The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

by Alyson Rudd

  ‘I think we can safely say no detective will find this useful,’ she said. ‘I mean, how can a white square and a Christmas turkey help anyone understand what happened to him?’

  ‘Yeah, but it might help anyone understand why it matters to keep looking,’ said Patti. ‘I mean, it all looks so sorrowful. To me anyway.’

  ‘There is the excitement of the novelty of it all in the cartoons and then it sinks in and becomes a tragedy,’ Lydia said.

  Gregory stood apart, nodding seriously.

  ‘You should do something with it. A display or something,’ Lydia added, vaguely.

  ‘That’s interesting… It should definitely be put somewhere. It’s so arresting… And it really makes you think about loss. It tells a story.’ Gregory paused. ‘Lauren, would it be OK with you of we dedicated a wall in the lobby to this? We can use it to highlight the work of the new missing people charity I saw the other day. Make it the official charity of the company maybe. We are in the heart of London, after all – this is where people come and then go missing.’

  Tim frowned. He did not want earnest charity people turning up and pinning posters in his lobby. It would emit the wrong sort of vibe. There was something unsettling about the faces, usually faces in blurred photographs, of people who had disappeared. It allowed the imagination to run wild towards evil. Kidnapping, murder, suicide. And to think, they were here to also toast his and Lauren’s engagement.

  Perhaps he would now have to toast Peter Stanning. On the other hand, had he not gone missing maybe he and Lauren would never have met given they only shortlisted those who emerged from art college with stellar recommendations. Yes, he thought, I might owe something to this Stanning bloke.

  As he poured them all a glass he noticed that Gregory was gazing still at Peter’s face, the only traditional portrait in Lauren’s collection.

  ‘I am fascinated by this man,’ Gregory said. ‘People like him just don’t vanish. What do you suppose happened?’

  Tim was trying to focus on the toast he was about to make and did not welcome the diversion.

  ‘Probably something very dull,’ he said.

  ‘Hmm,’ Gregory said, ‘I think he had squirrelled away money over the years and wanted a new life with a new woman and was a coward about telling anyone.’

  ‘Better not tell Lauren that,’ Tim said, ‘she is convinced he was the victim of some kind of accident and an honourable man in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now,’ and he made a determined effort to seem casual about it when in fact he was feeling this might be the first of many significant toasts, ‘it is time for raised glasses.’

  Tim had an idea he was regarded as serious and possibly self-important but he hoped his union with Lauren would reflect well on him. I can be funny, he thought, but then thought better of trying.

  ‘I’d been wondering how to cleverly combine Lauren’s art with our engagement and it has just struck me that I might never have met the woman who will soon become my wife were it not for the fact she chose to depict the story of missing Peter Stanning which in turn ensured she was one of our picks to interview at JSA and is now part of the gang at Pilot.’

  He paused. He knew he was stood in his own home but sounding like he was in the office. He cleared his throat.

  ‘That’s me getting too corporate, as always. What I mean is that I am lucky Lauren found a way into my life and perhaps a tiny bit of that is down to a man we will never meet. So please raise your glasses to the love of my life and her art.’

  They all clinked their flutes and talk turned to the wedding.

  ‘We’re in negotiation,’ Tim said when Lydia asked about the venue.

  ‘We’re not really in negotiation,’ Lauren said and Lydia beamed. She had long suspected wedding plans ruined relationships or at least soured them and here was proof.

  Later she asked Lauren if she would call it all off if Tim insisted they marry in London.

  ‘He won’t do that,’ Lauren said.

  ‘But if he did?’

  ‘Then we wouldn’t be able to get married.’

  Lydia beamed again, pleased her new friend had some fire in her belly.

  ‘Do you want me to be your bridesmaid?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Lauren said, and Lydia screamed with delighted laughter.

  Bob

  He went to Andrea’s house first and asked the taxi to wait as he posted the short letter. He tried very hard not to run back to the car but he knew he scuttled like a coward.

  The front door opened of his big blackened-brick house before the taxi had pulled away. Suki stood there, or rather, he thought, his sister loomed there, larger than before.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m just here to collect clothes and check on my wife. I won’t speak to her if she doesn’t want to see me.’

  ‘Oh, Bob,’ Suki said, and she strode towards him.

  Is she going to hit me? Bob thought, not that he would much mind if she did. Instead his sister pulled him into an embrace.

  ‘How could you not come to me? I’m your sister, I love you.’

  He was stunned into silence and, confused, he remained, hugging Suki, wondering if he might weep in gratitude. Instead it was Suki who allowed a tear to fall.

  ‘I thought you had, you know, I thought you had…’

  He stepped back and held her hand and let her words float down the driveway.

  ‘Just had a bit of thinking to do,’ he said. ‘Sorry to be dramatic.’

  He held her gaze and smiled what he hoped was a smile which conveyed that he was perfectly well aware that this was real drama and he was up to coping with it.

  He was surprised to see that Suki smiled back with a hint of her usual impishness.

  ‘I have some ideas of my own,’ she said and pulled him inside.

  Rachel was out on Rachel’s Refuge duty, looking, Suki said, like nothing had happened.

  ‘One minute her eyes are all red and puffy and the next she is composed and beautiful.’

  Bob lowered his head.

  ‘That’s what makes it worse. She’s been through this kind of crap before. I was supposed to be the knight in shining armour, not more of an arsehole than her ex.’

  Suki laughed.

  ‘Bobby, Bobby, she was your knight, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, well, now I’m scared of her, scared of saying the wrong thing, scared to be here really. She wants me gone.’

  ‘For now she does, but that’s understandable. Look, pack a bag and stay at my place. You have to stay with me, I’ve cleared space for you and made up the sofa bed. With clean sheets and everything.’

  As he found a suitcase and began to stuff his clothes into it he wondered why he felt a reluctance to stay with his sister, who was, after all, being understanding and far from accusatory, as he had supposed she would be. And then he reached the answer. Suki lived much further from the beach and he needed the beach. Even though it had been the place where Rachel was humiliated and Andrea driven to despair, he wanted it to be close by. It was the only place since his first dose of pain that he had been at peace.

  ‘Where’s Pascal?’ he asked, unable to prevent a note of panic.

  ‘Don’t worry, she hasn’t taken him back to the dogs’ home,’ Suki said. ‘He’s with her now.’

  ‘Oh,’ Bob said, feeling unaccountably sad. ‘Let’s go then. Off to Chez Suki.’

  ‘Jesus, it’s not a prison,’ Suki said. ‘Just a bit cluttered.’

  Bob followed his sister in his own car. He had never before visited her home. Suki had never suggested it, she was private in that way, despite thinking nothing of turning up unannounced at his house. She lived at the end of a short terrace of pretty cottages that seemed too narrow to form any sort of comfortable dwelling but were very long to compensate. Even so, he was sure he was too big for the place and wondered how whole families coped. It was full of plants and cushions and plenty of art on every wall, some of it crass, some of it intriguing and some of it downrig
ht arresting, but what took him most by surprise were the photographs. There was one of Lauren he had not seen before and one of Vera and Lauren and him laughing in the sunshine, his wife’s face dappled with shadow, his daughter’s hair glistening from playing in the paddling pool. It was such a beautiful image that he forgot, almost, what it meant to him.

  ‘I don’t remember you taking this,’ he said.

  ‘Did you never wonder where Lauren got her talent from?’ Suki said, but Bob had never really thought much about what his sister’s talents might be. She had always just been Suki.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t have you down as sentimental.’

  ‘I’m not. This was just too wonderful to put away.’

  ‘And this?’ he said, picking up a photo of Lauren aged about eleven.

  ‘It’s fondness, not sentimentality,’ Suki said, and she showed him his sofa bed and shrugged when she pointed to the downstairs bathroom.

  ‘All the houses are like this,’ she said and asked him what he wanted to drink.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any cocoa?’ he asked, astonished that his recuperative cocoa with Miranda had been but a few hours ago. He would send her some flowers although he had a suspicion she was always being sent flowers; she was a problem solver.

  He had to settle for warm milk. Suki patted the sunken armchair by the gas fire, before rummaging for a small saucepan.

  ‘Do you want to hear my plan?’ she said.

  For a moment he thought she was about to tell him about a new carpet or extending her kitchen but he quickly realised that Suki thought she had a means to fix his life.

  ‘I’m exhausted, to be honest, and not sure I will give your plan the attention it deserves.’

  Suki scowled good-naturedly.

  ‘Never mind. Later. What are you doing tomorrow?’

  Bob wriggled in the armchair.

  ‘I have to be up reasonably early to see Andrea. You know who I mean by Andrea?’

  ‘I do now,’ Suki said. ‘Rachel didn’t say her name. But, well, can we chat before you leave? Please?’

  Bob nodded and glanced over at the photograph of his family. His face was in slight shadow, Vera’s was partially in shadow but Lauren’s face shone brightly, radiantly, so that it seemed she emanated the light rather than being illuminated by it.

  ‘I wonder what she would look like now,’ he said, and Suki, so full of surprises today, pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan, wiped her nose and closed her eyes.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Simply beautiful.’

  Lauren

  She had thought herself plain at twenty but was learning to be more confident, to look in the mirror and approve, to know she needed little if any make-up, to acknowledge she would be an attractive bride.

  She had enjoyed enormously asking Tim’s half-sister to be the sole bridesmaid. Lottie had scowled at the engagement announcement but when Lauren asked her if the responsibility would be too much for her, she could not bear to turn it down.

  ‘Can I choose my own dress?’ she said.

  ‘Naturally. And I’d like you to help me choose mine. It’s one of the duties of the bridesmaid,’ Lauren said and Lottie’s animosity evaporated in the space of five seconds.

  ‘You do realise this is all happening in Cheshire?’ Tim said to no one in particular and no one in particular took any umbrage.

  ‘How delightful,’ said his stepmother.

  ‘Never been,’ said his father. ‘Be an adventure.’

  ‘But we’ll have a party in London too,’ Lauren said, and Tim sighed. He was not sure how he had been quite so outmanoeuvred but a part of him admired his fiancée for being so pleasantly inflexible. He stared at her thinking, for the first time, that he was properly in love. In love with Lauren and not with the idea of being in love. In love enough to be different, to put her first, to make her his priority over anything.

  The plans brought Lauren closer again to her parents. The wedding was new territory and the disconnectedness that had become a low irritating hum whenever she saw them disappeared. She did not tell them Tim was reeling from the choice of venue, that he had had to stomach a church – and a church that was in Cheshire – and had suffered a double whammy of incredulity.

  Lauren also knew that Tim would not let it show too much in the build-up, and not at all on the day. She had to drag him to the church in the weeks beforehand for the banns to be read and, while Lauren and Tim felt like intruders, Vera and Bob had sat with them comfortably, having visited the church in the months following Lauren’s accident and intermittently thereafter. Lauren was surprised at how relaxed her parents were in the church but even more taken aback by how Tim wrapped his arm around her waist and tenderly rubbed her back as the vicar spoke.

  They married on a sunny Saturday in May with Bob and Vera clutching hands tightly to ward off tears, sat next to Beryl and Alfie. Lauren made sure to catch the eye of her grandparents and give them a warm lingering smile. Her grandad had suffered two heart attacks in the past few years and much as he pretended he was up for anything, the drive to the church would have been a slog for him. Alfie winked at her, a wink full of all sorts of meanings and she could think of nothing to do but wink back. She did not see him as often as she wanted to but of all the people she knew he was the one she would say, if pressed, she felt most telepathically connected to. With just a smile he could convey he understood how she felt when she struggled to explain herself.

  The light careered in through the narrow stained-glass windows so that the dust tingled as prettily as confetti. Everyone inside the small church noticed the shafts of sunlight and sighed at the beauty of it, all except Lauren, who found it fleetingly intrusive, as if someone uninvited had opted to turn up to the ceremony and tried to upstage the bride.

  The unease did not last long as the fast-forward button was pressed and all of a sudden she was sat at a long table decorated with roses as her husband stood to speak about his wife. Tim uttered the word ‘wife’ sixteen times. Everyone chuckled each time he did so. He praised the Cheshire weather, his in-laws, Beryl and Alfie’s stoicism and a fine example of long-lasting devotion, his darling half-sister who now loved Lauren more than she did him. What Lauren liked most about his speech and what cemented her commitment to him was that he did not mention Pilot once. He kept it to family, to love, to happiness. And she was happy. The wine flowed, the toasts came and went and Lauren, who had barely eaten a thing, realised too late she might have downed one glass too many. As she gazed across the room, at the finery on display – the pink silks, shiny ties, a tartan waistcoat, a metallic gold shawl – all of it was suddenly pierced by a metal rod that glinted so boldly it put the fashion show to shame.

  It mocked her. She felt it had stalked her from the church, and it was daring her to move closer. She stood up and a few guests cheered but she did not hear them. She walked slowly over to the beam, kissing a few cheeks en route. The apparition had landed on the plate in front of Estelle, an old friend of Tim’s who she had met only three times before. To peer at it she would need to embrace Estelle which she knew to be odd but the compulsion to get closer was too strong.

  Estelle, an angular young woman of high intelligence but low self-esteem who hated her pinched nose, saw the bride walking towards her. She cannot be heading to me, she thought. Why would she be walking to me? I’m probably the least important person in the room – but she is looking at me. Do I stand up? If I stand up and she walks straight past me, I’ll look a fool. I’m already a fool for thinking she even remembers my name.

  But Lauren stroked her shoulder. Yes, she definitely stroked her shoulder, and bent down, which was all wrong. She must stand up for the bride. So Estelle stood up and Lauren hugged her and said, ‘I’m so glad you came all the way up here, you’re a good friend to Tim,’ and Estelle flushed with gratitude and found herself unable to say a single thing as Lauren peered past her neck at the metal beam. It had stopped shimmering now so she peere
d closer and saw movement inside it so she peered closer still and saw there was a whole new world there, or rather a different wedding, one that had moved on to the dancing and one in which the bride was at least forty and had an entourage of thick-armed bridesmaids clad in hideous mauve.

  Tim had watched his wife glide between the tables, had watched her stop to embrace Estelle, and been filled with smug affection. He had been right all along about Lauren. She was special and she loved him enough to hug one of his oldest if dullest friends. He forgot he was in Cheshire, that the food was provincially served, that the non-London women wore too much jewellery on too much décolletage, that he had begun to dread the live music. He took a sip of wine and smiled. He was happy.

  Lauren squeezed Estelle’s hand and headed back towards her husband feeling light-headed. She had drunk one glass of wine too many and eaten too little and already the vision that had nestled next to Estelle had become something like a figment of her imagination. An hour later and she had forgotten all about it. An hour later she was ignoring her sore knee and jiving to the live band’s version of a Rolling Stones song with her father.

  ‘That was nice,’ she said sleepily to Tim as she lay in a corny four-poster bed.

  ‘You’re nice,’ he said, running his fingers along her wedding ring. ‘You’re so nice I do believe I might develop a soft spot for Cheshire.’

  ‘We have good cheese and fine women,’ Lauren said.

  ‘The finest,’ he said.

  Bob

  He looked pale and nervous.

  ‘I feel sick,’ he confessed.

  Suki made him sit down.

  ‘If I ask you what you want, you’ll say you want for none of this to be happening but, Bobby, it is happening and you have to find the best way through it.’

  He nodded, unconvinced.

  ‘Hear me out,’ Suki said. ‘Rachel is so hurt but she doesn’t hate you. It’s just that she can’t have kids and—’