How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  The sad snake is back in her belly. What if her father has lied to her? He left her and her mother, her mother became ill, and now he might have lied to her. She is so mad about it, she could kick something.

  She looks across the street, trying to distract herself, and that’s when she spots it. She grabs Emily’s arm, a desperate, unconscious sort of grab. The kind people make when they’re choking or trying to stop somebody walking into traffic. Emily looks at Poppy, then follows her gaze to the Perspex newspaper stand catching the sunlight on the high street.

  Truro pensioners threatened at knife point in own home by balaclava youths.

  ‘What?’ Emily says.

  ‘Look,’ Poppy says.

  Emily stares at the sign.

  ‘Truro. In balaclavas,’ Poppy says.

  Emily heads decisively towards the news stand and Poppy follows her.

  Emily scans the article. Poppy can’t look. She’s going to be sick. She wipes at her eyes – tears have come from nowhere – and her fingertips come away chimney-black, stained by her supposedly waterproof new mascara.

  ‘It doesn’t say.’ Emily puts the newspaper back. ‘They don’t know who it was.’ She looks at Poppy.

  Emily pulls her into the foyer of McDonald’s where they stand amongst the people waiting for sausage and egg McMuffins. ‘They went in – two men in balaclavas. They took a knife. When they realized it was two pensioners, they left. The people reported it.’ Emily’s bony shoulders that Poppy has long admired rise up and then down again. ‘They didn’t steal anything,’ she says softly.

  ‘It’s them, Em,’ Poppy says tearfully. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Emily says quietly. ‘Probably. But, look, they got the wrong address. They don’t know for sure.’

  Emily picks up a straw and rips the paper casing off it. Poppy watches her. Emily tugs on her arm and they go and sit in a plastic booth. There’s a half-finished cup of coffee on the table, scummy tidemarks of cappuccino foam around the rim. Emily puts the paper straw wrapper in it and it becomes brown and saturated.

  ‘I need a milkshake,’ Emily says. ‘Then we can strategize.’ She cracks a wry smile. ‘You want one?’

  ‘No. Can’t stomach it,’ Poppy says.

  ‘Okay,’ Emily says, with a patient smile.

  Her beautiful friend. Poppy shouldn’t have led her into this mess. She sits for a few minutes in one of the cream plastic booths.

  Emily arrives back with her milkshake and sips it, no straw. Strawberry. Same thing she always has. She gets a milk moustache, like a small child. She smiles as she wipes it off with a stiff napkin.

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ Emily says. ‘I mean … if he is …’ she invites Poppy to say the unsayable.

  Poppy looks around her desperately, tears budding in her throat. ‘Em, I was reading about witness protection online. They literally present you with a sheet of rules and you have to sign it. You know, don’t lead a life of crime, don’t contact family members from the past, because it messes it up. I need to … I need to tell someone. The witness protection people. If he’s in touch with them. Pensioners are getting threatened. It’ll be Lauren and Zara next.’ The thought makes her chest bloom with anxiety.

  Emily bites her bottom lip. Her two front teeth come away covered in MAC’s Ruby Woo lipstick. ‘If it was them.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Poppy says.

  She fiddles with the lid of Emily’s cup. Emily reaches over the table and holds on to her hand. It’s cold and damp from the drink, doesn’t feel like a hand at all.

  ‘We’ll look at Dad’s phone, soon,’ Poppy says.

  ‘And in the meantime …’

  ‘If balaclava man rings me back,’ Poppy finishes. ‘Which he will …’

  ‘Well, then you need to lie and tell him they’re not actually in Truro,’ Emily says.

  49

  Zara

  Coniston, the Lake District

  Six weeks gone

  It’s ten past five in the afternoon. Phoebe is sitting opposite Zara. She’s double-jointed, kneeling with her feet splayed out to the side. The undersides of her heels are completely smooth, her toes painted a perfect pastel blue.

  Zara is sitting rigidly next to her. Here she is, at the fabled sleepover. This is her moment, and she is trying, in her own awkward way, to seize it.

  ‘Yeah, definitely,’ Zara is saying to Olivia in response to whether or not she is going to go to university. And she is. She’ll study English.

  Olivia is the oldest of the year, born on the third of September, and her entire identity seems to have been constructed around that. She seems to know about things before they become things. Tortoiseshell nails. Calling people ‘a mood’. Zara naturally shrinks into herself as she encounters her, and becomes somebody she isn’t. The yin to Olivia’s yang.

  But maybe soon they will be friends, and Zara won’t need to sit on her bed and have imaginary conversations with Poppy, with old friends. Or to replay old memories late at night on her bed.

  ‘Sienna is such a nice name,’ Phoebe says. She is softer than Olivia. She concentrates avidly in all lessons except maths, which she ignores. ‘I’ll just fail it,’ she said sadly, a few days ago. ‘I haven’t got a clue what’s going on. I’ve decided I’ll just be one of those adults who’s crap at maths.’ Zara had laughed at that, and wished she could have that sort of perspective. The high-level view. Zara’s entire self-worth is predicated on passing her GCSEs. She doesn’t know where she gets it from. Her mum treats exams with derision – ‘Far more important things in life,’ she will say. Zara sometimes wonders if she gets it from her father, her real father, but now they will really never know.

  Sienna. Zara turns her head immediately. She has trained herself to. She thought she would find it difficult to answer to a new name, but she doesn’t. Sienna is a smoke signal to her. An alarm. A warning sound.

  Phoebe’s bedroom is enormous, an old bedroom in the eaves of the house. There’s something shabby about it, but Zara likes that. Cobwebs across the beams. The pale blue carpet, darker at its edges where it meets the skirting boards. Old, shapely radiators that hiss and creak.

  There are two skylights above the huge bed. Steady December rain runs down the glass. It rains a lot here, so much more than in London. It’s cold with it, too. In London, the rain formed a kind of steamy closeness, especially on the Tube and in school. Out here, the rain is wild. Cold and free, being blown through valleys and across the lakes. It smells salty and clean. Zara likes it, but she isn’t used to it.

  ‘So. Truth or dare,’ Olivia says. She raises her glass of squash. It’s cheap stuff. Orange. The colour of butter.

  Zara is surprised: she thought it would be alcohol and cigarettes at sleepovers – she came steeled to try things – but it isn’t. There is something charmingly wholesome about Phoebe and her ancient house and the row of teddy bears that still sits along the end of her bed, faded and dusty.

  ‘Truth,’ Phoebe says, shifting ever so slightly closer to Olivia.

  Zara is unnerved by Phoebe’s eagerness. She guesses it comes from having been bullied. But it gives Zara the uneasy sensation that, if necessary, Phoebe would say something about her. Something private, secret, to get close to Olivia. Zara closes her eyes, just briefly, and imagines she is thirty-five, that this phase of her life is over. She will have been Sienna for longer than she was Zara. The lies won’t matter, because they are so far back, a dot on the horizon behind them.

  ‘Number one fear,’ Olivia says.

  ‘Spiders,’ Phoebe immediately says.

  Zara made friends with so many spiders during the spring/summer she spent growing those lettuces that she hated. The spring/summer she saw the murder from that same greenhouse, and after which everything changed. People shouldn’t be afraid of spiders: they should be afraid of football fans, of entitled men, of criminals, of the justice system, and of the police. That’s what is to be feared, Zara thinks. She closes her eyes again, and wishes she
could go back. Back to fears of spiders and snakes and the dark. Of flying and heights and vaccinations and public speaking. But she can’t go back. And she can’t go forward.

  ‘We get so many spiders here,’ Phoebe adds, gesturing to the old, uneven walls of her bedroom. ‘It’s a thing with period properties. Nightmare.’

  ‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Zara lies. ‘We used to get loads …’ She pauses, for just a second. ‘In Bristol.’

  ‘Really? City spiders?’

  ‘Yeah, there was a certain type,’ Zara says. ‘Um, black widows, or something.’ Her mind is racing, trying to inhabit this new person. There aren’t black widows in Bristol. That’s Cornwall. She’d seen it on the news. Nobody will look it up, she tells herself. Nobody cares.

  ‘Your turn,’ Olivia says, pointing to Zara with her drink.

  ‘Dare,’ Zara says immediately. She has no truths to tell. She is all lies, these days.

  ‘Get on the roof,’ Olivia says, gesturing to the skylights.

  ‘There’s no way I can get on the roof!’

  ‘On the roof.’

  Zara stares up at it. She’d fall. She’d definitely fall off the roof in the wind and the rain. Break her leg, or worse. She’d look so awkward on the bed, the two girls looking up at her. An unflattering angle. They’d be able to see up her T-shirt. She tucks it into her jeans absent-mindedly.

  Her mum would do it. So many times, when she was younger, Zara awoke to her mother’s laughter, the clink of wine glasses, music a little too loud, Aidan shushing her. Zara wishes she was like her, but she isn’t. She is far more like Aidan. Cautious and thoughtful and scared.

  And what would Aidan say? Don’t get on the roof! His eyebrows would be up, a hand dragging his hair back.

  ‘Truth,’ Zara concedes.

  ‘What’s your biggest secret?’

  Zara puffs air into her cheeks. Olivia goes for the jugular.

  ‘I haven’t got one,’ she says. ‘I haven’t really got any.’ She smiles benignly. ‘Very boring, really.’

  ‘Where’s your dad?’ Olivia exchanges a glance with Phoebe that tells Zara they have talked about this before.

  ‘He left my mum before I was born,’ Zara says truthfully. It is nice to be speaking the truth. Zara’s external reality matches her internal self, and it feels satisfyingly tidy, authentic, like a weighty key fitting exactly into an ancient lock.

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Well, not left,’ Zara says. ‘He was never with her, really. It was just a …’ She waves a hand. ‘Just a … hardly anything at all.’

  ‘Still, imagine – he has a daughter out there who he doesn’t know at all.’

  ‘I know, but –’ Zara stops herself just in time. She was about to say that she has Aidan. But she doesn’t. Not any more. ‘My dad’s a prick,’ she finishes, hoping a swear word will win her some kudos.

  ‘And your mum is …’

  ‘A nursery key worker, moved up here for work,’ Zara says mechanically.

  ‘You’re close?’

  ‘We get on, yeah,’ Zara says, again truthfully. ‘Mostly. Though we’re opposites.’ Sometimes, Zara used to think that Poppy and Lauren would have made a much better mother–daughter pairing. Lauren doesn’t really care about fashion, it’s true, but they have a similar volatile core running through them.

  She could tell them about the way her mother has been irritating her these days, and how closed and cold Zara feels, how wrong inside, like she must be totally broken. But then she’d have to tell them why. And nobody knows why.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Phoebe says. ‘My mum is … difficult.’

  ‘Why?’ Zara asks.

  ‘Mood swings,’ Phoebe says.

  Zara knows she is the one with the mood swings. She’ll be better tonight. She will. She won’t be rude or caustic to her mum.

  Phoebe reaches over and opens Olivia’s bag of Haribo. Zara looks on enviously. She would never do that. Not without huge amounts of over-thought. Was the bag of sweets for her? Would she look entitled if she opened it? But nothing happens. Zara rolls her shoulders. She wishes she could climb out of her brain, sometimes, and into somebody else’s. Into Poppy’s, her mother’s, Phoebe’s.

  ‘You never know which mum you’re going to get.’ Phoebe drops a fizzy snake into her mouth and puts the bag between the three of them.

  It’s dark above them, the skylights black, the rain a beaded pattern across them. Zara looks longingly at the beds, all made up, bedtime still hours away.

  ‘My mum’s just cold,’ Olivia says. She stretches her feet in front of her and points her toes. Her legs are completely shaved. Totally hairless. Not a single ankle hair missed. ‘Ice cold.’

  ‘How so?’ Phoebe says.

  Zara reaches tentatively into the bag and picks up a fried egg sweet. She carefully separates the egg from the white as she listens to them.

  ‘Just doesn’t care. Doesn’t like me – the real me. Likes it if I get good marks. Achievement, basically. Likes it when I agree with her. But doesn’t like the things I say. The things I’m into. Dad’s the same. Sort of. He said the other day that I was entitled because I wanted a takeaway.’

  Zara swallows. Maybe she’s lucky, after all. Her mother’s love is so inclusive, it is a trawling net that catches everything. Dogs, cats, strangers on adverts. Everything Zara says to her is considered special. She takes it for granted.

  ‘I do wonder why they had kids,’ Phoebe says. ‘I mean. I don’t know. But I’d like to think I would be nice to my child. Make them feel welcome.’

  ‘So it’s all hearts and flowers with your mum, is it?’ Olivia says to Zara.

  ‘Yeah,’ Zara says.

  ‘Oh, well, it’s just us two who’re fucked up,’ Phoebe says, raising her glass of squash to Olivia.

  Zara’s face is hot. She looks down. She’s gone blotchy. She always does when she’s nervous. She guesses her cheeks are red, too. Poppy used to use this green-toned concealer on her, on days when Zara knew she was going to blush. School photo day. That sort of thing. ‘To avoid you looking like a beacon,’ Poppy would say, her fingers feather-soft against Zara’s cheeks and temples.

  ‘Next time your mum is mean to you, you call me,’ Olivia says to Phoebe. Phoebe’s eyes are damp.

  Zara is hot with the wanting of it. To shrug off the shroud of loneliness, of pretence, of lies. To tell them exactly how things are with her mother at the moment. It’s been weeks of not fitting in, and now, here she is, finally at the sleepover, and she won’t be invited back.

  Unless.

  She leans forward, elbows on her knees, and leaps.

  ‘Guess what,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ Phoebe says.

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’

  Phoebe picks up another fizzy worm, looking at her curiously. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like …’ Zara starts.

  She thinks of her mum and Aidan and Poppy and Jon, and of every single person who has lost something because of her lie. Harry, the lawyer, whose case fell apart. The jury whose time was wasted. Aidan’s mother, who has lost her daughter-in-law. And Jamie himself, of course, whose only advocate told lies instead.

  Is ruining all that again worth it? To fit in here?

  ‘I have secrets, like all of us,’ Zara says, stalling.

  ‘So tell us one,’ Olivia says.

  Zara looks up at the window and then down at her hands. No. It isn’t worth it. Another betrayal won’t make the first lie correct. ‘I find it hard to fit in,’ she says honestly, though it sounds lame even to her.

  Olivia stares at her. ‘That’s it?’ She tilts her head back and laughs, three slow exhalations. ‘Ha, ha, ha. I could have told you that.’

  And that’s what does it. Olivia’s contempt for her truth. Her certainty that Zara is hiding nothing interesting. That she is just nerdy, nobody Zara.

  ‘Actually, there is something else,’ she says.

  Olivia doesn’t even look up.
She is fiddling with the Haribo bag.

  ‘You’d better not tell anybody,’ Zara adds.

  And then she tells them. She tells them every last bit. The murder, the court case, and what happened afterwards. How she was taken into witness protection. Her old name. Her new name. The differences in her dates of birth. And how she is now: cross, unpredictable, moody, scared. So fucking scared.

  When she’s told them everything, Olivia’s mouth parts in slow motion. Phoebe stops chewing. And then all she can hear is the drum of the rain on the skylights, the low murmur of the heating. And the sound of the truth, settling silently like snow on the ground. Flake by flake.

  ‘You’re in witness protection,’ Olivia breathes.

  ‘Yes,’ Zara says. ‘So I’m not an ice queen. I’m not … I’m just as fucked up as you two. More so.’ And, just like that, with the truth out of her chest and her lungs and her mouth and in the ancient bedroom with them, she cries.

  Olivia holds her left hand and Phoebe rubs her back, and Zara is drowning in it, this connection, this intimacy, this acceptance.

  50

  Lauren

  Coniston, the Lake District

  Six weeks gone

  Zara is at a sleepover. Lauren is alone when her phone wakes her.

  She must have fallen asleep reading the Next catalogue that dropped through the door the other day. It’s splayed open on a page she was about to fold down, a cute Christmas jumper with a pompom snowman on it. It takes her a second to realize that it’s late.

  She fumbles across the bed for her phone. It’s the Ring app that woke her. The video doorbell the protection service installed. It is showing a notification on the lock screen. Motion detected, it says.

  Her stomach coils into knots immediately. Somebody is outside their house but not ringing their doorbell.

  She opens the app. It has never once gone off in the night in all the time they’ve been here. View motion? it asks. Lauren clicks ‘yes’ and watches as a video plays.