Page 73 of None of This is True

‘I can be there now. Just’ – she glances around at her two children, still in their school uniforms, kicking off their shoes in the hallway, and thinks how long it would take for her mother to drive there from Harrow and says – ‘give me an hour. I’ll be there in an hour.’

On the table in front of Alix lies a Nespresso pod, a bottle of the expensive hand soap that she uses in her guest WC, her bracelet with the little hanging crystals that Nathan had given her for her birthday, a receipt from the organic supermarket dated Alix’s birthday, the interiors magazine, a shiny teaspoon, a card from Alix’s kitchen wall that Eliza had made for her three years ago after Teeny the dog died, and a strip of passport photographs of Leon. She feels her mouth turn sour at the sight of these tiny, vital, intensely personal parts of her family ephemera on the cold institutional tabletop.

But there are other things, too, on the table in front of Alix. There is a photograph of two tiny children sitting one on each knee of a young girl, all three children beaming into the camera. There is a hair scrunchie made of pink satin. There is a rubberised phone case with gems arranged into flowers glued to the back. There is an empty Hubba Bubba container. There is a single silver earring with a crucifix hanging from it. There is a scrunched-up paper napkin with pink smudges on it, and a large silk flower attached to a circle of elastic. She shakes her head and says, ‘These aren’t mine. I don’t know, I mean I assume they belong to her girls? But this …’ Her eyes go to the photo of the young girl with the toddlers on her knees. ‘This isn’t Erin or Roxy. But the girl … she looks familiar. She looks …’ Alix trawls her mind for the place in her life where she has seen this face before. And then she gets it and she points at the photo as her heart gallops under her ribs and says, ‘Brooke Ripley. That’s Brooke Ripley, isn’t it? Look! And I remember Josie said Brooke had two small siblings, her half-brother and -sister? And that … hold on …’ She grabs her phone from her bag and runs a search for Brooke Ripley on Facebook. ‘There.’ She shows it to Chris Bryant and Sabrina. ‘Look. It’s her. And …’ Her eye goes to a detail on the prom-night photo of Brooke that she had not noticed before – a large white flower attached to her wrist. Her throat burns dry, and she clutches her stomach subconsciously with her left hand. ‘Look,’ she says, her eyes going from the photo to the flower and then to the two detectives. ‘Look.’

The detectives stare at the items and the photo on Alix’s phone, and a chill permeates the warm office.

‘There’s a key,’ she finds herself telling Sabrina. ‘Josie left it under the mattress in my spare room. It has blood on it.’

‘Describe this key?’ Sabrina says to Alix.

‘It’s small. Gold, I think, or brass. A single key. There’s a plastic tag attached, one of those that comes as part of a multipack, with the clear plastic window, with the number 6 on it. Just that. I have it at home. I can give it to you. I’m sorry. I should have given it to you before. I didn’t think.’

‘Please, don’t worry. You’re being incredibly helpful. And this’ – Sabrina gestures at the silk wrist corsage, the photograph of Brooke Ripley with her two young siblings – ‘this could be very important. We will be doubling up our attempts to find Brooke’s family. And in the meanwhile, please just take care of yourself and your family. We’ll call you when we have anything more to share.’

Alix gets up to leave and then stops when she remembers something that’s been nagging at her for days.

‘Was that all?’ she asks the detective. ‘There wasn’t a necklace? With a golden bumblebee pendant?’

‘No,’ says Sabrina. ‘Not that I’m aware of. But if it turns up, I’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you,’ says Alix, her fingers going instinctively to her clavicle where the pendant used to hang. ‘That would be great.’

Alix’s mother looks up from the kitchen table where she is sitting with Leon when she hears Alix close the front door behind her half an hour later. She throws her a look that says, ‘Well?’

Alix shakes her head, just perceptibly, and busies herself for a moment, putting things in the dishwasher, plugging in her phone to charge, wiping cat hair off the hob. When she’s done, she gestures at her mother to join her in the garden. They sit side by side, staring down the garden towards the back wall. The bright evening light glints gold off the windows of Alix’s recording studio and for a moment she wonders if she will ever again sit behind the sound desk, ever again take pure, focused interest in somebody else’s life.

‘So?’ her mother says after a short moment.

‘Nothing,’ says Alix. ‘They have nothing. But …’ She shivers slightly as she recalls the unpleasantness of seeing those tiny pieces of her life, her home, her family, laid out in front of her, pulled from the depths of, apparently, Josie’s underwear drawer. The thought of Eliza’s precious drawing of her with Teeny, Alix’s just departed dog, and Leon’s slightly startled-looking four-year-old face nestling in amongst Josie’s sad, faded underwear makes her feel nauseous.

‘They found some items in one of her drawers: some stuff belonging to me. Things she’d stolen from the house. Nothing valuable. Just bits.’ Her voice cracks and she clutches her mother’s hand inside hers and feels her mother’s squeeze back hard.

She doesn’t tell her mother about the corsage, about Brooke Ripley, about the blood-smeared key hidden under Josie’s mattress. She just holds her hand and stares into the middle distance, holding back the tears that threaten to overwhelm her.

‘He’ll show up,’ her mother says softly. ‘I know he will. I can feel him. He’s out there. I reckon he’ll be home by the weekend.’

And it’s just what Alix wants to hear. She wants to think that she too can feel him out there; she wants to feel certain that he will walk in through the door this weekend, that he will have a tale to tell her over wine, that they will curl up together in bed, his body maybe smaller, thinner, his arms around her desperate with the relief of being home, that they will wait, wait to talk about Katelyn, wait to talk about the hotel room, they will heal, come together, love, and then they will fix whatever was so broken that Nathan ended up in a hotel room with a girl called Katelyn in the first place. She wants that ending to this story and she kisses her mother gently on her cheek and says, ‘Thank you. Yes. Thank you.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows Katelyn Rand sitting on the small red velvet sofa.

‘So, Nathan was still going on and on about wanting to go home and have sex with his wife, even though he could hardly put one foot in front of the other. We ended up in a bar in Soho and I could tell his mates were fading a bit, getting restless. It was so hot that night and, I mean, they weren’t young, you know? But he kept wanting one more drink . So I said, “Listen. Why don’t you guys go? Leave him with me. I can get him home.” And then they left and I told Nathan I would get him home, but first we should have something to eat to sober him up, and I took him to the hotel that Josie had told me to get him to. She said there was a room there, booked under Nathan’s name, all paid for. Just had to check him in. Easier said than done. Could barely keep him upright. Had to sort of prop him up while I did all the business. He kept saying, “Where’s Alix? Is she here? Is she here?”

‘And I said, “Yeah. She’s upstairs, waiting for you. Come on, sweetie, let’s get you up there.” And then we got into the room, and he said he was hungry, so I got us a McDonald’s delivery; we ate that; he drank all the miniatures. All the time he just kept saying, “Where’s Alix? Is she coming? Is she coming?”

‘I said yeah. She’s coming. She’s in an Uber. She’ll be here soon. And then … Well, he tried to leave. Yeah.’

She brings her hand to the back of her neck and rubs at it, smiles apologetically at the interviewer off-screen.

‘That was bad. And I was just like watching my phone for a message from Josie, telling me that she was coming, and I was calling her and calling her, and I’d locked the door and was standing in front of it. He was going nuts . “Let me go. Just let me go!” And then he started throwing stuff about, knocking stuff over. Didn’t touch me, though, but he accidentally caught me on my cheek with the edge of something sharp. And I was like trapped in this room with this total nutter, losing his shit big-time, and Josie was not answering, not answering, and then finally at about three o’clock in the morning she called. She said send him out. Tell him Alix is out there, in a black Kia, reg plate blah, whatever it was. So I unlocked the door, let him go. Dropped some underwear on the floor in the bathroom. Sprayed my perfume all about the place. Messed up the bed. Left. Ten minutes later a thousand pounds landed in my PayPal. And that, I assumed, was that. Jesus Christ.’

She sighs, runs her hand around the back of her neck again.

‘I couldn’t have been more wrong about that, could I?’

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