Alias

by Tracy Alexander

  I rang the number on the card and was invited straight round to the house, which was on Brudenell Road.

  ‘You’ll be the first viewing,’ said the voice – young, male, southern.

  Mack would have come with me, but as far I was concerned his job was done.

  ‘Nice meeting you, Mack.’

  ‘Same. See you around, Saffron.’

  He disappeared off. I didn’t give him another thought, because I had no idea he’d be part of my story.

  26

  I knew I’d take the room before I saw it. Being homeless meant being vulnerable. Like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, shelter was my priority.

  The landlord, Freddie, was a post-grad whose generous parents had bought him a house. If he thought it was odd that I wanted to move in right away, he didn’t say. Nor did he comment on the sparse luggage, but I covered that anyway by saying, ‘I’ve got some stuff to pick up that I left with a friend.’

  ‘Let me know if you want a hand,’ he said.

  I paid the deposit and the first month’s rent in cash, promising to set up a direct debit when I’d changed banks. As far as Freddie was concerned I’d decided to look for work in Leeds, because London was too expensive.

  ‘The other lodger’s called Polly. She’s a post-grad like me. She’s not here and I’ve got to go out. So … make yourself at home, Saff.’

  I waited in my room until I heard him leave and then went to the bathroom, locked the door and ran a bath. The water was blissfully hot. I had no toiletries of my own, but there was some lemon zest shower gel, so I helped myself. I felt disgusting. Dirty. A failure. And very, very alone. I sank down so deep that only my nose and eyes were above the waterline, like a hippo in a river. I needed to think. But the weariness was making it difficult. And the anger was clouding my judgement. All the way through the Dronejacker affair I’d been prepared for it to fail. So many things could have gone wrong. But they didn’t. When I finally had control of the drone, I knew nothing could stop me. And yet, something did. Crushing. Seriously crushing. I needed to channel the feeling into something positive, or I’d drown in my own bitterness.

  I heaved my overheated body out of the bath and realised I had no towel. There was a small, stripy, germ-ridden one slung on the radiator, which I reluctantly used.

  I nipped back into my room in my filthy T-shirt and put on a pair of joggers and a hoodie, which were only slightly better.

  I wanted to curl up on the mattress and sleep, but there was no bedding, so I made myself go in search of a decent-sized supermarket. I didn’t want alarm bells ringing right away. Normal people had ‘stuff’.

  I filled a trolley with bedding, towels, toiletries, a Union Jack cushion, food, underwear, clothes and a burner phone – all paid for with yet more cash – and got a taxi back. Luckily Freddie was still out, because I was too tired to think of an explanation for the ridiculous number of orange plastic bags.

  By eight-thirty on day one of Saffron Anderson’s new life in Leeds, I had stir-fry in my belly, a made-up bed, three changes of clothes in the cupboard and the means to wash and clean my body and the bathroom. Not bad. My mood had lifted too. I hadn’t chosen the easy path – that would have meant grieving for my grandma and moving on. I’d chosen to take a stand. My first attempt had failed. I decided right then that my second, whatever shape it might take, wouldn’t.

  I was slipping into sleep, thinking about the people who’d narrowly missed dying on the streets of London three days before, when I heard someone come in the front door. I was instantly wide-awake again, too recently in fight-or-flight mode to properly let go. I wondered who it was – Freddie or Polly? Wondered what they’d say if they knew their new lodger was Dronejacker.

  PART 2

  27

  ‘You certainly seem to have packed a lot in,’ said Liam, the manager, flicking back to the first page of my application form.

  I nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘I’ve always been a busy sort of person.’ My voice was as clear and confident as when I’d said exactly the same to the bathroom mirror.

  ‘And that’s the sort of person we need,’ he said, smiling.

  The interview was almost over. Liam had gone through my carefully worded lies one by one and I’d answered him as though I’d lived through each of them. Practice makes perfect, as Mum used to say – except she was talking about eating spaghetti without slurping.

  ‘One last question, Saffron. Where do you see yourself five years from now?’

  Good question. And one I hadn’t predicted.

  ‘In your job, hopefully.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that,’ he said, unable to suppress a grin.

  He shuffled his papers together, then moved his chair back so he could stand up.

  ‘Something about you … seems familiar …’

  I dropped my head, took a second to get a grip.

  ‘I’ve got that sort of face,’ I said as I too stood up.

  Liam walked back to the reception area with me. The next interviewee was already waiting, hunched over and picking his nails. No contest!

  ‘We’ll be in touch by the end of the week,’ said Liam, shaking my hand.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I replied, meeting his eyes – green flecked with brown.

  You can tell a lot from someone’s eyes. I’d ticked all his boxes, employment and otherwise. I glanced down at the new me – black trousers, black brogues, grey silky top – the whole look copied from Grazia magazine. Being Saffron Anderson was starting to feel good.

  As I pushed open the door and felt the May breeze warm on my face, I wondered what he thought he saw in my eyes … Probably exactly what I let him. Keen. Organised. Personable. Bright. Pity he couldn’t see any deeper, but then dark eyes are so much less transparent.

  I walked home, all the way up Woodhouse Lane and through the park, convinced that I’d soon be the Customer Services Agent for a worldwide courier company. Poor Liam was going to end up regretting his decision. Shame – he seemed like a nice guy.

  I knew I shouldn’t be getting ahead of myself. The job was only the first step, but it felt so good to be wrestling back control.

  It had been a tricky few weeks, finding my feet in Leeds, but I was back on task.

  28

  No one was in. Good. I made a cup of tea and took it up to my room. Sharing a house wasn’t ideal, but the fact that Freddie was so casual definitely was.

  I had three hours until I was due at the pub for another evening of being chatted up by students and wiping up slops. I hated every second of it, but if Liam liked me as much as I thought he did, I wouldn’t be doing it for much longer.

  I fished my seventh-hand (according to the names inside the cover) chemistry book out from under the bed and got cracking. No way could I get talking to a proper chemist without appearing to have at least some idea of redox equilibria and condensation polymerisation.

  I was finished with technology and had gone back to basics. The internet, email, phones – they all left traces. Even if you were clever – zig-zagging the globe, leaping from server to server – there was no guarantee you were either invisible or anonymous. If I even tiptoed around the web I was risking everything. I’d single-handedly had security organisations on both sides of the Atlantic on the hop. People were looking for me. Looking hard. I needed to stay hidden, and that meant staying away from chatrooms and hackers, and browsing books not HTML.

  I’d made two other decisions. I was going it alone – look where my faith in Sayge and Dan had got me – and this time it was going to be fast. It was twenty months since the killing. A countermove was long overdue.

  Too soon, the key in the front door announced that Freddie was back.

  ‘Saff!’ he yelled up to me. ‘You in?’

  ‘No!’ I yelled back, shoving the book away.

  ‘Very funny.’ He was already loping up the stairs for his daily dose of sarcasm. Not that I minded him. He was twenty-one – like Saffron! – and ea
sy to get along with.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asked.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  Freddie plonked himself on the end of my bed.

  ‘Did they test out your parcel-wrapping?’

  ‘Yes.’ I leant forward slightly, earnest face. ‘I had to wrap three odd-shaped objects against the clock, and there were penalties for using too much tape.’

  ‘A straight answer would be nice, just for a change …’ He pushed his hair away from his face. The long locks were an act of rebellion. Along with the tattoo I’d spotted on his shoulder.

  Mum gave me a fake tattoo once, a butterfly, chosen from a sheet that came in a party bag. Dad went ballistic, thinking it was permanent. When he realised you could wash it off, he let me put a rose on his shoulder. The memory made my heart stop. I couldn’t begin to imagine how Mum and Dad were dealing with not just a lost daughter, but an evil one …

  I banished the thoughts – the past only got in the way. After all, I couldn’t go back …

  ‘The interview was fine,’ I said. ‘They send stuff all over the world with stickers on. I can do that.’

  ‘What’s the money?’

  I told him.

  He wasn’t impressed but managed to say, ‘At least it’s not minimum wage.’

  It was annoying having to fake being strapped. I still had plenty of cash, but it would be far too complicated to invent a reason why a twenty-one-year-old would live in a shitty room in studentville if she was loaded. Better to be poor, reliant on wages from the pub, hoping for something better …

  ‘My folks are coming up to Leeds in a couple of weeks,’ said Freddie. ‘Why don’t you come and pig out at their expense?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Families aren’t my thing.’

  He glanced at the walls. Bare. Looked at the top of the chest of drawers. I could see the cogs whirring – he was looking for clues to my life. Fat chance. I could have printed some photos from the internet and framed them to keep him happy … but the genius lay in keeping things as simple as possible. As far as Freddie was concerned, I didn’t speak to my parents, ditto the rest of my family.

  The less I invented, the smaller the chances of a hiccup. But I didn’t want to appear isolated. So ever since I’d moved in, I’d been to the cinema at least twice a week coming back full of details about the film, or sometimes the pub or club I’d supposedly been in, the punters, the drunks on the bus, the imaginary friend I’d gone with …

  Truths, like getting an income from the pub job, helped tether the fiction.

  ‘Not all families are the same, Saff.’

  His voice was kind. A warning bell went off in my head. Letting anyone get close would be a Mistake, capital M.

  ‘They are to me, Freddie.’ I was deliberately offhand. ‘I’m going out anyway.’

  ‘You can bring whoever you like back, you know,’ said Freddie. ‘It’s your room.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  There was a silence that I didn’t try to fill. He stood up, uncomfortable, which was what I wanted. But yet to deliver his parting shot.

  ‘There’s something not quite right about you, Saff.’

  Get the hell out, I wanted to say, but I needed to keep things nice.

  ‘I’m left field,’ I said, a laugh in my voice.

  If only he’d hide in his room like Polly. She was doing some sort of research into eating disorders, but went to Birmingham every Thursday night to spend the weekend with her boyfriend.

  Freddie was studying theoretical philosophy, but seemed more interested in studying me.

  I shut the door behind him and, reluctantly, took my Union Jack cushion off the bed. I undid the zip and took out three press cuttings. One last look and then they had to go. Keeping them was an indulgence anyway, and indulgences weren’t allowed. One was an analysis, published the Sunday after, of the ‘frighteningly well-organised attack’, heavily criticising the American security measures and praising the Brits for shooting down the drone. The second was a piece suggesting that I was in Syria with my jihadi friends. (Most reports assumed I’d left the country.) The third, my favourite, was a blistering attack on America’s drone wars, and included a paragraph about Lamyah and Jaddah.

  I got a lighter out of my rucksack, leant out of the window of my room and watched each piece burn. There was something symbolic about seeing the coverage reduced to ashes. Next time the ashes would be made of more than just typeface.

  29

  I got the call two days after the interview. It was gone eleven but I was still in bed, scribbling on my A4 writing pad. The shopping list of what I might need had turned into more of a mind map, with dashes connecting chemical compounds with their common names and less violent uses. Like potassium nitrate, aka saltpetre – handy for preserving meat, fertilising plants and as an oxidiser in explosives. Not that I was using that. I’d decided on the stuff they put in the cold packs you use on sore muscles – because you can buy them in Tesco.

  I liked the unexpectedness of it – no one would imagine, after the complexity of the drone attack, that I would shun the internet in favour of chemistry, parcel tape and a worldwide courier operation. It wasn’t anything like as audacious a plan, but all I was after was success. Bombs were a tried-and-tested method – and not that difficult to put together. Seriously, anyone who could follow a recipe for a Victoria sandwich had a bomb within their grasp. All I had to do was make one and decide where to send it.

  ‘Is that Saffron Anderson?’

  ‘Speaking,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Saffron, it’s Liam from SendEx.’

  ‘Hi, Liam.’

  He went through the main points of the offer, emphasising that if I was as good as he expected, the three-month contract would turn into a permanent position – not that I cared. Three months and I’d be gone. Job done. Staying anywhere for too long risked my past catching up with me.

  Liam ended the call by saying that the paperwork would be in the post by end of play. I confirmed that I could start next Tuesday – Mondays were frantically busy, evidently, because there were no deliveries on Sunday.

  Getting the job felt like a major achievement. Not only could I give up the bar work, but it meant I could start information gathering – see how difficult it was to send a bomb. There was bound to be screening at some point in the process. Until then, there wasn’t much I could do, so I decided to take a walk in the park. I didn’t reckon on company, but was quite glad of it.

  ‘Saff!’ It was Mack, truanting as usual. I saw him every few days. And most often fed him.

  ‘What have I told you about that stuff?’

  He was leaning against the toddler slide with a can of cider in his hand.

  ‘There wasn’t no milk,’ he said, his grin showing his awful teeth.

  ‘I got a job,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Mack. ‘In the pub.’

  ‘Not any more. From next Tuesday, I’m working for a company that sends things all over the world.’

  ‘Can you send me?’ said Mack. ‘I want to go to Germany.’

  ‘Why there?’ I asked.

  ‘Cos my dad’s there.’

  I didn’t know he had a dad. His mum I knew all too well – she was barred from the pub, but still tried her luck when she was staggering and slurring but not yet in a coma. I’d refused to serve her a few times and she’d called me a selection of racist names. Nice.

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Never seen ’im.’

  I didn’t push it.

  ‘Let’s get a 99.’

  Mack drained the can, tossed it onto the shiny green grass and walked with me towards the ice-cream van.

  ‘Can I live with you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Why? Is something up?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Can I see your flat?’ he asked.

  ‘I live in a house,’ I said. ‘And no, you can’t. Someone’ll call the police if I’m seen stealing a littl
e boy like you.’

  ‘They came to ours yesterday. Mum was yelling.’

  ‘The police?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What for?’

  Mack told me a variation of the now-familiar story. It seemed like every week his mum would go ape, accusing the downstairs neighbour of thieving, curtain-twitching, being black, being a benefits cheat …

  This time, Mack’s social workers had threatened to take him away.

  ‘If they took me I could live with my sister,’ he said, before pressing his finger on the picture of the Screwball. ‘Can I have one of them?’

  ‘Recognise any letters?’ I asked.

  ‘Scr,’ he said, lying. It was pointless trying to teach him to read, but I did it anyway.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me,’ he said. Fair point.

  We wandered to the swings and sat side by side. A few little kids were playing on the climbing frame, their mums gossiping on the bench. The Big Issue man came past and nodded at Mack, who gave him a thumbs-up.

  ‘Have you got a sister?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I told you, I haven’t got anyone.’

  ‘You’ve got me.’

  I pretended to slap my own forehead.

  ‘So I have.’

  He smiled. When he was happy, his filthy face, horrid teeth and grimy hair all disappeared, leaving just shining eyes. When he was sad, he looked like those kids on the posters for the NSPCC – only worse, because I knew him.

  ‘Where’s your mum, then?’ he said.

  ‘She died,’ I said. Her face flashed in front of me – long brown wavy hair, lips always painted a rosy pink, a heavy gold necklace she never took off because Dad had bought it for her. I quickly pushed the picture back where it belonged.

  ‘I wish my mum died,’ he said.