Page 79 of None of This is True

An actor playing a young Pat O’Neill stands in the kitchen of the flat, talking to a man. She is laughing at something he has just said.

The actor playing young Josie watches them curiously.

The text underneath says:

This is the voice of Pat O’Neill, talking to Alix Summer on 28 July 2019.

‘It’s true that I was not ready to be Josie’s mother. Not ready at all. I was coming to the end of the second year of my degree in Social Anthropology. I was at my peak. I felt so alive. So vibrant. I just wanted to keep going. Keep ploughing on, see how far I could get. And then I got pregnant and because I didn’t show, I had no idea until it was too late to do anything about it. Josie’s father was long gone by then. I can’t even remember his surname to this day. Isn’t that awful? I think it began with a K. Kelly, maybe? Anyway. Josie arrived and I was not ready. No. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. But mainly, I was not ready for Josie.’

The actor playing young Josie in the re-enactment turns and looks at the camera.

‘She was a dark child. And yes, maybe that was partly to do with me, with my style of mothering. I wanted her to be independent. I wanted her to be strong and impressive. I probably left her to her own devices too much. It’s important, though, for children to make their own mistakes and learn from them. It’s not good to never let your kids fuck up. But she was so needy. So needy. I gave her as much as I could, but it was never enough. And it wasn’t just me. She did it with her friends; I saw it happen, time after time. She was a brooding presence in social situations; it was almost as if she spent her whole life just waiting for someone to show her that they didn’t want her. She pushed so many friends away over the smallest thing. And as for me ever having a boyfriend – forget it. Seriously, forget it. She turned psycho whenever she thought a man might encroach on our lives. She would play cruel tricks on them. Insult them. Pretend to be ill if I was going out on a date. She even made a voodoo doll once, I kid you not. I mean, where did she even get the idea from? But yes, she made one of a man I was seeing and left it lying around the flat, with pins sticking out of it when he came round to see me. So all of them upped and left, of course they did. And then I started seeing Walter—’

Alix’s voice cuts in. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I started dating Walter. When Josie was about thirteen?’

There is a prolonged silence.

‘Josie didn’t tell me that.’

‘Well, no, of course she didn’t, because she only told you what she wanted you to know, what suited her weird narrative. And that’s exactly why I’m here talking to you, you see. Because Josie didn’t tell you lots of things and Josie’s run off letting the whole world think that her husband was a monster, that he groomed her, that he abused his children, and the world needs to know that’s rubbish. You need to know that’s rubbish. Walter Fair was far from perfect. He was quite controlling. Liked things done his way. He was quite full of himself, yes. And obviously I knew it was wrong that we were having an affair behind his wife’s back. Of course I knew that. But he was a loving man, a real man, he just wanted to love and to be loved. He just wanted a quiet life. And what we had was very real, very intense, and I was prepared to wait it out until he found the right time to leave his wife. At first Josie was very resistant to him, as she was with all my boyfriends. But then as she got older she seemed to become fixated on him. She would try to divert his attention away from me and on to herself. She would put make-up on when he came over and say disparaging things about me, about how old I was, how fat I was. At first Walter and I used to joke about it together, but then the jokes stopped, around the time Josie turned sixteen, and then, just after she turned eighteen, they told me.’

There is prolonged silence. Then Alix speaks.

‘ So you didn’t know?’ You didn’t know that they were together before that?’

Pat sighs. ‘Obviously I should have known. As Josie’s mother, I should have known . And I take full responsibility for the fact that I dropped the ball. I was so desperate for Josie to be independent, to have her own life. I just wanted – and I know how bad this sounds – but I wanted her to be somewhere else. Not at home. I hated it when she was at home, she cast this mood, this atmosphere. I didn’t want to talk to her. I didn’t … God save my soul, I didn’t like her. So I never asked her where she’d been, what she’d been doing. I didn’t want to know. I was just happy that I didn’t have to deal with her. But God. The shock, when I found out. The pure horror of it. And you know, when Walter and I were together, Josie used to tell me I was disgusting for being with a married man. And then she went right in there and snatched him away from his wife, and from me.’

‘So, in your opinion, Walter didn’t groom Josie?’

‘Groom her? You mean manipulate her into a relationship with him? No. I don’t think so. I think she saw him, she wanted him, she got him. She didn’t care who she hurt. She’s never cared who she hurt. She’s – and this is a terrible thing to say about your own child, and obviously, I’ve been far from perfect myself, but I really think Josie has a heart of stone. A heart of pure stone.’

The screen turns black and then changes to Pat O’Neill sitting in a community hall.

She shakes her head slightly.

There are tears in her eyes.

***

6 p.m.

For a while after Pat leaves, Alix feels numb. Her mother comes over and cooks something for the children to eat, serves it to them, sits with them while they eat it, listens to their chatter, creates a sense of calm and peace which Alix is currently incapable of doing.

‘I think he’s dead,’ she says to her mother when they’re alone together in the garden later on.

Her mother looks at her with concern and says, ‘No. Surely not.’

‘No. He is. I can feel it. All this time I’ve been thinking that Josie was weird because Josie was damaged. All this time I’ve been thinking she was crying out for help somehow. That she needed me. But now I realise she was never crying out for help. She never needed me. She did have a plan though. The whole time. And I was just a cog. And so was Nathan.’

‘But why? Why would she want to hurt Nathan? She barely knew him.’

‘Look. She made it clear to me that she thought very little of Nathan, that she thought I’d be better off without him. She even asked me once how I’d feel if he died and then seemed really disappointed when I said that I would be sad. And when she first suggested that I should make a podcast about her, she pretty much told me that she was embarking on a project of change and that she wanted me to document it.’

‘You think all this was deliberate?’

‘I don’t know how exactly, but yes, I think it was. I mean, she obviously knew that Erin had all that money in her bank account and then somehow found a way to get her PIN, to extract all that cash, to pay someone to lure Nathan to that hotel. She knew that Nathan was going to be out that night because he told her and, you know, when she left that day, I was surprised about how easily she went, how she didn’t make a fuss or try to stay, and now I know it was part of the plan too. And I really think she took him to kill him, Mum. I really do. Every second we’re sitting here is a second lost for Nathan. And I don’t know what to do, Mum. I just don’t know what to do.’

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