Page 15 of None of This is True

In her bedroom she picks up the photograph of her small girls from the top of the chest of drawers and kisses that too.

Then she takes the Nespresso pod from inside her handbag and tucks it into her underwear drawer, right at the very back.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a leather chair in empty City pub.

Muted light shines through a dusty window.

A man walks in and sits down. He wears a white shirt and jeans. He smiles.

The text on screen reads:

Jason Fair, Walter Fair’s son

He starts to talk; he has a Canadian accent.

‘The last time I saw Dad? I guess when I was about ten?’

The interviewer interjects off-mic: ‘And why is that?’

Jason: ‘Because he left my mum for a teenager and my mum was so disgusted that she emigrated us out of the country.’

Interviewer: ‘And that teenager was …?’

‘That teenager was Josie Fair. Yes.’

Jason shakes his head sadly and drops his gaze to the floor.

When he looks up at the camera again, he is seen to be crying.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Could we just …’

The screen fades to black.

***

8 p.m.

Nathan doesn’t come home from work that night. Alix feels the dreadful inevitability of it in her gut from the minute the clock ticks over from 8 p.m. to 8.01 p.m. He said he’d be home at seven. Even accounting for last-minute delays or phone calls or problems on the tube, eight o’clock marks the cut-off point for explainable lateness and tips it into something darker. She texts him. He doesn’t answer. At eight thirty she calls him. It goes to voicemail. And she knows. Alix knows.

When the children are in bed at nine, Alix takes a glass of wine into the studio and listens back to her interview with Josie from that morning.

They had talked for over an hour, but hearing it now, Alix suspects that the whole conversation will be edited down to about ten minutes. And those ten minutes will be the ones that Josie had spent talking about how she met her husband.

Alix had been barely able to breathe. She’d merely nodded, her eyes wide, not interjected with questions, just listened and absorbed.

A fourteen-year-old girl.

A forty-one-year-old man.

Alix thinks of the man she’d barely noticed in the restaurant on Saturday night, the man she had assumed to be Josie’s father: nondescript, balding, faded, bespectacled.

They’d stopped recording before Alix had been able to uncover more about what had happened after the birthday-cake moment on Josie’s fourteenth birthday, what had led to Josie and Walter becoming a couple. They will discuss that at their next meeting. But the tiny prickle of excitement that she’s been feeling since the first moment she decided to make a show about Josie is growing by the minute. She can sense something bigger than her here, something dark and brilliant, with every fibre of her being.

Back indoors, Alix looks at her empty wine glass and considers for a moment the possibility of topping it up. But no, it is gone ten o’clock and she is tired, and she wants a clear head tomorrow when she wakes up in what she already knows will be an empty bed and has to deal with the aftermath of Nathan’s latest bender so soon after the last, and this one on a school night. Her message to him remains unread and her final attempt to call him goes through to voicemail again. She feels adrenaline pulsing through her and she knows she won’t sleep, but she goes to bed anyway. She tries to read a book, but her heart races. She scrolls through the news on her phone, but it swims in front of her eyes, and she feels suddenly, strangely, that she wants to talk to Josie, Josie with her waxy skin and haunting voice and her dark, dark eyes, Josie who doesn’t know Nathan, who didn’t dance at their wedding, who has no investment in the mythical mirage of their marriage.

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