None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

(she’d expected something more sophisticated from Alix than stodgy pasta and can’t help feeling a bit shortchanged)

Oh my GOD

Alix had been distracted and sharp. She had not been a good host and it had not been a good evening.

“In what way,” he says, “did I embarrass you?” “Just—just by being you.” “That’s nice, Jojo.”

“All the work? What work? Listen, I really don’t know what’s going on between you and that woman, but I can tell you something for certain. She’s no ‘friend’ of yours. She doesn’t even like you.”

Josie feels the swirling fragments of the universe slow down and thicken and then clear and all that is left is red-hot fury that feels as if it’s burning her from the inside out. She thinks of the things she heard Walter saying to Alix in the recording studio, poisoning her with his vile lies, and she knows that it is here, at last, the moment she has been waiting for; she feels certainty rip through her like a cyclone.

Did she kill him....she killed him didn't she

“I haven’t got an inner sanctum,” Josie wails. “I’ve got Walter and I’ve got the girls and I’ve got Fred and I’ve got you.” Alix feels the contents of her stomach curdle slightly at Josie’s intonation of the word “you.” It sounds proprietorial and odd. No, she wants to say. No, you don’t have me.

Alix doesn’t react with the words she wants to utter. She doesn’t say, Please do not ever compare your elderly, dead-eyed, pedophiliac gaslighter of a husband with mine, who has a drink problem but is fundamentally decent.

“Yes. My husband did it.” “Oh my God. That’s awful.” “Yes. It’s terrible. Only slightly more terrible than a husband who doesn’t come home for a dinner that his wife has cooked for him and spends the whole night out somewhere in his work clothes.”

Ohhhh my god

And there’s an edge to her voice which makes Alix think that Josie actively wants Nathan to go on another bender, to commit another cardinal sin, to blow it somehow. That she actively wants Nathan to be as bad as Walter.

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 makeup, 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.

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.

Ohhh no

She thinks of her underwear drawer, at home, of the trophies and trinkets tucked away behind her socks and bras. Not just Alix’s. The others too.

WHAT

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.”

What in the absolute hell

“But you weren’t wearing your pajamas when you came to me. You were wearing the dress. The lovely dress.” “I put it back on. I wasn’t going to walk halfway across Kilburn in my pajamas.” “But the dress had blood on it. How did the dress have blood on it if you weren’t wearing it during the attack?”

Get herrrrrr

“She’s fine, Alix. She’s fine. She can take care of herself.” “But you said she can’t. You said you’ve been feeding her baby food. You said—” Alix flinches as Josie pulls off her headphones and slams them on the tabletop. “I’m trying to tell you my story, Alix. My truth. And you seem to be trying to make it into something it isn’t. You either want my story or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. You just can’t.”

Jesus Christ

“Can you remember whereabouts in the Lake District you used to go?” “Yes. Ambleside. Right by the water.”

LOL ofc it was

“She said that your father left the marital bed every night and went into Erin’s bedroom, then didn’t come back.” “Yes. He was gaming with her.” “Gaming?”

Omfg

Roxy is always OK and would never want anyone to think otherwise.

it was almost as if she spent her whole life just waiting for someone to show her that they didn’t want her.

tomorrow I am collecting our lockdown puppy from a breeder in Hampshire. She is an Aussie sheepdog with mismatched eyes, and she will be called Matilda, for obvious reasons. She will, I hope, bring joy to our small family as we learn to live with the absence, with the grief, with the questions, with the pain.

And maybe one day I would have reached the end of the road, maybe one day I would have decided to live without him. But Josie took that choice from me. She took all the other possible paths our lives could have taken away from us.

Do not claim that you are anything other than what you are. An evil motherfucking basic bitch.

She stares through the window of the bus, and for just a fleeting moment, Josie is sure, she is so sure that—yes!—that is what really happened

Sure girl!

And she has done nothing wrong, not really, not ever.

me as hell