Josie awakens suddenly from a shallow puddle of a dream, a dream so close to the surface of her consciousness that she can almost control it. She is in the Lansdowne. Alix Summer is there and calling her to join her at her table. The table is dressed with extravagant bowls of fruit. Her friends leave. The pub is empty. Alix and Josie sit opposite each other, and Alix says, ‘I need you.’ And then Josie wakes up.
It’s the buses.
The buses always wake her up.
They live right next to a bus stop on a busy, dirty road on the cusp of Kilburn and Paddington. The large Victorian villas on this street were built, according to a local history website, in 1876 for wealthy merchants. The road once led to the spa at Kilburn Priory and would have rumbled with the wheels of carriages and clicked with the hooves of horses. Now every grand villa on the road is split into clunkily converted apartments and the stucco exterior walls are stained the colour of old newspaper by the endless traffic that passes so close. And the buses. There are three on this route and one passes or stops outside every few minutes. The hiss of the hydraulics as they pull up at the bus stop is so loud that it sometimes sends the dog cowering into the corners.
Josie looks at the time. It is 8.12 a.m. She pulls back the heavy denim curtains and peers into the street. She is a matter of feet from the faces of people sitting on the bus, all oblivious to the woman spying on them from her bedroom window. The dog joins her, and she cups his skull under her hand. ‘Morning, Fred.’
She has a mild hangover. Half a bottle of champagne last night and then they finished with a Sambuca. Much more than Josie is used to drinking. She goes to the living room, where Walter sits at the dining table in the window overlooking the street.
‘Morning,’ he says, throwing her a small smile before turning his gaze back to his computer screen.
‘Morning,’ she replies, heading to the kitchen area. ‘Did you feed the dog?’
‘Yes, indeed I did. And I also took him out.’
‘Thank you,’ she says warmly. Fred is her dog. Walter never wanted a dog, least of all a handbag dog like Fred, who is a Pomchi. She takes full responsibility for him and is grateful to Walter whenever he does anything to help her with him.
She makes herself a round of toast and a mug of tea and curls herself into the small sofa in the corner of the room. When she switches on her phone, she sees that she had been googling Alix Summer late last night. That explained why she’d been dreaming about her when she woke up.
Alix Summer, it appears, is a reasonably well-known podcaster and journalist. She has eight thousand followers on Instagram and the same on Twitter. Her bio says: ‘Mum, journo, feminist, professional busybody & nosey parker, failed yoga fanatic, Queen’s Park dweller/lover.’ Then there is a link to her podcast channel, which is called All Woman , where she interviews successful women about being successful women. Josie recognises some of the names: an actress, a newsreader, a sportswoman.
She starts listening to one: a woman called Mari le Jeune who runs a global beauty empire. Alix’s voice in the introduction is like velvet and Josie can see why she’s pursued this particular career path.
‘What’s that you’re listening to?’ she hears Walter ask.
‘Just a podcast thing. It’s that woman, Alix, who I met in the pub last night. My birthday twin. It’s what she does,’ she replies.
She carries on listening for a while. The woman called Mari is talking about her marriage at a young age to a man who controlled her. ‘Everything I did, he controlled, everything I ate, everything I wore. He turned my children against me. He turned my friends against me. My life was so small, like he took it and squeezed every last drop of me out of it. And then, in 2005, he died, quite suddenly. And it was like pressing the “reboot” button on my life. I discovered that all through those dark years with my husband, when I thought I was all alone in the world, there’d been a cast of people waiting in the background for me to come back to them, they’d been there all along. They picked me up and they took me with them.’
Then Alix’s voice is back. ‘And if your husband – and I hope this doesn’t sound like a harsh or unfeeling thing to say – but if he hadn’t passed away at such a young age, what do you think might have been your path? Do you think you might have found your way to where you are now? Do you think in any way that your success, everything you’ve achieved, that there was maybe some kind of destiny at play? Or do you think that it was only the tragic passing of your husband that allowed you to follow this path?’
‘That’s such a good question and, actually, I think about it all the time. I was thirty-six when my husband passed away. At the time of my husband’s prognosis, I was nowhere near strong enough to leave, I’d been subconsciously waiting until the children were older. But I’d already spent so many years dreaming about the things I would do when I did leave that I had the blueprint for my life without him all drawn up, even if I didn’t know how I would ever get away. So it’s possible, yes, that I could have followed this path without losing him to cancer. But it just happened sooner, I suppose. Which gave me longer to really build the company, to know it, nurture it, grow with it. It would have been different if I’d waited. And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no grey areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way. And that proved very helpful to me in terms of negotiating the endless possibilities that opened up to me during those first few years. I would not be where I am at this very moment had he lived.’
Josie presses pause. Her breath has caught slightly; she feels almost winded. Death is a clean break . She glances across the room at Walter, to see if he’s noticed, but he is oblivious. She presses play and listens to the rest of the podcast. The woman called Mari now owns three properties around the world, employs all four of her children in her family business and is the founder of the biggest anti-domestic-violence charity in the UK. At the end of the podcast Josie sits for a moment and lets all she has heard about this woman’s extraordinary life percolate through her. Then she goes back to the Google results and scrolls through Alix’s Instagram feed for a while. She sees, as she’d known she would, a large kitchen with an island, red-headed children on windswept beaches, views from London skyscrapers, cocktails and cats and rose-gold holidays. Alix’s children look young, probably no older than ten, and Josie wonders what Alix was doing for all those years before; what do you do when you’re thirty years old if you’re not raising children? How do you spend your time?
She pauses at a photograph of Alix and her husband. He is tall, even compared to Alix, who is taller than most, and his thatch of thick red hair looks much redder under the effect of some kind of filter than it looks in real life. The caption says: ‘Fifteen years today since you came into my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been you and me’, followed by a string of love-heart emojis.
Josie has social media accounts, but she doesn’t post on them. The thought of slapping a photograph of her and Walter on to the internet for people to gawp at and to judge makes her feel queasy. But she’s happy for others to do so. She’s a consummate lurker. She never posts, she never comments, she never likes. She just looks.
Sunday dawns hot and sticky. Nathan is not beside her in their bed and Alix tries to pull the fragments of the night before into some semblance of a bigger picture. The pub, the champagne, the tequila, the walk home around the park, talking to the ducks in the petting zoo through the fence, wack wack , Nathan pouring Scotch, the cat curled on her lap, the smell of the scented reed diffuser in the downstairs toilet mixed with the smell of her vomit, peering into the kids’ rooms, eyelashes touching cheeks, nightlights, pyjamas, Nathan’s face in the mirror next to hers, his mouth against her neck, hands on her hips, wanting sex, NO ARE YOU ACTUALLY MAD, then bed. But the pillow on Nathan’s side of the bed has not been touched. Did they have a row? Where is he sleeping?
She gingerly climbs off the bed and peers into the en suite. He is not there. She takes the stairs down to the hallway and hears the sound of her children. The television is on in the kitchen, and Eliza is lying on the sofa in front of it with the cat lying on her chest. Leon is on the laptop. Breakfast detritus is scattered across the long cream kitchen counter.
‘Where’s Dad?’
Eliza glances up. She shrugs.
‘Leon. Where’s Dad?’
He removes his headphones and squints at her. ‘What?’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘I dunno.’
Alix wanders into the garden. The flagstones on the back terrace are already warm underfoot. Nathan is not in the shed; nor is he in the studio. She pulls her phone out of her pyjama pocket and calls him. It rings out.
‘Did you see him earlier?’ she asks Eliza as she walks back into the kitchen.
‘Nope. Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can we go to the bookshop today?’
‘Yes. Of course. Of course we will.’
Alix makes coffee and drinks water and eats toast. She knows what’s happened and she knows what to expect. It hasn’t happened for a few months, but she remembers the shape of it, the awful, grinding nightmare of it. The pleasure of her birthday night lies already in tatters in her memory.
As she sits with her second coffee, she remembers something from the night before.
The woman in the toilets who shared her birthday. What did she say her name was? Or maybe she didn’t.
She wonders what the woman is doing this morning. She wonders if her husband has disappeared silently in the night, leaving her to wake alone. No, she thinks, no, of course he hasn’t. That’s not what other husbands do. Only hers.
He reappears at 4 p.m. He is wearing the same clothes he was wearing the night before. He brushes past her in the kitchen to get to the fridge, from where he pulls out a Diet Coke and drinks it thirstily.
Alix eyes him, waits for him to talk.
‘You were out cold,’ he says. ‘I was still … buzzing. I just needed to …’
‘Drink some more?’
‘Yes! Well, no. I mean, I could drink here. But I just wanted to be, you know, out .’
Alix closes her eyes and breathes in hard. ‘We were out all night. All night, from six until midnight. We saw all our friends. We drank for six solid hours. We had fun. We came home. You had whisky. And then you wanted more?’
‘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.