Page 14 of None of This is True

The next shot shows her sitting in a café, with a cappuccino on the table in front of her.

The text beneath her reads:

Helen Lloyd, Josie Fair’s schoolfriend

Helen starts to speak.

‘Josie and me were best friends. From when we were about five years old. From primary school.’

Helen pauses.

There is a short silence.

Then she says: ‘She was always a bit odd. Controlling? She didn’t like it when I had other friends. She always wanted to make things about her. “Passive aggressive” is the term these days. She would never just come straight out and tell you what was bothering her. She made you go all around the houses to get to it. She was a sulker, too. The silent treatment. We’d already started to grow out of each other when she met Walter.’

The interviewer asks a question off-mic: ‘ So what was that like, when she met Walter?’

‘Weird. I mean, he was an old man, virtually. And that was that. From her fourteenth birthday, she just disappeared. Into this other world . With an old man.’

The interviewer interjects: ‘Would you say Walter Fair groomed Josie?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously. But …’

Helen’s eyes go to the interviewer. She touches the rim of her coffee cup.

‘As bad as it sounds. As weird as it sounds. It was a two-way street, you know? She wanted him. She wanted him, and she made him want her.’

***

11 a.m.

Josie walks home from Alix’s house an hour later. Her head spins with all of it.

She thinks of Alix’s home: from the front, a neat, terraced house with a bay window, no different to any other London Victorian terraced house, but inside a different story. A magazine house, ink-blue walls and golden lights and a kitchen that appeared weirdly to be bigger than the whole house with stone-grey cabinets and creamy marble counters and a tap that exuded boiling water at the touch of a button. A wall at one end reserved purely for the children’s art!

She remembers pinning the girls’ artwork to the fridge with magnets and Walter tutting and taking it down because it looked messy.

Then the garden with its fairy lights and winding path and the magical shed at the bottom that contained yet another world of wonder. Even the cat; a cat unlike any she’d seen before. A Siberian, apparently. Tiny and fluffy with the huge green eyes of a cartoon Disney princess.

Her hand goes to the inside pocket of her handbag, where she touches the smooth skin of the Nespresso pod she’d taken when Alix wasn’t looking. There was a huge jar of them on the shelf behind the recording desk, all different colours, like oversized gemstones. She doesn’t have a Nespresso machine at home, but she just wanted to own a little bit of Alix’s glamour, tuck it into a drawer in her shabby flat, know it was there.

Walter is at his laptop in the window when she gets home. He looks at her curiously, his eyes huge through the strong prescription of his reading glasses. She’d told him she was seeing the school mum again. He’d raised an eyebrow but not said anything. Now he says, ‘What’s really going on?’

A spurt of adrenaline shoots through her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘you’ve been gone ages. You can’t have been drinking coffee all this time.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I went to see my gran after. At the cemetery.’ A pre-planned fib.

‘What for?’

‘I dunno. I just had a really weird dream last night about her and it made me want to go and see her. Anyway, I need to get ready for work. I’ll be back in a tick.’

She walks towards her bedroom, hears the sound of Erin’s gaming chair, through her bedroom door, squeak squeak , notices that the smell from Erin’s room is starting to drift out into the hallway now. She can’t put it off for much longer. But not now. Not today. Tomorrow, definitely.

She touches Erin’s door with her fingertips as she passes, then kisses them.

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