The First Time Lauren Pailing Died
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To Suki’s surprise, the visit was a success. Bob tried to cheer up Beryl and Beryl tried to cheer up Bob. Bob told her about his ‘options’ and Beryl told him she had none unless she considered leaving the country to stay with her sister and her family in Canada but as she had not been invited she could not, really, consider it much of an option at all.
‘Funny place to want to live, don’t you think?’ she said to Suki.
‘Utterly ludicrous,’ Suki said and for the first time in a long time Bob gently chuckled.
It was a turning point. It was as if one chuckle had broken the spell of pain and inertia. Bob decided he could have a future and it only took him two years to decide which one. It was not on the list made by Peter Stanning but it was in the spirit of it. Bob rented out No. 13 The Willows because he could not bear to break the ties completely, and bought an apartment in a trendy conversion overlooking the River Mersey and not too far at all from Suki. He did not retrain, but set himself up as a consultant, working on projects for Peter’s business and for smaller clients.
When Peter vanished, the December after presenting Bob with his life options, Bob helped out from a sense of duty, but gradually he expanded his private client base and cut his ties to his old firm. He liked to be busy but he also liked knowing he could cut away for brief periods and wallow and weep without letting anyone down. One Sunday each month he let Beryl cook him a roast chicken, and one Saturday each month Suki let herself take him out to a pub or the cinema.
Was it living? Suki wondered sometimes how her brother’s mind worked, whether he could forget for a while about his wife and daughter or if it might be worse if he could forget only to have to remember and suffer all over again. There was something very contained about Bob, she thought. It was like being with an acrobat, a man treading the high wire and wanting to appear confident and calm but knowing one lapse in concentration could lead to a catastrophic fall. His laughter was measured, his smiles were tempered, his eyes could twinkle but only dimly. She remained, all the same, very fond of him.
‘Do you fancy seeing Prizzi’s Honor?’ Suki asked Bob on the phone ahead of their regular Saturday outing. His wife had been dead for two years and his daughter had been dead for over three but, still, there was a remnant of it being somehow inappropriate to spend too much time wondering which film they should see.
‘Seen it, Suki, very good, though.’
Suki paused. How had he seen it, the film had only been in cinemas for a week?
‘I went with Rachel,’ he said.
‘Who the fuck is Rachel?’ Suki said.
Bob laughed.
‘I think I somehow ended up on a date,’ he said.
‘In that case no movie for us on Saturday, we’re meeting for a drink,’ Suki said.
Rachel was deep into divorce proceedings and had employed Bob to untangle the financial mess of her marriage. There was a large house on The Wirral, a large house near Lake Windermere and a flat in Menorca to be sold off and all manner of stocks and shares and registers which Rachel had not even known her name was attached to.
Rachel had a golden tan, long legs and expensive hair and when she met Bob she realised how much she wanted a solid man who did not travel, who was straightforward and honest and serious and highly unlikely to have been secretly shagging another woman for the past seven years. The fact that Bob did not notice her tan, her legs or her hair made him desperately attractive to her. The fact that Bob was sad and damaged made him irresistible.
Suki wondered how protective she should be. Rachel could be a shallow vulture or exactly what her brother needed. She rattled off her questions.
‘How old is she?’
‘Er, forty.’
‘Children?’
‘Nope.’
‘Does she have a brain?’
‘She knows a lot about Menorca.’
Suki paused. Was Bob humouring her?
‘OK, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just, well, you know.’
‘I know,’ he said.
Eventually, Rachel was introduced to Suki. Bob’s sister had low expectations. Yes, she was attractive and very golden for someone living on Merseyside. She was dressed immaculately in beige and cream and her eyes glazed over when Suki made a quip about Thatcherism. Just as Suki gave up any notion she would be able to stomach Rachel for the length of any meal together, Bob’s new friend let slip she had bought a dilapidated building and was refurbishing it to become a women’s shelter.
‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘I could afford to disappear for a few days while I recovered from being let down by Gary and in any case Gary’s not the violent type. But there are plenty of women who ought to leave their husbands and can’t because they are too poor or too afraid.’
Suki was intrigued and by the end of the evening had agreed to join the executive committee of the nascent charity. By the end of the year they were firm friends. Bob would sometimes lean back in his chair as the pair animatedly discussed the charity’s progress and feel he was living someone else’s life. Vera and Lauren were sometimes so far away that he needed to reel their memory back in like a fisherman scared of losing a big catch. The remembering hurt but the notion of forgetting was terrifying.
And then, remarkably, he found himself discussing marriage. He half wanted his sister to dissuade him but if anything Suki seemed to be as fond of Rachel as he was. Bob was content with things as they were but also knew that was not allowed. No one was allowed to drift. Things had to be headed somewhere. In a muffled way he heard conversations about a new life together, starting afresh, commitment, cementing the relationship. It was true. He was in a new relationship. Sometimes he woke and wondered who he was. Sometimes he woke and he did not feel sad and he had Rachel to thank for that. If she needed them to be married, so be it.
Lauren
Lauren’s student days were almost done. Her friends were plotting, planning, leaving, stagnating, worrying. The answer to almost every question was to party. She found herself at the entrance to a nightclub that was grubby to the point of extreme elitism. She groaned. Her knee hated heels and hated dancing. Just this once people said – or maybe she was the one who said it. Let’s end this thing in style.
Everyone had their arms in the air, there was jumping, swaying, gyrating to Inner city’s ‘Big Fun’. She liked it. No one but men had heels on and even the ugly were sexy. Everyone is ugly, she thought, everyone is sexy. Ski placed a tablet on her tongue. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but just once, Loz, just one, just for me.’ He swallowed and smiled, Nina smiled, so she swallowed and smiled and soon the music was in her belly, warming her with love.
‘I love,’ she shouted to Ski, and then it appeared.
Across the middle of the dancefloor there hung a row of metal strings that had no end and no beginning. She gasped. There was beauty and danger and familiarity. And fear. And love. She swayed closer to the beams that were glittering mirrors and then suddenly magical glass. She peered into the rod that was closest to her eyeline saw the same dance floor, the same bar, but in place of students were lots of middle-aged men and women dressed in school uniform and dancing provocatively. The women had their hair in silly pigtails and wore short skirts and shirts that were too tight and the men were just drunk enough not to laugh at themselves.
She peeled away and turned her back on the beams, which she sensed were reproducing. She wanted love not peculiarity. But then she was twirled around again and the compulsion was too strong. She tilted her head and saw an empty supermarket with a solitary woman mopping the floor. The overhead lights flickered and the woman looked over her shoulder as if only just at that moment realising she was alone in a big building. Lauren wanted to hug her but then she mopped her way out of view and Lauren was left staring at an aisle of breakfast cereal and teabags.
She stepped to her left to peer into another kingdom but it was without illumination of any kind. She moved on to another beam and saw dancing much like the dancing she was part of right now. On tiptoes she peered into a big kitchen with sweating men wiping down tables and sealing bin bags, and then she lost her balance and was pushed forward into the shining lattice, pain searing through her temple, and it hurt so much she passed out.
It hurt so much that her parents travelled down from Cheshire. It hurt so much she mumbled about glass and light and visions and not caring who heard. It hurt so much she promised Bob and Vera she would never take drugs again in her life. It hurt so much she knew it was not the ecstasy. The tablet had unleashed something that was part of her, just as the cannabis had back in Ski’s flat. She would have been terrified except for a nagging sense of continuity. It has always been there, she thought. It is always there. It is part of who I am. She stared at the mole on her mother’s forehead as if it held all the answers before falling into a deep recuperative sleep and dreaming of angels carrying her to a Heaven that looked just like home.
Her parents had returned to The Willows worried but triumphant. They had known all along that London was dangerous. Vera had ached to bring Lauren home and install her in her small bedroom with its sheepskin rug and she could not understand why, even though her studies were at an end, her daughter felt the need to stay in the capital a week longer. Every time the phone rang, Vera hoped it was Lauren, hoped it was Lauren with the noise of a railway station in the background and her only child raising her voice to tell her she was about to step onto a train and could Bob meet her the other end because she had all her belongings with her.
The phone did ring but the line was crystal clear. Lauren was very permanently in London.
‘Is Peter Stanning still missing?’ she asked Vera, to lighten the mood. Her mother sounded close to tears.
‘I’ll visit soon, Mum,’ Lauren said unable to think of anything else to add.
‘I’ll put your dad on,’ Vera said.
‘Tell me the news, then,’ Bob said.
‘Well, I can’t quite believe it, Dad, but I’ve got the first job I applied for. I’m assistant to an art editor at an ad agency. It’s not a big one or a famous one, you won’t have heard of it but that might be a good thing really, but I think Mum is… disappointed.’
Bob lowered his voice. ‘Jan’s daughter is back home from finishing university in Edinburgh, and you know the Weller boy, he’s been back from college for two years and is still with his parents now. I think your mother thought you’d be coming home too, at least for a few months. But she knows this is great news. She’ll be OK, and we’re so proud of you, you know that.’
Lauren sighed. The burden of being not just an only child but one they had almost lost, not once now, with the Jeep, but twice, thanks to the ecstasy, never grew lighter but she had too much to do in London to spare time for a trek back home. She had to find a flat, buy work clothes, find herself, really. This was the grown-up world and she wanted to be calm and ready for it.
Before the night in the club she had been living with Ski, but he did not want a permanent flatmate and could be disconcertingly moody, and Nina had, to everyone’s astonishment, secured a place on a post-grad course in New York, so Lauren scoured advertisements until she arrived at an address in Paddington where the door was opened by a twenty-something man in pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt.
He grunted then smiled and turned towards two women who had walked into the hall.
‘Can we have this one, please?’ said the man, whose name was Luke, as he ambled upstairs.
The women tutted and fussed, apologised for Luke’s behaviour, made her a mug of tea and quizzed her about every inch of her life story without seeming nosy at all.
‘We share the big double bedroom at the front,’ one of the girls, Kat, said as the other girl, Amy, nodded. They went silent then, looking at Lauren for signs of disgust or discomfort.
Lauren took it as a cue to ask questions about the household. Were there other couples? What jobs did they have? How long had they lived there?
They drank more tea, laughed a good deal, and then Luke appeared, fully dressed, his hair damp from the shower.
‘Have they done a character assassination on me?’ he asked.
‘You are Luke and you are twenty-five,’ Lauren said, ‘and you are a social worker and do more good for the world than all the people Kat and Amy know put together but you never, ever put food back in the fridge.’
Luke pouted and Lauren felt herself fall in love right there and then, but she had not asked Kat and Amy if Luke was single, or if they would hate her to be in love with him, or even if everyone fell in love with him. I’ll find out soon enough, she thought.
Ski offered to help her move in but all he did was lean against a wall, smoking and nodding as Luke, Kat, Amy and a post-grad student only ever called Jeffers carried Lauren’s suitcases and bedding and art to her second-floor room.
Lauren had shared a house in her second year with three girlfriends, all art students, and of course she had lived with Ski, but this felt different, much more grown-up – a rite-of-passage moment. She had two days to settle before starting her new job. Her career. Her proper life.
Luke, predictably, was the spaghetti-sauce man, while Kat and Amy provided Sunday roasts even if no one else was in and Jeffers was a dab hand at chicken breasts in a variety of sauces all of which contained copious amounts of cream. This left Lauren to summon a specialty. She phoned Vera in a panic, who, pleased to be needed, calmly talked her daughter through the baking of fish as well as the creation of a salad Niçoise.
The Paddington house had an old-fashioned pantry as well as a fridge and when she first opened its door she became transfixed by the smell of stale jam tarts and old butter biscuits. It was such a familiar and happy sort of smell. She held the doorframe and closed her eyes and felt herself hurtling down The Willows on a tricycle then being walked back up the cul-de-sac again, hand in hand with her mother towards a large van, and she smiled at herself for having such an odd daydream. She opened her eyes when she thought she heard a man’s voice, a Welsh accent. But when she walked into the hallway there was nobody there.
Lauren’s office on Charlotte Street was airy, her immediate boss a short compact serious man in his thirties whose shirts were beautifully ironed, and her workmates were bustling and busy but they smiled and were welcoming. On the streets outside people wore acid-washed denim and big jumpers but in the office the staff were either impeccably suited or wore stylistically independent T-shirts with clever slogans over expensive leather skirts. The only faux pas was to not know what your own style was. One night, a few days in, she joined them for after-work drinks before travelling home for Luke’s Thursday-night pasta. Even my knee is happy, she thought, having spent an entire day without noticing even a twinge.
Jeffers opened a bottle of port to toast her first four days in gainful employment and the fact that Thursday was the new Friday. As she drifted towards drunkenness a beam of silvery light cut across the big sagging sofa. Lauren lurched forward and then stopped, filled her glass with water and drank it quickly, refusing to be drawn towards the apparition. She drank another glass and another and then made coffee. As she sobered up the metallic light ebbed and she was filled with an indescribable sorrow. She had let someone or something down, and she went to bed confused and unhappy. In the morning, though, she remembered none of it, except that she was a maudlin drunk and needed to limit her alcohol intake.
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