AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘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 .’
***
