Wednesday, 17 July

The Facebook post shows Brooke Ripley in a white, fitted ankle-length dress and silver trainers. She looks pensive in the photo, fragile and unsure. It’s only because Alix knows that a mere six weeks beforehand this girl was being groomed and abused by Walter Fair that she can see so deeply into her soul, read so much into the uncertain tilt of her head, the slimness of her smile. She is amazed, in fact, that Brooke Ripley went to her school prom at all, given the horrific backdrop to it all.

The Facebook post, which has been shared around twenty times, is a plea from Brooke’s aunt, Ffion, writing on behalf of Brooke’s mum.

Alix reads the comments. They’re all of the ‘thoughts and prayers’ variety. Nobody has a clue. A girl called Mia who was in the edges of the prom photograph with Brooke replies: ‘That’s me in the photo. Like literally saw her just a few minutes before she disappeared. She said she was going home. Wish I knew where she was,’ accompanied by a sad-face emoji and a heart.

Alix clicks on Mia’s profile and finds that it has maximum security settings, all the way down to blocking access to her friends list. She clicks on Message and stares for a moment at the empty space in Messenger. What would she say? And how?

And why, Alix wonders, has she never heard of Brooke Ripley? Why is her name and the photo of her in the beautiful white dress not synonymous with the summer of 2014? And then Alix realises that in June 2014 she had a sleepless baby and a feisty six-year-old. She was deep down inside the well of early parenthood, so maybe she had seen this story around at the time and totally forgotten about it, or maybe it had been quickly subsumed by something bigger?

She switches screens at the sound of footsteps down the stairs. It’s Josie, still wearing the same outfit that Alix had lent to her on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday. She has her own clothes hanging in her room, cleaned and ready to be worn. Yet she is still wearing Alix’s.

‘I was thinking,’ Alix says. ‘If you’re going to be here for a couple more days, would you like me to go over to yours and pick up some clothes for you?’

She sees a flash of something pass across Josie’s face. ‘No,’ she says, her mouth set firm. ‘No, thank you.’

‘The weather’s turning though – it’s going to be really hot the next couple of days. Pushing thirty. I could pick you up some more of those summer dresses?’

‘Honestly.’ Josie’s mouth softens. ‘Honestly. It’s fine.’

‘Well, let me know if you change your mind.’

‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘I will.’

‘And what will you do? On Saturday? Where will you go?’

She tries not to stare too hard at Josie as she finds her answer to this question, as she already knows that she will be struggling, already knows that Josie has no plan beyond the end of each day.

‘I suppose I’ll …’ She trails off momentarily. ‘I’m not sure. I mean, how would you feel …?’

Alix feels herself stiffen.

‘I noticed that there’s a fold-out bed. In the study. I mean, I could always sleep there, while your sister’s here? I don’t suppose anyone will be using the study on a Saturday night? And I’d absolutely stay out of your way so that you and your sister can do sister things?’

Alix’s mouth has turned dry. This is it. This is the line that she had put metaphorically inside her relationship with Josie from day one, and each day they have been stepping a little closer and a little closer and right now they are touching it with their outstretched toes and once that line has been breached Alix no longer has any idea how she will regain control of the situation. She knows, with a sickening certainty, that she has to have Josie gone from her house by Saturday afternoon. But she also knows, with a sickening certainty, that Josie is currently controlling her and that making her leave the house before she’s ready to do so would spell the end of the podcast just as it was gearing up towards being something riveting and unmissable. She thinks all of this in the two seconds it takes for her to say, ‘Well, let me ask Nathan. I’m kicking him out of the girls’ space on Saturday night so he might well end up in the study, working.’

She glances quickly at Josie, long enough to observe a slightly menacing back-tip of her head, a cool refinding of her bearings.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘OK. But let me know as soon as you can.’

‘Yes,’ Alix replies warmly. ‘Yes! Of course.’

When Josie mentions that she won’t be going into work that afternoon, Alix invents a reason to leave the house. Everything has been so intense since the moment that Josie and Walter walked into her house on Friday night. Every minute of every day has been overshadowed by the existence of these people and their horrible, messy lives and by the physical presence of Josie and her dog in Alix’s home. Time has lost its form and its meaning. Another weekend is approaching and on the other side of that weekend is the end of the school term and then there will be six long weeks of unstructured time and loose-limbed days and she needs something which feels normal and just for her. She tells Josie she is going to return some library books and then she heads into the park to have her lunch at the café.

The café in Queen’s Park has formed the basis of huge swathes of Alix’s life since she and Nathan moved into the area ten years ago. She sees ghosts and hears echoes of herself at all the different stages of herself; pregnant with Leon, later sitting with a newborn and a five-year-old, with mums from nursery, mums from school, with Nathan and the kids at the weekends. The ice-cream kiosk makes her think of Leon and Eliza with bright blue mouths after eating the bubblegum flavour. The beers in the chilled cabinet make her think of the slightly woozy sensation of daytime drinking on hot summer afternoons. She’s sat at each table at various points, lived different versions of herself in multiple light-refracting fragments. So today she will sit in the café, and she will eat a panini and she will live another fragment of her life and she will try to feel normal, to feel like the Alix of six weeks ago, the Alix who hadn’t met Josie Fair.

She orders her panini, the one she always has, goat’s cheese and ham, and she orders an iced tea, and she sits with her numbered wooden paddle on the table in front of her and waits for her food to arrive and waits to feel normal. But the normal doesn’t come. Maybe normal is over there, she ponders, on the other side of the park somewhere; maybe it’s in the sand pit where she still takes the children sometimes when they’re feeling little. Or maybe it’s on the zipwire in the adventure playground. Or in the petting zoo, which she and Nathan had walked past drunkenly on the night of her forty-fifth birthday, the dark night air still warm on their bare skin.

Her panini arrives and it is the same panini she always has but it doesn’t bring her normal. It feels like Josie has taken Alix’s normal and swallowed it deep down somewhere inside her darkness. Alix thinks of the blood-smeared key under the mattress with the number 6 scrawled on it. She thinks of Josie rooting through her recycling bin while she was out with her family. She thinks of Josie in her home, right now, wearing Alix’s clothes, Alix’s make-up, scattering her hair, her dead skin cells, everywhere she goes. She pictures Josie going into their study, spotting the sofa-bed, going into Alix’s bathroom, taking her foundation. Then she sees Walter having sex with Brooke, Erin with her ear to the wall, Josie pretending it hadn’t happened, getting on with her life.

Alix pushes the panini away and gets to her feet. She needs to get this podcast finished. Get it done, immerse herself in this filth, get to the end of this miserable story, get Josie out of her house and reclaim her life. But first, she needs to walk past Josie’s flat, peer through the window, see if she can get a sense of what Walter might be doing or thinking.

12.30 p.m.

Alix said she’d be gone for an hour. She said they’d do some recording when she returned, if Josie was up for it. An hour is a long time, Josie thinks. A long time to be alone in someone’s house. Alix told Josie to help herself to lunch. ‘Whatever’s in the fridge, just help yourself.’

So Josie peers into the fridge. She sees the rest of the baba whatever it is, the brown stuff that made Fred sick. She shudders. Then she sees a block of cheddar and thinks that a piece of that and a slice of bread and butter will be all she needs. She eats the tiny lunch at the kitchen table, staring blankly into space. Fred snuffles around the kitchen, looking for crumbs. The floor is surprisingly messy. There has been the plastic twist from the top of a loaf of bread on the floor for three days now. Nobody seems to see it. It’s not commensurate with the image that Alix likes to present on Instagram. None of it is, really, not when you look up close. But that doesn’t matter. Josie is not naturally tidy herself, she’s only tidy because Walter likes it that way, and so she feels happy for Alix that she’s allowed to have a plastic bread-bag tag on her floor for three days without it causing an argument.

A moment later she finds herself striding across the kitchen, picking up the tag and putting it in the pocket of her trousers.

She opens and closes the silky-smooth drawers in the kitchen until she gets to the messy one with all the things in it. She leafs through takeaway menus and biros and packets of Handy Andies and bulldog clips and books of postage stamps and bottle stoppers and rubber bands. Everything has been thrown in, there is no order to any of it. Her fingers feel the sheen of a photograph and she pulls out a column of passport shots. They’re of Leon looking sombre and serious, the pale-blue collar of his school shirt just visible. She slides it into her pocket too.

She thinks of her underwear drawer, at home, of the trophies and trinkets tucked away behind her pants. Not just Alix’s. The others too. She feels an itch to go home, just for a moment, to tuck the child’s drawing and the bread tag and the photos of Leon into the drawer. She could do that, she’s sure. She’d be in and out in seconds. Nobody would see her. She’ll go tomorrow, she decides, after work.

And then she pulls out a shiny black business card with Nathan’s details on it. The name of his company – ‘Condor and Bright, Commercial Property Consultants, EC1’ – and his mobile phone number beneath his office number is printed on it. She puts it in her pocket.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a young, very bubbly woman. She has a mass of blonde curls tied back into a ponytail and wears large gold hoop earrings and a fitted black cardigan.

She sits on a small red sofa in a dimly lit bar and is shown rearranging herself a few times and trying to find the perfect pose.

‘Can you see down my top at this angle?’ she asks the interviewer.

The interviewer is heard saying, ‘No, you’re fine,’ off-mic.

She laughs and says, ‘Good. Well, then. Let’s go.’

The text beneath reads:

Katelyn Rand

‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was a friend of Josie’s. I knew of her. She knew of me. I lived on her estate when I was small and I remember her and her mum. Particularly her mum. Everyone knew Pat O’Neill. She was larger than life. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.’

Katelyn laughs wryly.

‘And I remember my mum telling me about Josie suddenly leaving home at eighteen and the gossip that went round at the time, that she’d gone off with an older man. Last time I saw her I guess I was about ten? And I didn’t see her again for years and years. Until I brought some stuff into that shop where she worked. Stitch, the alterations place in Kilburn, and I recognised her immediately. She hadn’t changed at all, weirdly. Pretty sure she was still wearing the same clothes she used to wear when she was a teenager! So I got chatting with her and she asked me what I did and I told her about the acting. Told her I was struggling. You know. As actors do. Made light of it. And she said – and these were her exact words – “I might have a gig for you. Give me your number.” So I gave her my number and then, yeah, a few days later she called me. And that was that. Up to my neck in it. Up to my fucking neck.’

***

12.40 p.m.

It’s a twelve-minute walk from the lush greenness of Queen’s Park to the stained grey of Josie’s street. Even on a sunny day the stucco houses look humiliated by their poor condition. Alix stares first from across the street and then from outside, directly into the windows. She sees a table in the bay. It’s a dark wood, the sort that is unfashionable these days. There are three dark wooden chairs around it with barley-twist spindles. She can make out a sofa facing towards an older-looking television. Blank walls. A kitchen open to the living room is built into an alcove at the back. The cabinets are pine clad with white plastic handles. She can make out a dark passageway leading to a door. Denim curtains are half drawn over the smaller window. Through the gap she can see a bed, freshly made with a pale floral duvet and two floral pillows, a pair of denim cushions, some white Formica-clad drawers.

It looks like a rental that’s just been vacated by its previous owners, spruced and tidied and dressed for its next occupants. It does not look like a flat that is currently being lived in. She goes back to the big bay window, casts her eyes around the room again. It is hard to believe that a domestic incident occurred here in the early hours of Saturday, that a big man beat his small wife until she was bloodied and bruised.

And where is that big man? she wonders. There is a laptop closed on the dining table. But nothing else. Josie described him as never going out. As always being home. But he is not home now. So where is he?

She looks, one more time, at the sofa. She pictures Walter and Josie sitting side by side in the aftermath of his atrocity with Brooke, silently watching TV. Then she pictures Walter, five years later, slamming his wife’s head against the wall in rage at her belated accusations.

As she turns back, she looks slightly to her left. She sees a double-decker bus rumbling down Kilburn High Road a few hundred feet away, heading south towards Maida Vale. And as she sees it, she thinks of Brooke Ripley climbing off a bus in her white column dress five years ago, just there.

Just there, in fact, at the point where Kilburn High Road meets Maida Vale.

Just there, a two-minute walk from Josie and Walter’s flat.

2 p.m.

Alix stares hard at Josie. She tries to make her face look soft, but it’s difficult because inside she feels all hard edges and spikes and darkness. Josie has her headphones on and is drinking tea out of Alix’s favourite mug. (Alix suspects that Josie knows it is Alix’s favourite mug and that is why she always uses it.) Alix adjusts the volume on the controls and then clears her throat, watching the lines jumping on the screen of her laptop. Her next question feels solid on her tongue, like something that she might accidentally swallow and choke on. She clears her throat again and says, ‘So. What happened to Brooke?’

‘Brooke?’

Alix smiles and nods. ‘Yes. Brooke.’

‘I have no idea. Never heard from her again.’

‘Never heard from her again?’

‘No.’

‘Did you never try to find her?’

Josie narrows her eyes at Alix and throws her a questioning look. ‘No. Why would I? After what she did?’

‘Well, maybe she might have had some sort of an idea about where Roxy was.’

Alix watches Josie’s face as she reaches for a reply.

‘No,’ she says after a pause. ‘No. She wouldn’t have known. They had that big fall out. It was all over between them. Completely.’

Alix raises an eyebrow coolly, finding it virtually impossible to cover her feelings.

‘How would you feel,’ she says, ‘about me getting in touch with Brooke? Getting her side of things? For the podcast?’

‘No.’

It’s as immediate and definite as a slammed door.

‘Why not?’

‘Because … just, no. It’s too much. I’m telling you what I want to tell you. What I need to tell you. I have to live my life on the other side of this podcast. You know? Show my face in the world. And if you get her involved …’ She stops and inhales.

Alix waits.

‘I just don’t trust her. That’s all.’

‘You must wonder, though? What happened to her?’

‘Of course I do. I wonder all the time. About Roxy. And about Brooke. All the time. It’s like my life … it’s like it ended that day. You know. Like all the good things stopped.’

‘But Erin,’ Alix says. ‘What about Erin?’

‘What about Erin?’

‘I mean, she must bring you happiness. Surely? What was it like for her when Roxy left? You barely talk about Erin.’

Josie shrugs. ‘There’s not much to say.’

‘Well, shall we just try?’

Josie nods.

Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!

A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES

The screen shows a dramatic re-enactment of a woman sitting on a sofa in an apartment, staring through the window as a bus goes past.

The text below reads:

Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 17 July 2019

‘After the Brooke thing, my relationship with Walter became a game of chess. It was like I was a pawn, being pushed about by some huge invisible finger from square to square with no thought of my needs and wants. Walter was the king, of course, and everything in the home was done to protect him. I’d created a kind of invisible barrier around my family, behind the door of our flat. I’d been doing it for years, of course, all throughout the fourteen years of the children being at school, with the mums and the teachers and the social workers and my work colleagues and the next-door and upstairs neighbours; I kept people away. But that was when nobody had really done anything wrong. When all I was worried about was being judged for having badly behaved children, a violent husband. But now I was in danger of being judged for having a husband who seduced teenage girls and slept with them in his own home and yes, I did go on to his laptop and yes, he had been looking at things that were illegal and disgusting and actually very upsetting and yes, Walter is a pervert and a criminal, disgusting, repellent, a man that I would never touch again, not in that way. And I told him as much. Told him that that side of our marriage was over. So I cooked and cleaned and worked and smiled at people I trusted, kept my head down around people I didn’t, and then two years ago I told Walter I wanted a dog because I was sick of not having anything to love and he said if we were going to get a dog, then he wanted an Akita or a Dobermann or something he could feel proud of walking down the road and I said, “ No , this dog is for me and I want a dog I can carry like a baby, because you ruined my babies, you ruined them.”

‘Because, by then, not only had Roxy gone, but Walter had started abusing Erin.’

The screen fades and the credits roll.

***

2.30 p.m.

‘Abusing? What do you mean?’

Josie tips her head back slightly and rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Alix waits with her breath caught painfully at the back of her throat. She feels as if she’d known this all along, somehow, like this had been a terrible hum in the background of everything right from the very start.

‘I mean that nearly every night, when I fall asleep, Walter gets out of bed and goes into Erin’s room. And then, when I get up, he’s sitting at the table in the living room acting like nothing happened.’

‘And? I mean – how do you know?’

‘I just do. That man thinks he’s the king, you see. He lets me have my way here and there, like with the dog. Like coming here for dinner. But he does it in the way that a king would do it. A thrown treat.’ She gestures with her arm. ‘You have to run for it. You know. But as far as he’s concerned, everything in that flat is his. It all belongs to him, and so the minute I told him I wasn’t his any more, that he was no longer allowed to touch me, he took the next nearest thing. He took Erin.’

‘Have you ever seen anything? Heard anything?’

Josie shakes her head. ‘I put in my earplugs. I stay in my room until the morning comes.’

‘Fuck! Josie!’ Alix can’t help it. She cannot contain the shock and dismay. She’s meant to be impartial. Her job is not to judge or react, but simply to ask and listen. But this – she’ll edit out her reaction, she knows that – this is too animal and raw to remain circumspect about, especially – and yes, she knows it’s the most awful cliché – but especially as a mother.

‘What was I meant to do?’ Josie snaps. ‘It was so gradual. I didn’t realise at first, what was happening. I just happened to wake up a couple of times and see the empty bed. I’d ask him where he’d been, and he’d say he’d been chatting online with his kids in Canada. And I thought: Why does it have to be in the middle of the night? What’s wrong with the evening? And once I’d worked out what was happening, well, I thought she’d come and tell me. Erin. I kept waiting. But instead, she just went more and more into herself. Stopped eating anything I gave her. She’d always been fussy, but she got fussier and fussier and then started asking for baby food.’

‘Baby food?’

‘Yes. She said, “I want that stuff I used to have when I was little. The stuff you gave me out of a jar. When you used to feed me with a spoon.” I mean, I assumed it was some kind of – what do they call it? – regression, I suppose. She wanted to be a baby again. To be safe.’

‘But, Josie, sorry,’ Alix interjects, sensing that Josie is skimming over vast swathes of important back story. ‘What did Walter say? I mean, you must have said something to him, surely?’

Josie shakes her head and Alix sighs so loudly it makes the audio display on her laptop oscillate wildly. ‘I’m really sorry, Josie. Really, I am. But I need to get this straight. You are telling me that in the aftermath of what happened with Walter and Brooke, your youngest daughter ran away from home and you withdrew conjugal favours from your husband, and that as a result of that, your husband started to visit your older teenage daughter in her bedroom every night, to, you assume, sexually abuse her. Your daughter began to regress to the point of wanting to eat only baby food and stopped leaving her room entirely. And this has been going on for the past five years?’

‘Around about. Yes.’

Josie voice is clipped. Her mouth is pursed.

‘And you have not spoken to either your daughter or your husband about it?’

She nods. ‘That’s correct.’

‘It just … happens?’

‘It just happens.’

‘And your daughter. Erin. Was she restrained in any way? I mean, was she free to leave?’

‘Yes. She was free to leave.’

‘But she didn’t?’

‘No. She didn’t.’

‘And why do you think that is?’

‘He probably got inside her head. He probably made her think it was OK. The way he does. You know?’

Alix leaves a moment of silence. Her listeners will need it at this point. But she needs it too. Then she asks the question that she fears the answer to.

‘Before Friday night, Josie, when you and Walter had your fight, the night Walter beat you, when was the last time you’d seen Erin?’

She shrugs. She sniffs and wriggles slightly in her chair. ‘About six months? Maybe a year? About that.’

‘Not at all? Not once? Not even going to the bathroom?’

‘She waits until I’m not in the house. She doesn’t want to see me.’

‘But how do you know that?’

‘Well, she’d come and see me if she did, wouldn’t she? She knows when I’m there. I feed her. I leave her the food and then she puts the empties outside her room. And don’t think, don’t think for a minute, that I didn’t want to see her, because I wanted to see her more than anything, but when something goes on for that long it, well, you know, it just gets harder and harder, doesn’t it? Harder to turn back and do the right thing. I stopped at her door, every day, twice, three times a day. I stopped. And I touched the door and I made my hand like this.’ She forms it into a fist with knuckles. ‘Like I was going to knock. And I never did, Alix. I just never did. And don’t think I don’t hate myself because I hate myself so much. So much. Hate that it took so long for me to break this. To stop it.’

‘And it took a dinner at my house …?’

‘Yes. Like I told you when we first met up, it was all about breaking patterns. Going to the fancy pub that night. Getting rid of the denim. Getting to know you. Doing this.’ She gestures at the space between them. ‘It was as if I had to break small patterns before I would be ready to break big ones.’

Alix nods slowly, and peers at Josie through narrowed eyes. ‘I see,’ she says. Although she really doesn’t. ‘I see. But you say that Erin has been a virtual recluse for the past few months, hasn’t left her room, or the house. So, where did she go, exactly, on Friday night? Which friend has she gone to stay with?’

Josie repositions herself. ‘I have no idea.’

‘Someone she went to school with?’

‘Oh. I doubt that. No, probably just someone she knows from gaming. An online friend.’

‘You must be so worried about her.’

‘Yes. I am. I’m horribly worried about her. I’m worried about her, and I’m worried about Roxy.’

‘And what about Walter? Are you worried about Walter?’

‘God. No. Why would I be worried about him? He’s a pervert and a wife-beater. He’s a monster. I despise him. I absolutely despise him. I’m glad—’

She stops herself short.

‘Glad what?’

‘I’m glad he hit me. I’m glad he hurt me. It got me out of there. Got me out of that sick prison. I’d take the beating all over again to be free.’

Her face sets hard, and Alix wishes this was a documentary, not a podcast. She wishes her listeners could see the way Josie’s face has frozen into a mask, and the single, glycerine tear that appears in those black eyes of hers and spills down her cheek in a straight line.

‘What will become of him? Of Walter? Will you tell the police about what he did to Erin?’

She wipes the tear away with the back of her hand and sniffs. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That’s not my move to make. That’s up to Erin.’

‘Have you talked to her about it?’

‘No. I haven’t spoken to her at all. She won’t take my calls. Or reply to my messages.’

Alix makes a circle of her mouth and exhales. None of this makes any sense. None of it. ‘Have you thought about going to the flat and going through Erin’s computer? Seeing what you can find?’

‘I don’t know anything about computers.’

‘Well, yes, but I do. I could come with you?’

‘No. No, thank you. Erin will come to me when she’s ready.’

‘But, Josie, think about it. Erin has been abused under your roof for years. You’ve done nothing to protect her. She waits until you’re out of the house before she uses the bathroom. What on earth makes you think she’s going to get in touch with you?’

Josie sighs and shrugs. ‘You’re probably right,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you’re right. But whatever happens, it’s better for her than being in that flat with that man. Whatever happens, at least she’s free.’

3.30 p.m.

Alix stands outside the school gates. She has brought the dog, who has not been taken for a walk yet today. She wanted an excuse to leave a little early, to be out a little late. Her head is bursting. She feels sick. Mothers chat with her and she chats back, glad of the opportunity to take herself completely out of the place she’s spent the past few hours. The dog sees another dog and yaps at it and Alix apologises to the dog’s owner. Children fuss around the tiny dog and Alix says, ‘Be careful, he can be a bit snappy.’ Someone asks if the dog is hers and she says, ‘No, he belongs to a friend,’ then corrects herself and says, ‘To someone I know.’

She takes the children to the park and watches them on the swings, the dog tucked under her arm. She wishes the dog could talk. The dog would know, she thinks, the dog would know everything. She wants to talk to Josie’s mum, but she has promised Josie that she won’t.

She can’t stop thinking about Walter, about the way he’d been on Friday night when he came for dinner. The brand-new clothes with the creases still in. The moderate drinking (he had only two beers, all night). The quiet way he’d talked to her in her recording studio about his ‘Jojo’, about her lying and her making up stories to suit her own narrative. She’d put it down to the behaviour of a gaslighter; she’d assumed that it was all part of his act. And maybe it was. But she can’t shift the discomfiting sense that there’s something else. Something behind this dark, yet somehow typical, story of a family blighted by the dysfunction of a controlling and dominant man.

She’s not who she makes out to be. Not at all .

That’s what he’d said. And as much as her gut tells her to believe a woman who says she has been abused, it also tells her that Josie is not to be trusted.