The familiar chime of the Ring doorbell slices into Alix’s dream. At first she thinks that it is her alarm, that it is six thirty and she must get up and get the children ready for school. Then her eye catches the time, and she sees that it is 3.02 a.m. and she remembers that last night was Friday and that today is Saturday and then, and only then, does she register the fact that the other side of the bed is unslept in.
‘Fuck’s sake,’ she mutters to herself, pulling back the duvet and ripping herself from the warmth of her bed. ‘Fuck’s sake .’
She tiptoes down the stairs and hears the Ring bell chime again and her blood heats with rage. Fucking Nathan, waking up the fucking children. She wrenches open the door, ready to flounce silently, furiously back to bed, but then stops and gasps when she sees that it is not Nathan.
It is Josie.
Josie stands, defeated, her shoulders slumped and tears streaking through a mask of grazes and dried-up blood on her face. The dog peers over the top of his denim carrier.
‘Oh my God, Josie! Oh my God. What happened?’
A choked sob emerges, but no words.
Alix opens the door wider and says, ‘God, come in!’
She helps Josie through the door and into the kitchen, where she sits her carefully on the sofa. ‘What happened, Josie? Please, you have to tell me.’
‘It was Walter,’ she says through juddering sobs. ‘He attacked me.’
‘Walter did this?’
‘Yes! And it’s not the first time. It’s when he’s been drinking. He just sees red.’
‘Here,’ says Alix. ‘Let me get a wet cloth, get this face cleaned up, see if there’s any damage.’
Josie nods defeatedly.
Alix takes a clean tea towel from a drawer and runs it under the tap. She dabs Josie’s face gently with it, revealing a horribly swollen and split lip and scuff marks down both cheekbones.
‘The back of my head too, I think?’
She turns her head and Alix sees that there is encrusted blood on her crown, beneath which is a small split in her scalp.
‘Any dizziness?’ Alix asks.
Josie shakes her head. ‘No. I feel OK. Just a bit shocked.’
‘Shall I call you an ambulance?’
‘No! No, please don’t. It will just set off a load of things happening that I really can’t deal with right now. And I’m fine. Really.’
Alix takes the bloodied tea towel, rinses it under the tap, squeezes it out and hands it to Josie. Then she fills the kettle and switches it on. ‘What happened, Josie?’ she asks. ‘I mean, everything seemed OK when you left?’
‘Well. Yes and no. I mean, Walter was grumpy, obviously, because of Nathan not coming. I think he thought it was really rude, which it was. He wouldn’t talk to me the whole walk home. And then he had another beer when we got home, and things sort of escalated. He called me all sorts of horrible names. Told me I was stupid. And I saw red and went for him.’
‘You mean you attacked him?’
‘Yes. Well, no. I intended to, and I know he might look like an old man, but he’s very strong, still. He’s big. And he overpowered me. Completely. Just kept pounding and pounding and pounding. And then—’
‘Then what?’ Alix catches her breath.
‘Then Erin walked in. Erin came in and saw what he was doing and she tried to get him off me but he hit her too.’
‘Oh my God. That’s just horrific. Is she OK?’
‘Yes. She’s fine. She’s at a friend’s house.’
‘And where’s Walter?’
‘I don’t know! Still there, I suppose.’ Tears fall from Josie’s eyes again and she dabs them away with the damp tea towel.
Alix breathes in and then places her hand over Josie’s. ‘You know we should call the police?’
Josie glares at her. ‘No!’ she says. ‘No. Please. Don’t.’
‘But, Josie, look what he’s done to you. He’s committed a terrible crime. You say he’s done it before. He hurt your child! I—’
‘No! I’m not having the police getting involved. Absolutely not.’
‘But what are you going to do? I mean, are you going to go back there?’
‘I’m not going back there.’
‘And what about your mum? Have you told her?’
Josie widens her eyes at Alix and groans; fresh tears start falling. ‘I can’t tell my mum! She’ll just say it’s all my own fault. She’ll take his side.’
‘Take his side? When he’s done this to you! Of course she won’t.’
‘You’ve met my mum. You’ve seen what she’s like. She thinks I’m the lowest of the low.’
‘No, that’s—’
‘It is . It is true. I cannot tell my mum. I can’t tell her any of it.’
‘But you have to tell someone. Surely.’
‘I’m telling you! For God’s sake. I’m telling you!’
‘Yes. And I’m glad you’ve told me. But—’
‘But what?’
‘I just think you need to tell someone in your inner sanctum?’
‘I haven’t got an inner sanctum, ’ Josie wails. ‘I’ve got Walter and I’ve got the girls and I’ve got Fred and I’ve got you .’
Alix feels the contents of her stomach curdle slightly at Josie’s intonation of the word you . It sounds proprietorial and odd. No, she wants to say. No, you don’t have me. But she puts her arm around Josie’s shaking shoulders and squeezes her reassuringly. ‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ she says. ‘Unless you’d prefer something stronger?’
Josie looks at Alix with red, glassy eyes and says, ‘Do you have brandy?’
Alix smiles and gets to her feet. ‘I certainly do.’
Josie sighs deeply while Alix gets the brandy. ‘Any sign of Nathan?’
‘No. Looks like he’s decided to stay out.’
Josie tuts softly. ‘Men,’ she says again. ‘Men.’
Alix doesn’t react with the words she wants to utter. She doesn’t say, ‘Please do not ever compare your elderly, dead-eyed, paedophiliac gaslighter of a husband with mine, who has a drink problem but is fundamentally decent.’ Instead, she gently pops the cork back in the brandy bottle and brings the glass to Josie, who takes it from her with a shaking hand.
‘What are you going to do?’ Alix asks, knowing even as she does so that Josie is assuming that she will stay here, but hoping, desperately, that she will respond otherwise.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I could talk to my friend Mari, she’s very involved with a domestic violence charity. She could suggest a safe place for you to be. I can give her a call, right now.’
‘No. Don’t disturb her. It’s fine. I’m fine. If it’s OK with you, Alix, I’d feel safest just staying here with you tonight?’
Alix feels her insides curl up in a knot. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m not sure, it’s a bit …’
Josie’s eyes widen and she draws her body in on itself, recoiling slightly from Alix’s words. She looks as though she might be about to cry, and Alix says, ‘Sure. Of course. I’ll make up the spare room for you. It’ll be fine.’
She sees Josie’s body language soften immediately, her shoulders grow round. She hears a tremulous sigh come from her quivering mouth and then the words ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
I am literally the worst person in the world. I can either come home now and prostrate myself at your feet, or I can kill myself. Your choice.
After the weirdness of the previous night, Alix is too relieved to hear from Nathan to be angry any more. She replies quickly.
Please don’t kill yourself. I need you. We have a problem. Get back soon!
He replies with a GIF of a man running and Alix smiles, despite herself.
Josie is in the guest bedroom on the top floor. Alix peered through a small gap in the door earlier and the dog, perched at the foot of the bed, lifted his top lip briefly and began growling, so she’d quietly retreated. But that was two hours ago and there’s still no sign of her. Alix tiptoes back up the stairs and peers once more through the gap in the door. A smell hits her, violently, a smell she recognises all too well from her own dog-owning days. In the corner of the room, thankfully on wooden floorboards, is an arc of tiny dog droppings and a puddle of urine. Fred bares his teeth at her and this time she lets him bark.
The noise rouses Josie from her deep sleep and she sits up suddenly. Alix is taken aback by the state of her face, which looks worse this morning than it did last night, the bruises blooming into vivid pools of mustard and mauve. ‘Oh,’ she says, blinking blindly into the half-light. ‘Oh. God. Hi.’
‘Hi,’ says Alix. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Oh. God,’ she says again. ‘Sorry. I was out cold. What time is it?’
‘Just gone ten.’
‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’ She turns her head to the side and sniffs the air. Her eyes find the pile of dog mess and she groans. ‘Oh no! I am so, so sorry. I slept through his toilet time. Poor baby. Just give me some cleaning stuff and I’ll deal with it.’
Josie climbs painfully from the bed. She is wearing Alix’s Toast pyjamas, which she lent her last night.
‘It’s fine. I’ll do it. You get back into bed. I’ll bring you some coffee.’
Josie nods gratefully and swings her legs back into the bed. ‘Thank you so much, Alix. That would be amazing.’
Alix passes Leon on the stairs on her way back down.
‘Why is she still here?’ he whispers.
‘She had an accident,’ Alix replies. ‘On her way home. I’m just going to take care of her for the day.’
‘She looks really scary,’ he whispers.
‘You saw her?’
He nods. ‘I peeped in. Her dog growled at me.’
‘Well, she’ll be gone by bedtime tonight, so let’s just be kind to her for now. Yes?’
Leon nods again.
Alix makes Josie a cappuccino and brings it up to the guest room, with a roll of kitchen towel and a spray cleaner. She places the coffee by the side of Josie’s bed and collects Fred’s droppings into a sheet of paper, puts them in the toilet in the en suite, then sprays and cleans the whole area. She pulls down the sash window, saying, ‘Let’s get some fresh air in here, shall we? I can walk the dog for you, if you like?’
‘Oh. Yes. I’m sure he’d love that. His harness is in the carrier. Over there.’
Alix passes her the harness and Josie straps him into it and then clips on the lead. The moment he sees the lead his demeanour changes and he happily walks off with Alix without a backward glance at Josie.
Alix takes him to the park. It is a grey morning, but with the promise of better weather to come. She allows her head to clear as she walks. She thinks back to her encounter with Walter the previous night, when she’d taken him to look at her recording studio. She thinks of the things he’d said about Josie.
She’s not who she makes out to be. Not at all … Josie just likes to control things.
He’d described her as wanting to be seen as simple, as acting as though there was nothing in her head when really there was too much. He’d described her as having an elastic relationship with the truth. And as with everything that Walter had said last night, it could be taken more than one way. He was either painting her badly to make himself look better, or he was telling the truth. And if he was telling the truth, then what did that mean? What was in Josie’s head? Good things, or bad things? From the very start of the project, Alix had been attracted by Josie’s slight weirdness: the denim, the old husband, the clipped, detached way in which she spoke. It would be easy to assume that all her weirdness was a result of having spent her childhood with a narcissistic mother and her adult life with a man like Walter. But what if the weirdness was innate? What if the weirdness was what had led her into such a strange marriage in the first place? What, she wonders, if Josie was actually mad?
And as she thinks this, she pictures her baby boy, alone in the house with a stranger. She picks up the dog, tucks him into the denim carrier and walks home as fast as she can.
Josie hears the front door click open and then slam closed. She thinks it must be Alix back from the park with the dog, and peers down the stairs. But it’s not Alix. It’s him. Her stupid husband. He looks worse than she feels. His red hair is stuck together in clumps, his suit jacket is slung over his shoulder and he’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s cloudy. She sees Leon run up the hallway and into his dad’s arms.
‘You smell bad,’ says Leon.
‘Thanks, mate,’ says Nathan. And then his gaze heads up the staircase and he spots Josie. She sees him jump slightly, a look of horror passing over his face.
‘Oh my God,’ he says, clutching his heart. ‘Sorry. You made me jump. It’s Josie, yes?’
Josie nods.
‘It was just the, er, the pyjamas. They’re Alix’s, aren’t they? Moment of, er, cognitive dissonance. How are you?’
‘Well,’ says Josie, gesturing at her facial injuries. ‘Not the best.’
‘My God. I hope that didn’t happen here?’
Josie grimaces. Does he really think this is something to be joked about? ‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
Nathan blinks at her and then turns towards the living room. ‘Any idea where Alix is?’ he asks.
‘She’s taken Fred out to the park. She should be back any minute.’
‘Fred?’
‘My dog.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Right. Well. I’ll, er, see you.’
Then he drops his jacket on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and heads into the kitchen.
Josie goes back to her room and changes into the clothes that Alix gave her this morning: a white T-shirt and some loose blue trousers. She unbraids her hair and brushes it through with her fingers, watches the flakes of dried blood drift to the floor, pushes it back into a ponytail and ties it with a band. She brushes her teeth in the en suite, admiring the lovely tiles that have been arranged in a herringbone style: so simple, yet so effective.
After she’s brushed her teeth, she examines her appearance in the mirror. She looks terrible. The bruises have spread and changed colour overnight. Her bottom lip looks like a split tomato and the blood has dried to a black crust. She smiles and the scab breaks open a little, releasing a tiny droplet of scarlet blood. She dabs it away with the tip of her tongue and then heads downstairs.
‘So,’ says Nathan as she walks into the kitchen. ‘What happened to your, er …?’ He describes her face with his hands.
‘An angry man,’ she says.
‘Seriously?’ He looks up at her through his pale eyelashes, his lips pulled back into a letterbox of disquiet.
‘Yes. My husband did it.’
‘Oh my God. That’s awful.’
‘Yes. It’s terrible. Only slightly more terrible than a husband who doesn’t come home for a dinner that his wife has cooked for him and spends the whole night out somewhere in his work clothes.’
Josie relishes the symphony of expressions that plays across Nathan’s doughy, booze-wrecked face. She stares at him and waits for him to find a response.
‘Well, yeah,’ he says. ‘That was pretty shit. It’s, er …’
‘It’s an issue.’
His left eyebrow scoots up his face. ‘Yes,’ he says tersely. ‘But rather an issue between me and Alix, I’d say.’
‘Well, not last night it wasn’t. It was painful for all three of us. And look what it led to.’
Nathan looks aghast. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
Josie sighs. ‘The only way I could persuade my husband to come here last night was by telling him that you were going to be here, i.e., another man. Because he’s a man’s man, Walter. And he came under duress. And you didn’t show up, so he felt like a prize idiot. It was a horrible evening, and he took it out on me.’
Nathan’s face is a picture.
‘Well, I’m really sorry to hear that,’ he says, flushing slightly. ‘Really sorry.’
Josie purses her mouth. ‘You should be a better husband.’
Nathan blinks at her. ‘Wow,’ he says after a moment. ‘Wow.’
The front door clicks again, and they both turn to see Alix walk in, looking slightly breathless and stressed. Her face softens when she sees Nathan, which makes Josie feel bizarrely furious.
‘Hi,’ says Nathan.
‘Hi,’ says Alix, taking the dog from the carrier and passing him over to Josie. ‘I see you and Josie have found each other?’
‘We certainly have,’ Nathan replies drily.
Josie sees him throw a meaningful look at Alix, trying to send her a message with his eyes. She sees Alix frown slightly, trying to work out what the message might be.
‘Anyway,’ Josie says. ‘I might just go and have another lie-down, if that’s OK with you, Alix? I’m still feeling completely shattered.’
‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Of course. Can I get you anything? Some breakfast?’
‘Oh. No. Thank you. I don’t have much of an appetite.’
‘No. Of course. Well, just message me or shout down if you need anything, won’t you?’
Josie smiles wanly and nods.
She passes close to Nathan as she leaves the kitchen, sees him recoil slightly, smells the fumes coming from him and feels a surge of dark fury. At the top of the stairs, she stops and waits, listens to the conversation coming from the kitchen. There’s a long, telling silence, which she knows consists of Alix and Nathan exchanging looks. Then she hears muted, urgent whispering, whispering that grows louder and louder, until she is able to make out the words ‘Well, what was I supposed to do?’ from Alix and the words ‘Fucking ridiculous’ from Nathan. And then she hears Leon come into the kitchen and ask for something to eat and the conversation changes and moves on.
She goes back to the spare bedroom and closes the door. She opens her handbag on the bed and roots around one of the interior pockets, until she feels the hard edges of the key that she’d taken from the flat last night. As her fingers find it, she experiences a sequence of flashbacks: the heft of flesh and bone, the splash and spatter of blood, electric light strobing in and out between splayed fingers, the metal taste of blood, the salt taste of sweaty hands, the sounds of muffled crying. She sees herself, as if from above, curled on the floor, the dog snuffling at her head, and then she hears the silence that followed, broken only by the hiss of a bus opening its doors at the stop outside the window, the whimper of the dog, the rumble of the bus leaving again.
She takes the key, and she slides it under the mattress.