‘I was thinking of inviting Josie and her husband over for dinner this weekend? For my project.’
Alix has been gathering the nerve to make this pronouncement for over an hour, since she and Nathan woke up this morning. She’d been awake half the night, oscillating between feeling utterly convinced that it was a perfectly good idea and just another way of doing her job and feeling utterly convinced that it was the worst idea she’d ever had. Right up until ten seconds ago she had still been uncertain which way she was going to go. But the words are out now, and she bites her lip as she waits for his response.
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know. It’ll be weird as fuck. But I really think it’s going to move this project along.’
‘But do I have to be there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I think you do. Sounds like he’s a man’s man. I don’t think he’d want to hang out with only two women. And I could just interview him, but I get the feeling I’d get more out of him in a social setting. With alcohol. You know.’
She throws Nathan a pleading look and his faces softens. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Anything for you, my love.’ He says this with sarcasm, but also, Alix knows, with a touch of sincerity, an awareness of how much he currently owes her.
Alix exhales with relief. ‘Thank you,’ she says, then picks up her phone and texts the invitation to Josie.
Josie glances at her phone and, seeing Alix’s name, snatches it up from the kitchen counter.
How about you and Walter come to my place for dinner on Friday night? Let me know! And see you tomorrow for another session?
Josie stills. Her gaze flicks across the room to Walter, sitting on the sofa, watching BBC Breakfast and eating toast, in his dressing gown. She returns her gaze to the message again and then lets it percolate for a while, as she waits for her toast to cook. Occasionally her eyes go back to Walter, to the thatch of wiry white hair on the back of his neck that grows horizontally, to his fluffy earlobes and patchy stubble.
‘Walter,’ she says. ‘You need to go to the barber’s.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I was going to go on Saturday.’
‘We’ve been invited for dinner on Friday. At Alix’s house. You need to go before Friday.’
He turns briskly and narrows his eyes at her. ‘What?’
‘Dinner. At Alix’s. We’re going. OK?’
‘The woman with the same birthday as you? The woman you’ve been seeing so much of?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why the hell does she want to have us for dinner?’
‘I told you. We’re friends. That’s what friends do.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘One of those roads that runs between the park and Salusbury Road.’
His left eyebrow shoots up. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Seriously, Walter. This is important. You need a new outfit too. I can’t take you in any of your clothes. When was the last time you bought anything new? Eh?’
The atmosphere in the flat shifts into a new realm with every word that she utters. It’s like she’s smashing a fist through a sequence of invisible walls with each one, getting closer and closer to something approaching the truth of everything.
Walter puts up his hands into a gesture of surrender. ‘Jesus Christ, Jojo. Chill out. I’ll sort it, OK?’
‘Hair? Clothes?’
‘Yes. Hair. Clothes. Jeez.’
He turns off the television and brings his plate through to the kitchen. He has a smell about him, probably his dressing gown needing a wash. Also stale stubble and morning breath. The smell of decay. Of defeat. It sits at the back of her throat and makes her feel enraged.
‘I don’t know what’s got into you, lately, Jojo,’ he says as he heads towards the bathroom for his morning shower. ‘I really don’t.’
At work that afternoon, Josie feeds the hem of a dress through the overlocker, her hands moving mechanically while her brain whirls and weaves chaotically through the new universe of things she thinks about these days. She’s obsessively planning an outfit for Friday whilst anxiously picturing Walter in a rotating range of clothes that don’t suit him. Inside her head there plays a grainy movie of them all sitting around the table in Alix’s kitchen with the mismatched chairs, the red-haired children running about in colourful pyjamas, wine being poured into huge glasses by the annoying red-haired husband, cool music through a speaker, the cloud-cat curling around their ankles, the light dying in the sky as the conversation flows. And then her spiralling thoughts bring her back to Walter and his old-man teeth, his irritating monotone, his defeated air, and she is fourteen again, sixteen, eighteen, a young mum spending her husband’s money frugally in Sainsbury’s, a middle-aged woman in a quiet flat, and in every incarnation she is the same person: a girl in stasis. And now, just as she’d hoped would happen when she first thought about asking Alix to make her the subject of a podcast, someone else is breaking through her carapace. Another person entirely. And that person is bigger than her, louder than her, harsher than her, older than her. That person is ready finally to tell her truth.
She cuts the ends of the thread from the overlocking machine and turns the dress over, ready to hem the other side. A tube rumbles along the tracks beyond the big window and Josie sees her face as a blurred reflection in the glass. She looks like a half-finished painting, she observes, waiting for the artist to come back and add the detail.
Her phone buzzes with a message from Alix. She experiences the endorphin rush she always gets when she sees Alix’s name on her phone, the sense that something good is happening to her.
Can you bring a photo tomorrow of the girls? Would love to see what they look like. See you then!
A chill goes through Josie. The girls . How can she talk to Alix about the girls? she asks herself. But then she looks again at the blurred version of herself in the big window and suddenly she sees that the half-finished portrait is that of a queenly woman, not a gauche girl, and she knows that finally, after all these years, it is time to hold her life up to the light.