Zara has always tried to do the right thing. And, today, on this sofa, she takes the truth and anchors herself to it, like a ship out to sea with only this to tether her. She knows that it was right, even though everything fell apart. Nobody can tell her otherwise. Especially not now, not after what Anna told her on Sunday.
‘What would that involve?’ Aidan now says to the police.
Her mum is rhythmically stroking Bill’s ears.
‘It would be full protection,’ Nazir says. He avoids Zara’s gaze.
He goes to the gym, Zara can tell. Swimmer’s arms. A tiny waist. His trousers sit low down. He looks like many of the boys she goes to school with, the ones who drink protein shakes out of enormous clear plastic bottles and who Instagram themselves lifting weights. The sort of boys Poppy hangs around with. Full of banter and slang. The sort of people who make Zara feel like an alien.
‘New name. New location. New identities. We’ll send someone out … to discuss it further,’ Nazir adds.
Zara’s mum is nodding quickly. Zara is queasy, her stomach in tight, guilty knots. This is all her fault.
‘The protection service deems you at enough risk that you would be relocated. Now that there have been two attempts.’ He catches Zara’s eye, this time, and her cheeks colour.
‘Like starting a new life?’ her mum says. ‘From scratch?’
‘It’s the best solution when violence like this –’ Nazir gestures to the phone, ‘– is attempted.’
‘Right,’ Zara says, because she feels she should say something. She looks down into her lap, hoping his gaze moves away from her. When she looks up, he’s staring at her the same way Jamie looked up at her as he died. A fixed stare. Zara closes her eyes. It’s worth it. All of this is worth it. For justice. For Jamie.
‘Where would we go?’ Lauren says.
‘It’s best not to disclose that yet. We take you there first. But it’s usually far away,’ Nazir says.
The enormity of it all seems to step into the room and sit right next to Zara on the sofa. Leaving her school. Her friends. Poppy. Waste Not and the homeless community. Jamie’s friends he left behind, who like her just as she is. How she’s got her bedroom just so, her many novels arranged by colour, her clothes rolled up like Marie Kondo advises. These may sound like small things, but they are important to Zara.
‘There’s got to be an alternative to this … to this madness,’ Aidan says.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nazir says.
‘Why can’t the police just keep protecting us?’
‘You all need to go to work – and school,’ Nazir says. He rubs at his face awkwardly. ‘I mean, it’s not a long-term solution. To have this –’ he gestures outside, ‘– for ever.’
‘But this could blow over!’ Aidan says.
Her mother is looking at him thoughtfully, the sort of dark look he receives when he’s left wet towels on the bathroom floor. Zara’s witnessed it many times.
‘We need to be safe,’ she says, more to Aidan than to Nazir. ‘We’ll do whatever it takes.’
‘We could hire security guards,’ Aidan says.
He sounds so desperate. Zara didn’t think it was possible for her to feel worse than she did.
Nazir spreads his hands apart, his elbows resting on his thighs. ‘I don’t think most families’ budgets would stretch to that,’ he says. ‘You’re free to explore alternative arrangements if it would make you happy. But this is what we – the police – are officially advising. Protection.’
‘Okay,’ her mother says.
‘It would be the three of you?’ Nazir says, making a note.
‘Yes,’ Lauren says.
Zara’s head snaps up. She immediately looks across at Aidan. The faintest of blushes has stained his cheeks, underneath his glasses.
13
Aidan
Clapham, London
It’s six o’clock in the evening. The police have left – save for the three unmarked vehicles that now surround the house – and Aidan has excused himself. He’s come out to see his mum, Brenda. And then, later this evening, his daughter.
He shouldn’t be out. Lauren and Zara are jumping at every noise, double- and triple-checking locks. But he’s so tired, so jaded. So in need of some headspace, of something for him.
He sits on a pallet of Carling and looks at his mum. It smells like the past in here. The wood-and-ink scent of newspapers.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ She is bracing herself on the doorframe. Her knees are bad. She’s waiting for an operation.
Aidan’s mind is spinning over witness protection. If he went with Lauren … he’d leave Poppy, and his mother. He shakes his head. This is what he has done since he arrived. Gone over and over what’s happened. He wanted, he guesses, to talk to his own parent, while he tried to fathom out a decision about his child. His children. His blended family.
Lauren didn’t say anything. When the police left, she sat on one of the stools in the kitchen and sipped her drink. Eyes looking dolefully over the rim at him. But she didn’t speak.
He needs to take Poppy with them. He stares at his feet as he tries to think how he could do it.
Brenda hands him a mug. He only drinks coffee with her. They shared a pot in a cheap diner after his father’s funeral – she couldn’t face the wake, not yet – and it became their ritual. It’s sacrosanct, just for them. The cafetière slowly plunging down on the counter in the back room, the black liquid swirling, blond bubbles on top. The two mugs, an inch of milk in each. The click of Brenda’s knees as she sits down – she insists on making it.
Aidan pulls at the plastic wrapping between the cans of lager, procrastinating. ‘It’s not Zara’s fault she’s not my own.’
‘I know,’ his mother says, eyes sympathetic.
‘How can I make it work? For everyone?’ he says, though he knows that’s not what it’s about. None of those things matter. It’s about Poppy, and only Poppy. His beautiful, emotional, complicated child. Poppy, Poppy, Poppy, beats his heart.
‘You’re always trying to make things work,’ Brenda says mildly. ‘After Dad, and then with Natalie …’
‘I know.’
‘The weight of the world doesn’t rest with you,’ she says. ‘You know?’
‘I do,’ he says, even though he doesn’t. If he hadn’t gone to see his mother four times a week after his father died, he is sure she wouldn’t still be here now. If he hadn’t tried to make it work with Natalie, Poppy’s mother, he is sure Poppy would hate him today. He can’t rest. He can’t become complacent. He will lose everything.
‘But this is serious,’ he says.
‘Yes. I’m just saying, it isn’t your fault. You take it all on yourself.’
‘I don’t know what to do –’ he says tightly, resting the toe of his shoe on the corner of another box.
‘Which option,’ his mother says, cutting over him and opening a packet of Quavers, ‘is the one you definitely cannot live with?’
Aidan pauses for a minute, thinking. And then he recoils from the thought. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, it’s not a straight choice.’ He swallows. ‘There’s no way I can voluntarily leave Poppy,’ he adds. It’s the sort of truth that feels solid when spoken, like a sad, heavy fact in his stomach. He can’t leave Poppy, because he loves her. He can’t leave Poppy, because he left her once, already, when he divorced Natalie. She’s damaged. He can’t leave Poppy alone with her mother, her unwell mother.
But how can he take her? Make her leave her mother, her little life? The cousins on Natalie’s side of the family, her friends, her school?
He is thinking of Poppy, of the unwitting carer she’s become for Natalie, of the invisible things he tries to do to ease her burden. The shopping trips. Bringing provisions in for Natalie that Poppy doesn’t see, so she doesn’t feel undermined. He can’t leave her to fend for herself. He can’t.
Aidan has always known there to be a ranking system within blended families. It’s crass to admit, to explo
re, but there is. Poppy is his. Zara isn’t. He loves them equally, but not in the same way.
Aidan looks at his mother, who surely feels the same way about him. She still dyes her hair – a mousey brown – and the effect is that she still looks near to Aidan’s age. Her skin is unlined. She uses that Nivea stuff, in the navy and white tub. Her face looks greasy late at night, on the rare occasions he sees it – Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, birthdays – and the smell transports him back to 1980s London.
‘Would you stay with Poppy? Or would you go, and leave Poppy? All things being equal,’ his mother says.
Her voice is soft in the dim back room of the shop.
That’s it, he realizes: he’s got to take Poppy with him.
‘I’m going to ask if Natalie can come, too,’ he says.
His mother’s brow crinkles.
‘Would you come?’ he prompts. ‘There’s got to be a way … a way this can … I can …’
‘Of course I would,’ she says. ‘You’re my baby.’ She smiles. ‘But, Aidan,’ she probes. ‘There’s got to be a limit to who you can take.’
‘Families aren’t just neat little sets of four,’ he snaps.
‘I know.’ She holds her hands up.
Of course she knows. He shouldn’t have retorted. ‘Everybody is connected,’ he says, his voice hoarse-sounding in the quiet of the back room. ‘I don’t know how to …’
‘What would happen if you … if you let them go? To be safe? And stayed here for Poppy.’
‘I can’t do that,’ he says. ‘I can’t … I just … it feels like I only just met Lauren.’
‘It might not be for ever,’ Brenda says. ‘Until it blows over. Maybe.’
‘I can’t leave them.’
‘I know.’
‘I can’t leave Poppy.’
Brenda says nothing.
‘I’m going to speak to Natalie, now,’ he says.
‘Okay,’ she says, and there is something funny about her tone.
He realizes what it is as he turns away from her. She is humouring him. She thinks there is no solution, but she is letting him believe that there is. Because he is her baby.
As they part, she stands on one of the tatty old mats they keep outside the back of the shop. ‘It’ll be okay,’ she says. ‘Just do your best.’ This is the phrase she has always said to him, right from when he was a little boy, and worried about PE lessons and friendships.
As he kisses her goodbye, he feels her cheek quivering, just slightly, like the fluttering heartbeat of a tiny animal.
‘That’s absurd,’ Natalie says to Aidan. She’s in bed, propped up against four pillows arranged in a diamond shape behind her. Even though she’s ill, currently cradling one limp arm in the other, she is still Natalie. Still his ex. They broke up over a decade ago and, in order to make sense of that, she thinks that he is a twat. It’s crass, but it’s true.
‘It’s less absurd than me leaving our daughter.’
‘And have you thought about who else I would leave?’
Aidan doesn’t say anything to that. All of these hurdles are just that. And isn’t it better to overcome hurdles than to leave his family for ever?
‘You’re putting your problem on to me. You don’t want to leave your family, so I have to leave mine. Typical you.’
‘Jesus,’ Aidan says, standing awkwardly in the doorway of her bedroom. It smells old-fashioned in here. Of talcum powder and scented drawer liners. He remembers, suddenly, the first night they slept together. She had a Conservative Party membership card on her bedside table. Traditional talcum powder and traditional views, that had been Natalie. ‘One of them was in our fucking back garden, grinning like a mad person.’
Natalie ignores him. ‘And my brother? And his kids? And my parents? And Poppy’s friends?’ Natalie presses. She’s always been this way, but the spikes of her personality are more angled, now, with him. ‘This isn’t just about you, Aidan. You can’t take the whole world.’
Aidan walks over and sits on the edge of the bed, his legs too close to hers, really, but he doesn’t care. He puts his head in his hands. ‘It’s an octopus,’ he says.
Natalie doesn’t acknowledge his apt metaphor. The conversation is over. It has lasted four minutes. His suggestion is too ludicrous to even warrant a proper discussion.
‘You won’t come,’ he adds.
‘Have you got any idea what you’re asking me to do?’
‘I do. But, Natalie. I don’t have a choice. You really – actually – won’t come?’
‘No, I won’t come. Some girl I hardly know lied in court,’ Natalie says. Her complexion has blanched. He’s tired her out.
He is a shitty, shitty person.
‘Poppy’s half-sister,’ he corrects out of loyalty.
‘Step,’ Natalie says immediately.
‘If you don’t come, I will have to leave Lauren and Zara for ever,’ Aidan says. His voice is a cracked vase.
Natalie shrugs then. Not even an outright no. Just a shrug, an argument won. She is the victor, now, over ten years on.
Aidan flushes the toilet and runs the taps in Natalie’s bathroom, to cover the noise of what he is about to do. And then he sits on the edge of the 1980s avocado suite, his socked feet sinking into the carpet that’s green-black with dirt around the edges, which he knows Poppy religiously hoovers once a week, even though it’s never clean.
He concentrates on it. Slowly, his throat seems to open, and, finally, here, alone in the bathroom, he lets it happen. He rests his palms on his knees and lets his body judder. His shoulders tense, his mouth opens in a silent scream. And here they come. The tears.
He has to choose between leaving his wife and leaving his child.
His family. His wife. His poor babies.
14
Poppy
Battersea, London
‘It’s just wild,’ Poppy finds herself saying. She brings a hand to her mouth. She shouldn’t say it like that. Sometimes, when it’s been a tough day looking after her mother – which, today, it has – she sounds so … so abrasive.
Her dad has come over to see her. To fill her in properly, rather than through rushed phone calls and cryptic texts. On quite what, she doesn’t know. He is behaving like he is about to make an announcement, but isn’t making it. He insisted on going upstairs first to see her mum, and then he spent an age in the bathroom, and now he’s here, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
He and her mother are cordial, divorced because they no longer loved each other. Nothing more or less than that. It was four years later that her mum developed multiple sclerosis, though her dad worries – constantly – that people think he left her because of it. Who cares? both Poppy and Lauren have said in response to this, but the problem is that her dad does care: he cares about absolutely everything.
The kitchen is messy. Poppy can feel her father looking at it. Seven mugs in the sink, a plate on top of them, a baking tray on top of that, like a tiered cake. She’s been meaning to tidy up a bit, but now he’s here. There’s just a bit of judgement, of concern, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s just crockery.
‘She lied to the police,’ she adds.
Poppy is drinking a detox tea by a company that her dad regularly reports on Instagram. He tells her it’s nonsense, but she likes the idea of it. She doesn’t want to lose weight, or anything. She just saw them as part of a YouTuber’s morning routine, and she thought: yes. When her mum is ill, like now, the flare-up affecting her left arm and leg this time, she can open these little pastel sachets and just … have a moment.
Poppy means it when she says she never thought Zara would have lied. Good Zara, kind Zara. Poppy is surprised. Surprised and, yeah, sort of … half pleased. She shouldn’t be. But, like all siblings, she wants the heat off herself.
‘I know,’ her dad says.
The last time he was here, he saw her pass her mum a drink to sip with a straw. When they were alone, he said, ‘She can’t sip a drink now?’
Her dad took the plate she had started rinsing and ran it under the tap himself. His cheeks were red. ‘Maybe we should sort some outside help.’
‘She doesn’t want carers,’ Poppy said in a low voice. She sounded stoic but, inside, her heart was singing. He had noticed. He had noticed.
When she went to lock up after he left, she found a handwritten note pushed through the letter box. Anytime you need a day off, an evening off, a weekend off, you call me, and I’ll sort it for you, it had said. Poppy had sat on the doormat and had read it, over and over.
‘But this is the situation,’ he says now, ‘and we need to –’
‘I mean, are they just going to … what? Start new lives?’ She leans her elbows on the kitchen counter, staring up at him.
He doesn’t look irritated by her reaction, or like she is being a nuisance, or he is tired of explaining things to her, as he sometimes does. He looks … he looks bewildered. Lost, as though he’s arrived in totally the wrong house.
‘They say we’ll never see them again,’ he says eventually, and he can’t keep the tears out of his voice.
Poppy stares down at her swamp-coloured tea, horrified. ‘That’s … I can’t imagine. God.’ That’s all she can say. She can’t fix it for him. She can’t fix either of them. She stares at her bare feet, jeans carefully rolled up after she watched a how-to video on YouTube, and feels her own emotions, right after his. Her stepmother. Bubbly Lauren, who says things like, ‘We all need daily treats and lovely eye make-up.’ And Zara, too. Quiet, calm, bookish Zara, who is clearly waiting to meet a boy out of a novel rather than from the real world.
How to Disappear Page 6
