How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  She wishes there wasn’t such a persistent alarm system in her head. That everything new didn’t make her nervous. She is trying to ignore it, the hyper-vigilance, but perhaps anybody would be afraid in this situation. Perhaps it isn’t only anxiety.

  A girl is standing outside the grey reception building – all of the buildings in Coniston are grey – holding a pale pink bag.

  Zara walks into the reception and the girl follows her, smiling self-consciously as Zara holds the door open for her. There’s a dark brown rug, wrinkled up, the very end of it folded over like a duvet cover, exposing the rubbery underside. It smells like schools. Pencil shavings. Trainers. Industrial floor polish. Overcooked dinners. Sweat. Zara likes that they all smell the same. She and the girl sit on two green chairs, side by side. The seats are made of cheap foam, and it yields too much underneath her.

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ the girl with the pink bag suddenly says, gesturing to the upturned rug and the dirt, fluff and crumbs underneath it. ‘They never even lift it to hoover?’

  Zara can’t help but smile. ‘It gives me hives to look at,’ she says, thinking of her always ordered bedroom, her new stationery, the chaos of her mum’s messiness. She might be Sienna now, but she still wants to wipe up under the rug. So much for new Sienna. It’s funny how hard it is to change. She wishes she could say something funny. Something original or cool.

  Jamie used to say the same thing to her about change being hard. He’d been in the army. Served in Afghanistan, so he said, and she believed him, because he knew things about it that you couldn’t make up. How the ground beneath him would shake with tremors during explosions. He described it so well to her once, both hands coming out in front of him and trembling. ‘Sounds like an engine starting up, couple of streets away,’ he once said. ‘It’s hard to change my mindset back to safety.’

  She can’t forget the wound. A ragged line across his neck, still feebly leaking, like a faulty tap rhythmically spurting mouthfuls of water, a betrayal, his heart unknowingly pumping blood out of him instead of around inside him. She’d rolled him on to his side and tried to stem it with her denim jacket, later taken away by the police for forensics. They offered it back to her, months later, pale denim in a clear plastic bag, a stain across the collar like a huge red flower. Zara had just looked at them, and her mum had said, ‘Please dispose of that for us,’ in an incredulous voice.

  She’s glad she had a shot at getting Luke and Mal sent where they belong, that’s the truth of it. Jamie didn’t deserve it. She did it for a subculture of people who are ignored and marginalized. She did it for people who are only ever offered leftovers, both literal and metaphorical.

  And now she’s paying the price. Their family divided, because of her. And it isn’t over yet. She thinks of the motto … and the rest of it.

  ‘Reckon we can sweep it up while we wait for them?’ the girl says, interrupting Zara’s thoughts.

  ‘Probably not,’ Zara says.

  ‘I’m Phoebe.’

  Zara waits just one beat. This is it. Her rehearsals in front of the dingy mirror in their new bathroom. The chanting in her head as she walked into the school gates today. ‘Sienna,’ she says. She feels as though she has a gun to her temple. God, why is she like this?

  ‘What a nice name. Where have you moved from?’ Phoebe says.

  Zara swallows, trying to remember her story. It’s written in a note on her phone – locked down, password protected, like Jon told them to do – but there, just in case she forgets.

  ‘Bath – no, Bristol! It’s Bristol,’ Zara says. Her hands are sweating. She is so bad at this. ‘Lost my mind for a second there,’ she says, with a forced laugh. ‘You?’

  ‘I’m only local.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Zara says, but, instead, her mind is racing. Already, she’s slipped up. She glances towards the window. How long before it gets out, and they come for her? The gloved hands, the tight grips? Anxiety clutches at her chest again like an old enemy. Her entire body is tense, like she is made of wood.

  She stares down at her feet, trying to breathe deeply the way the therapist told her to, thinking of the people she has left behind. Poppy and Aidan. And Bill.

  ‘Must be so weird to move miles and miles away,’ Phoebe says, and Zara feels her whole body start. She knows?

  No. She doesn’t know. Bristol is miles away. It’s fine. It’s fine. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. And then she adds, ‘Must be kind of weird to move locally.’

  Zara watches as Phoebe turns to the window. It is frosted, toughened glass, with metal threads running through it like graph paper.

  ‘Yeah. It is. But necessary.’

  ‘Same for me.’

  Phoebe leans her head back against the wall and sighs. ‘I don’t know if I should have moved, or stuck it out,’ she says.

  ‘Bullies?’ Zara says immediately.

  Phoebe waits a second before answering. ‘Yeah, I guess they were,’ she says eventually. ‘Group of vicious girls. Used to be my friends.’

  ‘Oh,’ Zara says, and her heart seems to expand painfully for her. Maybe she could make a real friend up here.

  ‘How come you moved?’ asks Phoebe.

  ‘Mum’s work,’ Zara says faithfully. Panic moves up her body, the exact way it used to. She needs to escape. She can’t do this. She’s going to mess it up.

  Phoebe is looking at her closely, can see she is struggling.

  But Zara can’t say. She takes a deep breath as she thinks of the witness protection rule sheet. She likes rules.

  She’s got to be convincing. She can’t let on that there is even a secret to conceal. She’s got to keep people at arm’s length.

  ‘Well, sorry you were bullied,’ Zara says. ‘I hope it’s better here for you – it’s going to be good for me. I’m sure we’ll see each other around.’ She turns away from Phoebe.

  Phoebe’s expression opens like a wound, then closes down. She’s been given the brush-off.

  Zara stares at her hands.

  A middle-aged man strides into the reception. ‘Sienna and Phoebe? Today’s new starters.’

  Later, much later, Zara is walking home, alone, the mountains in the distance, the pavements sparkling at her feet, thinking of how soon she can sign up to the nearest library.

  She is totally alone out here, tonight. Goosebumps cover her back, nevertheless. She wonders if she will ever stop being terrified.

  She gets her phone out and trudges along, ruminating. She walks for five minutes, now thinking about Phoebe, then stops suddenly when she hears something. Other footsteps. She turns around in a slow circle. She’s on a residential street. It’s deepest, darkest winter, the grasses spiked with frost, air vents pumping out steam into the evening air. She can’t see anybody, so she keeps walking, her skin freezing in the cold, her eyes darting around her.

  How is she going to make any friends when she can’t tell the truth? A heavy weight sits in her stomach as she thinks of it. How is it ever going to work for them, here?

  The footsteps again. She stops. And, this time, she sees him. A tall man in a black coat, his face completely obscured by the shadow of his hood and the darkness. He’s a few hundred yards behind her, emerging from an old-fashioned wooden bus stop. He stands and watches her for a beat, then resumes walking towards her.

  Her heart rate quickens. She’s all alone out here. What should she do? Phone somebody? She gets her mobile out and taps a text out to her mother that she doesn’t send. Prospect Road, come find me. It’s there, just in case. She watches the man catching up to her. She can’t turn her back to him. She can’t keep walking. She is frozen, out here on the winter street, waiting for him to get to her.

  As he approaches, she sees his face. He’s wearing glasses. She can just make out the white trail of a pair of headphones down the front of his hoody. He’s almost reached her, now. Her entire body is trembling.

  He walks past her, jostling her arm slightly. ‘What you looking at?’ he says accusatorily
.

  Zara’s shoulders sag with relief. Thank God, thank God, he’s just a regular yob.

  She deletes the emergency text to her mother, but adds one into the keyboard shortcuts. If she types SOS, her phone changes it to Please help me, they’ve found me. It makes her feel better.

  She carries on walking, more slowly this time, letting the man recede into the distance. She resumes her worrying, as Zara often does, about how to make friends in protection.

  After a while, she begins to talk. To nobody. To herself. She is walking an imaginary Bill, an imaginary lead in her hand.

  ‘I am worried they’ll find me. I regret lying. I miss Aidan and Poppy. I miss London. I’m never going to have a single true friend ever again,’ she is saying. Tears are collecting in her eyes and her nose is streaming and her mouth is full of sticky, sad saliva. ‘I’m sad, I’m scared, and I’m lonely,’ she says to the night air. ‘I’m so lonely. So lonely and so frightened.’

  26

  Aidan

  Shepherd’s Bush, London

  Four days gone

  Aidan hasn’t seen Lauren for four days. The longest they have ever been apart. He doesn’t know if she got his text. She hasn’t replied yet. He thought setting the alarm to go off on the second night made logical sense. She’d be alone by then – especially at eleven at night – and he calculated it would be before the battery ran dead. He is surprised she didn’t text him right away. She’s the impulsive one, he the considered over-thinker, but maybe their roles are reversing. Or maybe she didn’t get it. Or maybe he got her into trouble. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  The truth is, he needs a line to her. An open method of communication. Not because he misses her – though he does – but because he needs to be able to warn her. If the group find Zara. That’s why he’s taken this risk. Because not taking it is worse than taking it.

  He can’t tell Lauren about Zara and the cover-up, even if he could get hold of her. He weighed it up this morning in the shower. If he told her, what would it achieve? It would frighten her. She’s in protection anyway. Everything that can be done is being done.

  And, deep down, he knows she might tell somebody. That’s the truth. She could go nuclear.

  And information is harmful.

  He is standing in central London as he re-justifies this decision to himself, waiting for Lauren’s sister, Hannah, underneath a dripping awning, Bill sniffing at a wrapper of something. Thinking about when he might see her again. He watches a glassy raindrop fill and bulge, then fall to the ground, shattering to nothing. Still thinking.

  He checks his map and sends Hannah the street he’s on. He wouldn’t meet her at hers, in case her house is being watched.

  The Find Girl A meeting pops into his mind while he is staring out at the street. Nobody has mentioned Malcolm, the second defendant, who doesn’t appear to be in the group and wasn’t at the meeting. Where’s he at, then? Is he holding a grudge? Or …?

  Hannah is late, just like Lauren would be. He texts her again.

  Am walking now, call when you’re here.

  It doesn’t deliver. So she’s on the Tube. He starts walking with Bill, who falls easily into step beside him. He feels safer in backstreets, his thoughts racing like hamsters in wheels.

  He walks through Leicester Square and Piccadilly. He buys a cup of tea from a cheap café in a plastic white cup that burns his hand. The rain becomes heavier, and water begins to run down Aidan’s neck. Bill shakes it off his cream fur. A church looms up above him. He looks at the sign outside it. The Church of Notre-Dame de France. It’s a huge, ugly building, grey-brown stone – ‘A lovely greige,’ Poppy would say – with navy-blue gates either side. But it looks open, and it will be dry, and there won’t be anybody in there from a Facebook group that might want to harm him.

  He ascends the stone steps and slips inside. If anybody wants to throw Bill out, they can, but he’s not leaving him in the rain again. He tugs him up the steps and he follows Aidan faithfully. It smells of smoky incense. There’s a confessional box just on the right.

  It’s silent in the way that places of worship are. Wooden pews, a huge oval window up ahead. Six stone pillars in front of him. He wishes he was religious, that he found comfort in crosses nailed to pillars and hymn books and cushions for kneeling on. But nevertheless, the air is quiet and still and calm, like he is looking at his own reflection in a pond.

  He sits on one of the pews, cold underneath him, his back to the entrance, feeling safe for the first time since he left the flat. He extends his legs, his jeans damp with raindrops, and exhales. Relaxes his shoulders, the way Lauren told him to when he gets like this. He sips his tea. Despite it costing 89p, it’s nice tea. Rich and smooth. Steam curls out of the little hole in the lid, and he covers it with his fingertip.

  What is he going to do about giving the group the information from the scrapers? He’ll have to stall. Get the evidence and give it to the police, and quickly. That’s the plan.

  He opens his burner phone.

  There’s a text from Kevin.

  Download Telegram app, OK?

  Aidan knows exactly what Telegram is. An encrypted, self-destructing underground messenger service where texts disappear at will. Untraceable. Banned in Russia and used by radicalists, Aidan has never downloaded it, but he’s not afraid to. It isn’t illegal, not of itself.

  He circles around the church, phone in hand, and stops by a statue labelled Saint Anthony of Padua.

  It downloads over 4G – anachronistic, next to a statue of a patron saint, but still true – and he’s in. He sets his profile photo to a bland cartoon version of himself – brown hair, no glasses, beard – and, within a few moments, he’s added to a group: Find Girl A – Underground. A self-destruct timer is set for one day. The messages will disappear after that. Aidan makes a diary reminder to screenshot each evening before bed. There are thirteen members. Already, information has been gathered.

  Here is a list of Girl A’s old interests, from Facebook: Bookish Box, Anxiety and Me (Recovery Stories Only!), Shelter, Golden Retriever Owners, Smart Girl Problems.

  They also have two new photographs of her. One Aidan recognizes – Zara by their Christmas tree with Bill – and one he doesn’t, a selfie taken with Zara’s friend Hattie. Both are good resemblances to her, and his heart sinks.

  At the top is a pinned message by Kevin.

  Now, we really can plan.

  Underneath it is a sticker: a little cartoon with black gloved hands, a dark cape, holding a cross up. A Scream mask over his features.

  The grim reaper.

  ‘I just can’t understand it,’ Hannah says to Aidan for the third time.

  He closes the door to the pub behind them, heading out into the frigid, damp air. Leaves line the gutters of the streets like litter. Bill crunches through them, oblivious to the dark tone the conversation has taken, to the danger they are in.

  Aidan told Hannah everything he feels able to share while she listened, wide-eyed. They’d found a deserted pub and sat right at the back, able to whisper in private over a pot of horrible tea made with UHT milk that curdled in the cups. It is the only time they have ever been together, one-to-one. Afterwards, he tried to ask her about work and her husband, Conrad, but she kept circling back to witness protection, to her missing sister, and still does now. Aidan understands: he is the same.

  ‘Everyone thinks I know what the fuck’s happened, but I’m as clueless as you, Han,’ he says now in the cold.

  ‘They can’t mean it,’ she says, her breath vaporizing in the air in front of them.

  It’s freezing. The cold seems to wrap itself around Aidan’s legs. They turn towards the Tube and descend. The steps are slick with dirt and rain, a brown city watercolour at their feet.

  ‘Why would they want to harm a girl who annoyed a football club?’

  Aidan winces. He can’t tell her the truth. Instead, he says nothing.

  ‘It can’t be for ever,’ she says, and Aidan says nothing.<
br />
  She’s going west and he’s heading north, so they part in the artificially warm Tube tunnel. A brief hug. She pats Bill’s head. He found an old tennis ball in the pub under a table, left by another dog, and has been squeezing it all the way home.

  As Aidan walks to his platform, he feels his torso is littered with bullets, one for each question she asked him. ‘It’s for ever?’ ‘How could it be?’ ‘Why didn’t you stop her?’ ‘How did you say goodbye?’

  So he does what anybody would do in this situation: he calls his mother. He’s been hiding, deliberately not updating her, in the way that people do sometimes when they can’t face those closest to them in a crisis. But now he wants to reach out. Now that Hannah is relying on him for answers. He needs his own safety net. His mother.

  ‘How are you all?’ she says, instead of hello.

  He stands on the platform, his breath misting the air in front of him, the phone warm to his ear, and lets tears collect in his eyes. They leak out, and he tries to not let them affect his voice. ‘Yeah, alright. Keeping on,’ he says. His sadness is a wound deep inside him that he can’t expose, not even to her. Aidan doesn’t know why he is like this, but he is. Really, it is since his father died. He became the successor, the next Mr Madison, the man of the house.

  ‘They went,’ he says simply.

  His mother inhales quickly. He can tell she is casting about for something to say.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she settles on eventually.

  ‘Me too,’ Aidan says. ‘But I’ll be fine.’ He looks into the distance. The lights of his train are two pinpricks on their way to him in the freezing mist.

  ‘Sure you will,’ Brenda says. ‘You will.’

  Aidan says nothing, letting the tears fall and freeze on his face as he waits, with Bill, for his train. ‘Anyway. How’re you?’ he says. He can’t tell her about the group, about what he’s started. She would be so disappointed.