The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

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 squint,’ 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.

And should Simon make an appearance in the dining room, Debbie would throw a coaster at him while Lauren would wonder what the music was that had now replaced The Cure in his affections and whether when he smiled at her it was in sarcasm or friendliness.

‘You’re tagging along with us to Cornwall this year, then?’ Simon said one evening as he threw a coaster back towards his sister.

Lauren opened her mouth but could think of nothing to say.

‘Hey, Cornwall’s not that amazing,’ Simon said and walked out.

Lauren and Debbie faced each other, their eyes gleaming.

‘Did my mum speak to your mum?’ Debbie said.

‘I’ll find out,’ Lauren said, feeling as if she were the last to know about the most exciting invitation she had ever received, and she skipped home across the cul-de-sac after giving Debbie a hug, the first hug they had shared feeling like sisters.

‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ Lauren said as she burst through into the kitchen.

‘Of course I was, sweetheart, I was just thinking it through, that’s all. I think perhaps you’re a bit young to be away for a fortnight.’

This was an understatement. In fact, Vera’s instinctive response, when sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea opposite Karen, who was busily dunking her biscuit and burbling about the beauty of the Cornish coastline, had been to laugh it off as a wild and ridiculous suggestion. Vera was as much fun as any thirteen-year-old could ask their mum to be but deep down she was panicked that Lauren was all she had. And, since she was thirty-six, Lauren was likely to remain all she had.

‘It’s not America, Mum,’ Lauren said pleadingly. ‘Can I phone Granny? You do know she thinks I should be busier in the holidays and this will make me much busier.’

Vera had no retort that made any sense. Beryl, her mother, was right. Lauren should be out and about with friends who had siblings. Vera wanted to tag along on the holiday, but Bob was bogged down at the office and would have been wounded had she left him to his own devices every evening for a fortnight. All the same, two whole weeks without Lauren would be torture.

‘She’ll be fine, she’ll have fun,’ Bob said, coming into the room and giving his wife a tight hug.

Allowing her only child to leave for a fortnight made Vera want to burst into tears, but eventually she had taken a deep breath and given her consent. She threw herself into packing a large suitcase with the attentiveness a trip to the Niger Delta would have deserved. Lauren stared at the plethora of ointments and plasters and double quantities of sanitary towels and instead of griping as a teenager might have been expected to, she shouldered the ridiculousness. It was her burden as an only child to indulge such behaviour. Only when on the road with her friend did Lauren make a joke about the fussiness of her mother. Only when she had waved Lauren off did Vera succumb to a couple of heaving sobs of love and self-pity.

Debbie’s family had rented a huge house not far from St Ives. They were joined by Karen’s sister and Karen’s sister’s best friend and her son Brian, who was a gangly twelve-year-old who stuck tightly to Simon as if girls carried infectious diseases. Slowly, they all relaxed and Lauren marvelled at the noise and laughter and the cheating at cards and the arguments over draughts. Other families popped by. Karen’s sister even went on a date. It was all silly and riotous enough for it not to matter when it rained. The adults wandered around in a perpetual state of tipsiness, clutching glasses of wine or beer as Phil Collins played on a perpetual loop in the background. It was hypnotically loud and busy. They all ate when they felt like it and the nightly barbecue lasted for three hours, so that Lauren regularly lost count of how many sausages she had eaten.

On the second evening, Simon was placed in charge of flaming some fatty steaks. As Lauren settled into a canvas chair with a plastic glass of lemonade a thin glistening steel rod appeared in front of her nose. She sharply pulled back her head, fearful of touching it, of the holiday being cut short by the nasty headache such a collision would provoke, and then gingerly leaned forward to spy upon another world. She expected to see simply more sausages and perhaps a new face or two, so unremarkable had been most of her recent peeks through the glass. Instead she saw Simon, wearing a faded red T-shirt that suited him better than the black one he was really wearing, squirting lighter fluid onto the hot charcoal that caused a flame to angrily reach up and slap his face, and setting fire to his clothes.

Lauren closed her eyes as her heartbeat quickened. She breathed in deeply and opened her eyes. The beam was gone and so was Simon but then he emerged, really re-emerged, walking from the shed to the patio, a small can with a spout in his hands. He had changed out of his black T-shirt and was wearing a faded red one.

Lauren was both transfixed and horrified. She wanted to shout to him to stop but lacked the courage to do so. Simon paused and held the can close to his face as he read the label.

‘Dangerous stuff,’ he said to his father, who grabbed the can from his hands.

‘Too right,’ he said.

Lauren exhaled and spent the rest of the evening in such high spirits that Lucy, Karen’s sister, kept asking what she was really drinking.

Breakfast was Frosties or slabs of white bread from the freezer toasted to never the acceptable colour. Lauren noted that Simon would tip back his head and let the dry cereal fall from the packet into his mouth and then take a gulp of milk while winking at her. At least she thought he was winking at her. It might have simply been that it was impossible to eat breakfast in such a fashion while keeping both eyes open.

This was life, she thought. She was growing up. She had experienced a short burst of homesickness on the first night that had been interrupted by a glistening beam piercing the end of her camp bed. Through it she had seen a toddler sucking at a bottle of milk, its eyes wide, its toes curling around the ears of a small white teddy bear, and the vision had instantly cured her of her loneliness. I’m not their baby, she thought indignantly, and they had better get used to it.

Eleven days into the holiday an old Jeep appeared in the driveway driven by a man Lauren had not seen before, but Debbie and Simon and gangly Brian piled in and so she did too. There were no seats for the youngsters; they just sat on the back and clung on facing the way they had come. The lanes, banked by thick hedgerows, became increasingly narrow. Lauren could hear her mother wailing about how dangerous it all was and made a mental note not to mention this particular outing when she got home. Debbie started singing Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ and they all joined in, even Brian, because they were in a Jeep and felt they could be in California, and because it was easy to sing a song by Kim Wilde because Kim Wilde couldn’t sing all that well herself.

Then the driver veered sharply round a bend and braked as a tractor approached and Lauren was thrown out of the back of the Jeep and onto the road. And the singing stopped.

Lauren felt like a small hard rubber ball bouncing down some stairs. She felt her neck snap, painlessly, like the wishbone of the Christmas turkey. She felt warm blood trickling across her chin. She felt the world spin, the colours of the beautiful early evening dim into sludge brown, then grey, then black.

She opened her eyes slowly, not out of pain or the fear of pain, but out of a curious sort of trepidation.

She knew without thinking, without calculating, the way that she knew her name and she knew that ice was cold, that she had died.

Part Two

Lauren

Whereas other little girls in The Willows might have clasped their hands together and prayed to God or to Jesus or grandparents in Heaven or a pet in the afterlife, Lauren had formulated her own religion. It had never been taught to her at Brownies or Sunday School or in assembly. She had not heard it mentioned on television or in the conversations grown-ups had over cups of tea or gin and tonics.

Lauren had always had her sunbeams and they had always shown her windows to other places. She was sure that everyone had these other worlds but that, for some reason, no one else could see them. What was the point of it all, she couldn’t be sure, but her beams suggested to her that instead of dying, she could shift.

Shifting was, she thought, more sensible than Heaven. More convenient than Heaven. More realistic than Heaven. Nicer than Heaven. Her Grandad Alfie had confirmed it.

‘We carry on,’ Grandad Alfie had whispered to her when she was eight or nine and had asked him if he would still be able to see her when he died.

‘Where?’ she had whispered back.

‘Somewhere nicer, or at least somewhere where we aren’t dead,’ he had laughed throatily but Lauren had not laughed along. She had simply nodded seriously and he had stopped laughing and nodded too.

When Grandad Alfie had died, she had known he had not been ready to actually die. He was sprightly and funny and liked to beat younger men at cards. He had carried on regardless, she was sure of it. He had carried on oblivious to the silent tears of Granny Beryl, the misery of Vera and the sad hymns in the church.

That had not been her grandad’s time and this was most certainly not Lauren’s time. She was thirteen. She could not die. She opened her eyes. She was in a hospital bed and she was sore. She could not move her head, it was being held in place by a plastic contraption and it made her feel claustrophobic.

Her mother’s face loomed into view. Vera was both relieved and panic-stricken. Vera looked different somehow beyond the frown of desperation, the fear of what her daughter’s injuries might mean. Lauren forgot about the pain and mounting unease and stared and stared at her mother’s face. Though it was not what she was expecting, she recognised the face. She had seen it pouting sadly through the magic glass.