Alias (5 page)

Three weeks after I first had the idea, Sayge and I met online to decide what to do next.

it’s definitely doable with the right l33ts
– messaged Sayge.

I agree
– I typed.

time to start recruiting then
– typed Sayge.

I didn’t expect to have second thoughts. Having someone by my side, urging me on, albeit virtually, had made all the difference. Yet I suddenly got cold feet. The talk, the planning, visualising Washington in a panic with an armed drone circling overhead had made me feel alive … but it had never felt real.

There was a long interval – by online messaging standards – while I tried to work out what I was thinking. I wanted revenge. I understood the need for drastic action. But …

we could steal the drone – send a warning but not fire
– I typed.

Sayge didn’t like my sudden attack of conscience.

nothing will change unless we make it – remember frederick douglass and malcolm x
– he typed.

if I kill a grandma I’m as bad as them – threats are enough
– I typed.

if someone attacks you and you respond you are not the same because they are the aggressor – your move is self-defence

but both sides have done wrong
– I typed.

what exactly did your grandma do wrong?

I meant jihadists and americans have both done wrong
– me.

since when was this about world politics?

The online discussion carried on, with us both typing at the same time so the replies made no sense.

a drone strike on American soil will highlight the complete injustice of the stealth war targeting exclusively Muslim tribal communities
– he typed.

I ran out of things to say. He didn’t –

violence is a legitimate tool in the fight for human rights

He said there was one rule for western lives, and another for non-western ones. He said that there would only be a reaction if we vaporised a ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’. Society has changed for the better because of people willing to stand up and make waves. My actions would make the world reconsider its use of drones. Once the public appreciated the true horror of the high-tech assassinations, the intolerable killing of innocents would be stopped and its perpetrators brought to account.

It was a strange sensation. I was, in some ways,
already committed, and yet a fundamental part of me was reluctant. Maybe it was the speed – we’d pushed the idea over the top of the hill and now it was careering down the other side, out of control, the momentum all its own.

‘Grub’s up!’ shouted Mum. For once I was delighted to be dragged away.

I need to think
– I typed.

thinking won’t help – nor will writing silly little letters to your MP

Something grated. It might only have been twelve words, but he could hardly have been more condescending. The tone rang a bell …

I read the words aloud.

I didn’t remember mentioning the letter to my Tory MP to Sayge.

The ringing in my head got louder, blocking out everything else. It wasn’t a bell – it was a church tower full of bells.

got to go – talk tomorrow
– I typed.

I went offline.

If what I suspected was true, I’d been incredibly stupid.

I got up early to escape the voices in my head, smothered some toast with Nutella, then left the house, desperate for some air. I sat in the park and, for the nth time, went back over my relationship with Sayge –

Who was he?

Why was he so keen to help?

How had he so easily gained my trust?

The same answer satisfied all the questions.

He knew me. He knew what made me tick.

It was laughable – me, the arch-manipulator, had almost certainly been manipulated.

But I had to be sure.

When I got home, Mum was about to go and watch Dad play football – he hardly ever got selected for the reserves, so it was a
big
deal.

‘Want to come?’

‘OK,’ I said, which surprised her.

The more you think, the less clear things become. I concentrated on the game, cringed when Mum shouted out helpful advice and talked to a man with a nice black Labrador who was standing next to us.

Dad’s team won, 3–0. Mum took him to the pub to celebrate.

By the time I went online on Sunday I knew exactly what I had to do.

Just like the paper chase that led the runners along the tracks and under the tunnel in
The Railway Children
, I needed Sayge to follow my scraps, without realising where they were heading.

not sure a like-for-like attack will get the most sympathy
– I typed.

If you could hear a sigh over Wi-Fi, I heard one.

you don’t want sympathy – you want the damage drones do to be top of the agenda

but what if top of the agenda are the lives I end up taking
? – I replied.

that’s what will catapult drone strikes into the news
– he typed.

what if I kill a child?

I waited to see if Sayge would outline an argument I’d heard before.

in war there are casualties – no one suggests world war 2 was bad because children died

but the right and wrong was clear – Hitler was a maniac

exactly – think of the greater good – this is not about individuals

it is – my grandma was an individual

detach yourself from the personal

what?
– I knew what he meant, but I needed to see it in black and white.

think of it like vaccination – to protect the masses everyone has the measles jab – if the odd kid dies that doesn’t mean the practice is wrong

the parents wouldn’t agree

some deaths are justifiable

There was the proof. He even used the same words as he had way back in Year 11 when some of the girls had been stressing about the HPV injections.

I replied straight away so he didn’t realise he’d messed up, even though what I wanted to do was never, ever have anything to do with him ever again. I signed off a few minutes later –

sorry – not ready – still thinking it through

– convinced he still believed he was anonymous.

I sat back in my chair, closed my eyes and double-checked my memory of Hugo holding court in registration. He’d decided to summarise the history of vaccination – repeating that it was for the ‘greater good’, even if healthy children died along the way.

‘We have a societal responsibility,’ he’d said, which went over most people’s heads.

Someone drippy had said, ‘Does that mean we could die because of a jab?’

‘Of course. Some deaths are justifiable.’

Hugo’s statement had caused a girly panic, which, I quite enjoyed at the time. The memory of how I fawned over him brought on an attack of self-loathing, heightening
my rage. Tears fell, wetting my face and then my T-shirt. Only the most enormous self-control stopped me getting a taxi to his house so I could pour petrol through the letterbox, having made sure he was inside. It was excruciating to imagine his (and Juliette’s?) reaction when I’d shared my idea for the drone strike. I was so earnest – he must have died laughing. The humiliation was complete and utter.

As the shock receded, I felt like I’d been dreaming. How could a seventeen-year-old girl expect to steal a drone, fly it and unleash a missile on a major city? It was madness. Which meant I was mad. Or maybe I was bipolar. Invincible one minute, and despairing the next.

I knew all along I wouldn’t confront him. Unmasked, Hugo would turn it into a huge joke. He’d work his magical spin on the story, making me the half-Arab weirdo, plotting to murder innocent Americans, and him the hero, uncovering my plans. Better that I carried on pretending, which meant getting in contact.

It took a few days for me to overcome my revulsion, but then self-preservation got the better of me.

I was never going to go through with it – you knew that
– I typed.

No I didn’t – had you down as the real thing

I think you just wanted to see how far I’d go

Hugo was smart. He’d soon see there was no point in pushing it.

I think you have a legitimate reason to take direct action
– he typed, clearly keen to reel me back in. I wasn’t biting. I changed tack.

who are you anyway? – I bet you’re a kid

doesn’t matter who I am

whatever – listen it was fun but I’ve got exams
– I typed.

how about we blow up the houses of parliament on Nov 5?
– he asked.

how about we don’t
– I replied.

It was all good. The tone was jokey. We were, on the face of it, still friends.

I’d keep his secret, because that meant he’d keep mine.

It was six months since the drone strike, and all my efforts – legitimate and otherwise – had come to nothing. I went to school, played mindless games on my laptop and tortured myself by constantly trawling through the latest reports of drone strikes. The mainstream news sites rarely referred to civilian casualties, concentrating on the militant targets. Anti-drone bloggers from the States, and the handful of local sources, provided the best information.

Time drifted by, but, despite what people say, it didn’t heal. A car accident, leukaemia, taking a tablet from a bad batch of Es even – those deaths might be the sort you get over, but positioning the cross hairs over the image of an old lady’s head, watching her stoop to pick some tomatoes and firing …

Every single day I woke up angry.

‘Have you revised for the physics test?’ Lucy asked one day at lunch. It was April – the month of my grandma’s birthday. She would have been sixty-two.

‘Sort of.’

‘How about I come round? Do it together.’

No one had been to my house in months.

‘OK.’

Mum was delighted. She cooked sausages, with mashed potato, beetroot and beans.

‘How’s the family?’ she asked.

‘Getting smaller,’ said Lucy. Her two older brothers were already at universities up north.

‘I bet your mum misses the boys.’

‘She does a Tesco shop for them every two weeks,’ said Lucy. ‘All ready-meals and biscuits. They’ll never learn to cook!’

We all laughed.

After demolishing strawberries and cream, we went back to my room on a mission to nail electrons, waves and photons.

‘You’re so lucky,’ said Lucy. ‘You only have to look at something once and you’ve got it.’

‘You mean like flu?’ I said. ‘Or an STD?’

Her brain did one of those leaps that you can see from the outside.

‘What happened with Hugo?’

‘You know – there was that thing in the common room.’

‘He told me he’d apologised.’

‘Big deal.’

‘You know he never comes out any more. I haven’t seen him at a party since Halloween.’

Too busy being someone else.

‘Juliette says he’s constantly on the computer in his room. She thinks he’s depressed.’

‘Lucy, I really don’t care.’

And I didn’t. But I wondered if she did …

‘Has something happened between you and Jake?’

Jake had messed up big time – Instagrammed with his tongue in the wrong mouth. Lucy claimed she wasn’t bothered.

‘Do you want to go to Milton Keynes on Saturday?’ she asked as she was leaving. ‘I need Birkenstocks.’

‘Nobody
needs
Birkenstocks,’ I said.

Joint eye-roll.

Dad came home to find me watching
24 Hours in A&E
, with Mum ironing by my side. He sensed the change in atmosphere and offered to make us both a cup of tea – Dad in the kitchen, a rare thing.

‘Yes, please,’ we both said.

‘And a biscuit, love,’ added Mum.

It was a kind of turning point, at least on the surface.

I threw myself into studying, went to Prezzo with Lucy and a load of others to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, spent a weekend with Aunty Helen in Chester, got glandular fever, but still did well in my exams. Lucy and I went to three open days in June – Cambridge, Leeds and Exeter. In August we had a family holiday in Norfolk, and I went to the Edinburgh Festival for three days, again with Lucy. I wrote my personal statement
and read the list of suggested books for applicants studying law, although I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to do.

Why study law – or anything else, in fact – in a world that was so flawed that you could get up every day, go to work, kill the wrong people, go home with your pay cheque, get up the next day and do the same thing, without ever being blamed?

The agonising was all rather pointless, because it wasn’t meant to be.

Fate stepped in and showed me the way.

As the anniversary of the drone strike drew near I felt like a black cloud was weighing me down. On the day itself, I stayed in bed, reliving that terrible, terrible day –

Going to school in my M&S suit for the first time – a sixth-former at last. Being eager to see Hugo. The kiss after school. My cheerful walk home. Dad crying on the sofa
…

I got scared of the emotion that was building, so I got up, unplugged my laptop and took it back to bed. One of the anti-drone bloggers I followed had posted a link to a YouTube video. I clicked. It was a boy from a remote village in Pakistan. He told the story of what had happened to him and his sister when they were picking okra in their fields with their grandmother the day before the festival of Eid.

He said a drone appeared out of the bright-blue sky, making the
dum-dum
noise, but he wasn’t worried because only the three of them were there. Then the drone fired, making the ground shake and black poisonous smoke and dust fill the air. He ran, but the drone fired again.

‘They always do,’ he said, ‘to kill the relatives who come to help.’

The second missile broke both his legs.

His sixty-seven-year-old grandmother, a midwife, was killed. He was taken to hospital, together with seven other members of his family, all injured by the shrapnel.

He held up an X-ray of his legs, showing the rods that had been put in to mend his shattered limbs.

His final, trembling words were: ‘She was the heart of our village. My friends, they say we all lost a grandmother that day.’

The video swapped to show his sister. She gave her version, which was similar but more distressing, because I knew what was coming. Her big brown eyes, not dissimilar from my own, stared at me from the screen of my laptop. They were asking me to do something.