‘You try to do the right thing always, and you end up sent away, away from everyone, and they act like it’s a crime to even want to be in touch with anyone. It’s a joke.’
Aidan knows to try and address the symptom, not the cause. That’s the best way, with Lauren. She won’t know that she is homesick. She will only know that she wants a bath.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Does the boiler switch off when the water gets cold, or does it stay running?’
‘Let me see,’ she says. ‘I need to be quiet. I’m going to tell Zara you’re the protection service.’
‘Right.’
There’s a beat. A comedic beat, where they almost both laugh at the absurdity of it. It throbs down the phone.
He glances towards the window. Victorian sash windows. They used to open them right up in the summer, hot, spicy London smells rushing in. Now, they’re closed tight against the cold air, the blood-orange street lights. Anybody could be out there. He swallows, tongue dry against the roof of his mouth.
‘You okay?’ she says.
She knows him. She may as well be here next to him. She would see the duvet tucked protectively around him, his wild eyes, and she would know.
‘I’m just worried about you,’ he says.
‘I know. But we’re miles away. Nobody is going to find us,’ Lauren says.
‘Okay,’ Aidan says. ‘Okay.’ He swallows, then. Miles away. He stares at the sash windows, thinking. Miles away. Already, she’s revealing things, without even meaning to.
38
Poppy
Battersea, London
Two weeks gone
Poppy is keeping her mother company. Her mother is on a new drug, and symptoms are milder, a nuisance, like summer flies in the heat, rather than a catastrophe.
‘I don’t feel perfect today, you know,’ her mum said this morning, ‘but the symptoms are so much more predictable on this drug. Does that even make sense?’
Poppy tells her it does, even though it doesn’t, not really. Her mother seeks reassurance from Poppy, and Poppy can completely understand why, and so she gives it.
Anyway. Her mum looks better in a sort of intangible way. There is colour in her cheeks, a powdery pink. Poppy hopes it lasts. That she gets stronger and stronger and …
They’ve brought the spare duvet down, the one they usually keep in the airing cupboard. It’s November, and it hardly ever gets light. It may as well be the evening, Poppy thinks, as she channel hops. Her ankles are just touching her mother’s, and she likes it. The warmth of another body next to hers.
‘Escape to the Country? I like that one,’ her mum says.
Poppy nods. ‘Though they never actually buy a house.’
‘No, I know,’ her mum says, tipping her head back as she laughs. It’s funny. Everyone – even people Poppy knows well – thinks of her mother as ill. Sometimes she walks with sticks. She doesn’t drive. But Poppy only sees this, here. Slightly crooked teeth. Shiny dark hair that hasn’t gone grey yet. Her laugh. The way she says things like, ‘Sod what people think, Pops,’ smiling naughtily. Her father doesn’t like that attitude of her mother’s, but Poppy does.
Escape to the Country begins and her mother settles back against the sofa cushions. Poppy brings out her phone and starts scrolling through it. It’s packed full, like a box of treats. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
‘You’ll miss their budget,’ her mum says, but she doesn’t mind the phone use. Her dad does – ironically enough, because he’s always on his.
‘Shame,’ Poppy says. She opens Instagram. Eight new followers. She follows them back without thinking, browses the feed for a while. She begins to feel relaxed and numb, the scrolling bright images a kind of kaleidoscope in front of her.
Now Facebook. She prefers Instagram: she likes the selfies and the make-up items listed underneath. And the art of it – though, if she ever told anybody that, they’d laugh.
She has four friend requests. She accepts them all, too. She doesn’t put much on there anyway.
39
Zara
Coniston, the Lake District
Two weeks gone
‘Where have you been?’ Lauren says.
‘Nowhere,’ Zara says, which is true. She’s been around the block. What’s it to her mother what she’s been doing? She can’t tell anyone that.
She feels so … so pent up. Like the tension she has always carried with her, inexplicably, at times, has begun to boil. She wants to join the after-school literature club but she is worried she will have no friends if she does. If she does the things she wants to do, her school friends will reject her. If she tells white lies in court, her family gets destroyed. There must be something wrong within herself, she is thinking, as she stares at her mother’s bewildered expression. She must be rotten to the core.
There is a civil war raging inside her. Who she wants to be. Who she should be. And who she will be accepted as. None of them match up. They never have, and witness protection has made it all worse.
In doing the right thing for Jamie, what did Zara get in return? Absolutely nothing. She grits her teeth as she thinks about it. She has, instead, been robbed. Of her family, her friends, her dog. She had no idea how much she would miss Bill. The rhythmic slosh of him drinking from his water bowl. The way he was terrified of the vacuum cleaner. The way he didn’t understand the dishwasher and used to look at her, like, ‘The plates live in the wall?’ every single time she opened it.
‘You can’t just be half an hour late and not tell me,’ her mum says. Her eyebrows are raised in exasperation.
‘I can,’ Zara says. Fuck it. Let her be unlovable.
‘It’s dangerous. Don’t you understand that we’re here because … because it’s dangerous?’
‘If you fucking speak to me like that again,’ Zara says, feeling empowered suddenly, adult, ‘I’ll make your life miserable.’
Her mother steps back in shock.
Zara has never shocked Lauren, but it feels good. The anger has been a stopped bottle, and Zara has pulled the top off.
40
Lauren
Coniston, the Lake District
Two weeks gone
Lauren is baking cookies.
It’s her day off from the nursery and she has tried everything today to stop the heartache. She’s tried a hot-water bottle, chocolate bars, and crying. She downloaded a stupid app where you tell people your secrets, anonymous people, but she deleted it because she couldn’t type hers in the little box. She ordered an entire sticky toffee pudding to the house and ate it in one sitting, her stomach fat and distended afterwards.
It didn’t work. She didn’t feel anything.
She’s losing her daughter.
Her bookish, moral daughter, always composed – she blew up. Lauren loves her, but she’s so angry with her, too. How dare Zara be so rude to her? The only person in the world ostensibly on her side.
And so now here she is, self-soothing via the medium of baking cookies, even though she will feel too sick to eat them. They’re called abbey biscuits, Hannah’s recipe, though Lauren can’t remember it. Oats, syrup, butter, flour. Was there something else? These biscuits that she’s made hundreds of times with her sister aren’t coming together in her kitchen. The mixture feels like cement, so dry, not combining. The cookies crumble as she scatters them on a baking tray and tries not to cry. She added too much flour, maybe. Or was there an egg? Fuck it. She kicks the oven door closed. Fuck the witness protection service. They’ve taken everything from her, and now she’s losing her daughter, too. She sits on the kitchen floor, the tiles cool underneath her, and cries.
She doesn’t miss her family and friends today: she misses herself. The Lauren she used to be. Part of her identity was the people in her life, the location in which she lived, the job she did. The kind of parent she was. The daughter she had: anxious, but biddable. Not ever hard work, even when she was little.
She takes a shower and the water cools to freezing as sh
e races to wash the conditioner out. As the icy rivulets track down her spine, she lets out a moan of frustration.
In her bedroom, she opens the burner phone. She stands there for a second, then dials.
But he doesn’t take her call. She shivers, freezing shower water on her skin, rejected by the man she loves. She reaches for a towel, warm from the brass radiator, and wraps it around her, pretending it is him. That is what Lauren does, these days: pretends. All of her intimacy is artificial. She cuddles up to a row of pillows in bed. She informs an imaginary friend, Aidan Madison, of all her news.
And so she tells him, now, for real, on text message, about Hannah, because she knows he will call her. It’s manipulative, it’s wrong, she knows. But she does it anyway. She has lost her life, and now she feels like she is losing her daughter to some teenage rebellion. She just wants a dose of normality, just one, swallowed down like medicine.
I sent something to Hannah.
Aidan rings her immediately.
‘It’s finally happened for them,’ Lauren says. ‘So I had to send something.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I used your Instagram login.’
‘Jesus, Lauren.’
‘Are they pleased?’
‘Yes. Very.’
Lauren’s entire body relaxes. They could almost be brushing their teeth together, bodies in each other’s way, debriefing. They have had hundreds of conversations like this about Lauren’s sister.
Hand in hand on New Year’s Day, at two o’clock in the morning, coming home from a party at Hannah’s. ‘Did they kiss at midnight?’ Lauren had said.
Aidan had rubbed a hand over his face. ‘You were supposed to be kissing me, not monitoring them,’ he’d said. ‘You big gossip.’
‘I wonder … is she anxious? Will she have extra scans?’ Lauren asks now.
‘I don’t know,’ Aidan says.
‘Was Conrad pleased? Or worried? I always wondered if he was as up for it as she was.’
‘You can’t be doing that,’ Aidan says. ‘Posting things to them.’
‘Is she well?’ Lauren says.
‘I think so?’ Aidan says distractedly. ‘Look –’
‘I got the worst sickness, in the first trimester. I was admitted twice for fluids.’ Lauren is gabbling just to keep him on the phone. She misses him so much.
‘I think she’s fine. Where did you post from?’
‘Outside a convenience store with no CCTV,’ Lauren says proudly.
‘Aren’t parcels postmarked?’
‘No, I checked,’ Lauren says. Admittedly on a forum. ‘Look, she won’t tell anybody.’
‘Lauren. They are watching everyone who used to be connected with Zara. Hannah’s her aunt. They’ll probably go through her rubbish. What did it say?’
‘She won’t throw that out,’ Lauren says.
‘I’m just worried,’ he says. ‘I’m just … I’m trying so fucking hard to keep you safe. What did it say?’
‘It’s fine,’ Lauren says sadly, not wanting to spend this precious time fighting. ‘I wrote congratulations on it. That’s it.’
‘Right.’
‘And an “L”.’
‘Lauren!’
‘Tell me something good. Zara shouted at me earlier.’ She says it even though she doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to wallow in the swamp waters of this topic.
‘Zara?’
‘I know. Wouldn’t tell me where she’d been. I don’t even know if she’s made any new friends.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Oh, just more rebellion, I’m sure. She’s just angry. And I can barely even comfort her …’
Aidan sighs, a soft, sad sigh for her. ‘What fabric softener do you use?’ he says. Distraction. He knows her so well. ‘I can’t get it smelling the same.’
Lauren smiles as she tells him the brand.
He’s smiling too. She can’t see it, but she can hear it in his voice. She closes her eyes and conjures it up. That smile. Like a crack of thunder, like a downpour after a drought. She is drowning in it, that wide, white, bright smile of his.
The next time she calls, exactly a week later, he answers first go. She knew he would. He would have observed that nothing bad has happened as a result of their last call. He will have rationalized it, drawn a new boundary. Lauren knows it is wrong to capitalize on this nature of his, but she does it anyway. She’s so lonely. She’s so lonely it has made her desperate.
‘It can be our thing,’ she says to him. ‘A Friday-night little chat.’
‘You’ve not sent any more letters?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve not over-shared to anybody?’
‘No. We’re safe,’ she says, without thinking. ‘Zara has gone bowling with a new friend from school.’ And they are safe, even if they’re not exactly harmoniously living together. When was the last time she jumped at a noise? At least a few days ago, she thinks. Hard times always ebb away slowly, until you wake up one day and realize you don’t feel worried, or fearful, at all.
‘Good,’ he says. His signal is bad.
‘Where are you?’ she asks.
‘The flat.’
‘Oh, yeah – terrible signal there.’
‘Yeah. Thought it was best to be here, though.’
‘Are people harassing you?’
‘Don’t worry about it. I’m fine. Tell me about today,’ he says.
Lauren chatters. About this and that. ‘Speaking of which, I might lose signal downstairs. We’re between hills and …’ The words seem to die on her lips, but it’s too late, and they are out. And she can’t take them back, no matter how hard she tries.
41
Aidan
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Three weeks gone
Aidan waits a beat. He should resist – oh, he should resist – but, surely, if he knows where they are, it’s better? If he knows, then if the Find Girl A group guesses their location, he’ll know whether or not they’re right.
At least three hundred miles away.
In between hills.
‘Are you near lakes?’ Aidan says.
‘Yes,’ she whispers.
The hairs on the back of his neck rise up slowly, one by one, until his entire back feels shivery. He tightens the duvet around his shoulders like there’s a draught. The Lake District.
Aidan cannot imagine Lauren in the Lake District. She is a city girl. A shopper. She can’t even drive. She does not appreciate stark beauty and bleak landscapes and bodies of water. She likes Westfield shopping centre, late-night corner shops and Yo! Sushi.
‘God, bet you’re loving that,’ he says.
Lauren laughs softly, sadly. ‘So now you know,’ she says.
‘Now I know.’
‘You can’t come looking.’
‘I won’t,’ he says. He pauses. ‘Bill would love it.’
‘He would. But you can’t come.’
‘I know.’
That’s where he will draw the line. He can call her on this phone he knows to be safe. He’ll only ever do it here, inside a locked flat, late at night. But he won’t go there. He won’t visit her.
Those are his new rules. Written and rewritten, the lines in the sand moving constantly, a tide moving further and further out, but these are the absolutes. The tide can only go out so far. If he isn’t careful, they will both drown.
They talk some more, with him lying in bed on his back. And on the other end of the phone – in his hand, a device containing his wife – Lauren is listening to him as she has a hundred times before.
42
Lauren
Coniston, the Lake District
Three weeks gone
Saw this and thought of you, Lauren sends to Aidan, with a photograph of a man wearing a backpack in the street.
She has both of her phones in her hands, but she doesn’t care. Nobody is looking at her, Lindsey Smith, a perfectly normal middle-aged woman.
Amazingly,
another backpack man exists! she adds.
My backpack makes perfect sense. But his is nicer x, Aidan replies immediately.
He must have his phone out with him, too. It’s a weekday afternoon.
Yours is nicest because it is on you x
You old flirt.
Lauren: This is apparently a Cumberland Tatie Pie. Picture coming …
Aidan: This is the face of a confused man.
Lauren tops up the phone the next day. Credit from a market stall.
Another £10. No, make it £50.
43
Aidan
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Three and a half weeks gone
Lauren: Thinking of you. In this naff bar by myself. With colleagues. Pre-Christmas thing.
Aidan: It’s November.
Lauren: I know. They have empty lives.
Aidan: I am walking to running club. Put your burner phone away!
Lauren: Everyone is completely self-involved. We are safe. Anyway, yours is out in public. Shock horror.
Aidan: … true.
Lauren: I think we’re fine.
Hannah has had an early scan, and she wants to show Aidan the photograph. She suggests meeting outside his work, but he can’t do that, though he doesn’t let on why. The group probably know where he works, but he would sound like a maniac, a paranoid person, to say that he thinks it’s likely he’ll be followed. To admit that he leaves in a baseball cap from his work’s back entrance.
Instead, he tells her that he is only free on his commute, so that he can lose anybody who might be following him from work, take some backstreets, and get to the Tube alone. She joins him at Green Park. He waits at the station for her.
Hannah looks different as she emerges. Her gait has changed, more cautious somehow, as she boards the Tube, as though she is injured.
He’s glad of the packed rush-hour Tube. The rattle of the open windows, the lights flickering on and off. It is anonymous. It is public and safe. And, when they get off it, he will walk a circuitous route with her, and they can talk then.
How to Disappear Page 21