Page 82 of None of This is True

Her words appear as moving text on the screen.

‘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 …’

The voice of Josie Fair returns.

‘Don’t you ever think, Alix, that everything would be easier if they were dead?’

The screen turns black .

***

12.45 a.m.

Alix presses stop and pulls off her headphones. She leans back into her chair, lets her head roll back and exhales loudly. There it was. There it was, all along. She hadn’t got it at the time. She’d had no recollection of what Mari le Jeune had said about clean breaks and death. She’d thought Josie was rambling. But really she’d been giving her her warped manifesto, laying it out for Alix to see. And she’d totally missed it. This , Alix realises now, was what Josie had wanted to share with Alix when she approached her outside the children’s school with that slightly desperate air about her. She’d had a revelation and she wanted Alix to be the depository for it. And she’d shown it to her during this interview and Alix had blown it. She’d totally blown it.

She thumps her fists against the studio desk and cries out in rage and frustration at her own stupidity. ‘Stupid! So stupid!’

And then she pulls herself together when she hears the ringtone coming from her phone and sees DC Albright’s number on the screen. She glances at the time. It’s nearly 1 a.m.

Her stomach rolls over and she breathes in until her lungs are full. Then she presses ‘answer’ and waits for Sabrina to speak.

The drive is endless. The children are at Maxine’s and it is now almost two in the morning. Alix thinks back to Sabrina’s words on the phone, what feels like a lifetime ago, but was only an hour and a half. ‘He was definitely here, Alix. It looks like he was held by force in the lodge. There’s evidence of restraint. Of struggle. And there are tracks leading down to the lake. So what we’re doing, Alix, is we’re going to launch a water-rescue operation, right now. We’re also going to be sending boats out across the whole lake, in case they’ve taken off on water. I think, Alix, you should make your way up here, as soon as you possibly can. Is there anyone who can drive you?’

She and her mother have been on the road for nearly an hour and they’re barely out of London. Alix feels jittery and hollow. She hasn’t eaten all day. All that is in her stomach is the glass of wine she had with her mother in the garden at nine o’clock. She should eat, but she can’t eat and she doesn’t want to stop for food and make this journey take any longer than it already is. She scrolls through her phone, mindlessly, aimlessly, painfully. She looks at all the messages that she’s been sent over the past few days from people she hasn’t seen or thought about for years and years, but who all love her and care about her, and she wants to reply to them all, but she cannot, she doesn’t know what words there are or how to arrange them or what use it would be anyway, so she shuts down her messages and stares instead into the darkness of the night, the occasional beam of light from oncoming cars heading into London as she heads away from it, and the miles go so slowly and the Lake District is so far and her husband is out there somewhere and she’s about to find out where and she loves him so much and hates herself so much for bringing that woman into their world, their messy, grubby, broken and perfectly imperfect world, the world she thought that she didn’t want but which she now knows is the only thing, the only thing she truly wants: her family, her home, her bad husband, his benders, the desperate, inglorious, ridiculous normality of it all. She wants it, she wants him, she wants that, she doesn’t want this , this endless journey, her mother’s knuckles white on the steering wheel of her car, the blinding lights, the grinding hunger in her gut, the sickening nothingness of it all. She wants Nathan back. She wants him back. And then she feels her phone thrum under her hand and she switches on her screen, and there is a message from a number that she doesn’t recognise. Her breath bunches up in her lungs and she presses on the message to open it up. And when she sees what it is, she knows, even before the call that follows shortly afterwards from DC Albright. She already knows.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows grainy footage of a female news reporter at dawn. Behind her is a sea of police lights and police officers and reporters holding microphones.

Beyond is Lake Windermere, with the rising sun reflected on the surface of the water. The text underneath says:

Lake Windermere, 5.27 a.m., 29 July 2019

The reporter speaks in a reverential tone of voice.

‘I’m here this morning just outside the beautiful Cumbrian village of Ambleside, on the banks of Lake Windermere, where overnight a grisly discovery was made. The body of North London man Nathan Summer, who went missing from a Central London hotel in the early hours of Sunday the twenty-first of July, was found in shallow waters, just here, a few hours ago. Police had entered a lodge, just behind the lake, and discovered items belonging to Mr Summer. This instigated a full-scale water-search operation overnight with the sad discovery made at around two thirty a.m. Mr Summer’s family have been notified and are on their way here as I speak. The hunt for Josie Fair is still ongoing. This is Kate Mulligan, BBC News, Ambleside.’

The screen fades to a re-enactment of a woman in the passenger seat of a car at night, pulling a phone out of a handbag at the sound of a text notification.

She turns on the screen and opens the text.

On the screen is a voice message.

She presses play.

The text below says:

This is the voice message that Josie Fair sent to Alix Summer. It arrived five minutes before Alix Summer was notified of the discovery of her husband’s body.

‘Alix. Hi. It’s me. I’m not sure what to say. I don’t know what happened. What I was thinking. It wasn’t my intention. None of it. The whole thing. I was trying to be helpful, trying to show you how much better your life could be without him. I was just going to keep him for a few days and then leave him somewhere to find his own way back to you, but it all went wrong, it’s all a disaster. It makes me look like I’m evil. But I’m not. You know I’m not, Alix. That’s why I wanted to share my story with you, because we are alike, you and I. We’re both idealised wives with disappointing husbands. We’ve both been living in the shadows of awful men who chose us because of what we represented, not for who we are. We both had more to give, more to offer. And now Erin will wake up and say things about me too, and those things won’t be true, Alix, you have to believe that. They won’t be true. Everything I told you was the truth. We know that. You and me. You’re the only person in the whole world I can trust to know the real me, Alix. Please, tell the world that I’m not a bad person. That I’m just a normal person coping with bad things. Not just the bad things I told you about, but other things. The thing I wanted to tell you about, the real end of the story, the darkest, worst thing of all, but I lost my nerve, I couldn’t do it and I wish I had because now, because of this stupid mistake with Nathan, I’ve blown it. Now nobody would believe me anyway. So please. Don’t believe the things you’ll hear. I’m so sorry, Alix. I really truly am. Goodbye.’

Monday, 29 July

DC Albright steps back to allow Alix to peer inside the lodge. Alix wears paper covers over her shoes and has been told to go no further than the entry. The lodge is still a crime scene, but she had begged DC Albright to at least let her see it, the place her husband spent his last days. She has to know. And as she stands in the entrance she is comforted in some strange and probably inappropriate way by the fact that the lodge is beautiful. It is modern and stylish and airy, with large windows on all sides, incredible views of the lake from the front, and the countryside elsewhere. It resembles, in some strange way, Alix’s house in London with its aqua-themed cushions and copper kitchen taps and pastel-painted tongue-and-groove cladding. It even has a window seat in the kitchen area, overlooking the front balcony. It’s gorgeous. Alix wonders at herself for taking comfort from this, wonders at herself and her values and every last aspect of herself as she has done constantly for the past week. Who is she? Why is she? What has she done? What should she do? Is she a good mother? Has she been a good wife? Good sister? A good friend? A good woman? Does she deserve what she has? Is she shallow? Is she irrelevant? Does she want to be relevant? Is she a feminist? Or is she just feminine? What more could she have done for Josie? And women like her? What more could she have done for her marriage?

Her boy sits inside headphones every night with eyes wide staring at a screen. Her girl cries over mean things said to her by other girls on the piece of plastic and glass she allows her to have access to. Her husband hands her cash as if she had a gun to his head. She sits in her recording studio pulling words out of women who’ve had a much harder life than her, who have suffered and survived, who have worked so hard and succeeded against all the odds. And there she sits in a twenty-thousand-pound recording studio built for her as a birthday gift by her husband whom she hasn’t had sex with for over two months and who would rather go drinking in Soho with strangers than come home to her body offered to him like a cookie jar for good behaviour – and what sort of feminist rewards men for not behaving badly with offers of penetration? She is not a feminist, she is not anything; she is a trinket, a flibbertigibbet; and for a moment, yes, she can see herself from Josie’s perspective, she can see what Josie saw in her, the big gaping space in her soul that she filled with things that couldn’t hurt her, and she knows why she agreed to work with Josie: because, subconsciously, she wanted something to hurt her, and here she is now, staring at the last four walls her husband ever saw, and she is hurting, she is hurting so badly it feels as if fingers are inside her gut shredding it into pieces and she grabs hold of the doorframe with both hands and curls into herself and howls.

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