming chair, through her bedroom door, squeak squeak , notices that the smell from Erin’s room is starting to drift out into the hallway now. She can’t put it off for much longer. But not now. Not today. Tomorrow, definitely.
She touches Erin’s door with her fingertips as she passes, then kisses them.
In her bedroom she picks up the photograph of her small girls from the top of the chest of drawers and kisses that too.
Then she takes the Nespresso pod from inside her handbag and tucks it into her underwear drawer, right at the very back.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a leather chair in empty City pub.
Muted light shines through a dusty window.
A man walks in and sits down. He wears a white shirt and jeans.
He smiles.
The text on screen reads:
Jason Fair, Walter Fair’s son
He starts to talk; he has a Canadian accent.
‘The last time I saw Dad? I guess when I was about ten?’
The interviewer interjects off-mic: ‘And why is that?’
Jason: ‘Because he left my mum for a teenager and my mum was so disgusted that she emigrated us out of the country.’
Interviewer: ‘And that teenager was …?’ ‘That teenager was Josie Fair. Yes.’
Jason shakes his head sadly and drops his gaze to the floor. When he looks up at the camera again, he is seen to be crying. ‘Sorry. Sorry. Could we just …’
The screen fades to black.
***
8 p.m.
Nathan doesn’t come home from work that night. Alix feels the dreadful inevitability of it in her gut from the minute the clock ticks over from 8 p.m. to 8.01 p.m. He said he’d be home at seven. Even accounting for last-
minute delays or phone calls or problems on the tube, eight o’clock marks the cut-off point for explainable lateness and tips it into something darker. She texts him. He doesn’t answer. At eight thirty she calls him. It goes to voicemail. And she knows. Alix knows.
When the children are in bed at nine, Alix takes a glass of wine into the studio and listens back to her interview with Josie from that morning.
They had talked for over an hour, but hearing it now, Alix suspects that
the whole conversation will be edited down to about ten minutes. And those ten minutes will be the ones that Josie had spent talking about how she met her husband.
Alix had been barely able to breathe. She’d merely nodded, her eyes wide, not interjected with questions, just listened and absorbed.
A fourteen-year-old girl. A forty-one-year-old man.
Alix thinks of the man she’d barely noticed in the restaurant on Saturday night, the man she had assumed to be Josie’s father: nondescript, balding, faded, bespectacled.
They’d stopped recording before Alix had been able to uncover more about what had happened after the birthday-cake moment on Josie’s fourteenth birthday, what had led to Josie and Walter becoming a couple. They will discuss that at their next meeting. But the tiny prickle of excitement that she’s been feeling since the first moment she decided to make a show about Josie is growing by the minute. She can sense something bigger than her here, something dark and brilliant, with every fibre of her being.
Back indoors, Alix looks at her empty wine glass and considers for a moment the possibility of topping it up. But no, it is gone ten o’clock and she is tired, and she wants a clear head tomorrow when she wakes up in what she already knows will be an empty bed and has to deal with the aftermath of Nathan’s latest bender so soon after the last, and this one on a
school night. Her message to him remains unread and her final attempt to call him goes through to voicemail again. She feels adrenaline pulsing through her and she knows she won’t sleep, but she goes to bed anyway.
She tries to read a book, but her heart races. She scrolls through the news on her phone, but it swims in front of her eyes, and she feels suddenly, strangely, that she wants to talk to Josie, Josie with her waxy skin and haunting voice and her dark, dark eyes, Josie who doesn’t know Nathan, who didn’t dance at their wedding, who has no investment in the mythical mirage of their marriage.
She sends her a message:
It was lovely talking to you earlier. Thank you so much for your time. I just listened to the recording, and I can see how this is going to take shape and I’d really like to continue with the project if you’re happy to do so? Maybe next time we could visit the estate where you grew up, where you first met Walter. What do you think?
She presses send and stares for a few minutes at her phone, looking for a sign that Josie has seen it, that she is replying. But ten minutes pass and
there is nothing. She finally turns off her screen and lies herself flat, tries to lull herself into a sleep that she knows will not come for many hours.
10 p.m.
Josie rests her open book against her chest and looks at the message on her phone screen.
It’s from Alix. The sight of her words on her screen sparks something
inside Josie. A kind of childish delight. Something like a crush. She opens it and reads it in a rush and then again more slowly. She pictures herself on her Kilburn estate with Alix and she feels a shiver of delight. She could
introduce her to her mum, watch her mother’s face as it dawns on her that someone like Alix is interested in her daughter. She could picture the
confusion followed by, yes, no doubt, a flicker of jealousy. She would think that Alix should be making a podcast about her , the legendary Pat O’Neill. And no doubt Alix would have questions for her mother, but they would be questions related only to Josie, questions to help Alix find out more about
Josie, not more about Pat. Her stomach flips, pleasantly. She doesn’t reply immediately, but goes instead to her browser and googles Alix Summer,
spends half an hour flicking through photos of Alix, looks at her Twitter feed, at her Facebook page, which is set to private but has a couple of posts visible, at her Instagram feed. She reads listeners’ reviews of Alix’s
podcasts and sees photos of her at award ceremonies in swirling satin dresses. When Josie has had her fill of Alix Summer, she returns to the
message but realises that it is gone eleven, that it is too late to politely reply. She sighs, turns off her screen and picks up her book.
From somewhere else in the flat she hears the muted sounds of her husband’s voice. She tucks in her earplugs and turns the page of her book.
Friday, 21 June
Nathan finally replies to Alix’s message at 6 a.m. She hears her phone buzz on the bedside table, yanks down her sleep mask, grabs her phone and
squints at it.
Fuck. Sorry. Don’t know what happened. At Giovanni’s. Blacked out.
Please don’t kill me.
She lets the phone fall back on to the bedside table and tugs her mask back down over her eyes. She has thirty minutes before her alarm goes off – she’s not wasting it. She didn’t get to sleep until after two in the end and her head is thick with tiredness and despair. She tries to claw back the stolen half-hour, but her adrenaline is pumping again; her husband went
somewhere last night and has woken up in his friend’s flat and doesn’t know what happened in between. Her husband, who has a career and a
mortgage and two children to think about. Her husband, who is forty-five.
A second later her phone buzzes again. She groans and picks it up.
On my way home now. Please don’t hate me. I love you. I’m sorry. I’m a dick.
Once again she puts the phone down and pulls her sleep mask over her eyes. But now there is even more adrenaline pumping through her. She is enraged. Please don’t hate me . Like a whiny little boy.
She gives up on salvaging the last half-hour of sleep and sits up in bed.
She stares for a moment at the messages on her phone and wonders what to do. She decides not to reply, not yet, not until her rage has subsided. But a moment later her phone buzzes again and it’s him with a plaintive: Alix???
Her hands shake slightly with rage as she presses call on his number. ‘Hi.’ His voice is small, and it makes her even angrier.
‘I didn’t get to sleep until two a.m., Nathan. Two a.m., waiting to hear from you. Wondering where the fuck you were. And then you message me at six a.m. and wake me up, and you know my alarm goes off at six thirty yet you couldn’t even wait for half an hour because you’re too fucking selfish. So yes, thanks a lot, Nathan. I’ve had four hours’ sleep and now I
have to get our kids up and get them ready for school and then do a full day’s work and you don’t even know where you’ve been.’
‘Alix, I am so sorry. It’s just—’ ‘Fuck off, Nathan.’
She turns off her phone and slams it down.
Then she gets out of bed and has an extra-long shower.
By the time she gets the children to school at 8.50, she is calm again. Nathan has messaged three more times, professing his dismay at his own behaviour and promising her that it will never ever happen again. It is Friday and the weather is forecast to be beautiful this weekend and Alix is having lunch with her sisters on Sunday and she doesn’t want to hold on to the terrible dark feelings that had her in their nightmarish grip all of last night and so she forces herself to let them go.
After saying goodbye to the children at the school gates she is about to turn and leave when she remembers that she has a form that needs to be handed into the school office. She goes to the side gate of the school and rings on the bell, is buzzed in a moment later.
‘Hi, Alix!’
It’s Mandy, the office manager.
‘Hi, Mandy. This form is for the Natural History Museum trip tomorrow. I’m really sorry, it’s been in my handbag for weeks and I keep forgetting to drop it in. Sorry, it’s a bit scrunched up.’
She passes the scruffy piece of paper across the desk towards Mandy, who smiles and says, ‘No problem, lovey. I have seen worse, I can assure you.’
And as she says this, Alix looks at her and thinks, Mandy has been working here for twenty years; there was a celebration for her last year to mark the anniversary. The longest-serving member of staff.
‘Oh, Mandy. By the way. I’ve just started talking to a mum whose kids used to be at this school, a long time ago. They’re in their early twenties now. I wonder if you remember them?’
‘Oh. Try me! I always pride myself on never forgetting any of my children.’
‘Roxy and Erin? Fair?’
A strange shadow passes across Mandy’s face. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Yes. I remember Roxy and Erin. They were …’
Alix inhales and waits.
Mandy glances behind her at the door to the headteacher’s office, and then from left to right before leaning towards Alix and lowering her voice. ‘They were a strange family, I suppose you could say. I mean, Roxy was wild. Oppositional, you know. Turned over furniture. Threw things about. Had to suspend her a couple of times. But Erin was the sweetest thing. The total opposite to her sister. So quiet. Had some issues, possibly on the autism spectrum? But wasn’t statemented as far as I can remember. And
there was this one time, I think when Erin was in year six, just towards the end of her time here …’ Mandy pauses and looks around herself again
before continuing in a semi-whisper, ‘She came in with a broken arm. And there was all this talk about how she’d fallen out of bed and then one day
she told a friend that it was Roxy.’ ‘Roxy?’
‘Yes. Her younger sister. Said that she’d done it to her. Had to get the social services involved. It was all very messy.’
‘And had she? The younger sister? Had she broken Erin’s arm?’
‘I don’t think it was ever proved. But the parents were livid. There was
some horrible scenes. Only time I ever met their dad. Big man. Big temper. And the mother …’
Alix nods, her breath held again.
‘She was really very odd. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Just stood there with this sort of blank look on her face. Let it all play out as if it was nothing to do with her, you know? And then they took Roxy out. Home- schooled her until she went to secondary school, I seem to recall.’
‘Which secondary school did they go to?’
‘Queen’s Park High, I think. But yes. Funny family. Always wondered what happened to them. And you’re friends with the mother now, are you?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t say friends. No. Acquaintances.’ ‘And the girls? Have you met them?’
‘No. No, not at all.’
‘Would love to know what they’re both up to now. I never had a good feeling for either of them, do you know what I mean?’
Alix nods and smiles.
Sunday, 23 June
On Sunday Josie makes a roast. She and Walter eat it quietly at the table in the window overlooking the street. It’s the only meal of the week they eat at the table. Afterwards she liquefies the leftovers with her stick blender and
spoons them into a bowl for Erin. She covers it with a plate to keep Fred’s snout away and puts it on a tray outside Erin’s room alongside a chocolate- flavour Müller Corner and two teaspoons. She still hasn’t been in there. The longer she leaves it, the harder it gets. She will go in. Next week. She will go in and clean. Walter said it’s not so bad. But she doesn’t know how that can be true, given the smell.
She washes up slowly and cleans the kitchen thoroughly. By three o’clock it’s spotless, as if nothing ever happened. She looks at Walter over the kitchen hatch and says, ‘Taking the dog out now. Want to come?’
She hopes he’ll say no, and he does.
Sunday afternoon, and the area around Queen’s Park is full of the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s summer days: half-drunk plastic pints of honey-gold lager left to go warm outside pubs, crumpled picnic blankets in the park, discarded beer cans and pizza boxes overflowing from bins, melted ice-cream puddles on the pavement that she has to drag Fred away from. Other people have been out here all day, enjoying themselves,
enjoying the weather, enjoying their friends and their children. Other people have been living.
At the thought of the extraordinariness of other people’s lives, she finds her feet leading her subconsciously around the park and towards Alix’s road.
She keeps her distance. She would be mortified, completely mortified, if Alix were to see her standing here in her scruffy leggings and her denim jacket, loitering around her house on a Sunday afternoon. But she just needs a glimmer, nothing more, of Alix’s existence, and then she can return to her flat ready to deal with the long Sunday evening ahead of her.
The view through the front window is obscured by white wooden shutters. The front door is painted a milky-blue colour that reminds Josie of a particular dress she had when she was small. On either side of the door is a pair of plants in matching milky-blue pots, cut into puffballs. She wonders who did that to them, or if you could buy them like that. She glances up at
the two windows on the first floor: more wooden shutters. The house is a blank face. Not like her flat with its huge windows that let in the faces of all the people on the bus who can virtually see what they’re eating for their dinner. After a minute or two she turns to leave, but at that moment she sees a group of women walking towards her from the other direction. They are all tall and angular and a split second later she realises that one of them is Alix and the other two look just like her and that they must be her sisters:
one has dark blonde hair down to her waist; the other has strawberry-blonde hair in a top knot. They are a mass of hoop earrings, big leather bags with tassels, flip-flops, black nail polish, long skirts that swish when they move, suntans from other countries. They are loud, even from here; one of them
says something and the other two tip back their heads and laugh – so many teeth, such big, wide mouths. She watches as they move towards Alix’s front door. She recognises the smaller one now from the night of her birthday at the pub. Zoe. Alix removes a set of keys from inside the bag that is looped over her arm, puts one in the lock and then there is the hallway and the cat just visible, and a child, and she hears Alix say, ‘We’re back!’ and then there is the husband, Nathan, with his thick red hair, greeting her distractedly, and they all pile in and the door closes and Josie pictures wine being pulled from the big chrome fridge and olives being tipped into bowls, a water sprinkler flip-flopping lazily over the lawn in the back garden. She pictures it and she wants it. She wants it more than anything.
Confident now that Alix and her family are all firmly ensconced inside the house, she crosses the street. She walks past Alix’s house as if she is simply walking past her own house, but as she does so, she lets her
fingertips trail across the climbing plant that graces Alix’s front wall. She glances down and sees the remarkable purple and lime-green face of a passionflower staring up at her from between the leaves and her breath catches. She pulls it towards her, plucks it and holds it in her hand the
whole of the way home.
Tuesday, 25 June
Alix stands outside the estate where Josie was brought up. It’s a low-level estate, no blocks higher than four storeys, built around a playground and several winding pathways. Josie appears a moment later. She is wearing
jeans and a chambray top with puffed sleeves. The dog peers out over the top of the denim dog carrier.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Josie says. ‘Couldn’t get away.’
Alix leans towards her with a kiss and feels the same awkwardness
emanate from Josie she’d noticed the first time she’d greeted her this way. ‘No problem! Not at all.’ Alix turns to survey the estate and says, ‘So,
this is where you grew up?’
‘It certainly is. My mum’s going to meet us in the community hall. Is that OK? Then you can get yourself all set up.’
‘Perfect,’ says Alix.
She follows Josie through the estate towards a squat building at the back.
Inside, a woman with dyed brown hair and trendy black-framed glasses is pulling chairs around a table. She’s wearing a bright-print summer dress and strappy sandals. She looks up at Alix and Josie and beams. ‘Welcome! Welcome! I got some juice in, and some pastries.’
She is not what Alix was expecting. Where Josie is stiff and unanimated, her mother is all expansive hand gestures and chatter. She’s glamorous, too, clearly takes care of her appearance, sees herself as a woman worthy of attention and respect. She sends Josie to make them teas and coffees in the kitchenette and invites Alix to sit down.
‘So,’ she says, eyeing her frankly. ‘I went and listened to some of your podcasts, when Josie told me about you. So inspiring. I would have had a career to talk to you about, but I devoted all my life to this estate. This
estate has been my career, I suppose you’d say. Not that I get paid for it. I do it for love.’
Alix turns slightly to look at Josie. She has her back to them, waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘Of course,’ Pat continues, ‘my first question has to be – why Josie?’ ‘Oh!’ Alix laughs nervously. She glances again at Josie’s back. Josie has
asked her not to mention the truth to her mother about why Josie wanted to do this. ‘Just tell her you’re making a series about birthday twins,’ she suggested. ‘Make it sound harmless.’
‘Well. Why not Josie?’ Alix says now. ‘That was really my starting point.
A woman, born on the same day, in the same place as me. I guess it was a
case of the “swapped babies” scenario, but the other way round. We weren’t swapped. We went home with the right parents. But what would have happened if we hadn’t? What would it have been like for me if you’d taken me home? If I’d been brought up here, by you? And Josie had been brought up a mile away by my parents?’
‘Nature/nurture?’ says Pat. ‘Well, yes, to an extent.’
‘You know, I studied Social Anthropology for a while. At Goldsmiths.
But then I got pregnant.’ She sighs. ‘Had to drop out. So yes, there’s another “what if” scenario for you. What if I hadn’t got pregnant? What if I’d finished my degree? I’d have got off this estate, wouldn’t I, for a start. And then someone else would have to be here doing what I do. Except they wouldn’t, would they, and then this estate would be a disgrace, like the
others round here. So yeah, maybe that’s it. I got pregnant for a reason; I got pregnant so that I could sacrifice my ambitions and save this estate.’ Pat trails off and stares dreamily into the middle distance for a minute. ‘Funny, when you think about it. Strange. But I guess maybe everyone has a purpose. Though some are harder to fathom than others.’ She directs this point towards her daughter as Josie pulls out the chair next to Alix and sits down. Alix squirms. This woman, she strongly suspects, loathes her daughter.
‘So, talking of getting pregnant with Josie – and given that you gave birth to her in the same hospital and on the same day that my mother gave birth to me – what are your memories of that day?’
‘Oh, God. I try not to think about it. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t married. I’d been in denial throughout my whole pregnancy – drinking, smoking. I know that’s horribly frowned upon now, but back then it barely mattered. And I didn’t look pregnant. Not until the very end. Was still wearing my size ten jeans. So I just kind of carried on. And then the
contractions kicked in and I tried to pretend it wasn’t happening because I
wasn’t ready. I really wasn’t. I had so much I wanted to do. I was halfway through this essay, and I wanted to finish it. And I nearly did, even through the contractions. But then it got too much and my mum got us a taxi to St Mary’s and four hours later, the baby arrived. What happened in those four hours is not something I ever want to think about or talk about ever again.’
‘What time was she born?’
‘God. I don’t know. I suppose about eight in the morning.’ ‘And how did you feel, when you first saw her?’
‘I felt—’ Pat stops. Her eyes go across the community hall and stare for a moment, blankly. ‘I felt terrified.’
Alix feels Josie flinch slightly in the chair next to her.
‘Just terrified. Didn’t know what to do. Kept going on about this bloody essay. Finished it.’
‘You finished it?’
‘Yes. Well, newborns, they just sleep, don’t they? Finished it. Submitted it. Got an A. But after that … I suppose I just surrendered to motherhood. Let it subsume me. Always thought I’d go back, finish my degree. But’ –
she spreads her hands around the room – ‘here we are. And in fact, I’ve probably learned more about life, more about people , through my
experiences here than I ever could have in a lifetime of studying books. So, it all worked out in the end.’
Alix narrows her eyes slightly and clears her throat. ‘And at the hospital, that day, when Josie was born, do you remember any of the other women
there? Do you remember this woman?’ She pulls from her bag the photograph that she’d tucked in there last night: her mother, in a grey sweatshirt and jeans, her blonde hair cut into a bob and permed, holding newborn Alix (or Alexis as she had been named by her parents) in her arms, beaming into the camera. ‘I’m about four days old here, just home from the hospital.’
Pat glances at the photo and smiles drily. ‘God,’ she says, ‘Elvis Presley could have been there that day and I wouldn’t remember. It’s all a blur. It really is. How old’s your mum there?’
‘Thirty-one.’ ‘Not young.’
‘No. Not young. She was building a career.’
Alix sees a sour look pass across Pat’s face. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Nice if you can plan it that way, I guess.’
Alix blinks. She wants to ask Pat why she didn’t plan it that way. She was clever and had ambitions. Why did she get pregnant at twenty? Why didn’t she go back to university afterwards? But she doesn’t. Instead, she
slides the photo back into her handbag and says, ‘Is it OK if we take a look around the estate? You can show me where Josie was brought up, memories, et cetera.’
‘Finish your tea first,’ says Pat, and there’s an edge to her intonation that makes it sound more like a command than a suggestion. Alix drinks the tea and gets to her feet. For half an hour Pat guides them around the estate and the entire half-hour is a running commentary from Pat about her achievements: what she did, when she did it, how hard it was for her to do it, and how grateful other people were to her for doing it. And it is impressive, the sort of life’s work that could ultimately lead to an honour from the Queen, and Alix can picture Pat in a smart two-piece suit and a slightly eccentric hat, bobbing on one knee in front of the monarch, a haughty smile on her face.
But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed. This
knowledge adds nuance to her view of Josie, helps make more sense of her.
Pat leads them to her flat, where Josie lived when she was a child. It’s on the ground floor, with a flower bed outside. Pat lets them in.
‘Here,’ says Josie, opening the door into a room that is painted pink and dressed for a young girl. ‘This was my room. And this was where I first saw Walter, through the window.’
Alix stands for a moment and absorbs the energy of the room, pictures a young Josie peering through the slats in the wooden Venetian blinds that had once covered this window. Back in the kitchen she touches the top of
the dining table. ‘Is this where you were sitting? When Walter ate your birthday cake?’
Josie smiles. ‘Yes. Not this table, this one is new, but yes, right here.’
Alix turns to Pat. ‘Did you know?’ she asks. ‘That day. Josie’s fourteenth birthday. Did you know what was going to happen?’
‘You mean with Josie and Walter? No, of course not. I mean, come on.
He was older than me! How could I have thought? How could I have known?’
‘And what did you think? When you found out? You must have felt quite shocked?’
‘Well, what do you think?’ Pat issues this with a note of dark fury.
Alix looks at Josie. Her face is pinched, and Alix takes a breath and stops herself from asking her next question.
8 p.m.
Nathan has been extra nice since the events of Thursday night. Not that Nathan isn’t always nice. It’s his default setting. But he’s been getting back from work early enough to enjoy time in the garden with the kids, to help
make dinner, to watch a show and look at homework and chat and be part of the family. He had no explanation for Thursday night, other than that he ‘lost control’. He has promised that he won’t do it again, and for now, bathed in the warm waters of marital harmony, Alix is choosing to believe him.
Now, as they clear the kitchen together, he says, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ll be working from home tomorrow.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘How come?’
‘Just have a ton of paperwork to catch up on and no appointments in the diary, thought I’d make the most of it. Maybe I can take you out for a cheeky lunch?’
She pauses. She hasn’t yet told him about her new podcast project with Josie. But she will be here tomorrow morning at nine thirty and Alix will need to explain her to him. She says, ‘I’ve got an interviewee coming in the morning.’
‘Oh, OK. I thought you’d finished your series. Is this something new?’ ‘It is … It’s, well, it’s a kind of experiment, I guess. It’s the woman from
the pub the other night, the one who was my birthday twin. I’m doing a thing about, erm, birthday twins, you know, the randomness of life, the
otherness of strangers, nature/nurture, that sort of thing.’ Her face flushes with the white lie and she turns away from Nathan so that he can’t see it.
Nathan looks at her sceptically. ‘Sounds … different.’ ‘Yes. Exactly. Different.’
‘Difficult to pull off?’
‘Maybe. But actually, there’re a couple of compelling things going on with her already.’
‘What sort of compelling things?’
She draws in her breath: A husband who groomed her as a fourteen-year- old child; a narcissistic mother; two problematic children; and brushes with social services. But the compelling things feel precious somehow, half- formed and delicate, not yet ready for the judgement of her husband. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out.’
Nathan raises an eyebrow humorously. ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘Fair enough.’
Alix pulls a full bag out of the bin, ties a knot in it and takes it to the front garden. She stops after she’s dropped the bag in the wheelie bin and
stares into the inky summer sky, waiting for some time to pass. She doesn’t want to talk about this with Nathan. Not right now. He doesn’t deserve her confidences. He doesn’t deserve to know every last thing she does.
Nathan has his own priorities, his own secrets. She should have some too.
Wednesday, 26 June
Josie is breathless by the time she arrives on Alix’s doorstep the next morning. It’s all she’s wanted to do, the only place she’s wanted to be, and she’s walked extra fast to get here. She pulls a tissue from her bag and
wipes the sweat from her forehead and upper lip before ringing the doorbell.
She is all primed for the soothing, beatific face of Alix Summer as the door opens, but instead, there is the husband. His features are rough and
raw, the sort of man who is only attractive because of some base, elemental factors to do with chemicals and attitude. There is not one thing on his face that Josie could pick out for special mention; even his eyes are a sludgy,
indefinable colour. He has stubby eyelashes and a two-day beard growth that contains every shade that hair can be, from silver, to red, to blond. His mouth is tight and thin. He wears a sloppy T-shirt and grey joggers and
peers at her curiously over the top of a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses. He clicks his fingers and says, ‘Josie?’
She nods and says, ‘Hi. Alix is expecting me.’
He lurches towards her suddenly and for a terrible moment she thinks he’s going to kiss her but then she realises he is aiming for Fred’s head, poking out of the dog carrier. ‘Well, hello!’ he says, recoiling slightly when Fred begins to growl at him. ‘Aren’t you a feisty little dude? He? She?’ He offers Fred the backs of his fingers to sniff, which he does, gingerly.
‘He,’ says Josie. ‘Fred. He’s a Pomchi.’
‘A Pomchi,’ says Nathan. ‘Well I never. Anyway, come in. Alix is just in the kitchen.’
She appears from behind her husband then, her face betraying some regret that it was he who met Josie at the door, and not her. Josie smiles at her and bypasses Nathan, her arm just brushing against the cotton of his T- shirt, close enough to feel the clean heat emanating from his flesh.
They walk through the kitchen, where the cat is sitting on the kitchen island looking like a pretend cat. The dog growls quietly as they pass it.
‘We’ll be about an hour,’ Alix calls over her shoulder to Nathan, who is still loitering in the hallway.
‘Okey-dokey,’ he calls back, distantly.
This time Josie tries to absorb every last detail of the kitchen. The fridge, she now realises, is not chrome at all. It is hidden away inside cabinetry that matches the rest of the kitchen. There is a huge cake mixer on the counter that’s the same milky blue as the front door. There’s an upholstered window seat overlooking the garden scattered with cotton-covered cushions in
numerous shades of ocean blue. There’s a row of plastic shoes and boots lined up by the back door. The cat’s food bowls are made of copper and the chairs around the kitchen table are all different shapes and sizes.
‘How are you?’ Alix asks her as they cross the lawn. ‘Oh. I’m fine, I suppose.’
‘You seemed a bit … stressed yesterday?’
‘Yes. I was a bit. My mum always makes me feel like that. I mean, I know she looks very together. I know she gives off this vibe of being a
decent person, all her talk of saving the estate and everything. But believe you me, she’s not what she seems at all. She was a terrible mother, Alix. A terrible, terrible mother to me.’
‘Actually, I could see that, Josie. And I’d like to talk about it today, if that’s OK with you?’
Josie shrugs. ‘I suppose so. I don’t really know. If you think it will be good for the podcast, then yes.’
‘I think it will be great for the podcast. But of course you’ll get final approval before it goes to air and if there’s anything you don’t like, I won’t put it in.’
In the studio, Alix makes Josie a cup of coffee from the Nespresso
machine and Josie stares at her from behind. She’s wearing a long filmy top over leggings. Through the fabric, Josie can see the knuckled impression of her spine and the outline of a sports bra. ‘How was your weekend?’ she
asks her.
‘Oh. Goodness. That feels like a long time ago now. But yes. It was nice.
I saw my sisters on Sunday. That’s always a good thing.’ ‘What are their names?’
‘Zoe and Maxine.’
‘Nice names. What did you do?’ ‘Long boozy lunch.’
Long boozy lunch. The words wash through Josie like a dream. She nods and smiles and says, ‘That sounds good.’
Alix places Josie’s coffee in front of her and then sits down. She tucks her hair behind her ears and smiles at Josie. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Let’s get these headphones on and start, shall we? And I wanted to start where we left off last time. With Walter. And how you two became a couple.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows Alix’s empty recording studio.
The camera pans around the details of the room.
Josie’s voice plays over the footage in conversation with Alix. The text on screen reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 26 June 2019
‘Ah, yes. So now we’re at my fifteenth birthday. Me and Walter were sort of friends, by that point. He always stopped and had a chat with me if we crossed paths on the estate. He always waved, said something nice to me. You know. And on the day I turned fifteen Walter ran after me when I was walking to school. He’d remembered my birthday from the year before and he’d bought me a present.’
‘What did he get you?’
‘A bracelet. Look. This one.’ ‘You’re still wearing it. Wow.’
‘Well, why wouldn’t I? We’re still together.’
Josie sighs heavily.
‘And then my friends took me to the park after school that day, to the rec, and there was this boy, he was called Troy? I think? And Helen really wanted me to, you know, kiss him. I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet and she was always trying to get me to go with a boy and I did not want to go with a boy because they were all disgusting, honestly. And he’d been drinking cider and his breath – I can smell it, even now. The sourness of it, rancid, in my face as he came towards
me, and I just got up and left and as I left I knew, I knew that I was done. Done with being that sort of teenager. I went home.
‘My mum said, “You’re back early.” I told her I wasn’t feeling well. She asked me if I’d been drinking. I told her about the cider and the boy and she told me I had good friends, that I should make more of an effort with them. I said, “I do make an effort. But then they do things I don’t want to do, and there’s not much I can do about that.” She said, “What do you want to do, Josie?” I said, “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? What did you want to do when you were fifteen?” She stared at me like she couldn’t believe I was anything to do with her and she said, “I wanted to take over the whole world, Josie. That’s what I wanted to do.” I said something like, “Well, I’m not going to take over the whole world drinking cider in the rec, am I?” and she said, “You’re not going to do it sitting in here with me, either. On your birthday.” So I said, “Fine then. Fine. I’ll leave.” And I slammed the door and stormed through the estate, down to the cabin where Walter worked.
‘I was just going to thank him for the bracelet, but I knew, I think, I knew what was going to happen. I felt powerful then. And he took me to the pub. I sat in a pub with a forty-two-year-old man and I was fifteen and he poured a shot of vodka into my lemonade and he kissed me and I remember looking down at my hands, at the pen scribbles on them from school, and looking down at my shoes, these battered old Kickers with the little leather tags that everyone wore back then, and thinking, This is it. I’m jumping. I’m going. I’m leaving this world. I’m entering another. It was almost as if I knew, even then, that there was no way back. That once I’d befriended the monster, that was it. For life.’
***
Midday
‘Oh my God,’ Alix whispers to herself an hour later, after closing the front door behind Josie. She stands with her back against the door, her arms behind her. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispers again.
She closes her eyes and tries to gather herself, but her head is spinning. She’d hidden her shock when Josie was talking. Nodded furiously. Made encouraging noises of interest. Interjected with neutral questions. All the while resisting the temptation to say, Fuck, Josie, you married a paedophile.
She goes back to the shed to tidy up her studio, gather the cups and saucers, lock it up behind her. In the kitchen she loads the cups and saucers into the dishwasher and then she heads to the downstairs toilet, the one tucked under the stairs. After she’s used the toilet, she turns on the tap to wash her hands and then stops when she realises there’s no hand wash. She looks behind her, she looks on the ledge that runs along the floor covering the waterpipes, she looks inside the cupboard under the sink. She washes her hands without soap and then asks Nathan when she walks back into the kitchen, ‘Did you do something with the hand wash in the downstairs toilet?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, move it? Get rid of it? I only put it in there a couple of days ago.’ ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Of course not. Maybe it was your weird friend?’
Alix scowls at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It must have been one of the kids. I’m sure it’ll turn up.’
1 p.m.
Josie tucks the hand wash into the back of her underwear drawer with the Nespresso pod. It came in such a pretty bottle: dark grey with a cherry- blossom print on it, like Japanese art. And it smells like Alix.
The experience of being at Alix’s house again has given her a strange kind of energy. Meeting the husband was a bonus, although she doesn’t know what Alix sees in him. And using their beautiful toilet with the mottled glass mirror and crazy wallpaper with peacocks on it. The posh hand wash. The soft black towel hanging from a golden ring. And the
interview itself: reliving the early days of her relationship with Walter; telling her about her terrible mother; the look on Alix’s face of rapt fascination, as though Josie were the most interesting woman she’d ever met in her life.
Buoyed up, she walks to Erin’s bedroom door and puts her ear to it. She can hear the chair squeaking, the buttons clicking, the tinny noises from her earphones. She can smell the layers of her room. But she can’t keep ignoring it. It’s not going to go away. She pulls down the handle and pushes the door. It goes only a few inches before it stops, wedged up against the
piles on the floor. She calls through to Erin, but Erin can’t hear her. She pushes a little harder, another couple of inches. She can see a bit of Erin now, the side of her face, her threadbare sheepskin slippers, her hands
clutching the controller, pale and bony. She decides that she can’t do it. Not today.
Josie brings Alix’s kitchen into her mind’s eye. The brightness of it. The sweetness of it. The children’s drawings pinned to the special wall. Then
she remembers the way that Erin’s room used to look, when she shared it with Roxy. It used to have two pink beds in it and a white wardrobe with hearts cut out of it. Where Erin’s gaming desk is, there used to be a chest full of dolls and toys. In her head she hears the sound of two small girls laughing together at bedtime.
She closes her eyes and pulls the door shut again.
Saturday, 29 June
Alix searches the chest by the front door for her pull-on rain cape, the one she bought to take to a festival a few years back when rain had been forecast for the whole weekend. The warm, dry spell is over for now, and
the next few days are predicted to be cool and wet. She finds the cape, puts it on over her clothes and then calls for Eliza. She’s walking her to her friend’s house for a birthday party, about half a mile away.
The pavements are full of puddles and the traffic makes hissing sounds as it passes by. Alix barely notices Josie, at first, through the overhanging hood of her rain cape. She notices the dog first, looks at it and thinks, Oh, a Pomchi like Josie’s! Then she notices the denim slip-on shoes, stained wet from the rain, a denim jacket tied at the waist with a matching belt and an
umbrella printed with a denim-effect pattern and she says, ‘Josie!’ Josie blinks at her. ‘Alix! What a surprise!’
‘Not exactly dog-walking weather,’ she says.
‘No. It’s not. But I could wait all day for it to stop raining and then Fred wouldn’t get any kind of walk. Where are you off to?’
Alix puts her hands on Eliza’s shoulders and says, ‘Taking this one to a birthday party. Just a couple of roads down.’
She sees Josie’s eyes mist over with some sort of longing. ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she says. ‘How old?’
‘Eleven.’
‘Well, have a wonderful time, won’t you? Enjoy every minute.’
‘She’ll be home in a couple of hours bouncing off the walls on sugar and TikTok.’
‘Well, enjoy. And have a good weekend, Alix. See you next week.’ ‘Yes. See you next week.’
As they carry on down the street, Eliza looks up at Alix and says, ‘Who is that lady?’
‘Oh, she’s the lady I’m interviewing for my podcast.’ ‘Why? She seems quite boring. Apart from her dog.’
‘Well, yes. But that’s sort of the point. That people who seem boring can sometimes have the most interesting stories to tell. You just need to get it out of them somehow.’
Alix stays a while at the party, long enough to have a cup of tea and swap some school-gate gossip with a couple of the other mothers. Then she
makes her way back through the puddles and the umbrellas towards home. As she passes the spot where she saw Josie on her way here, she stops with a start. She is still there.
‘Oh,’ says Alix. ‘Josie. What are you doing still out in the rain?’ ‘I don’t really know. I was just …’
She trails off and she looks strangely as if she might be about to cry. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes. I’m fine. I just … What we’re doing, it’s making me feel a lot of things. A lot of things I haven’t felt for a long time. You know? It’s making me feel like I’ve been numb. And when I saw you just now, with your lovely little girl … I just … I don’t really know, to be honest, Alix. I don’t really know. I just sort of couldn’t get my feet to work. Does that sound mad?’
‘No, Josie. No. It doesn’t sound mad at all. It sounds completely understandable. And listen, let’s get out of the rain, shall we? Come on. I’ll buy you a cup of tea. Or something stronger?’
Alix guides Josie into the nearest café and sits her at a table while she goes to the counter and orders them both cappuccinos. She adds two
chocolate cookies to the order and then brings them back.
But Josie is nowhere to be seen.
4 p.m.
Josie is soaked to the bone when she gets home. She wraps the dog in a towel and rubs him dry, then she makes herself a cup of tea to warm herself up and pads barefoot into the living room, where Walter is on the sofa watching football.
‘You’re drenched.’
‘Yeah. Don’t know what I was thinking going out in that.’
The dog looks longingly at the sofa and Walter looks at him and says, ‘No chance. You stink. Not having you up here.’
Josie scoops him up and holds him to her chest. She doesn’t like it when Walter talks sternly to the dog.
She sits on the other end of the sofa from Walter and stares numbly at the football. She hates the sound of football – the dull bass monotone of male calls, the incessant up and down intonation of the commentators, the
whistles and the drums; it sounds like the backdrop to a nightmare, an oncoming army of bloodless killers. It’s been the soundtrack of her
weekends for twenty-seven years, since she first moved into Walter’s flat. She’d watched with him in the early years, professed her enthusiasm for the game, shouted when their team scored, pretended to be devastated when they lost. Although, no, not pretended. It had been real, at the time.
Everything she thought, did, wanted, cared about back then had been through the filter of Walter. All she had wanted, from the moment they first got together, was to please him, to be the person he thought she was, to be his dream come true.
She finishes her tea and takes the mug into the kitchen. ‘I’m going to get into bed,’ she says. ‘I’m feeling a bit shivery.’
Walter looks up at her, concern shining in his eyes. ‘Oh, love. I hope you’re not coming down with anything?’
‘No. I’m sure I’m fine.’
‘I’ll bring you in a Lemsip?’
‘Oh, no. But thank you. I love you.’
‘Love you too—’ but the ‘ooh’ of his final word is torn in half as something exciting happens on the screen and his attention is gone from her.
She carries the dog into the bedroom and closes the door behind them.
She feels poleaxed, beaten-up. She doesn’t know what happened to her. The last hour is a blur. The rain that descended down upon her, then Alix in her plastic poncho, her daughter staring curiously at her from under the hood of her raincoat, and then … a blank. Then sitting in the coffee shop, watching Alix at the counter, the beads of rain gleaming on her plastic poncho; then she’d seen something through the window – what was it? She’s not sure. At the time, she’d thought it was Roxy. Had been convinced it was her.
Collected the dog, her bag, run out on to the pavement. No sign of Roxy. Was it real? Or was it a memory? A shadow? Maybe just someone who looked like her?
In bed, she searches for Alix’s podcast channel on her phone and selects one at random, lets the sound of Alix’s voice wash away the black noise of the mooing football fans from the living room.
Monday, 1 July
Josie listens to Heart FM through headphones. Behind the glorious crashing crescendos of ‘Greatest Day’ by Take That lies the buzz of sewing machines, the rumble of the tube trains, the chatter of her colleagues, the loud voice of the current customer, but she focuses on the music, the way it makes her feel, filling up her senses with rightness and certainty. The weekend feels like a blur. She spent most of it in bed. Walter diagnosed her with a summer cold and brought her food and beverages. He took Fred out for her and fed him. But this morning she’d awoken feeling fresh and normal, and headed into work despite Walter’s protestations that she should stay home, take care of herself.
In her break at three o’clock, she makes herself an instant hot chocolate using powder from a jar, and she writes Alix a message.
I am sorry about Saturday. I had a summer cold. Spent the weekend in bed, shivering. Think I had a touch of deliria! I’m fine now though and looking forward to our next meeting. I can do tomorrow morning.
Alix’s reply comes a moment later.
Oh no! I’m so sorry you were unwell. You did seem a bit out of sorts.
Please come over tomorrow, if you’re feeling up to that?
Josie replies with alacrity.
I would love that. See you then.
Tuesday, 2 July
‘What does Walter do, now he’s retired?’ Alix asks as they begin their recording.
Josie sighs. ‘Good question,’ she says. ‘Not a lot. He’s quite happy just being at home, reading the news online, watching sport, emailing family.’
‘What family is he emailing?’
‘Oh, his sons. They’re in their thirties. They live in Canada.’ ‘Both of them?’
‘Yes. Their mum emigrated there when she and Walter split up. He’s not seen them again since.’
‘And they were how old?’
Josie shrugs. ‘Ten and twelve, when they left.’
‘He hasn’t seen his sons since they were children?’
‘No. It’s very sad. But his ex wouldn’t let him anywhere near them.’ ‘Why?’
Josie shrugs again. ‘I guess she was just really unhappy about what happened with me.’
Alix registers this uptick in the already strange narrative of Josie’s relationship with Walter. ‘So,’ she begins gently. ‘Josie. I’d love to hear
more about this, but only if you’re comfortable talking about it. Remember, anything you’re not happy about can be deleted before this goes out.’
Josie nods her assent.
‘So, Walter was married? When you met him?’
There is a tiny pulse of silence, long enough for Alix to read Josie’s discomfort with the answer she is about to provide.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘He was. But obviously I didn’t know. Obviously he didn’t tell me. Otherwise, I never would have got together with him. I mean, of course I wouldn’t.’
‘So, hold on. After that day, your fifteenth birthday, when he took you to the pub, how long was it before you found out that he was married?’
This time the silence is even longer. ‘Quite a long time,’ she says eventually. ‘I’d say a few years.’
‘A few years?’
‘Yes. I didn’t find out he was married until I was eighteen.’ ‘So he was still living with her? Right up until then?’
‘No. He wasn’t. That’s why I didn’t know. Because he had his flat in London, that he had from his dad. But his ex and the boys lived outside London, somewhere in Essex. He went home at the weekends. It was all – it was a bit messy, I suppose.’
Alix nods but stays silent.
It’s raining when their session ends a while later and Alix offers to drive Josie home. After she drops her back, Alix watches from her car as she
walks round the corner, to see which house she goes into. Alix knows this road. She’s been down it a thousand times: an unprepossessing rat run connecting Paddington with Kilburn. And there, just as Josie had described, a long sweep of huge Victorian villas in semi-detached pairs, all built close to the pavement and shabby and faded with no trees to protect them from
the dirty fumes. She watches Josie unlock the door of a house set right behind a bus stop. She sees Walter in the window and is taken aback once more by how old he looks. She tries to imagine the handsome forty-two- year-old Josie had described kissing her in a pub when she was a girl, but it’s hard to do. He has not worn the passage of time well. She sees him turn as Josie enters the room and a small smile break over his face. He mouths something at her and then turns back to his laptop. Josie appears briefly by the window, holding her dog and looking behind her, before disappearing again. There is another window next to the bay in which Walter is sitting.
This one has denim curtains which are half opened. Alix can see the shape of a wardrobe and a door. Somewhere beyond that door, she supposes, is Erin, the older girl, the one who still lives at home, the one who had her arm broken by the little sister who left home when she was sixteen.
And then a bus pulls up in front of the house and snaps Alix out of her peculiar reverie. She puts her car into gear and drives home.
At the kitchen counter she opens her laptop and googles Josie’s address.
She adds the name ‘Walter Fair’ but nothing comes up. She adds the names ‘Josie Fair’, ‘Erin Fair’ and ‘Roxy Fair’, but still nothing comes up. As
she’d suspected. Anonymous, like 90 per cent of the population of the world. Even in these days of ubiquitous sticky fingerprints all over social media, most people aren’t traceable on the internet. She puts the address into Google Maps and stares at the Street View for a while, scrolling up and down Josie’s road, looking for something, she’s not sure what.
Thursday, 4 July
Josie puts her denim jacket on over her T-shirt and joggers and looks at herself in the mirror. It’s the same denim jacket she’s had since she was a teenager, the one she was wearing on her fifteenth birthday in the pub with Walter. It’s worn on the elbows and at the cuffs, but she has kept it in one piece over the years, kept it looking smart enough to wear. It’s her lucky jacket, the jacket she was wearing when her life turned around, when she went from being the sort of girl who drank warm cider with rough boys to
the sort of girl who had the love of a real man, who had beautiful babies and a two-bedroom flat. But that girl … that girl is starting to feel like a shapeshifter, a fraud, a one-dimensional paper doll. She’s blurring in her mind’s eye into a human puddle. She rips the jacket off and looks at herself again. She has kept her figure, somehow, without trying. She looks nice.
She could probably wear similar clothes to Alix and look good in them. She flicks through her wardrobe, looking for something that’s not denim – why does she have so much denim? – and something that’s not grey. She finds a floaty black shirt that she’d bought to cover up her swimsuit once when it was really hot in the Lake District. She puts it on over her T-shirt and
joggers and turns this way and the other. She decides she looks nice and she hangs her denim jacket back in the wardrobe. She gets some sunglasses out of her chest of drawers and tucks them into her hair and then she takes out her dangling turquoise earrings and replaces them with a pair of hoop
earrings Walter had bought her for her birthday one year.
Walter glances at her as she gets the dog ready for his walk. ‘You look like you’re on holiday.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘Well, it’s nice out. Thought I might hang out in the park for a bit. Get some ice cream.’
Walter looks out the window and then back at her. He says, ‘You know what, that sounds nice. I’ll come with you.’
Josie reels slightly. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘No. I mean, I’m meeting my friend there. The school mum. You know.’
Walter narrows his eyes at her. ‘Are you sure it’s not a school dad you’re meeting?’ He has a playful tone to his voice, but she knows that beneath it there is a thin blade of anger.
She matches his playful tone and says, ‘God, Walter, you clearly never saw any of the school dads for you even to say that!’
He nods slowly and then puts his glasses back on and turns back to his screen. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘have fun. See you soon.’
She clips the dog’s lead on to his collar and leaves the flat.
‘Oh!’ says Alix, eyeing Josie up and down on her doorstep fifteen minutes later. ‘No denim!’
‘No,’ Josie replies brightly. ‘Not today. I wasn’t in the mood.’
‘I’d love to talk to you one day, maybe, about the denim? Would that be OK?’
‘Yes. I think I’d like to talk about it too.’
Josie glances about Alix’s house, looking for signs of the red-haired husband, but he is not here today; the house feels silent and still. Just the two of them.
‘Husband back at work?’
‘Yes.’ Alix nods and smiles. ‘He hardly ever works from home.’ ‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a leasing agent for commercial property. Mainly in the City.’ ‘Sounds stressful.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose it is in a lot of ways. Hard work.’
‘But clearly it pays off.’ Josie arcs her gaze around the open-plan kitchen. ‘Yes. Yes, it does. We’re very lucky. Most people work hard, don’t they?
But not everyone gets to live in a house like this.’ ‘I love this house.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Not just because it’s beautiful, which it is. But because it’s so homely. It’s not just like a house in a magazine. It’s a proper home. It’s … very you
.’ Josie runs her hands over the creamy marble of the work surface as she says this. ‘My flat,’ she continues, ‘it’s never really felt like my flat. It’s
always felt like Walter’s. It’s all his furniture. His things. And of course it’s council so we can’t really spend any money on it. I look around it and all I
see is other people’s things. And Walter doesn’t like stuff on the walls. Or clutter. You know. It would be a dream come true to have a place like this that I could just fill with things I like.’
‘And what things do you like?’
‘Well, yes, that’s half the problem. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve just … lost my way. Or in fact, I’m starting to realise, I never even had a way in the first place. I handed my life over to Walter when I was a child and never gave myself the chance to find out who I really was.’
Josie pulls herself up straight when she realises she might be about to start crying. She looks up at Alix and smiles as brightly as she can.
‘It’s not too late for you to find out,’ says Alix. ‘Come on.’ She guides her towards the studio. ‘Let’s start right now.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Screen shows a re-enactment of a young woman following an older man into a large white house.
She wears a denim jacket.
The soundtrack over the images is Josie’s voice, taken from Alix Summer’s podcast. The text on screen reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 4 July 2019
‘He first invited me to his apartment when I was sixteen, exactly a year after our date in the pub on my fifteenth birthday. He said we’d have pizza and he’d give me my present. I’d never been there before. We always met in public. Or in his Portakabin on the estate after his team had all gone home. We just kissed. Talked. And I’d known, all along, that at some point he’d want more from me and I made it very clear that when it did happen, it had to be perfect. So he had champagne. He had music. He drew the curtains, lit a candle.
He gave me an engagement ring and he asked me to marry him. I said yes. Of course. Of course I said yes. And then, roughly twelve hours after I turned sixteen years old, he took my virginity.’
Friday, 5 July
There is a young man standing on Alix’s doorstep. It takes a moment for Alix to realise who it is and then she says, ‘Oh! Harry! Hi! How are you?’
Harry is their next-door neighbour’s son. Alix has known him since he was a child, but now he’s an adult, in his last year at university, and she hasn’t seen him for a long while.
‘I’m good. How are you?’ ‘Not bad. Everything OK?’
‘Well, no. I just got back, and Mum’s out and she won’t be back until, like, this evening. And I haven’t got a key. She said that you might have a spare?’
‘Oh,’ she says, turning behind her to look at the console where she keeps things like neighbours’ keys. ‘Yes, I think actually I do, hold on just a second.’
She feels through the drawers in the console, but they’re not there. ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Come in. I think they might be in the kitchen.’
Harry follows her through the hallway and stands awkwardly in the
entrance to the kitchen while she goes through more drawers. Eventually she finds them, in an envelope with her neighbour’s name scrawled on it. ‘Aha!’ she says triumphantly. ‘Here they are. I think you were about ten
years old when she gave us these. It’s when you were off on your American road trip. Remember that?’
‘Ha,’ says Harry, taking the envelope from her outstretched hand. ‘Yes, I do. And thank you.’
‘No worries at all.’ She leads him back down the hallway and then, just before they get to the door, she remembers something. ‘Oh, Harry. By the way. You and your brother went to Queen’s Park High, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘And you’re how old?’ ‘I’m twenty-one.’
‘So, do you remember two sisters at your school – Erin and Roxy Fair?’
She studies his face carefully as he forms his response. ‘Oh, shit, yes. I certainly do,’ he says with a wry smile. ‘Roxy was in my year. She was insane.’
‘Insane?’
‘Yes. Scary as shit.’
‘Oh, that’s interesting. In what way?’
‘Just scary. You know. Hard. Aggressive.’ Harry cocks his head and looks at her. ‘Wait,’ he says, ‘do you know her?’
‘No. No, I’ve never met her. I know her mother though.’ ‘Right.’
‘Apparently Roxy left home when she was sixteen.’ Harry throws her another look. ‘Left? Or ran away?’ ‘Ran away? Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t know. There were a lot of rumours about her. About both of them. About their home life. Like, dark stuff.’
‘Like …?’
‘I dunno. Abuse, I guess? The older one, Erin. She was so weird.
Literally the weirdest person I have ever met. I never spoke to her, but I would see her around, with these really dark brown eyes, and she was so thin. You know, apparently, she never ate solid food. That’s what I heard. Never in her life. Only soft food.’ He tips the envelope from one hand to the next and then beams at Alix. ‘Well, thanks for the keys. I’ll get them back to you later. In case we need them again in another eleven years from now. See you.’
‘Yes,’ says Alix, closing the door as he leaves, ‘see you.’
Saturday, 6 July
Josie returns to the same spot where she’d bumped into Alix the week before, just outside the coffee shop from which she’d run in a state of certainty that she’d seen Roxy on the street. She buys a coffee and sits outside with it. It’s a cool cloudy day, the beginning of July, but it feels more like September and the air carries the sad feeling of the end of
summer although it is still in its full stride. Josie knows that it wasn’t Roxy she saw last week. She knows it with 99 per cent of her soul. But there is still 1 per cent that thinks: Why not? Why wouldn’t it be Roxy? Roxy had once existed in three dimensions, there is no reason why she shouldn’t exist in three dimensions still, and no reason furthermore why those three
dimensions should not be here, on Salusbury Road, inches from where she sits.
She sips her coffee and stares across the street, her eyes taking in the form and shape of every young woman who passes. The dog sees a standard poodle and starts yapping madly at it. ‘Shhh,’ Josie whispers into his ear. ‘Shush now.’
She makes the coffee last as long as she can and then she sighs and gets to her feet.
She has not seen Roxy.
The emptiness of this realisation scoops out the base of her belly. But then relief quickly takes its place.
It is nearly midday, and Alix’s house looks still, it looks empty. Josie scans the street for Alix’s car, but it isn’t there. Emboldened, she walks up the front path and peers through the edges of the shutters. She sees a living room that she’s never seen before. Alix always takes her straight through from the front door to the kitchen and into the garden. She sees the cloud- cat, curled on a chair. She peers through the window to the side of the
milky-blue door. There is a pile of mail on the stairs, shoes in a managed heap under a console table, a spiky flowering plant in a brass pot. She stares for a moment more, relishing the luxury of time, of not being rushed, of
taking in details. A photo of the four of them, on a beach, in raincoats. Alix’s hair is under a hat, just one strand escaped, kicked across her forehead by the wind. Nathan looks ruddy and faintly ridiculous.
Josie hears a car slowing on the street behind her and turns. It’s not them. But the adrenaline rush reminds her that they could be back any minute and she is loitering on their doorstep with no good reason to be there. She casts around desperately for something to take, some shred of Alix to fill her up until they meet again. She lifts the lid of Alix’s recycling box and sifts through it until she comes upon a glossy magazine called Livingetc . She
flicks through it and sees that it is full of beautiful photographs of houses. She slides it into her shoulder bag, and she heads home.
4 p.m.
‘Erm, Alix?’
‘Yes,’ Alix calls back to Nathan, who is sitting at the kitchen table staring at his phone with a frown on his face.
‘Isn’t this your friend Josie?’
Alix stops what she’s doing and takes a step towards Nathan. ‘What?’
He turns his phone towards her. ‘The Ring app. It showed movement at
the front door at about midday when we were at my dad’s. So, I just looked at it. And it’s her, isn’t it?’
Alix draws up beside him and takes the phone from his hand. And yes, it is, clearly. It’s Josie, staring first through their shutters into the living room, and then through the small side window in the hallway. Her face looms in and out of shot of the camera. At one point Josie turns slightly and the dog’s face comes right into focus, his funny bug eyes looking even buggier.
‘She must have dropped by, on the off chance,’ she says to Nathan.
‘But look,’ he says, pointing at the screen. ‘Look how long she’s standing there for. Staring through the window. I mean, what the fuck is she doing?’
Alix continues watching the footage and the seconds pass by slowly and still there is no obvious explanation for what Josie is doing outside her house.
‘But this ,’ says Nathan. ‘This is the weirdest thing. Look what she does next.’
Alix watches but can’t make sense of what she’s seen. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘rewind that bit.’ Nathan rewinds and she watches again and yes, there it is, Josie opening the lid of their recycling box and taking out a magazine, stuffing it in her handbag and then leaving, very, very quickly.
‘Oh my God,’ she says breathlessly. ‘Oh my God.’
7 p.m.
Alix sits next to Nathan in the back of an Uber that evening, on their way to a friend’s birthday dinner in Acton. She wants to talk to him about Josie, but she also doesn’t want his opinion to cloud her view of how to handle things. Her project feels simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. She has opened a physical and metaphorical door to this woman, a pure stranger;
she has brought her into her home, made her feel that she is somehow party to Alix’s inner life. She takes full responsibility for the decisions she has
made to this point and now she needs to decide if she is prepared to take full responsibility for anything untoward that may happen to her or her family as a result. If she discusses this with Nathan, she knows what he will say. He will say, ‘Bin it. Tell her it’s off. Get rid,’ and then if she ignores him and this project turns out to be a disaster, he will tell her that he’d told her, he will tell her that she was wrong and he was right, and Alix does not want to make professional or personal decisions based on what her husband will think if she makes a mistake.
Because if she is right and he is wrong, this podcast could be the making of Alix’s professional career.
She watches Nathan that night over the dinner table. The friends are his friends; Giovanni is Nathan’s best friend from college; his partner is Nathalie, who Alix knows only in relation to Giovanni. When Nathan is with his friends, he is bombastic, he is high-octane, he engages every element of his being in the act of producing the sort of persona that his
friends expect from him, and in order to tap into these elements, he drinks twice as fast as he does when he’s with Alix’s friends or with his family.
She feels a sense of unease pass through her as she sees Giovanni head to the cocktail cabinet for a second bottle of vodka, the careless, loose-wristed glugging into guests’ glasses, the glaze across Nathan’s eyes, the loudness of him, the babble of bullshit, the overloud laugh, and she knows already
that this will be one of those nights and she doesn’t want to be that wife ,
the purse-lipped, stick-up-the-butt wife, the wife who can’t relax and can’t have fun and spoils it for everyone else. She wants to down tequila shots and sing and dance and laugh like a drain. But she can’t take on that role
because Nathan has already staked his claim on it and one of them has to remain sentient and together; one of them has to be the grown-up.
At eleven o’clock she whispers into Nathan’s ear, ‘We need to get back for the babysitter,’ but even as she does so she knows that he isn’t really listening and that even if he was, he has no intention of heading home, that he has entered the stage of inebriation where time has no meaning, when
consequences have no meaning, and so she calls herself an Uber and she leaves.
In bed an hour later, she looks at her phone. Emboldened by drink, she types a message to Josie.
Hey, Josie. We saw you at the house earlier, on our doorbell camera. Is everything all right?
The ticks turn blue immediately and Josie is typing.
Everything’s fine. I was just passing. I thought I’d say hello. Sorry to worry you.
Alix stares at the message for a moment. There is more to it than her
innocuous reply would suggest. But it is late, and if there is more to Josie’s peculiar behaviour at her front door earlier today than she is letting on, then maybe it is a topic of conversation better kept for their next face-to-face meeting.
No problem, she replies. Sleep tight.
You too Alix, replies Josie, followed by a sleeping emoji and a love-heart.
Alix turns off her phone and picks up her book, waits for sleep to take her away from the weird, swirling sensations of alcohol-induced paranoia,
edginess and very slight dread.
Midnight
Josie switches off her screen and puts down her phone. She picks up the
magazine that she’d been studying before Alix’s message came through and returns to the article she’d been reading about a lakeside house near Cape Town lived in by a handsome architect, his beautiful mermaid-haired wife
and a dog called Rafe with dreadlocked fur. Also to hand she has a notepad in which she is writing down the things in the magazine that she would like to buy. Her grandmother left her £3,000 in her will in May. She also has about £6,000 in savings built up over the years because she barely spends
the money she earns as they mostly live on Walter’s pension. She could afford the lamp with a base in the shape of an owl, or the blue rug with textured stripes that look like ripples on the surface of the sea. She could afford a velvet bed throw the colour of overripe raspberries and the huge silky cushions printed with abstract streaks of ink blue and clotted cream. She could afford other things as well, but she doesn’t want to go crazy.
She glances across at Walter’s side of the bed. He is not there. She
swallows back the dark feeling this gives her and turns her attention to the magazine. As she flicks through it, something falls out from between the pages. It’s a paper receipt. It’s dated 8 June. Her birthday. Alix’s birthday. It’s from Planet Organic, 10.48 a.m. Sunflower oil. Sourdough olive loaf. Alpro chocolate milk. Oatly milk. Organic Pinot Grigio. A 200-gram pat of unsalted butter for £3.99.
This suggestion of what Alix had been doing in the hours before they first met seems strangely magical, weighted down with some essence of fortune, of posterity. She holds it to her mouth and kisses it, then slides it back inside the pages of the magazine.
Monday, 8 July
‘So,’ says Alix, smiling at Josie across the desk in her studio. ‘Denim. Are you happy to talk about that today?’
‘Yes. Sure.’
‘So, I’ve noticed that most things you wear are made of denim and I’m curious about that. For example, today you are wearing a denim skirt, with a pale blue top and denim plimsolls. Your handbag is made of denim and your dog is in a denim dog carrier. Do you have a story, or a theory? About your love of denim?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t sure at first when you mentioned it last week. I wasn’t sure what the reason was. I think I always just thought I liked it because it’s practical, you know. Easy. But you’re right. A denim jacket is one thing –
everyone has a denim jacket. But denim accessories are another thing completely and you know, in my bedroom I actually have denim curtains. So clearly there’s something going on. And I think it’s got something to do with the early days of my relationship with Walter, you know. I was wearing a denim jacket the first time I went out with him. I wore it a lot during the first couple of years we were together and it became, for me, almost a part of our love affair. Always there. On the back of a chair. Or hanging off my shoulders. He’d put it there for me, if the sun went in and I got cold, just put it there. Like I was a princess or something. And then one day he picked it up and cuddled it and sniffed it and said something really cheesy like: “This jacket is you, it’s just you.” Something to do with my
essence being inside it? Something to do with the smell? And he made the jacket sound so powerful and important and it made me feel like the jacket was maybe lucky, in some way? Had brought us together? I don’t know, it all sounds so stupid when I try to explain it. But after that I think I always made sure I was wearing something denim, so that maybe the way Walter felt about me then might last forever.’
Alix leaves a stunned moment of silence, and her mind fills with the image of the old man in the window of Josie’s flat.
‘I believe you brought some photos along today, of you and Walter, when you were both younger. Shall we have a look at those now?’
Josie nods and pulls an envelope from her shoulder bag. ‘There aren’t many,’ she says. ‘Of course, this was pre-smartphones, so we only took
photographs with cameras and obviously, back then, well, we were kind of still a secret, so we weren’t exactly snapping each other here, there and everywhere. But I found a couple. Here.’
She passes them across the desk to Alix. Alix looks at one and then the other. Her eyes widen. ‘Wow,’ she says. Then she laughs drily and gazes at Josie. ‘Wow! Walter was quite a hunk.’
She sees Josie flush pink. ‘He really was,’ she says.
Alix looks again, studying the two photos more carefully. In one, Josie wears a denim jacket and baggy jeans. Her chestnut hair is mid-length and clipped back on one side. She appears to be wearing lipstick. She stands a foot away from Walter, who is beaming down at her from his elevated height, wearing a hoodie and jeans and a baseball cap. In the other, Josie
sits on his lap, her hair in a ponytail, her head resting back against his chest, smiling widely into the camera, which is being held aloft by Walter. His hair is thick and shiny, his skin is clear and smooth, he looks young for his age, more early thirties than early forties. His forearms are big and strong.
His eyes are madly blue. Alix feels a sick swoop in her stomach as she acknowledges that if she were to bump into forty-something-year-old Walter today, she would be attracted to him. And she gets it. She gets it.
And the fact that she gets it sickens her. Because Josie was a child, and he was a grown man, and he may not have looked like a paedophile then, but he looks like one now, and whether he looks like one or not, he was, and he is.
‘You look so young,’ she says, handing the photos back to Josie. ‘So very young.’
‘Well,’ she replies. ‘I was. I was young. I was … It’s crazy, when you think about it.’
‘So, if you could go back to thirteen-year-old Josie, just before she met Walter, what would you say to her?’
She watches Josie’s face. She sees it fall slightly before lifting again, almost with an effort. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, her voice tight with emotion. ‘I really don’t know. Because in some ways, being with Walter all these
years has been the making of me, you know. Having the babies young.
Having something solid in my life. Having something real, when other girls my age were running round being fake and ridiculous, searching for things. But on the other hand’ – Josie looks up at her with glassy eyes – ‘on the other hand, I do wonder, I wonder quite a lot, especially now that the girls
are grown, especially now I’m middle-aged and Walter is getting old and
…’ Josie pauses and sighs. Then she looks straight at Alix, something sharp and clear suddenly shining from her nearly black eyes, and she says, ‘I wonder what it was all for, you know? I wonder what else might have been. And actually, all things considered, I’d probably tell thirteen-year-old me to run for the hills and not look back.’
11 a.m.
‘What’s your cat called?’ asks Josie as they pass back through the kitchen an hour later.
‘Skye.’
‘Skye. That’s a beautiful name. Are you still looking for a puppy?’ ‘Hm. Not really. It seems a lot right now, you know? I have other issues
that seem more pressing than house-training and sleepless nights.’ ‘What sort of issues?’
‘Oh. Just …’ Alix pauses and gazes at the floor for a moment. She hasn’t told anyone about Nathan’s recent behaviour, not even her sisters. They would judge him, and they would judge her for putting up with him. They would tell her to fix it, to deal with it, to do something. She thinks of all that Josie has shared with her these past few days and finds herself saying, ‘Nathan. You know – he’s amazing. Obviously, he’s amazing. But he has … he has a drink problem.’
She sees Josie flinch.
‘Like, not all the time. Most of the time, he’s fine. But when he’s not fine, he’s really not fine. He goes on benders. Doesn’t come home.’
Benders.
It sounds like such an old-fashioned word. It must surely have been superseded by now by something more modern? But it’s the only word Alix can find to explain what her husband does. What he did on Saturday after Giovanni’s dinner party. What it now seems he will keep doing from here on in unless she starts issuing ultimatums and threats.
Josie sucks in her breath. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s not good.’ ‘No,’ says Alix. ‘No. It’s not good.’
‘And does he cheat on you? When he stays out all night.’
Alix starts at the question. ‘God. No! Nothing like that. No. I don’t think he’d be capable of doing anything like that, even if he wanted to. Which he wouldn’t. Because it’s not his style.’ But even as she says the words, an
image flashes through her mind: her reflection in the bathroom mirror on the night of her birthday party, Nathan’s arms around her waist, his smile buried into her neck, her brusque rejection – Are you actually mad? – and his subsequent disappearance into the petrol-dark Soho night.
She shakes the image from her mind.
Josie stares at her intensely. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ she says.
Alix sighs. ‘I have no idea. He used to do it a lot before the children were born, and I did have my concerns back then. Did wonder if he was going to be the right father for my children. But then Eliza arrived, and he changed, overnight. I thought that was that. You know. But then, a couple of years ago, it started up again. It feels almost as if he thinks that we’ve got to the end of the intense bit of parenting, that we’re on the home run, that he’s, well … free again .’
Both women fall silent. Then Josie sighs and says, ‘Men.’
And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviours that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.
‘Alix,’ says Josie. ‘I’ve been thinking, about the denim. It’s weird. I
know it’s weird. It’s like I’ve been holding on to something for so long and there’s no meaning to it any more. Walter doesn’t feel that way about me any more. He hasn’t for a long time. Walter barely sees me, you know? So what’s it for? And I have a little money, an inheritance, and I want to, I suppose, refresh my life? My clothes? The flat? And I hope this doesn’t sound strange, but you …’ She waves her hand towards Alix. ‘You always look so nice and I wondered if maybe you might want to go shopping, one day? Help me?’
Alix blinks at Josie. And then she smiles. ‘Of course!’ she says. ‘I’d love to!’
She glances at the time on the clock above the hob. It’s not even midday. ‘Do you know the boutique, on the corner, the Cut?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘It’s on your route home. We could go in there now, maybe?’ Josie glances at the time too. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Sure.’
Midday
Josie has walked past this boutique a hundred times and never set foot inside the door. Not for her . She’d imagined the clothes inside to cost
hundreds of pounds, the sales assistants to be snooty and rude, the other
customers to be entitled and sour. But as she pulls the price tag on a black jersey dress closer to inspect it she sees that it is only £39.99. And then a young girl appears at her side and makes baby noises at the dog and says, ‘Oh my God, so cute! What’s her name?’
‘Oh,’ says Josie. ‘Him. He’s a him. He’s called Fred.’
‘Fred! Oh my God. Cute name. Sophie, look!’ She beckons over her colleague, another very young girl, who coos and clucks and says, ‘How old is he?’
‘He’s one and a half.’
‘Oh my God, he’s a baby!’
Josie wills Fred not to growl or snarl at the girls and he doesn’t. ‘Did you want to try that on?’ the girl called Sophie asks.
‘Er, yes. Sure.’
‘I’ll just hang it in the changing room for you. Let me know if you need any help.’
‘Here,’ says Alix, heading towards Josie with a handful of summer dresses, some knitwear, a blazer-style jacket in red. ‘Try these on too.’
Josie hands Fred to Alix and heads into the changing cubicle. She tries on the black jersey dress first, the one she’d chosen. It hangs loose and
shapeless on her and she immediately takes it off and puts it back on its hanger. Then she tries on one of the dresses that Alix chose for her; soft floral jersey with a V-neck, fitted to the knee, and she checks the price tag and sees that it is £49.99 and that she can afford it and then feels a shiver of excitement because the dress is exquisite and because it makes her look pretty and shapely and young and because it is not made of hard-wearing denim but of a soft, silky fabric that feels beautiful to touch, and she takes it off and then tries on another and another and another and all of them make
her look like a woman she has never met before and would like to know better, and she takes all three dresses, both pieces of knitwear and the red cotton blazer to the till and watches in breathless awe as all six items are rung through by one assistant while the other assistant wraps them in tissue and the total is £398.87 and that is more than Josie has ever spent in one go on anything ever in her life but the atmosphere feels celebratory, somehow, as if Alix and the sales assistants are all cheering her on, as if the purchase is an achievement of some kind, a reward, an award, a prize for good behaviour.
She tries to hold on to that feeling as she says goodbye to Alix outside
the boutique, lets Alix bring her in for one of the hugs that come so easily to her but that still feel so strange to Josie, tries to hold on to it as she walks
the ten minutes from the boutique to her flat, tries to hold on to it as she
enters the flat, sees Walter’s eyes turn towards her, questioningly, smells the stench from Erin’s room even from here, sees the faces of the people on the bus at the stop outside staring numbly through her grimy windows, wondering about the people who live in here and never, she is sure, coming even halfway close to the reality of it.
She takes the bag straight into the bedroom and hangs the dresses in her wardrobe, puts the tissue-wrapped knitwear in a drawer and then, from the inside pocket of her handbag, she takes the bracelet she’d seen sitting on Alix’s console table by the front door. She holds it in the palm of her hand
and stares at it. It’s gold with tiny little diamond droplets, like a little puddle of glitter. She puts it to her lips and kisses it before putting it in the back of her underwear drawer.
Then she goes to Pinterest, to the page she started a few days ago for inspirational quotes about being single. She thinks of Alix’s husband disappearing for hours and days, leaving his beautiful wife alone at home, scared and angry and unhappy. Josie recognises that Alix has shown some vulnerability in sharing this with her, and thinks that maybe Alix needs this today, needs to know she has options. Josie scrolls through the memes,
chooses one and WhatsApps it to Alix.
A WEAK MAN CAN’T LOVE A STRONG WOMAN. HE WON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER.
Underneath the image, she types in a row of love-heart emojis interspersed with strong-arm emojis. She presses send.
Tuesday, 9 July
Alix looks at the image on the screen of her phone that Josie sent her yesterday. A black square with the words ‘A weak man can’t love a strong woman. He won’t know what to do with her’ in white capitals. Underneath are some emojis and for a few seconds Alix squints at it trying to work out what it means and why Josie has sent it to her. And then she realises that
Josie is using memes and quotes to bolster her resolve to change her life, so she types in a thumbs-up emoji and presses send. Then she carries on getting ready to leave the house with the kids.
‘Nathan, have you seen my bracelet? The one you bought me for my birthday?’
She hears his disembodied voice coming from somewhere else in the house. ‘No. Wasn’t it by the front door?’
‘Yes. That’s what I thought.’ She opens the drawers and goes through them again. She calls out to Eliza, who also has no idea where it is. Alix
sighs and closes the drawers. She’ll look again later. Now she needs to get the kids to school.
Josie is wearing one of the dresses she bought at the boutique yesterday when she arrives at Alix’s door at nine thirty. She looks almost like a completely different person and there’s a second of dissonance, before Alix smiles and says, ‘Josie! Hi! I didn’t think we’d …’
‘Didn’t we?’
‘Not that I …’ Alix scrolls through her mental diary and fails to find the moment that they agreed to another interview today. ‘Not that I remember. But that’s OK. I’m not busy. Come in. You look great, by the way.’
‘Thank you! Walter nearly had a coronary.’ ‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, Walter doesn’t say much. Man of few words. Asked how much it cost, obviously. First thing they all ask, isn’t it?’
Alix laughs. Nathan never asks her how much things cost. ‘So true!’ she says.
‘But yes. I think he liked it. But the important thing is that I like it, isn’t it?’
There’s a brittle note of uncertainty in her tone and Alix recognises the need to bolster her.
‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘That is absolutely right. Come through.’ ‘No Nathan?’ Josie asks, peering into the living room as they pass. ‘No. Like I say, he rarely works from home.’
‘And all OK? You know, with what you were telling me about yesterday?’
Alix blanches. She’s beginning to wish she’d never said anything to Josie. ‘I guess,’ she says. ‘I mean, we haven’t really talked about it.’
‘It’s really shitty, you know, that sort of thing. You deserve better. That’s what we both need to start to understand. We’re forty-five, Alix. We can do better. We have to do better.’
Josie’s words sting slightly. Alix knows that she deserves better than being abandoned by her husband twice a week while he gallivants around spending money on tequila shots and hotel rooms, that she deserves her messages to be replied to, her calls answered, a proper explanation for the absence of her husband for twelve straight hours. She knows it, but
somehow the pendulum of pros versus cons keeps swinging back to the pros.
‘Do you love him?’
Alix spins round to face Josie. ‘Nathan. Do you love him?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, yes. Yes. Of course I do.’
‘Because, you know, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about love. About what it is, what it’s for. And I feel like maybe I have no idea. That I’ve got to forty-five years of age and I really don’t know. And people talk about it all the time like it’s, you know, something real, something you can touch – like when we talk about love, we’re all talking about the same thing. But we’re not, are we? It isn’t a real thing. It isn’t anything. And sometimes I make myself imagine what it would be like if Walter died, to see if maybe that will make me know if I love him or not, and I really do think, if he died, everything would be better. And surely, if that’s the way I feel, then I don’t really love him? Do I?’
Alix says nothing.
‘And I have to wonder, then, what it was all for, at the end of the day. All the smallness of everything. All the quietness . And you don’t know yet, Alix. You’re still in the middle of it all – your kids, they still need you. But after they’ve gone, then what? Will you still want this? Everything you’ve built? Will you still want Nathan?’
‘I …’ Alix puts her hand to her throat and clasps her bumble-bee pendant. ‘I really don’t know,’ she says. ‘I used to think that I couldn’t live without him. But recently, with all the, you know, the benders, I do
sometimes wonder if life would be easier on my own.’
‘But when you think about Nathan dying, how does it make you feel?
Really? Inside? Does it make you feel sad? Or does it make you feel … free
?’
Alix looks inside herself, for something true to give to Josie. She pictures Nathan dead, the children fatherless, her future alone, and she says, ‘No. It doesn’t make me feel free. It makes me feel sad.’
There’s a harsh silence and Alix can feel judgement in it. Josie stares at her dispassionately. ‘Oh,’ she says, and the atmosphere chills by a degree. ‘Anyway,’ she says coolly, ‘if you’re busy, I’ll let you get on.’
‘No!’ says Alix, feeling strangely as if she needs to win back Josie’s approval. ‘It’s fine. I don’t have anything on right now. We can do another session, if you want?’
Josie’s demeanour softens and she smiles. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘OK.’ Alix leads her to her studio.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a young girl sitting at a kitchen table.
To her right is an older man.
Standing by the kitchen sink is an older woman, the girl’s mother. The text on the screen reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 9 July 2019
Josie’s voice begins.
‘We told my mother on my eighteenth birthday. Told her we were engaged. Told her we were going to get married. Told her I was moving out. Walter was there. He said there was no way he’d let me do something like that unsupported. And I genuinely had no idea
how my mother was going to react. No idea if she’d laugh or cry or scream or call the police. But she just sighed. She said to me,
“You’re an adult now. I can’t make your choices for you. But, Josie, I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all.” And then she took hold of my face, like this, inside her hand, so hard it almost hurt, and she stared hard into my eyes and said, “ Remember you have choices .” Then she let go of my face and left the room, slammed the door behind her. Me and Walter just looked at each other. Then he took me out for dinner to an Italian restaurant on West End Lane. Went back to his after and never went home. My life had actually begun. Or at least that’s what I told myself. That’s what I believed. It’s only now that I can see how wrong I was. That I was just handing myself from the hands of one controlling person to another.’
The screen changes to a young couple sitting on a sofa in an empty apartment staged with vintage furniture and spotlights.
The man holds a small dog on his lap. He lifts the dog on to its back legs by holding its front paws and turns it to face the camera.
‘ Say hello, Fred ,’ he says, waving the dog’s front paw.
The dog wriggles from his hold and jumps across to the woman’s lap.
Both of them laugh.
The text beneath them on the screen says:
Tim and Angel Hiddingfold-Clarke, current owners of Josie’s dog, Fred
An interviewer asks them, off-mic: ‘Tell us how you and Fred got together?’
Tim and Angel exchange a look and then Tim speaks.
‘This woman approached us a couple of years ago. We were on honeymoon in the Lake District, summer 2019, eating lunch on a bench. And she just appeared in front of us. She looked kind of
scared. Haunted in a way. And it was hot but she was wearing her hood up, dark sunglasses, a jacket done all the way up to her chin. She said, “Please, please help me. I can’t take care of my dog any more. Please, will you take him to a rescue centre. Please. Please help me.” And then she just handed him to us, in this, like, dog- carrier thing and passed us a carrier bag with food in it. She said,
“He’s lovely once he gets to know you. The loveliest, loveliest boy.” And then she sort of kissed him and left and it was literally the weirdest, weirdest thing that ever happened. And of course we had no idea at the time who she was. No idea whatsoever. It was only a few days later that we saw that it was her. That it was Josie Fair.’
‘But you kept the dog?’
‘Oh my God, yes. Of course we did. I mean, look at him. Just look at him!’
***
11 a.m.
Josie sits outside the café where she once thought she’d seen Roxy. She has a cappuccino, and the dog sits on her lap. Her hands shake slightly and her mind pulses and twitches with contradictory thoughts. She thinks of Alix’s stupid-faced husband, with his mud-coloured eyes, leaving Alix and his children to go out drinking to the point of stupefaction. She thinks: At least Walter has never done that. She thinks: Walter has always been there for me and the children. But then she thinks: Walter is always, always there. Walter is never anywhere else. She would like it if Walter could be somewhere else. She would like it if she could be somewhere else. Forever. But then
she thinks: What is my alternative? And she thinks: Alix. She thinks Alix is the answer to everything, somehow, but then Alix ‘loves’ her stupid-faced, cheating husband, which makes Josie think that Alix is maybe every inch as stupid as she is. And Josie needs Alix to be cleverer than her. Josie has
always needed people to be cleverer than her. And she doesn’t know how she feels about Alix any more. She also doesn’t know how she feels about Walter. As her eyes scan the pavement for the daughter she hasn’t seen for five years, her thoughts spiral back to the day Roxy disappeared and the
reason why she left and she feels a nauseating darkness envelop her, and as
it begins to smother her, her breathing grows laboured and panicky and she knocks her coffee cup as her hand goes to the pocket of her jacket and she pulls out the teaspoon that had rested on the side of her coffee cup in Alix’s studio.
She caresses it gently and slowly brings her breathing back to normal.
She checks around her to see if anyone is looking her way, and when she is sure they are not, she puts the teaspoon to her lips and kisses it.
She gets home an hour later. Walter turns and smiles at her from the table in the window.
‘Never see you any more,’ he says. ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you do.’
‘What’s going on with you and this school mum?’ ‘Nothing. We’re just getting to know each other.’ ‘Where do you go?’
‘Here and there. Cafés. Her house. The park.’ ‘What’s her name?’
‘Alix.’
‘Alix? Isn’t that the name of the woman, when we were at that pub on your birthday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it her?’ ‘Yes.’
She sees Walter’s face crumple with confusion. ‘Why didn’t you say?’ ‘I don’t know. I thought you might think it was weird.’
Walter’s right eyebrow lifts slightly, and he turns back to his laptop with a sigh. ‘Like I’d ever think you were weird,’ he says drily.
Josie’s wiring is all off after talking to Alix. Instead of ignoring Walter,
as she normally would, she feels the nauseating darkness fall upon her again and she folds her arms across her chest and says, ‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Oh, nothing, love. Nothing. Obviously.’
‘No! Walter! Seriously. What is that supposed to mean? Just say it.’
Walter slowly removes his reading glasses and rubs away the sweat at the bridge of his nose. Then he turns to her and says, ‘Josie. Leave it.’
‘I’m not going to leave it, Walter. If you’ve got something to say, then say it.’
‘No. I’m not doing this, Josie. I’m not going there.’
Suddenly she finds herself striding across the room, propelled by pure adrenaline. She stops a foot from Walter and breathes in hard and then slaps him, ringingly, hideously hard, across his face. ‘I FUCKING HATE YOU,’ she screams. ‘I FUCKING HATE YOU!’
She stops, recoiling slightly in the wake of her own violence.
Walter blinks at her, touches the side of his face with his fingertips. Then he slowly returns his glasses to his face and turns back to his computer.
2.30 p.m.
‘Alix? Isn’t it?’
Alix turns to locate the source of the greeting.
It takes a second for her to recognise Josie’s mother, Pat O’Neill, and then she says, ‘Oh, Pat. Hello!’
Alix is on Kilburn High Road, on her way to the bank to pay in the
cheque that her great-aunt sends on her birthday every single year. It’s for twenty-five pounds and she’s been putting it off for too long, risking
causing offence to her great-aunt, who will be watching her bank account to see the money being cashed and if it isn’t, will send a message to her via her mother to check that it hasn’t got lost in the post.
Pat is wearing an apple-green linen shirt with skinny jeans and strappy sandals. She looks vibrant and glamorous; her aura is busy and important.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m great,’ Pat replies. ‘Just getting some paperwork sorted for one of my ladies on the estate. Sally. She’s nearly ninety. Still thinks she can do everything, bless her. How are you?’
‘Oh, yes, fine. Just heading to the bank.’ ‘Seen Josie lately?’
‘Yes! Saw her earlier today, in fact.’
‘So, this podcast thing. It’s still happening?’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ Alix pauses. She feels the need to dig just a little. ‘What do you think about it?’
‘I think it’s weird, to be honest. If you didn’t seem so completely normal, I’d be wondering about what your motivation was. As it is, I can tell you’re
straight up. I googled you and I saw your credentials. You’re proper. But this birthday twin thing – I still don’t really get it?’
Alix cocks her head to one side and glances upwards briefly. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It’s not really so much about that now. It’s evolving into something else, something that’s more about being women at a very particular age, on the cusp of menopause, not young but not quite old, questioning our choices, wondering about our paths, our futures. Looking at the similarities between us, but also …’ She pauses, choosing her next words carefully.
‘Well, Josie – she’s very different to me too.’
‘That’s for sure.’ Pat’s mouth purses at the end of her sentence. ‘You’re polar opposites. You’re the sort of woman I’d always assumed a daughter of mine would be. You know, grit and talent and get-up-and-go.’
Alix ignores the slight against Josie and says, ‘What do you think of Walter?’
‘She’s told you, has she? How they met?’ Alix nods.
Pat eyes her disparagingly. ‘Well then – what do you think I think about Walter? A forty-five-year-old man hooking up with an eighteen-year-old girl. Disgusting. And God knows how long it had been going on before they told me about it. Have you met him?’
‘No. Just seen him, from a distance. Is he … is he controlling?’
Pat considers the question for a moment and then says, ‘They’re both as bad as each other if you ask me. They’re what you call a toxic combination. And those poor girls …’
‘Yes. Tell me about the girls. Josie doesn’t mention them much. Just that one still lives at home and the other left home when she was sixteen. I couldn’t help feeling that there was more she wasn’t telling me.’
Alix sees immediately that she has crossed a line. Pat’s face closes down and she takes a step back. ‘Probably best you talk to Josie about that sort of thing,’ she says. ‘Not my place to say. But listen. Good luck with it all.
You’re going to need it.’
Then she hitches her bag up on to her shoulder, musters a weak smile, turns and walks away.
Alix messages Josie when she gets home:
I think it is really important that I meet Walter and talk to him about his
side of the story. Would he be open to the idea of coming to the studio? Or I
could even come to yours and talk to him at home? Let me know what you think.
A reply appears a few seconds later.
I’m not sure Walter would want to do that. He’s very private. Alix stares at the message for a moment. Then she types a reply. Does Walter know about this project?
Sort of. He knows I’m talking to you.
OK. Well, I do think I really need to talk to him. It could be off the record if he’d prefer. How do you think we could persuade him?
There’s a short delay then before Alix sees that Josie is typing a reply.
She stares at her screen waiting for the message to appear.
If it was social he’d probably come? As long as your husband was there?
Maybe dinner?
Wednesday, 10 July
‘I was thinking of inviting Josie and her husband over for dinner this weekend? For my project.’
Alix has been gathering the nerve to make this pronouncement for over an hour, since she and Nathan woke up this morning. She’d been awake half the night, oscillating between feeling utterly convinced that it was a perfectly good idea and just another way of doing her job and feeling utterly convinced that it was the worst idea she’d ever had. Right up until ten
seconds ago she had still been uncertain which way she was going to go. But the words are out now, and she bites her lip as she waits for his response.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know. It’ll be weird as fuck. But I really think it’s going to move this project along.’
‘But do I have to be there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think you do. Sounds like he’s a man’s man. I don’t think he’d want to hang out with only two women. And I could just interview him, but I get the feeling I’d get more out of him in a social setting. With alcohol. You know.’
She throws Nathan a pleading look and his faces softens. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Anything for you, my love.’ He says this with sarcasm, but also, Alix knows, with a touch of sincerity, an awareness of how much he currently
owes her.
Alix exhales with relief. ‘Thank you,’ she says, then picks up her phone and texts the invitation to Josie.
8.30 a.m.
Josie glances at her phone and, seeing Alix’s name, snatches it up from the kitchen counter.
How about you and Walter come to my place for dinner on Friday night?
Let me know! And see you tomorrow for another session?
Josie stills. Her gaze flicks across the room to Walter, sitting on the sofa, watching BBC Breakfast and eating toast, in his dressing gown. She returns her gaze to the message again and then lets it percolate for a while, as she waits for her toast to cook. Occasionally her eyes go back to Walter, to the thatch of wiry white hair on the back of his neck that grows horizontally, to his fluffy earlobes and patchy stubble.
‘Walter,’ she says. ‘You need to go to the barber’s.’ ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I was going to go on Saturday.’
‘We’ve been invited for dinner on Friday. At Alix’s house. You need to go before Friday.’
He turns briskly and narrows his eyes at her. ‘What?’ ‘Dinner. At Alix’s. We’re going. OK?’
‘The woman with the same birthday as you? The woman you’ve been seeing so much of?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why the hell does she want to have us for dinner?’ ‘I told you. We’re friends. That’s what friends do.’ ‘Where does she live?’
‘One of those roads that runs between the park and Salusbury Road.’ His left eyebrow shoots up. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Seriously, Walter. This is important. You need a new outfit too. I can’t take you in any of your clothes. When was the last time you bought anything new? Eh?’
The atmosphere in the flat shifts into a new realm with every word that she utters. It’s like she’s smashing a fist through a sequence of invisible
walls with each one, getting closer and closer to something approaching the truth of everything.
Walter puts up his hands into a gesture of surrender. ‘Jesus Christ, Jojo.
Chill out. I’ll sort it, OK?’ ‘Hair? Clothes?’
‘Yes. Hair. Clothes. Jeez.’
He turns off the television and brings his plate through to the kitchen. He has a smell about him, probably his dressing gown needing a wash. Also
stale stubble and morning breath. The smell of decay. Of defeat. It sits at the back of her throat and makes her feel enraged.
‘I don’t know what’s got into you, lately, Jojo,’ he says as he heads towards the bathroom for his morning shower. ‘I really don’t.’
At work that afternoon, Josie feeds the hem of a dress through the overlocker, her hands moving mechanically while her brain whirls and weaves chaotically through the new universe of things she thinks about
these days. She’s obsessively planning an outfit for Friday whilst anxiously picturing Walter in a rotating range of clothes that don’t suit him. Inside her head there plays a grainy movie of them all sitting around the table in Alix’s kitchen with the mismatched chairs, the red-haired children running about in colourful pyjamas, wine being poured into huge glasses by the annoying red-haired husband, cool music through a speaker, the cloud-cat curling around their ankles, the light dying in the sky as the conversation flows.
And then her spiralling thoughts bring her back to Walter and his old-man teeth, his irritating monotone, his defeated air, and she is fourteen again, sixteen, eighteen, a young mum spending her husband’s money frugally in Sainsbury’s, a middle-aged woman in a quiet flat, and in every incarnation she is the same person: a girl in stasis. And now, just as she’d hoped would happen when she first thought about asking Alix to make her the subject of a podcast, someone else is breaking through her carapace. Another person entirely. And that person is bigger than her, louder than her, harsher than her, older than her. That person is ready finally to tell her truth.
She cuts the ends of the thread from the overlocking machine and turns
the dress over, ready to hem the other side. A tube rumbles along the tracks beyond the big window and Josie sees her face as a blurred reflection in the glass. She looks like a half-finished painting, she observes, waiting for the artist to come back and add the detail.
Her phone buzzes with a message from Alix. She experiences the endorphin rush she always gets when she sees Alix’s name on her phone, the sense that something good is happening to her.
Can you bring a photo tomorrow of the girls? Would love to see what they look like. See you then!
A chill goes through Josie. The girls . How can she talk to Alix about the girls? she asks herself. But then she looks again at the blurred version of herself in the big window and suddenly she sees that the half-finished portrait is that of a queenly woman, not a gauche girl, and she knows that finally, after all these years, it is time to hold her life up to the light.
Thursday, 11 July
‘Here.’ Josie pushes a fan of photographs across the table towards Alix. ‘My girls.’
Alix lifts her gaze to Josie and smiles. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Amazing. Thank you.’
The first photograph shows two chubby toddlers in thick knitted jumpers and jeans holding hands and standing in what looks like the big sand pit in Queen’s Park. The older girl has hair the same colour as Josie’s, but more vivid in tone. The younger one has sandy blonde hair with the type of
ringlets at the ends that will never grow back after her first haircut. ‘Which one is which?’ she asks.
‘This one’ – Josie points at the one with the ringlets – ‘is Roxy. That one’ – she indicates the one with chestnut-brown hair – ‘is Erin.’
‘They’re adorable,’ Alix says. ‘Just adorable.’
Josie nods and smiles and watches as Alix moves on to the next photograph. It’s the two girls, side by side, outside the school where Alix’s children go, wearing the same sky-blue polo shirts and navy bottoms that her children were wearing when they left the house this morning.
‘Roxy’s first day,’ says Josie, a note of pained nostalgia in her voice. ‘I cried for about four hours that day.’
Alix glances at Josie. ‘Oh, God. Really?’ She thinks back to Leon’s first day at school, returning to an empty house for the first time in seven years and the euphoria of knowing that it could be about her again for a while.
She’d never understood the weeping mums outside the playground.
‘I was bereft. I didn’t know what I would do. Suddenly, all this time.
Suddenly, all this silence.’
Alix thinks of her conversation with Mandy in the school office and says, ‘And the girls. How did they get on at primary school? Did they like it?’
She notices Josie tense slightly, her shoulders lifting towards her ears. ‘Oh, you know,’ she says. ‘Not really. You see, Erin, my oldest, she’s
always had some problems. Not quite sure how you’d describe it, really.
The teachers called it global developmental delay? But I didn’t agree with that. She was just a bit lazy, I think. A bit passive? Hard to get a reaction out of her. Hard to know what she was thinking. And then Roxy was the opposite. Oppositional defiant disorder, the teachers called it. I think I did agree with that. You could never tell Roxy anything. She would never, ever comply. She was always angry. Used to hit me. Hit her sister. Just the angriest, angriest child.’ Josie shudders at the memory. ‘So between them, with their problems, no, it wasn’t the happiest of times. And high school
was no better, of course.’
Alix doesn’t respond, just goes to the last of the three photographs.
‘This is the last one I have of the two of them,’ says Josie, touching the edge of the photo gently. ‘Just before Roxy left home.’
Alix holds her breath as she absorbs the image. It is not what she was expecting at all. She cannot relate the girls in this photograph to the girls in the other photographs. She cannot believe that they are the same people.
The girl who once had sandy ringlets is now a stocky girl wearing her hair scraped back hard from a wide greasy forehead with rings pierced through both of her nostrils, and her septum. Erin, who had once been a glowing, sweet-faced child with an air of shy vulnerability, is stony-faced and scrawny to the point of emaciated, with dark circles around her eyes and her hair hanging limp on both sides of her face.
‘Look different, don’t they?’ Josie says with a brittle edge to her voice. ‘Yes. Yes. They do.’
There’s a tart silence before Josie shuffles the three photographs back together and slides them into her shoulder bag. ‘Please don’t judge me.’
Alix flicks her eyes towards Josie. ‘Sorry?’
Josie opens her mouth, words waiting on the tip of her tongue but not being spoken. Then she smiles, tightly, and says, ‘Nothing! Nothing.’ She places her bag on the floor, pulls her headphones towards her and says, ‘Shall we start?’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Screen shows a pink wooden chair with a heart shape cut out of the back.
The chair has been modified with straps and belts.
It stands in an empty room, lit by rays of daylight shining through grubby windows.
The text under the shot reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 11 July 2019
Josie’s voice begins.
‘Walter couldn’t cope with them. He was away a lot. He’d been made redundant by the company he’d been working for in London and ended up getting a much better job with an electrical company that worked mainly out of Scotland and the Northeast. So he’d be away for days on end, just back for the weekends. I have to say, I liked it. For so many years I’d existed only as half of a couple and as a mother. I had never been alone, not really. You know, before the girls were born, I didn’t even have a key to our flat. I just used to have to wait in for him to get home from work. Just wait in, all day … so I liked those years when Walter worked away during the week, when it was just me and the girls. We were happy. We were free. I let the girls be themselves, gave them room to breathe. But then Walter would get back at the weekends and, well, everything would change. And not in a good way.’
The shot of the pink chair with the leather straps fades away. The screen goes black.
***
11 a.m.
Walter has been to the barber’s and, to Josie’s great disappointment, looks almost exactly the same. She masks her dismay and thanks him for making the effort. He grunts in response, and she knows that she’s pushing him very close to the precipice of his own tolerance of her.
Their marriage sometimes feels like a huge ship that left harbour facing one way and has slowly, lugubriously, turned 180 degrees, headed off in the
wrong direction and then stalled. Somehow, Josie had taken control of the deck, but it had turned out that she was as bad at steering the ship as Walter had been, and ever since, they’d been going round and round in circles, staring disconsolately into the middle distance, waiting to be rescued.
Until Alix.
Josie takes three jars of baby food from the cupboard and heats them up for Erin. She places them on a tray with a spoon and a pouch of Ella’s Kitchen pureed mango and apple. She leaves the tray outside Erin’s room. She kisses her fingertips, puts them to the door and then goes to her bedroom to get ready for work.
When Josie gets back from work, Walter has been clothes shopping. He doesn’t do her a fashion parade. He merely cocks his head at the Primark bags and says, ‘Go on, then. Have a look.’
He’s done quite well. A nice navy-blue casual long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of camel-coloured chinos. He’s even got some new socks.
‘Good,’ she says to him, with a nod. ‘Very nice.’ He grunts. She can sense him shutting down.
She gets started on a shepherd’s pie. It’s Walter’s favourite of her small repertoire of dishes, and even though she’s trying to be more experimental with food these days (yesterday she made a dish with couscous, halloumi and chickpeas), today Walter deserves something he likes. Then she takes the dog for a walk around the block. She thinks she sees Roxy three times in the ten minutes she’s out of the house and the second she gets home she opens up her laptop and searches for her in the places she always searches for her on the internet. But, as always, she is not there.
Normally Josie doesn’t talk to Walter about Roxy; they never talk about the girls at all, it’s just made everything easier, somehow. But later on, as they sit side by side on the sofa eating the shepherd’s pie, Josie turns to Walter and says, ‘Do you ever think you see her? Roxy?’
He throws her a look. She knows he’d planned not to talk to her tonight; he’s still smarting from how horrible she’s been to him the last few days.
But this isn’t the sort of question you can ignore because you’re in a huff, and she sees his guard fall, and then another take its place. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, when you’re out. Do you see someone on the street and think it’s her, for a minute? And then realise it’s not?’
He’s silent for a second before nodding. ‘Yeah. Sometimes.’ ‘Do you ever wonder if she’s dead?’
‘Course I do. All the time.’
They fall silent for a moment and eat their food, but the air is filled with things they both want to say, and Josie gets in first.
‘You know, I’m probably going to tell Alix about the girls.’ His head snaps towards her. ‘What do you mean, tell her?’ ‘I’m going to tell her. What happened. What we did.’
He narrows his eyes at her. ‘Are you mad?’
Josie recoils slightly. She hates it when Walter says things like that. ‘It’s time. That’s all. She’ll be able to help us.’
‘Help us? Fuck, Josie. She’ll call the fucking police.’ ‘Good.’
‘Oh my God. Oh Jesus. Josie. You actually are, aren’t you? You’re actually mad. Genuinely. We’ve been through all of this. I thought we agreed—’
‘No. No, we did not agree. We did not agree anything. We need to—’
‘We need to do nothing , Josie. We need to do nothing. Fucking hell …’ He slaps his forehead with his hand and pushes the tray of food off his lap so he can stand up.
He starts to stride away from Josie and she pulls him back by his arm and then flinches when she sees his hand arcing towards her. He brings it back quickly to his side and carries on walking towards the bay window.
‘It’s happening, Walter. Whether you like it or not. I’m going to tell Alix everything. I can’t live like this any more. We’re moving on.’
‘I can’t talk to you. You’re insane. You’re literally insane. I’m married to a fucking nutter.’
‘And I’m married to a fucking paedophile !’
The air in the room freezes. For a second, neither Josie nor Walter breathes or moves.
Finally, Walter speaks. ‘I’m sorry?’
She wants to say it again. And then again and again. She wants to pummel her fists against his chest and spit the word into his face until he’s choking on it. But she can’t. It’s gone.
She collects their half-eaten plates of food, scrapes some into the blender for Erin, throws the rest into the bin.
She purees the pie for Erin and spoons it into a bowl. She puts it on a tray with a strawberry-flavoured Müllerlight. She leaves it outside Erin’s room, her spare hand clamped over her mouth and nose to mask the smell. She is about to touch the door and then kiss her fingers, but she stops herself.
She’s starting to feel that Erin is part of the problem here. She’s starting to feel like Erin is no longer on her side.
Friday, 12 July
Nathan texts Alix at 6.30 p.m.:
I’m just having a quick one with Gio. Should be back before 7.30. Need me to pick anything up?
Alix sighs heavily, her thumb over the keyboard, thinking of and discarding a dozen ripe responses, before simply typing OK , turning off the screen and putting the phone down. She returns to the onion she’d been slicing for the dish she’s cooking for Josie and Walter, turns it round to dice it, then slides it into the casserole dish, where it sizzles in a pool of melted butter.
Eliza is at her friend’s house for a sleepover. Leon is watching TV in the living room. Alix thinks about the half-open bottle of wine in the fridge,
thinks about pouring herself a large glass right now and glugging it. But she mustn’t. She has to hold it together. She slices chicken breasts into strips and adds them to the frying onions.
Nathan is still not home at seven thirty. She stares at her phone desperately, even though she knows there won’t be anything there. She
sends a prayer out to the universe that Josie and Walter will be late, but at seven thirty-two the doorbell rings and she dries her hands, tidies her hair and heads to the front door.
‘Hi!’
Josie stands on the top step in one of the dresses they’d chosen together at the boutique, her hair held back in a French braid on one side of her head, clutching a bunch of pink roses and a bottle of expensive champagne. She
beams at Alix brightly and slightly unnervingly; Josie does not usually beam. And then she leans into her and kisses her firmly on both cheeks. ‘Hi! You look lovely!’
Then Josie turns and pulls Walter to her gently by his elbow. ‘Alix, this is Walter. Walter, this is Alix.’
Walter smiles shyly at Alix and gives her his hand to shake. He has had a brutal haircut since the last time Alix saw him and is wearing brand-new
clothes with sharp crease marks down the legs and sleeves. Alix feels a stab of tenderness towards him, but then remembers that he is not the innocent old man that he appears to be.
‘Come in! Come in! I’m afraid Nathan isn’t back from work yet. But he should be here any minute.’
She takes the pink roses from Josie and thanks her profusely. Then she
puts the room-temperature champagne in the fridge and offers them drinks, seats them on stools at the kitchen island, pushes bowls of crisps and nuts and dips towards them and checks on the pasta sauce.
‘You have a very nice home,’ says Walter, his fingers wrapped around the bottle of Peroni Alix has just passed to him.
‘Thank you!’
‘How long have you lived here?’
Walter has a monotone voice which makes him sound as if he’s being sarcastic.
‘Oh,’ she replies. ‘About ten years. We were in a flat in Kensal Rise before that.’
‘Is that where you come from? Kensal Rise?’
‘No. I was brought up in Paddington, actually. Nathan and I moved here after we got married. And talking of Nathan’ – she locates her phone and
touches the screen – ‘let me just see if he’s sent an update.’
There is no update from Nathan and it is nearly quarter to eight. She calls him and the call goes straight through to voicemail. She smiles tightly and says, ‘Gone straight through to voicemail. He must be on the tube.’
‘After-work drinks?’ says Walter. ‘Yes. I’d imagine.’
‘What does he do, your husband?’
‘He leases high-end commercial space to big companies.’
Walter nods thoughtfully, as if considering the legitimacy of this claim, and then grabs a handful of nuts from a bowl and tips them directly from the palm of his hand into his mouth.
‘How are you, Josie?’ Alix asks, her voice sounding too high in her ears. ‘Great, thanks.’
‘I love your hair like that.’ Alix gestures at the very professional French braid. ‘Did you do it yourself?’
‘Yes. I used to do the girls’ hair like this. I was always quite good at hairstyles.’
‘I just can’t,’ says Alix. ‘It hurts my brain trying to work out how to do it!’
‘I suppose I’m what you’d call “dextrous”. Sewing, dressmaking, knitting, crochet, all that kind of thing.’
Alix sees Josie throw a quick glance at Walter, who is staring unhappily at the label on his beer bottle.
‘I’ve always been good at things like that,’ Josie says, flicking another look at her husband. ‘Haven’t I?’
Walter nods, his fingertips pulling at the beer label. ‘Yes. You have.’
Alix turns to Walter. ‘Tell me about yourself, Walter. Are you from around here originally?’
‘No. I was brought up in Essex, then my parents split up when I was fifteen and I came and lived in Kilburn with my dad.’
‘In the flat where you live now?’ ‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘And you raised your family there too?’ ‘Yes. Erin and Roxy.’
‘And what’s Erin up to tonight?’ ‘Oh, she’ll just be in. Gaming.’ ‘Oh! She’s a gamer?’
‘Yes. Hardcore.’ He laughs drily and Alix sees a strange look pass across Josie’s face. Why hasn’t Josie mentioned this aspect of Erin’s existence to her? she wonders. She glances at the kitchen clock and sees that it is nearly eight o’clock. She apologises to Josie and Walter and calls Nathan again.
This time it doesn’t go through to voicemail, it rings out, and she feels a surge of hope that maybe he is, right now, halfway down the street, his tie loosened, his mood softened by a couple of pints, ready to bring fresh energy to this strange gathering of people. More than anything in the world she wishes Nathan was here – Nathan with his loud voice and high-octane ways. She doesn’t care how drunk he is, she just wants him here.
‘So,’ Walter says. ‘You and Josie. That’s an odd thing, isn’t it?’ ‘What, you mean …?’ She gestures at herself and then Josie.
‘Your friendship. Yes.’
‘Friendship?’ Alix replies. ‘I thought you meant the podcast.’ ‘Podcast?’ he says. ‘What podcast?’
‘Oh, come on, Walter,’ says Josie. ‘I told you. I told you this.’ ‘I don’t think so.’
‘I told you that Alix does podcasts.’
‘Well, you might have mentioned it, but you didn’t say she was doing one about you.’
‘Oh, it’s not about me. It’s about us being birthday twins. Me and Alix.’
Alix feels an awkward cloud of dishonesty pass through the room. She’d been surprised by the fact that Walter had agreed to come along and essentially make himself a part of the project and thought that maybe he
was more evolved than Josie had made him sound. But no, this was, Alix realised, a classic Josie manoeuvre, like buying a Pomchi without checking that it really was a Pomchi, or allowing herself to be groomed into a lifelong relationship by a man old enough to be her own father: a sort of blundering, thoughtless, aimless approach to life. A ‘do the thing and worry about it later’ approach. And so now Alix has to go along with the subterfuge.
She clears her throat and smiles. ‘Can I top you up?’ she asks brightly, before excusing herself to get something from the larder. When she comes back, Walter and Josie are sitting in silence, chewing crisps. Alix looks at
the time. It’s been ten minutes since she tried calling Nathan and he should be home by now. She calls him again. It goes to voicemail. She sighs and
brings up Giovanni’s number. She wouldn’t normally, but she cannot do this by herself. She simply cannot.
‘Oh, Gio! Hi! It’s Alix. I’m sorry to bother you, but are you still with Nathan?’
The background of the call is frenetic with the sounds of laughter and music.
‘Oh, hi, Al! Yeah. Hold on. Here he is.’
A moment later Nathan is on the line. ‘Fuck,’ he says, drawling already, and it’s not even eight thirty. ‘Fuck. Alix. Fuck. I’m leaving. Right now.
Literally leaving right this second. I’ll get a cab, OK? I’m so sorry. I’ll see you in … half an hour . Start eating without me, though, if you need to.’
Alix forces a stiff smile as she ends the call. ‘Everything OK?’ asks Josie.
‘Yeah, he’s on his way. Lost track of time. Said to start without him. So I’ll get this pasta on now, shall I?’
‘I’m sorry, Alix, but I think that’s disgusting.’
Alix stops halfway to the tap with the pasta pan and turns back to Josie. ‘I—’
‘Seriously. I’m sorry. But I could hear him, on the phone, slurring. And here you are, slaving over a nice meal for him, entertaining guests, looking so nice. Who does he think he is?’
Alix feels her breath catch in the back of her throat. Suddenly, she feels threatened. It’s the deathly tone of Josie’s voice, the otherness of her, Walter by her side breathing so heavily through his nose that Alix can hear it. She
thinks of Leon next door in his big headphones, his legs tucked up under him on the sofa that still makes him look tiny even now he’s getting big and she wonders what she has done. She thinks of Josie on her doorstep, rifling through her recycling box, taking home the old magazine. She thinks of Walter keeping Josie locked up at home as a young woman without a key, waiting for him to get home from work. And then she thinks of Josie’s
daughters with the dead eyes and she suddenly wants to scrap the whole thing; get the champagne out of the fridge and hand it back to them, hustle them down the hallway, out of the front door and forget that she had ever allowed Josie Fair into her life.
But it is too late now. They are here, on her kitchen stools, eating sweet chilli flavour Kettle Chips, waiting for her chicken, bacon and spinach alfredo, insulting her husband. She can feel Josie’s eyes boring into her and she brings the stiff smile back to her face and says, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal.
Friday night, you know. I’m sure he’s not the only man out there losing track of time. Anyway, what else can I get you? Another beer, Walter?’
He nods and thanks her and she passes him a cold beer. Then Josie says, ‘Why don’t you show Walter your amazing recording studio, Alix. He loves stuff like that.’
Alix throws Walter an uncertain glance. But he nods at her and says, ‘Yeah. I’d like that. If it’s all right with you?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. You coming, Josie?’
Josie smiles. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s OK. You go. I’ve already seen it.’
Alix leads Walter through the garden, which is all lit up with solar lamps and fairy lights. She unlocks the studio door and flicks on the switches.
‘Wow,’ says Walter. ‘This is pretty cool.’ He eyes every detail of the room and asks her questions about the wiring and the electrics which she cannot possibly answer.
‘You’d have to ask Nathan,’ she says. ‘He was the one who had it all done for me.’
They share a dry exchange about the general lack of Nathan and then, finally, Alix finds the impetus to ask Walter the question she’s wanted to ask him since the day she met Josie.
‘May I ask you, about you and Josie? About how you met?’
She sees Walter blanch slightly, before recovering himself and taking a slow sip from his beer bottle. ‘Depends what she’s told you, really.’
‘Well, I’d really like to just hear it from your side.’
He shrugs and sighs. ‘I knew Jojo from when she was a kid. I was friends with her mum at first. Then Jojo and I started hanging out a bit. She was too mature for people her age, you know? Found them tedious. Comes from being an only child, I think. I was the same. Always preferred the company of grown-ups. And yeah, one thing led to another, and it turned out that
somewhere along the line we’d fallen for each other. And I suppose it must look weird to some people, me being so much older than her. But it’s never felt weird to us. Not once.’
Alix nods, slowly, hypnotised slightly by the bass monotone of Walter’s voice, the way he makes opinion sound like fact, the lack of nuance, space, dichotomy in the way he speaks. Yes, she thinks, yes. I can see that. I can
see how that might happen between two people. But then she snaps out of it, remembers that this man bought a fifteen-year-old girl a gold bracelet for her birthday, took her to the pub and poured vodka in her lemonade. All
while married to somebody else.
‘And your ex-wife,’ she continues. ‘Was she much younger than you?’ ‘No. Not really. She was ten years younger than me.’
‘And how old were you when you met her?’
‘Oh, God.’ He scratches at the back of his neck and screws up his eyes. ‘I must have been late twenties, I suppose.’
Alix lets the maths of this pronouncement float between them, unremarked upon.
‘You know,’ Walter says, thoughtfully, peering at Alix through narrowed eyes, ‘she’s a tricky one, my Jojo. She gives this impression, doesn’t she … of being … simple.’
‘Simple?’
‘Yes. You know. Like there’s not much going on in her head. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about her over the years it’s that there is actually too much going on in her head. She’s not who she makes out to be. Not at all.’
His words sit there, like ticking bombs. Alix nods and says, ‘Yes. I think there is more to her than meets the eye.’
‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he says.
‘Would you …’ Alix begins, uncertainly. ‘How would you feel about talking to me a little? For my podcast?’
‘This birthday twins one?’
‘Yes.’ Alix pinches her bottom lip between her thumb and forefinger and eyes him anxiously.
‘But what would it have to do with me? I’m not your birthday twin.’ ‘Well, no. You’re not. But you’re married to one. And you’ve shared
most of her life journey with her. It’d be great to get a few nuggets of insight from you. Just for context.’
She watches him for a reaction. It comes slowly, as a shake of the head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I think not. But for what it’s worth from my side – Jojo’s got what you might call an elastic relationship with the truth.’
‘Elastic?’ she repeats.
‘Yeah. She, er … how can I put it? When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.’
‘You mean, everything she’s been telling me about herself, about her life, is untrue?’
‘Well. No. I wouldn’t go that far. But you can’t believe everything she says. Just keep your wits about you.’
Alix narrows her eyes at Walter, assessing how much he is trying to manipulate her. She says, ‘Ah. OK. I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Probably best not to say anything to Jojo. About this conversation. You know?’
‘Why not say anything to Josie?’
‘Just …’ He pauses. ‘Josie just likes to control things. You know? If she knew that I’d been talking to you, she would feel like she was losing control of you.’
‘Of me?’
‘Yes. Of you and the whole situation.’ He sighs. ‘Believe me, I know Josie better than anyone, and she’s a control freak. And you don’t even realise you’re being controlled until it’s too late.’
Alix stares at Walter for a moment. Once again, she is struck by the sheer blandness of him, the impenetrable wall of nothingness between his physical being and the rest of the world. Yet he is clearly a master
gaslighter. Behind the dead eyes lies the soul of a groomer and a liar and an abuser. She feels a bolt of ice shoot through her core and shivers slightly.
She serves the pasta half an hour later at the kitchen table. Nathan has still not returned. The conversation limps on. They discuss the primary school that they have in common, working out which teachers are still there, and which have left. They discuss the state of the world, in a stolid, one- dimensional way. Leon walks in at one point, and Alix is able to leave the table for a couple of minutes to get him a snack and a drink, and to locate a charging cable for him. They discuss how delicious the food is and Alix
manages to stretch out the description of the recipe into a five-minute spiel. ‘Anyway,’ says Josie, after a somewhat painful silence. ‘Where’s that
husband of yours? Maybe you should give him another call?’
‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Maybe. I’ll give him another ten minutes.’
‘Hardly worth him coming back now,’ Josie says. ‘I mean, dinner’s over.’ Josie shakes her head sadly and tuts under her breath. ‘Terrible,’ she says. ‘I’m so sorry, Alix. You poor thing.’
Alix feels herself tense up with a weird, defensive anger. ‘I’m not a poor thing,’ she replies tersely. ‘I really am not.’ She gets to her feet, the chair scraping noisily against the floor tiles, then collects the plates together loudly. She drops them on the counter above the dishwasher with a clatter and then goes into the hallway and yells, ‘Bedtime! Now!’ to a startled- looking Leon.
When she comes back to the kitchen, Josie and Walter are collecting themselves together and the atmosphere between them is horrendous.
‘Well,’ says Josie. ‘Thank you so much for a lovely evening. The food was delicious. But I think we’d best let you get on now.’
Alix drops her head into her chest. She sighs loudly and says, ‘I am so sorry. So, so sorry. But yes. And thank you for coming.’
Walter brings his empty beer bottle and places it gently on the counter.
He looks like he’s about to say something, but then the moment passes, and he turns to leave. She sees them to the door and Josie pats her arm and gives her a strange hug.
‘Men,’ she whispers into Alix’s ear. ‘Fucking men .’
Alix cleans the kitchen after they leave. Then she sits and finishes the third of a bottle of wine that was left of the one she’d been sharing with Josie.
When the kitchen is dark and the dishwasher is running and she feels drunk enough, she gets to her feet and goes to the living room where Leon is still sitting in the dark, curled into the big sofa, the cat at his side, staring at the TV screen with wide, exhausted eyes.
She sits down next to him and gently pulls his headphones away from his head. ‘It’s late, baby. We both need to go to bed now.’
‘Can I have five more minutes?’ he asks sweetly.
The sofa feels nice. The cat is purring. She nods and says, ‘OK. I’ll put my timer on.’ She sets the timer on her phone to go off in five minutes and leans back into the sofa, pulling her son’s feet on to her lap.
‘Why were those people here?’ Leon asks after a moment.
‘Oh,’ she replies, rubbing his toes absent-mindedly. ‘I’m interviewing them. For a podcast.’
He nods. Then he turns to look at her and says, ‘Why was the lady standing outside your studio?’
‘The lady who was here?’
‘Yes. The lady who was here. She was standing outside your studio, when you were in there with that old man, like she was listening. I saw her. Through those doors. She looked really cross. Really, really cross.’
10 p.m.
Josie and Walter walk home in silence. Josie feels sick. All the rich food (she’d expected something more sophisticated from Alix than stodgy pasta and can’t help feeling a bit short-changed) and all the wine. She’s cross that her expensive champagne never made it out of the fridge, and cross with the way that Alix just dumped her roses in a cheap-looking vase and didn’t trim the stems or fluff them out at all. They weren’t the cheap ones; they cost
twelve pounds. They deserved better.
And the whole night, of course, was completely ruined by Nathan doing what he’d done. Alix had been distracted and sharp. She had not been a good host and it had not been a good evening.
Once home, Josie opens the front door and calls out into the darkness of their flat, ‘Fred! Mummy’s home!’
The dog comes hurtling towards her and jumps into her arms.
She takes the dog out for a wee and then brings him back in again.
She notices that Walter has discarded his new Primark outfit and is back in joggers and a baggy T-shirt, the smart shirt and trousers left pooled on
the floor by the linen basket like a silent two fingers up at her.
She passes Erin’s room and puts her ear to the door, listens to the sound of her gaming chair squeaking. She thinks of the little boy in the pyjamas on the sofa at Alix’s house, with the huge headphones on, staring blankly at the screen for hours and hours, totally ignored and neglected, and thinks, really, what’s the difference? Is she really such a bad parent? Who’s to
know how he’ll end up ten, twenty years from now?
She watches Walter take a beer from the fridge, open it and go to the
table in the bay window. He clears his throat and lifts the lid of his laptop. They have still not spoken to each other. The atmosphere between them is worse than it’s ever been in all the time they’ve been together.
‘You were an embarrassment tonight,’ she says to Walter.
He ignores her. She hears him sigh heavily through his nose. ‘The whole thing, Walter. I wanted to die.’
‘Mm-hm ,’ he intones, his gaze on his laptop, his fingertips clicking the keys.
‘Walter,’ she shouts, ‘I’m talking to you.’ ‘Yes. I can hear that.’
‘So talk to me!’
‘Talk to you about what, exactly?’
‘About tonight. About how you embarrassed me.’
Finally, his fingertips stop clicking off the keys and he turns and looks at her. He looks so tired and so old that it startles her for a moment. ‘In what way’, he says, ‘did I embarrass you?’
‘Just – just by being you .’ ‘That’s nice, Jojo.’
‘I’m not trying to be nice. The whole evening was a disaster. I’d been so looking forward to it and it was horrible. And you, you just sat there with your stupid beer looking like everything was beneath you. You made no effort at all. I had to do all the work.’
‘All the work? What work? Listen, I really don’t know what’s going on between you and that woman, but I can tell you something for certain. She’s no “friend” of yours. She doesn’t even like you.’
Josie feels the breath inside her lungs freeze and stop. ‘Of course she does.’
‘No, Josie. She doesn’t. She’s just trying to get inside that tiny, weird brain of yours and work out what makes you tick.’
For a moment it feels to Josie that she is in the eye of a storm, that the universe has fragmented into a million tiny pieces and is swirling and whirling around her, that she is all that is still in the world. She closes her eyes, but the feeling grows stronger.
‘Stop. Calling. Me. Weird.’ ‘Well, stop being weird.’ ‘Stop it!’
‘I’m not sure I can do this any more.’ ‘Do what?’
‘You, Jojo. I can’t do you .’
‘And what do you think it’s like for me? Walter? Living with you . Living like this .’ She gestures around the room. ‘I can’t do this any more either.
I’m at the end of my tether. I can’t keep it all locked inside. It’s killing me, Walter. It’s killing me. I need someone to know. I have to tell Alix!’
Walter stares at her through tired, disappointed eyes, and he says, slowly and coldly, ‘You really are stupid, aren’t you? Stupid as they get.’
At the sound of these words, Josie feels the swirling fragments of the
universe slow down and thicken and then clear and all that is left is red-hot fury that feels as if it’s burning her from the inside out. She thinks of the
things she heard Walter saying to Alix in the recording studio, poisoning her with his vile lies, and she knows that it is here, at last, the moment she has been waiting for; she feels certainty rip through her like a cyclone.
