The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

‘Hello, Other Mummy,’ she whispered through cracked lips before sinking back into unconsciousness.

The next waking was an emotional affair. Vera stroked her daughter’s cheek trying to disguise how hurt she felt that Lauren seemed, ever so slightly, to flinch. Lauren sneaked a glance at her mother’s forehead. It was dirty. How ridiculous. Had she tried to apply her eyebrow pencil while driving?

‘You’ve got… stuff… on your face, Mum,’ Lauren said.

‘Oh,’ Vera said, disappointed, adding with false brightness, ‘I’ll go to the bathroom mirror.’

Vera returned having rubbed off the faint traces of rouge she had applied simply to disguise her anxious pallor so as not to worry her daughter but Lauren had slipped back to sleep. Vera waited until her daughter stirred once more.

It hurt to move but her right arm was unharmed, not even bruised, so Lauren gingerly lifted her hand to her mouth and licked her forefinger.

‘Lean closer, Mum,’ she said and gently rubbed at her mother’s forehead. This time it was Vera’s turn to flinch. She had never liked her mole to be touched.

Lauren frowned. The small but annoying mark on her mother’s face was not flat but raised and rubbery and solid and not at all like a smudge of eyebrow pencil or an errant piece of melted chocolate. She squinted at Vera suspiciously and then at her own right hand. There was silence, while Vera realised that the spot her daughter was trying to rub away had always been there.

‘What a funny thing to forget about, darling,’ Vera said, again with forced brightness.

‘I didn’t forget,’ Lauren said angrily but she was bereft more than angry and she wondered why she felt as if her mother were dead when there she sat, on the bed, breathing and talking and being so obviously loving.

Through her recuperation her parents, and her mother in particular, had been attentive and doting but Lauren had become frustrated by Bob and Vera’s lack of a sense of fun. Before her holiday to Cornwall, Lauren had hated Benny Hill, but loved how her father had giggled like a schoolboy in front of the television. Mr Hill had now vanished from their lives, and so had the giggles.

‘Have they stopped making…’ Lauren started to ask, but discovered she suddenly could not remember the comedian’s name. She closed her eyes and tried to picture his face but she could not even do that. The harder she tried the more distant he became and within the hour she had forgotten that such a man had ever existed.

Lauren had fractured her skull, broken ribs, snapped her arm and splintered her right kneecap. It had been sore, then boring, then sore again. It was Bonfire Night before Lauren felt able to walk outside. The Harpers in the grand house were holding what the invitation they had pushed through the letterbox called their ‘annual firework party’. They had never held one before, but Lauren allowed this detail to pass without letting it annoy her. The Harpers had spent a lot of money on the display and the cul-de-sac residents cooed accordingly. Lauren, though, was more intrigued and impressed by the Harpers’ stained-glass window which seemed both familiar and not. It was decadently large, and depicted a white dove against an expensive azure-blue sky.

Her father worked slightly longer hours than she recalled him working before the accident, and her mother did not go to work in the boutique on Saturdays. Lauren wondered why she thought she would work there, so little interest did Vera seem to have in clothes. Her mother was altogether just a little bit less outgoing since the accident in Cornwall. It must have knocked her confidence, Lauren thought. Her skirts were slightly longer, her jumpers less jazzy, but she was just as tender and loving and smelled the same. Yes, she smelled exactly the same.

Gradually, Lauren forgot that she must have shifted to somewhere else. So many things felt off-kilter but they were small things and the doctors all said she might have lapses in memory. She did not push the point, she did not tell them that there were no gaps in her past; that her past felt skewed. She did not want these tiny electric shocks of surprise; she wanted to feel she belonged, and so she willed it that her other mummy was simply her only mummy, Dad was Dad, and Debbie was Debbie.

Lauren clung to sameness. It brought her disproportionate joy when she found a small black lacquer box at the back of her wardrobe and knew what she would find inside. She had had a six-month spell of collecting buttons in primary school, and she smiled at how tacky they looked compared to how magical she had thought them four years earlier.

If only the same were true of the garage, which was lined with long splinter-free wooden shelves, upon which were stacked neat wooden boxes bearing brightly coloured labels indicating items such as ‘torches and matches’ or ‘anti-freeze’. She stood, watching Bob proudly fishing out a nail from a box of nails that were all the same size, and wondered why she pitied him. She brought him a mug of tea one cold Saturday morning and he was grateful and he smiled and told her how lucky he was not to have a stroppy and thoughtless daughter, but then there was a silence and she walked away feeling less warm inside than she had expected to.

Debbie’s mother Karen was changed in other ways – ways that everyone, not just Lauren, could see. It was the guilt she felt over the accident in the Jeep. For weeks she was unable to be in the same room as Lauren without bursting into tears, and Vera, who had originally been tempted to freeze her out of their lives, was melted by her neighbour’s remorse and they became closer friends than they had been before.

The next summer, the curtains were tightly drawn against the sun so that Bob and Vera and Lauren could watch the tennis from Wimbledon, cheering on John McEnroe and rooting for the bespectacled but pretty Jocelyn Evert, and through a tiny gap popped a concentrated shaft of sunlight fizzing with dust. Lauren felt a bolt of indigestion. It was like the unannounced visit of a long-forgotten friend.

It took the crack in the curtain to make Lauren remember that she used to see a different sort of sunbeam, magical thick ropes of metal that were both fascinating and cruel. She sighed at the shock of the sunbeam and let it go. She could not even remember if the beams had exhausted her, entranced her or worried her. In the weeks that followed, she had dreams about the few occasions on which multiple beams had appeared, blocking her path as if angry with her, but the dreams ebbed into different dreams about vapour trails and knitting and a sports day tug-of-war. She stopped noticing the mole on her mother’s forehead and started noticing the boy playing the lead in the sixth-form production of West Side Story.

Before long, Lauren was able to walk, limping still, past No. 2 without giving any thought to who lived there. The fact that it was a house bereft of any twin boys stopped registering with her. She had accepted, and then forgotten, that the twins had not moved away. They had never lived there. The twins, in this world, had not been born and, perhaps because they had never existed, Lauren was able to absorb their absence as easily as anyone can accept that they left their keys to the left or the right of the table lamp. There was no significance. They were not even a memory, they were the wisp of smoke from the corner of a distant dream.

Mr and Mrs Cork, who did live at No. 2, were on the quiet side, but after an initial moment of uncertainty Lauren accepted that she had known them all her life. They smiled at their neighbours and wrote thank-you notelets to everyone who gave them a gift to mark the arrival of Jonathan, their first child, whose birth had been either ‘difficult’ or ‘botched’ depending on who you spoke to. Jonny would grow to become the mascot of The Willows, the child welcomed into every home because everyone felt a little bit sorry for him but also a little bit amused by his sunny stupidity. And not a day passed that Mr Cork did not wonder what sort of son would have been his first-born child had a different midwife been on duty that night.

Lauren liked to listen to her parents chatting to each other. She yearned to be older, to be free to do anything at any time of her choosing, to be able to talk about politics and money and know what it meant. She noticed that although her father left the house at twenty-past eight every day and arrived back home just after six thirty in the evening, it was the details of her mother’s day which filled the conversations. She wondered if her father was involved in very secretive work or perhaps had a role that was too complicated for casual conversation. Or perhaps his work was so very dull that Vera’s trip to the hairdresser’s was a more enriching topic of conversation.

Lauren watched him closely. Was he bored? Vera always asked him how he was when he returned home and he would give an economical reply, exhale and then, brightly, ask what had been happening at home. It was one of the puzzles of adult interaction but just as Lauren thought she was close to solving it, everything changed.

Bob arrived home later than normal one December evening, his shirt rumpled, his hair ruffled. Peter Stanning, his boss, had gone missing. Lauren had, for no reason she could fathom, looked at her advent calendar while she digested this exciting but troubling news. Just two windows were open. She felt she had, right there and then, started a countdown; that Peter Stanning had to be found by Christmas Day.

The police had interviewed all the staff at Bob’s office, the rumours had grown more intense and more upsetting by the hour, and suddenly all they spoke about at home was Bob’s work, Bob’s day, Bob’s world. As they decorated the Christmas tree, her mother winding cheap tinsel around the branches in what was, to Lauren’s mind, an annoyingly gaudy manner, she thought about the tree in the Stannings’ house. If your father was missing did you even want a Christmas tree?

Bob became the celebrity of The Willows simply because he was the only person in the cul-de-sac who knew Peter Stanning. Bob was an accountant. Peter was an accountant. Such dramas did not usually unfold in the world of spreadsheets and tax breaks but there was no disputing the fact. Peter had gone missing. Peter had two sons, Peter had a wife who liked horses and growing strawberries, Peter had a sharp brain and a weakness for slapstick comedy. Bob was slightly worried that he could not be sure if he liked Peter all that much or even knew him properly but it felt right to speak of what a great boss he was. Great chap, very smart, very reliable.

There was so much chit-chat about the missing Peter Stanning that Bob felt reality begin to slip. Christmas Day came and went and still he was not found. The anecdote about the sandwiches Peter forgot and left in a drawer to rot and to stink; was that his story or one he was regurgitating? Bob thought he could smell the rotting chicken as he related the tale but this was Miranda the receptionist’s reminiscence, not his, wasn’t it?

Lauren turned it all into her school project. She produced a cartoon strip that began with Bob and Peter staring at a large graph on a wall, then incorporated the first visit of the police and then the imagined home life of the distraught Stannings. She painted a parcel wrapped in gold-and-red Christmas paper with a gift tag that read, ‘for Dad, Merry Christmas.’ She had to blink away tears as she wrote the message in a delicate but not trembling hand. She hoped he would be found in time for the start of the new school year so that her storyboard could be completed with a happy ending but Peter Stanning remained missing.

For her fifteenth birthday Debbie took Lauren and her other, less important friends to the cinema to see Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence because they thought it sounded mature. Lauren had bought Debbie a pair of cream leg warmers which the others fawned over as if they were all suddenly living in 1944 and Debbie had been given silk stockings. Julian paid for them all to have a Chinese banquet at the upmarket Mr Yee where Debbie declared her love for David Bowie complete. In the window of Mr Yee’s there was a poster asking for information about Bob’s boss.

The New Year’s Eve of 1983 was a quiet affair. Peter Stanning was still missing in the spring of 1984. Debbie was still Lauren’s closest friend and Lauren was impatient to be grown up, to be in love, to be free of the pain in her knee. Since the incident in Cornwall she had been keen to turn the pages on her life rather than dwell in the moment. Only when drawing or sketching or painting did she slow down, enjoy the task at hand, concentrate on the present.

Sixth Form was, really, Dance Form. Led by Debbie, the girls would attend any disco going to be Madonna or Chaka Khan. Lauren, longing to feel love or be loved, wondered if, had she been able to wear heels after her accident, she would have had better luck with boys. She was buoyed enormously to discover that the female students at the art schools she visited all wore pumps or flat boots or trainers and that they looked sexy and cool and desirable. She wondered if her art project, Peter Stanning is Missing, was cool too, or a sixth-form assignment to be binned.

Lauren leaving home was hard for Vera when it came. Bob, too, was emotional. He ran his finger along the tiny windowsill of Lauren’s small halls of residence room and inspected it for dust. Vera sniffed the air not knowing if she was expecting to smell drugs or a blocked drain or Cup-a-Soup. Lauren was impatient to explore but paused to hug them both, to promise to phone the next day, to love them forever.

In the car on the way home Vera and Bob agreed they had raised the sweetest, most talented of daughters and inwardly they both wondered if they loved her too dearly and whether life in The Willows would be too quiet, too dependent on knowing the date of her next trip home. Right now, a sibling for Lauren would have helped enormously. None had come though, thought Vera, none had ever come, and she let the tears, large dramatic tears, plop onto her lap as Bob, blinking, concentrated on the road ahead. He switched on the radio for distraction and although there was emotional discussion about the Hungerford massacre that had taken place a few weeks earlier, an incident which had been of political and human interest and therefore one both he and Vera could discuss with equal insight, he could hear only a jumble of meaningless and boring words.

‘I just, I just… love her too much,’ Vera said out loud and Bob took one hand off the steering wheel to squeeze his wife’s arm.

It could be worse, he thought to himself. Peter Stanning, for example, was still missing and the house-to-house enquiries had long dried up. And the Jeep, the bloody Cornwall Jeep, well, that could have been an unthinkable thing.

Bob

Back in Lauren’s first life, it would be her birthday soon. Bob could not find the words to describe how much he was dreading it. His daughter had already had one dead birthday, six weeks after Cornwall, but it been just another grotesque day among many. Now that Vera had stopped drinking and started caring about the house and the garden and cooking and even the boutique, this birthday could be a setback. He was scared to mention it, scared not to mention it.

He was so grateful to Peter Stanning. He had been stoically kind to them, especially when they began to feel isolated. It had been agony in The Willows. What had felt cloistered was now confining but it was impossible to contemplate leaving Lauren’s room behind for another child to inhabit. And they lived opposite Karen and Julian who had not lost either of their children. Debbie was damaged emotionally but neither Debbie nor her brother had suffered more than bumps and bruises when the Jeep had braked.

The resentment and grief from one side of the spoon mingled poisonously with the guilt and indignation from the other. Ten months passed and then a ‘For Sale’ sign was put up in front of No. 17. Eventually, the removal van arrived and Debbie with her pink sheepskin rug left for a new home, a new school and the hope of new friends who would not fall out of the back of a Jeep.

The rage that had been directed towards Karen and Julian altered its trajectory and Vera began to blame herself. She stopped eating properly and began to drink heavily. Peter Stanning limply handed over another pot of jam as Vera poured him a Scotch which he barely touched. Bob tried to talk about the office. He was back at work but leaving early to keep an eye on his wife.

‘Tell me about your kids,’ Vera had slurred at the petrified Peter.

‘They, um, they’re great kids, Vera, thanks.’

‘And would you let them go off in the back of a crappy old truck?’

‘No, Vera, I wouldn’t but I would let them go on holiday without me and the wife. Anyone would have done that.’

Vera glowered. It left Peter speechless. Bob cleared his throat. Peter stood up to leave as Vera scratched at the table top with an old butter knife.

‘I didn’t want her to go but I let her go,’ she said, the mother’s guilt seeping from her lips, her eyes. ‘What if I had put my foot down? She’d be here now. Sat here, right here.’

Vera stared at an empty chair and then put down the knife and slowly pushed her glass to one side.

‘I’ve drunk enough. I’m sorry, Peter. You’re a good man.’

‘Don’t be sorry,’ Peter mumbled and there followed a strained, normal conversation about the weather and the deliciousness of Peter’s wife’s fruit preserves.

Vera stood and smiled politely and walked with him to the front door. Peter did not know her well but it seemed to him that Bob should be more worried about this suddenly calm, reserved Vera than the angry one who blamed herself.

‘Any time you like tomorrow, Bob,’ Peter said.

‘You should go in early tomorrow,’ Vera said a week later. ‘I’ll have a lie-in and potter in the garden and fix us some dinner and I’ll be fine.’

Bob was relieved. He felt torn between doing the right thing at home and the right thing at work, and work was so much easier to bear than the quietness of their home. After Peter left, Vera cooked him one of her mild fruity curries, the first she had prepared since the accident and they watched the BBC news still reporting on the fall-out of how Labour, led by Michael Foot, were humiliated in the 1983 General Election, by a Tory party that had to Bob’s surprise elected Margaret Thatcher as its leader. Vera did not say how little any of it mattered and even nodded at the political analysis on offer. It felt like the start of something, a life worth living perhaps and he was sure he had Peter’s gentle interventions to thank for that.

But it was Lauren’s birthday soon and so, as they sat on the sofa in front of the TV, he plucked up some courage.

‘Love, I’ll take the day off next Tuesday. Maybe we can go and see Suki or drive somewhere quiet and go for a long walk. Whatever you want, love.’

There was silence and then Vera turned and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she said but she did not think ahead to the long walk, she thought back. Back to that moment when, alone in the house, with Bob at work and her daughter on her first holiday without her, Vera had pouted into the mirror. Her complexion was youthful, her skin smooth and unblemished. She had a mole close to the top of her left shoulder and she often wondered how she would feel if that mole had ended up on her chin or her cheek or her forehead. One of her teachers at school had a strange sort of wart on the tip of her nose and Vera had thought it ridiculous that it had never been removed.

She was young enough yet for another baby, she had thought. She was feeling upbeat about life, about miracles. Bob was planning to leave work as promptly as possible so they could walk to The Plough together and find a table outside. It had been a shimmering day of unbroken sunshine, the pub would be packed even on a Wednesday. Afterwards they could try for a baby, she thought as she applied Tweed perfume to her wrists and neck. She had walked past Lauren’s bedroom and wondered if the weather was as lovely in St Ives for her. She resisted the temptation to sit on her daughter’s bed and absorb the scent of her, of her clothes, of her craft box. She’ll be home soon enough, she had thought to herself teasingly, and then the phone rang.

Karen began speaking in a slow, strangulated voice and then grew increasingly hysterical. Julian, who had been loitering guiltily outside the door, took over but by now Vera was deaf. It was panic deafness. She really could not hear a word after Karen mentioned a terrible accident.

Oh Vera, there’s been a terrible accident.

Vera’s throat became tight, she could feel it tighten now, and she had replaced the receiver without saying goodbye. She stood, paralysed, forgetting to breathe. There was a rap on the door and a voice through the letterbox.

‘It’s me, Monica Harper. Open the door and I’ll take care of everything, my dear.’

Vera inched slowly, not sure how to make her legs move, towards the voice of the poshest of her neighbours, who it seemed had been contacted by Julian.

Vera did not know Monica that well at all, only really seeing her at her annual Christmas party, but it transpired that she was calm and efficient and gentle and somehow bundled Vera and Bob onto a train, with overnight bags, to be met by Julian, whose eyes were so cloudy, guilty, hurt and red that both Vera and Bob knew instantly that their daughter was dead.

Everything, in fact, was dead. The friendship with Karen and Julian died. The innocence of Debbie died. Poor Debbie had stretched out to catch hold of Lauren but managed only to scratch her best friend’s arm. She would burst into tears in the middle of supper or the middle of class. She became the girl to be avoided.

Some people were kind, others avoided them. Bob’s boss, Peter Stanning, not only gave Bob unlimited time off, but frequently drove round after work with fruit and his wife’s homemade strawberry jam. Vera would stand at the upstairs windows glaring as the children of The Willows scampered and shrieked, threw balls and fell off scooters. Only Monica Harper would look up and smile at her and offer Vera a glimpse of life beyond bereavement.

Someone organised the funeral. It was not Bob and it was not Vera. Debbie cried the loudest and had to be ushered out of the church before the last hymn had been sung. Teachers said nice things about Lauren’s art and Aunt Suki said nice things about Lauren’s sweet nature.

Wreaths of flowers were knee-deep in places and the smell of them was pungent and cruel. The Harpers hosted the compulsory post-funeral gathering and even Vera could tell they did it faultlessly.

‘Without you…’ she said to Monica.

‘I know,’ Monica said, and kissed her on her forehead. Vera knew it was supposed to have been a healing kiss but the memory of it felt more like she was being given permission to leave behind the pain.

The day before Lauren’s second dead birthday Vera waited for Bob to leave and then began rummaging in the cupboard under the sink in the big bathroom. She had squirrelled away a stash of sleeping pills and paracetamol tablets and needed to get going fast.

She had been saving them ever since that first terrible day and the ring of the phone. It had been more important than eating, the hoarding of the pills. Monica’s kiss, the Stanning jam and the pills. They were all she had.

Vera had a jug of water to hand and a bottle of whisky. She had planned to swig them while stood at the sink but decided it might be easier to do it at her dressing table. She would be closer, then, to the bed. She counted in Laurens.

One Lauren and swallow. Two Lauren and swallow. Three Lauren and swallow.

When the room began to spin, she lay down with her pre-prepared ice-cold face towel to place on her forehead so she would not vomit and therefore survive. She carried on counting, carried on breathing and then, ever so slowly, stopped.

Bob was slightly later home than usual, wanting to leave everything squeakily efficient at work so he could concentrate on keeping Vera afloat the next day. It was breezy and orange and yellow leaves swirled in the bowels of The Willows as he placed his key in the door. It was quiet and he could not detect any signs of food being prepared. He shouted her name, climbed the stairs and as he reached the landing he smelled the whisky fumes. He paused, he couldn’t blame her. He badly wanted a drink too. He tapped lightly on the bedroom door before opening it.