The First Time Lauren Pailing Died Read online

  ALYSON RUDD was born in Liverpool, raised in West Lancashire and educated at the London School of Economics. She is a sports journalist at The Times and lives in south-west London. She has written two works of non-fiction. This is her first novel.

  The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

  Alyson Rudd

  ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019

  Copyright © Alyson Rudd 2019

  Alyson Rudd asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © July 2019 ISBN: 9780008278298

  Note to Readers

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  Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008278281

  Praise for The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

  ‘Stylish, alluring, utterly gripping. An intricate, elegantly written time-slip tale that keeps you guessing until the last page’

  LISA O’KELLY, OBSERVER

  ‘A stylish time-slip story à la Sliding Doors’

  GUARDIAN

  ‘This stunning novel gives you many stories for the price of one. In dealing with grief, love, and luck – and the unfair way they are distributed – it is both very moving and very clever’

  MARK LAWSON

  ‘Beautiful, extremely moving and expertly done, with a lightness of touch that belies the complexity behind the plotting. I loved it (and I cried several times!)’

  HARRIET TYCE

  ‘So many wonderful and unexpected moments … such a unique voice. A very special book’

  SARRA MANNING, Red

  For Sam and Conor

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  PRAISE

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  LAUREN

  PART TWO

  LAUREN

  BOB

  VERA

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  VERA

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  VERA

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  VERA

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  VERA

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  VERA

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  BOB

  PART THREE

  LAUREN

  TIM

  LAUREN

  BOB

  LAUREN

  TIM

  LAUREN

  TIM

  BOB

  VERA

  LAUREN

  VERA

  LAUREN

  TIM

  LAUREN

  VERA

  TIM

  LAUREN

  TIM

  LAUREN

  BOB

  TIM

  PETER

  TIM

  PETER

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Lauren

  Lauren Pailing lived in The Willows, a Cheshire cul-de-sac that was shaped like a dessert spoon and as warm and cosseting as any pudding. Every Wednesday morning, sometime between eleven and twenty-past eleven, a big cream van would park at the corner of The Willows and Ashcroft Road. Seconds later, Lennie, who drove the van, would spring out of the driver’s seat, open the double doors at the rear and lower the wooden steps so that the residents of The Willows and Ashcroft Road could climb in and choose their groceries.

  The contents of Lennie’s van were unpredictable, so the housewives of The Willows relied on the local mini-market for the bread or biscuits or tinned ham they needed. But when the van arrived, they all made sure to purchase at least one item as a means of ensuring that it was profitable for Lennie to keep them on his route. So it was that Lauren and the other children of the two streets came home from school on Wednesdays to Watch with Mother and a whole array of unnecessary treats: bottles of cream soda, slightly soggy Battenberg cakes and gooey peppermint creams.

  To the children of The Willows’ dismay, Lennie took a break over the long summer school holiday – so generally speaking Lauren had to be off school unwell, but not too unwell, in order to jump into his van herself. And this she loved to do. Everything about Lennie enchanted Lauren: the twinkle in his eyes, his creased forehead, his Welsh lilt, the way he added up the bills on a small pad of paper with a too-small pencil. She liked that the van was stocked with as many extravagances as essentials, that the whole operation involved adults behaving like children. It was make-believe shopping; grown-ups pointing at a bag of sherbet dip as if it were a serious transaction.

  The very best part, though, was the smell. To enter the van was to be instantly transported to a new world, one that was permeated with the scent of stale custard creams and old and broken jam tarts. Lauren supposed the van had never been cleaned, for there was not one whiff of disinfectant. It smelled only and seductively of years of cakes. It was so old-fashioned that there were no lamps in the back – so the labels of the packets and the bottles were illuminated only by daylight from the open doors or the light that filtered in through the thin curtain that separated the shelves of food from Lennie’s cabin. This was why Lauren’s favourite time to visit the van was on sunny days: when the tiny food hall would be filled with dust sparkling from its contact with icing and sponge fingers.

  It was, for Lauren, safe light. Delightful light. She had been inside the van only four times but always felt completely protected. No Santa’s Grotto would ever compare, no Santa’s Grotto ever smelled as lovely. Above all, thought Lauren, no Santa’s Grotto could resist the temptation to overdo the lighting. In the van, Lauren would stick out her tongue, and Lennie would smile because so many children tried to taste the floating sugar splinters, but Lauren seemed to be tasting the light itself.

  * * *

  The Willows was not unreasonably named, as three of the houses had willow trees near their front doors. The street comprised two rows of small semi-detached houses which fanned out to make room for five detached homes, the grandest of which sat
at the apex, as if keeping a patrician eye on them all. The grandest house of all had a tall narrow pane of green and red stained glass depicting tiny sheaves of golden wheat above the front door – just in case anybody was in doubt as to its status – and its front and back gardens were twice the size of the rest. Lauren, along with her parents, Bob and Vera, lived at No. 13, the first of the detached houses on the right.

  It ought to have been a place simmering with social tension and envy, but The Willows was nestled in aspirational Cheshire and, as the years rolled by, the residents socialised with ease. Every Christmas morning, the Harpers in the grandest house welcomed them all, even the family at No. 2 with their boisterous twin boys who fought each other from the moment they woke to the moment they fell, exhausted, asleep, for sherry and mince pies. Meanwhile, on sunny days, the children would pile into the centre of the spoon and whizz around on tricycles or roller skates. The summer of 1975, when it rolled around, was dominated not only about speculation on the whereabouts of the murderer Lord Lucan and the rise of unemployment, but also by the Squeezy Bottle War. Empty washing-up liquid bottles were turned into water pistols and many a child would scream as the contents, still soapy, were squirted into their eyes. With the exception of water fights, however, The Willows was a place of utter safety.

  * * *

  One Thursday after school the following summer, Lauren was sat in her bedroom on her sheepskin rug, making a birthday card for her mother and sipping occasionally from a plastic tumbler full of cream soda, each sip evoking the seductively sweet smell of Lennie’s van. She was immensely proud that her rug was white; white like a sheep and not dyed pink like the one in the bedroom of her friend Debbie.

  Lauren’s current obsession was to create pictures with complicated skies. She was using the stencil of a crescent moon when, to her right, a thin beam appeared, which to most observers, had they been able to see it at all, would have looked like a sharp shaft of sunlight. Lauren knew better.

  She sighed, and tried to ignore it by pressing her nose against her artwork and wondering how paper was manufactured and how so much of it was stored in her father’s big steel desk which sat incongruously in the spare bedroom. She had once covered the desk with stickers of stars and rainbows and was still not sure if her father had been cross, or had pretended to be cross but quietly found it as loving a gesture as she had hoped. Grown-ups, she thought, were always secretive. They were so secretive that it was possible they all saw special sunbeams which, if peered through, granted tiny windows into other worlds, too. Lauren doubted it. But she, on the other hand, had been visited by these peculiar, dangerous sunbeams for as long as she could recall.

  Two years ago, when Lauren was six, a steel sunbeam had appeared in the kitchen, and Lauren’s mother had walked straight through it. Lauren had caught her breath, waiting for her mummy to clutch her head and sit down trembling, perhaps even to fall through to another place, but nothing had happened – and so, over time, Lauren came to understand that the curious metal, rod-straight beams belonged to her and only to her. Experience also taught her that it had been a mistake for her to turn to her best friend, Debbie, one day and say, ‘Look at that.’ Debbie had looked and, seeing nothing, had called Lauren Ghostie Girl for an hour or so before forgetting, as six-year-olds tend to do, why she was saying Ghostie Girl at all.

  The Christmas after the Ghostie Girl incident, during the school nativity – dressed as an angel and feeling so happy about it that she suspected she might just be capable of flight – Lauren had seen a plethora of beams slice across the heads of the audience. It was as though Baby Jesus were sending the school his approval for their efforts to make his stable cosy with a fanfare of light, and Lauren had turned her head to her fellow angels, expecting to see her own awe mirrored in their eyes – but she saw only glassy tired eyes or vain eyes or look-at-me eyes. No one saw what she saw.

  But the unease never lasted long, and the next day, the whole of the next day, was spent choosing, then buying, then decorating the Christmas tree with felt Santas, silk angels, frosted glass icicles – no tacky tinsel – realistic feathery robins and white twinkling lights. Vera, Lauren’s mother, had looked on, feeling inordinately proud that she did not have a child who wanted to throw a dozen plastic snowmen at the tree but could see Yuletide in an aesthetic way.

  By seven, Lauren had noted the way adults responded to her sunbeam stories and had learned to avoid mentioning them. She had also noted how her school friends were ignorant of these gleaming gateways, and that to insist they were real was to be met with teasing, laughter or annoyance. Still, it was hard for her to remain silent when sometimes such lovely things happened through the miniature windows.

  ‘You look nice in a silvery silky dress, Mummy,’ Lauren had said one night when her bedtime story was finished. She’d started to care about clothes, started to notice that her mother dressed a little more elegantly than the mothers of her friends. Fashion was such a grown-up thing and she wanted to show she could make sense of it – that she might only be seven, but she had style – and a light beam on the stairs that morning had revealed her mother smoothing down a magical-looking skirt. Vera did not own a silvery silky dress and she frowned as she closed the book.

  ‘You mean, darling, that I would look like nice in a silvery silky dress.’

  Lauren had been sleepy and off-guard.

  ‘No, you do look nice, and the dress is more gorgeousy than anything the Bionic Woman wears.’

  Vera considered herself to be a devoted, sensible mother but allowed herself to feel occasionally undermined by her daughter’s murmurings. She wondered if Lauren wanted a different sort of mother, a prettier one perhaps or one that constructed more elaborate cakes. Vera wondered if being at home meant her daughter took her for granted. Then, she would wonder if, on the contrarty, Lauren resented her having a Saturday job, or if her daughter was simply lonely.

  Vera was occasionally disconcerted by her only child. When Lauren had been much younger, she had watched her tilt her head and squeeze her eyes as if peering through a crack in the wall, a crack that was not there. Quietly, stood to one side, Vera would watch her daughter peer, watch her smile or grimace, watch her sigh, watch her turn away. While Lauren was mesmerised, Vera would vow to take her to the doctor, to speak to Bob, her husband, to investigate what might be happening, but as soon as Lauren turned away and carried on with being a child, Vera scolded herself for worrying and did and said nothing.

  * * *

  Lauren, sitting proudly on her white sheepskin rug, studiously ignoring her sunbeam, was now the wise old age of eight, and had long absorbed the peculiarities of her life in the way that most children can be hugely accommodating of anything; be it abuse, poverty, neglect or boredom. She knew that up close the sunbeam currently piercing her carpeted bedroom floor appeared to be a streak of mirrored glass but that, when viewed closer still, so close she almost touched it, there would be no reflection whatsoever. She also knew, she had known for a long time, not under any circumstances to touch the mysterious ray of light.

  For while it looked heavy and solid and glistening, her hand could glide straight through it as if it were indeed a sunbeam. She could even walk through it unimpeded, but to do so was to feel instantly cold with a sharp, nasty headache that lasted for hours and made it impossible for her to do anything but lie down and moan. As this had once prompted her parents to take her to hospital she knew better than to let it happen again.

  It was not her headache that had so worried her parents as the fact Lauren had mumbled through her pain about her other mummy. Her parents had stared at each other, perplexed and a little scared. If they, too, saw the beams, then they would surely not have been so frightened.

  ‘I don’t like my other mummy,’ Lauren had whispered indignantly, her eyes squeezed tight, her hands cold to the touch.

  It was true, on that occasion she had not liked her other mummy, but subsequently she had liked her just as much as the regular one. Gra
dually, Lauren had come to know many mothers, all spied with caution through the prism of the magic glass, just as she had learned to accept the views through her beams, which were usually pretty dull and often almost exactly the same as the scene would be without her magic glass. Only now and again would the view cause her to gasp – such as when she caught sight of her mother, supposedly in the boutique she helped to run on Saturday mornings, sat on Lauren’s own bed throwing Lauren’s own dolls at the wall and spitting with rage.

  Noisily, Lauren devoured the last few drops of cream soda, put down her stencil and crawled from her sheepskin rug to the base of the beam, which had appeared at a forty-degree angle and refused to be ignored any longer. She aligned her eyes and slowly inched forward so that the shimmering stopped and the view began. Peering through, she saw the same bedroom in the same home she was sitting in. Taped to the wall was a child’s painting of the sun shining down on rows and rows of pink and purple flowers. Lauren made a small scoffing sound and looked away to the wall in her own room, upon which was taped a much cleverer child’s painting of a full moon hanging over a wild sea out of which darted flying fish with smiling faces.

  It seemed that, like so many of the sunbeam views, this one was boring and fairly pointless so, carefully, and with a sigh, Lauren set to work again on her card, making today’s crescent moon yellow but the stars silver, humming, ‘Happy birthday, dear Mummy, happy birthday to you,’ and not wondering at all who had painted the simple sun and the garish pink and purple flowers.

  Nothing made Lauren happier than creating pictures for her parents. She was a perfectionist. Many a crayoned red-roofed house, colourful garden and smiling cat had been binned before she deemed it worthy of handing over. It mattered to her that, when her parents gushed their delight, the picture was deserving of such rapture. It was not about competition – after all she had Bob and Vera’s undivided attention – but being an only child conferred a deep sense of responsibility. If she was all they had, then she had better be good. She had better concentrate on the job at hand, and not become distracted by strange other worlds.