Page 27 of None of This is True

But then relief quickly takes its place.

It is nearly midday, and Alix’s house looks still, it looks empty. Josie scans the street for Alix’s car, but it isn’t there. Emboldened, she walks up the front path and peers through the edges of the shutters. She sees a living room that she’s never seen before. Alix always takes her straight through from the front door to the kitchen and into the garden. She sees the cloud-cat, curled on a chair. She peers through the window to the side of the milky-blue door. There is a pile of mail on the stairs, shoes in a managed heap under a console table, a spiky flowering plant in a brass pot. She stares for a moment more, relishing the luxury of time, of not being rushed, of taking in details. A photo of the four of them, on a beach, in raincoats. Alix’s hair is under a hat, just one strand escaped, kicked across her forehead by the wind. Nathan looks ruddy and faintly ridiculous.

Josie hears a car slowing on the street behind her and turns. It’s not them. But the adrenaline rush reminds her that they could be back any minute and she is loitering on their doorstep with no good reason to be there. She casts around desperately for something to take, some shred of Alix to fill her up until they meet again. She lifts the lid of Alix’s recycling box and sifts through it until she comes upon a glossy magazine called Livingetc . She flicks through it and sees that it is full of beautiful photographs of houses. She slides it into her shoulder bag, and she heads home.

4 p.m.

‘Erm, Alix?’

‘Yes,’ Alix calls back to Nathan, who is sitting at the kitchen table staring at his phone with a frown on his face.

‘Isn’t this your friend Josie?’

Alix stops what she’s doing and takes a step towards Nathan. ‘What?’

He turns his phone towards her. ‘The Ring app. It showed movement at the front door at about midday when we were at my dad’s. So, I just looked at it. And it’s her, isn’t it?’

Alix draws up beside him and takes the phone from his hand. And yes, it is, clearly. It’s Josie, staring first through their shutters into the living room, and then through the small side window in the hallway. Her face looms in and out of shot of the camera. At one point Josie turns slightly and the dog’s face comes right into focus, his funny bug eyes looking even buggier.

‘She must have dropped by, on the off chance,’ she says to Nathan.

‘But look,’ he says, pointing at the screen. ‘Look how long she’s standing there for. Staring through the window. I mean, what the fuck is she doing?’

Alix continues watching the footage and the seconds pass by slowly and still there is no obvious explanation for what Josie is doing outside her house.

‘But this ,’ says Nathan. ‘This is the weirdest thing. Look what she does next.’

Alix watches but can’t make sense of what she’s seen. ‘Wait,’ she says, ‘rewind that bit.’ Nathan rewinds and she watches again and yes, there it is, Josie opening the lid of their recycling box and taking out a magazine, stuffing it in her handbag and then leaving, very, very quickly.

‘Oh my God,’ she says breathlessly. ‘Oh my God.’

7 p.m.

Alix sits next to Nathan in the back of an Uber that evening, on their way to a friend’s birthday dinner in Acton. She wants to talk to him about Josie, but she also doesn’t want his opinion to cloud her view of how to handle things. Her project feels simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. She has opened a physical and metaphorical door to this woman, a pure stranger; she has brought her into her home, made her feel that she is somehow party to Alix’s inner life. She takes full responsibility for the decisions she has made to this point and now she needs to decide if she is prepared to take full responsibility for anything untoward that may happen to her or her family as a result. If she discusses this with Nathan, she knows what he will say. He will say, ‘Bin it. Tell her it’s off. Get rid,’ and then if she ignores him and this project turns out to be a disaster, he will tell her that he’d told her, he will tell her that she was wrong and he was right, and Alix does not want to make professional or personal decisions based on what her husband will think if she makes a mistake.

Because if she is right and he is wrong, this podcast could be the making of Alix’s professional career.

She watches Nathan that night over the dinner table. The friends are his friends; Giovanni is Nathan’s best friend from college; his partner is Nathalie, who Alix knows only in relation to Giovanni. When Nathan is with his friends, he is bombastic, he is high-octane, he engages every element of his being in the act of producing the sort of persona that his friends expect from him, and in order to tap into these elements, he drinks twice as fast as he does when he’s with Alix’s friends or with his family.

She feels a sense of unease pass through her as she sees Giovanni head to the cocktail cabinet for a second bottle of vodka, the careless, loose-wristed glugging into guests’ glasses, the glaze across Nathan’s eyes, the loudness of him, the babble of bullshit, the overloud laugh, and she knows already that this will be one of those nights and she doesn’t want to be that wife , the purse-lipped, stick-up-the-butt wife, the wife who can’t relax and can’t have fun and spoils it for everyone else. She wants to down tequila shots and sing and dance and laugh like a drain. But she can’t take on that role because Nathan has already staked his claim on it and one of them has to remain sentient and together; one of them has to be the grown-up.

At eleven o’clock she whispers into Nathan’s ear, ‘We need to get back for the babysitter,’ but even as she does so she knows that he isn’t really listening and that even if he was, he has no intention of heading home, that he has entered the stage of inebriation where time has no meaning, when consequences have no meaning, and so she calls herself an Uber and she leaves.

In bed an hour later, she looks at her phone. Emboldened by drink, she types a message to Josie.

Hey, Josie. We saw you at the house earlier, on our doorbell camera. Is everything all right?

The ticks turn blue immediately and Josie is typing.

Everything’s fine. I was just passing. I thought I’d say hello. Sorry to worry you.

Alix stares at the message for a moment. There is more to it than her innocuous reply would suggest. But it is late, and if there is more to Josie’s peculiar behaviour at her front door earlier today than she is letting on, then maybe it is a topic of conversation better kept for their next face-to-face meeting.

No problem, she replies. Sleep tight.

You too Alix, replies Josie, followed by a sleeping emoji and a love-heart.

Alix turns off her phone and picks up her book, waits for sleep to take her away from the weird, swirling sensations of alcohol-induced paranoia, edginess and very slight dread.

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