Thursday, 18 July

Alix and the children have left for school, but Nathan is running late for work. Josie had heard him say something to Alix about a meeting in Bishopsgate at 10 a.m., not worth him heading to the office beforehand.

Just as Alix had predicted, the weather has turned from pleasant-for-mid-July to unbearably hot. Nathan sits in the garden with his laptop and a cup of coffee and, even from here, Josie can see the sheen of sweat on his forehead. It occurs to her that he sits in the garden in the mornings deliberately to avoid having to share space with her indoors. She forces a smile and slips through the gap between the sliding glass doors. She’s still wearing the clothes that Alix gave her on Saturday. She has her own clothes hanging in her room, but she no longer wants to wear them, even though they are clean. She had hoped that Alix might take pity on her seeing her descend the stairs every morning wearing the same top and trousers, that she might offer to lend her something new. But she hasn’t.

‘God,’ she says, standing a few feet from Nathan. ‘It’s boiling, and it’s not even nine o’clock!’

‘They’re saying thirty-two by lunchtime.’

‘Bloody hell.’

She allows a silence to pass before turning to him and saying, ‘Oh. By the way. Alix said you might be using the study on Saturday night? When her sister is here?’

‘Oh,’ he says, looking slightly flustered, and Josie knows immediately that he and Alix have been talking about this, secretly, privately, behind her back. ‘Well, yeah. That was the plan. But no. Apparently, they’re all sleeping over now. I think Alix was going to tell you. Both sisters and all three kids. They’re going to be using the fold-out. So …’ He clears his throat and trails off.

Lies. All of it.

‘Oh,’ says Josie. ‘That’s fine. I’ll find something. But what about you? Where will you be hiding out?’

‘Oh, I’ll probably hang out here for a bit and then head off around seven for a couple of drinks with some mates.’

‘The same mates you were with when you didn’t show up for dinner last Friday?’ She tries to inject a hint of playfulness into her words, but she fails. She’s so cross she could scream.

He throws her an uncertain look and shrugs. ‘I’m not sure yet,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure.’ Then he necks the dregs of his coffee, slaps his hands against his legs and says, ‘Well, time for me to head into work. What are you up to today?’

‘Nothing really. We’ll do some more of the podcast, then I’ll go to work. That’s it really.’

‘And what are your plans, Josie? Generally? I mean, obviously from Saturday you’ll need a plan. Won’t you?’

Josie eyes him coolly. He has gone off-script, she can tell. This is not what Alix told him to say. This is, she thinks furiously, none of his bloody business. But she manages to sound civil when she says, ‘Yes. I’ll need a plan. But what I’ve found, Nathan, is that life shows you the way when you forget to make one. So, you know, let’s wait and see.’ She shrugs and heads back into the kitchen, scoops up the dog and takes him to her room, where she waits until she hears the sound of Nathan slamming the front door behind him a few minutes later. She watches him through the small window in her bedroom, slinging his suit jacket over his shoulder, sliding his stupid sunglasses onto his stupid nose, walking down the street as if he were the king of the universe.

Alix said she was going to the shops after the school run, she said she’d be home about nine thirty. It’s 9.10 a.m. now and Josie shuts the dog in her room and tiptoes down to the next floor. Alix and Nathan’s bedroom door is wide open, which she feels is a sign of some sort that Alix isn’t precious about people seeing inside. She hasn’t properly investigated their room yet. It feels too much. Much too much. But Nathan has put her in a bad mood with all his talk of ‘plans’.

If Nathan thinks she should have a plan, she decides, then a plan she will have.

Alix and Nathan’s bed is very big. It has a bedhead made out of rattan and pale green velvet. It is unmade; huge voluminous clouds of creamy duvet are bunched up at the foot of the bed, kicked off no doubt during the encroaching heat of the previous night, with two fat pillows squashed into fortune cookies at the top end and two more kicked on to the floor on either side. The walls are hung with a mishmash of prints and paintings and photographs. A pair of milky-white lights hang from the ceiling, one on each side of the bed, instead of table lamps, Josie supposes. There’s a square bay window with a little seat built into it, overlooking the back garden. It’s scattered with discarded clothes, mostly Nathan’s, including a nasty-looking pair of threadbare socks (you’d think he could afford new ones).

Between the bedroom and the en-suite bathroom is a kind of anteroom, or dressing area, with clothes hanging on either side: Alix’s on one, Nathan’s on the other. She spends a minute or two leafing through Alix’s clothes. She rubs the fabrics between her fingers, the silks and linens and soft bamboo cottons. She pulls open the shoe drawers beneath and looks at the neat rows of golden strappy sandals and suede heeled boots and silken heels with ankle straps. She wants to take them out and try them on, admire herself in the full-length mirror. But the minutes are ticking by, so she turns to Nathan’s rail and starts feeling through his pockets. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for precisely, but she has a very strong feeling that Nathan is stupid enough and Alix is trusting enough for her to find something she will need.

She pulls out crumpled paper receipts and business cards and empty chewing-gum packages. She pulls out paperclips and sugar packets and the wrinkled paper tubes from drinking straws; boarding passes for flights to Brussels and Dublin; a comb; half a Polo mint. And then, yes. There. Right there. In the inside pocket of a blue business jacket, exactly what she was looking for. A tiny clear bag with a residue of white powder clinging to its insides. She pictures him now, in a bar, his tie slung over his shoulder, surrounded by tequila shots and baying men, snorting cocaine off a glass-topped table. Despicable, she thinks. Just despicable. With a wife and children at home. In another pocket she finds a scrap of paper napkin with an illegible number written on it. And in another a cardboard sleeve for a hotel key card – the Railings – with the room number 23 written on it.

She takes all three items and puts them in her pocket, goes back to her room and waits for Alix to come home.

Nathan wants her to have a plan.

Well, now she’s got one.

Alix returns a few minutes later. She is laden with bags from the supermarket and Josie watches her unload them on to the island in the kitchen. Melon and strawberry fruit bowl. Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. A huge steak. A bag of onions. Pouches of cat food with pictures on them of a cat that looks exactly like the cloud-cat, as if Alix’s cat has had her very own personalised dinner designed for her.

‘I’ll go to my mum’s,’ Josie says to Alix. ‘On Saturday. When your sisters come.’

Alix stops what she’s doing, a cylinder of chocolate biscuits held aloft in her hand. ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘OK. That’s great. What changed your mind about getting in touch with her?’

Josie shrugs and pulls out a tiny loose hair from Fred’s fur, lets it float lazily to the floor. ‘I didn’t really have a choice, I suppose. I mean, Nathan told me about your other sister coming to stay. So I know the fold-out bed will be taken. Though I thought your other sister lived in London?’

‘Yes. Yes, she does. But her kids didn’t want to miss out on the fun. They wanted to sleep over too. So yes. I’m sorry about that. A bit of a, er, last-minute thing. But I’m so glad you’re going to see your mum! I really think it’s time.’

Josie nods, as though she has given Alix’s words serious thought and now agrees with her. ‘It is what it is,’ she says. ‘But while I’m still here, we’ve got two more days, we should make the most of them.’

‘You mean, the podcast?’

‘Yes. We should try and get as much down on tape as we can.’

Josie feels her heart pick up under the cotton of Alix’s expensive T-shirt at the thought of next week. She feels the heat in the air, the sun burning already as it starts its arc across the empty sky and blazes through the glass roof of Alix’s kitchen extension, and it’s only going to get hotter.

By Sunday it will be pushing thirty-five.

She’d thought she’d have longer. She’s running out of time.

She glances up to see Alix staring thoughtfully at her. ‘I’m not sure what else there is to chat about now? I mean, we got to the end, I think? We’re up to date. Apart from the events of Friday night, of course. Would you like to talk about that?’

Josie nods, her mouth tightly pursed.

‘Shall we …?’ Alix gestures to the studio.

‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘Let’s.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a dramatic reconstruction of a couple walking down a dark street.

The text reads:

Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 18 July 2019

‘He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. Made such a fuss. I bought him some nice new clothes, but he refused to wear them, insisted on wearing cheap stuff from Primark, deliberately got a terrible haircut, just to spite me. And then of course, when Nathan didn’t make an appearance …’

Josie sighs.

‘Well, you could see how annoyed he was. And then he seethed the whole walk home. I could feel it coming off him. The dark rage building and building. By the time we got home …’

The screen shows a couple letting themselves into the Fairs’ building.

‘… the atmosphere was putrid. I couldn’t control my anger by that point. I felt it all, all of it, rolling and churning through me like a storm, and finally, after all these years, I found the strength to hurl it out of my gut and into the air, to hit Walter with it, right between the eyes. I just screamed at him. “Paedophile! You’re a paedophile! You groomed me and you took me when I was too young to know what I wanted. And then you groomed Brooke and you took her when she was too young to know what she wanted. And then you abused your own daughter. The only daughter you have left after what you did to Roxy. You have abused your daughter over and over again and I have let you do that because I have been programmed by you to believe that you are God and that you can have anything you want. But you are not God, Walter, and you cannot have anything you want. You cannot. And it stops tonight. What you’re doing to Erin. It stops tonight . No more. No more.”

‘And then I ran to Erin’s door and I pushed it open and there was my baby, my Erin, staring at me from wide, dead eyes. I said, “Pack a bag, baby. Quickly. I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving.” I said, “I know what Dad’s been doing and I’m so, so sorry, baby. So sorry that I abandoned you.” And that was when I felt it, a blow to the back of my head, then a kind of deep radiating heat and pain and wetness. I turned and saw Walter’s arm coming back towards me, with the remote control he’d just used to hit me with held in his hand, coming towards my face and then he beat me with it, all over my face and head. Erin just stood there; so thin, she was. So thin. And I threw myself towards Walter and shoved him in his chest with both my hands outstretched and said, “ Enough. That is enough .” And I saw him raise his hand to hit my child and I just flung myself between them, and then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped.’

The screen shows an actor playing the part of Walter, breathing heavily in the doorway, the remote control hanging from his hand, the actors playing Erin and Josie, standing in Erin’s room, their arms around each other. Then Walter turns and leaves.

‘A moment later I peered into the living room. Walter was sitting at his laptop. The remote control was sitting on the coffee table. It was like he was trying to give the impression that none of it had ever happened, like I didn’t have a split lip and blood seeping down the back of my neck. It was as if he thought we were all just going to carry on. Normally. Like we always did. But he was wrong. I grabbed my handbag, I grabbed the dog, I grabbed Erin, and we left. Neither of us said goodbye.’

The screen shows Erin and Josie closing the front door of their building behind them; the actor playing Josie turns slightly, to look at Walter in the bay window.

The screen fades to darkness.

***

11 a.m.

Alix exhales. She has not breathed for what feels like minutes. The scenario that Josie has painted inside her head is making her feel claustrophobic, as if she is trapped in that dark, shabby flat with all three of them. She can smell it inside her nostrils: the fear and the blood. She pictures them on the street, Josie and Erin, carrying just what they grabbed as they left, the blood congealing on Josie’s face. Walter, still and unrepentant in the bay window.

But that is where the picture starts to fragment. Josie walked from her home near Kilburn the sixteen minutes to Alix’s house in Queen’s Park. But it was 3 a.m. when she appeared on Alix’s doorstep. It was cold. What happened between ten o’clock, when they would have returned home, and 3 a.m., when Josie arrived here?

She glances up at Josie and says, ‘Where did you go? When you left the flat?’

Josie issues a small laugh. ‘Well, here, obviously.’

‘But in between?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘But – you said that the argument started when you got home. And it only lasted a few minutes. I just—’

Josie interjects. ‘No. It didn’t happen when we got home. I didn’t say that. It happened when Walter got out of bed. Like he does nearly every night. Like I told you. We went to bed and then I couldn’t sleep. It took me ages. And then I finally dropped off and I felt him, I felt him peel back the covers. I knew. I knew what he was doing. Where he was going. And that was when I confronted him.’

‘So, you were in bed. In your pyjamas?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then you got up and followed him?’

‘Yes. I saw him going to Erin’s door. And that was when I screamed at him.’

‘But you weren’t wearing your pyjamas when you came to me. You were wearing the dress. The lovely dress.’

‘I put it back on. I wasn’t going to walk halfway across Kilburn in my pyjamas.’

‘But the dress had blood on it. How did the dress have blood on it if you weren’t wearing it during the attack?’

‘Alix. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Are you saying that you don’t believe me?’

‘No! Not at all. Of course not. But listeners are going to be hearing this like it’s a novel, they’ll notice plot holes. You and I have been having this conversation for a month, but listeners will be gobbling this down in a day once it’s out there and edited down. It needs to make sense. For the listener. Do you see?’

Josie sighs deeply. ‘Well, yes. I suppose. But you’d think that the sort of people who listen to your stuff would have some sympathy, some empathy. You’d think they’d understand that when something like that happens, like what’s happened to me, when someone has been the victim of abuse and violence and gaslighting, that maybe they might get a bit confused.’

‘Yes. Josie, yes, of course. That’s absolutely true. So I just want to help you to unpick it all a bit and then put it back together. So that it makes sense. That’s all. So Walter got out of bed in the early hours. You accosted him. He attacked you. He tried to attack Erin. Then you and Erin collected a few things – you got redressed – and then you both left together?’

Josie nods firmly. ‘Yes.’

‘And you walked here – and Erin? Where did Erin walk?’

‘The opposite direction.’

‘At three in the morning?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she have things with her?’

‘I suppose so, yes. A small bag.’

Alix smiles glassily at Josie. She wants to push through. She wants to understand how Josie could have left her vulnerable daughter to walk somewhere, God knows where, all alone in the middle of the night. She wants to know. But she can tell that Josie is shutting down now, pulling up her drawbridge. She sighs. ‘I hope Erin is OK. It’s very scary thinking of her all alone in the night.’

‘Yes,’ Josie replies firmly. ‘But she’s safer out there than she ever was in her own home. Wherever she is, she’s safe.’

She says this with a strange certainty, as if the world were not full of dangerous people who prey on the vulnerable, as if nothing bad could possibly have happened to her daughter between three o’clock on Saturday morning and now.

‘I really think we should try to track her down, Josie. It’s been nearly six days. No messages. No calls. I know she’s safe from Walter now. But is it possible she might have found herself somewhere worse? That maybe her online friend wasn’t who they claimed to be? I mean, you hear that sort of thing a lot, don’t you? People with fake online identities. It’s just—’

‘She’s fine , Alix. She’s fine. She can take care of herself.’

‘But you said she can’t. You said you’ve been feeding her baby food. You said—’

Alix flinches as Josie pulls off her headphones and slams them on the tabletop. ‘I’m trying to tell you my story, Alix. My truth . And you seem to be trying to make it into something it isn’t. You either want my story or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. You just can’t.’

And then she picks up her dog from her lap and storms out of the recording studio, leaving Alix reeling in her wake.