The First Time Lauren Pailing Died Read online

  * * *

  Vera was delighted with her daughter’s card, and she hugged her tightly. Lauren hugged her back.

  ‘You’re the best of all my mummies,’ she said, forgetting her own rules in her haste to say the most loving thing she could on her mother’s special day.

  Vera stiffened but carried on hugging.

  ‘Well, cherub,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I’m the only mummy you’ve got.’

  Lauren sighed contentedly and Vera relaxed. She reminded herself that she had had an imaginary friend called Tuppence when she was four. Lauren was, at eight, a bit old for such things, but Vera could tell her daughter was creative and with creativity came, perhaps, an overexcitable imagination.

  It was such a lovely, long hug. Bob walked in and chuckled and said he had booked a surprise Sunday lunch for the three of them. This turned out to be not a silver-service affair, but cold chicken, tongue, ham salad and homemade coleslaw at No. 17 where Lauren’s friend Debbie lived with her parents, Julian and Karen Millington, her bright pink sheepskin rug, and her brother, Simon. But Vera was amused by the conspiracy and the fact that Bob both shaved beforehand and cleaned the sink properly after having done so. She knew she would have to wear the long white silk scarf Bob had bought for her and that meant she could not wear the wraparound dress she had bought from her boutique with her fifteen per cent discount the previous day. She stood in front of the mirror before they left for lunch, Lauren by her side.

  ‘Long scarves go only with long trousers,’ she told her daughter, and Lauren gazed admiringly at her mother’s self-assuredness, her smooth, blemish-free skin, her elegant neck, her tiny wrists. When she dressed her Sindy Doll she would think how much more elegant her own mother was compared to the doll, or the other mothers of The Willows and especially when compared to the other mothers inside the sunbeams.

  It always thrilled Lauren to notice the differences between her and Debbie’s homes. From the outside, they were almost identical, bar the fact that No. 13 had a green garage door and No. 17 had a white one. Inside, though, they felt unrelated. Vera was very partial to glass partitions and bold wallpaper such as the orange-and-brown paperchain pattern in the living room. Debbie’s parents preferred solid walls and had placed textured magnolia on them.

  As a giant trifle was hauled onto Debbie’s dining table, a metal sunbeam appeared in front of the sideboard. No one but Lauren noticed it. She was used to this by now, used to being different. She sometimes felt pestered by the magic silver string, as though a smelly boy were pulling at her ponytail. She also was beginning to recognise that the nagging cracks of light lingered longer if not given attention. But it would not be so easy, she thought, to give this particular beam attention while in a packed dining room in someone else’s home.

  She ate her trifle with one eye on the beam, which was noticed by Karen.

  ‘Have you spotted our wedding photo, Lauren?’ she asked.

  Lauren stopped eating mid-mouthful, wondering if it was rude to look at another family’s photographs, then realised this would give her a reason to peer closer at the sideboard.

  ‘Can I look?’ she said, and sprang out of her chair. Fortunately, no one paid too much attention to the way Lauren cocked her head to one side and stooped oddly.

  ‘I was so slim back then,’ Karen twittered self-consciously. Karen liked Bob and Vera but Vera had arrived in platform clogs worn under maroon flared trousers, looking, to Karen, like some sort of film star, and she had had to tug at her own hair in order to clear her head and remind herself that it was Vera’s birthday and she had every right to look a million dollars.

  Lauren stared into the metallic gap. Through it, she could see Karen sitting in a chair, her eyes closed, her cheeks hollow, her lips pursed. She was bony and brittle like a twig. It made Lauren feel sad. There was never a soundtrack to the visions, but Lauren could sense a weighty silence, a room enveloped with pain.

  ‘Pass the photo here, love,’ Karen said, keen to make sure Vera had a good look at how petite she had been on her wedding day.

  Lauren had to loop her arm under the beam and lean back a little to ensure she did not touch it. Watching her, the quiet bored Simon decided his sister’s friend was, like all girls, uncoordinated and a bit stupid.

  * * *

  Eventually the long hot summer of 1976 ended, school restarted and Lauren was placed in charge of the art and stationery cupboard in the corner of her classroom. This was dressed up as an honour but it really meant that the teacher could avoid having to tidy up. Nevertheless, Lauren took her role very seriously. She loved the trays of string, of glue, of poster paint, of crayons, the stacks of thick coloured paper, the pencils and pencil sharpeners, the hole punches. It was her domain and she even sort of liked how for a few seconds, as the strip light flickered into life, it could be pitch-black in there. It was a small windowless space that smelled of plasticine and turps and, oddly, of forgotten fruit gums, and not once had a rod of light appeared. And yet.

  Deep into her cupboard duty one afternoon Lauren heard a scuffling outside her door. It sounded to her like mice so she turned sharply and noticed a luminescence clinging to the cupboard’s keyhole. She bent down and peered through the gap and saw her classmates rushing to sit down as the teacher, beaming, lowered the stylus of the portable record player. This could mean only one thing. The record player was used to play just one record and one record only, ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’. This was how birthdays were marked in her school and the children would sing with gusto as the birthday boy or girl was more or less ignored. ‘I saw a mouse!’ they would shriek along with the scratchy old vinyl record.

  Lauren felt left out. How could they? she thought. The Windmill song was taken very seriously. The teacher would wait for the children’s full attention and only when there was an expectant silence would she ease the stylus onto the record. For the first time in her stationery cupboard Lauren felt lonely and left out. She would have to act in haste not to miss the opening refrain so she firmly and a little indignantly pushed the handle and stepped into the room singing, ‘A mouse lived in a windmill—’ and then she stopped short. No child was at their desk, the portable record player was still on the shelf.

  ‘Anything the matter, Lauren?’ asked the teacher as a few children giggled.

  ‘Was there…? Were you all going to sing?’ she said in a whisper.

  The teacher shook her head distractedly. Gavin was handing out sweets again, an eight-year-old version of a spiv on market day. Lauren stepped back into the cupboard and the door clicked shut.

  ‘Well, I declare,’ she hummed to herself defiantly. She had, after all, always known strangeness and was an adaptable soul. ‘Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair,’ she mouthed as she found a spare drawer for the plastic beads that had spilled on the floor every time the class had an arts and crafts afternoon.

  As she sat down for the glass of orange squash the teacher handed out to the children at two o’clock every day a lattice of metallic beams dangled from the ceiling and Lauren took a deep breath to mask a gasp at its majesty. This, she felt, was an apology for the Windmill debacle, and it might have been the first spiritual moment of her life except for the fact that Tracy Campbell saw her gazing at the ceiling and began screaming that there was spider in their midst about to drop into her beaker.

  Lauren saw no spider, and wondered briefly if Tracy saw spiders the way she saw metal sunbeams. But she soon worked out that where her classmates had imagination, she had something more tangible. Something that could not be shared, that was more dangerous than the wildest of daydreams and so much more compelling.

  * * *

  A week after her eleventh birthday Lauren was sat in a chair at the optician’s.

  Her parents had seen her squinting as she stood before the newly installed bookshelf in the living room. They had also seen her, head cocked in the kitchen, seemingly struggling to make sense of a cereal packet on the table.

  ‘I don’t sq
uint,’ she said sullenly.

  The optician knew an easy sale could be made. The parents were very suggestible to something corrective being necessary, desirable even. But, after a thorough examination, he had to accept that there really was absolutely nothing wrong with this girl’s vision. What’s more, something about the child unnerved him. It was as if she could see through him, see him for what he really was – which was lonely, and obsessed with his receding hairline.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said brightly, and Vera shook her head.

  ‘Well, that’s good news, I suppose,’ she said as Lauren rolled her eyes. She felt spied upon. She had tried to be surreptitious when peering through the shimmering rods, but clearly her parents had sneaked up on her. She would have to be even more careful. She did not live in a world where it was acceptable to see things that other people did not see although she was sure there was a world somewhere where it would have been just fine. In fact, the more beams she looked through, the more it seemed to Lauren that there were endless variations of life; that her glimpses were not big revelations but tiny clues. She was only ever peeking, not properly looking, at what might have been. Or what could be. Or what also is.

  By now, she had stopped telling her mother about her other mothers. Gradually she had noticed the stiffening, the frowning, the flushing it induced in Vera and the last thing she wanted was for her mother to be unhappy. Vera, Bob and Lauren enjoyed a contained and contented life. There was no need to spoil it. But Lauren was maturing and starting to wonder what the point was of her visions. Was this to be her life, always ducking under the beams, always needing to see into them?

  By the time she was twelve, the beams had begun to gang up on her. Now and again she would walk into a room and be faced with a wall of metallic slices. There could be fifty or sixty of them blocking her path. It was impossible for her to duck or jump or squirm past them. These were the only occasions when she felt intimidated by the visions. It was like finding her bedroom window fitted with iron bars or being trapped in a public toilet cubicle. Fortunately, it did not happen very often and so far it had not caused a stir but she did worry that one day it would. That the headmaster of her new secondary school would ask her into his office and she would be unable to step through his door. Or that the beams would multiply to the extent that they formed a wall of steel, trapping her so that she could not even see what was ahead, only what else might be around her.

  Otherwise, school was just fine. Lauren had forged a reputation for being artistic and creative. Little did she realise that the vast majority of secondary schools would have had no time at all for her clever cartoons and bold montages, that most teachers would have told her to spend less time with tissue paper and more time on her spelling tests. It was a school that almost treasured its pupils and that made it, almost, a wondrous place to be. There were sports days, plays, concerts, film clubs and art exhibitions on a seemingly endless reel. No one wanted to leave. Its sixth form was full to bursting. It was a very happy place. Or at least it was happy in Lauren’s day-to-day version.

  She knew by now that she was seeing alternatives, through her glittering rods, to what was really there, and once in the corridor between lessons she had peered, making sure not to squint too heavily, and seen a bleak school corridor with no artwork and a runt of a boy being spat upon by larger, older children. There was not time for her to dwell on his features, but she tried to burn the image in her mind so she could recognise him if he was somewhere in her real school. But if he was there then he was not in her class and she never passed him in the playground.

  It made her thankful that she lived in a kinder place. It made her smile at the staff, make eye contact with the dinner ladies and share her crisps with her friends. This in turn made her liked and popular, which helped to fill the void left by the fact that she could not share her visions with anyone. Nonetheless, it could be lonely, and she thought of her Aunt Suki, who lived by herself, and wondered if, when she grew up, she would have to live by herself too, watching television alone and never joining in the laughter or tears of anyone else. When a beam appeared that night as she brushed her teeth, Lauren muttered a prayer to no one in particular that, when she peeped through, she might see in it her Aunt Suki laughing with friends at a sophisticated party brimming with handsome men, but all she saw was the bathroom she was already in – albeit a version that had a sink with a large brown stain.

  By the summer of 1981, Lauren was approaching thirteen and beginning to feel the first stirrings of teenage claustrophobia. Her home was so quiet, so full of routine. Not even the Royal Wedding was enough to spice it up although it was nice that she, Vera, Karen and Debbie were able to watch it – all the girls cooing together while Bob and Julian went crown green bowling with Debbie’s grandfather. A whole week could pass without a visit from Aunt Suki, without even the visit of a neighbour; so the visit of sunbeams, no matter how many, was a welcome diversion, even the ones where there was a young boy being cuddled by her mother which made her feel a spurt of jealousy. There were days when just bringing her father a mug of tea as he pottered about in his messy garage was a highlight of the weekend. Usually she disliked it when her parents chatted about politics but it was different when it was just her and her dad in the garage. Bob was mesmerised by Margaret Thatcher and Lauren deduced that he admired her, feared her and was baffled by her.

  ‘How do you reckon she and the Queen get on?’ he would ask his daughter, and they would engage in a role play that invariable ended with Bob mimicking the Prime Minister and saying something silly such as, ‘Where there are biscuits, may we bring tea?’ and the two of them would giggle helplessly.

  ‘One day I’ll sift the rubbish from the necessary,’ he would say as he rummaged in yet another cheap plastic box for a spanner or a rusty pair of secateurs, and Lauren would look at the oil stains and the cobwebs and say, ‘Of course you will, Dad,’ and they would laugh conspiratorially, then walk together into the kitchen where Vera might be mashing eggs with butter, mayonnaise and cress for sandwiches – the clearest indicator of all that the three of them were ‘going for a drive’.

  It amused Lauren greatly that, during these drives, her parents derived so much joy from pretending that they did not know where they would end up even though she knew that they discussed in detail their next outing to make sure that they saw every stately home or went on every country walk at the time when it would be at its most beautiful. Lauren could appreciate the beauty of Lyme Park’s architecture and the rhododendrons that lined the still waters of the local quarry but, all the same, she was bored of tagging along, no matter how tasty the sandwiches or how good a mood her parents were in.

  It was not normal, she grunted inwardly, that an invitation to a treasure-hunt lunch at Easter at the home of Peter Stanning, her father’s boss, should have been such a highlight in her life. But there had been plenty of other teenagers around her age there, and also a decadent sort of freedom to it all, with the youngsters permitted to roam as they pleased. Lauren had liked Dominique, a girl home from boarding school, who carried a camera around her neck and took photographs of tree stumps and discarded bikes. Dominique was the daughter of who Mrs Stanning referred to as ‘dear old friends’ and it struck Lauren that this was evidence of a class divide. The Pailing family did not have any ‘dear old friends’ whatsoever. They just had people who they ‘used to know quite well’, like the family who had lived near Lauren’s primary school before moving to Leighton Buzzard.

  ‘They have eleven bicycles in this shed but thirteen bike wheels,’ Dominique had said to Lauren as they stood before one of the many Stanning outhouses, and Lauren had fervently wished she was capable of noticing such details. Later that evening, she told Dominique that she too was an artist, that she did not have a camera but liked to draw and to paint, and Dominique had replied that she, Lauren, possessed the greater gift. Yes, Lauren, thought, I really like Dominique. But then she disappeared off to boarding school and Peter Stanning did
not hint that his wife would be hosting any more such gatherings. Lauren recalled how Mrs Stanning had been a distant sort of hostess, as if she had something much more important to be seeing to, while her husband had been friendly and attentive and had spent ten minutes looking for some Savlon cream to rub into Dominique’s elbow when she scratched it while making space for her camera lens through a lattice of wild and thorny roses. Peter Stanning had looked Dominique in the eye and said, as if speaking grown-up to grown-up, that she should pursue her dream in photography.

  * * *

  In the absence of parties, Lauren increasingly gravitated towards the house across the cul-de-sac spoon where there was noise and the odd raised voice, the squabbling of siblings and the laughter of parents who liked a midweek nip of booze.

  She always knocked, but no one ever physically answered the door. Instead Debbie or one of her parents would call out for her to come in, and sure enough the back door was always unlocked. Debbie had begun to sequester herself in the dining room on the basis that her brother had the largest bedroom and it was an insult to expect Lauren to perch next to her on her small bed. They would sit, instead, on uncomfortable dining chairs, trying to feel sophisticated as they leafed through magazines bursting with shoulder-padded women, and swapped gossip or pretended to complete homework as they sipped at too-hot Pot Noodles. Above them could be heard the heavy beat of Simon’s music and muffled lyrics which made Debbie groan and pout.

  ‘The Cure. Again,’ She would sneer.

  As the months passed, Lauren spent more and more time at Debbie’s. She quietly considered The Cure to be intriguing. She inwardly relished the chaos and the fact that sometimes the music would be so loud that the furniture would actually bounce. Furniture never bounced in her house. At Debbie’s, if you wanted to open a tin of hot dogs and heat one up you could do so without anyone telling you it would spoil your appetite. If the terrible twins from No. 2 rang the front door bell, they would not be ignored, as they were in Lauren’s house, but chased down the road and even sometimes called back and asked if they wanted to watch the football on the telly, whereupon they would turn into identical pink-cheeked curly-haired cherubs, dunking their Jacob’s Club biscuits into beakers of milk, glued to the progress of Liverpool in the European Cup.