Thursday, 20 June

Alix’s studio is at the bottom of the garden. It was Nathan’s fortieth birthday present for her, in recognition of how well her newly launched podcast was doing. He’d sent her away on a girls’ weekend, had it all professionally fitted, then wrapped the shed in an oversized ribbon and guided her to it blindfolded on her return. Is it any wonder that Alix is so torn about her marriage, when her husband is capable of such acts of generosity and affection, whilst also capable of making her want to die?

She switches on the power for the Nespresso machine at the wall and places a vase of flowers on the desk. At ten o’clock the doorbell rings and Josie is on her doorstep with her little dog in a shoulder bag.

‘I hope it’s OK to bring Fred,’ says Josie. ‘I should have checked.’

‘No problem at all,’ Alix replies. ‘I have a cat but as long as he’s in the studio with us, she won’t bother him. Come on through.’

‘Your house is beautiful,’ says Josie as she follows Alix through the open-plan kitchen at the back of the house and out into the garden.

‘Thank you so much.’

‘My house was probably beautiful once. It’s one of those big stucco villas. You know. But the council chopped them into flats in the seventies and now they’re ugly.’

Alix smiles and says, ‘So sad. London’s full of places like that.’

Josie oohs and aahs about Alix’s studio, runs her hands over the gleaming recording equipment, pats the fat foam head of the microphone. ‘Will I be talking into that?’ she says.

‘Yes.’

Josie nods, her eyes wide.

She lets the little dog out of its dog carrier and it trots around, sniffing everything.

Alix makes Josie a cup of tea and herself an espresso. They pull on their headphones and face each other across the recording desk. Alix does a test run with Josie, asks her the standard question about what she had for breakfast, and then they begin.

‘Josie, first of all, hello and thank you so much for giving me your time so generously. I cannot tell you how excited I am to start this project. For listeners coming across from my regular podcast series, All Woman , welcome and thank you for taking a punt on me doing something new. For new listeners who’ve come upon this podcast from some other angle, welcome. So, let’s kick off with an easy question, Josie. Your name. What is it short for? If it is in fact short for anything?’

Josie shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. Just Josie. Not short for anything.’

‘Named after anyone?’

‘No. Not that I know of. My mum is called Pat. Her mum was called Sue. I think she just wanted to give me a pretty name, you know. Something feminine.’

‘So, just to set up the premise for everyone, the story behind the title of this podcast, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! , is that those were Josie’s first words to me when we met in our local pub the night we both turned forty-five. Josie and I are not just birthday twins but were born in the same hospital too. And now we live less than a mile apart in the same corner of northwest London. So, before we get into your life story, let’s talk about your birth story. What did your mum tell you about the day you were born?’

Josie blinks. There’s a ponderous silence that Alix already knows she might need to edit out. ‘Well,’ she says, eventually. ‘Nothing much really. Just that it hurt!’

Alix laughs. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘yes. That’s a given. But what did she tell you about the day itself: the weather, the midwife, the first time she saw you?’

There follows another silence. ‘Like I say. Nothing. She never said anything. Just that it hurt so much she knew she’d never do it again.’

‘And she didn’t?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘So, no siblings?’

‘No siblings. Just me. What about you? Oh.’ Josie stops and puts her hand against her heart. ‘Sorry. Am I allowed to ask you questions?’

‘Yes! Absolutely! And I am one of three girls. The middle.’

‘Oh, lucky you. I’d’ve loved a sister.’

‘Sisters are the best. I’m very lucky. And tell me about your mum, Pat. Is she still around?’

‘Oh, God, yes. Very much so. She lives on the same estate where I was born, runs the community centre, looks after the old people, shouts at the politicians, works with the anti-gang unit, all of that. Larger than life. Louder than life. Everyone knows her. It’s like she’s famous.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Oh, he was never in the picture, my dad. My mum got pregnant by accident and then went off and had me without even telling him. I’ve never met him.’

Alix shuts her eyes and mentally loops back to the man in the pub on her birthday who she had assumed to be Josie’s father. ‘So, in the pub, on the night we met – the man you were dining with. That was your …?’

‘That was my husband. Yes. Not my father. And no, you are not the first person to make that mistake. My husband, Walter, is a lot older than me. I’ve been with him since I was fifteen.’ Josie pauses and glances up at Alix.

Alix tries to hide her surprise. ‘Fifteen,’ she repeats. ‘And he was …?’

‘Forty-two.’

Alix falls silent for a moment. ‘Wow. That’s …’

‘Yes. I know. I know how it seems. But it didn’t quite feel like it sounds at the time. It’s hard to explain.’ Josie purses her lips and shrugs. ‘There’s power in being a teenager. I miss that power in some ways. I would like it back.’

‘In what way was there power?’

Josie shrugs again. ‘Just in the way that you have something a lot of people want. A lot of men want. And a lot of them want it. They want it so much.’

‘It? You mean youth?’

‘Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. And when you meet someone who is very clear about what they want and you know that the only thing that stands between what they want and what you have is your consent … Sometimes, as a very young girl, there’s a power in giving that consent. Or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. That’s how they make you feel. But really, it’s not, is it? I can see that now. I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed? But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.’

Alix leaves a brief silence to play out, to allow Josie’s words the space they need to hit home to her listeners. She maintains her composure, but under the surface her blood races with shock. ‘And you and Walter, how did you meet?’

‘He was a contractor, doing the electricals on our estate. He was the project leader and my mum, of course, made it her business to get involved with it all, so one day, when I was about thirteen, I was sitting in my room and the doorbell rang, and I looked out and he was standing there. Had his high-vis vest on, holding his hard hat in his hand. That was the first time I saw him.’

Alix says, ‘And what did you think?’

Josie issues a small laugh. ‘I was thirteen. He was forty. There wasn’t much more to think really. It wasn’t until my fourteenth birthday that I could tell there was something else going on. He walked into the house when I was blowing out the candles on my birthday cake. I was there with my best friend Helen. And my mum invited him to stay for a slice of cake and he sat next to me and it was …’ Josie exhales and makes a sound like she’s been punched in the throat. ‘It was just there. Like an invisible monster in the room.’

‘A monster?’

‘Yes. That’s what it felt like. His interest in me. It felt like a monster.’

‘So, you were scared of him?’

‘Not of him. No. He was nice. I was scared of his wanting me. I couldn’t believe that nobody else could see it. Only me. It was so big and so real. But my mother didn’t see it. Helen didn’t see it. But I saw it. And I was scared of it.’

‘So, it didn’t feel like power then?’

‘Well, no. And yes. It felt like both things at the same time. It was confusing. I became obsessed with the idea of him. But it was another year until anything happened.’

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen opens with a woman pulling a small suitcase through an airport. She is tall and heavily built, with her dark hair pulled back into a small bun.

The next shot shows her sitting in a café, with a cappuccino on the table in front of her.

The text beneath her reads:

Helen Lloyd, Josie Fair’s schoolfriend

Helen starts to speak.

‘Josie and me were best friends. From when we were about five years old. From primary school.’

Helen pauses.

There is a short silence.

Then she says: ‘She was always a bit odd. Controlling? She didn’t like it when I had other friends. She always wanted to make things about her. “Passive aggressive” is the term these days. She would never just come straight out and tell you what was bothering her. She made you go all around the houses to get to it. She was a sulker, too. The silent treatment. We’d already started to grow out of each other when she met Walter.’

The interviewer asks a question off-mic: ‘ So what was that like, when she met Walter?’

‘Weird. I mean, he was an old man, virtually. And that was that. From her fourteenth birthday, she just disappeared. Into this other world . With an old man.’

The interviewer interjects: ‘Would you say Walter Fair groomed Josie?’

‘Well, yes. Obviously. But …’

Helen’s eyes go to the interviewer. She touches the rim of her coffee cup.

‘As bad as it sounds. As weird as it sounds. It was a two-way street, you know? She wanted him. She wanted him, and she made him want her.’

***

11 a.m.

Josie walks home from Alix’s house an hour later. Her head spins with all of it.

She thinks of Alix’s home: from the front, a neat, terraced house with a bay window, no different to any other London Victorian terraced house, but inside a different story. A magazine house, ink-blue walls and golden lights and a kitchen that appeared weirdly to be bigger than the whole house with stone-grey cabinets and creamy marble counters and a tap that exuded boiling water at the touch of a button. A wall at one end reserved purely for the children’s art!

She remembers pinning the girls’ artwork to the fridge with magnets and Walter tutting and taking it down because it looked messy.

Then the garden with its fairy lights and winding path and the magical shed at the bottom that contained yet another world of wonder. Even the cat; a cat unlike any she’d seen before. A Siberian, apparently. Tiny and fluffy with the huge green eyes of a cartoon Disney princess.

Her hand goes to the inside pocket of her handbag, where she touches the smooth skin of the Nespresso pod she’d taken when Alix wasn’t looking. There was a huge jar of them on the shelf behind the recording desk, all different colours, like oversized gemstones. She doesn’t have a Nespresso machine at home, but she just wanted to own a little bit of Alix’s glamour, tuck it into a drawer in her shabby flat, know it was there.

Walter is at his laptop in the window when she gets home. He looks at her curiously, his eyes huge through the strong prescription of his reading glasses. She’d told him she was seeing the school mum again. He’d raised an eyebrow but not said anything. Now he says, ‘What’s really going on?’

A spurt of adrenaline shoots through her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘you’ve been gone ages. You can’t have been drinking coffee all this time.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I went to see my gran after. At the cemetery.’ A pre-planned fib.

‘What for?’

‘I dunno. I just had a really weird dream last night about her and it made me want to go and see her. Anyway, I need to get ready for work. I’ll be back in a tick.’

She walks towards her bedroom, hears the sound of Erin’s gaming chair, through her bedroom door, squeak squeak , notices that the smell from Erin’s room is starting to drift out into the hallway now. She can’t put it off for much longer. But not now. Not today. Tomorrow, definitely.

She touches Erin’s door with her fingertips as she passes, then kisses them.

In her bedroom she picks up the photograph of her small girls from the top of the chest of drawers and kisses that too.

Then she takes the Nespresso pod from inside her handbag and tucks it into her underwear drawer, right at the very back.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a leather chair in empty City pub.

Muted light shines through a dusty window.

A man walks in and sits down. He wears a white shirt and jeans. He smiles.

The text on screen reads:

Jason Fair, Walter Fair’s son

He starts to talk; he has a Canadian accent.

‘The last time I saw Dad? I guess when I was about ten?’

The interviewer interjects off-mic: ‘And why is that?’

Jason: ‘Because he left my mum for a teenager and my mum was so disgusted that she emigrated us out of the country.’

Interviewer: ‘And that teenager was …?’

‘That teenager was Josie Fair. Yes.’

Jason shakes his head sadly and drops his gaze to the floor.

When he looks up at the camera again, he is seen to be crying.

‘Sorry. Sorry. Could we just …’

The screen fades to black.

***

8 p.m.

Nathan doesn’t come home from work that night. Alix feels the dreadful inevitability of it in her gut from the minute the clock ticks over from 8 p.m. to 8.01 p.m. He said he’d be home at seven. Even accounting for last-minute delays or phone calls or problems on the tube, eight o’clock marks the cut-off point for explainable lateness and tips it into something darker. She texts him. He doesn’t answer. At eight thirty she calls him. It goes to voicemail. And she knows. Alix knows.

When the children are in bed at nine, Alix takes a glass of wine into the studio and listens back to her interview with Josie from that morning.

They had talked for over an hour, but hearing it now, Alix suspects that the whole conversation will be edited down to about ten minutes. And those ten minutes will be the ones that Josie had spent talking about how she met her husband.

Alix had been barely able to breathe. She’d merely nodded, her eyes wide, not interjected with questions, just listened and absorbed.

A fourteen-year-old girl.

A forty-one-year-old man.

Alix thinks of the man she’d barely noticed in the restaurant on Saturday night, the man she had assumed to be Josie’s father: nondescript, balding, faded, bespectacled.

They’d stopped recording before Alix had been able to uncover more about what had happened after the birthday-cake moment on Josie’s fourteenth birthday, what had led to Josie and Walter becoming a couple. They will discuss that at their next meeting. But the tiny prickle of excitement that she’s been feeling since the first moment she decided to make a show about Josie is growing by the minute. She can sense something bigger than her here, something dark and brilliant, with every fibre of her being.

Back indoors, Alix looks at her empty wine glass and considers for a moment the possibility of topping it up. But no, it is gone ten o’clock and she is tired, and she wants a clear head tomorrow when she wakes up in what she already knows will be an empty bed and has to deal with the aftermath of Nathan’s latest bender so soon after the last, and this one on a school night. Her message to him remains unread and her final attempt to call him goes through to voicemail again. She feels adrenaline pulsing through her and she knows she won’t sleep, but she goes to bed anyway. She tries to read a book, but her heart races. She scrolls through the news on her phone, but it swims in front of her eyes, and she feels suddenly, strangely, that she wants to talk to Josie, Josie with her waxy skin and haunting voice and her dark, dark eyes, Josie who doesn’t know Nathan, who didn’t dance at their wedding, who has no investment in the mythical mirage of their marriage.

She sends her a message:

It was lovely talking to you earlier. Thank you so much for your time. I just listened to the recording, and I can see how this is going to take shape and I’d really like to continue with the project if you’re happy to do so? Maybe next time we could visit the estate where you grew up, where you first met Walter. What do you think?

She presses send and stares for a few minutes at her phone, looking for a sign that Josie has seen it, that she is replying. But ten minutes pass and there is nothing. She finally turns off her screen and lies herself flat, tries to lull herself into a sleep that she knows will not come for many hours.

10 p.m.

Josie rests her open book against her chest and looks at the message on her phone screen.

It’s from Alix. The sight of her words on her screen sparks something inside Josie. A kind of childish delight. Something like a crush. She opens it and reads it in a rush and then again more slowly. She pictures herself on her Kilburn estate with Alix and she feels a shiver of delight. She could introduce her to her mum, watch her mother’s face as it dawns on her that someone like Alix is interested in her daughter. She could picture the confusion followed by, yes, no doubt, a flicker of jealousy. She would think that Alix should be making a podcast about her , the legendary Pat O’Neill. And no doubt Alix would have questions for her mother, but they would be questions related only to Josie, questions to help Alix find out more about Josie, not more about Pat. Her stomach flips, pleasantly. She doesn’t reply immediately, but goes instead to her browser and googles Alix Summer, spends half an hour flicking through photos of Alix, looks at her Twitter feed, at her Facebook page, which is set to private but has a couple of posts visible, at her Instagram feed. She reads listeners’ reviews of Alix’s podcasts and sees photos of her at award ceremonies in swirling satin dresses. When Josie has had her fill of Alix Summer, she returns to the message but realises that it is gone eleven, that it is too late to politely reply. She sighs, turns off her screen and picks up her book.

From somewhere else in the flat she hears the muted sounds of her husband’s voice. She tucks in her earplugs and turns the page of her book.