Page 42 of None of This is True

And the whole night, of course, was completely ruined by Nathan doing what he’d done. Alix had been distracted and sharp. She had not been a good host and it had not been a good evening.

Once home, Josie opens the front door and calls out into the darkness of their flat, ‘Fred! Mummy’s home!’

The dog comes hurtling towards her and jumps into her arms.

She takes the dog out for a wee and then brings him back in again.

She notices that Walter has discarded his new Primark outfit and is back in joggers and a baggy T-shirt, the smart shirt and trousers left pooled on the floor by the linen basket like a silent two fingers up at her.

She passes Erin’s room and puts her ear to the door, listens to the sound of her gaming chair squeaking. She thinks of the little boy in the pyjamas on the sofa at Alix’s house, with the huge headphones on, staring blankly at the screen for hours and hours, totally ignored and neglected, and thinks, really, what’s the difference? Is she really such a bad parent? Who’s to know how he’ll end up ten, twenty years from now?

She watches Walter take a beer from the fridge, open it and go to the table in the bay window. He clears his throat and lifts the lid of his laptop. They have still not spoken to each other. The atmosphere between them is worse than it’s ever been in all the time they’ve been together.

‘You were an embarrassment tonight,’ she says to Walter.

He ignores her. She hears him sigh heavily through his nose.

‘The whole thing, Walter. I wanted to die.’

‘Mm-hm ,’ he intones, his gaze on his laptop, his fingertips clicking the keys.

‘Walter,’ she shouts, ‘I’m talking to you.’

‘Yes. I can hear that.’

‘So talk to me!’

‘Talk to you about what, exactly?’

‘About tonight. About how you embarrassed me.’

Finally, his fingertips stop clicking off the keys and he turns and looks at her. He looks so tired and so old that it startles her for a moment. ‘In what way’, he says, ‘did I embarrass you?’

‘Just – just by being you .’

‘That’s nice, Jojo.’

‘I’m not trying to be nice. The whole evening was a disaster. I’d been so looking forward to it and it was horrible. And you, you just sat there with your stupid beer looking like everything was beneath you. You made no effort at all. I had to do all the work.’

‘All the work? What work? Listen, I really don’t know what’s going on between you and that woman, but I can tell you something for certain. She’s no “friend” of yours. She doesn’t even like you.’

Josie feels the breath inside her lungs freeze and stop. ‘Of course she does.’

‘No, Josie. She doesn’t. She’s just trying to get inside that tiny, weird brain of yours and work out what makes you tick.’

For a moment it feels to Josie that she is in the eye of a storm, that the universe has fragmented into a million tiny pieces and is swirling and whirling around her, that she is all that is still in the world. She closes her eyes, but the feeling grows stronger.

‘Stop. Calling. Me. Weird.’

‘Well, stop being weird.’

‘Stop it!’

‘I’m not sure I can do this any more.’

‘Do what?’

‘You, Jojo. I can’t do you .’

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