Monday, 15 July

Josie awakes to the sounds of Alix’s family getting ready for school. For a moment the sound is reassuring, like an echo of a happy day at the beach or a childhood Christmas. For a moment she is back in the early days of parenting, when her babies were adorable and her husband was handsome and strong. It occurs to her that maybe this was never actually the case, that she is looking back through an out-of-focus lens. But it had been better, at first – it had to have been better. Otherwise, what on earth was it all for?

She gets out of bed and throws on the linen gown that Alix left for her. She picks up the dog and puts on her slip-on shoes and heads downstairs. ‘Morning,’ she says as she walks into the kitchen.

She sees the children turn and gawp at her. The sight of them in their Parkside uniforms is unnerving and she gawps back. The dog growls when he sees the cloud-cat sitting on the kitchen counter.

‘Morning, Josie!’ says Alix, who is wearing a white embroidered tunic top over yoga pants and has pulled her hair from her face with a fabric headband. She is barefoot and cutting a banana into slices directly over a toasted bagel and looks like one of her Instagram posts come to life. ‘Come in. Can I get you anything to eat?’

Josie shakes her head. ‘No. Thank you. I’ll just have a coffee. Is it OK if I use your machine?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Nathan will make you one. Nathan!’

Nathan appears from the terrace clutching an empty cereal bowl and a mug.

‘Can you make Josie a cappuccino?’

Josie sees a look of antipathy pass across his face, masked with a grim smile. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Sugar?’

Josie nods. ‘One please. Thank you.’

She takes a seat on one of the mismatched chairs at the table, opposite Leon, who eyes her suspiciously. ‘My children went to your school,’ she says. ‘When they were small. But they’re big now.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Erin is staying at her friend’s house and Roxy is off travelling the world.’

‘So they’re adults?’

‘Yes. They’re adults.’ Josie feels her voice crack dangerously on the last syllable and clears her throat. ‘I hear you still have Mandy, in the office?’

Leon nods seriously. Josie lets her eyes linger on his hands, still plumped up with whatever it is that lives under the skin of young children. There’s a scab on the knuckle of his thumb and she remembers scabs. She remembers verrucas and nits and ingrown toenails and baby teeth hanging on by threads and all the other tiny, perfect defects of small children. She resists the urge to touch the scab, to give it a magic kiss. She resists the urge to say, ‘Oh no, you have an owee.’ She feels the loss of her children so viscerally and horribly that she could scream with the agony of it.

She manages a smile and says, ‘Mandy was there when my children were there.’

Leon runs his hands back and forth along the edge of the table and then looks up at Josie and says, ‘How come you’re the same age as my mum, but your children are already adults and we’re only small?’

‘Well. That’s maths really, isn’t it?’

Leon looks at her questioningly.

‘So. If I’m forty-five and my oldest daughter is twenty-three, then how old was I when I had her?’

Leon screws up his face and says, ‘Is that forty-five take away twenty-three?’

‘Yes! Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Clever boy!’

‘So that’s …’ He unpeels his fingers from his fist, one by one on the tabletop, like an unfurling blossom, as he counts it out. ‘Twenty-two?’

‘Oh my goodness! And how old are you?’

‘I’m six.’

‘Six! And you can do such complicated maths! That’s amazing. Yes. Forty-five take away twenty-three is twenty-two. And that’s how old I was when I had my first child. And what is forty-five take away six?’

‘That’s easy. It’s thirty-nine.’

‘Yes! So your mum was thirty-nine when she had you. And that’s why my children are grown-ups, and you are still only six. Because everyone does things at different times.’

Josie turns and looks at Alix. Alix is smiling. ‘He’s very good at maths, your boy.’

‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Yes. He is. Leon’s good at everything, aren’t you, baby? Apart from being ready to walk out the door when it’s time to go to school. So – come on. Let’s get those shoes on, shall we?’

Soon the house is empty. Nathan has gone to work, and Alix is walking the children to school and will be gone for at least half an hour. Josie is alone. She crosses the kitchen and looks at the artwork on the special board that has been installed for the children. She looks, in particular, for any signs of stress or darkness, remembering the unsettling drawings that Erin and Roxy used to produce, the concerned looks on teachers’ faces at parent–teacher meetings as they passed across pieces of artwork that displayed what they described as ‘signs of emotional stress’. But here there are only yellow suns and orange flowers and happy mummies and smiling daddies. Here is the art of healthy children living in a happy home. She unpins a tiny scrap of a sketch; it’s a girl, drawn in minute detail, with a giant bow in her hair and a small dog on a lead that looks a bit like Fred. Underneath is the word ‘Teeny’.

Josie doesn’t know who the girl is meant to be or whose dog it is meant to be, but the image is so pure and perfect that she knows she needs it. She slips it into the pocket of the linen dressing gown and rearranges the other drawings a little to hide the space.

Then she notices a calendar. It is printed with family photographs. Her eyes go to next Saturday. There it is: ‘Zoe and Petal’. Zoe is Alix’s sister’s name. She feels a reassuring sense of calm. Alix had not been lying to her. Her sister really is coming to stay on Saturday. She smiles a small smile and traces the calendar entry with her fingertips.

She opens the fridge then, lets her eyes roam over the contents, is surprised to see Cheese Strings and mini Peperamis, not surprised to see something in a tub called skyr and something else in a tub called baba ghanoush.

She feels she should be showered and dressed by the time Alix returns from dropping the children, so she heads upstairs. There are three rooms on this floor. One bedroom for Alix and Nathan. One bedroom for Leon. And at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, is a small study. Josie goes to the study door and peers inside. A desk in the window, a wall of bookshelves and there, against the back wall, what looks like a sofa-bed. She hitches up the bottom cushion and sees the metal mechanism, then lets the cushion drop again. So. There is another spare room in the house. She does not have to leave on Saturday. She smiles and heads up the next flight of stairs to her room next to Eliza’s on the top floor.

She’s not ready to leave. Not even slightly.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

Screen shows three young people sitting on high stools in a dimly lit bar. Two young women, one young man.

They’re casually dressed in jeans and T-shirts; they all have tattoos and one of them wears a beanie hat.

The text below reads:

Ari, Juno and Dan: subscribers to gaming platform Glitch

The man speaks first. He has an American accent:

‘So, yeah, I think we were all just kind of messing about that night. We had a couple friends over, we’d had a few beers, it was a hot July night. All the windows were open. So we weren’t paying as much attention as we normally would. We weren’t, you know, like rapt .’

Interviewer, off-mic: ‘So you were normally rapt?’

‘Yeah. I guess. I mean – she was amazing. We just knew her as her player name. Erased.’

Interviewer, off-mic: ‘Her player name was Erased?’

‘Yeah. I can see now that was sort of a play on words, sort of a combination of her real name and a comment on her real life. But we didn’t know anything about her real life. She was just Erased to us. She played with a, like, green screen backdrop – so we couldn’t see her actual room; it looked like she was in an empty warehouse. She was really quiet. She virtually whispered. That’s unusual in this world. But that was part of what made her cool. So it was the noise that alerted us that something weird was happening.’

‘From your computer?’

‘Yeah. We saw her getting off her chair and she never did that. She never moved. And she disappeared and it was all kind of a blur, because of the green screen. You know how it messes with movement? Screaming. Shouting. Banging. And then it went dead. Literally, just dead. Her chair sat there, empty. We watched and we watched and we watched and she did not come back. And we all started messaging each other. Like, all over the world. But nobody knew where she lived. Nobody knew her real name. Nobody knew anything about her.’

The girl in the beanie hat speaks.

‘We had footage of the whole thing. I called the police. They were like, what do you want us to do about it? She’s on the other side of the world. We sent the footage to Glitch. They didn’t have a physical address for her. Just an IP address and email details. They told us she was in, like, North London? So we started messaging anyone we knew in North London. We just became obsessed with this thing. It went viral. In the community. It was all anyone was talking about. And then suddenly, just as we were getting close to finding out who she was and where she lived, the story broke. And then holy crap, our minds blew. Our minds just totally and utterly blew .’

***

9.30 a.m.

Josie is ready and dressed and sitting at the kitchen table when Alix gets back from dropping the children at school. The dog is in the back garden, sniffing around the flower beds. Alix sees that Josie has attempted to cover up some of the damage to her face with make-up and wonders for a moment where she had found it. She had arrived here on Saturday night with only her tiny handbag and the dog.

‘You look better,’ she says, indicating Josie’s face.

‘Yes. I was sick of seeing that horror show in the mirror. I found a tube of something in the bathroom cabinet. I hope you don’t mind?’

Alix shakes her head distractedly. She’s 99 per cent sure there was no foundation or make-up in the bathroom cabinet in the en suite to the spare room, but maybe a guest left it there without her noticing.

‘I just have a couple of jobs I need to do around the house, and then we can get going. Is that OK?’

‘Absolutely,’ says Josie. ‘I’m happy just sitting here, in your lovely kitchen.’

Alix throws her the warmest smile she can manage and then heads up to the bedrooms. She wrenches dirty bedclothes off Leon’s bed and bundles them together. Then she redresses it with fresh sheets and empties his wastepaper bin into a black bag. She does the same in her bedroom and in the bathroom. As she moves from job to job, she is followed by a sense of unease. She tries to unhitch it from her psyche, but she can’t. Everything feels wrong; everything feels off-kilter. She hears the dog yapping in the back garden and peers out to see him staring longingly at a squirrel up a tree. She pictures Josie sitting at the kitchen table, the strange benignity of her, the placid smile. She doesn’t seem like someone whose husband assaulted her on Saturday night and who had to escape in the early hours and hasn’t been home since. She doesn’t seem like she’s in the eye of a terrible personal trauma. She seems … happy?

She brings the dirty laundry and the black bin bag downstairs and there she is, just as she’d left her. ‘I’ll be two more minutes,’ she calls out to Josie before taking the laundry into the utility room.

‘No rush!’

And there it is. That strange, unnerving note of jollity.

A moment later they are in the recording studio, each with a coffee in front of them and headphones on. The time is almost 10 a.m. and Alix presses record.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a young girl sitting at a stool by the open-plan kitchen in Josie’s apartment.

She is laughing out loud at something that another young woman, an actress playing Josie’s younger daughter, Roxy, has just said.

An actress playing Josie sits on the sofa, looking at a magazine and smiling quietly.

The text beneath reads:

Recording of Josie Fair from Alix Summer’s podcast, 14 July 2019

‘I have to tell you about Brooke.’

‘Brooke?’

‘Yes. She was Roxy’s friend. From school. Roxy never had a friend until Brooke. But she turned up at the beginning of year ten, and they were inseparable immediately.’

The screen shows the two girls sitting on a bed, cross-legged, playing with phones and laughing together.

‘Brooke was bolshy, like Roxy, and potty-mouthed. And she was fearless too. Scared of nothing and nobody. But I liked her because she was a good influence on Roxy. She got Roxy studying that year. She persuaded Roxy that GCSE s were useful, and she was fun. We weren’t a fun family. Not in that way. But Brooke was fun and she made us fun too, became almost a part of the family. She lived in a tiny flat with two small half-siblings, didn’t get on with her stepfather, had lots of issues at home, so I think she saw our place as a kind of refuge? It was a lovely time, in retrospect. And then we got towards the end of their year eleven, the GCSE s were coming up, Brooke was over a lot, revising with Roxy.’

The screen shows the two girls sitting on the floor, poring over exercise books.

‘But suddenly one day, just before the exams started, it was all over. Roxy came home from school, said they’d had a big fight. Said she’d punched Brooke. Given her a fat lip. We got a call from the school, asking us to come in. But then Roxy disappeared. Right in the middle of her exams. Just gone, for three whole days. Finally she reappeared, looking grubby, shell-shocked, said she’d been sleeping rough, been taken into a hostel, hadn’t slept for three nights. I ran her a bath; she was in there for over an hour.’

Screen shows the actor playing Roxy lying in a bath in a darkened bathroom.

‘Then she came out and told me what had happened. Told me about Brooke … and Walter.’

There is a prolonged silence.

The screen shows Roxy disappearing under the bathwater, her hair spreading out around her.

‘Walter?’

‘He’d been grooming her. All along. Just like he did with me. All those times she was here, when it felt like she was part of the family, it had been more than that. And then, just like he did with me, he bought her a necklace, he took her to the pub, he slipped a shot of vodka into her lemonade and then, on her sixteenth birthday, he slept with her.’

The screen goes black and slowly changes to a young girl, sitting in shadow on a chair in a studio.

Josie’s voice continues in the background:

‘While I was at work and Roxy was at school doing an exam, he invited her into our home and he slept with her in my bed. In my bed .’

‘How did Roxy find out?’

‘Erin told her. They thought Erin wouldn’t notice because of the way Erin is with her gaming and everything. But she did. She heard them and then she saw through the crack in her bedroom door Brooke leaving and she told Roxy when she got back from her exam and the next day Roxy went into school and she beat Brooke. Beat her bloody.’

The screen oscillates between dramatised scenes of two girls fighting in a school playground and the girl sitting on the stool in shadow.

‘Shortly after Roxy came back from the homeless shelter, she left for good. We haven’t seen her since.’

A light flashes very briefly onto the face of the girl sitting on the stool, illuminating a small portion of her face.

The closing credits roll.

***

11 a.m.

Josie stares into Alix’s eyes. Alix looks mind-blown. Horrified.

‘I know,’ says Josie. ‘I’m sorry, it’s gross. But there it is. There is the truth about the man I married.’

‘Did you confront him?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Not then. I pretended I didn’t know.’

There it is again, across the smooth surface of Alix’s face, that flinch, that pinch.

Josie can hear Alix gulping drily. She comes in for the kill. ‘That night,’ she says, ‘on Friday. When we got home from having dinner here with you. That was the first time. The very first time I ever confronted Walter about what had happened with Brooke.’

‘And that was why …?’ Alix gestures at the damage to Josie’s face.

Josie nods. ‘Yes. That was why. Exactly.’

They stop for lunch. Alix toasts some sourdough for them and serves it with houmous and baba ghanoush.

She glances across the kitchen table at Josie and says, ‘Any word from Walter?’

‘None. No.’

‘Would he normally be in touch after an episode like this?’

‘I’ve never walked out on him before.’

‘So, you normally just sit it out?’

‘Mm-hmm. Yeah.’

‘So, what was different this time?’

‘Everything, I guess. Ever since I turned forty-five, even before we started making this podcast, I’ve been feeling different about everything. I mean, that was why I was in that pub in the first place that night. We never normally go out to eat. At least, not to places like that. And then I met you and …’

Alix stares fixedly at Josie, not wanting to give away any of her interior disquiets through a twitch or a blink.

‘It felt like fate, like destiny. It was a turning point for me, my moment to take control of my narrative, unburden myself, share my truth – change. And so on Friday night, the minute he first raised his hand to me, I already knew it felt different. I already knew I would go and that I wouldn’t come back.’

Alix swallows drily. ‘When did he first hit you?’

‘Oh, you know. I mean, it would be hard to say exactly. It was a thing that happened slowly. You know. A little push here and there. Around the same time he started to be physical with the girls. I preferred it in a way. Preferred it if he pushed me around than them. Shocking, when you think about it. A man like that. A big man. Touching girls, women – hurting them. I mean, it’s impossible even to fathom. Like the sort of people who hurt animals.’ Her gaze drops to Fred, who sits at her feet staring at her meaningfully. She tears off a corner of sourdough dipped into the baba ghanoush and passes it to him. He chews it excitedly.

‘Has he ever hurt Fred?’

‘No. Not yet. Probably only a matter of time though, I guess.’ She passes another piece of bread and dip to the dog and then glances up at Alix. ‘What about you?’ she asks. ‘Has Nathan ever hurt you?’

‘Oh. God. No.’ And Alix realises as she says it how it sounds. It sounds smug and entitled, as if her life is lived on a different plane to Josie’s, as if only a woman like Josie would have a husband who hit her, only people who were brought up on estates and married to electricians experienced domestic violence, when, of course, nothing was further from the truth. ‘No,’ she says again, toning down her incredulity. ‘Never.’

‘And the kids?’

‘No. Neither of us has ever hit the kids.’

Josie pushes her plate away from her and stares directly into Alix’s eyes. ‘But obviously, you have other problems. You have the drinking thing.’

‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘I do. Although I am hoping after Friday night that that might be the end of it.’

‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we?’

And there’s an edge to her voice which makes Alix think that Josie actively wants Nathan to go on another bender, to commit another cardinal sin, to blow it somehow. That she actively wants Nathan to be as bad as Walter.