‘What were you, before?’ Lauren asks him spontaneously. She can’t sit here in silence as her life changes up the motorway. It is too strange. He knows everything about her. He invented her.
‘Before?’ he says blankly.
‘You said you’ve worked in witness protection for five years.’
‘It’s not witness protection. It’s person’s,’ he says automatically.
She says nothing. Aidan taught her the value of a loaded pause. People always fill them. Jon’s cheeks blush. Lauren is used to that. ‘Oh, it’s because I’ve had too much coffee, it gave me the shits!’ she would say at a party and then, at home in bed, she would lie there and think: why did I say that?
They pass the rest of the journey in silence. M1, M6. M62 past Liverpool. Further and further up. Finally, she sees the sign that prompts Jon to indicate left, a soft flick of the stick, three clicks, the car moving over carefully. Coniston. The Lake District.
‘Police,’ he says quietly, when they pull off the motorway. ‘I was police. Before.’
Coniston Water is to the left, but Jon drives right. The streets angle back on themselves, hairpin turns as they snake their way up a hill. It’s completely dark. No street lights. Lauren misses their amber hues: the night-time is black and white without them. She squints out of the car window. It’s raining steadily. Tap, tap, tap on the roof of the car.
John swings into a driveway, checks the rear-view mirror, waits, and then turns the engine off. Zara is asleep.
‘This one,’ he says, indicating a terraced house in front of them.
It’s made of flat, grey bricks. Like a drystone wall. The effect is a sort of brindled colour, like an animal. Lauren studies it. She gets out of the car and stands on the gravel driveway.
Silence.
Zara stirs inside the car and gets out, too. ‘Wow,’ she says drowsily, rubbing her eyes. She’s wearing pale jeans, a pretty white top with frilly arms, and a light grey cardigan with a big, rust-coloured scarf. She looks so adult. Always neat, not a hair out of place.
Lauren hides a smile. Her daughter has no idea what a knock-out she’ll be.
Jon is getting a set of keys out of a plastic wallet and standing by the door. They’re number two. Both houses next door, numbers one and three, have no lights on. It’s a safe haven, flanked by two empty properties. They are uniform, identical, plain. Net curtains across every window. Metal handrails by the steps. There is something of the public sector about them. Social housing. Army housing. Care homes. Something like that.
Lauren stands awkwardly, staring at the ghoulish black windows. She hopes she can fall in love with this house. She has to be able to fall in love with this house. It has to become hers. But where are the shined wooden floors of her London house? Where are the deep bay windows, the twenty-four-hour shops, the art galleries?
It smells up here. Freshwater on stone, the air misty and thick. It’s so isolated. The street is unlit, and Lauren can only see a hundred yards or so into the distance. Then it is blackness. She shudders. Anything could happen here.
‘Come on in and we’ll talk properly,’ Jon says, catching her hesitation.
He unlocks the front door and it opens straight into a living room painted grey. It’s furnished. A cream sofa with fluffy cushions. An empty bookcase. A lamp in the corner. Jon ushers them in and closes the door behind them.
‘Three beds. Same as in London. We place you in like-for-like conditions. No Ferraris and unlimited funds here, I’m afraid,’ he says, standing right in the centre of the living room and staring out of the window. His posture is rigid, like a guard’s.
He leads them down a beige hallway and into a small kitchen with oak worktops. ‘Kitchen. Basic appliances here. Anything you need within reason, we get it for you. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she says. The house has that cold feeling peculiar to buildings that have been unoccupied for more than a few days. A dead fly lies on its back on the window sill, legs in the air. She can see little chains of dirty droplets, like tidemarks, where somebody has hastily cleaned. She looks up at the ceiling. Artex.
‘Do I own this?’ she says. ‘This house?’
‘No.’
‘Does the State?’ she asks.
He blinks, surprised at her inquisitiveness, as people often are. ‘You can’t ask people how they vote!’ Aidan once said as they were walking home from a party. But she could. She would tell people how she voted. What she earned. Regularly did.
Jon turns his mouth down, nods his head slightly to the left. ‘Yeah,’ he says, though it sounds like no.
She would’ve laughed with glee if somebody had given her a free house a year or two ago. No bills to pay. Everything taken care of. But what she wouldn’t have realized is that it feels artificial. Sterile. A life being constructed around her is not her life. She has stepped into somebody else’s. Lindsey’s, she supposes.
‘When you’re settled here, six months or so, we’ll liaise with Aidan to sell the Islington house and get your half. Then you can buy here.’
She closes her eyes against these words. Zara is standing next to her, holding a paperback. The Hunger Games. She started it in the car, shutting Jon out by reading it, escaping somewhere else. Lauren doesn’t blame her. She could never do denial, closing her mind to terrible things, but fair play to Zara if she can. It’s a privilege afforded to kids. One Lauren wishes she still had.
‘Boiler – gas, combi,’ Jon says, morphing from chauffeur to bodyguard to estate agent.
‘Good for your baths,’ Zara says immediately to Lauren.
‘Is it?’ she says.
‘Yes – no water tank, right?’ Zara says to Jon.
‘You’re so smart,’ Lauren says sincerely to her daughter, who makes a face. Somehow, somewhere along the line – probably because of some shitty boy – Zara has come to believe that being smart is a bad thing. Lauren wishes she could undo it. Study hard. Know about boilers. Read three novels a week, if you want to.
‘Small utility,’ he says, opening a wooden door off the kitchen – it’s split horizontally, like a barn door, and the two halves clack together. That will be good for Bill, she thinks. No. It won’t. Her mind hasn’t yet adjusted to her new reality, and she doesn’t know how to make it happen. Bill’s gone for now. Consigned to the past, like everyone. She misses his ears already, so soft, like stroking a silk collar.
Jon leads her back into the hallway and up the stairs. The master bedroom is to the left – bed, chest of drawers, empty wardrobe, four coat hangers. Zara’s, Lauren supposes, is to the right.
Zara walks in and runs her hand along the coat hangers. She looks cagey. The body language of somebody who has followed through on a dare.
As Jon descends the stairs, Lauren reaches for her. ‘Feeling okay?’ she says.
Zara shrugs, not saying anything, but when she looks up at Lauren, her eyes are wet. Lauren can practically feel the anxiety coming off her daughter in vibrations. ‘I … I don’t know if I should say this –’ she starts, but Jon calls up to them.
‘Shall we do the identities before it gets too far into the evening?’ he says.
Lauren looks downstairs. He is standing in the hallway, holding a pink plastic wallet. When they reach him, he leads them through and lays it out on the kitchen table. ‘Passports. Lindsey and Sienna.’ He hands them out.
Zara turns hers over in her hands. It looks stiff and new. They took their photos from their old passports. Zara is so young in hers: a relic from a past life. She stares at it. Lauren has been able to bring baby photos of Zara – was encouraged to. Just no other photos.
‘Tea?’ she says artificially to everybody, searching in the cupboards. Eventually, she finds a blue-and-white striped tin containing tea bags. She makes three cups and sits back at the kitchen table.
‘You’re going for an interview here,’ Jon says to her. He pushes two pieces of paper over, printed out from the internet. She scans them. Nursery key worker. All new colleagues. All
new kids. But the same job. The same little toddler feet. The same fat hands inexpertly holding paint brushes. It is a tiny consolation prize.
‘Did I apply?’ she says.
‘Don’t worry about that.’
‘What about references?’
‘Don’t worry about those, either,’ he says. He runs a hand through his hair, not breaking eye contact as he does so. ‘That’s all in hand.’
‘But is my … my employment history must be fabricated, right?’
‘Look, Lindsey,’ he says, using her new name totally unironically.
Lauren stares at him. She isn’t Lindsey. Not here, not behind closed doors.
‘In some ways,’ he continues, ‘the less you know about how this operates, the better.’
‘Why?’ she says shrilly. She shouldn’t be asking this in front of Zara, showing, behind the curtain, her mother’s own human fallibility, but she can’t help herself.
‘Because then you can’t give anything away.’ His eyes – dark blue in the dimness – look directly at her. ‘You have to live it. Become Lindsey. Don’t be thinking about where your references come from. You applied. You were a nursery nurse before, in Bristol, remember. Become it. Become her.’
Lauren turns away from him. No. No. In two years, she’ll go back. Somehow. Does Jon not have any idea of the magnitude of what he’s asking her to do?
‘Next up, driving lessons. You’ll need to drive to get around up here. On Thursday, someone called Janey is coming at eleven for a five-hour lesson. An intensive course is the best.’
‘But I don’t want to know how to drive,’ Lauren says. Not doing it has become part of her identity. She hates chips, Prosecco, and will never learn to drive, doesn’t need to, likes the Tube, doesn’t want to become the designated driver. So she always thought, but here she is, an ex-Londoner, exiled to the Lake District. Pour the Prosecco. Pour the whole fucking bottle.
‘It’s for the best,’ Jon says. He takes a sip of his tea. The steam leaves his nose damp.
Lauren is struck by how little he moves. He doesn’t fidget or mess with anything on the table, doesn’t blow his nose or rub at his eyes. All the way up here, he had his hands at ten and two, driving slowly, eyes scanning the road. Everything measured, calm, robotic.
‘Background, then,’ he continues.
‘Just give it to us,’ Zara says tightly, which surprises Lauren. She’s drawn the sleeves of her cardigan down over her hands.
Outside, the wind blusters around their row of houses. The heating clicks on, and Lauren rests her arm along the kitchen radiator, waiting for it to heat up. ‘Okay.’
Jon addresses Lauren directly. ‘You’re Lindsey Smith. The most common breach is signing the wrong name. So watch that. Only child. Different parents’ names – they’re noted down here.’ He slides a family tree over to her. ‘They’re ex-pats, in Spain. Costa Del Sol. Dead parents make people suspicious. Estranged is better.’ He tells her this like he is confirming an order back to her. So that’s the soup, the roast chicken and the parfait. Her parents, resurrected, just like that. Back from the fucking dead.
She looks at the family tree. There is no fanfare about it at all, no branding. Done on Microsoft Word in Times New Roman, clip art arrows connecting the people.
Her mother went to choir and voted for the Green Party for her entire life, never travelled by plane because of the environment. Her father hated the sun. And yet, ‘Sue and Gerry’, her parents, are resident in Estepona, Spain. Lauren stares at the table and tries not to cry. She shakes her head and looks across at Zara, whose body is trembling.
‘You were born and raised in Bristol.’
‘But I’ve never even been to Bristol,’ Lauren says. ‘And my accent …’
‘Your accent is neutral,’ he says tightly. ‘Your medical records have been moved over into Lindsey’s name, too. But,’ he holds a hand up, ‘only the main events. Vaccinations. Allergy to penicillin. Glandular fever. Appendicitis.’
‘I’ve never had glandular fever,’ Lauren says after a second’s pause. But, inside, she is thinking it all sounds so irreversible. So final.
‘Oh, really?’ Jon says, a pen in hand. He slices a clean line through the words. ‘We’ll get that altered.’ He doesn’t apologize, or say there’s been an error. He simply says nothing, which makes it worse. Some poor other woman whose life has been uprooted has probably been confused with her.
‘Okay,’ she says, in a small voice.
‘And finally, here’s your mobile. The other’s been wiped now.’
Lauren blinks, looking down at the table. All those old text messages. All those photographs. All those memories … gone.
‘New number,’ Jon says. ‘Memorize it, because everyone knows their number these days.’
Lauren’s had the same number since she got her first phone in her mid-twenties. She can trot it out without thought, the numbers falling rhythmically off her tongue. She picks the iPhone up and scrolls to the top of the contacts. She’ll never memorize it. There’s no rhythm to this one. 07912 …
She opens the apps. All blank. All waiting for logins.
‘So, social media,’ Jon says. He leans forward, more engaged, his elbows on the table, his forearms parallel to each other.
‘Right.’
‘You can use it. In fact, it’s better to. Because somebody with no obvious family who’s also not on socials might raise questions.’
‘Right.’
‘I’d stay off Facebook because people will see that you have no network, which is unusual.’
‘Okay.’
‘But Twitter and Instagram are good. Make your profiles private. Follow celebrities and brands. Just look normal. Okay?’
‘Yep,’ Lauren says, her tone sounding clipped and efficient, though she is feeling anything but.
‘No selfies.’
‘I’m not really much of a selfie taker.’
‘Zara will be.’ A sidelong glance at her.
She shrugs.
She’s really not, Lauren thinks. She’s so beautiful, but she couldn’t be less vain.
‘We don’t want photos of either of you online. It’s so easy to stumble across these things, now, and one person tells another … and there are computer programs that can scan faces for matches these days.’
‘Okay.’ Lauren places her hands back on the radiator. It’s hot, now, and she shifts closer to it. At least they’re safe, she tries to tell herself. At least they’re warm.
‘And so that leads us nicely on to breaches.’
‘Yes.’
‘Needless to say, no contact with anyone back home.’
‘Right.’
‘We try to be understanding of breaches,’ he says. ‘Of the need to … reach out. But they make life hard for us. If you’re not cooperating with the protection we give then we can choose not to give it.’
He’s making too much eye contact and Lauren feels her cheeks heat up. How is that being ‘understanding of breaches’? It doesn’t sound understanding to her. It sounds like a threat.
Zara’s life is at stake. She’s got to make this work. She stares down at her hands, at her bare ring finger. Maybe she can wait out the two years. Maybe it will blow over.
Lauren looks at the small collection of papers on the pine table between them. A new passport containing a tiny photograph of herself, Lindsey Smith. New medical records. An interview. A driving lesson booked. So that’s a life, according to the department for protection.
She thinks of all of the things that really comprise a life. A real, authentic life. An identity. Possessions. Preferences. The purple leather purse Aidan got her one year for Christmas with the three sets of pockets inside that was so special to her because he had seen her: seen her fumbling with multiple sets of loyalty cards, and cash and lipsticks, and solved a problem. The bedspread she bought them that had llamas on. ‘Which is your favourite llama?’ Aidan had asked at night, and she had said, ‘The prancing one.’ The baking tra
y with the crimped edges that she used to make lemon tarts during the summer. How much she loves the bath. Her name, her job, the way she cuts her hair. The thoughts she has. Her mannerisms, the way she holds herself. Where she chose to live, in cool-as-fuck Islington. That her parents are dead. That she married a man called Aidan Madison who takes the piss out of her shopping habit.
‘Are you going to give Zara her history now?’ she says, her voice cracked.
‘Sienna. Yes.’
Sienna again. She would never have chosen it.
She gulps as she sees Zara’s date of birth. 23rd October. Six days out. Different star sign. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.
‘She has had all of her immunizations and the sepsis is on her record, but in the UK.’
‘No.’ She can’t help but say it. Don’t erase that. Not that.
‘It’s too distinctive, that five weeks in Paris,’ Jon says. ‘A doctor might mention it to a friend of a friend, they happen to recall Zara’s history, they tell someone they think they know where you are … it wouldn’t be right.’
‘Six degrees of separation,’ Lauren says bitterly. Her eyes seem to mist over, even though she isn’t crying. Whatever identity is, that experience is part of it. ‘But she was … they treated her differently in France,’ she tries. ‘It’s important that any doctor is aware of it.’ Even as she says it, she knows it to be irrational. There’s nothing wrong with Zara now. But she’s … somehow vulnerable. Always has been. The sepsis was a symptom of it, but there are others, too. She gets every cold, flu and stomach bug going. Has always been too thin. Bookish. Left behind sometimes, extra-confident and athletic friends striding in front of her at nursery. She would fall over at sports days, over-think, lose friends easily, confident girls moving on to new groups.
‘Rest assured, our medical experts have reviewed the notes and taken any salient points over,’ Jon says.
‘It’s fine, Mum,’ Zara says, looking tired around her eyes.
‘Give me the rest,’ Lauren says.
Zara’s left hand is wrapped around her mug. It must be burning her. Her hands are adult size, the exact same as Lauren’s. Slim fingers, short nails.
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