‘So busy you have to see me on your commute?’ Hannah says archly to him.
Her face looks different. Lauren always said she could tell when somebody was pregnant. She would always make the same gesture, a one-handed wash of the face. ‘Something around the …’ she would say. It had become a joke between them, but actually, he can see exactly what she means. There is something around the … the eyes? Tired, but happy.
‘Sorry,’ he says, not elaborating.
Hannah huffs in a very Lauren way. She’s annoyed because he rang her up the week before last and told her to burn the envelope Lauren sent. She insisted she’d keep it safe. That she wouldn’t throw it out. But she wouldn’t burn it, either. He hung up on her. He’s not proud of it.
Hannah looks out of the window of the Tube, waiting, Aidan guesses, to be asked how she is.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Weird, though. Feels like there’s a balloon in my stomach. I’m so gassy.’
They lapse into silence until they get off at Holland Park.
‘Lauren said she got really bad sickness,’ Aidan says, once they’re on the stairs, catching Hannah’s eyes. Her dark curls are obscuring one of them. ‘In her pregnancy. She told me ages ago,’ he adds quickly. God, how amateur. He may as well have said: we haven’t been speaking on burner phones.
‘That’s okay so far,’ she says. ‘Early days, though.’
Aidan directs them into an alley, walking in the opposite direction to his flat. The street is slick with rainwater. A chip shop pushes fried smells out into the air.
Hannah reaches into her pocket and opens the NHS piece of cardboard, the scan inside. It looks exactly like all scan photos he’s seen. Black, white, pixellated. Something resembling an alien in the centre. Aidan could send Lauren any scan off the internet and she’d never know the difference. But, nevertheless, he takes a photo of it on his phone, smiles briefly at Hannah, and passes it back to her.
‘Fingers crossed,’ he says, because it seems churlish not to acknowledge her anxiety.
She winces, and he guesses he said the wrong thing. They emerge on to a side street, passing behind a set of sixties office blocks. It begins to spit rain again, and Hannah wipes at her face. She bites her bottom lip with those gappy front teeth and nods.
‘Where is the envelope Lauren wrote on?’ he says quietly.
‘It’s safe, don’t worry. I told you I’d keep it safe.’ She gives him the exact same wounded look Lauren would. An indignant sort of expression.
Aidan can’t help but smile at it, mostly because it reminds him of all the times he has been on the receiving end of it. In a simpler, past life, when his errors related to saying no to rescue cats and elaborate holidays.
‘It wasn’t postmarked, anyway.’
‘But if they know you’re in touch, Hannah, they will come to find you and make you tell them.’
‘Will they?’ she says.
In her eyes, he sees his own former doubts echoed there: why would a bunch of football fans care this much?
‘Did you tell anyone?’ he says. ‘About the envelope?’
They’re walking quickly in the November cold. In between two office blocks and out on to a high street with a Pret on the corner.
Hannah’s eyes avoid his. ‘Conrad,’ she says.
Aidan nods.
‘And a friend,’ she says.
‘What?’ Aidan says. It comes out too loud, and Hannah winces, moving away from him. It’s okay, it’s okay, he tells himself, though he doesn’t believe it. He is the captain of the Titanic. The orchestra is starting up, the lower decks are filling with water, and he’s listening to a fucking violin concerto.
‘It’s hard, this,’ she says. She gestures vaguely to, Aidan guesses, her own baby, and then to him. ‘My sister is …’
‘I know,’ Aidan says, thinking, selfishly: it’s harder for me. Not only missing Lauren, but trying to keep everything taped together. Plasters over wounds that are lacerating faster than he can cover them. ‘Who’s the friend?’
‘She’s called Molly.’
Aidan waits, looking at her.
‘She isn’t going to tell anyone,’ Hannah adds.
Her breath clouds up the air in front of her. They walk past a Costa and she is silhouetted against it and, once again, he sees Lauren. The slightly crooked nose.
‘How do you know? You weren’t going to tell anyone,’ Aidan says.
‘We spent the day together on Sunday. We went walking. Bushy Park. I don’t know. I just told her. Look, I told her to not tell anybody. I’ll make sure.’
Aidan looks beyond her, into the Costa full of Christmas drinks. They walk on, past a bank. Hannah looks up at him in the gloom, those tired, happy eyes.
They part ways and Aidan gets the Tube two stops one way, two the next, just to confuse anybody who might be trying to follow him. The lights flicker and go out halfway back home, and he enjoys sitting in the dimness, thinking. Lauren tells one person. Hannah tells one person. Molly tells one person. Each of those people tells another. Promise you won’t say anything, but …
That’s the age they live in: information is gathered and disseminated to those who care about it. If everybody tells just one person, how long will it be before they’re found?
Not long at all, he thinks. The Tube lights come back on, but Aidan still feels like he is in the darkness.
That blackness follows Aidan home. Not home. To his flat. The place he is now forced to call home. Bill greets him, but he hardly sees him. He sends the group the latest results from his scraper, all faked. A blonde woman working at a nursery in Fife. The woman doesn’t exist, and everyone who works at that nursery has dark hair, so nobody will be harmed.
He’ll get found out, soon, when all of his results are deemed bogus, but all he needs is a bit more time.
His iPhone is ringing and he answers it without looking who it is. It won’t be Lauren, and the rest doesn’t seem to matter.
‘The envelope has gone.’
It’s Hannah. Aidan sits on the uncomfortable, cheap old sofa.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Conrad put the envelope in the recycling. I’m sorry. He’s a neat freak. It was on top of the microwave. He thought it was rubbish.’
‘Well, get it out, then,’ Aidan says, his palms slick with sweat. More moisture in the wrong places. The phone slides against his hand.
‘They collected it – he always does it dead early … the recycling.’
‘Great,’ Aidan says flatly.
‘Look, it’s fine,’ she says. ‘It’ll be in some recycling centre somewhere, now. Best place for it. Only …’
‘Only what?’
‘Well. Look. It’s probably nothing …’
Aidan closes his eyes. There is a furnace in his chest, the heat turning up and up and up. This can’t be happening. ‘What?’
‘Well, it’s the sort of thing I would never … I’d never have noticed, before.’
‘Yes …’
Aidan has to pace. His body is a home for his worries, and he can feel them in every inch of him. He can’t raise his voice with her. He can’t get cross with her. She is fragile.
‘There was a man. Just … a man. The other day. I should’ve said earlier, but I thought it was … just nothing.’
‘A man?’
‘I don’t know. Hanging around near my house. Enough for me to remember him, you know? He seemed out of place.’
‘In what way?’
‘He looked like he didn’t want to be seen,’ Hannah says. ‘Just on the corner, at the end of our terraces. The other evening. I don’t know.’
‘How was he dressed?’
‘Dark clothes?’ she says, as vaguely as Lauren would.
Aidan cannot understand how they are not scanning and memorizing the faces of everybody they meet, at the moment. He rises and crosses the room to sit at a makeshift desk. A pine table in front of the window. He picks up a pen and
clicks it against his teeth.
Is this a risk? A missing envelope. Congratulations and L written on it. No postmark. And a suspicious man. He clicks the pen once, twice. Hannah isn’t speaking. She is waiting – as everybody seems to – for him to make a decision.
His hairline has started receding.
He puffs air out of his cheeks and decides. Yes. It is a risk. Anything tiny is a risk, or rather, the stakes are too high. They’ll know exactly who L is. And, if they know Lauren is in touch with Hannah, they will try to get information out of Hannah.
And they will assume she is in touch with other people, too … him.
And, if they monitor him, they will find out that James Thomas is Aidan Madison.
He has to tell Lauren. He rings off and runs a bath because he misses the sound of her regular baths. Sometimes quick and functional. Sometimes elaborate. But daily, at a minimum.
His hands are shaking as he squirts shower gel into the running water – Lauren would baulk at that – and gets in. He thinks about all of the text messages. All of the little breaches. Texting in public with a second phone. Taking her calls. Finding out her location. Her sending the little parcel to Hannah. And the rest. The things he doesn’t know about. The firm lead the group has on Zara. He still doesn’t know what it is. He’ll out himself if he insists they tell him.
They’ve made too many mistakes. And the parcel to Hannah has confirmed that. A warning sign.
He calls Lauren and she answers. ‘A weekly call?’ she says.
‘Two things,’ he says.
‘Are you in the bathroom?’ she asks.
‘I’m in the bath,’ he says.
‘Nice!’
‘Look, the envelope you sent to Hannah has gone missing,’ he says. ‘I think you should tell the protection service. Hannah saw someone hanging around, too, and … well, you can never be too careful with this stuff.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ she says drily, sounding tired, suddenly, of his concerns. ‘It’s an envelope, Aidan, not an identity card. It had an L on it. It could have been anyone.’
Aidan stares at his toes surrounded by a crown of cheap bubbles that are popping quickly. The water is already becoming tepid.
‘And they only postmark small letters. It was risk-free, which is why I did it,’ she goes on.
‘You don’t know what they’re like,’ he says quietly.
‘Neither do you.’
He thinks about telling her, then, but he doesn’t. ‘When I was looking at the Facebook group before it got taken down,’ he lies, ‘they said they would watch the people left behind.’
‘For how long?’
‘Look, just tell the service, will you?’
Lauren pauses. ‘I am not going to tell them I sent that parcel, Aidan. What’s the second thing?’
‘The phones,’ he says. ‘They were for emergencies only. These phones.’
‘No,’ she says softly, her tone completely different. ‘You’re the only person I know. Please don’t. I made these fucking cookies the other week and –’
‘Can’t you see?’ He tries to be gentle with her. ‘We’re going to end up slipping up. Already we’ve gone from texts to calls to this – I was half-cut, texting you the other night – in plain sight.’
‘Nobody is looking,’ she says. ‘Please don’t leave me. Zara is – she’s being a nightmare, and I … I need you.’
‘I love you too much,’ he says.
‘Please.’
‘We can’t. We can’t,’ he says. ‘We can’t.’
‘We can.’
‘Every call we make, it endangers Zara. You have no idea how badly they want to find her.’
She pauses. A loaded pause, a pregnant pause. ‘Aidan, what do you know?’ she says.
Her tone chills him. He has frightened her. He gazes at his shadowy form in the frosted window. He is changing. He looks menacing, his features drawn. He looks away from himself.
He says nothing, hundreds of miles apart, their ears just inches away from each other. ‘I know things I shouldn’t,’ he says softly. God, what is he doing? He is telling her things. More things he said he wouldn’t. Reasonable, logical Aidan: he crumbles around her. ‘Keep the phone charged. But don’t ring me,’ he says. ‘We have to obey the system. Or we’re going to get caught.’
‘But –’
‘For Zara,’ he says.
Her silence is her agreement.
‘I’ll contact you if there’s anything you need to know,’ he says.
When he gets out of the bath, he still has too much energy. He starts doing push-ups, feeling his biceps strain. It’s for the best. It’s for the best if he gets fitter. It’s for the best if he gets bigger. Stronger. Able to defend himself against anybody.
Aidan wakes in the night.
Daytime Aidan tells himself that he’s ahead of the group, that he’s controlling the situation. But, right now, as the dawn is just breaking and the rain is falling on the roof of the flat, he can feel it: they’re coming for him, too. It’s all going to fall apart.
So he does what most people would do in this situation, living in fear for themselves and for their children: he travels to see his mother.
She’s sorting a delivery of stock when he gets there at seven thirty. He’s hardly ever seen his mother sleep. She seems to be on the go for eighteen hours a day. Always up before him when he was a child.
‘I knew you’d be here,’ he says to her as he approaches the shop.
The sky has lightened from navy blue to grey beyond the row of shops – a pharmacy, a takeaway and his mother’s shop. She is checking items off a list as a delivery driver waits, his van idling on the leaf-strewn road at the front.
She catches his eye. ‘It’s nice to see you,’ she says in a considered, slow way. She is wondering how he is.
And there it is: his safety net.
That thought is all it takes. Everything Aidan is trying to keep aloft falls down around him. His jaw shudders and his mouth opens against his will and he’s crying, right out here on the street, in front of the delivery man, in front of his mother for the first time as an adult.
Brenda glances at him, then says quickly to the delivery driver, ‘Just leave the stuff – just leave it.’
‘Okay,’ the delivery driver says, having not noticed Aidan. ‘We do just have to do the check –’
‘Just tick them all off,’ Brenda says. ‘I’ll just sign it.’
She holds Aidan’s arm and leads him inside, through the shop and into the back room. She silently makes a pot of coffee and gestures for him to sit on one of the delivery pallets. It yields underneath him.
‘It’s just juice,’ Brenda says. ‘Burst it if you want to.’
Aidan gives a wan smile and rubs at his face, then lets the tears keep coming. ‘God, sorry,’ he says, while Brenda plunges the coffee. ‘I miss them,’ he says. ‘I miss them and I don’t know what to do.’ He takes a deep breath. The back room is warm and is filled with the nutty smell of the coffee. He feels each muscle relaxing in his back, one by one.
The pallet of juice depresses as Brenda sits next to him. It isn’t big enough for both of them, but she squeezes on anyway and suddenly, he is young again, Aidan the child, in the safety of his mother’s presence.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘You must. I do, too.’
Aidan nods quickly. Lauren always got on with Brenda. She gets on with everyone, which is actually part of the problem.
‘You know, after she met you, Lauren only shopped here,’ she says, gesturing to the shelves around them. ‘She had a shop right outside her flat, and never went there. She was loyal only to here.’
Aidan stares at his lap, his hands shaking. He had no idea. He had no idea of all the ways his wife had privately loved him. ‘Wow,’ he says.
‘And she bought tons of stuff.’
‘I can imagine,’ Aidan says wryly.
They don’t speak for a few minutes.
And then Aidan l
ooks sideways at his mother, blinking so the tears clear in his vision. ‘What do I do?’ he asks.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘I used to be a night owl.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. I made sure to be in bed by two, before work, that was my rule. Before I had the shop,’ she says.
Aidan nods. She worked in a laundrette for years, evening shifts. He remembers her telling him about it when they walked past it one day. ‘Your father came to wash his sheets and we got talking,’ she had said, pointing to a red laundrette in Clapham. She used to come home when he was a child smelling of detergent, the white powdery kind with the blue flecks in it.
‘Wow,’ Aidan says.
‘And you changed it all.’
She sips her coffee and he does the same. It’s bitter, tarry, like liquorice. Something in the way she dips her head, the bend of her neck, reminds him just of Poppy. He’s never seen that before. Families are so funny, the way the genes thread seamlessly through the generations.
‘I was a bad sleeper?’ he says.
‘Not bad, no,’ Brenda says, her mouth turned down. ‘You just had a very set body clock. You wanted to be in your cot, on your own, by seven. Up the next day by six. I learnt to appreciate the mornings, you know? The fresh breeze, the pretty colours in the sky. You taught me that. And then, when we bought this place –’ she gestures around them to the canned goods and the newspapers, ‘– we were set. I was used to it. Haven’t had a lie-in since. Wouldn’t want one.’
Aidan says nothing, enjoying sitting next to his mother and letting his tears fall, his nose running unchecked on to his top lip. He leans back, his shoulders touching the hot radiator.
‘You never regret what you do for your kids,’ Brenda says. ‘It’s always the right thing to do.’
Aidan grasps her meaning immediately. ‘You do your best,’ he says. ‘I’m doing my best.’
‘You’d feel a lot worse if you had gone,’ she says, with a small, sad shrug.
And it’s true. Both options available to him were poor. That’s all. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.
How to Disappear Page 22
