Aidan begins to cry again, in earnest this time, and his mother wraps an arm around him, the way she has done for over forty years, and he cries against her collarbone. And that’s all he needed. His problem hasn’t gone away. Nothing is solved. But he feels better. Because he has seen his mother, and because he knows that he is doing the right thing. He’s been dealt a bad hand, and all he can do is make the best of it. It’s all anybody would do. It’s not his fault that this has happened to him. He looks into his mother’s eyes, so like his own, and he feels whole.
He takes a deep breath, here in the back room, his own confessional, and tells her what’s really going on.
‘I’m trying to get them arrested,’ he says. ‘The footballers. The group. I’ve … I’ve joined it.’
He expects his mother to be shocked, to advise against it, to be disappointed, even, but she doesn’t. ‘You always did whatever you wanted to,’ she says, with a wan kind of smile on her face.
‘Did I?’
‘All the time,’ she says, though she doesn’t supply a memory of him, and he wishes she would.
‘It’s all a complete mess,’ he says. ‘They think I’m someone else.’
‘Aidan,’ she says softly.
‘Please help me,’ he says in a small, sad voice, even though he, a father himself, knows that parents don’t always have the answers. ‘Tell me what to do.’
‘What made you do it?’ she says, finally being drawn now that he has asked explicitly for her advice. He should be more this way with Poppy. Less dictatorial. Brenda turns and looks him square in the eye.
‘I wanted to help,’ he says.
She breathes in deeply, then lets it out slowly through her nose, like a smoker. Perhaps she wishes he hadn’t told her, as he sometimes does with Poppy. Parenthood, for Aidan, has been a series of worries, one resolving as another is created, year after year, and he supposes it must be the same for Brenda.
‘I think you should stop it,’ she says softly. ‘Leave it to the police. The protection people. Sometimes life is about acceptance, not battles,’ she says, and Aidan knows that they are both thinking of their father, who spent his whole life gripped by hypochondria, and then died anyway. ‘You know?’
‘I’m going to end it,’ he says to her.
She nods once, sucks her lips in, and pats his knee. He deliberately lets her misunderstand him. She thinks he is going to stop. He means he is going to end it all. The protection arrangements. The group. He is going to save them.
On his way home, he gets a message from Kevin on Telegram. He still hasn’t sent the scrapers. Has given excuse after excuse.
Ordering a few bits n bobs, if you know what I mean – who needs any? – message me privately.
Aidan stares at it for a second. Weapons. It’s all he needs. Evidence of intent.
He messages Kevin: What sort of bits n bobs?
You know.
I need a knife, Aidan writes.
He holds his breath as he waits for a response.
Consider it done.
Bingo.
When he gets home, he finds a central London warehouse online and books a slot.
Then he sends a message to the main group.
Things aren’t moving fast enough for my liking, he writes. Let’s meet. 7.00 p.m., 20th December. Find Girl A massive – anyone who’s anyone. Strategize. Compile knowledge. Bring everything you know. Defeat.
The messages start coming in.
U r on, Kevin writes eventually, and Aidan lets his breath out.
Three weeks from now.
That’s when it’ll end. But he won’t tell Lauren. The hope would kill both of them.
Later that morning, he tells the police. Lottie. She picks up, listens, and tells him she’ll prepare to be there. With a team. Ready to arrest.
44
Poppy
Battersea, London
Twenty days to go
Poppy says goodbye to Emily at her road. Auckland Road. They hug goodbye because it makes them feel like adults. Their fuzzy winter coats catch on each other.
They have been learning about Jesus in religious education. Poppy didn’t expect to enjoy it, but she did. The tragic figure of the man on the cross who sacrificed himself for the world. She doesn’t believe it, but she likes learning about it. She likes thinking that there is … something else. Beyond all this.
She looks around her. It’s completely dark. She cuts down Cairns Road, a small shortcut. She takes it often. Usually when she’s cold or rushing. She’s less than five minutes from home. The cemetery is on her left, houses to the right. She takes her purple gloves off and runs a hand along the black railings. They’re cold, wet with raindrops. It’s been the coldest November Poppy can remember. The air so fresh and blue and misty as she steps into it each morning, like walking into a huge freezer.
Her nails hit each railing and the sound rings out like chiming bells in the evening air.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket and Poppy picks up the call.
‘You on your way home?’ her mum says. She doesn’t usually ask.
‘Yes,’ Poppy says. ‘Less than five minutes.’
‘It’s been a good day today.’
‘I’m glad,’ Poppy says sincerely. It’s the first time she’s said that in years. She’s still on the new drug and, the longer she’s on it, the better it seems to be working. Poppy fizzes with joy to think of it. Maybe her mum will become … what could she become? Imagine. Hiking in the mountains. Working. Giving TED talks on how to get your life back from multiple sclerosis.
Poppy went to Emily’s house recently when they had a snow day – they got to school and it was closed. Her mother made them chicken soup with actual real noodles swimming at the bottom like eels, and she told Poppy her blusher looked lovely (and it did). Then she started tidying, but not in a harassed way. Just in a sort of calm, methodical way, stacking up two pots of fair trade coffee and putting them neatly away in the cupboard, leaving the work surface completely free. Just … being a mum. A little like Lauren.
‘I’ll be home soon and you can tell me about what you’ve done,’ Poppy says.
‘I will,’ her mum says, and her voice seems higher and lighter.
Poppy hangs up, puts the phone in her pocket and resumes her trilling of the railings with her nails. She hears an Instagram message tone on her phone, but she doesn’t check. Not because she is enjoying being ‘off grid’ or anything, but because she enjoys saving up the notifications and feasting on them, later, seeing a whole screen of messages queued up. She once told her dad this, and he said, ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
It is under way before she realizes anything is happening at all.
A man all in black. Tall, lanky, like a big spider. Eyes just visible. They’re dark, with long lashes. He would look great with some mascara on, she finds herself thinking, absolutely completely nonsensically.
He grabs her.
And the thing with crises – she learns, while it all unfolds – is that you might worry and worry and worry about them happening, but actually it is so totally different when they do. A basement in her mind opens up, revealing new strengths, new resources. A calmness descends. She is not thinking shit or fuck or call 999 as the man pulls her towards the railings. She is merely thinking: I am not currently dead, yet, and that is good. Poppy is Zen, there in the small street, being dragged by a man in a balaclava.
‘You say anything, I hurt you,’ the man says to her.
The railings are digging into her back. The man has one hand across her chest like a seat belt.
‘Your sister is Girl A,’ he says. He has a West Country accent, maybe Bristol. ‘Zara Starling.’
She’s glad she just had a call with her mum. Whoever finds her phone will be able to find her mother, fast. And, anyway, she’s glad she … she’s glad they spoke, and that it was nice. If that’s the last thing she has done. Well. That would be okay.
‘You know where she is,’ he says.
/>
The small opening in the balaclava is parting as he speaks, revealing a pink mouth like a hamster’s. Poppy stares at it, trying not to move. She breathes shallowly. ‘No,’ she says. ‘They disappeared.’
‘She hasn’t got in touch with you?’
‘No.’
‘You know where your dad’s wife is?’
‘No.’
‘She’s with Girl A.’
‘Yes, I guess so.’
‘You know who does know where she is? Girl A?’
‘No.’
‘Your dad.’
He says it like a punchline, the red line of his mouth curling up slowly as he delivers it.
‘I don’t know that,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Well, do you know what? That’s your job.’
He stares at her. They’re still joined together like two jigsaw pieces. Poppy struggles against him but his arm tightens across her. It’s effortless, his power over her.
‘Her mum is in touch with your dad.’
She says nothing to him, just looking.
‘Your job,’ he says, louder this time, ‘is to find out from your dad where they are. Alright?’
‘He doesn’t know,’ she says, thinking of him and the weight he’s lost from his face already this week. The way his hair has gone white at the temples. How, suddenly, she can see how he will look as an old man.
‘He fucking does,’ the man in the balaclava says, spittle collecting on his bottom lip.
Poppy stares at him, horrified.
‘What’s your job?’ he shouts.
She says nothing.
‘What’s your job?’
‘To find … to find out where they are.’
‘And then what?’ He’s still yelling.
Poppy doesn’t know the answer. She’s trembling.
‘You tell us. Or it’ll be much worse for you next time,’ he says.
He makes an impatient sort of gesture, beckoning abruptly with his fingers.
Poppy looks at him blankly.
‘Phone,’ he says.
She passes it to him wordlessly, and thinks about that Instagram message. He throws it to the ground. She sees it crack like a lightning bolt across the screen. The sort of thing that would have devastated her before a man grabbed her in the street.
‘Not your phone, you little fucker,’ he says. ‘What’s your number?’
Poppy reads it out to him and he enters it into a cheap, old Nokia. ‘So I can keep in touch,’ he says. He kicks her iPhone a few feet away. ‘When shall I check in with my new penpal?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘When are you next seeing your dad?’
‘I don’t know. Weekends, sometimes.’
‘Monday, then. Who’s going to call you?’
‘You,’ Poppy whispers.
‘You tell nobody,’ he says. ‘Five o’clock, Monday.’
‘Yes,’ she says again. And then he’s gone. The grip across her chest lifted. She breathes slowly in and out.
She blinks up at the houses in front of her, the windows that remain blank like heavy-lidded eyes. The people who didn’t even look out as a crime was committed. She walks, jelly-legged, across the street and retrieves her iPhone. The unread Instagram message, splintered into two across the broken screen. She wonders what to do. Who to call. They might still be looking at her. She’d be foolish to call 999 now. To call her dad, her mum.
She hurries home, little steps becoming bigger strides becoming a jog and then a run. Poppy hates running – hates getting sweaty – and she’s amazed she can even think these thoughts from a past life, but she can, and she is.
She reaches the busy road with the church just opposite and she crosses it, so pleased to see shopkeepers with propped-open doors, and kebab houses and cars and lights and people and noise. She stops running, her breathing shallow, and tries to think.
Telling will make her mum more ill. That’s the truth of it. Poppy is used to thinking, and then thinking again, about her mum’s illness.
But she can tell her dad.
‘Please, help me,’ Poppy says on the phone to her father.
He will sort it. That is what Poppy is thinking. He can’t help her with everything. He can’t help her care for her mother. She is slowly seeing the chinks of bright light in his armour. But she still thinks he can help her now.
‘What?’ Aidan says, his voice immediately alert.
‘Please come and get me.’
‘Where are you? Are you alright?’
‘Near Mum’s.’
‘Okay, I’ll come to Mum’s. Be half an hour. Traffic –’
‘No, come here. Right where I am now,’ Poppy says. She can’t go home. She can’t let her mum hear her. She stands outside a phone case shop and next to a shoe repair place, staring up at the church.
‘Um, okay. Send me a pin, a location pin thing. You are okay?’
‘I’m okay.’
Her dad arrives after only twenty minutes, which must mean he was speeding. His face, even his too-thin face, fills her with a rush of safety as he winds his window down. She gets into the passenger seat. The heat is up, Radio 4 playing soft night-time murmurs. She unfolds her legs, drops her broken phone into her father’s lap, and cries. She so rarely cries on him. She didn’t cry on him when her mother was diagnosed, or the first time Poppy needed to wipe her mouth for her, or the time she got an F in maths because her mother kept her up all night before an exam and she couldn’t concentrate on the questions. But now she does.
And when she’s told him, he says nothing for ninety seconds. She counts them. He stares out at the wintry sky, completely black, looking across at the little lake in Wandsworth Common where they’ve parked up, evidently thinking.
‘Monday,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
‘You come to me Monday. I’ll meet you. I’ll take that call. I’ll sort it,’ he says, as though it’s simple.
‘Okay,’ Poppy whispers. And she doesn’t ask him what he’ll say. And she doesn’t ask him if the balaclava man is correct. She doesn’t ask him anything. Instead, she thinks again of the ‘Jesus classes’, as Emily calls them. She is happy to be handing this over to her dad, her saviour. She is giving him this impossible task, this poisoned chalice, this crown of thorns.
45
Aidan
The edge of Wandsworth Common, London
Twenty days to go
Aidan’s heart is three times the size it normally is. He’s looking out at Wandsworth Common, trying to cry without tears. To release his feelings, somehow, without showing her. He fakes a yawn, and that helps a little bit. He is opening the void, here in South London. His poor baby girl. His poor, innocent baby, so angry already by what life has dealt her, caught up in his shit.
Aidan has no idea what he’s going to do when this call from the man comes, so, instead, he watches a group of youths play basketball, envious of their braying masculinity, their games, their child’s play.
The common is brown, like the world has turned sepia. Dark spindly trees. He hopes the spring buds are in there somewhere, waiting to come out.
On Monday at five o’clock, Aidan sits in the car in the under-building garage, while Poppy watches TV in the flat upstairs. For an entire minute, Aidan thinks the man isn’t going to call. But he does, a few seconds after the display ticks over to 5:01 p.m.
‘Thought I’d leave you hanging,’ a voice says.
Aidan strains to recognize it. He turns the car’s interior light off and leans back in the seat, eyes closed, mentally going through everyone he’s seen at the group meet-up. It might be the sinewy man with the brown-grey hair.
‘I thought I’d deal direct,’ Aidan says crisply. ‘Rather than involve my daughter.’
‘Well, hello there, Mr Madison. Been having a nice time liaising with the old ball ’n’ chain in protection, have you?’
‘No,’ Aidan says.
‘No?’
Aidan stares at t
he blackness of the car park. The neat demarcations of each bay. The sandblasted side of the building. The security gate, accessible only with a fob.
‘Where is your wife?’
‘I don’t know … I don’t know where she is.’ He tries to play it down. If he didn’t know, he doesn’t think he would cry, or beg. He tries to be his two selves, the Aidan who knows and the Aidan who didn’t ever plant that burner phone.
‘You don’t ring her – little marital chats? Little missives sent?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know where she lies awake, missing you?’
‘No.’
‘I’m giving you one last shot …’
‘I don’t know,’ Aidan says tightly.
‘Okay, then,’ the voice says, suddenly jolly. A sort of gung-ho cheerfulness.
He rings off before Aidan can say any more. Aidan sits there, under the cover of the garage, watching the cars come and go, watching the moon rise. Watching the world, from darkness. Anxiety floods his body. What the fuck is he doing? He’s dicing with death, endangering his daughter. His mother, the person he trusts most in the world, advised him to stop, and he did the exact opposite. And now he can’t even tell her how much worse he’s made it all. He’s too ashamed.
He lies the seat back, flat, in the car, and puts his hands over his face, and cries.
Later, when Poppy asks him what he said to the man, before she heads home to her mum, he tells her the truth.
But when she asks him if he is in touch with Lauren, he lies.
Aidan leaves work unusually late for somebody in IT, at almost seven o’clock. He puts his headphones in and the radio on as he leaves out the back. It helps the loneliness. There’s something about the voices directly in his ear that makes him feel as though he’s with people. He sleeps with it on, too, through the night. The shipping forecast. The soft hum of the news.
The stars are out already. It’s been raining, and the puddles are smeared with the red of traffic lights and the reflections of the London buses passing by.
Earlier today, during the work day, he checked the burner phone. Fuck it, he thought, as he did it. He’s all in now. This plan has to work.
How to Disappear Page 23
