Page 6 of None of This is True

‘Yeah. I guess. I mean … I was very drunk. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just followed my urges.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Into Soho. Giovanni and Rob were there. Just had a few more drinks with them.’

‘Until four in the afternoon?’

‘I took a room in a hotel.’

Alix growls gently under her breath. ‘You paid to sleep in a hotel rather than come home?’

‘I wasn’t really capable. It just seemed the best option at the time.’

He looks appalling. She tries to imagine him stumbling around Soho in the middle of the night, tipping drink after drink down his throat. She tries to imagine what he must have looked like reeling into a hotel at four in the morning, his bright red hair awry, breathing the putrid breath of a long night of alcohol and rich foods into the receptionist’s face, before collapsing into a hotel bed and snoring violently in an empty room.

‘Didn’t they kick you out at midday?’

He rubs at the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and grimaces slightly. ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Apparently, they made quite a few attempts to get me up. They, erm, they had to let themselves in in the end. Just to check I wasn’t, you know, dead.’

He smirks as he says this, and Alix realises that twenty years ago this would have been something they would have joked about. It would have been funny, somehow, a grown man drinking for nearly twelve hours, going AWOL in Soho, forcing hotel staff to enter his room because they thought he might be dead, finding him, no doubt, spread-eagled and half-naked on the bed, oblivious, hungover, revolting.

She would have laughed.

But not any more.

Not now she’s forty-five.

Not now.

Now she’s simply disgusted.

Josie listens to nearly thirty episodes of Alix’s podcast over the following week. She listens to stories of women bouncing back from a hundred different kinds of crud: from illness, from bad men, from poverty, from war, from mental health issues and from tragedy. They lose children, body parts, autonomy; they are beaten, they are humiliated, they are downtrodden. And then they rise up, each and every one of them, they rise up and find goals they didn’t know they had. The podcast series has won awards and Josie can see why. Not only are the women’s stories inspiring, but Alix’s approach is so empathetic, so intelligent, so human that she would make an interview with anyone she chose to talk to sound moving. Josie tries to uncover more about Alix from the internet, but there’s very little to go on. She has rarely been interviewed, and when she is, she gives little away. Josie assumes her to be a self-made woman, in control of her life. She assumes she has a similar tale to tell as the women whom she interviews, and Josie entertains fantasies about crossing paths with Alix again, swapping their own stories, Alix maybe mentoring Josie somehow, showing her how to be the person she thinks she was always meant to be.

Then one afternoon there is a new photo on Alix’s Instagram feed. It’s a birthday party for one of the children. There are balloons with the number eleven on them and the daughter with the red hair is dressed as a punk fairy and the father stands behind her watching proudly as she purses her lips to blow out the candles on a huge pink cake and other people stand behind, their hands cupped halfway to applause, faces set in smiles. And then Josie zooms in to the background at the sight of something familiar. A school photograph on the sideboard behind the group, the two children in crested polo shirts, pale blue with a dark blue logo. And she realises that Alix Summer’s children go to the same school that Roxy and Erin went to when they were small and suddenly she feels it again, that strange wire of connection, that sense that there is something bringing her and Alix Summer together, something in the universe. She pictures Alix Summer in the same playground that she had spent so many years of her life standing in, going into the same overheated office to pay for school trips and dinner money, sitting squashed on the same benches at the back of the same small hall to watch assemblies and nativities, hanging out the same navy and sky-blue uniforms to dry.

Born on the same day.

In the same hospital.

Celebrated their forty-fifth birthdays in the same pub, at the same time.

And now this.

It means something, she’s sure it does.

Monday, 17 June

Alix watches her husband in the kitchen, his hair still wet from the shower, the back of his shirt stuck to his skin – she’s never understood why he doesn’t dry himself properly before he gets dressed – drinking coffee from his favourite mug and nagging the children to move faster, eat up, get their shoes on. He’s acting as if it’s a normal Monday, but it is not a normal Monday. It is the Monday after his second bender in a row. The Monday after he failed to come home yet again and appeared once more, bedraggled and pitiful, on a Sunday afternoon, stinking of the night before. It is a Monday when Alix has started seriously wondering about the future of their marriage again. If she keeps wondering about the future of their marriage in this way, this could well be the Monday that marks the beginning of the end. Nathan has always been a walking list of pros and cons, from the very first time she met him. She’d even written a list after their third date to help her decide whether or not she should carry on seeing him. His behaviour these last two weekends has suddenly added a huge weight to the cons column, which is bad because the pros have always been quite slight. Being a good dancer, for example. Great on a second date, but not so important fifteen years down the road with two children, two careers and a future to worry about.

At eight fifteen Nathan leaves. He calls out his goodbyes from the hallway. It’s been a long time since they habitually kissed when leaving the house. Ten minutes after that, Alix walks the children to school. Leon is grumpy. Eliza is hyper.

Alix walks between them, looking at her phone, checking her emails, looking at websites for the puppy she has promised they will get some time this year, an Australian Shepherd that should, ideally, have mismatched eyes and hence is proving impossible to find, about which Alix is secretly relieved. She hasn’t got space in her head right now for a puppy, as much as she misses having a dog in the house.

She’s just finished recording the thirtieth episode of All Woman ; it’s launching next week and then after that she wants to try something new. The theme has run its course and she’s ready for a new challenge, but she’s still waiting for inspiration to strike and her diary is empty and an empty diary is as stressful as a full diary when it comes to a career.

The children are gone a few minutes later, sucked into the maelstrom of the playground, and Alix turns to head home. After a cloudy morning, the sun suddenly breaks through and dazzles her. She delves into her handbag, looking for her sunglasses, and then, when she’s found them, she looks up and sees a woman standing very close to her. The woman is immediately familiar. She thinks for a brief moment that she must be a mother from the school and then it hits her.

‘Oh,’ she says, folding down the arms of her glasses. ‘Hello! You’re the woman from the pub. My birthday twin!’

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