Page 1 of None of This is True

Prologue

Stumbling from the cool of the air-conditioned hotel foyer into the steamy white heat of the night does nothing to sober him up. It makes him feel panicky and claustrophobic. A sweat that feels like pure alcohol blooms quickly on his skin, dampening his spine and the small of his back. How can it be so hot at three in the morning? And where is she? Where is she? He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double-vision through the glass windows of the hotel. And then he sees a car indicate to pull over and his heart rate starts to slow. She’s here. At last. Thank God. This terrible night is coming to an end. He squints to bring it into focus, to search the driver’s seat for the reassuring gleam of her white-blonde hair, but it’s not there. The window winds down and he recoils slightly.

‘What?’ he says to the dark-haired woman behind the wheel. ‘What are you doing here? Where’s my wife?’

‘It’s OK,’ says the woman. ‘She sent me. She’d had too much to drink. She asked me to bring you home. Come on. In you get.’

He looks behind him for the girl, sees her leaving the hotel and walking quickly away in the opposite direction, her handbag clutched tight against her side.

‘I’ve got water. I’ve got coffee. Come on. You’ll be home in no time.’

The dog on her lap growls at him softly as he slides into the passenger seat.

‘I thought you’d left?’ he says, fumbling behind himself to find the seatbelt. ‘I thought you’d gone away?’

The woman smiles at him as she unscrews the lid from a plastic bottle of water and passes it to him.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I had. But she needed me. So. Anyway. Drink that. Drink it all down.’

He puts the bottle to his dry, dry mouth, and gulps it back. Then he closes his eyes and waits to be home.

Part One

Coming to Netflix in May: Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

Now here’s a strange one, coming your way from the people behind The Monster Next Door and The Serial Date Swindler . It’s a podcast within a documentary, a kind of podumentary, if you will. In June 2019, popular podcaster Alix Summer, better known for her All Woman series of podcasts about successful women, branched out into a one-off project, which she called Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! , about a local woman who was born on the same day as her. As the project progressed, Summer started to learn much more about her unassuming neighbour than she could ever have imagined and, within weeks, Summer’s life was in shreds and two people were dead. Absolutely spine-chilling stuff, with some shocking glimpses into the darkest corners of humanity: we guarantee you’ll be bingeing the whole thing in a day.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen is dark. Slowly the interior of a recording studio is revealed.

The text on the screen reads:

Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 20 June 2019

A woman’s voice fades in slowly. ‘You comfortable there, Josie?’

‘Yes. I’m fine.’

‘Great. Well. While I’m setting up, why don’t you just tell me what you had for breakfast this morning?’

‘Oh. Erm …’

‘Just so I can test the sound quality.’

‘Right. OK. Well, I had toast. Two slices of toast. One with jam. One with peanut butter. And a mug of tea. The posh stuff from Marks. In the golden box.’

‘With milk?’

‘Yes. With milk.’

There is a short pause.

The camera pans around the empty recording studio, zooming in on details: the lines going up and down on the monitor, an abandoned pair of headphones, an empty coffee cup.

‘How is it? Is it OK?’

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