‘Imagine leaving everything?’ Poppy says. ‘If that was me, I’d have to say no to the art foundation!’ Her mouth falls open in horror.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘None of it is easy. Or ideal.’
He says it in the tone of voice of somebody who is trying to teach her something. But she already knows it, of course. Life isn’t fair. That much is clear to Poppy. She remembers the moment her mum was diagnosed. She had gone with her, on the bus, the number 344.
By then, even though her mum’s eyesight had temporarily gone, Poppy hadn’t expected the diagnosis. Nobody had prepared her. And then the consultant neurologist said ‘multiple sclerosis’, and Poppy’s brain remembered whenever she’d heard those words: conjuring images of monstrous, uncontrolled people in wheelchairs. That famous woman who went to Dignitas to end it all. Poppy sometimes looks on Instagram at the #MSStrong hashtags. That’s better, she thinks. People hiking. Shopping. Walking with a stick, but still walking.
Her dad fiddles now with the zip of her make-up bag, which is lying on the counter. She’s got it out to practise doing liquid liner, but that doesn’t seem to matter now.
‘Do you think … are they really going to go?’ she asks.
‘They tried to grab her in the street, Pops,’ he reminds her.
‘I know.’ Poppy picks up the tea again and takes a sip, then grimaces.
‘That tea work, anyway?’ he adds.
‘No detoxing that I can see, yet,’ she says. ‘Unless detoxing is just having the shits, instead?’
He laughs. ‘Oh, come here,’ he adds. There is something off about his tone.
Poppy puts the tea down and crosses the kitchen to him. His arms are around her shoulders just like they’ve always been, on and off, for fifteen years. He smells of dads. Imperial Leather soap. Outside. New car smell.
And that’s when she realizes. What is he trying to tell her, exactly? ‘Are you going to go?’ she says, filled with horror.
She feels his body tense as they stay embraced, together.
‘I don’t suppose …’ he says into her hair. ‘I don’t suppose, if I went, you’d ever come?’
She pulls her head back quickly, stumbling away from his embrace. Surprise ratchets up to alarm as she catches his serious expression. Has he just asked her this? Is he going? She looks upwards, at the ceiling where her mum’s bed rests. The universe is out to get her.
‘What?’ she says. ‘Are you going?’
He doesn’t say anything.
She thinks of her friends and her school and going off to do the art foundation next year in Chiswick. The beacon on her horizon. And after that: fashion school, she hopes. And, always, caring for her mum, as long as she needs it, just as her mum once cared for Poppy, too.
Jesus fucking Christ. What has he just asked? She feels light-headed.
‘I can’t leave my life!’ she says.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says quickly. ‘I don’t mean that. I would never ask that. No, I’m not going.’
She looks up at him, wanting to believe him. ‘Really?’
‘Yes. Absolutely,’ he says earnestly.
She sighs, relief unspooling on the exhale. Thank you, she thinks. Thank you. She steps back into his arms and hugs him for a while longer. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, but – God.’
His embrace is stiff. The relief disappears immediately. How could he? Does he mean it? She thinks of her parents’ divorce, and her mother’s illness, and now this. She tries to slow her breathing in her father’s arms. She can’t carry on being so angry all the time. It can’t be good for her. She’ll get frown lines, for starters.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says, so softly into her hair. ‘Don’t you worry.’
It feels awkward after another minute, and he must think so, too, because he adds, ‘That diet tea stinks,’ even though it doesn’t.
She laughs loudly, her hoop earrings pulling at her ears as she throws her head back. ‘It’s detox, not diet,’ she says. ‘Though I take your point.’
He pulls her close again and says, so softly she wonders if she might be imagining it, ‘Never, never, never. I will never leave you.’
It’s only later that she thinks: so what is he going to do?
15
Lauren
Islington, London
Aidan is sitting in their tiny garden, apparently waiting to speak to Lauren, who has been in the bath. The bath is always where she goes. In times of happiness, in times of sadness. There isn’t much the hot water can’t cure.
It smells of wood smoke and autumn peat, out here in the cold.
Aidan had wanted to move to the suburbs a few years ago. Kent. Sussex. He’d wanted a big garden. ‘But it’s my soulmate, London,’ Lauren had said plaintively to Aidan.
‘Your soul is overly mated,’ he had said with a half-smile. ‘Remember the Mulberry handbag?’
She’d bought the handbag with Hannah, her sister and biggest enabler. They’d gone up to Bicester for the day from London one February, and then into Oxford afterwards, the sky white and the stone brown, like they’d stepped into the pages of a Victorian novel. ‘I’ll get lunch,’ Hannah had said wryly. ‘You’ve just spent half a grand on a bag.’
‘God, don’t tell Aidan,’ Lauren had laughed.
They’d eaten lunch together, not speaking much, in that comfortable, intimate way that siblings can. Lauren had looked at her sister’s features and enjoyed seeing her deceased parents reflected there, like a small holiday from the grief of being an orphan. As they waited for the train back to London, Hannah had said, out of nowhere, ‘You look so much like Mum,’ and Lauren had told Hannah she’d been thinking the exact same thing over lunch. They had laughed while standing there in the bleak winter mist, against the brown stone station, waiting for the train.
So they stayed in London, Lauren and Aidan, in the end. Three parents, all dead before they were sixty-five. Three early inheritances. The only way to buy in London. Aidan’s father had been a saver, just like Aidan tried to be, and they’d almost paid off the flats’ mortgages with the inheritances in one go. They saved the rent from their buy-to-let, and bought the Islington house with the garden. They kept her old flat in Shepherd’s Bush. They rented it out until recently. Now, it lies empty, and they never quite got to the suburbs with the big garden, though this’ll do.
Aidan is in their very small garden, wearing sweatpants and a navy T-shirt, even though it’s freezing. In front of him is a cup of peppermint tea. Lauren gets her packet of Marlboro Lights out of the drawer in the kitchen. She brings them out, lighting up as she crosses the cool paving slabs, the end of the cigarette an orange dot in the night. She is a casual smoker, a few times a year, though Aidan hates it. The last time she smoked was in the summer when they went to a beer garden. Cigarettes should only be smoked in summer, she finds herself thinking as she sits down, the smell evocative of gin and tonics and of cut grass as she taps the end to dislodge the ash. She won’t smoke again in the winter fug. It’s too depressing, like she is a widow or something.
‘Look,’ Aidan says. It’s a conversation opener, not a command. He stretches his legs out under the table.
They’ve come outside to talk in privacy, at his insistence. Zara’s room is at the front of the house. They won’t be overheard.
Lauren is wearing a dressing gown, socks that come up to her knees, and a scarf. She’s perfectly warm out here in the cold, like a skier in full gear.
‘What?’ she says.
‘I’ve got a plan,’ he says. ‘We should sell the house and hire our own security guards.’
‘What? Aidan, Nazir dismissed that out of hand.’
‘He did not! He said we are free to explore it.’
‘It’s farcical. What are we supposed to do – sit in the house, forever under watch?’
Aidan looks at her. ‘Isn’t that less farcical than going into witness protection?’
Lauren says nothing, staring into the distance, smoking. ‘
If we were to have any sort of life, we’d need three,’ she says eventually.
‘Then let’s not have a life,’ he says, and Lauren is surprised by the desperation in his voice. ‘And be together.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve worked it out. We’d need fifty grand a year. If we sold the house and lived in the Shepherd’s Bush flat …’
‘Which has two bedrooms.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we’d never be able to go out.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Zara would never go to school.’
Aidan sighs, an angry exhale. One of the many things Lauren loves about Aidan is his sense of responsibility. He takes on seemingly endless tasks, never moaning, never saying he feels pressurized. At various times over the past ten years, she has guiltily caught herself thinking: Aidan will sort it. About birthday parties, MOTs, life admin. But this is … this is extreme, even for him. God, she thinks, staring down at her cigarette packet. He sounds like – well, he sounds like her, saying the sorts of fanciful things she would usually say.
‘Why are you trying to do something they haven’t even advised we do?’ she says to Aidan, meeting his eyes. ‘They dismissed security. Witness protection is their solution. It’s a threat to her life.’
‘I know,’ Aidan says quickly. ‘I know.’
The moon is out, full and bright. London is usually too bleached with light pollution to see the moonlight, but tonight, Lauren can. It creates shadows as vivid as a floodlight on their patio. Lauren stares at the silhouettes of spindly trees and rooftops on their paving slabs like a light show. Neither of them speaks for several minutes.
‘I can’t imagine leaving everything, either,’ Lauren says eventually, her breath clouding the night air in front of her with warmth and moisture and cigarette smoke. ‘But we have to. We can’t sell the house and hire … that’s … that’s ludicrous.’
‘Lauren,’ Aidan says.
She looks up in surprise. ‘Yes?’ she says blankly. She finishes the cigarette and lights up another. A new job. A new town. God, a new school. It is all she is thinking about. New things close in like the autumn cold. She doesn’t want them. She wants her life – exactly as it is now. She takes a deep, steadying drag on the cigarette. No. They can make this work. There has to be a way. They will build a life together. They’re strong enough. She reaches across the table for his hand. ‘We’ll be okay,’ she says. ‘We’ll be okay, won’t we? Wherever we end up.’
‘How can I come with you?’ Aidan says quietly, in the tone of voice of somebody who feels that they are not being heard.
There is no sound. Lauren breathes smoke into the night. It hangs suspended in the air for just a second. She watches it, a slow-motion disappearing act. ‘What do you mean?’ she says eventually, though she has grasped his meaning immediately.
‘Lauren, I …’ Aidan says. His voice is sore-sounding, ragged at the edges. He reaches, to her surprise, for a cigarette and lights up. It takes him three rasps of the lighter. His hands are shaking.
‘How can I leave Poppy?’ he says.
‘No,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘No.’
But even as she denies what he is saying, she understands it. Of course she does. Their children are more important than each other. Zara is the love of Lauren’s life, and Poppy of Aidan’s. She just hadn’t … she just hadn’t thought it through. Her first thought is that she has been so selfish and single-minded. The second is that she is going to lose him.
No. That can’t happen. She understands it now. The talk of security guards. Desperation. And she’s desperate too, but she’s got to follow the advice of the police. If she stayed, and something happened to Zara …
She stares at the table, his steaming peppermint tea.
‘I can’t see a way out. You have to go,’ he says. ‘And I … Natalie won’t.’
‘Natalie?’
‘I asked if she could come. I can’t … I can’t rip up Poppy’s family, I just can’t.’
‘I know,’ Lauren says. ‘I know.’
‘I’d rather rip up mine than hers.’
Stoic Aidan. He has only told her now. He let her prattle away to the police about them all going. She is glad of it, that the conversation – and the heartbreak – is here, in their garden, while they’re totally alone, like a controlled explosion. He always knows how to do things the right way.
‘You have to go,’ he says. His cheeks hollow as he drags on the cigarette. ‘She’s not safe. That fucking Osman notice.’
‘I can’t start a life without you,’ she says through tears. ‘I can’t.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he says.
They sit in silence for several moments.
‘It’s impossible,’ Lauren says eventually.
‘Yep. My mum basically said the same.’
Despite everything, Lauren feels a shard of jealousy lodge inside her chest. Oh, to have a mother. Her own mother would never have given advice. She would say that she didn’t know. Honest and straightforward and totally unable to emotionally connect, that was Lauren’s mother. Even now, sometimes, when Lauren cries, she feels embarrassed that she’s doing it. ‘If Brenda doesn’t know, then we’re truly fucked,’ Lauren says.
Aidan throws her a half-smile. ‘I know.’
‘There’s got to be a middle ground,’ she says.
He puffs on the cigarette again. She wishes he wouldn’t. That poisonous cigarette.
‘Now it’s you who wants to hire security guards,’ he says dryly.
‘I still think that’s ludicrous,’ she says softly.
‘What if it blew over?’ he says, a funny expression on his face.
‘Huh?’
‘What if you go – we’ll try it for a bit … and hopefully it’ll blow over? We’ll give it a time limit?’ he says.
‘A time limit?’
‘A year or two.’
‘The idea is they give you a new identity for life. The protection service wouldn’t do it for someone who intended to come back,’ Lauren says.
‘So don’t tell them that,’ Aidan says, looking directly at her. Brown eyes behind glasses. ‘The group will die down, surely? It’s fucking kids.’
‘I can’t go,’ she says, but she knows that she can. That she must. ‘I wish I met you in 2004 and Zara was yours,’ she says suddenly, emotionally, panic mounting up inside her.
Aidan smiles a kind of wan smile around the cigarette. ‘Then she wouldn’t be Zara,’ he says simply.
Lauren closes her eyes and sees her beautiful daughter in all of her guises. She opens her eyes and looks at Aidan. His strong jaw. How much he cares. She loves him so completely, her life partner, her best friend, her lover.
But she loves him slightly less than she loves Zara. She always will. And he will always love Poppy more than he loves her. It is what makes their choice impossible. There is no way for him to come with her.
The confirmatory thought chokes her. They’re going to be parted. The sadness is so deep she feels it cracking her, and so she turns it to anger, instead. Aidan is fucking right. Her soul is overly mated. She loves too many people too much, and look where it’s got her. Maybe her mother’s way made more sense, after all.
‘Try it,’ he says. ‘Two years, say. I’ll be here, waiting.’
She reaches across the table for his hand. He holds on to it, but despondently so, their hands trailing low, between their chairs. Eventually, he pulls away. Goosebumps have formed on his arm. He must be cold, after all, Lauren thinks, but not showing it.
Jon, their assigned case worker from the protection service, is standing in their living room by nine the next morning. Zara is upstairs. Lauren thinks that for the best. Jon cautioned against Zara being present, because she is a minor. Lauren could filter out the appropriate bits and tell them to Zara later, he said, a beat of judgement behind his words about the conversations Zara has already been privy to. Lauren is too tired to think properly about what’s best.
/>
Everything has happened so quickly, like a fast-tracked health referral for something sinister. Lauren is existing in a different world to last week, and it is getting worse and worse as more people get involved.
Jon has just informed her that they are leaving tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
He is tall, with strawberry-blond hair, good teeth, the front ones slightly larger than normal, and a long, straight nose. He pauses just slightly before answering questions, which Lauren likes. She always answers right away, and is often bullshitting. She is in safe hands with him.
He sits on the armchair in the bay window. Lauren hesitates, then sits on the sofa. They’re slightly too far apart, but it’s better than being too close together.
It’s sleeting outside. Lauren looks out at it as she tells Jon that Aidan does not intend to go into protection. He shows no emotion, no surprise, except when Lauren looks at him closely. Something around the eyes. A slight narrowing. Just a tiny bit of sympathy. A squint of understanding.
‘He has a child from a previous relationship,’ Lauren explains needlessly. ‘Zara isn’t his.’
‘I see,’ Jon says carefully. ‘Well, I will need to brief you on … the implications of that.’
‘Okay,’ Lauren says.
‘Is Aidan here now?’
‘He’s upstairs.’
Jon inclines his head just slightly towards the ceiling. Lauren swallows. She ascends the stairs. The striped runner she fell in love with last year is soft against her feet.
‘They need to see you,’ she says to Aidan at the door of his office. He must surely have heard her coming, but he hasn’t turned around. He sits with one foot tucked up underneath him, the other resting on the light wood floor. ‘Hello?’ she adds. ‘The protection guy wants to talk to you.’
He closes the Kickstarter page down. ‘What about?’
‘Implications.’
He looks at her for a second. Something seems to cross his features, like a shadow from a nearby window moving over them. ‘Okay, sure,’ he says easily.
When they arrive back downstairs, Jon is holding a different leaflet. Contact with Past Family. ‘Right, then,’ he says.
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