The familiar chime of the Ring doorbell slices into Alix’s dream. At first
she thinks that it is her alarm, that it is six thirty and she must get up and get the children ready for school. Then her eye catches the time, and she sees that it is 3.02 a.m. and she remembers that last night was Friday and that today is Saturday and then, and only then, does she register the fact that the other side of the bed is unslept in.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she mutters to herself, pulling back the duvet and ripping herself from the warmth of her bed. ‘Fuck’s sake .’
She tiptoes down the stairs and hears the Ring bell chime again and her blood heats with rage. Fucking Nathan, waking up the fucking children. She wrenches open the door, ready to flounce silently, furiously back to bed, but then stops and gasps when she sees that it is not Nathan.
It is Josie.
Josie stands, defeated, her shoulders slumped and tears streaking through a mask of grazes and dried-up blood on her face. The dog peers over the top of his denim carrier.
‘Oh my God, Josie! Oh my God. What happened?’ A choked sob emerges, but no words.
Alix opens the door wider and says, ‘God, come in!’
She helps Josie through the door and into the kitchen, where she sits her carefully on the sofa. ‘What happened, Josie? Please, you have to tell me.’
‘It was Walter,’ she says through juddering sobs. ‘He attacked me.’ ‘Walter did this?’
‘Yes! And it’s not the first time. It’s when he’s been drinking. He just sees red.’
‘Here,’ says Alix. ‘Let me get a wet cloth, get this face cleaned up, see if there’s any damage.’
Josie nods defeatedly.
Alix takes a clean tea towel from a drawer and runs it under the tap. She dabs Josie’s face gently with it, revealing a horribly swollen and split lip
and scuff marks down both cheekbones. ‘The back of my head too, I think?’
She turns her head and Alix sees that there is encrusted blood on her crown, beneath which is a small split in her scalp.
‘Any dizziness?’ Alix asks.
Josie shakes her head. ‘No. I feel OK. Just a bit shocked.’ ‘Shall I call you an ambulance?’
‘No! No, please don’t. It will just set off a load of things happening that I really can’t deal with right now. And I’m fine. Really.’
Alix takes the bloodied tea towel, rinses it under the tap, squeezes it out and hands it to Josie. Then she fills the kettle and switches it on. ‘What happened, Josie?’ she asks. ‘I mean, everything seemed OK when you left?’
‘Well. Yes and no. I mean, Walter was grumpy, obviously, because of Nathan not coming. I think he thought it was really rude, which it was. He wouldn’t talk to me the whole walk home. And then he had another beer when we got home, and things sort of escalated. He called me all sorts of horrible names. Told me I was stupid. And I saw red and went for him.’
‘You mean you attacked him?’
‘Yes. Well, no. I intended to, and I know he might look like an old man, but he’s very strong, still. He’s big. And he overpowered me. Completely. Just kept pounding and pounding and pounding. And then—’
‘Then what?’ Alix catches her breath.
‘Then Erin walked in. Erin came in and saw what he was doing and she tried to get him off me but he hit her too.’
‘Oh my God. That’s just horrific. Is she OK?’ ‘Yes. She’s fine. She’s at a friend’s house.’ ‘And where’s Walter?’
‘I don’t know! Still there, I suppose.’ Tears fall from Josie’s eyes again and she dabs them away with the damp tea towel.
Alix breathes in and then places her hand over Josie’s. ‘You know we should call the police?’
Josie glares at her. ‘No!’ she says. ‘No. Please. Don’t.’
‘But, Josie, look what he’s done to you. He’s committed a terrible crime.
You say he’s done it before. He hurt your child! I—’
‘No! I’m not having the police getting involved. Absolutely not.’
‘But what are you going to do? I mean, are you going to go back there?’ ‘I’m not going back there.’
‘And what about your mum? Have you told her?’
Josie widens her eyes at Alix and groans; fresh tears start falling. ‘I can’t tell my mum! She’ll just say it’s all my own fault. She’ll take his side.’
‘Take his side? When he’s done this to you! Of course she won’t.’
‘You’ve met my mum. You’ve seen what she’s like. She thinks I’m the lowest of the low.’
‘No, that’s—’
‘It is . It is true. I cannot tell my mum. I can’t tell her any of it.’ ‘But you have to tell someone. Surely.’
‘I’m telling you! For God’s sake. I’m telling you!’ ‘Yes. And I’m glad you’ve told me. But—’
‘But what?’
‘I just think you need to tell someone in your inner sanctum?’
‘I haven’t got an inner sanctum, ’ Josie wails. ‘I’ve got Walter and I’ve got the girls and I’ve got Fred and I’ve got you .’
Alix feels the contents of her stomach curdle slightly at Josie’s intonation of the word you . It sounds proprietorial and odd. No, she wants to say. No, you don’t have me. But she puts her arm around Josie’s shaking shoulders and squeezes her reassuringly. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ she says.
‘Unless you’d prefer something stronger?’
Josie looks at Alix with red, glassy eyes and says, ‘Do you have brandy?’ Alix smiles and gets to her feet. ‘I certainly do.’
Josie sighs deeply while Alix gets the brandy. ‘Any sign of Nathan?’ ‘No. Looks like he’s decided to stay out.’
Josie tuts softly. ‘Men,’ she says again. ‘Men.’
Alix doesn’t react with the words she wants to utter. She doesn’t say, ‘Please do not ever compare your elderly, dead-eyed, paedophiliac gaslighter of a husband with mine, who has a drink problem but is
fundamentally decent.’ Instead, she gently pops the cork back in the brandy bottle and brings the glass to Josie, who takes it from her with a shaking hand.
‘What are you going to do?’ Alix asks, knowing even as she does so that Josie is assuming that she will stay here, but hoping, desperately, that she will respond otherwise.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I could talk to my friend Mari, she’s very involved with a domestic
violence charity. She could suggest a safe place for you to be. I can give her
a call, right now.’
‘No. Don’t disturb her. It’s fine. I’m fine. If it’s OK with you, Alix, I’d feel safest just staying here with you tonight?’
Alix feels her insides curl up in a knot. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m not sure, it’s a bit …’
Josie’s eyes widen and she draws her body in on itself, recoiling slightly from Alix’s words. She looks as though she might be about to cry, and Alix says, ‘Sure. Of course. I’ll make up the spare room for you. It’ll be fine.’
She sees Josie’s body language soften immediately, her shoulders grow round. She hears a tremulous sigh come from her quivering mouth and then the words ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
a.m.
I am literally the worst person in the world. I can either come home now and prostrate myself at your feet, or I can kill myself. Your choice.
After the weirdness of the previous night, Alix is too relieved to hear from Nathan to be angry any more. She replies quickly.
Please don’t kill yourself. I need you. We have a problem. Get back soon!
He replies with a GIF of a man running and Alix smiles, despite herself.
Josie is in the guest bedroom on the top floor. Alix peered through a small gap in the door earlier and the dog, perched at the foot of the bed, lifted his top lip briefly and began growling, so she’d quietly retreated. But that was two hours ago and there’s still no sign of her. Alix tiptoes back up the stairs and peers once more through the gap in the door. A smell hits her, violently, a smell she recognises all too well from her own dog-owning days. In the corner of the room, thankfully on wooden floorboards, is an arc of tiny dog droppings and a puddle of urine. Fred bares his teeth at her and this time she lets him bark.
The noise rouses Josie from her deep sleep and she sits up suddenly. Alix is taken aback by the state of her face, which looks worse this morning than it did last night, the bruises blooming into vivid pools of mustard and mauve. ‘Oh,’ she says, blinking blindly into the half-light. ‘Oh. God. Hi.’
‘Hi,’ says Alix. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Oh. God,’ she says again. ‘Sorry. I was out cold. What time is it?’ ‘Just gone ten.’
‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’ She turns her head to the side and sniffs the air.
Her eyes find the pile of dog mess and she groans. ‘Oh no! I am so, so sorry. I slept through his toilet time. Poor baby. Just give me some cleaning stuff and I’ll deal with it.’
Josie climbs painfully from the bed. She is wearing Alix’s Toast pyjamas, which she lent her last night.
‘It’s fine. I’ll do it. You get back into bed. I’ll bring you some coffee.’
Josie nods gratefully and swings her legs back into the bed. ‘Thank you so much, Alix. That would be amazing.’
Alix passes Leon on the stairs on her way back down. ‘Why is she still here?’ he whispers.
‘She had an accident,’ Alix replies. ‘On her way home. I’m just going to take care of her for the day.’
‘She looks really scary,’ he whispers. ‘You saw her?’
He nods. ‘I peeped in. Her dog growled at me.’
‘Well, she’ll be gone by bedtime tonight, so let’s just be kind to her for now. Yes?’
Leon nods again.
Alix makes Josie a cappuccino and brings it up to the guest room, with a roll of kitchen towel and a spray cleaner. She places the coffee by the side of Josie’s bed and collects Fred’s droppings into a sheet of paper, puts them in the toilet in the en suite, then sprays and cleans the whole area. She pulls down the sash window, saying, ‘Let’s get some fresh air in here, shall we? I can walk the dog for you, if you like?’
‘Oh. Yes. I’m sure he’d love that. His harness is in the carrier. Over there.’
Alix passes her the harness and Josie straps him into it and then clips on the lead. The moment he sees the lead his demeanour changes and he happily walks off with Alix without a backward glance at Josie.
Alix takes him to the park. It is a grey morning, but with the promise of better weather to come. She allows her head to clear as she walks. She
thinks back to her encounter with Walter the previous night, when she’d taken him to look at her recording studio. She thinks of the things he’d said about Josie.
She’s not who she makes out to be. Not at all … Josie just likes to control things.
He’d described her as wanting to be seen as simple, as acting as though there was nothing in her head when really there was too much. He’d described her as having an elastic relationship with the truth. And as with everything that Walter had said last night, it could be taken more than one way. He was either painting her badly to make himself look better, or he was telling the truth. And if he was telling the truth, then what did that
mean? What was in Josie’s head? Good things, or bad things? From the very start of the project, Alix had been attracted by Josie’s slight weirdness: the denim, the old husband, the clipped, detached way in which she spoke. It would be easy to assume that all her weirdness was a result of having spent her childhood with a narcissistic mother and her adult life with a man like Walter. But what if the weirdness was innate? What if the weirdness
was what had led her into such a strange marriage in the first place? What, she wonders, if Josie was actually mad?
And as she thinks this, she pictures her baby boy, alone in the house with a stranger. She picks up the dog, tucks him into the denim carrier and walks home as fast as she can.
10.30 a.m.
Josie hears the front door click open and then slam closed. She thinks it must be Alix back from the park with the dog, and peers down the stairs. But it’s not Alix. It’s him. Her stupid husband. He looks worse than she feels. His red hair is stuck together in clumps, his suit jacket is slung over his shoulder and he’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s cloudy. She sees Leon run up the hallway and into his dad’s arms.
‘You smell bad,’ says Leon.
‘Thanks, mate,’ says Nathan. And then his gaze heads up the staircase and he spots Josie. She sees him jump slightly, a look of horror passing over his face.
‘Oh my God,’ he says, clutching his heart. ‘Sorry. You made me jump.
It’s Josie, yes?’ Josie nods.
‘It was just the, er, the pyjamas. They’re Alix’s, aren’t they? Moment of, er, cognitive dissonance. How are you?’
‘Well,’ says Josie, gesturing at her facial injuries. ‘Not the best.’
‘My God. I hope that didn’t happen here?’
Josie grimaces. Does he really think this is something to be joked about? ‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
Nathan blinks at her and then turns towards the living room. ‘Any idea where Alix is?’ he asks.
‘She’s taken Fred out to the park. She should be back any minute.’ ‘Fred?’
‘My dog.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Right. Well. I’ll, er, see you.’
Then he drops his jacket on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and heads into the kitchen.
Josie goes back to her room and changes into the clothes that Alix gave her this morning: a white T-shirt and some loose blue trousers. She unbraids her hair and brushes it through with her fingers, watches the flakes of dried blood drift to the floor, pushes it back into a ponytail and ties it with a band. She brushes her teeth in the en suite, admiring the lovely tiles that have been arranged in a herringbone style: so simple, yet so effective.
After she’s brushed her teeth, she examines her appearance in the mirror. She looks terrible. The bruises have spread and changed colour overnight. Her bottom lip looks like a split tomato and the blood has dried to a black crust. She smiles and the scab breaks open a little, releasing a tiny droplet of scarlet blood. She dabs it away with the tip of her tongue and then heads downstairs.
‘So,’ says Nathan as she walks into the kitchen. ‘What happened to your, er …?’ He describes her face with his hands.
‘An angry man,’ she says.
‘Seriously?’ He looks up at her through his pale eyelashes, his lips pulled back into a letterbox of disquiet.
‘Yes. My husband did it.’ ‘Oh my God. That’s awful.’
‘Yes. It’s terrible. Only slightly more terrible than a husband who doesn’t come home for a dinner that his wife has cooked for him and spends the
whole night out somewhere in his work clothes.’
Josie relishes the symphony of expressions that plays across Nathan’s doughy, booze-wrecked face. She stares at him and waits for him to find a response.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. ‘That was pretty shit. It’s, er …’
‘It’s an issue.’
His left eyebrow scoots up his face. ‘Yes,’ he says tersely. ‘But rather an issue between me and Alix, I’d say.’
‘Well, not last night it wasn’t. It was painful for all three of us. And look what it led to.’
Nathan looks aghast. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
Josie sighs. ‘The only way I could persuade my husband to come here last night was by telling him that you were going to be here, i.e., another man. Because he’s a man’s man, Walter. And he came under duress. And you didn’t show up, so he felt like a prize idiot. It was a horrible evening, and he took it out on me.’
Nathan’s face is a picture.
‘Well, I’m really sorry to hear that,’ he says, flushing slightly. ‘Really sorry.’
Josie purses her mouth. ‘You should be a better husband.’ Nathan blinks at her. ‘Wow,’ he says after a moment. ‘Wow.’
The front door clicks again, and they both turn to see Alix walk in, looking slightly breathless and stressed. Her face softens when she sees Nathan, which makes Josie feel bizarrely furious.
‘Hi,’ says Nathan.
‘Hi,’ says Alix, taking the dog from the carrier and passing him over to Josie. ‘I see you and Josie have found each other?’
‘We certainly have,’ Nathan replies drily.
Josie sees him throw a meaningful look at Alix, trying to send her a message with his eyes. She sees Alix frown slightly, trying to work out what the message might be.
‘Anyway,’ Josie says. ‘I might just go and have another lie-down, if that’s OK with you, Alix? I’m still feeling completely shattered.’
‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Of course. Can I get you anything? Some breakfast?’ ‘Oh. No. Thank you. I don’t have much of an appetite.’
‘No. Of course. Well, just message me or shout down if you need anything, won’t you?’
Josie smiles wanly and nods.
She passes close to Nathan as she leaves the kitchen, sees him recoil slightly, smells the fumes coming from him and feels a surge of dark fury. At the top of the stairs, she stops and waits, listens to the conversation coming from the kitchen. There’s a long, telling silence, which she knows
consists of Alix and Nathan exchanging looks. Then she hears muted, urgent whispering, whispering that grows louder and louder, until she is able to make out the words ‘Well, what was I supposed to do?’ from Alix
and the words ‘Fucking ridiculous’ from Nathan. And then she hears Leon come into the kitchen and ask for something to eat and the conversation
changes and moves on.
She goes back to the spare bedroom and closes the door. She opens her handbag on the bed and roots around one of the interior pockets, until she feels the hard edges of the key that she’d taken from the flat last night. As her fingers find it, she experiences a sequence of flashbacks: the heft of
flesh and bone, the splash and spatter of blood, electric light strobing in and out between splayed fingers, the metal taste of blood, the salt taste of sweaty hands, the sounds of muffled crying. She sees herself, as if from above, curled on the floor, the dog snuffling at her head, and then she hears the silence that followed, broken only by the hiss of a bus opening its doors at the stop outside the window, the whimper of the dog, the rumble of the
bus leaving again.
She takes the key, and she slides it under the mattress.
Sunday, 14 July
‘Have you spoken to Erin?’ Alix asks Josie in the kitchen the following morning.
Josie nods. ‘Just messaged her. She’s fine.’
‘And, dare I ask, Walter? Have you spoken to him at all?’ ‘No. No I have not. And I don’t intend to.’
‘So – how are you going to move forward?’
Alix hears a small catch in her voice as she words her last question. Josie has been here for only a day or so, but Nathan hates her, the kids are weirded out about her face and the cat is not happy about having a dog in
the house who keeps growling at her.
‘I really don’t know, Alix. I feel like I have a lot to process.’ ‘Maybe your mum could—’
‘No!’ Josie breaks in before Alix has got even halfway through the sentence. ‘I am not involving my mum. No. I am just going to work this out for myself.’
‘Yes, but, Josie, you have to work this out with Walter. Don’t you see?
You’re going to need to see him.’
Alix sees a dark shadow pass across Josie’s face, accompanied by a slight shake of her head. ‘Not yet. I’m not ready to talk to him yet.’
‘Do you want me to talk to him?’
‘No. God. Definitely not. I just want to … I just need to … Alix, I need to be here. Just for a while. Is that OK?’
Alix feels her insides curdle. ‘I … Well, yes. Of course. For a while. But I have my sister coming to stay next week. I’m afraid we’ll need the guest room back then.’
‘Oh.’ Josie blinks. ‘Right. When is she coming?’ ‘Saturday.’
‘Oh. I see. OK. Well, I’ll be out of your hair by then. I promise.’
Alix swallows down a bilious realisation of what she has just allowed to happen – Josie thinks she is welcome to be here all week – and smiles.
‘Thank you. And I’m sorry.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry for, Alix. Honestly. You’re amazing.’
Alix waits a beat before she asks her next question. ‘Listen, Josie. I know people who can help you – women who can help you. My friend Mari le
Jeune who I told you about. I interviewed her for my podcast. She’s the co- founder of a domestic abuse charity, the biggest in the country. She’d be
able to help. I can put you in touch with her if you want. If you’re feeling unsafe?’
She draws in her breath as she waits for Josie’s reaction, but Josie merely nods, and says, ‘OK. Thank you. But I feel safe. I promise.’
‘Oh,’ says Alix. ‘Good.’
‘What are you doing today, Alix?’ Josie asks.
‘Oh. Nothing much really. Nathan’s working today so I was going take the kids out for lunch.’
‘I … Never mind, then.’ ‘No. Go on.’
‘I was just thinking, since I’m here, maybe we could spend some time on the podcast. I really feel like I want to talk about the girls.’
Alix nods, containing her response. ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘yes. Let me just tell the kids where I’ll be and we can get going.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
A woman sits in a café next to a large steamed-up plate-glass window.
Behind her and out of focus, a man is cleaning a big chrome coffee machine with a white tea towel.
The woman smiles uncertainly at the interviewer and clears her throat.
Below, the text reads:
Mandy Redwood, School Administrator, Parkside Primary School, 1998–present day
‘Alix Summer’s kids were both at Parkside. Lovely kids. Some families just light up a school like ours, you know, and the Summers are one of those families. And so it was surprising when Alix came to me that day, back in 2019, asking after the Fairs. You couldn’t imagine two more different families, two more different mothers.
Obviously, at the time I had no idea that Alix was making a podcast about the Fairs. So I told her what I remembered. But it was only after everything happened, later on, that I went through the records, and that’s when I remembered other things too. Like the day that Roxy broke a child’s finger in the reading corner when they were in reception. Trod on it. Just stood there, crushing it under the sole of her shoe. The kid screaming.’
Mandy shudders and smiles drily.
‘Of course we had to bring the parents in after that and they were just …’
Mandy looks down at the tabletop while she searches for the right word.
‘Emotionless. Completely emotionless. It was the strangest thing. I put it down to shock at the time, but now … now I know what was really going on in that house. Well, it all makes more sense.’
She shudders again.
Then she shakes her head slightly and sighs.
The screen fades to black and changes to footage of an empty recording studio.
The camera pans around the room. Below, the text reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 14 July 2019
Alix: ‘What did Walter do, when you told him about the child with the broken finger?’
Josie: ‘Well, I didn’t tell him. He went off to work early back then, out of the house by seven o’clock most mornings, not back until five or six; the school day was a total mystery to him. I think he set foot on school premises about five times over the years the girls were there. So, I just didn’t say anything.’
‘And Roxy didn’t tell him?’
‘No. Roxy didn’t tell him. It was just … well, his temper. You know.
We were all a bit scared of him.’
‘Was he violent? With the girls?’
‘Not then. No. But he was rough. He’d push them about.
Especially Roxy. But not violent. That came later.’
Josie sighs loudly.
‘I have not been a good parent. I have not been a good parent.’ ‘What do you mean?’
‘I just mean …’
She sighs again.
‘I let bad things happen. I didn’t stop them. I just let it all happen.’
***
2 p.m.
Alix’s phone buzzes for the third time in a row. She puts her finger in the air and presses pause on the recording, removes her headphones and says, ‘Sorry, Josie. I should get this. It’s Eliza. Hi, baby.’
‘Mum. Can you come back inside now? Leon’s being really annoying and I’m hungry.’
Alix glances at the time. It’s nearly two o’clock. ‘Yes. I’m really sorry.
Yes, I’m coming in now.’
She throws Josie an apologetic look. ‘I’m so sorry. But I’ve really left them alone for long enough now.’
Josie nods. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course. Sorry. I’m being selfish. It’s just I’ve kept this stuff all locked up for so long now and I’m scared that if I don’t get it all out in one go, it might go back in again.’
Alix smiles. ‘We won’t let that happen, Josie. OK? Let’s take a break for today and then we have all day tomorrow. I assume you won’t be going in to work tomorrow.’
Josie nods.
‘All day tomorrow, then. OK?’ ‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘OK.’
Monday, 15 July
Josie awakes to the sounds of Alix’s family getting ready for school. For a moment the sound is reassuring, like an echo of a happy day at the beach or a childhood Christmas. For a moment she is back in the early days of parenting, when her babies were adorable and her husband was handsome and strong. It occurs to her that maybe this was never actually the case, that she is looking back through an out-of-focus lens. But it had been better, at first – it had to have been better. Otherwise, what on earth was it all for?
She gets out of bed and throws on the linen gown that Alix left for her. She picks up the dog and puts on her slip-on shoes and heads downstairs. ‘Morning,’ she says as she walks into the kitchen.
She sees the children turn and gawp at her. The sight of them in their
Parkside uniforms is unnerving and she gawps back. The dog growls when he sees the cloud-cat sitting on the kitchen counter.
‘Morning, Josie!’ says Alix, who is wearing a white embroidered tunic top over yoga pants and has pulled her hair from her face with a fabric headband. She is barefoot and cutting a banana into slices directly over a toasted bagel and looks like one of her Instagram posts come to life. ‘Come in. Can I get you anything to eat?’
Josie shakes her head. ‘No. Thank you. I’ll just have a coffee. Is it OK if I use your machine?’
‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Nathan will make you one. Nathan!’
Nathan appears from the terrace clutching an empty cereal bowl and a mug.
‘Can you make Josie a cappuccino?’
Josie sees a look of antipathy pass across his face, masked with a grim smile. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Sugar?’
Josie nods. ‘One please. Thank you.’
She takes a seat on one of the mismatched chairs at the table, opposite Leon, who eyes her suspiciously. ‘My children went to your school,’ she says. ‘When they were small. But they’re big now.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Erin is staying at her friend’s house and Roxy is off travelling the world.’
‘So they’re adults?’
‘Yes. They’re adults.’ Josie feels her voice crack dangerously on the last syllable and clears her throat. ‘I hear you still have Mandy, in the office?’
Leon nods seriously. Josie lets her eyes linger on his hands, still plumped up with whatever it is that lives under the skin of young children. There’s a scab on the knuckle of his thumb and she remembers scabs. She remembers verrucas and nits and ingrown toenails and baby teeth hanging on by
threads and all the other tiny, perfect defects of small children. She resists
the urge to touch the scab, to give it a magic kiss. She resists the urge to say, ‘Oh no, you have an owee.’ She feels the loss of her children so viscerally and horribly that she could scream with the agony of it.
She manages a smile and says, ‘Mandy was there when my children were there.’
Leon runs his hands back and forth along the edge of the table and then
looks up at Josie and says, ‘How come you’re the same age as my mum, but your children are already adults and we’re only small?’
‘Well. That’s maths really, isn’t it?’ Leon looks at her questioningly.
‘So. If I’m forty-five and my oldest daughter is twenty-three, then how old was I when I had her?’
Leon screws up his face and says, ‘Is that forty-five take away twenty- three?’
‘Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Clever boy!’
‘So that’s …’ He unpeels his fingers from his fist, one by one on the tabletop, like an unfurling blossom, as he counts it out. ‘Twenty-two?’
‘Oh my goodness! And how old are you?’ ‘I’m six.’
‘Six! And you can do such complicated maths! That’s amazing. Yes.
Forty-five take away twenty-three is twenty-two. And that’s how old I was when I had my first child. And what is forty-five take away six?’
‘That’s easy. It’s thirty-nine.’
‘Yes! So your mum was thirty-nine when she had you. And that’s why my children are grown-ups, and you are still only six. Because everyone does things at different times.’
Josie turns and looks at Alix. Alix is smiling. ‘He’s very good at maths, your boy.’
‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Yes. He is. Leon’s good at everything, aren’t you,
baby? Apart from being ready to walk out the door when it’s time to go to school. So – come on. Let’s get those shoes on, shall we?’
Soon the house is empty. Nathan has gone to work, and Alix is walking the children to school and will be gone for at least half an hour. Josie is alone.
She crosses the kitchen and looks at the artwork on the special board that
has been installed for the children. She looks, in particular, for any signs of stress or darkness, remembering the unsettling drawings that Erin and Roxy used to produce, the concerned looks on teachers’ faces at parent–teacher meetings as they passed across pieces of artwork that displayed what they described as ‘signs of emotional stress’. But here there are only yellow suns and orange flowers and happy mummies and smiling daddies. Here is the art of healthy children living in a happy home. She unpins a tiny scrap of a sketch; it’s a girl, drawn in minute detail, with a giant bow in her hair and a small dog on a lead that looks a bit like Fred. Underneath is the word ‘Teeny’.
Josie doesn’t know who the girl is meant to be or whose dog it is meant to be, but the image is so pure and perfect that she knows she needs it. She slips it into the pocket of the linen dressing gown and rearranges the other drawings a little to hide the space.
Then she notices a calendar. It is printed with family photographs. Her eyes go to next Saturday. There it is: ‘Zoe and Petal’. Zoe is Alix’s sister’s name. She feels a reassuring sense of calm. Alix had not been lying to her.
Her sister really is coming to stay on Saturday. She smiles a small smile and traces the calendar entry with her fingertips.
She opens the fridge then, lets her eyes roam over the contents, is surprised to see Cheese Strings and mini Peperamis, not surprised to see something in a tub called skyr and something else in a tub called baba ghanoush.
She feels she should be showered and dressed by the time Alix returns from dropping the children, so she heads upstairs. There are three rooms on this floor. One bedroom for Alix and Nathan. One bedroom for Leon. And at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, is a small study. Josie goes to the study door and peers inside. A desk in the window, a wall of
bookshelves and there, against the back wall, what looks like a sofa-bed.
She hitches up the bottom cushion and sees the metal mechanism, then lets the cushion drop again. So. There is another spare room in the house. She does not have to leave on Saturday. She smiles and heads up the next flight of stairs to her room next to Eliza’s on the top floor.
She’s not ready to leave. Not even slightly.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
Screen shows three young people sitting on high stools in a dimly lit bar. Two young women, one young man.
They’re casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts; they all have tattoos and one of them wears a beanie hat.
The text below reads:
Ari, Juno and Dan: subscribers to gaming platform Glitch
The man speaks first. He has an American accent:
‘So, yeah, I think we were all just kind of messing about that night.
We had a couple friends over, we’d had a few beers, it was a hot July night. All the windows were open. So we weren’t paying as much attention as we normally would. We weren’t, you know, like rapt .’
Interviewer, off-mic: ‘So you were normally rapt?’
‘Yeah. I guess. I mean – she was amazing. We just knew her as her player name. Erased.’
Interviewer, off-mic: ‘Her player name was Erased?’
‘Yeah. I can see now that was sort of a play on words, sort of a combination of her real name and a comment on her real life. But we didn’t know anything about her real life. She was just Erased to us.
She played with a, like, green screen backdrop – so we couldn’t see her actual room; it looked like she was in an empty warehouse. She was really quiet. She virtually whispered. That’s unusual in this
world. But that was part of what made her cool. So it was the noise that alerted us that something weird was happening.’
‘From your computer?’
‘Yeah. We saw her getting off her chair and she never did that.
She never moved. And she disappeared and it was all kind of a blur, because of the green screen. You know how it messes with movement? Screaming. Shouting. Banging. And then it went dead. Literally, just dead. Her chair sat there, empty. We watched and we watched and we watched and she did not come back. And we all started messaging each other. Like, all over the world. But nobody
knew where she lived. Nobody knew her real name. Nobody knew anything about her.’
The girl in the beanie hat speaks.
‘We had footage of the whole thing. I called the police. They were like, what do you want us to do about it? She’s on the other side of the world. We sent the footage to Glitch. They didn’t have a physical address for her. Just an IP address and email details. They told us she was in, like, North London? So we started messaging anyone we knew in North London. We just became obsessed with this thing. It went viral. In the community. It was all anyone was talking about.
And then suddenly, just as we were getting close to finding out who she was and where she lived, the story broke. And then holy crap, our minds blew. Our minds just totally and utterly blew .’
***
9.30 a.m.
Josie is ready and dressed and sitting at the kitchen table when Alix gets back from dropping the children at school. The dog is in the back garden, sniffing around the flower beds. Alix sees that Josie has attempted to cover up some of the damage to her face with make-up and wonders for a moment where she had found it. She had arrived here on Saturday night with only her tiny handbag and the dog.
‘You look better,’ she says, indicating Josie’s face.
‘Yes. I was sick of seeing that horror show in the mirror. I found a tube of something in the bathroom cabinet. I hope you don’t mind?’
Alix shakes her head distractedly. She’s 99 per cent sure there was no foundation or make-up in the bathroom cabinet in the en suite to the spare room, but maybe a guest left it there without her noticing.
‘I just have a couple of jobs I need to do around the house, and then we can get going. Is that OK?’
‘Absolutely,’ says Josie. ‘I’m happy just sitting here, in your lovely kitchen.’
Alix throws her the warmest smile she can manage and then heads up to the bedrooms. She wrenches dirty bedclothes off Leon’s bed and bundles them together. Then she redresses it with fresh sheets and empties his wastepaper bin into a black bag. She does the same in her bedroom and in the bathroom. As she moves from job to job, she is followed by a sense of unease. She tries to unhitch it from her psyche, but she can’t. Everything
feels wrong; everything feels off-kilter. She hears the dog yapping in the back garden and peers out to see him staring longingly at a squirrel up a tree. She pictures Josie sitting at the kitchen table, the strange benignity of her, the placid smile. She doesn’t seem like someone whose husband assaulted her on Saturday night and who had to escape in the early hours and hasn’t been home since. She doesn’t seem like she’s in the eye of a
terrible personal trauma. She seems … happy?
She brings the dirty laundry and the black bin bag downstairs and there
she is, just as she’d left her. ‘I’ll be two more minutes,’ she calls out to Josie before taking the laundry into the utility room.
‘No rush!’
And there it is. That strange, unnerving note of jollity.
A moment later they are in the recording studio, each with a coffee in front of them and headphones on. The time is almost 10 a.m. and Alix
presses record.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a young girl sitting at a stool by the open-plan kitchen in Josie’s apartment.
She is laughing out loud at something that another young woman, an actress playing Josie’s younger daughter, Roxy, has just said.
An actress playing Josie sits on the sofa, looking at a magazine and smiling quietly.
The text beneath reads:
Recording of Josie Fair from Alix Summer’s podcast, 14 July 2019
‘I have to tell you about Brooke.’ ‘Brooke?’
‘Yes. She was Roxy’s friend. From school. Roxy never had a friend until Brooke. But she turned up at the beginning of year ten, and they were inseparable immediately.’
The screen shows the two girls sitting on a bed, cross-legged, playing with phones and laughing together.
‘Brooke was bolshy, like Roxy, and potty-mouthed. And she was fearless too. Scared of nothing and nobody. But I liked her because she was a good influence on Roxy. She got Roxy studying that year. She persuaded Roxy that GCSE s were useful, and she was fun. We weren’t a fun family. Not in that way. But Brooke was fun and she made us fun too, became almost a part of the family. She lived in a tiny flat with two small half-siblings, didn’t get on with her stepfather, had lots of issues at home, so I think she saw our place as a kind of refuge? It was a lovely time, in retrospect. And then we got towards the end of their year eleven, the GCSE s were coming up, Brooke was over a lot, revising with Roxy.’
The screen shows the two girls sitting on the floor, poring over exercise books.
‘But suddenly one day, just before the exams started, it was all over. Roxy came home from school, said they’d had a big fight. Said she’d punched Brooke. Given her a fat lip. We got a call from the school, asking us to come in. But then Roxy disappeared. Right in the middle of her exams. Just gone, for three whole days. Finally she reappeared, looking grubby, shell-shocked, said she’d been sleeping rough, been taken into a hostel, hadn’t slept for three nights. I ran her a bath; she was in there for over an hour.’
Screen shows the actor playing Roxy lying in a bath in a darkened bathroom.
‘Then she came out and told me what had happened. Told me about Brooke … and Walter.’
There is a prolonged silence.
The screen shows Roxy disappearing under the bathwater, her hair spreading out around her.
‘Walter?’
‘He’d been grooming her. All along. Just like he did with me. All those times she was here, when it felt like she was part of the family, it had been more than that. And then, just like he did with me, he bought her a necklace, he took her to the pub, he slipped a shot of vodka into her lemonade and then, on her sixteenth birthday, he slept with her.’
The screen goes black and slowly changes to a young girl, sitting in shadow on a chair in a studio.
Josie’s voice continues in the background:
‘While I was at work and Roxy was at school doing an exam, he invited her into our home and he slept with her in my bed. In my bed
.’
‘How did Roxy find out?’
‘Erin told her. They thought Erin wouldn’t notice because of the way Erin is with her gaming and everything. But she did. She heard them and then she saw through the crack in her bedroom door Brooke leaving and she told Roxy when she got back from her exam and the next day Roxy went into school and she beat Brooke. Beat her bloody.’
The screen oscillates between dramatised scenes of two girls fighting in a school playground and the girl sitting on the stool in shadow.
‘Shortly after Roxy came back from the homeless shelter, she left for good. We haven’t seen her since.’
A light flashes very briefly onto the face of the girl sitting on the stool, illuminating a small portion of her face.
The closing credits roll.
***
a.m.
Josie stares into Alix’s eyes. Alix looks mind-blown. Horrified.
‘I know,’ says Josie. ‘I’m sorry, it’s gross. But there it is. There is the truth about the man I married.’
‘Did you confront him?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Not then. I pretended I didn’t know.’
There it is again, across the smooth surface of Alix’s face, that flinch, that pinch.
Josie can hear Alix gulping drily. She comes in for the kill. ‘That night,’ she says, ‘on Friday. When we got home from having dinner here with you. That was the first time. The very first time I ever confronted Walter about what had happened with Brooke.’
‘And that was why …?’ Alix gestures at the damage to Josie’s face. Josie nods. ‘Yes. That was why. Exactly.’
They stop for lunch. Alix toasts some sourdough for them and serves it with houmous and baba ghanoush.
She glances across the kitchen table at Josie and says, ‘Any word from Walter?’
‘None. No.’
‘Would he normally be in touch after an episode like this?’ ‘I’ve never walked out on him before.’
‘So, you normally just sit it out?’ ‘Mm-hmm. Yeah.’
‘So, what was different this time?’
‘Everything, I guess. Ever since I turned forty-five, even before we started making this podcast, I’ve been feeling different about everything. I mean, that was why I was in that pub in the first place that night. We never normally go out to eat. At least, not to places like that. And then I met you and …’
Alix stares fixedly at Josie, not wanting to give away any of her interior disquiets through a twitch or a blink.
‘It felt like fate, like destiny. It was a turning point for me, my moment to take control of my narrative, unburden myself, share my truth – change.
And so on Friday night, the minute he first raised his hand to me, I already
knew it felt different. I already knew I would go and that I wouldn’t come back.’
Alix swallows drily. ‘When did he first hit you?’
‘Oh, you know. I mean, it would be hard to say exactly. It was a thing that happened slowly. You know. A little push here and there. Around the same time he started to be physical with the girls. I preferred it in a way. Preferred it if he pushed me around than them. Shocking, when you think about it. A man like that. A big man. Touching girls, women – hurting them. I mean, it’s impossible even to fathom. Like the sort of people who hurt animals.’ Her gaze drops to Fred, who sits at her feet staring at her meaningfully. She tears off a corner of sourdough dipped into the baba ghanoush and passes it to him. He chews it excitedly.
‘Has he ever hurt Fred?’
‘No. Not yet. Probably only a matter of time though, I guess.’ She passes another piece of bread and dip to the dog and then glances up at Alix. ‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘Has Nathan ever hurt you?’
‘Oh. God. No.’ And Alix realises as she says it how it sounds. It sounds smug and entitled, as if her life is lived on a different plane to Josie’s, as if only a woman like Josie would have a husband who hit her, only people who were brought up on estates and married to electricians experienced
domestic violence, when, of course, nothing was further from the truth. ‘No,’ she says again, toning down her incredulity. ‘Never.’
‘And the kids?’
‘No. Neither of us has ever hit the kids.’
Josie pushes her plate away from her and stares directly into Alix’s eyes. ‘But obviously, you have other problems. You have the drinking thing.’
‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘I do. Although I am hoping after Friday night that that might be the end of it.’
‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’
And there’s an edge to her voice which makes Alix think that Josie actively wants Nathan to go on another bender, to commit another cardinal sin, to blow it somehow. That she actively wants Nathan to be as bad as Walter.
Tuesday, 16 July
‘When is she leaving?’ Nathan whispers sharply into Alix’s ear the next morning.
They’re standing side by side in their en-suite bathroom, over their respective washbasins. Nathan is buttoning his work shirt. Alix is smoothing in her face cream.
‘Fuck. I don’t know. I’ve told her that Zoe’s coming to stay on Saturday, so she knows that at least she has to be gone by then.’
‘Wait. Hold on. Zoe’s coming? Did I know about that?’
Alix sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘Yes, Nathan. You did know about that. It’s been in the diary for a month. We’ve talked about it. Zoe and Petal sleeping over. And Maxine and the boys are coming over too and we’re having pizza and margaritas.’
‘So, a kind of girls’ night? No men?’
She sighs again. ‘No, you don’t have to stick around. But, Nathan, please just come home at a proper time. I can’t have my sisters judging you too.
It’s bad enough having her ’ – she points at the ceiling, indicating Josie in the room above them – ‘judging you. Please just have a normal night out and come home and come to bed and be here when my sister wakes up on Sunday morning.’
Nathan makes a face at her reflection in the mirror. It’s his sweetest face. She can’t help but soften to him. ‘Good,’ she says, smiling slightly. ‘Good.’
‘But all bets are off if that woman is still here come Saturday night.’ ‘She won’t be,’ Alix replies. ‘I promise you. She’ll be gone.’
Josie is clutching a pile of bedding when she walks into the kitchen at eight thirty.
‘Alix,’ she says. ‘I am so sorry. Fred had an accident in the night. In fact, a few accidents. I think maybe it was that stuff we had yesterday. That brown stuff. The baba—?’
‘Ghanoush?’
‘Yes. I think it’s not agreed with his stomach. I’m really sorry, but there’s some mess on the floor too. But let me sort it all out. Just tell me where the cleaning stuff is, and I’ll do it all.’
As she speaks, Alix watches in horror as Fred dribbles diarrhoea across
the kitchen floor. ‘Oh,’ she says, taking the bedding from Josie’s hands. ‘Oh dear. Listen. You take him out in the garden. I’ll clean this up.’
‘I’m so sorry, Alix. I really am. He’s never done this before.’ ‘No. No. Of course. Please don’t worry about it.’
Josie throws her an apologetic look and picks up the dog and heads into the garden, where he immediately squats and empties more liquid from within himself. Nathan, who is drinking his coffee on the terrace, looks from the dog to Josie and then turns to catch Alix’s eye through the bifold doors, throwing her a horrified look. Alix shrugs and gathers cleaning stuff from under the sink. She thinks of Saturday. She thinks of saying goodbye
to Josie, and then the arrival of her sisters and the opening of tequila bottles and squeezing of limes and the calls and shouts of pizza preference to whoever is accessing the Deliveroo app and the children buzzing from room to room, and she wants it so badly she can almost taste it. But for now, she has liquid Pomchi shit to clean up and soiled bedsheets to wash and, of course, a bed to redress. She retches slightly as she lifts Fred’s mess with super-absorbent kitchen towels and antibacterial kitchen spray and throws them in the bin.
‘Kids,’ she says, through gritted teeth. ‘Chop chop. We’re going to be late.’
She leaves the house five minutes later, her nostrils still thick with the smell of dog shit.
Harry, her next-door neighbour’s son, is just turning towards his house when Alix gets home half an hour later.
‘Hi!’ she says.
He turns at the sound of her voice and looks at her benignly. ‘Hi,’ he says.
‘How are you?’
‘Oh. Yeah. I’m good, thanks. How about you?’
‘Yes. I’m good too.’ She glances at her front door, then joins Harry at the turning to his garden path. ‘Roxy Fair,’ she begins quietly. ‘Do you remember a friend of hers called Brooke?’
‘Er, yeah. I remember her. She was a bit …’
She watches his face as he struggles to find the words he’s looking for. ‘A bit of a … a player?’ he says eventually.
Alix throws him a disapproving look. ‘An opinion based on …?’
‘Yes. Sorry. I mean nothing really. She was just quite mature for her age.
Quite heavy-handed around boys. I have no idea if she was actually sleeping around, but that was the impression she gave.’
‘And what happened to her? After you all left school? Do you have any idea?’
He blows air from his cheeks and says, ‘She went missing, as far as I recall. Ran away, maybe? I can’t quite remember. But I do know there was some kind of falling out between Roxy and Brooke, towards the end?’
‘Oh. Right. And what was that about?’
‘I don’t know. But it was toxic for a while. Really toxic. There was a fight. Like, a cat fight? One of them got a split lip. Can’t remember which one.’
‘And Brooke. Can you remember her surname?’ ‘Yeah, I can. It was Ripley.’
‘And Brooke spelt …?’ ‘B-R-O-O-K-E. I think.’
‘Amazing!’ Alix flashes him a smile. ‘Great. Thanks. Say hello to your mum and dad for me, won’t you?’
Josie is gone when Alix gets back inside. The kitchen still smells faintly of disinfectant and shit, and she opens up the sliding doors to let fresh air in. Then she makes herself a coffee and opens her laptop and googles ‘Brooke Ripley’.
There are many, most of them too old to be Roxy’s Brooke. She opens Instagram and searches for her there. There are five. None of them looks
quite right, but she clicks on each in turn. They live in places that someone who’d been brought up in Kilburn would not end up living, at least not at
the age of twenty-one. None of them looks quite right either. Then she goes on to Facebook and searches for her there. She clicks first on People but
runs once more into a seam of unlikely candidates, before clicking on Posts
. And there – her heart stops and then races – there is her name, Brooke Ripley , highlighted, in a sequence of posts about a missing girl.
Alix clicks on the first post. She reads the first few words: ‘Please help!
Anyone in Kilburn/Paddington/Queen’s Park/Cricklewood areas. My beautiful niece, Brooke …’
And then she starts.
Josie is standing in front of her, clutching Fred. ‘Oh!’ says Alix. ‘You made me jump!’
‘I’ve cleaned the floor upstairs,’ she says. ‘And opened the window to let some air in. If you want to give me some fresh bedding, I’ll pop it on.’
‘Great. I’ll get some out for you next time I go up.’
‘Again, I am so sorry. He seems fine now. I think he just needed to pass it through his system. I’ve never fed him anything like that before. He clearly wasn’t built for it.’
‘Bless him,’ says Alix. ‘Poor little thing. Are you up for some more recording this morning?’
Josie nods. ‘Absolutely. Yes. Let me just get myself a coffee.’ ‘Great. I’ll just pop to the bathroom. See you soon.’
Alix shuts her laptop and heads upstairs to grab some fresh bedclothes for Josie from the cupboard on the landing. She leaves them at the foot of
the stairs, intending to let Josie do it herself, but something makes her carry them up the stairs to the top floor. The door to the spare room is ajar. A
breeze ruffles the curtains through the open window. The clothes that Josie was wearing when she arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning are hanging, laundered and fresh, from the freestanding rail. The pyjamas that Alix lent Josie are folded neatly on the stripped bed. In the en suite a damp towel hangs from the rail, and on the glass shelf above the sink is a tube of Alix’s foundation that she has no recollection of having ever put there, and also a tube of her mascara. She picks them up and looks at them curiously, as if they might offer her an explanation.
Then she sets about remaking the bed in the fresh clothes. She stuffs the pillows into their cases, shakes the duvet into its cover and tucks the sheet under the mattress, and it is as she is doing so that she feels something hard and cold. She locates it and pulls it out.
It’s a key. It’s attached to a fob with the number 6 written on the internal paper label. The fob is streaked with dried-on blood. Alix drops it, as if it is white-hot, then slides it, quickly, urgently, back under the mattress and
closes the bedroom door behind her.
Josie is waiting for her in the kitchen. She smiles. ‘Ready?’ she says.
Alix nods.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a woman walking through a park with a chocolate Labrador. The sun is setting in the sky behind her and is a deep, blood red.
The next shot shows her sitting in a small armchair, next to a blazing wood fire in a grate, the dog at her feet sleeping.
The woman has a glass of red wine in front of her and her legs curled up beneath her. The text underneath says:
Ffion Roberts, Brooke Ripley’s aunt
The woman called Ffion opens up her laptop, which is briefly shown on screen.
It shows a Facebook post.
The camera returns to Ffion and shows her reading the post:
‘“Please help! Anyone in Kilburn/Paddington/Queen’s Park/Cricklewood areas. My beautiful niece, Brooke, went to her
school prom on Wednesday. She told friends that she was going to meet ‘a friend’ afterwards and her schoolfriends said goodbye to her at the bus stop outside the prom venue, on Shoot Up Hill in Cricklewood, at just after nine p.m. We have CCTV footage of her getting on the number twenty-eight bus at nine eleven and getting off again near the top of Maida Vale at nine twenty-two. After that, we don’t know where she went, but she is not answering her phone and her mum and all her family are worried sick. If you have any idea who she might have been going to meet on Wednesday at nine thirty, please, please let us know. And please share this as far as it
will go. The police have been informed but there’s only so much they can do.”’
She closes the laptop and looks up at the interviewer. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her face crumples and it is clear she is about to
cry.
‘I’m sorry.’
She turns away from the camera .
‘I’m really sorry. Could I just have a minute?’
Wednesday, 17 July
The Facebook post shows Brooke Ripley in a white, fitted ankle-length
dress and silver trainers. She looks pensive in the photo, fragile and unsure. It’s only because Alix knows that a mere six weeks beforehand this girl was being groomed and abused by Walter Fair that she can see so deeply into her soul, read so much into the uncertain tilt of her head, the slimness of her smile. She is amazed, in fact, that Brooke Ripley went to her school prom at all, given the horrific backdrop to it all.
The Facebook post, which has been shared around twenty times, is a plea from Brooke’s aunt, Ffion, writing on behalf of Brooke’s mum.
Alix reads the comments. They’re all of the ‘thoughts and prayers’ variety. Nobody has a clue. A girl called Mia who was in the edges of the prom photograph with Brooke replies: ‘That’s me in the photo. Like literally saw her just a few minutes before she disappeared. She said she
was going home. Wish I knew where she was,’ accompanied by a sad-face emoji and a heart.
Alix clicks on Mia’s profile and finds that it has maximum security settings, all the way down to blocking access to her friends list. She clicks on Message and stares for a moment at the empty space in Messenger. What would she say? And how?
And why, Alix wonders, has she never heard of Brooke Ripley? Why is her name and the photo of her in the beautiful white dress not synonymous with the summer of 2014? And then Alix realises that in June 2014 she had a sleepless baby and a feisty six-year-old. She was deep down inside the well of early parenthood, so maybe she had seen this story around at the
time and totally forgotten about it, or maybe it had been quickly subsumed by something bigger?
She switches screens at the sound of footsteps down the stairs. It’s Josie, still wearing the same outfit that Alix had lent to her on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday. She has her own clothes hanging in her room, cleaned and ready to be worn. Yet she is still wearing Alix’s.
‘I was thinking,’ Alix says. ‘If you’re going to be here for a couple more days, would you like me to go over to yours and pick up some clothes for you?’
She sees a flash of something pass across Josie’s face. ‘No,’ she says, her mouth set firm. ‘No, thank you.’
‘The weather’s turning though – it’s going to be really hot the next couple of days. Pushing thirty. I could pick you up some more of those summer dresses?’
‘Honestly.’ Josie’s mouth softens. ‘Honestly. It’s fine.’ ‘Well, let me know if you change your mind.’
‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘I will.’
‘And what will you do? On Saturday? Where will you go?’
She tries not to stare too hard at Josie as she finds her answer to this question, as she already knows that she will be struggling, already knows that Josie has no plan beyond the end of each day.
‘I suppose I’ll …’ She trails off momentarily. ‘I’m not sure. I mean, how would you feel …?’
Alix feels herself stiffen.
‘I noticed that there’s a fold-out bed. In the study. I mean, I could always sleep there, while your sister’s here? I don’t suppose anyone will be using
the study on a Saturday night? And I’d absolutely stay out of your way so that you and your sister can do sister things?’
Alix’s mouth has turned dry. This is it. This is the line that she had put metaphorically inside her relationship with Josie from day one, and each day they have been stepping a little closer and a little closer and right now they are touching it with their outstretched toes and once that line has been breached Alix no longer has any idea how she will regain control of the situation. She knows, with a sickening certainty, that she has to have Josie gone from her house by Saturday afternoon. But she also knows, with a sickening certainty, that Josie is currently controlling her and that making her leave the house before she’s ready to do so would spell the end of the podcast just as it was gearing up towards being something riveting and unmissable. She thinks all of this in the two seconds it takes for her to say, ‘Well, let me ask Nathan. I’m kicking him out of the girls’ space on Saturday night so he might well end up in the study, working.’
She glances quickly at Josie, long enough to observe a slightly menacing back-tip of her head, a cool refinding of her bearings.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘OK. But let me know as soon as you can.’ ‘Yes,’ Alix replies warmly. ‘Yes! Of course.’
When Josie mentions that she won’t be going into work that afternoon, Alix invents a reason to leave the house. Everything has been so intense since
the moment that Josie and Walter walked into her house on Friday night. Every minute of every day has been overshadowed by the existence of these people and their horrible, messy lives and by the physical presence of Josie and her dog in Alix’s home. Time has lost its form and its meaning. Another weekend is approaching and on the other side of that weekend is the end of the school term and then there will be six long weeks of unstructured time and loose-limbed days and she needs something which feels normal and just for her. She tells Josie she is going to return some library books and then
she heads into the park to have her lunch at the café.
The café in Queen’s Park has formed the basis of huge swathes of Alix’s life since she and Nathan moved into the area ten years ago. She sees ghosts and hears echoes of herself at all the different stages of herself; pregnant with Leon, later sitting with a newborn and a five-year-old, with mums from nursery, mums from school, with Nathan and the kids at the weekends.
The ice-cream kiosk makes her think of Leon and Eliza with bright blue
mouths after eating the bubblegum flavour. The beers in the chilled cabinet make her think of the slightly woozy sensation of daytime drinking on hot summer afternoons. She’s sat at each table at various points, lived different versions of herself in multiple light-refracting fragments. So today she will sit in the café, and she will eat a panini and she will live another fragment of her life and she will try to feel normal, to feel like the Alix of six weeks ago, the Alix who hadn’t met Josie Fair.
She orders her panini, the one she always has, goat’s cheese and ham, and she orders an iced tea, and she sits with her numbered wooden paddle on the table in front of her and waits for her food to arrive and waits to feel normal. But the normal doesn’t come. Maybe normal is over there, she ponders, on the other side of the park somewhere; maybe it’s in the sand pit where she still takes the children sometimes when they’re feeling little. Or maybe it’s on the zipwire in the adventure playground. Or in the petting zoo, which she and Nathan had walked past drunkenly on the night of her forty-fifth birthday, the dark night air still warm on their bare skin.
Her panini arrives and it is the same panini she always has but it doesn’t bring her normal. It feels like Josie has taken Alix’s normal and swallowed it deep down somewhere inside her darkness. Alix thinks of the blood- smeared key under the mattress with the number 6 scrawled on it. She
thinks of Josie rooting through her recycling bin while she was out with her family. She thinks of Josie in her home, right now, wearing Alix’s clothes, Alix’s make-up, scattering her hair, her dead skin cells, everywhere she goes. She pictures Josie going into their study, spotting the sofa-bed, going into Alix’s bathroom, taking her foundation. Then she sees Walter having sex with Brooke, Erin with her ear to the wall, Josie pretending it hadn’t happened, getting on with her life.
Alix pushes the panini away and gets to her feet. She needs to get this podcast finished. Get it done, immerse herself in this filth, get to the end of this miserable story, get Josie out of her house and reclaim her life. But first, she needs to walk past Josie’s flat, peer through the window, see if she can get a sense of what Walter might be doing or thinking.
12.30 p.m.
Alix said she’d be gone for an hour. She said they’d do some recording when she returned, if Josie was up for it. An hour is a long time, Josie thinks. A long time to be alone in someone’s house. Alix told Josie to help herself to lunch. ‘Whatever’s in the fridge, just help yourself.’
So Josie peers into the fridge. She sees the rest of the baba whatever it is, the brown stuff that made Fred sick. She shudders. Then she sees a block of cheddar and thinks that a piece of that and a slice of bread and butter will be all she needs. She eats the tiny lunch at the kitchen table, staring blankly into space. Fred snuffles around the kitchen, looking for crumbs. The floor
is surprisingly messy. There has been the plastic twist from the top of a loaf of bread on the floor for three days now. Nobody seems to see it. It’s not
commensurate with the image that Alix likes to present on Instagram. None of it is, really, not when you look up close. But that doesn’t matter. Josie is not naturally tidy herself, she’s only tidy because Walter likes it that way, and so she feels happy for Alix that she’s allowed to have a plastic bread- bag tag on her floor for three days without it causing an argument.
A moment later she finds herself striding across the kitchen, picking up the tag and putting it in the pocket of her trousers.
She opens and closes the silky-smooth drawers in the kitchen until she gets to the messy one with all the things in it. She leafs through takeaway
menus and biros and packets of Handy Andies and bulldog clips and books of postage stamps and bottle stoppers and rubber bands. Everything has been thrown in, there is no order to any of it. Her fingers feel the sheen of a photograph and she pulls out a column of passport shots. They’re of Leon looking sombre and serious, the pale-blue collar of his school shirt just visible. She slides it into her pocket too.
She thinks of her underwear drawer, at home, of the trophies and trinkets tucked away behind her pants. Not just Alix’s. The others too. She feels an itch to go home, just for a moment, to tuck the child’s drawing and the bread tag and the photos of Leon into the drawer. She could do that, she’s sure. She’d be in and out in seconds. Nobody would see her. She’ll go
tomorrow, she decides, after work.
And then she pulls out a shiny black business card with Nathan’s details on it. The name of his company – ‘Condor and Bright, Commercial Property Consultants, EC1’ – and his mobile phone number beneath his office number is printed on it. She puts it in her pocket.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a young, very bubbly woman. She has a mass of blonde curls tied back into a ponytail and wears large gold hoop earrings and a fitted black cardigan.
She sits on a small red sofa in a dimly lit bar and is shown rearranging herself a few times and trying to find the perfect pose.
‘Can you see down my top at this angle?’ she asks the interviewer. The interviewer is heard saying, ‘No, you’re fine,’ off-mic.
She laughs and says, ‘Good. Well, then. Let’s go.’
The text beneath reads:
Katelyn Rand
‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was a friend of Josie’s. I knew of her. She knew of me. I lived on her estate when I was small and I remember
her and her mum. Particularly her mum. Everyone knew Pat O’Neill. She was larger than life. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.’
Katelyn laughs wryly.
‘And I remember my mum telling me about Josie suddenly leaving home at eighteen and the gossip that went round at the time, that she’d gone off with an older man. Last time I saw her I guess I was about ten? And I didn’t see her again for years and years. Until I brought some stuff into that shop where she worked. Stitch, the alterations place in Kilburn, and I recognised her immediately. She hadn’t changed at all, weirdly. Pretty sure she was still wearing the same clothes she used to wear when she was a teenager! So I got chatting with her and she asked me what I did and I told her about the acting. Told her I was struggling. You know. As actors do. Made light of it. And she said – and these were her exact words – “I might have a gig for you. Give me your number.” So I gave her my number and then, yeah, a few days later she called me. And that was that.
Up to my neck in it. Up to my fucking neck.’
***
12.40 p.m.
It’s a twelve-minute walk from the lush greenness of Queen’s Park to the stained grey of Josie’s street. Even on a sunny day the stucco houses look humiliated by their poor condition. Alix stares first from across the street and then from outside, directly into the windows. She sees a table in the bay. It’s a dark wood, the sort that is unfashionable these days. There are three dark wooden chairs around it with barley-twist spindles. She can
make out a sofa facing towards an older-looking television. Blank walls. A kitchen open to the living room is built into an alcove at the back. The
cabinets are pine clad with white plastic handles. She can make out a dark passageway leading to a door. Denim curtains are half drawn over the smaller window. Through the gap she can see a bed, freshly made with a
pale floral duvet and two floral pillows, a pair of denim cushions, some white Formica-clad drawers.
It looks like a rental that’s just been vacated by its previous owners, spruced and tidied and dressed for its next occupants. It does not look like a flat that is currently being lived in. She goes back to the big bay window,
casts her eyes around the room again. It is hard to believe that a domestic incident occurred here in the early hours of Saturday, that a big man beat his small wife until she was bloodied and bruised.
And where is that big man? she wonders. There is a laptop closed on the dining table. But nothing else. Josie described him as never going out. As always being home. But he is not home now. So where is he?
She looks, one more time, at the sofa. She pictures Walter and Josie sitting side by side in the aftermath of his atrocity with Brooke, silently watching TV. Then she pictures Walter, five years later, slamming his wife’s head against the wall in rage at her belated accusations.
As she turns back, she looks slightly to her left. She sees a double-decker bus rumbling down Kilburn High Road a few hundred feet away, heading south towards Maida Vale. And as she sees it, she thinks of Brooke Ripley climbing off a bus in her white column dress five years ago, just there.
Just there, in fact, at the point where Kilburn High Road meets Maida Vale.
Just there, a two-minute walk from Josie and Walter’s flat.
2 p.m.
Alix stares hard at Josie. She tries to make her face look soft, but it’s difficult because inside she feels all hard edges and spikes and darkness.
Josie has her headphones on and is drinking tea out of Alix’s favourite mug. (Alix suspects that Josie knows it is Alix’s favourite mug and that is why
she always uses it.) Alix adjusts the volume on the controls and then clears her throat, watching the lines jumping on the screen of her laptop. Her next question feels solid on her tongue, like something that she might accidentally swallow and choke on. She clears her throat again and says, ‘So. What happened to Brooke?’
‘Brooke?’
Alix smiles and nods. ‘Yes. Brooke.’
‘I have no idea. Never heard from her again.’ ‘Never heard from her again?’
‘No.’
‘Did you never try to find her?’
Josie narrows her eyes at Alix and throws her a questioning look. ‘No.
Why would I? After what she did?’
‘Well, maybe she might have had some sort of an idea about where Roxy was.’
Alix watches Josie’s face as she reaches for a reply.
‘No,’ she says after a pause. ‘No. She wouldn’t have known. They had that big fall out. It was all over between them. Completely.’
Alix raises an eyebrow coolly, finding it virtually impossible to cover her feelings.
‘How would you feel,’ she says, ‘about me getting in touch with Brooke?
Getting her side of things? For the podcast?’ ‘No.’
It’s as immediate and definite as a slammed door. ‘Why not?’
‘Because … just, no. It’s too much. I’m telling you what I want to tell you. What I need to tell you. I have to live my life on the other side of this podcast. You know? Show my face in the world. And if you get her involved …’ She stops and inhales.
Alix waits.
‘I just don’t trust her. That’s all.’
‘You must wonder, though? What happened to her?’
‘Of course I do. I wonder all the time. About Roxy. And about Brooke. All the time. It’s like my life … it’s like it ended that day. You know. Like all the good things stopped.’
‘But Erin,’ Alix says. ‘What about Erin?’ ‘What about Erin?’
‘I mean, she must bring you happiness. Surely? What was it like for her when Roxy left? You barely talk about Erin.’
Josie shrugs. ‘There’s not much to say.’ ‘Well, shall we just try?’
Josie nods.
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a woman sitting on a sofa in an apartment, staring through the window as a bus goes past.
The text below reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 17 July 2019
‘After the Brooke thing, my relationship with Walter became a game of chess. It was like I was a pawn, being pushed about by some huge invisible finger from square to square with no thought of my needs and wants. Walter was the king, of course, and everything in the home was done to protect him. I’d created a kind of invisible barrier around my family, behind the door of our flat. I’d been doing it for years, of course, all throughout the fourteen years of the children being at school, with the mums and the teachers and the social workers and my work colleagues and the next-door and upstairs neighbours; I kept people away. But that was when nobody had really done anything wrong. When all I was worried about was being judged for having badly behaved children, a violent husband. But
now I was in danger of being judged for having a husband who seduced teenage girls and slept with them in his own home and yes, I did go on to his laptop and yes, he had been looking at things that were illegal and disgusting and actually very upsetting and yes, Walter is a pervert and a criminal, disgusting, repellent, a man that I would never touch again, not in that way. And I told him as much.
Told him that that side of our marriage was over. So I cooked and cleaned and worked and smiled at people I trusted, kept my head down around people I didn’t, and then two years ago I told Walter I wanted a dog because I was sick of not having anything to love and he said if we were going to get a dog, then he wanted an Akita or a Dobermann or something he could feel proud of walking down the road and I said, “ No , this dog is for me and I want a dog I can carry like a baby, because you ruined my babies, you ruined them.”
‘Because, by then, not only had Roxy gone, but Walter had started abusing Erin.’
The screen fades and the credits roll.
***
2.30 p.m.
‘Abusing? What do you mean?’
Josie tips her head back slightly and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Alix
waits with her breath caught painfully at the back of her throat. She feels as if she’d known this all along, somehow, like this had been a terrible hum in the background of everything right from the very start.
‘I mean that nearly every night, when I fall asleep, Walter gets out of bed and goes into Erin’s room. And then, when I get up, he’s sitting at the table in the living room acting like nothing happened.’
‘And? I mean – how do you know?’
‘I just do. That man thinks he’s the king, you see. He lets me have my way here and there, like with the dog. Like coming here for dinner. But he does it in the way that a king would do it. A thrown treat.’ She gestures with her arm. ‘You have to run for it. You know. But as far as he’s concerned, everything in that flat is his. It all belongs to him, and so the minute I told him I wasn’t his any more, that he was no longer allowed to touch me, he took the next nearest thing. He took Erin.’
‘Have you ever seen anything? Heard anything?’
Josie shakes her head. ‘I put in my earplugs. I stay in my room until the morning comes.’
‘Fuck! Josie!’ Alix can’t help it. She cannot contain the shock and dismay. She’s meant to be impartial. Her job is not to judge or react, but simply to ask and listen. But this – she’ll edit out her reaction, she knows that – this is too animal and raw to remain circumspect about, especially – and yes, she knows it’s the most awful cliché – but especially as a mother.
‘What was I meant to do?’ Josie snaps. ‘It was so gradual. I didn’t realise at first, what was happening. I just happened to wake up a couple of times and see the empty bed. I’d ask him where he’d been, and he’d say he’d been chatting online with his kids in Canada. And I thought: Why does it have to be in the middle of the night? What’s wrong with the evening? And once
I’d worked out what was happening, well, I thought she’d come and tell me. Erin. I kept waiting. But instead, she just went more and more into herself. Stopped eating anything I gave her. She’d always been fussy, but she got fussier and fussier and then started asking for baby food.’
‘Baby food?’
‘Yes. She said, “I want that stuff I used to have when I was little. The stuff you gave me out of a jar. When you used to feed me with a spoon.” I mean, I assumed it was some kind of – what do they call it? – regression, I suppose. She wanted to be a baby again. To be safe.’
‘But, Josie, sorry,’ Alix interjects, sensing that Josie is skimming over vast swathes of important back story. ‘What did Walter say? I mean, you must have said something to him, surely?’
Josie shakes her head and Alix sighs so loudly it makes the audio display on her laptop oscillate wildly. ‘I’m really sorry, Josie. Really, I am. But I need to get this straight. You are telling me that in the aftermath of what happened with Walter and Brooke, your youngest daughter ran away from home and you withdrew conjugal favours from your husband, and that as a result of that, your husband started to visit your older teenage daughter in her bedroom every night, to, you assume, sexually abuse her. Your daughter began to regress to the point of wanting to eat only baby food and stopped leaving her room entirely. And this has been going on for the past five years?’
‘Around about. Yes.’
Josie voice is clipped. Her mouth is pursed.
‘And you have not spoken to either your daughter or your husband about it?’
She nods. ‘That’s correct.’ ‘It just … happens?’
‘It just happens.’
‘And your daughter. Erin. Was she restrained in any way? I mean, was she free to leave?’
‘Yes. She was free to leave.’ ‘But she didn’t?’
‘No. She didn’t.’
‘And why do you think that is?’
‘He probably got inside her head. He probably made her think it was OK. The way he does. You know?’
Alix leaves a moment of silence. Her listeners will need it at this point.
But she needs it too. Then she asks the question that she fears the answer to. ‘Before Friday night, Josie, when you and Walter had your fight, the
night Walter beat you, when was the last time you’d seen Erin?’
She shrugs. She sniffs and wriggles slightly in her chair. ‘About six months? Maybe a year? About that.’
‘Not at all? Not once? Not even going to the bathroom?’
‘She waits until I’m not in the house. She doesn’t want to see me.’ ‘But how do you know that?’
‘Well, she’d come and see me if she did, wouldn’t she? She knows when I’m there. I feed her. I leave her the food and then she puts the empties
outside her room. And don’t think, don’t think for a minute, that I didn’t want to see her, because I wanted to see her more than anything, but when something goes on for that long it, well, you know, it just gets harder and harder, doesn’t it? Harder to turn back and do the right thing. I stopped at her door, every day, twice, three times a day. I stopped. And I touched the door and I made my hand like this.’ She forms it into a fist with knuckles. ‘Like I was going to knock. And I never did, Alix. I just never did. And don’t think I don’t hate myself because I hate myself so much. So much.
Hate that it took so long for me to break this. To stop it.’ ‘And it took a dinner at my house …?’
‘Yes. Like I told you when we first met up, it was all about breaking patterns. Going to the fancy pub that night. Getting rid of the denim.
Getting to know you. Doing this.’ She gestures at the space between them. ‘It was as if I had to break small patterns before I would be ready to break big ones.’
Alix nods slowly, and peers at Josie through narrowed eyes. ‘I see,’ she says. Although she really doesn’t. ‘I see. But you say that Erin has been a virtual recluse for the past few months, hasn’t left her room, or the house. So, where did she go, exactly, on Friday night? Which friend has she gone to stay with?’
Josie repositions herself. ‘I have no idea.’ ‘Someone she went to school with?’
‘Oh. I doubt that. No, probably just someone she knows from gaming.
An online friend.’
‘You must be so worried about her.’
‘Yes. I am. I’m horribly worried about her. I’m worried about her, and I’m worried about Roxy.’
‘And what about Walter? Are you worried about Walter?’
‘God. No. Why would I be worried about him? He’s a pervert and a wife- beater. He’s a monster. I despise him. I absolutely despise him. I’m glad—’
She stops herself short. ‘Glad what?’
‘I’m glad he hit me. I’m glad he hurt me. It got me out of there. Got me out of that sick prison. I’d take the beating all over again to be free.’
Her face sets hard, and Alix wishes this was a documentary, not a podcast. She wishes her listeners could see the way Josie’s face has frozen into a mask, and the single, glycerine tear that appears in those black eyes of hers and spills down her cheek in a straight line.
‘What will become of him? Of Walter? Will you tell the police about what he did to Erin?’
She wipes the tear away with the back of her hand and sniffs. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not my move to make. That’s up to Erin.’
‘Have you talked to her about it?’
‘No. I haven’t spoken to her at all. She won’t take my calls. Or reply to my messages.’
Alix makes a circle of her mouth and exhales. None of this makes any sense. None of it. ‘Have you thought about going to the flat and going through Erin’s computer? Seeing what you can find?’
‘I don’t know anything about computers.’
‘Well, yes, but I do. I could come with you?’
‘No. No, thank you. Erin will come to me when she’s ready.’
‘But, Josie, think about it. Erin has been abused under your roof for years. You’ve done nothing to protect her. She waits until you’re out of the house before she uses the bathroom. What on earth makes you think she’s going to get in touch with you?’
Josie sighs and shrugs. ‘You’re probably right,’ she says. ‘I’m sure
you’re right. But whatever happens, it’s better for her than being in that flat with that man. Whatever happens, at least she’s free.’
3.30 p.m.
Alix stands outside the school gates. She has brought the dog, who has not been taken for a walk yet today. She wanted an excuse to leave a little early, to be out a little late. Her head is bursting. She feels sick. Mothers chat with her and she chats back, glad of the opportunity to take herself completely out of the place she’s spent the past few hours. The dog sees another dog and yaps at it and Alix apologises to the dog’s owner. Children fuss around the tiny dog and Alix says, ‘Be careful, he can be a bit snappy.’ Someone
asks if the dog is hers and she says, ‘No, he belongs to a friend,’ then corrects herself and says, ‘To someone I know.’
She takes the children to the park and watches them on the swings, the dog tucked under her arm. She wishes the dog could talk. The dog would know, she thinks, the dog would know everything. She wants to talk to Josie’s mum, but she has promised Josie that she won’t.
She can’t stop thinking about Walter, about the way he’d been on Friday night when he came for dinner. The brand-new clothes with the creases still in. The moderate drinking (he had only two beers, all night). The quiet way he’d talked to her in her recording studio about his ‘Jojo’, about her lying and her making up stories to suit her own narrative. She’d put it down to the behaviour of a gaslighter; she’d assumed that it was all part of his act. And maybe it was. But she can’t shift the discomfiting sense that there’s something else. Something behind this dark, yet somehow typical, story of a family blighted by the dysfunction of a controlling and dominant man.
She’s not who she makes out to be. Not at all .
That’s what he’d said. And as much as her gut tells her to believe a woman who says she has been abused, it also tells her that Josie is not to be trusted.
Thursday, 18 July
Alix and the children have left for school, but Nathan is running late for work. Josie had heard him say something to Alix about a meeting in
Bishopsgate at 10 a.m., not worth him heading to the office beforehand.
Just as Alix had predicted, the weather has turned from pleasant-for-mid- July to unbearably hot. Nathan sits in the garden with his laptop and a cup of coffee and, even from here, Josie can see the sheen of sweat on his forehead. It occurs to her that he sits in the garden in the mornings deliberately to avoid having to share space with her indoors. She forces a
smile and slips through the gap between the sliding glass doors. She’s still wearing the clothes that Alix gave her on Saturday. She has her own clothes hanging in her room, but she no longer wants to wear them, even though they are clean. She had hoped that Alix might take pity on her seeing her descend the stairs every morning wearing the same top and trousers, that
she might offer to lend her something new. But she hasn’t.
‘God,’ she says, standing a few feet from Nathan. ‘It’s boiling, and it’s not even nine o’clock!’
‘They’re saying thirty-two by lunchtime.’ ‘Bloody hell.’
She allows a silence to pass before turning to him and saying, ‘Oh. By the way. Alix said you might be using the study on Saturday night? When her sister is here?’
‘Oh,’ he says, looking slightly flustered, and Josie knows immediately that he and Alix have been talking about this, secretly, privately, behind her back. ‘Well, yeah. That was the plan. But no. Apparently, they’re all sleeping over now. I think Alix was going to tell you. Both sisters and all
three kids. They’re going to be using the fold-out. So …’ He clears his throat and trails off.
Lies. All of it.
‘Oh,’ says Josie. ‘That’s fine. I’ll find something. But what about you?
Where will you be hiding out?’
‘Oh, I’ll probably hang out here for a bit and then head off around seven for a couple of drinks with some mates.’
‘The same mates you were with when you didn’t show up for dinner last Friday?’ She tries to inject a hint of playfulness into her words, but she fails. She’s so cross she could scream.
He throws her an uncertain look and shrugs. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure.’ Then he necks the dregs of his coffee, slaps his hands against his legs and says, ‘Well, time for me to head into work. What are you up to today?’
‘Nothing really. We’ll do some more of the podcast, then I’ll go to work.
That’s it really.’
‘And what are your plans, Josie? Generally? I mean, obviously from Saturday you’ll need a plan. Won’t you?’
Josie eyes him coolly. He has gone off-script, she can tell. This is not what Alix told him to say. This is, she thinks furiously, none of his bloody business. But she manages to sound civil when she says, ‘Yes. I’ll need a plan. But what I’ve found, Nathan, is that life shows you the way when you forget to make one. So, you know, let’s wait and see.’ She shrugs and heads back into the kitchen, scoops up the dog and takes him to her room, where she waits until she hears the sound of Nathan slamming the front door
behind him a few minutes later. She watches him through the small window in her bedroom, slinging his suit jacket over his shoulder, sliding his stupid sunglasses onto his stupid nose, walking down the street as if he were the king of the universe.
Alix said she was going to the shops after the school run, she said she’d be home about nine thirty. It’s 9.10 a.m. now and Josie shuts the dog in her room and tiptoes down to the next floor. Alix and Nathan’s bedroom door is wide open, which she feels is a sign of some sort that Alix isn’t precious about people seeing inside. She hasn’t properly investigated their room yet. It feels too much. Much too much. But Nathan has put her in a bad mood with all his talk of ‘plans’.
If Nathan thinks she should have a plan, she decides, then a plan she will have.
Alix and Nathan’s bed is very big. It has a bedhead made out of rattan and pale green velvet. It is unmade; huge voluminous clouds of creamy duvet are bunched up at the foot of the bed, kicked off no doubt during the
encroaching heat of the previous night, with two fat pillows squashed into
fortune cookies at the top end and two more kicked on to the floor on either side. The walls are hung with a mishmash of prints and paintings and photographs. A pair of milky-white lights hang from the ceiling, one on each side of the bed, instead of table lamps, Josie supposes. There’s a
square bay window with a little seat built into it, overlooking the back garden. It’s scattered with discarded clothes, mostly Nathan’s, including a nasty-looking pair of threadbare socks (you’d think he could afford new ones).
Between the bedroom and the en-suite bathroom is a kind of anteroom, or dressing area, with clothes hanging on either side: Alix’s on one, Nathan’s on the other. She spends a minute or two leafing through Alix’s clothes. She rubs the fabrics between her fingers, the silks and linens and soft bamboo cottons. She pulls open the shoe drawers beneath and looks at the neat rows of golden strappy sandals and suede heeled boots and silken heels with
ankle straps. She wants to take them out and try them on, admire herself in the full-length mirror. But the minutes are ticking by, so she turns to Nathan’s rail and starts feeling through his pockets. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for precisely, but she has a very strong feeling that Nathan is
stupid enough and Alix is trusting enough for her to find something she will need.
She pulls out crumpled paper receipts and business cards and empty chewing-gum packages. She pulls out paperclips and sugar packets and the wrinkled paper tubes from drinking straws; boarding passes for flights to
Brussels and Dublin; a comb; half a Polo mint. And then, yes. There. Right there. In the inside pocket of a blue business jacket, exactly what she was looking for. A tiny clear bag with a residue of white powder clinging to its insides. She pictures him now, in a bar, his tie slung over his shoulder, surrounded by tequila shots and baying men, snorting cocaine off a glass- topped table. Despicable, she thinks. Just despicable. With a wife and children at home. In another pocket she finds a scrap of paper napkin with an illegible number written on it. And in another a cardboard sleeve for a hotel key card – the Railings – with the room number 23 written on it.
She takes all three items and puts them in her pocket, goes back to her room and waits for Alix to come home.
Nathan wants her to have a plan. Well, now she’s got one.
Alix returns a few minutes later. She is laden with bags from the supermarket and Josie watches her unload them on to the island in the kitchen. Melon and strawberry fruit bowl. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. A huge steak. A bag of onions. Pouches of cat food with pictures on them of a cat that looks exactly like the cloud-cat, as if Alix’s cat has had her very own personalised dinner designed for her.
‘I’ll go to my mum’s,’ Josie says to Alix. ‘On Saturday. When your sisters come.’
Alix stops what she’s doing, a cylinder of chocolate biscuits held aloft in her hand. ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘OK. That’s great. What changed your mind about getting in touch with her?’
Josie shrugs and pulls out a tiny loose hair from Fred’s fur, lets it float lazily to the floor. ‘I didn’t really have a choice, I suppose. I mean, Nathan told me about your other sister coming to stay. So I know the fold-out bed will be taken. Though I thought your other sister lived in London?’
‘Yes. Yes, she does. But her kids didn’t want to miss out on the fun. They wanted to sleep over too. So yes. I’m sorry about that. A bit of a, er, last-
minute thing. But I’m so glad you’re going to see your mum! I really think it’s time.’
Josie nods, as though she has given Alix’s words serious thought and now agrees with her. ‘It is what it is,’ she says. ‘But while I’m still here, we’ve got two more days, we should make the most of them.’
‘You mean, the podcast?’
‘Yes. We should try and get as much down on tape as we can.’
Josie feels her heart pick up under the cotton of Alix’s expensive T-shirt at the thought of next week. She feels the heat in the air, the sun burning already as it starts its arc across the empty sky and blazes through the glass roof of Alix’s kitchen extension, and it’s only going to get hotter.
By Sunday it will be pushing thirty-five.
She’d thought she’d have longer. She’s running out of time.
She glances up to see Alix staring thoughtfully at her. ‘I’m not sure what else there is to chat about now? I mean, we got to the end, I think? We’re up to date. Apart from the events of Friday night, of course. Would you like to talk about that?’
Josie nods, her mouth tightly pursed. ‘Shall we …?’ Alix gestures to the studio. ‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘Let’s.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a dramatic reconstruction of a couple walking down a dark street.
The text reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 18 July 2019
‘He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. Made such a fuss. I bought him some nice new clothes, but he refused to wear them, insisted on wearing cheap stuff from Primark, deliberately got a terrible haircut, just to spite me. And then of course, when Nathan didn’t make an appearance …’
Josie sighs.
‘Well, you could see how annoyed he was. And then he seethed the whole walk home. I could feel it coming off him. The dark rage building and building. By the time we got home …’
The screen shows a couple letting themselves into the Fairs’ building.
‘… the atmosphere was putrid. I couldn’t control my anger by that point. I felt it all, all of it, rolling and churning through me like a storm, and finally, after all these years, I found the strength to hurl it out of my gut and into the air, to hit Walter with it, right between the eyes. I just screamed at him. “Paedophile! You’re a paedophile! You groomed me and you took me when I was too young to know what I wanted. And then you groomed Brooke and you took her when she was too young to know what she wanted. And then you abused your own daughter. The only daughter you have left after what you did to Roxy. You have abused your daughter over and over again and I have let you do that because I have been programmed by you to believe that you are God and that you can have anything you want.
But you are not God, Walter, and you cannot have anything you want. You cannot. And it stops tonight. What you’re doing to Erin. It stops tonight . No more. No more.”
‘And then I ran to Erin’s door and I pushed it open and there was my baby, my Erin, staring at me from wide, dead eyes. I said, “Pack a bag, baby. Quickly. I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving.” I said, “I know what Dad’s been doing and I’m so, so sorry, baby. So sorry that I abandoned you.” And that was when I felt it, a blow to the back of my head, then a kind of deep radiating heat and pain and wetness. I turned and saw Walter’s arm coming back towards me, with the remote control he’d just used to hit me with held in his hand, coming towards my face and then he beat me with it, all over my face and head. Erin just stood there; so thin, she was. So thin. And I threw myself towards Walter and shoved him in his chest with both my hands outstretched and said, “ Enough. That is enough .” And I
saw him raise his hand to hit my child and I just flung myself between them, and then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped.’
The screen shows an actor playing the part of Walter, breathing heavily in the doorway, the remote control hanging from his hand, the actors playing Erin and Josie, standing in Erin’s room, their arms around each other. Then Walter turns and leaves.
‘A moment later I peered into the living room. Walter was sitting at his laptop. The remote control was sitting on the coffee table. It was like he was trying to give the impression that none of it had ever happened, like I didn’t have a split lip and blood seeping down the back of my neck. It was as if he thought we were all just going to carry on. Normally. Like we always did. But he was wrong. I grabbed my handbag, I grabbed the dog, I grabbed Erin, and we left. Neither of us said goodbye.’
The screen shows Erin and Josie closing the front door of their building behind them; the actor playing Josie turns slightly, to look at Walter in the bay window.
The screen fades to darkness.
***
11 a.m.
Alix exhales. She has not breathed for what feels like minutes. The scenario that Josie has painted inside her head is making her feel claustrophobic, as
if she is trapped in that dark, shabby flat with all three of them. She can smell it inside her nostrils: the fear and the blood. She pictures them on the street, Josie and Erin, carrying just what they grabbed as they left, the blood congealing on Josie’s face. Walter, still and unrepentant in the bay window.
But that is where the picture starts to fragment. Josie walked from her
home near Kilburn the sixteen minutes to Alix’s house in Queen’s Park. But it was 3 a.m. when she appeared on Alix’s doorstep. It was cold. What happened between ten o’clock, when they would have returned home, and 3 a.m., when Josie arrived here?
She glances up at Josie and says, ‘Where did you go? When you left the flat?’
Josie issues a small laugh. ‘Well, here, obviously.’ ‘But in between?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘But – you said that the argument started when you got home. And it only lasted a few minutes. I just—’
Josie interjects. ‘No. It didn’t happen when we got home. I didn’t say that. It happened when Walter got out of bed. Like he does nearly every night. Like I told you. We went to bed and then I couldn’t sleep. It took me ages. And then I finally dropped off and I felt him, I felt him peel back the covers. I knew. I knew what he was doing. Where he was going. And that was when I confronted him.’
‘So, you were in bed. In your pyjamas?’ ‘Yes.’
‘And then you got up and followed him?’
‘Yes. I saw him going to Erin’s door. And that was when I screamed at him.’
‘But you weren’t wearing your pyjamas when you came to me. You were wearing the dress. The lovely dress.’
‘I put it back on. I wasn’t going to walk halfway across Kilburn in my pyjamas.’
‘But the dress had blood on it. How did the dress have blood on it if you weren’t wearing it during the attack?’
‘Alix. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Are you saying that you don’t believe me?’
‘No! Not at all. Of course not. But listeners are going to be hearing this like it’s a novel, they’ll notice plot holes. You and I have been having this
conversation for a month, but listeners will be gobbling this down in a day once it’s out there and edited down. It needs to make sense. For the listener. Do you see?’
Josie sighs deeply. ‘Well, yes. I suppose. But you’d think that the sort of people who listen to your stuff would have some sympathy, some empathy. You’d think they’d understand that when something like that happens, like what’s happened to me, when someone has been the victim of abuse and
violence and gaslighting, that maybe they might get a bit confused.’
‘Yes. Josie, yes, of course. That’s absolutely true. So I just want to help you to unpick it all a bit and then put it back together. So that it makes sense. That’s all. So Walter got out of bed in the early hours. You accosted him. He attacked you. He tried to attack Erin. Then you and Erin collected a few things – you got redressed – and then you both left together?’
Josie nods firmly. ‘Yes.’
‘And you walked here – and Erin? Where did Erin walk?’ ‘The opposite direction.’
‘At three in the morning?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Did she have things with her?’ ‘I suppose so, yes. A small bag.’
Alix smiles glassily at Josie. She wants to push through. She wants to understand how Josie could have left her vulnerable daughter to walk somewhere, God knows where, all alone in the middle of the night. She
wants to know. But she can tell that Josie is shutting down now, pulling up her drawbridge. She sighs. ‘I hope Erin is OK. It’s very scary thinking of her all alone in the night.’
‘Yes,’ Josie replies firmly. ‘But she’s safer out there than she ever was in her own home. Wherever she is, she’s safe.’
She says this with a strange certainty, as if the world were not full of dangerous people who prey on the vulnerable, as if nothing bad could
possibly have happened to her daughter between three o’clock on Saturday morning and now.
‘I really think we should try to track her down, Josie. It’s been nearly six days. No messages. No calls. I know she’s safe from Walter now. But is it possible she might have found herself somewhere worse? That maybe her online friend wasn’t who they claimed to be? I mean, you hear that sort of thing a lot, don’t you? People with fake online identities. It’s just—’
‘She’s fine , Alix. She’s fine. She can take care of herself.’
‘But you said she can’t. You said you’ve been feeding her baby food. You said—’
Alix flinches as Josie pulls off her headphones and slams them on the tabletop. ‘I’m trying to tell you my story, Alix. My truth . And you seem to be trying to make it into something it isn’t. You either want my story or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. You just can’t.’
And then she picks up her dog from her lap and storms out of the recording studio, leaving Alix reeling in her wake.
Saturday, 20 July
Josie wakes early. It’s her last morning waking up in Alix’s house. Her last morning opening up the curtains and seeing the view of Queen’s Park from the small window, instead of the grey staring faces of people on the bus from her old bedroom. It’s the last morning of wearing Alix’s pyjamas and showering in Alix’s designer bathroom and drinking coffee from Alix’s shiny coffee machine. There had been a takeaway curry the night before.
Josie had attempted to contribute some money towards it, but Alix had refused to accept it. ‘It’s your last night,’ she said, her hand gently touching the top of Josie’s hand. ‘It’s our treat.’ There’d been wine from a huge glass and a TV show with surround-sound audio booming through the house and Leon curled so that his toes were gently buried under Josie’s leg. Then the creak and bang and babble of a family putting itself to bed: hushed whispers, the click of light switches, the cloud-cat meowing gently from the darkened hallway as if to ask where everyone had gone.
It was, in some ways, the most perfect night of Josie’s life.
Josie sighs heavily. The air is limpid and sticky. Her phone tells her that it is already twenty-one degrees, and it is only seven thirty. The one time,
Josie thinks, that she could really do with a disappointing English summer, and the weather gods deliver an almighty heatwave.
She glances at the dress and cardigan that she was wearing when she arrived here a week ago. She pulls the dress to her nose and sniffs it. It smells of Alix’s detergent. It smells of Alix’s house. She showers, using
Alix’s spicy-smelling shower gel, and washes her hair using Alix’s herby- smelling shampoo, and she wraps herself in Alix’s thick, thick towels and sits on the side of Alix’s squashy bed and for a moment she feels a wash of
sadness pass through her. But then she thinks of what she has planned next, and the sadness quickly fades.
‘Oh!’ says Alix when Josie walks into the kitchen a few minutes later. ‘You’re back in your own clothes!’
‘Yes. Well, of course.’ She holds the worn clothes and the pyjamas in one hand, the dog in the other. ‘Where shall I put these?’ she asks about the clothes.
‘Oh, just give them to me. Here.’
She hands them to Alix, who takes them through to the laundry room. ‘Thank you!’ Josie calls after her. ‘Thank you so much.’ Then she asks,
‘What time are your sisters arriving?’
‘Oh, five-ish, I think. So you don’t need to rush. Just take your time.’ She throws Josie one of her golden smiles and then tears open a packet of croissants. ‘Want one?’ she asks and Josie nods.
Nathan comes downstairs an hour later, Leon trailing behind him in his pyjamas. Nathan eyes Josie up and down and says, ‘Pretty dress, Josie.’ ‘Thank you,’ she says, feeling simultaneously flattered and repulsed.
Eliza comes in a few minutes later and starts to cry about something mean someone had said to her on Snapchat and that is when Josie knows that it is time for her to go. She puts Fred into his carrier and slings her handbag over her shoulder.
She sees Alix eyeing her worriedly. ‘I can drive you?’ she says. ‘It’s quite a long walk, especially in this heat?’
Josie shakes her head. ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘I’ll walk in the shade. I’m not in any rush.’
‘And your mum knows you’re coming?’ ‘Yes. She knows.’
Alix brings Josie into her arms then, and for once Josie lets herself be held.
When they come apart, Alix is looking directly into Josie’s eyes. ‘Please stay in touch, Josie. Won’t you? Get the help you need and stay in touch.’
And then the milky-blue door is between them, Alix and her world on one side, Josie on the other.
Around the corner, Josie opens her handbag to check that it is there, the money she has been collecting all week from the various cashpoint
machines between Alix’s house and her job, the thick reassuring weight and shape of it, held together with one of Eliza’s pink glitter hairbands she’d found on the staircase earlier. Then she takes out the sunglasses she found under a chair in the garden this morning – a large pair with forest-green
frames – places them on her face and starts walking.
The sun beats down from a heartless sky as she heads towards the next place.
