Page 35 of None of This is True

‘Hair? Clothes?’

‘Yes. Hair. Clothes. Jeez.’

He turns off the television and brings his plate through to the kitchen. He has a smell about him, probably his dressing gown needing a wash. Also stale stubble and morning breath. The smell of decay. Of defeat. It sits at the back of her throat and makes her feel enraged.

‘I don’t know what’s got into you, lately, Jojo,’ he says as he heads towards the bathroom for his morning shower. ‘I really don’t.’

At work that afternoon, Josie feeds the hem of a dress through the overlocker, her hands moving mechanically while her brain whirls and weaves chaotically through the new universe of things she thinks about these days. She’s obsessively planning an outfit for Friday whilst anxiously picturing Walter in a rotating range of clothes that don’t suit him. Inside her head there plays a grainy movie of them all sitting around the table in Alix’s kitchen with the mismatched chairs, the red-haired children running about in colourful pyjamas, wine being poured into huge glasses by the annoying red-haired husband, cool music through a speaker, the cloud-cat curling around their ankles, the light dying in the sky as the conversation flows. And then her spiralling thoughts bring her back to Walter and his old-man teeth, his irritating monotone, his defeated air, and she is fourteen again, sixteen, eighteen, a young mum spending her husband’s money frugally in Sainsbury’s, a middle-aged woman in a quiet flat, and in every incarnation she is the same person: a girl in stasis. And now, just as she’d hoped would happen when she first thought about asking Alix to make her the subject of a podcast, someone else is breaking through her carapace. Another person entirely. And that person is bigger than her, louder than her, harsher than her, older than her. That person is ready finally to tell her truth.

She cuts the ends of the thread from the overlocking machine and turns the dress over, ready to hem the other side. A tube rumbles along the tracks beyond the big window and Josie sees her face as a blurred reflection in the glass. She looks like a half-finished painting, she observes, waiting for the artist to come back and add the detail.

Her phone buzzes with a message from Alix. She experiences the endorphin rush she always gets when she sees Alix’s name on her phone, the sense that something good is happening to her.

Can you bring a photo tomorrow of the girls? Would love to see what they look like. See you then!

A chill goes through Josie. The girls . How can she talk to Alix about the girls? she asks herself. But then she looks again at the blurred version of herself in the big window and suddenly she sees that the half-finished portrait is that of a queenly woman, not a gauche girl, and she knows that finally, after all these years, it is time to hold her life up to the light.

Thursday, 11 July

‘Here.’ Josie pushes a fan of photographs across the table towards Alix. ‘My girls.’

Alix lifts her gaze to Josie and smiles. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Amazing. Thank you.’

The first photograph shows two chubby toddlers in thick knitted jumpers and jeans holding hands and standing in what looks like the big sand pit in Queen’s Park. The older girl has hair the same colour as Josie’s, but more vivid in tone. The younger one has sandy blonde hair with the type of ringlets at the ends that will never grow back after her first haircut.

‘Which one is which?’ she asks.

‘This one’ – Josie points at the one with the ringlets – ‘is Roxy. That one’ – she indicates the one with chestnut-brown hair – ‘is Erin.’

‘They’re adorable,’ Alix says. ‘Just adorable.’

Josie nods and smiles and watches as Alix moves on to the next photograph. It’s the two girls, side by side, outside the school where Alix’s children go, wearing the same sky-blue polo shirts and navy bottoms that her children were wearing when they left the house this morning.

‘Roxy’s first day,’ says Josie, a note of pained nostalgia in her voice. ‘I cried for about four hours that day.’

Alix glances at Josie. ‘Oh, God. Really?’ She thinks back to Leon’s first day at school, returning to an empty house for the first time in seven years and the euphoria of knowing that it could be about her again for a while. She’d never understood the weeping mums outside the playground.

‘I was bereft. I didn’t know what I would do. Suddenly, all this time. Suddenly, all this silence.’

Alix thinks of her conversation with Mandy in the school office and says, ‘And the girls. How did they get on at primary school? Did they like it?’

She notices Josie tense slightly, her shoulders lifting towards her ears. ‘Oh, you know,’ she says. ‘Not really. You see, Erin, my oldest, she’s always had some problems. Not quite sure how you’d describe it, really. The teachers called it global developmental delay? But I didn’t agree with that. She was just a bit lazy, I think. A bit passive? Hard to get a reaction out of her. Hard to know what she was thinking. And then Roxy was the opposite. Oppositional defiant disorder, the teachers called it. I think I did agree with that. You could never tell Roxy anything. She would never, ever comply. She was always angry. Used to hit me. Hit her sister. Just the angriest, angriest child.’ Josie shudders at the memory. ‘So between them, with their problems, no, it wasn’t the happiest of times. And high school was no better, of course.’

Alix doesn’t respond, just goes to the last of the three photographs.

‘This is the last one I have of the two of them,’ says Josie, touching the edge of the photo gently. ‘Just before Roxy left home.’

Alix holds her breath as she absorbs the image. It is not what she was expecting at all. She cannot relate the girls in this photograph to the girls in the other photographs. She cannot believe that they are the same people.

The girl who once had sandy ringlets is now a stocky girl wearing her hair scraped back hard from a wide greasy forehead with rings pierced through both of her nostrils, and her septum. Erin, who had once been a glowing, sweet-faced child with an air of shy vulnerability, is stony-faced and scrawny to the point of emaciated, with dark circles around her eyes and her hair hanging limp on both sides of her face.

‘Look different, don’t they?’ Josie says with a brittle edge to her voice.

‘Yes. Yes. They do.’

There’s a tart silence before Josie shuffles the three photographs back together and slides them into her shoulder bag. ‘Please don’t judge me.’

Alix flicks her eyes towards Josie. ‘Sorry?’

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