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She pauses, takes a breath. ‘My husband is … He’s very complicated. And our family life has been quite traumatic at times and I just … I don’t know, listening to your podcasts, those amazing women – I’m forty-five, if I don’t break free of the past now, then when will I? It’s time. It’s time for me to change everything and I’m not asking you to help me, Alix, I just want you to …’ She stops as she tries to find the right words.
‘You want me to tell your story?’
‘Yes! That’s exactly what I want. Because I know I look quite ordinary, but my story is extraordinary and it deserves to be heard. What do you think?’
Alix is silent for a moment, not sure how to respond. Her instincts tell her very strongly to walk away, but she came here for a reason. She came here because the journalist inside her couldn’t resist the tantalising essence of the words ‘There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’ She wanted to hear what Josie was going to tell her. And now she’s heard that Josie has an extraordinary story to share, and even though Alix is slightly repelled by Josie’s intensity, she is also sickeningly drawn to the idea of finding out what it is.
‘I think’, she says, ‘that it sounds like a very interesting idea indeed. What are you doing tomorrow?’
Alix walks home through the back streets between Kilburn High Road and Queen’s Park. The June breeze is cool, and she walks on the sunny side of the street. She has two hours before she has to collect the children from school, and she can’t face going back to work on the edits for the final podcast of the All Woman series. She’s bored of listening to women who made good decisions and ended up exactly where they wanted to be and feels strongly and sharply that what she wants right now, as dark clouds begin to gather across the light in her own life, is to bear witness to the dark truth of another woman’s marriage. Alix feels the buzz of anticipation build inside her. She’s been doing the same thing for so long. The thought of doing something completely different is stimulating.
She takes a detour to the boutique on Salusbury Road and spends an hour leafing through clothes she doesn’t need before leaving with a pair of forest-green-framed sunglasses that she also doesn’t need. She goes to a delicatessen and buys expensive antipasti to eat in the garden tonight so that she doesn’t have to cook. She buys brownies from Gail’s and a cactus plant from the trendy florist’s. The money she spends is Nathan’s money; Nathan’s money that he earns selling leases on glamorous high-rise office space in various corners of the city. He works so hard. He earns so well. He’s so generous. He never looks at bank statements or makes snidey comments about clusters of designer carrier bags. His money, he always tells her, is her money. The money she earns is also her money, but he doesn’t expect her to contribute to family expenses, and as she thinks about these things, she feels the pros and cons list in her head start to shift a little, swinging back towards the pros. The memory of the empty bed on Sunday morning starts to fade away. The thought of him unconscious on a hotel bed diminishes. The hum of low-level anger and resentment mutes. She will open wine tonight. They will eat the expensive food on the terrace and sit and marvel at the way the midsummer sky is still light at ten and let the children stay up past their bedtimes and listen to music on Spotify and have the sort of night that people expect someone like her to have.
Wednesday, 19 June
Josie stares at herself in the mirror the next morning. Her skin looks nice; it’s hereditary, nothing to do with expensive creams or treatments. Her hair needs a trim, it’s far too long and splitting at the ends. She unzips her denim make-up bag and takes out a tube of mascara. She never normally wears make-up to walk the dog, but then she never normally meets a famous podcaster halfway through walking the dog. She colours her face with bronzer using a huge fluffy brush and puts on some tinted lip balm. Then she pulls on her favourite dress; it’s made of denim and buttons up the front to a shirt collar and ties up at the waist with a matching belt. She wears it with her denim plimsolls and appraises herself in the full-length mirror.
Walter is in the window overlooking the street, staring at his laptop. She tries to avoid his gaze as he will wonder about the make-up and the smart dress, and she doesn’t want to tell him about the meeting with Alix until it has happened and she knows what it means.
She stands in the hallway and puts the dog’s harness on. ‘Taking Fred out now,’ she calls out. ‘See you in an hour or so.’
Walter nods and says, ‘See you soon.’
She turns to leave and pauses for a moment outside Erin’s room. Erin will be sleeping now; she sleeps late, until at least lunchtime. She could open the door a crack, just grab a glimpse of her baby, but she knows what else lies on the other side of that door and she doesn’t have the stomach for it. Not now. Maybe later.
Halfway to Salusbury Road, Fred starts dawdling so she picks him up and tucks him into his dog carrier. She loves the feeling of having him there, close to her chest, it reminds her of carrying her babies in slings – Baby Björns they were called. Walter had thought they were for hippies, sneered at her clipping the babies into them, said, ‘What’s wrong with a pushchair? Worked fine for my other two.’
She spots Alix immediately, by the beacon of her white-blonde hair and angular face and shoulders. She waves and Alix waves back and then they do a kissing thing that takes Josie by surprise as she never really kisses anyone. She follows Alix to one of the trendy coffee shops on Salusbury Road, the ones she walks past all the time and never stops at, and she tries to insist on buying the drinks but Alix won’t let her, says it’s a business expense, which makes Josie get goosebumps.
‘So,’ says Alix a moment later, pushing her coffee cup to one side and sliding an iPad across in its place. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about your idea. And at first, I wasn’t sure. You’ve listened to my podcasts, so you know the format. They are fully fledged stories with a beginning, middle and end, which means that even before I start recording, I know what the format will be. I’ve done it twenty, thirty times and I know what I’m doing, I know how to get the story on to tape and how to edit it to make it gripping for the listener. But this would be very different. I have no idea how your story is going to end, but you’re promising me it will be worth following and so I’m already kind of hooked. I want to know too. And if I want to know, then maybe my listeners will want to know. So I think we could give this a bash, you know. It won’t be for my All Woman series, that’s finished now. This will be something completely new and different, a one-off. The interviews would be mainly studio-based but I’d also love to talk to you in various locations that tie in with your story – where you were brought up, where you went to school, where you met your husband, all that kind of thing. And then we can take it forward into the traumas you mentioned, and what you’re going to do next to escape the trap you’ve found yourself in. I thought I might call it Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! I don’t know if you remember but those were your first words to me in the ladies at the Lansdowne. I feel like it signifies the beginning of a journey that could go in absolutely any direction. The very first moment of me colliding with you. The spark, if you like? How does that sound?’
Josie realises she has stopped breathing and moving. Her teaspoon is still suspended over her Americano, the sugar she’d added still unstirred at the bottom of the cup. She stares at Alix and nods. ‘Yes. It sounds good.’
Alix smiles. ‘Great!’ she says. ‘It would mean spending a fair bit of time together, but you work part-time and your children are fully grown. So maybe you’d be able to squeeze it in. An hour or two, here and there?’
‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘Yes. Definitely. Where do you do it? Where do you record?’
‘At my house. I have a studio.’ Alix’s fingertips clutch her golden bee pendant and slide it back and forth along the chain. ‘We could make a test episode. Just you and me chatting for an hour, in my studio. I’ll edit it and get something back for you to listen to, no obligation, you’d be totally free to walk away from it if you don’t like how it sounds. I promise.’
Josie thinks of Alix’s eight thousand followers on Instagram. In her mind’s eye she sees a sea of white-blonde women with broad shoulders and oversized sunglasses all listening to her through expensive AirPods as they cook healthy dinners for their red-haired children in open-plan kitchens. She shakes her head slightly to dislodge it. It’s too much. Instead, she zooms in on the central pinprick notion of sitting in Alix’s studio for an hour, just the two of them, talking. She has so much she needs to share.
She picks up her coffee cup and takes a sip, then carefully places it back in the saucer. ‘I suppose we could give it a bash,’ she says. ‘We could at least try.’
Walter is in the kitchen when she gets back from coffee with Alix. He’s making tea and offers to make her one too and she says, ‘No thanks, I just had a coffee.’
He raises an eyebrow at her. ‘Oh yeah. On your own?’
‘No!’ she says, taking Fred out of his carrier and putting him down on the floor. ‘No. I—’ She freezes. She can’t. He would be horrified. He would talk her out of it. ‘I bumped into a mum from Erin and Roxy’s old primary school. We just had a quick catch-up.’
She turns away but recovers herself quickly. It wasn’t even a lie. It was true.
‘Nice?’
‘Yes. Very nice. We might meet up again.’
She knows he won’t ask anything else. Walter didn’t really have much to do with the girls’ schooling, especially after all that business with the social services when Erin was in year six.
‘I’m going to get ready for work,’ she says, hanging Fred’s harness back on the coat rack. Walter nods and then does a double take as he comes out from behind the kitchen counter with his tea. ‘You look all dressed up,’ he says, gesturing at her button-down dress.
