Page 21 of None of This is True

The camera pans around the details of the room.

Josie’s voice plays over the footage in conversation with Alix.

The text on screen reads:

Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 26 June 2019

‘Ah, yes. So now we’re at my fifteenth birthday. Me and Walter were sort of friends, by that point. He always stopped and had a chat with me if we crossed paths on the estate. He always waved, said something nice to me. You know. And on the day I turned fifteen Walter ran after me when I was walking to school. He’d remembered my birthday from the year before and he’d bought me a present.’

‘What did he get you?’

‘A bracelet. Look. This one.’

‘You’re still wearing it. Wow.’

‘Well, why wouldn’t I? We’re still together.’

Josie sighs heavily.

‘And then my friends took me to the park after school that day, to the rec, and there was this boy, he was called Troy? I think? And Helen really wanted me to, you know, kiss him. I hadn’t had a boyfriend yet and she was always trying to get me to go with a boy and I did not want to go with a boy because they were all disgusting, honestly. And he’d been drinking cider and his breath – I can smell it, even now. The sourness of it, rancid, in my face as he came towards me, and I just got up and left and as I left I knew, I knew that I was done. Done with being that sort of teenager. I went home.

‘My mum said, “You’re back early.” I told her I wasn’t feeling well. She asked me if I’d been drinking. I told her about the cider and the boy and she told me I had good friends, that I should make more of an effort with them. I said, “I do make an effort. But then they do things I don’t want to do, and there’s not much I can do about that.” She said, “What do you want to do, Josie?” I said, “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know? What did you want to do when you were fifteen?” She stared at me like she couldn’t believe I was anything to do with her and she said, “I wanted to take over the whole world, Josie. That’s what I wanted to do.” I said something like, “Well, I’m not going to take over the whole world drinking cider in the rec, am I?” and she said, “You’re not going to do it sitting in here with me, either. On your birthday.” So I said, “Fine then. Fine. I’ll leave.” And I slammed the door and stormed through the estate, down to the cabin where Walter worked.

‘I was just going to thank him for the bracelet, but I knew, I think, I knew what was going to happen. I felt powerful then. And he took me to the pub. I sat in a pub with a forty-two-year-old man and I was fifteen and he poured a shot of vodka into my lemonade and he kissed me and I remember looking down at my hands, at the pen scribbles on them from school, and looking down at my shoes, these battered old Kickers with the little leather tags that everyone wore back then, and thinking, This is it. I’m jumping. I’m going. I’m leaving this world. I’m entering another. It was almost as if I knew, even then, that there was no way back. That once I’d befriended the monster, that was it. For life.’

***

Midday

‘Oh my God,’ Alix whispers to herself an hour later, after closing the front door behind Josie. She stands with her back against the door, her arms behind her. ‘Oh my God,’ she whispers again.

She closes her eyes and tries to gather herself, but her head is spinning. She’d hidden her shock when Josie was talking. Nodded furiously. Made encouraging noises of interest. Interjected with neutral questions. All the while resisting the temptation to say, Fuck, Josie, you married a paedophile.

She goes back to the shed to tidy up her studio, gather the cups and saucers, lock it up behind her. In the kitchen she loads the cups and saucers into the dishwasher and then she heads to the downstairs toilet, the one tucked under the stairs. After she’s used the toilet, she turns on the tap to wash her hands and then stops when she realises there’s no hand wash. She looks behind her, she looks on the ledge that runs along the floor covering the waterpipes, she looks inside the cupboard under the sink. She washes her hands without soap and then asks Nathan when she walks back into the kitchen, ‘Did you do something with the hand wash in the downstairs toilet?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, move it? Get rid of it? I only put it in there a couple of days ago.’

‘No,’ he replies. ‘Of course not. Maybe it was your weird friend?’

Alix scowls at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It must have been one of the kids. I’m sure it’ll turn up.’

1 p.m.

Josie tucks the hand wash into the back of her underwear drawer with the Nespresso pod. It came in such a pretty bottle: dark grey with a cherry-blossom print on it, like Japanese art. And it smells like Alix.

The experience of being at Alix’s house again has given her a strange kind of energy. Meeting the husband was a bonus, although she doesn’t know what Alix sees in him. And using their beautiful toilet with the mottled glass mirror and crazy wallpaper with peacocks on it. The posh hand wash. The soft black towel hanging from a golden ring. And the interview itself: reliving the early days of her relationship with Walter; telling her about her terrible mother; the look on Alix’s face of rapt fascination, as though Josie were the most interesting woman she’d ever met in her life.

Buoyed up, she walks to Erin’s bedroom door and puts her ear to it. She can hear the chair squeaking, the buttons clicking, the tinny noises from her earphones. She can smell the layers of her room. But she can’t keep ignoring it. It’s not going to go away. She pulls down the handle and pushes the door. It goes only a few inches before it stops, wedged up against the piles on the floor. She calls through to Erin, but Erin can’t hear her. She pushes a little harder, another couple of inches. She can see a bit of Erin now, the side of her face, her threadbare sheepskin slippers, her hands clutching the controller, pale and bony. She decides that she can’t do it. Not today.

Josie brings Alix’s kitchen into her mind’s eye. The brightness of it. The sweetness of it. The children’s drawings pinned to the special wall. Then she remembers the way that Erin’s room used to look, when she shared it with Roxy. It used to have two pink beds in it and a white wardrobe with hearts cut out of it. Where Erin’s gaming desk is, there used to be a chest full of dolls and toys. In her head she hears the sound of two small girls laughing together at bedtime.

She closes her eyes and pulls the door shut again.

Saturday, 29 June

Alix searches the chest by the front door for her pull-on rain cape, the one she bought to take to a festival a few years back when rain had been forecast for the whole weekend. The warm, dry spell is over for now, and the next few days are predicted to be cool and wet. She finds the cape, puts it on over her clothes and then calls for Eliza. She’s walking her to her friend’s house for a birthday party, about half a mile away.

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