Page 85 of None of This is True

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Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen shows Roxy Fair sitting on a sofa, but this time Erin is sitting next to her.

Erin wears her hair long and parted down the middle. She has on a baseball cap with her gaming logo embroidered on it and a matching T-shirt.

The text beneath reads:

Roxy and Erin Fair

Then new text appears below, typed letter by letter.

Erin Fair was recently diagnosed as having ASD. To compensate for living with her disorder in a toxic and dysfunctional environment, she developed various habits and coping mechanisms. These include talking in a very soft voice. As some of her words are hard to pick up on, we have provided subtitles for Erin’s spoken words which will appear below.

‘Our mother didn’t want our dad to like us and she didn’t want us to like him. She wanted him all to herself and she wanted us all to herself. She wasn’t happy when we went to him or had fun with him or loved him. She wasn’t happy when he was with us and tried to show us any love or affection. She controlled every element of our relationship with our father and his with us. It became worse and worse as we got older and older. When we tried to bring friends home, she would make them feel really unwelcome, and when Dad tried to organise fun things to do as a family she would find ways to sabotage them. And obviously there were other challenges in our family too. The fact that Roxy had oppositional defiant disorder. My issues. She didn’t let my father have anything to do with his first family in Canada. He used to have to sneakily Skype with them when she was at work, and one day she pretended to go to work but didn’t, she sat at the bus stop outside and then Dad looked up from his Skype call with his sons and saw Mum staring at him through the window. She didn’t talk to him for days after that, so my dad just Skyped them from my bedroom instead. She didn’t like us seeing our grandma because she was the enemy. She told us all these lies about her, that she used to be a prostitute, brought tricks into the house, that she used to beat her and starve her and of course we were small so we believed her. But then our dad told us it wasn’t true, that Mum was just jealous of Grandma because she’d been with Dad before her.

‘But it got really, really bad when my dad got the job up north, when he was only home at the weekends, and we were alone with Mum. She couldn’t cope with us. Particularly couldn’t cope with Roxy. She took Roxy out of school when she broke my arm, which’ – she throws a playful look at her sister – ‘by the way, was kind of an accident. I mean, she did it in anger during a fight, but it wasn’t done maliciously, but the social services tried to intervene, based on things me and Roxy had said at school about our home life, and Mum pulled Roxy out of school for nearly two years and said she was “home-schooling” her. Which was bollocks. She just let her watch TV all day. And then when Dad got back at the weekends, she’d leave all this fake “learning” stuff around the flat to make it look like she’d been teaching her. And she’d leave Roxy tied up to the Naughty Chair in our bedroom. Sometimes for like hours. And she said if either of us ever told our dad that he would leave us and go back to his other family in Canada, and we’d never see him again. Dad would come back at the weekends, and she would act like everything was just so happy and wonderful. I think he knew. He did know. But he was trapped too. He had nowhere to go. He was getting old, and he’d already lost two of his kids and he didn’t want to lose us too. He stuck it out, for as long as he could. Tiptoed round her. Did everything he could to keep her happy. And then one night Dad couldn’t sleep, and he walked past my room and heard me online. I guess this was about four or five years ago – it was after I finished school anyway, when I was gaming full-time – and he walked in and all my followers were like, “Oh my God, is that your dad?” And I was like, “Yes, this is Pops.” And he said hi to everyone and he wanted to know what we were doing, and he pulled over a chair and sat down and watched and after about an hour or so he was totally into it. And it was great having him there, because I talk so quietly, it’s hard for me sometimes to create the sort of energy that gamers want when they’re watching online, and he was there giving it all the energy, all the vibes. He was so much fun, and everyone loved him, and so he started joining in more and more and of course no, we could not tell Mum about it. No way. She’d have put a stop to it, pronto. She’d have killed it dead. So Dad used to wait for her to go to sleep at night and then sneak in. And it was Dad who helped monetise it all, got me on Glitch, managed my subscriptions, opened my bank accounts. He did all of that for me. He was the one who made me famous. And we were planning a trip to Nevada for a convention that summer, the summer he died. I was going to play in front of a live audience, for the first time. Then when we got home, I was going to move out, move down to Bristol to live with Roxy. I was breaking free. It was all happening. It was all within reach. And I think she knew it. She could smell it. And that’s why she latched on to Alix Summer, made up that whole crazy story about Dad beating her and Dad abusing me. She wanted to disappear from her life before she lost control of it completely. Wanted to stop all the freedom and all the escaping. Roxy had already got out; she wasn’t prepared to let me and Dad get out too.’

‘And Brooke?’ the interviewer asks off-mic. ‘What can you tell us about Brooke?’

Erin sighs. ‘I was home with my mum. It was just the two of us. My father wasn’t in London that night. He was working away so it had nothing to do with him. Roxy was in Bristol, so it was nothing to do with her. And I was in my room, in another world. But then I heard voices. A girl’s voice. And I recognised it. It was Brooke, Roxy’s friend. She used to be over a lot in the months before but we hadn’t seen her for a while. I went to my door and peered through. I saw Brooke standing by the living-room door; her body language was like she didn’t want to stay. She was wearing this nice white dress. It was long. Down to her ankles. And my mum was saying, “She’s not here. She’s run away. It’s your fault.” And Brooke was saying, “No. No, it’s not my fault. I loved her. She was running away from you.” And then I saw my mum just …’

Erin pauses, closes her eyes for a moment and then opens them again, smiles awkwardly and continues:

‘She hit her. She hit her so hard. Around her face. And Brooke just stood there. She touched her cheek. She said, “See. See, that’s why Roxy ran away. Because of you. Because you’re fucking mad. You’re just totally mad. Roxy hates you, you know. She told me that. She hates you.” And then Brooke picked up the hem of her skirt and turned, and I put my head back inside my bedroom and closed the door and I heard her stamping down the hallway towards the front door but then I heard this crack. This crash. And I heard this noise, this choking noise. I didn’t dare look. I just stood there, my adrenaline pumping so hard I could feel it in my blood, listening to these sounds of struggle, of violence. And then …’

She closes her eyes again. Roxy reaches across and takes her hand, squeezing it.

‘And then it went quiet. And I did not leave my room for a very long time. Not for a very long time.’

Interviewer asks off-mic : ‘How long?’

‘A very long time.’

Interviewer: ‘Did you tell anyone what you’d heard?’