Eleven Lines to Somewhere

by Alyson Rudd

  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. Gradually, 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 for ward 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.

  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 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 t welve, 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 bet ween lessons she had peered, making sure not to squint too heavily, and seen a bleak school corridor with no art work 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.