Page 55 of None of This is True

‘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!’

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