The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

by Alyson Rudd

  A week later Luke was standing in their hallway, dishevelled and smiling. She wanted to reprise the kiss but Kat and Amy were fussing over him, offering to take his clothes to the launderette. It seemed plausible then, to Lauren, that if the house could handle one couple it should be able to handle another, and she wondered if Kat and Amy actually thought he deserved better than her.

  As they sat round the table, like an old-fashioned family, eating the oh-so-lovingly prepared roast chicken, Amy handed Luke a letter which he inspected reluctantly.

  ‘Your mother?’ asked Kat.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, and not for the first time Lauren felt left out but she wanted to be bolder. They had kissed after all.

  ‘Does that mean bad news?’ she asked and she held his gaze knowing that Kat and Amy were throwing her disapproving glances.

  He sighed. ‘Not really, it’s just that she’s so bloody formal, always acting as a go-between. Via letters. Like we live in 1902 or something.’

  ‘Go-between?’ asked Lauren, and she was sure she heard Kat hiss.

  ‘Yeah, don’t talk to my dad. He doesn’t like my… life choices.’

  With this Amy steered the conversation to skiing, which left Lauren musing that maybe Luke was titled and supposed to be in charge of a thousand-acre estate rather than saving drug-addled teenagers from abusive step-parents. Or maybe he had been expected to join the army. Or the Church.

  Jeffers cleared his throat and wondered if they should not hold a house party before he went into Finals Preparation Hibernation. It was his way of announcing he would soon be bookish, reclusive and against all partying, which they understood in some way, and it made them fonder of him. When asked by friends why they were throwing a party they all said it was to launch Jeffers’ FPH and nobody, strangely, asked what on earth that meant.

  Amy and Kat took charge and decided upon the theme of Block Colour.

  ‘Which means everyone will wear black,’ Luke said.

  ‘Which is fine,’ said Kat, ‘because one or two will wear white and one or two will be in green or yellow and it will all look crazy and superb.’

  Lauren was nervous. Ski might not come, or else he might come with ten very odd friends. And what about her office; should she invite only Patti, or everyone from the team? Mostly she was nervous about those Luke would invite. The Block Colour Party appeared to be a form of exposure. They all led very different lives and she wondered how their worlds would interact. As she handed Gregory the invitation Kat and Amy had asked her to design, she shrugged apologetically.

  ‘I have no idea if this will be fun or not, so please don’t come if there is a chance it will affect my career,’ she said in a jokey voice although she partly meant it.

  Gregory was, though, delighted to be involved. Everyone assumed he was an uptight, serious sort of guy but he liked boozing. He liked a bit of a dance. And he really liked a sartorial challenge. He was one of the first to arrive, dressed head to toe in deep brown. His shirt was crisply ironed and he was particularly proud of his brown satin tie which had been more difficult to source than he expected.

  Amy, cream, and Kat, black, were thrilled with the seriousness of his effort and pampered him for the rest of what was the most peculiar house party Lauren, turquoise, had, or ever would, experience.

  Ski, black, brought just one friend, orange, announced he was gay and almost burst into tears when Lauren said she’d thought he was, though she didn’t add that she’d suspected as much ever since she’d had a vision of him in his flat with a man. It was not clear if Ski was teary because he had hoped to surprise her or because he was touched by her intuition.

  Jeffers, denim blue, spent the entire evening lining up shot glasses and filling them with different varieties of vodka, washing them up, drying them, then starting again. The food comprised hundreds of cocktail sausages baked in honey and sesame seeds and separate bowls of tomatoes and celery and mozzarella balls: Block Colour Food.

  Someone connected to Luke, grey, turned up in black jeans and a red T-shirt and was heckled until he swapped his top for a black vest he found in Luke’s cupboard.

  Patti, black, brought her much older sister, black, who spent the evening glowering against a wall while Patti explained she was a writer who needed to observe. The writer took a long time to roll each cigarette she barely puffed upon and Lauren, newly enamoured of peach vodka, noticed a beam of silvery light appear in a rare halo of smoke above her head.

  Lauren did not gasp. She had, very vaguely, expected something odd to happen. She walked over to the writer and whispered in her ear.

  ‘I am going to look at something that is just above you. No need to move.’

  The writer’s eyes flickered then closed as Lauren used a small stack of books to reach over her. She peered at and then through the metallic string as naturally as a nosy neighbour peers through net curtains. She saw pointed trees bending across a starlit sky that was a warm, inky blue. There were no buildings, no people, just a plain and serene beauty. It was a place she could aspire to live in but she was not even sure it really existed. She climbed down off the books and thanked the writer, who grunted.

  People were dancing now. Luke gyrated slowly and she inched closer, her hips mirroring his hips until he placed his hands on her shoulders and kissed her before shuffling out to the kitchen.

  Patti took hold of her hands.

  ‘I’m in love with him too,’ she said. ‘I mean, who wouldn’t be?’

  This, to Lauren, seemed to sum up her dilemma. Luke could be with anyone he chose so why would he bother choosing someone?

  Bob

  The beach could never be too crowded, not even on a warm still day in June. It was not that sort of beach, but it was certainly busy as they sat, their backs against a dune, him gazing at her toes.

  ‘You have very lovely feet,’ he said.

  ‘Why thank you, Robert,’ she said teasingly and then she stiffened. ‘I need to discuss something with you,’ she said, and she did not wait for his acquiescence.

  ‘My mum is taking two weeks off work at the end of the month and she says she insists that I use one of them to get away. She’ll walk Walter, see to Dad’s lunch and stuff, and I do want to do something, find a cheap flight maybe. Anyway, before I start booking stuff, do you want to come with me? Can you come with me?’

  Bob had no realistic excuse to offer Rachel for being away from home. On the other hand, she was so tied up in her various projects that she might not mind at all if he found an old friend who wanted to meet up. The real trouble was Suki. If he invented a pal from school she would know he was lying. On the other hand, his sister knew little about his old office. She had met Peter Stanning, and was very pleased to have done so given his subsequent notoriety, but no one else.

  ‘Give me the dates and I will come with you,’ he said, pleased to sound so certain and feel so free.

  Rachel did not seem interested in the convoluted reasons he had rehearsed as to why he was joining some old work colleagues for a conference in Spain, although his chest tightened when she said had he given her more notice she would have accompanied him and amused herself by drinking sangria by the pool and flirting with the waiters while he wasted his time in an air-conditioned hall.

  Twelve days later Bob and Andrea were in Barcelona where they sneered at the beach for being nothing like as impressive as their own but were otherwise overwhelmed by the bustling long nights and oil-drenched sausages. Their hotel room was hot and noisy but pretty and they loved it that way – and the only means to fall asleep was to have sex they were too drunk to really want.

  Andrea was witty and lively. She dragged him down narrow alleyways in case there was a courtyard worth seeing at the end of it. She had a basic grasp of Spanish he had not expected her to have and had bothered to read up on the history of the region. On the plane she had finished reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and pressed it into his hands saying, ‘Your turn, Robbie.’

  Not once did she s
ay ‘I love you’ and not once did she ask him if he loved her, yet they held hands and stopped to kiss whenever they got close to something either of them pronounced beautiful. He thought of her as free and young but she was simply making sure she squeezed as much as possible from this interlude in her humdrum life. She was not madly in love with Robert but this trip was the happiest she had ever been and as she brushed her teeth on their last evening she thought she could, perhaps, become a little besotted with him.

  At the airport, as he held her bag and passport while she nipped to the bathroom, he realised he did not know for sure her age and birthday. What had she said? Don’t worry, Robert, I’m in my twenties. Sometimes she looked thirty, he thought, and sometimes sixteen. He looked around and opened her passport then closed it again. It was a violation, like peeking at her diary. He would not be so sly.

  ‘Did you look at my dreadful photo?’ she asked breezily.

  ‘Almost,’ he said, ‘but it felt like prying.’

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘let’s swap.’

  They swapped. She guffawed but only because that is what people do when they see a lover’s passport photo for the first time. He sniggered and then stopped sniggering to read the information.

  She was indeed called Andrea and she was a British Citizen.

  And then he froze. Her date of birth made no sense to him. It felt as if he was staring at hieroglyphics. He blinked. What was wrong here? September ’68?

  She snatched the passport from him, misunderstanding his grim expression.

  ‘OK, so I’m almost twenty. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  He did not answer. He was back at the hospital. Vera was cradling her newborn daughter.

  ‘She’ll be one of the oldest in her class,’ Vera had said.

  ‘And therefore one of the cleverest,’ he had said.

  It was 20 September, 1968.

  He snatched the passport back again and scoured the page for Andrea’s exact date of birth.

  29 September, 1968.

  He was having sex with a girl the same age as his daughter. Nine days younger than his daughter.

  ‘I never lied,’ Andrea said. ‘Why are you so pissed off?’

  He stared at her, his stomach churning.

  ‘No, no, I’m not pissed off,’ he said but her expression told him he would have to say something. ‘It’s something else entirely,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain later, when we’ve landed.’

  She was silent. It had been such fun and now it was spoilt. She could not think what it was in her passport that had spooked him. She told herself she did not even like him that much but as that had the unexpected effect of making her tearful she turned away from Bob and examined their fellow passengers, trying to eavesdrop and discover something diverting.

  He closed his eyes on the plane and wondered if he was the sort of man who would have an affair with a girl the same age as his daughter if that daughter were alive. He could not solve the riddle. If Lauren was here, then Vera would be here and he had no idea if his and Vera’s marriage would have lasted but he supposed it would have lasted just fine. They would have become grandparents one day. It would have been just fine. But he had never watched his daughter grow older, and neither Suki or Rachel had grown-up children. He thought of Rachel and her childlessness and he sighed; of course, that is why we have a cuddly toy on the bed. Just occasionally Rachel would flinch at a soap storyline revolving around a pregnancy; just occasionally she would hold the cuddly leopard too tightly.

  He had never dwelled on her sadness. She had given his the priority. His loss was greater than her loss. He needed to be better at being her husband. As Andrea fiddled with her seatbelt, he understood he needed to be better at being a boyfriend, too, and that he was, effectively, trapped into being utterly dreadful at both.

  He wanted his old life back, the one that would have been just fine.

  Lauren

  Patti and Lauren stood side by side as Gregory carefully brushed the sleeves of his jacket, then put it on and left to meet the writer in reception. They turned to look out the window to watch them walk together hand in hand across the road and then down a side street towards lunch.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Patti. ‘I didn’t even know my sister liked men.’

  ‘But nice,’ said Lauren. ‘I don’t think I will ever meet Luke for lunch. Or brunch. Or dinner.’

  ‘I really don’t see why you can’t just ask him out. Ooh, you could double date with Gregory and Lydia, how could he resist that?’

  Lauren smiled. It sounded so easy but if he declined they still had to live in the same house. It felt risky, potentially awkward, and she pictured the kitchen falling quiet as she walked in, with Amy and Kat frowning disapproval, Jeffers shifting uncomfortably in his chair and Luke not really noticing her. Except. Except they had kissed. Who kisses someone in a meaningless way? It had to count for something.

  ‘Actually,’ Patti said, thoughtfully, ‘the problem might be that you are a sort of family in that house. You could end up being his little sister or something. You should suggest meeting him from his work, or he could come here and do a Lydia.’

  Yes, thought Lauren. Yes. Part of her inhibitions stemmed from Aunt Kat and Aunt Amy and their entrenched belief that no one could be good enough for the beautiful, saintly and it had to be said, complicated, Luke. The nearest pub to her office held a comedy night on the first Monday of the month. She could ask him to that. Yes, thought Lauren. Yes. I can ask him to that. I will ask him to that.

  Their paths did not cross for a few days and then, one month on from the Block Colour Party, as her self-confidence had grown to almost the point where she might tell Luke something about her heart, Lauren found a ballet dancer on the landing. At least it looked like a ballet dancer. It was a slender, pixie-like thing with glossy auburn hair in leg warmers and a lace vest. And a wash bag. Why did it have a wash bag?

  It put its hand to its mouth.

  ‘Oops,’ it said. ‘Is it OK for me to use the bathroom now?’

  Lauren’s pulse began to rattle.

  ‘Ah, er, yes. If you are quick, I mean, who are you?’

  The dancer rose up on her tiptoes and announced herself as Tabatha.

  ‘Tabatha?’

  ‘Yes,’ the dancer said, her hair swaying in slight indignation. ‘Tabatha, as in Tabatha, girlfriend of Luke.’

  Never had Lauren taken such an instant dislike to anyone.

  ‘So nice to meet you,’ Lauren said icily. ‘How long do you think you’ll be?’ she added, nodding at the bathroom door.

  Tabatha glided past her whispering she would be just five minutes, maybe less, the implication being that one as lovely as she did not need to dwell in front of bathroom mirrors.

  Lauren felt the double whammy of betrayal and jealousy with none of the upside of having been in a relationship with Luke in the first place. As he stood beside her in the kitchen that evening offering to chop onions, she could not stop herself from feeling deeply wounded, betrayed even.

  ‘I met Tabatha this morning,’ she said, trying to keep her voice level and light.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Luke said. ‘Now she really was a big mistake.’

  This was not what Lauren had been expecting.

  ‘She won’t be moving in, then?’ she said.

  Luke groaned. ‘Let’s just say I woke up today feeling… not good.’

  ‘About Tabatha.’

  ‘Yes, not good about Tabatha.’

  The dancer was never seen in the house again but Lauren was wary now of Luke, fearful he might be incapable of even a minor level of commitment.

  ‘I need a break from thinking about him,’ she confided in Patti, and so the pair of them planned a blitz on big theatre productions and films in Leicester Square which left them broke but bedazzled and diverted. In the hours Luke did not occupy her thoughts, life was good. Gregory, her boss, was indulgent and happy. Her work itself was fulfilling and creative and outside the office she had time to l
augh and feel lucky.

  She tried not to drink too much and not to think about why she needed to avoid becoming drunk. She had an idea her accident, the fall from the Jeep, made her vulnerable to hallucinations and that alcohol exacerbated something in her brain but she felt no desire to discuss this with a doctor or a friend. She really wanted never to think about the accident but if it was not her knee then it would be a headache that reminded her. She had an idea that if Luke had fallen off the back of a Jeep and survived he would have taken up car rallying and counted each day a beautiful bonkers bonus but try as she might Lauren could not find a way to count her blessings.

  The accident was a very private thing and that was about all she was certain of. The really strange part was that she had no memory of the mechanics of what happened that day, or what happened when she drank too much only that something peculiar sometimes occurred to her. I’d probably be burned as a witch four hundred years ago, she thought, not the first time.

  * * *

  It was Easter, 1991, and her parents wanted her home but she did not want to be in their house. The Christmas visit had unnerved her; her memory had felt marginally fractured. It simply did not feel like home any more. She suggested they all meet in a hotel, have a four-day holiday together. Somewhere halfway between Cheshire and London.

  ‘Birmingham?’ Vera said. ‘I’m not staying in Birmingham.’

  ‘No, Mum, how about, well, not halfway exactly, but somewhere like the Cotswolds or Bath or something? I mean, you used to love all those National Trust places. There must be so many you’ve never visited.’

  ‘You are funny, Lauren,’ Vera said. ‘We only went to one stately home and you’re still holding it against us.’

  Lauren laughed. ‘I must have been so bored it feels like we went to loads of them,’ she said.

  The notion did not fulfil Vera’s desire to cook for and pamper her daughter but at least Lauren was making time for them and plotting a little trip might be fun. So it was that the Pailings stayed in an elegant hotel in the centre of Bath, where the weather was kind to them. Lauren wanted none of the unsettling disconnectedness of Christmas. She was sure she had simply outgrown The Willows and that it had nothing to do with her parents, but as they settled down to afternoon tea, with Bob clumsily spooning a generous helping of bright red strawberry jam onto a tiny scone and Vera examining a delicate cucumber finger sandwich, Lauren felt slightly uneasy in their company.