The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

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‘Four. Do nothing, but know I’ll take you back on at any time. When you are ready.’

He closed his notebook self-consciously.

Bob groaned and then swiftly sat up.

‘I can’t thank you enough, Peter. I, really – could you leave me the list? I’ll think about things, I will.’ Bob summoned a small smile. ‘Maybe after the stew.’

‘We’re eating it together,’ Peter said.

The two men sat in silence for a while, and then Peter emptied the bin and cleared some old food from the fridge before serving up the soupy beef.

‘I think that was nice,’ Bob said, ‘but I can’t seem to taste anything. Actually, Suki, my sister, asked to stay but I told her no. Perhaps…’

Peter seized on the idea.

‘Yes, absolutely, even if just for a few days, Bob. I know it would be better than you being on your own so why not call her now? I can speak to her too if it helps.’

Oddly, Bob thought it would help. He handed the phone to his boss. Between them, Peter and Suki concocted a plan to keep Bob from festering.

‘But she can’t sleep in Lauren’s room,’ Bob said in a sudden panic.

‘No, of course not, Bob,’ Peter said. ‘She’ll do everything required to make the spare room what she needs.’

Bob had been sleeping alternately in his daughter’s room, his and Vera’s room, and the spare room. They were all a bit smelly and somehow Peter knew this. He went upstairs and opened the window to the spare room and stripped the bed. He had told Suki to bring her own bedding.

Suki was a limited cook, but it was hardly appropriate, she decided, for the pair of them to be dousing pancakes with Grand Marnier or flambéing steaks. Suki was a limited housekeeper too, but even she could tell the place needed a good hoover. After vacuuming the entire house, she decided she had been enough of a martyr and called on the neighbours and devised a rota. She would look after Sundays and Monday mornings, but everyone else would have to chip in with something the rest of the week. The mother at No. 2 yelled at her twin boys to offer to wash Bob’s car, and when Suki realised that would be the most she would get from her she accepted the offer with a forced smile.

‘We don’t know him,’ said the couple who had recently moved into No. 17 and found The Willows to be a morose sort of place.

‘In that case, you can just drop off milk and bread on Thursday mornings,’ Suki said. ‘If he doesn’t answer, leave it outside the door.’ And with that she left them gawping, railroaded, and even more regretful that they had chosen this house over the smaller one near the church. Suki found The Willows stifling and dull and told Bob it would be a diversion, and good for him, to sell up. He mumbled something non-committal. Suki smiled, sadly. Bob was the quietest, least interesting person she knew but she was fond of him, always had been, and it angered her that he was being made to suffer.

‘We should visit Vera’s mum, don’t you think, Bob?’

Bob was startled and for the first time in weeks felt something other than self-absorbed grief. Beryl would be having just as awful a time of it as he was. Maybe worse. But he could not bear to phone her so Suki took charge of their sombre trip past Stockport to Marple Bridge and Beryl’s damp stone cottage.

At least, Suki thought it was damp. Everyone else thought it a sweet and cosy sort of place, but as soon as they walked in Suki began to feel uncomfortable. Every side table and shelf was stacked with photographs. Vera and Bob on their wedding day, Vera holding baby Lauren, Beryl and Alfie holding baby Lauren, Beryl holding baby Vera, Lauren on her first day of school, her uniform slightly too big, her briefcase slightly too formal. The telephone, instead of being on the hall table or in a corner, sat incongruously in the middle of the polished round dining table at the back of the living room. More than any photograph, it told a picture of loss. No more chats about nothing much at all with her daughter or her granddaughter.

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 (#ulink_77b194d7-339f-50a0-a4bc-2315d9b8f5df)

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.