How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

  ‘All fine here,’ she says.

  He boards the train, grateful for the rush of artificial warmth. He sits right by a heater.

  ‘You should come over soon,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I will.’

  His mother says nothing for a few seconds, and Aidan waits, tears running down his face.

  ‘You got a tissue there with you?’ she says quietly, listening to him cry, as she has a hundred times before.

  He wakes in the night and thinks again of Mal, the other defendant. He looks him up on Facebook – Malcolm Henderson – and finds him immediately. Aidan sets up a new account, as Mr A, and adds him.

  Even though it is three o’clock in the morning, Mal accepts almost immediately.

  Aidan opens the message box and writes and deletes and writes and deletes, thinking. Eventually, he doesn’t send anything, but the message box is there waiting. For when he’s thought it through.

  27

  Lauren

  Coniston, the Lake District

  Five days gone

  At the moment, all of Lauren’s concentration is taken up with a black handle she has discovered on the side of the combi boiler, in search of generating enough hot water for a bath. Lauren is going to fix it, tonight. She is determined.

  She has changed into her favourite pyjamas – striped almost-cashmere, some cheap variation, as soft as Bill’s tummy fur. She’s glad she could bring them with her.

  She has not touched the burner phone.

  How can she justify replying to Aidan? She can’t. That’s the truth.

  She’s been told not to contact anybody.

  She’s promised she won’t.

  They will withdraw protection – for her daughter, grabbed by a man in a car in London, just days ago – if she does.

  But she’s glad she’s got it. A line to him. If she needs him. And if he needs her.

  She is sure that is why he has sent it.

  So, to distract herself, she’s sitting on the floor of the kitchen in front of the boiler, thinking about today and working out how to turn the black handle, which won’t budge. She’s had a driving lesson today, and thinks back to her job interview yesterday. The rebuilding of it all, the ingredients for a life.

  ‘So you were a nursery nurse in Bristol, born and bred,’ her interviewer said.

  Lauren had nodded, thinking: Lindsey, Bristol, Sienna, Sienna’s father estranged. That last part, at least, was true. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  After she was given a tour of the nursery, the interviewer said she would be in touch. That was all. Perfectly normal. Except who would she be in touch with? The references are fabricated. Not real people. Would the people at the nursery not know that? Would they not google the fake nursery on her fake CV? Lauren can’t work it out. Aidan would know. He’s smarter than her.

  She’s not sure the black handle on the boiler is a handle. It could just be a fixed part. She stares at it. Zara has gone for coffee with ‘a new friend’. Just like that. Kids. They moved house when Zara was six, to Islington with Aidan, and Zara said, ‘What old house?’ just two weeks later. She’d forgotten all of it. They adapt so easily, even anxious types like Zara, still forming themselves, like a seedling that can withstand regular replanting.

  The handle doesn’t turn either way and Lauren has no tools. She fiddles with it uselessly. Is it a wrench she needs? Pliers?

  She gets a tea towel. She pauses as she grabs it. What’s that outside the window? She stands completely still, imagining the worst. A gang, a lynch mob, people in hoods, masks, carrying flaming torches. But it’s nothing. There’s nothing there. She checks and double-checks, standing in front of the window, a blurred reflection of herself looking back, terrified. It must have been the wind moving a tree, is all.

  She grips the handle of the boiler with the tea towel. She’ll have a fucking bath soon, even if she has to hire a plumber herself.

  Something happens. Just something. The handle shifts a millimetre or so. She puts her weight behind it this time, but nothing. No more movement.

  Tears threaten at the back of her eyes. It’s so quiet here. She is so displaced, stuck in the Lake District, with nobody she can call to confide in. It’s been four days and a lifetime.

  Despondent, lonely, a pit of sadness in her stomach, she reaches for her phone, just a couple of feet away on the carpet, and opens her apps one by one.

  Instagram. She looks at her feed – anodyne posts from brands – and then Twitter, which has more of the same.

  Sobs catch in her throat as she tries to turn the fucking black handle on the boiler, but it doesn’t budge. God, maybe she should ask Zara. She’d probably work it out quicker than Lauren. But no. How humiliating that would be. She can’t let Zara see how hopeless her mother is. What a useless custodian she is.

  ‘What would you do?’ she asks an imaginary Aidan, pretending he is just behind her.

  ‘Give it some elbow grease,’ he replies.

  So she does.

  The boiler makes a gentle hissing noise. A red arrow moves along a pressure gauge. Lauren watches it in astonishment, waiting for it to turn all the way up. ‘We did it,’ she says aloud to Aidan.

  She dashes to the bathroom and runs the tap. It’s hotter than it was, and she lets it rush over her fingertips, the water parting softly around them. There’s an inch of water in the bath. An inch of glorious hot water. She checks the tap again, just to be sure, but it’s gone cold.

  Lauren sits on the carpeted bathroom floor – she always hated carpet in bathrooms – and stretches her legs out in front of her. Fuck this. Fuck everything.

  She still has her old pedicure on. Pink, from the last time she got her toenails done, at the end of October. The last of the summer colours. She looks at the grown-out varnish and thinks she might never take it off, this relic from her life with the man she loved and Bill Gates and her daughter and her stepdaughter and her sister and her bath and the Chinese takeaway round the corner where they knew her name and her order without her having to say anything. She misses so many things about her old life, she doesn’t know where to start.

  She cries until her throat is sore, until her cheeks are wet, until her legs are quivering on the carpeted floor. She cries for Aidan and for Poppy and for Hannah and Bill, and for everyone she’s been forced to leave behind. Most of all, she cries for Zara, and the crime she witnessed, and the lies she felt she had to tell because of a failing system and a dose of misguided teenage idealism. She tries to tell herself she’s not angry about it, but she is. She backed her daughter doing the right thing, encouraged her, protected her, but, all along, Zara was actually doing the wrong thing, committing a crime of her own, perjuring herself in the witness box, for nothing. Jamie was already dead. What good did it do?

  She calls Jon’s mobile when she has composed herself. ‘Sorry,’ she says, when he picks up. ‘I just wanted a bath, and this boiler … it just doesn’t run enough hot water.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jon says easily, coolly. ‘I know. We’ll get someone out. Soon. Sorry, I did know. I should have fixed it sooner. It’s been busy.’

  Busy, Lauren thinks. Busy like shops are busy. Like the pre-Christmas period is busy in offices. Like the nursery in the early autumn. She knows it is just a job to him, and yet it feels wrong that it is, too.

  ‘I can call someone now,’ Lauren says. Her monthly protection budget will cover it.

  ‘No, it’s best if we do,’ he says.

  Lauren sighs. She never thought she’d miss the autonomy of running a house, but she does. She thanks Jon curtly and hangs up, then leans her head against the wall and tries not to cry again.

  The urge to pick up the burner phone and text Aidan is physical. It rises up through her, a toxic combination of temptation, guilt and love.

  She uses her iPhone instead of the burner phone to google plumbers. Some misdemeanours are less than others.

  She chooses the first one that comes up, an expensive, sponsored ad, a
n 0345 number. She’ll charge it back to the protection service. Fuck them.

  ‘Emergency Assist plumbers, how can I help?’ a detached voice says.

  Lauren explains the problem.

  They’ll dispatch somebody tomorrow morning, they tell her. ‘Can we take some details in order to pop you on the system?’ the woman says. She has a London accent, which makes Lauren miss home.

  ‘Fine,’ Lauren says.

  ‘Full name?’

  ‘Lindsey Anne Smith.’

  ‘Date of birth?’

  ‘Oh, hang on,’ Lauren says. Wait, is it February – the fifteenth? She has to check. Everything anybody normal would usually know, be able to recite without thought, without meaning. ‘February the twelfth.’

  ‘Mother’s maiden name? To set up your security questions for your account?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Lauren says thickly. She doesn’t know it. She doesn’t know herself. She hangs up the phone in a hurry, then leans her head against the side of the bath and sobs.

  After a while she goes back to Instagram and hesitates on the search bar.

  Nobody will know.

  She types in her sister’s name, then clicks and looks at her bio.

  Hannah Starling. East London. Photos of dogs, nieces, skincare. #IVFWarrior.

  Lauren swallows. They used to text all the time. Lauren scrutinized every single negative pregnancy test Hannah sent a photo of, sometimes filtering them through apps to make them clearer. She has had two failed cycles of IVF. She and Conrad were on their third when Lauren left. They’d spent all their savings on that and private fertility consultants. She’d cried about it a few months back, in Lauren’s kitchen. ‘Fucking twenty thousand pounds,’ Hannah had said.

  ‘That’s a lot of sheet masks,’ Lauren had said with a wry smile, hoping it was the right thing to say, that the joke wouldn’t sink.

  Luckily, Hannah had smiled back.

  ‘How many more goes have you got?’ Lauren said.

  ‘Just this one, but … you know. We said we’d only do two, then three. Who knows?’

  Her sister – younger, by three years – is almost forty. They hadn’t started trying until she was thirty-five. They’d been ambivalent. Conrad worked long hours in the City. Hannah worked at a jeweller’s. They’d had four holidays a year. Easy lives. But then they’d got a puppy, and Lauren had thought: it won’t be long. Sure enough, the folic acid supplements appeared on Hannah’s immaculate kitchen counter. But then one year became two, and then she started taking Clomid – ‘It makes me fucking mad!’ Hannah had said – and then the IVF had begun. They really wanted it by then. ‘I don’t just want a baby,’ Hannah had said passionately one night during the interval at a comedy evening. Lauren had strained to hear her over the chatter. They should never go out to things, she had thought privately. They liked to chat, a thousand words a minute: they should stay in and do just that. ‘I want to be a mother myself,’ Hannah had said. She’d grinned, then, her gap-toothed smile making a rare appearance, but it wasn’t a nice grin. It was one of disbelief. That she had articulated so perfectly what she wanted – something she didn’t even know herself to be true until she had said it, there in a blue-lit comedy club in Soho – and the universe still would not give it to her.

  She scrolls through Hannah’s feed now, even though she’s seen it all. A waiting room. Lauren knows exactly which one it is, the Nuffield in Chiswick. Two weeks before #transferday health check, Hannah has written.

  Nothing since.

  The next day, Lauren sees the red lanyard around the man’s neck through the glass and immediately opens the door. Outside smells of wood smoke; a specific, ashy sort of smell that reminds her of a winter break she once took with her mother and Zara to the Cotswolds. It was six months before she would meet Aidan. She’d walked next to her mother in awkward silence and wondered when she’d find her place in the world.

  She looks at the man with the utility company’s name emblazoned on his lanyard standing outside her door. ‘You’re a repairman?’ she says hopefully. She abandoned her phone call about the boiler. The protection service must have sent him.

  ‘That’s me,’ he says, after a beat. He’s wearing big boots, and is tall and broad, with hair that is neither brown nor blond but some nondescript shade in the middle. He blocks out the weak winter sunlight momentarily as he moves in through the doorway.

  ‘In here,’ Lauren says to him, leading him through to the kitchen.

  ‘Great,’ he says. ‘Kitchen taps, is it?’

  The briefest of shivers travels up Lauren’s spine. Shouldn’t he know the problem? Her eyes scan to the lanyard. Utility Co. Is that who the protection service have sent? Are they legitimate? Her mind races. The man stares at her, eyebrows raised, expectant. He’s about twenty-five. He could easily be a football fan. What has she done?

  ‘It’s the boiler … the hot water runs out,’ she says, her eyes frantically scanning him for tools, any evidence he is who he says he is. Maybe he misunderstood what he was told. Hot water running out. Taps. An easy mistake to make.

  ‘I’ll … I need to make a call. You okay here?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, wait – I need to ask you some things first,’ he says, gesturing to the boiler.

  Panic fills Lauren’s body. She’s not normally like this. But she’s so vulnerable here, alone, being kept away from an amorphous mass of strangers. She stares up at the man. Say if he pulls a weapon out of his coat, right now? Or he fixes the boiler, and disappears, but then Jon confirms they didn’t send anybody over, and Lauren and Zara are moved, a man having cased the joint, ready to bring the group back to harm her daughter …

  ‘I can’t,’ she says. She turns and flees the house, leaving the front door standing open, and calls Jon on the driveway.

  ‘Did you send a man over to repair the boiler?’ she says. ‘But I like your vigilance.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies.

  Lauren seems to deflate, right there on the drive. ‘Oh, you didn’t say.’

  ‘Sorry – thought it was self-explanatory,’ he says. ‘But I like your vigilance.’

  ‘Right.’ Lauren looks back at the house from the driveway, a hand to her forehead, taking in the confused man inside the kitchen, the way the sunlight catches the window, thinking: another bullet dodged. But how long can they keep dodging them for?

  28

  Poppy

  Battersea, London

  One week gone

  Poppy is on a school trip to the National Portrait Gallery. Unlike other trips – to visit old coal mines, or to see musicals she doesn’t care about – Poppy has been looking forward to this. It is early, half past nine, and she is in the Rubens section. She’d never heard of him, but she is looking at his Baroque paintings, alone, away from her friends. They’re going to be studying them after Christmas. She’s excited about them because they’re almost all portraits, and she loves the clothes they wear. Total vintage gear. A portrait at the end of the room catches her eye. She sits on a bench and stares up at it.

  It’s a nude. No clothes, but that fascinates Poppy more, not less, today. The skin is pale, the colour of off-milk. The breasts are uneven, one nipple pointing slightly to the left. There are three little rolls of fat running down her side. Her stomach is a dome, rounded out like a fruit bowl. Poppy is fascinated. The nude woman in front of her does not look like somebody off Love Island, or Instagram, and Poppy can’t stop staring. Not because of the imperfections, exactly, but because it is a body. A body that does what it is supposed to. A body that can walk, and run, and climb, and sleep when it is supposed to. Her mother’s body looks like this one, right in front of her, but it isn’t healthy. Poppy swears to herself, right there in the National Portrait Gallery, that so long as she stays healthy, she will never take it for granted, never complain about cellulite or uneven teeth or grey hairs. Never.

  ‘Pops,’ a voice says, and Poppy turns.

  It’s Emily. She has a clipboard in hand, a half-finished s
ketch on it. ‘Wow.’ She looks at the painting. ‘Send nudes.’

  A laugh escapes from Poppy’s mouth.

  ‘Look,’ Emily whispers. ‘I just spoke to Ryan. His cousin goes to your sister’s school.’

  Poppy and Emily move away from the handful of people in the room with them. The carpet muffles their steps.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘It’s all over there, you know?’

  Poppy looks furtively around them. Suddenly, it seems ludicrous to be here, talking seriously, surrounded by boobs and bums. ‘What – Girl A?’ she says in a low voice.

  ‘Yep. The school’s issued an email to stop people speculating that Zara was Girl A.’

  ‘Jesus. If they …’ Poppy looks down at her hands. ‘If they talk about Zara too much, the group could find out a lot about her, couldn’t they?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Emily says.

  ‘It’s like trying to stop an earthquake, isn’t it?’ Poppy says in the dim, quiet sanctuary of the gallery.

  ‘I know,’ Emily says. ‘I know.’

  Emily sits down and Poppy leans her head on her shoulder, the way she wishes she could do with her mother. She’s tried to ask her mum so many times how worried she should be about Zara, but she just can’t do it to her. She’d ask, and her mum would worry and – like clockwork – three days later, her health would fail. And whatever that relapse was, it would have Poppy’s name on it. Poppy read online once that there are only a finite number of relapses in front of them before …

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ Emily says, brushing Poppy’s hair back from her face.

  Poppy cries again. She doesn’t have to hold it all in here, with her friend. She finds the emotion comes out truthfully. It’s not anger or frustration or slamming the dishwasher shut because, once again, the housework has taken over her evening. It is just what she feels. Sadness. Sadness and guilt at not going. And hopelessness, too. Like, if she could find a way to put it right, she would. But she can’t. She just can’t figure it out.