None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

‘There’s power in being a teenager. I miss that power in some ways. I would like it back.’

Even the cat; a cat unlike any she’d seen before. A Siberian, apparently. Tiny and fluffy with the huge green eyes of a cartoon Disney princess.

But it is clear to Alix that Pat is actually a raging narcissist, and that no child of a narcissist ever makes it out into the world unscathed.

She hates the sound of football – the dull bass monotone of male calls, the incessant up and down intonation of the commentators, the whistles and the drums; it sounds like the backdrop to a nightmare,

But that girl … that girl is starting to feel like a shapeshifter, a fraud, a one-dimensional paper doll. She’s blurring in her mind’s eye into a human puddle.

And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviours that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.

The atmosphere in the flat shifts into a new realm with every word that she utters. It’s like she’s smashing a fist through a sequence of invisible walls with each one, getting closer and closer to something approaching the truth of everything.

I’m married to a fucking nutter.’ ‘And I’m married to a fucking paedophile!’

It feels like Josie has taken Alix’s normal and swallowed it deep down somewhere inside her darkness.