March 2022
Josie adjusts her face mask and pulls her dyed blonde hair over her face when two young women get on the empty bus and sit in front of her.
She stares resolutely from the window of the bus, watching the dark
streets of the small Midlands city where she now lives pass by, keeping her face away from people’s eyes as she always does.
The women in front of her chatter, an endless flow of words that passes through Josie’s consciousness like a thick, meaningless fog, until one of them draws in her breath sharply and says, ‘Oh my God, have you been watching that thing on Netflix? The Birthday Twin thing?’
The other woman says, ‘God, yes, I watched the whole thing in one sitting. I mean, what even was it?’
‘Yeah! Exactly! It was like … that woman! She was just creepy as fuck.’ ‘So creepy. And what she did to her children. And kidnapping that
woman’s husband. I was just … like, what the hell?’
‘What did you make of those kids, though? Roxy and Erin. Did you think they were telling the truth?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, just, like, they seemed a bit shady to me. And then what that
Josie woman said in her letter to the podcaster at the end. I just wondered if they were maybe in on it all.’
‘God. I hadn’t thought of that. But all of it felt sketchy to me. It was like Josie wasn’t the only one telling lies, you know. There was more to it, I think. The whole thing was just so fucking weird. Hard to believe that
people like that exist, you know, in the real world.’
The two women fall silent for a second, then their stop approaches, and they ready themselves to leave.
Josie watches them, feeling her breath hot and urgent inside her mask, her heart thumping roughly against her ribcage. One of them turns and Josie switches her gaze quickly back to the window. When she turns back again,
the women have gone, and she is once more alone on the bus.
Her fingertips find the golden bumble bee that hangs around her neck and she slides it back and forth across the chain, feels the skitter of her heart as her thoughts churn and roil, trying to make sense of the things that live in there, all the snapshots of her life, the mistakes she has made, the lies she
has told, her own reimagining of a life that started as an unborn child ignored and unwanted in her mother’s womb, brought into the world to feel every iota of her mother’s mistake, a life that was always destined to end
this way, in hiding, alone, a woman in a mask, and she remembers the
things that she did, as a child, as an adult, all the things she did not tell Alix, and she thinks of the thing she said she had done, although she didn’t. And the whole thing feels like a twisted, sickening knot of truths and untruths
that she will never ever be able to unravel, that no one would ever be able to unravel, but one thing shines through. It feels like the truth and she hopes it is the truth, because it defines her in so many ways: the night she came
home and found Roxy kneeling over the white-clad body of Brooke Ripley with tears coursing down her cheeks, wailing, ‘I didn’t mean to do it, Mum, I didn’t mean to do it.’ And Erin standing in the doorway, staring and rocking with her hand to her mouth, and Roxy saying, ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do? ’ and the call to Walter in Newcastle, who talked them so slowly and so insistently through what had to happen next:
the plastic sheeting in the store cupboard, the window in the bathroom that opened out on to the garage mews, the key, in a drawer, with the number 6 attached on a plastic tag.
She thinks of the days that followed, that key growing hot in the palm of her hand, staring at it, staring at it, turning it over and over, waiting for the doorbell to ring, waiting for something to happen, wanting to go to the police, wanting the whole thing gone, finished, and days later Roxy’s disappearance, her hate-filled words as she left: ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll just say it was you. I’ll just say it was you.’
She thinks of the row she had with Walter the night of the dinner at Alix’s house, how she’d pulled the key from the drawer and told Walter she was going to tell Alix everything, right now, that she was going to tell the world about their dirty little secret locked in the boot of his father’s old
Morris Minor in the garage behind their house. She remembers him clutching his chest, the stricken look on his face, she remembers staring at him as he fell to the floor, staring and just watching as the colour left his face, his fist against his chest. She tries to remember what happened after
that, but even as the memories form, she’s not sure if they are true or if
they’re dreams, hallucinations, but Erin was there, she is sure, hitting her and hitting her and hitting her. And then the memories bleach out into nothing.
She stares through the window of the bus, and for just a fleeting moment, Josie is sure, she is so sure that – yes! – that is what really happened and that she has been maybe not a good mother, but a true mother, that she has done what any mother would do and protected her baby girl, kept her safe, saved her child from herself and the consequences of her anger as she had
always done and will continue to do, now, tomorrow, forever, whatever it might take. And she has done nothing wrong, not really, not ever. All she has done, in her own way, is take care of the people she loves, try to help people, try to be a good person.
She is so sure that that is the truth. So incredibly sure.
