Page 5 of None of This is True

She carries on listening for a while. The woman called Mari is talking about her marriage at a young age to a man who controlled her. ‘Everything I did, he controlled, everything I ate, everything I wore. He turned my children against me. He turned my friends against me. My life was so small, like he took it and squeezed every last drop of me out of it. And then, in 2005, he died, quite suddenly. And it was like pressing the “reboot” button on my life. I discovered that all through those dark years with my husband, when I thought I was all alone in the world, there’d been a cast of people waiting in the background for me to come back to them, they’d been there all along. They picked me up and they took me with them.’

Then Alix’s voice is back. ‘And if your husband – and I hope this doesn’t sound like a harsh or unfeeling thing to say – but if he hadn’t passed away at such a young age, what do you think might have been your path? Do you think you might have found your way to where you are now? Do you think in any way that your success, everything you’ve achieved, that there was maybe some kind of destiny at play? Or do you think that it was only the tragic passing of your husband that allowed you to follow this path?’

‘That’s such a good question and, actually, I think about it all the time. I was thirty-six when my husband passed away. At the time of my husband’s prognosis, I was nowhere near strong enough to leave, I’d been subconsciously waiting until the children were older. But I’d already spent so many years dreaming about the things I would do when I did leave that I had the blueprint for my life without him all drawn up, even if I didn’t know how I would ever get away. So it’s possible, yes, that I could have followed this path without losing him to cancer. But it just happened sooner, I suppose. Which gave me longer to really build the company, to know it, nurture it, grow with it. It would have been different if I’d waited. And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no grey areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way. And that proved very helpful to me in terms of negotiating the endless possibilities that opened up to me during those first few years. I would not be where I am at this very moment had he lived.’

Josie presses pause. Her breath has caught slightly; she feels almost winded. Death is a clean break . She glances across the room at Walter, to see if he’s noticed, but he is oblivious. She presses play and listens to the rest of the podcast. The woman called Mari now owns three properties around the world, employs all four of her children in her family business and is the founder of the biggest anti-domestic-violence charity in the UK. At the end of the podcast Josie sits for a moment and lets all she has heard about this woman’s extraordinary life percolate through her. Then she goes back to the Google results and scrolls through Alix’s Instagram feed for a while. She sees, as she’d known she would, a large kitchen with an island, red-headed children on windswept beaches, views from London skyscrapers, cocktails and cats and rose-gold holidays. Alix’s children look young, probably no older than ten, and Josie wonders what Alix was doing for all those years before; what do you do when you’re thirty years old if you’re not raising children? How do you spend your time?

She pauses at a photograph of Alix and her husband. He is tall, even compared to Alix, who is taller than most, and his thatch of thick red hair looks much redder under the effect of some kind of filter than it looks in real life. The caption says: ‘Fifteen years today since you came into my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been you and me’, followed by a string of love-heart emojis.

Josie has social media accounts, but she doesn’t post on them. The thought of slapping a photograph of her and Walter on to the internet for people to gawp at and to judge makes her feel queasy. But she’s happy for others to do so. She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.

Sunday dawns hot and sticky. Nathan is not beside her in their bed and Alix tries to pull the fragments of the night before into some semblance of a bigger picture. The pub, the champagne, the tequila, the walk home around the park, talking to the ducks in the petting zoo through the fence, wack wack , Nathan pouring Scotch, the cat curled on her lap, the smell of the scented reed diffuser in the downstairs toilet mixed with the smell of her vomit, peering into the kids’ rooms, eyelashes touching cheeks, nightlights, pyjamas, Nathan’s face in the mirror next to hers, his mouth against her neck, hands on her hips, wanting sex, NO ARE YOU ACTUALLY MAD, then bed. But the pillow on Nathan’s side of the bed has not been touched. Did they have a row? Where is he sleeping?

She gingerly climbs off the bed and peers into the en suite. He is not there. She takes the stairs down to the hallway and hears the sound of her children. The television is on in the kitchen, and Eliza is lying on the sofa in front of it with the cat lying on her chest. Leon is on the laptop. Breakfast detritus is scattered across the long cream kitchen counter.

‘Where’s Dad?’

Eliza glances up. She shrugs.

‘Leon. Where’s Dad?’

He removes his headphones and squints at her. ‘What?’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘I dunno.’

Alix wanders into the garden. The flagstones on the back terrace are already warm underfoot. Nathan is not in the shed; nor is he in the studio. She pulls her phone out of her pyjama pocket and calls him. It rings out.

‘Did you see him earlier?’ she asks Eliza as she walks back into the kitchen.

‘Nope. Mum?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can we go to the bookshop today?’

‘Yes. Of course. Of course we will.’

Alix makes coffee and drinks water and eats toast. She knows what’s happened and she knows what to expect. It hasn’t happened for a few months, but she remembers the shape of it, the awful, grinding nightmare of it. The pleasure of her birthday night lies already in tatters in her memory.

As she sits with her second coffee, she remembers something from the night before.

The woman in the toilets who shared her birthday. What did she say her name was? Or maybe she didn’t.

She wonders what the woman is doing this morning. She wonders if her husband has disappeared silently in the night, leaving her to wake alone. No, she thinks, no, of course he hasn’t. That’s not what other husbands do. Only hers.

He reappears at 4 p.m. He is wearing the same clothes he was wearing the night before. He brushes past her in the kitchen to get to the fridge, from where he pulls out a Diet Coke and drinks it thirstily.

Alix eyes him, waits for him to talk.

‘You were out cold,’ he says. ‘I was still … buzzing. I just needed to …’

‘Drink some more?’

‘Yes! Well, no. I mean, I could drink here. But I just wanted to be, you know, out .’

Alix closes her eyes and breathes in hard. ‘We were out all night. All night, from six until midnight. We saw all our friends. We drank for six solid hours. We had fun. We came home. You had whisky. And then you wanted more?’

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