Page 52 of None of This is True

9.30 a.m.

Josie is ready and dressed and sitting at the kitchen table when Alix gets back from dropping the children at school. The dog is in the back garden, sniffing around the flower beds. Alix sees that Josie has attempted to cover up some of the damage to her face with make-up and wonders for a moment where she had found it. She had arrived here on Saturday night with only her tiny handbag and the dog.

‘You look better,’ she says, indicating Josie’s face.

‘Yes. I was sick of seeing that horror show in the mirror. I found a tube of something in the bathroom cabinet. I hope you don’t mind?’

Alix shakes her head distractedly. She’s 99 per cent sure there was no foundation or make-up in the bathroom cabinet in the en suite to the spare room, but maybe a guest left it there without her noticing.

‘I just have a couple of jobs I need to do around the house, and then we can get going. Is that OK?’

‘Absolutely,’ says Josie. ‘I’m happy just sitting here, in your lovely kitchen.’

Alix throws her the warmest smile she can manage and then heads up to the bedrooms. She wrenches dirty bedclothes off Leon’s bed and bundles them together. Then she redresses it with fresh sheets and empties his wastepaper bin into a black bag. She does the same in her bedroom and in the bathroom. As she moves from job to job, she is followed by a sense of unease. She tries to unhitch it from her psyche, but she can’t. Everything feels wrong; everything feels off-kilter. She hears the dog yapping in the back garden and peers out to see him staring longingly at a squirrel up a tree. She pictures Josie sitting at the kitchen table, the strange benignity of her, the placid smile. She doesn’t seem like someone whose husband assaulted her on Saturday night and who had to escape in the early hours and hasn’t been home since. She doesn’t seem like she’s in the eye of a terrible personal trauma. She seems … happy?

She brings the dirty laundry and the black bin bag downstairs and there she is, just as she’d left her. ‘I’ll be two more minutes,’ she calls out to Josie before taking the laundry into the utility room.

‘No rush!’

And there it is. That strange, unnerving note of jollity.

A moment later they are in the recording studio, each with a coffee in front of them and headphones on. The time is almost 10 a.m. and Alix presses record.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a young girl sitting at a stool by the open-plan kitchen in Josie’s apartment.

She is laughing out loud at something that another young woman, an actress playing Josie’s younger daughter, Roxy, has just said.

An actress playing Josie sits on the sofa, looking at a magazine and smiling quietly.

The text beneath reads:

Recording of Josie Fair from Alix Summer’s podcast, 14 July 2019

‘I have to tell you about Brooke.’

‘Brooke?’

‘Yes. She was Roxy’s friend. From school. Roxy never had a friend until Brooke. But she turned up at the beginning of year ten, and they were inseparable immediately.’

The screen shows the two girls sitting on a bed, cross-legged, playing with phones and laughing together.

‘Brooke was bolshy, like Roxy, and potty-mouthed. And she was fearless too. Scared of nothing and nobody. But I liked her because she was a good influence on Roxy. She got Roxy studying that year. She persuaded Roxy that GCSE s were useful, and she was fun. We weren’t a fun family. Not in that way. But Brooke was fun and she made us fun too, became almost a part of the family. She lived in a tiny flat with two small half-siblings, didn’t get on with her stepfather, had lots of issues at home, so I think she saw our place as a kind of refuge? It was a lovely time, in retrospect. And then we got towards the end of their year eleven, the GCSE s were coming up, Brooke was over a lot, revising with Roxy.’

The screen shows the two girls sitting on the floor, poring over exercise books.

‘But suddenly one day, just before the exams started, it was all over. Roxy came home from school, said they’d had a big fight. Said she’d punched Brooke. Given her a fat lip. We got a call from the school, asking us to come in. But then Roxy disappeared. Right in the middle of her exams. Just gone, for three whole days. Finally she reappeared, looking grubby, shell-shocked, said she’d been sleeping rough, been taken into a hostel, hadn’t slept for three nights. I ran her a bath; she was in there for over an hour.’

Screen shows the actor playing Roxy lying in a bath in a darkened bathroom.

‘Then she came out and told me what had happened. Told me about Brooke … and Walter.’

There is a prolonged silence.

The screen shows Roxy disappearing under the bathwater, her hair spreading out around her.

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