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‘You mean, the podcast?’
‘Yes. We should try and get as much down on tape as we can.’
Josie feels her heart pick up under the cotton of Alix’s expensive T-shirt at the thought of next week. She feels the heat in the air, the sun burning already as it starts its arc across the empty sky and blazes through the glass roof of Alix’s kitchen extension, and it’s only going to get hotter.
By Sunday it will be pushing thirty-five.
She’d thought she’d have longer. She’s running out of time.
She glances up to see Alix staring thoughtfully at her. ‘I’m not sure what else there is to chat about now? I mean, we got to the end, I think? We’re up to date. Apart from the events of Friday night, of course. Would you like to talk about that?’
Josie nods, her mouth tightly pursed.
‘Shall we …?’ Alix gestures to the studio.
‘Yes,’ says Josie. ‘Let’s.’
Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin!
A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES
The screen shows a dramatic reconstruction of a couple walking down a dark street.
The text reads:
Recording from Alix Summer’s podcast, 18 July 2019
‘He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place. Made such a fuss. I bought him some nice new clothes, but he refused to wear them, insisted on wearing cheap stuff from Primark, deliberately got a terrible haircut, just to spite me. And then of course, when Nathan didn’t make an appearance …’
Josie sighs.
‘Well, you could see how annoyed he was. And then he seethed the whole walk home. I could feel it coming off him. The dark rage building and building. By the time we got home …’
The screen shows a couple letting themselves into the Fairs’ building.
‘… the atmosphere was putrid. I couldn’t control my anger by that point. I felt it all, all of it, rolling and churning through me like a storm, and finally, after all these years, I found the strength to hurl it out of my gut and into the air, to hit Walter with it, right between the eyes. I just screamed at him. “Paedophile! You’re a paedophile! You groomed me and you took me when I was too young to know what I wanted. And then you groomed Brooke and you took her when she was too young to know what she wanted. And then you abused your own daughter. The only daughter you have left after what you did to Roxy. You have abused your daughter over and over again and I have let you do that because I have been programmed by you to believe that you are God and that you can have anything you want. But you are not God, Walter, and you cannot have anything you want. You cannot. And it stops tonight. What you’re doing to Erin. It stops tonight . No more. No more.”
‘And then I ran to Erin’s door and I pushed it open and there was my baby, my Erin, staring at me from wide, dead eyes. I said, “Pack a bag, baby. Quickly. I’m getting you out of here. We’re leaving.” I said, “I know what Dad’s been doing and I’m so, so sorry, baby. So sorry that I abandoned you.” And that was when I felt it, a blow to the back of my head, then a kind of deep radiating heat and pain and wetness. I turned and saw Walter’s arm coming back towards me, with the remote control he’d just used to hit me with held in his hand, coming towards my face and then he beat me with it, all over my face and head. Erin just stood there; so thin, she was. So thin. And I threw myself towards Walter and shoved him in his chest with both my hands outstretched and said, “ Enough. That is enough .” And I saw him raise his hand to hit my child and I just flung myself between them, and then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped.’
The screen shows an actor playing the part of Walter, breathing heavily in the doorway, the remote control hanging from his hand, the actors playing Erin and Josie, standing in Erin’s room, their arms around each other. Then Walter turns and leaves.
‘A moment later I peered into the living room. Walter was sitting at his laptop. The remote control was sitting on the coffee table. It was like he was trying to give the impression that none of it had ever happened, like I didn’t have a split lip and blood seeping down the back of my neck. It was as if he thought we were all just going to carry on. Normally. Like we always did. But he was wrong. I grabbed my handbag, I grabbed the dog, I grabbed Erin, and we left. Neither of us said goodbye.’
The screen shows Erin and Josie closing the front door of their building behind them; the actor playing Josie turns slightly, to look at Walter in the bay window.
The screen fades to darkness.
***
11 a.m.
Alix exhales. She has not breathed for what feels like minutes. The scenario that Josie has painted inside her head is making her feel claustrophobic, as if she is trapped in that dark, shabby flat with all three of them. She can smell it inside her nostrils: the fear and the blood. She pictures them on the street, Josie and Erin, carrying just what they grabbed as they left, the blood congealing on Josie’s face. Walter, still and unrepentant in the bay window.
But that is where the picture starts to fragment. Josie walked from her home near Kilburn the sixteen minutes to Alix’s house in Queen’s Park. But it was 3 a.m. when she appeared on Alix’s doorstep. It was cold. What happened between ten o’clock, when they would have returned home, and 3 a.m., when Josie arrived here?
She glances up at Josie and says, ‘Where did you go? When you left the flat?’
Josie issues a small laugh. ‘Well, here, obviously.’
