Josie puts her denim jacket on over her T-shirt and joggers and looks at herself in the mirror. It’s the same denim jacket she’s had since she was a teenager, the one she was wearing on her fifteenth birthday in the pub with Walter. It’s worn on the elbows and at the cuffs, but she has kept it in one piece over the years, kept it looking smart enough to wear. It’s her lucky jacket, the jacket she was wearing when her life turned around, when she went from being the sort of girl who drank warm cider with rough boys to the sort of girl who had the love of a real man, who had beautiful babies and a two-bedroom flat. But that girl … that girl is starting to feel like a shapeshifter, a fraud, a one-dimensional paper doll. She’s blurring in her mind’s eye into a human puddle. She rips the jacket off and looks at herself again. She has kept her figure, somehow, without trying. She looks nice. She could probably wear similar clothes to Alix and look good in them. She flicks through her wardrobe, looking for something that’s not denim – why does she have so much denim? – and something that’s not grey. She finds a floaty black shirt that she’d bought to cover up her swimsuit once when it was really hot in the Lake District. She puts it on over her T-shirt and joggers and turns this way and the other. She decides she looks nice and she hangs her denim jacket back in the wardrobe. She gets some sunglasses out of her chest of drawers and tucks them into her hair and then she takes out her dangling turquoise earrings and replaces them with a pair of hoop earrings Walter had bought her for her birthday one year.
Walter glances at her as she gets the dog ready for his walk.
‘You look like you’re on holiday.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘Well, it’s nice out. Thought I might hang out in the park for a bit. Get some ice cream.’
Walter looks out the window and then back at her. He says, ‘You know what, that sounds nice. I’ll come with you.’
Josie reels slightly. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘No. I mean, I’m meeting my friend there. The school mum. You know.’
Walter narrows his eyes at her. ‘Are you sure it’s not a school dad you’re meeting?’ He has a playful tone to his voice, but she knows that beneath it there is a thin blade of anger.
She matches his playful tone and says, ‘God, Walter, you clearly never saw any of the school dads for you even to say that!’
He nods slowly and then puts his glasses back on and turns back to his screen. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘have fun. See you soon.’
She clips the dog’s lead on to his collar and leaves the flat.
‘Oh!’ says Alix, eyeing Josie up and down on her doorstep fifteen minutes later. ‘No denim!’
‘No,’ Josie replies brightly. ‘Not today. I wasn’t in the mood.’
‘I’d love to talk to you one day, maybe, about the denim? Would that be OK?’
‘Yes. I think I’d like to talk about it too.’
Josie glances about Alix’s house, looking for signs of the red-haired husband, but he is not here today; the house feels silent and still. Just the two of them.
‘Husband back at work?’
‘Yes.’ Alix nods and smiles. ‘He hardly ever works from home.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a leasing agent for commercial property. Mainly in the City.’
‘Sounds stressful.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose it is in a lot of ways. Hard work.’
‘But clearly it pays off.’ Josie arcs her gaze around the open-plan kitchen.
‘Yes. Yes, it does. We’re very lucky. Most people work hard, don’t they? But not everyone gets to live in a house like this.’
‘I love this house.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Not just because it’s beautiful, which it is. But because it’s so homely. It’s not just like a house in a magazine. It’s a proper home. It’s … very you .’ Josie runs her hands over the creamy marble of the work surface as she says this. ‘My flat,’ she continues, ‘it’s never really felt like my flat. It’s always felt like Walter’s. It’s all his furniture. His things. And of course it’s council so we can’t really spend any money on it. I look around it and all I see is other people’s things. And Walter doesn’t like stuff on the walls. Or clutter. You know. It would be a dream come true to have a place like this that I could just fill with things I like.’
‘And what things do you like?’
‘Well, yes, that’s half the problem. I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve just … lost my way. Or in fact, I’m starting to realise, I never even had a way in the first place. I handed my life over to Walter when I was a child and never gave myself the chance to find out who I really was.’
Josie pulls herself up straight when she realises she might be about to start crying. She looks up at Alix and smiles as brightly as she can.
‘It’s not too late for you to find out,’ says Alix. ‘Come on.’ She guides her towards the studio. ‘Let’s start right now.’
Screen shows a re-enactment of a young woman following an older man into a large white house.
She wears a denim jacket.
The soundtrack over the images is Josie’s voice, taken from Alix Summer’s podcast. The text on screen reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 4 July 2019
‘He first invited me to his apartment when I was sixteen, exactly a year after our date in the pub on my fifteenth birthday. He said we’d have pizza and he’d give me my present. I’d never been there before. We always met in public. Or in his Portakabin on the estate after his team had all gone home. We just kissed. Talked. And I’d known, all along, that at some point he’d want more from me and I made it very clear that when it did happen, it had to be perfect. So he had champagne. He had music. He drew the curtains, lit a candle. He gave me an engagement ring and he asked me to marry him. I said yes. Of course. Of course I said yes. And then, roughly twelve hours after I turned sixteen years old, he took my virginity.’