Lauren feels her eyelids beginning to droop in the heat of the car, her head lolling to the left. Something about the car is safety to her. The hum of the road beneath them. The heaters on low. The relief of choosing to trust. She’ll be so good from now on. No burner phones. No website photos.
She dreams that, this time, the group does find them, and that Zara is frog-marched out of the house, a black hood over her head. As the noose is erected and she – her baby daughter, who Lauren grew in her own body – is placed into it, she wakes up. She checks the back seat to be sure.
When they are safely in their new, bland, army-issue house, a different biscuit tin, a different coffee jar, Lauren gets into another starched bed and pulls the burner phone out.
Let me know you’re okay, he’s sent.
I’m safe, she sends to Aidan. Are you?
She waits for a few seconds. The group are on their case, looking for any crack they can slip through, and she can’t do it any more, she just can’t. The black hood. The noose. She’s got to be good now.
She won’t tell him they have moved. If he doesn’t know, if even he thinks they’re in the Lakes, then nobody can find them. Lauren’s optimism has finally been rattled. There will be no calls. No texts. No parcels. She adds, a second message, and her last.
We had a near miss but they didn’t find us. We need to go back to no contact now x.
Thank God, he replies immediately, at three o’clock in the morning. A second later: I’m safe, yes. And I understand. Take care x.
Lauren stares at his final message and wonders where she will be two years from now. There are three options. She lists them on her fingers as she looks out of the dusty bedroom window, at a dead woodlouse on her window sill.
Back at home, the group disbanded. Unlikely.
Safe in protection. Settled in an identity. Ready to leave Aidan in the past, ready to date again, after their promised two years of waiting for the other is up. She can’t imagine it.
Or dead.
53
Poppy
Battersea, London
Nine days to go
The balaclava man rings Poppy again. She knows it’s him when No Caller ID flashes up on her phone. She stands, a rabbit in headlights outside the school gates, cold December mists swirling around her ankles. This is her moment to step in.
‘I don’t know who told you Truro,’ she says as she answers, ‘but that was wrong information. They’re not there. They never were.’
‘Is that right?’ the voice says.
‘Yeah, so … stay away from there.’
‘Sure, Poppy Madison. Sure.’
Poppy hangs up before he can say anything else, then switches her phone off. She needs to go inside, but she takes a moment, letting the anxiety dissipate, breathing in the smoky ice-cold air. Breathing out hot breath that looks like icing sugar. In again, out again. Eventually, when even her eyes are cold, she heads into registration.
She worries her way through English and double maths. Later, she taps her pen on the edge of the desk, thinking. Thinking about what to tell her dad. Nothing, she decides. He isn’t telling her anything, after all. How can she trust him to manage the situation when he’s making everything worse by his own actions?
She takes her school shoes off and rests her feet in their tights against the radiator. She is thinking about Zara, missing her, wondering if she has been broken or strengthened by what has happened to her.
They were on holiday in France when Zara started her period, only she didn’t tell Poppy. On the third night there, she merely took a sanitary towel to the toilet block with them. Poppy saw it, eyes wide: she hadn’t started hers yet. ‘Is that …’ she’d said, and Zara had nodded, quickly.
‘When …?’
‘Recently,’ Zara said.
‘How do you feel?’ Poppy had put her wash bag down in one of the sinks. It was an old campsite, a cheap one – ‘character building’, Aidan had said, as though holidays should never be fun – and the brick walls were covered with spiderwebs. ‘God, I’d hate to start on holiday.’
‘I’m fine,’ Zara had said, but her eyes were glassy.
‘Is it scary?’ Poppy had said.
‘Yeah.’ Zara had disappeared then, into the shower stall, and Poppy was sure she had heard muffled crying.
The next day, Zara didn’t swim, despite Lauren’s encouragement. Her cheeks reddened the more Lauren tried to make her.
‘Zara and I have decided not to swim, this holiday,’ Poppy had said from her sun lounger. ‘You get a better tan when you just lie in it, and rotate. No uneven bits.’
She’d smiled across the pool at Zara, who’d grinned back over her book. Later that year, when Poppy’s period started, a little packet of ‘essentials’ had appeared in her bedroom, on the bedside table, exactly where she needed them.
Poppy sits there, algebra blurring in front of her, and thinks, too, about her father, and about Lauren. She hopes she is helping, to keep them all safe, in her own misguided way.
Fucking Spirit Day. That is what Poppy is thinking as she browses a horrendous fancy-dress store after school. She’s sifting through a shelf of wigs. Red, blue, rainbow-coloured. Quite why, she’s not sure. She thought a costume for tomorrow would come to her, in this hour she allotted to looking, but it hasn’t yet. Poppy hates fancy dress. She likes to look her best, not her worst.
The brief is ‘movie characters’. She walks listlessly through the aisles, picking up cowboy hats and witches’ masks.
When her mum first became ill, Poppy enjoyed the challenge of these occasions. Having to deal with things, having to make a World Book Day costume while her mother slept. She enjoyed the adultness of it, like she was trying a lifestyle on for size.
But, these days, years on, it’s just a pain. She is jaded now. That’s life.
She needs to find something before it gets dark. Although even if she leaves late, she is safe, here, in the centre of Battersea, even if it is slightly grungy, because there are so many people around her. Crimes don’t happen in crowds, she tells herself.
She picks up a clown costume. Isn’t IT about a clown? She checks the price tag. It’s cheap enough. Then she sees a movement, just outside the shop. Probably nothing. Something and nothing. She inches behind a rack of Victorian costumes and peers out. Somebody in black is standing outside the shop. But not just standing casually. Standing somehow actively. She feels a white-hot flash of anxiety zip up and down her body.
She knew it would happen. She knew they would find her again. Bad things happen to Poppy Madison. She must have done something to deserve it once.
She reaches for her phone. Should she call the police? She tries to slow her breathing, to calm down. What’re they going to do to her, here?
But Poppy knows exactly what they will do. They will wait for her to leave the shop, and then they will threaten her. A strong arm across her chest. Something cool and hard in her back. They will make her walk with them, and if she alerts anyone, they will do something. To them, she is an informant, to be disposed of as soon as the information is extracted.
She only has now, this moment, to act.
She dashes up to the counter, clown costume forgotten. ‘Excuse me,’ she says to the assistant, a boy only a few years older than her, with braces across his teeth.
He looks at her questioningly.
The man in the dark outfit steps away from the shop frontage, and she sees that he is wearing a Carpetright uniform. He stubs out a cigarette with the toe of his black trainers, and moves on. Poppy’s entire back is covered in sweat.
‘Nothing,’ she says to the shop assistant. ‘Never mind.’
She stares and stares outside, but it’s okay. She’s safe. It’s a false alarm. Even so, she gets an Uber home. And she thinks she won’t walk anywhere alone again. She can’t, not on these side streets after the commuters die out like a river that divides into a hundred streams. She just can’t. She’ll ask her dad for money for the Ubers
.
She won’t take the risk.
54
Zara
York, Yorkshire
Six weeks gone
It’s an abstract concept to Zara that a section of society hates her enough to be desperately, violently searching for her, but she knows it’s true. When her mum first told her they had to move, she thought it was her breach that had led to the group finding them. But it wasn’t. It was a stupid website photo – her mother not thinking. A coincidence that it happened right after the sleepover.
But nevertheless, Zara can’t believe she was so stupid. To trade her safety for a few minutes’ intimacy and understanding. Those feelings may be potent, but they are not a substitute for being alive.
She needs to be tough in the new place, with everything that’s still to come. An ice queen, indeed.
She is scrolling through her phone, now, in the car, looking back at Phoebe’s Instagram as her mother sleeps in the warm. It’s gloriously unlocked, an eye through the keyhole to her world. There’s not a hint Phoebe misses her. Will she have been told they were moved, or what?
‘The takeaway from this is that you can’t relax the rules even for one moment,’ Jon had said seriously to her mother as they drove. ‘It needs to be better. Or we won’t be able to continue to offer protection.’ Zara had blushed so fiercely she had begun to sweat.
Two new friends, all that potential, just gone. She will never see them again. It had seemed so important, in that moment beneath the skylights at the sleepover, to be liked and accepted by them. And now – nothing. More evidence that her judgement is wrong. That she is broken inside. That the people who exchange glances about her at school and say, ‘Okay, Sienna,’ or the people who ignore her entirely when she speaks – that they’re right.
Something bubbles up through her. Frustration, anger, tears. Something negative and horrible is living inside her. This all began with her. It is all her fault.
The list of people they have left behind is growing. The lies and cover-ups will begin again now. They will start to bed down, grow beneath the soil, until somebody – maybe Zara, maybe her mother, maybe somebody else – makes a mistake, and they’re pulled out again, their roots shocked and anaemic-looking in the bright sun, just like the lettuces she had planted in the greenhouse where all this began.
Zara stands in the window of her new kitchen.
She spotted what would become their house immediately. She knows the look of army housing now. Plain, identical frontages. Net curtains. Red arm rails. Theirs will be the middle one. She knows it.
Surrounded by two empty houses, like sentries, standing tall, keeping them safe.
She sighed as they approached. Her breath misted the window for just a second, barely perceptible, then faded to nothing. Time to start over.
And now here they are.
New names. Her mother is Leonora. Zara is Suzanne.
They have new neighbours. Zara is surprised that the houses on either side aren’t empty, but one isn’t.
It’s hard to believe it’s a normal weekday for these people. Zara watches them from the kitchen window as they go to school. They seem to be a totally normal family unit. The mother is leaving the house in a suit. Sort of shabby and dated-looking. Poppy would have a view on the wide-leg black trousers and ballet flats, Zara thinks to herself, but she likes them. The woman seems like a safe pair of hands.
She allows herself a little reverie at the net-curtained window. She pretends they’re here. All of them. Aidan and Poppy. They’re late for their totally normal, mundane lives. How Zara would treasure normality, now, if she could grasp it. The boredom of the school day. Pale cheese sandwiches for lunch. No plans for the evening except a book, a shower and bed. These things are bliss to Zara, now. She wants to be bored. To be complacent. To not know her luck.
Her mum is upstairs, unpacking, and so Zara slips out on to the driveway in her socks, still holding the book she was reading in the car on the way here. The tarmac is frozen underfoot, and her feet stick to the frost the way lips stick to ice cubes. Her new neighbour’s son is outside. He is about her age, holding a guitar case upright next to him, his hand steadying the top of it. He has mid-brown hair. The ‘meet me at McDonald’s’ haircut that Poppy told her about. He raises his eyebrows and gives her a sort of backwards nod.
She lifts her hand in a wave. ‘Just moved in,’ she says, gesturing back to the house.
The houses here are pebble-dashed, not grey stone like the Lake District. They’re on an estate just outside of the city. Zara knows nothing about York except Bettys Tea Room. She couldn’t even have pointed to it on a map.
‘I can see that, yeah,’ he says, looking at the moving van he no doubt thinks is run by totally normal removals people and not a protection service. ‘Where did you come from?’
His accent. Zara stares at him, fascinated. The vowels all bent, but beautifully so, distorted from straight lines into curled wrought iron.
‘Bristol,’ Zara says.
Same story as for the Lake District. That’s been the briefing. Skip the Lake District. It never happened, just like London.
‘Yeah? Which school are you joining?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ she says, and the faintest of frowns crosses his features.
He wants to inch towards her, she can tell, but he doesn’t want to leave the guitar propped up alone against the car. She takes a step away from him, conscious of her odd socks, taken hastily from the washing airer when they were moved overnight.
‘Oh right,’ he says. ‘Well, I go to Hastings.’
‘Is that mixed?’
‘Mixed?’
‘You know … boys and girls.’
‘Oh. Yeah. It’s full of idiots, to be honest,’ he says. ‘I go in the music room.’ His lip curls up, just a fraction. Dark eyebrows draw down. Like, why did I say that? That’s the expression that seems to cross his face.
‘To practise?’ She gestures to the guitar. She likes that. Books and music have a lot in common. Creative endeavour, she supposes.
‘Yeah. It’s soundproof and warm. Best way to spend break.’
Zara winces. She spent break times in London lost in novels. She tried to make friends in the Lakes, and look. Now what?
‘I spend them reading,’ she says to him. A way to ward him off, she supposes. Suspicion comes easily to her now. He is not to be trusted. Nobody is.
He tilts his head to the side, appraising her. ‘Reading?’ he says.
‘Yeah.’ She waves The Time Traveler’s Wife at him. ‘I like novels.’
‘Cool. I like smart people,’ he says. ‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s a love story,’ she says.
He holds eye contact a moment longer than usual. It’s like a spotlight is on her.
‘I see,’ he says quietly. ‘Why do you read so much?’
Zara thinks for a second. ‘Because I’m anxious,’ she says eventually. ‘Escapism.’
‘I like anxious people, too,’ he says. ‘Bit of edge.’
Zara’s chest fills with liquid pleasure, like she’s stepped near to an open fire.
All this time. All this time! She’s been trying to mould herself into something cool, something worthwhile, someone other than her nerdy, anxious herself, and failing, failing, failing.
And yet here is the counterpoint to that. It isn’t change. It’s acceptance. Here is somebody who likes smart people. Who likes anxious people. Who could like her for herself.
No pretending to be cool. No attending parties when she wants to go to literature clubs, instead. She could be – gloriously, finally – herself. And embrace life all the more because of it, the civil war within her over.
But no. This cannot happen. She thinks of the sleepover and the website photo and all of the people who want to find her and hurt her. She turns away from him.
‘Got to go,’ she says coldly.
‘Well, if you are at Hastings, knock on Room Eleven in the music block at break or lun
ch,’ he says. He writes his number down on a bit of sheet music with a pen that he pulls out of his pocket. ‘Here I am. I’m Dom.’ He gives her a genuine smile. Top row of teeth. Straight and white. His nose wrinkles up ever so slightly.
Zara stares at him, still a few feet away, socks slowly dissolving the frost, and takes the paper from him.
But she can’t text him. She can’t text anybody. Can’t let anybody in. No matter how much she wants to.
Dom’s mobile number is beautiful to look at. 07900 781187. Such a nice symmetrical number. I like smart people.
God, she likes him.
Zara stares at the number and thinks. Maybe she could text. Just … if she stays within the parameters. The rules.
She writes her own set down on a note which she’ll keep under her pillow.
No confiding.
No hints at secrets.
No intimacy. Keep everything light.
You are Suzanne.
As an afterthought, she adds to the note, right at the bottom. She doesn’t know where it comes from, or why, but she writes it anyway.
Don’t fall in love.
Zara thinks about it for a few hours, just to be sure. Just to be cautious.
And then she sends a text. She’s glad he didn’t ask for her number. Partly because she has been issued with a new one in case her old one was breached, and she doesn’t yet know it, but also because it seems kind of respectful, to leave it up to her.
This is me, hi, she sends. Suzanne, your neighbour!
He pops immediately on to WhatsApp, and she looks at his profile picture. A selfie. Her profile is a cartoon of a bookworm at a rainy window, steaming mug of tea in hand. Anonymous, but normal, too. He won’t know that she only has three contacts, including him. Her mother and Jon from the protection service being the others. That’s what she likes about WhatsApp. It isn’t social media.
How to Disappear Page 27
