‘Here.’ Josie pushes a fan of photographs across the table towards Alix. ‘My girls.’
Alix lifts her gaze to Josie and smiles. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Amazing. Thank you.’
The first photograph shows two chubby toddlers in thick knitted jumpers and jeans holding hands and standing in what looks like the big sand pit in Queen’s Park. The older girl has hair the same colour as Josie’s, but more vivid in tone. The younger one has sandy blonde hair with the type of ringlets at the ends that will never grow back after her first haircut.
‘Which one is which?’ she asks.
‘This one’ – Josie points at the one with the ringlets – ‘is Roxy. That one’ – she indicates the one with chestnut-brown hair – ‘is Erin.’
‘They’re adorable,’ Alix says. ‘Just adorable.’
Josie nods and smiles and watches as Alix moves on to the next photograph. It’s the two girls, side by side, outside the school where Alix’s children go, wearing the same sky-blue polo shirts and navy bottoms that her children were wearing when they left the house this morning.
‘Roxy’s first day,’ says Josie, a note of pained nostalgia in her voice. ‘I cried for about four hours that day.’
Alix glances at Josie. ‘Oh, God. Really?’ She thinks back to Leon’s first day at school, returning to an empty house for the first time in seven years and the euphoria of knowing that it could be about her again for a while. She’d never understood the weeping mums outside the playground.
‘I was bereft. I didn’t know what I would do. Suddenly, all this time. Suddenly, all this silence.’
Alix thinks of her conversation with Mandy in the school office and says, ‘And the girls. How did they get on at primary school? Did they like it?’
She notices Josie tense slightly, her shoulders lifting towards her ears. ‘Oh, you know,’ she says. ‘Not really. You see, Erin, my oldest, she’s always had some problems. Not quite sure how you’d describe it, really. The teachers called it global developmental delay? But I didn’t agree with that. She was just a bit lazy, I think. A bit passive? Hard to get a reaction out of her. Hard to know what she was thinking. And then Roxy was the opposite. Oppositional defiant disorder, the teachers called it. I think I did agree with that. You could never tell Roxy anything. She would never, ever comply. She was always angry. Used to hit me. Hit her sister. Just the angriest, angriest child.’ Josie shudders at the memory. ‘So between them, with their problems, no, it wasn’t the happiest of times. And high school was no better, of course.’
Alix doesn’t respond, just goes to the last of the three photographs.
‘This is the last one I have of the two of them,’ says Josie, touching the edge of the photo gently. ‘Just before Roxy left home.’
Alix holds her breath as she absorbs the image. It is not what she was expecting at all. She cannot relate the girls in this photograph to the girls in the other photographs. She cannot believe that they are the same people.
The girl who once had sandy ringlets is now a stocky girl wearing her hair scraped back hard from a wide greasy forehead with rings pierced through both of her nostrils, and her septum. Erin, who had once been a glowing, sweet-faced child with an air of shy vulnerability, is stony-faced and scrawny to the point of emaciated, with dark circles around her eyes and her hair hanging limp on both sides of her face.
‘Look different, don’t they?’ Josie says with a brittle edge to her voice.
‘Yes. Yes. They do.’
There’s a tart silence before Josie shuffles the three photographs back together and slides them into her shoulder bag. ‘Please don’t judge me.’
Alix flicks her eyes towards Josie. ‘Sorry?’
Josie opens her mouth, words waiting on the tip of her tongue but not being spoken. Then she smiles, tightly, and says, ‘Nothing! Nothing.’ She places her bag on the floor, pulls her headphones towards her and says, ‘Shall we start?’
Screen shows a pink wooden chair with a heart shape cut out of the back.
The chair has been modified with straps and belts.
It stands in an empty room, lit by rays of daylight shining through grubby windows.
The text under the shot reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 11 July 2019
Josie’s voice begins.
‘Walter couldn’t cope with them. He was away a lot. He’d been made redundant by the company he’d been working for in London and ended up getting a much better job with an electrical company that worked mainly out of Scotland and the Northeast. So he’d be away for days on end, just back for the weekends. I have to say, I liked it. For so many years I’d existed only as half of a couple and as a mother. I had never been alone, not really. You know, before the girls were born, I didn’t even have a key to our flat. I just used to have to wait in for him to get home from work. Just wait in, all day … so I liked those years when Walter worked away during the week, when it was just me and the girls. We were happy. We were free. I let the girls be themselves, gave them room to breathe. But then Walter would get back at the weekends and, well, everything would change. And not in a good way.’
The shot of the pink chair with the leather straps fades away.
The screen goes black.
***
Walter has been to the barber’s and, to Josie’s great disappointment, looks almost exactly the same. She masks her dismay and thanks him for making the effort. He grunts in response, and she knows that she’s pushing him very close to the precipice of his own tolerance of her.
Their marriage sometimes feels like a huge ship that left harbour facing one way and has slowly, lugubriously, turned 180 degrees, headed off in the wrong direction and then stalled. Somehow, Josie had taken control of the deck, but it had turned out that she was as bad at steering the ship as Walter had been, and ever since, they’d been going round and round in circles, staring disconsolately into the middle distance, waiting to be rescued.
Until Alix.
Josie takes three jars of baby food from the cupboard and heats them up for Erin. She places them on a tray with a spoon and a pouch of Ella’s Kitchen pureed mango and apple. She leaves the tray outside Erin’s room. She kisses her fingertips, puts them to the door and then goes to her bedroom to get ready for work.
When Josie gets back from work, Walter has been clothes shopping. He doesn’t do her a fashion parade. He merely cocks his head at the Primark bags and says, ‘Go on, then. Have a look.’
He’s done quite well. A nice navy-blue casual long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of camel-coloured chinos. He’s even got some new socks.
‘Good,’ she says to him, with a nod. ‘Very nice.’
He grunts. She can sense him shutting down.
She gets started on a shepherd’s pie. It’s Walter’s favourite of her small repertoire of dishes, and even though she’s trying to be more experimental with food these days (yesterday she made a dish with couscous, halloumi and chickpeas), today Walter deserves something he likes. Then she takes the dog for a walk around the block. She thinks she sees Roxy three times in the ten minutes she’s out of the house and the second she gets home she opens up her laptop and searches for her in the places she always searches for her on the internet. But, as always, she is not there.
Normally Josie doesn’t talk to Walter about Roxy; they never talk about the girls at all, it’s just made everything easier, somehow. But later on, as they sit side by side on the sofa eating the shepherd’s pie, Josie turns to Walter and says, ‘Do you ever think you see her? Roxy?’
He throws her a look. She knows he’d planned not to talk to her tonight; he’s still smarting from how horrible she’s been to him the last few days. But this isn’t the sort of question you can ignore because you’re in a huff, and she sees his guard fall, and then another take its place. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, when you’re out. Do you see someone on the street and think it’s her, for a minute? And then realise it’s not?’
He’s silent for a second before nodding. ‘Yeah. Sometimes.’
‘Do you ever wonder if she’s dead?’
‘Course I do. All the time.’
They fall silent for a moment and eat their food, but the air is filled with things they both want to say, and Josie gets in first.
‘You know, I’m probably going to tell Alix about the girls.’
His head snaps towards her. ‘What do you mean, tell her?’
‘I’m going to tell her. What happened. What we did.’
He narrows his eyes at her. ‘Are you mad?’
Josie recoils slightly. She hates it when Walter says things like that.
‘It’s time. That’s all. She’ll be able to help us.’
‘Help us? Fuck, Josie. She’ll call the fucking police.’
‘Good.’
‘Oh my God. Oh Jesus. Josie. You actually are, aren’t you? You’re actually mad. Genuinely. We’ve been through all of this. I thought we agreed—’
‘No. No, we did not agree. We did not agree anything. We need to—’
‘We need to do nothing , Josie. We need to do nothing. Fucking hell …’ He slaps his forehead with his hand and pushes the tray of food off his lap so he can stand up.
He starts to stride away from Josie and she pulls him back by his arm and then flinches when she sees his hand arcing towards her. He brings it back quickly to his side and carries on walking towards the bay window.
‘It’s happening, Walter. Whether you like it or not. I’m going to tell Alix everything. I can’t live like this any more. We’re moving on.’
‘I can’t talk to you. You’re insane. You’re literally insane. I’m married to a fucking nutter.’
‘And I’m married to a fucking paedophile !’
The air in the room freezes. For a second, neither Josie nor Walter breathes or moves.
Finally, Walter speaks. ‘I’m sorry?’
She wants to say it again. And then again and again. She wants to pummel her fists against his chest and spit the word into his face until he’s choking on it. But she can’t. It’s gone.
She collects their half-eaten plates of food, scrapes some into the blender for Erin, throws the rest into the bin.
She purees the pie for Erin and spoons it into a bowl. She puts it on a tray with a strawberry-flavoured Müllerlight. She leaves it outside Erin’s room, her spare hand clamped over her mouth and nose to mask the smell. She is about to touch the door and then kiss her fingers, but she stops herself.
She’s starting to feel that Erin is part of the problem here. She’s starting to feel like Erin is no longer on her side.