The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

by Alyson Rudd

  ‘Yes, yes, I remember now. It’s like all my memories are stuck for a few seconds and then burst free but only one at a time. I’m sorry. I’m not doing it on purpose. I remember the big things properly, like I love you and the children, but I don’t understand why I thought Mum and Dad lived somewhere else.’

  She did not tell him that the somewhere else did not even exist. When she closed her eyes she could see, as if through an early-morning mist, the willow trees, the Squeezy Bottle war, the Christmas lights, her sheepskin rug. Maybe they were all part of her parents’ other house, but she doubted it.

  ‘Are you dizzy, do you feel ill?’ he said.

  ‘No, I feel better than I’ve ever felt, even with the sunburn on my shoulders. It’s just my memory that’s wonky. And, Simon, do I sound a bit posh?’

  Simon tilted his head to one side.

  ‘Not posh really, a bit different, yes. But only a bit.’ And then he changed the subject. He had no idea what was going on and the more they talked about it, the stranger, to him, it seemed to get.

  * * *

  Dr Haines was swift to act but the scans revealed no evidence of trauma or disorder. Dr Haines also noted that Lauren was disappointed rather than relieved. He wrote down the name of a therapist he had once used for a rape victim.

  ‘Please, go and chat, have a few sessions with her. You can tell her anything without being judged. It might help talking it through in confidence with a stranger who has heard about all sorts of problems and won’t be cynical or shocked.’

  He paused. ‘Actually, I insist that you go. You seem very distracted to me.’

  She nodded miserably. She was becoming tired of all the surprises in her life. Tomorrow her parents would be back from Cornwall and she was afraid of how desperately she wanted to see them. Their devotion to her had been stifling over the years but now she yearned for their unconditional love, yearned to be with people she had always known, who had always been there.

  Bob

  ‘But you don’t believe in God,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rachel said. ‘It’s a way of telling our friends this is our child, our new life. It is symbolic.’

  There was a small church christening and a slightly larger gathering for drinks back home. Bob was astonished to discover that his clients had become his friends and they arrived bearing gifts for his son. Andrea had asked his middle name be Grant, after her father who, three weeks before the birth, had suffered another stroke and was still in hospital trapped in 1969.

  That meant Rachel had full control of his first name and she had picked Jevin for no other reason it seemed than she liked the rhythm of Jevin Grant Pailing. Bob would have liked to have called his son Peter. As the years had passed, the dignity and loyalty of his boss became increasingly clear. Peter had saved him. Peter deserved to be remembered but Bob could not deny that Rachel was right, that Peter Pailing sounded like a character from a nursery rhyme while Jevan Pailing had an intriguing statesmanlike air to him.

  ‘He’ll be famous or important,’ she said.

  ‘Or an accountant like his dad,’ Bob said.

  They had reached the point where he could say something like that and not risk hurting her. They had swiftly moved to a place where he was in charge of the nature of their new son and she was in charge of the nurture.

  Suki had never had the chance to tell Bob of her plan and never would. They had not needed her and for the first time she felt herself to be a spinster doomed to be looking at families from the outside. She was proud of her brother’s new family, that he had held it together, but she had to convince herself she far preferred to help look after the peeved Pascal than the gorgeous Jevin.

  It was not all plain sailing. Bob would find Rachel gazing at the sleeping baby wistfully and knew his wife was either wishing she had given birth to him or torturing herself that Andrea would appear unannounced.

  Bob was less worried about Andrea. She had told him she was sure she had done the right thing and they had all agreed that she should send letters and postcards to her son about her life to form a Birth Mother Box so that when he was old enough he could have all his questions answered and not feel rejected.

  They told no one what had happened and most of their small number of friends and acquaintances decided Rachel and Bob had adopted the child of a woman from Rachel’s Refuge.

  The stayed in most evenings, tired and even happy as they watched film videos. The whirr and clunk as yet another VHS tape was pushed into their machine became a punctuation point of their life. It meant supper was over, the baby was in his cot and they could finish their wine with Rain Man or The Accidental Tourist or a Hitchcock classic with Pascal dozing on the thick rug beside them. Sometimes, when a character had an affair, Rachel would stiffen, Bob would stroke her hand and she would relax.

  The entire arrangement existed on the premise he would never again hurt her and they were starting over from scratch. This meant he could not dwell on Lauren and Vera so now and again he would shed a tear, just with Suki, and when Beryl died, Rachel stayed at home with Jevin while Suki and her brother attended the funeral.

  Andrea addressed letters to Jevin within letters to Rachel and Bob which was thoughtful of her, he thought. It meant their baby’s letters could remain unopened and private but they did not need to worry about what was in them. Andrea stayed put for a few months until it was clear her father was stable, if still in hospital, and then, on funds provided by Bob, took a course in French, which she had been good at in school, and then found a studio flat to rent in Paris where she, with some irony, found a small job as a dog walker.

  Bob wanted to know if all the dogs in Paris were called Pascal but the deal was that any communication would only be about Jevin and come only from Rachel, who hoped to hear soon that Andrea had fallen in love. But Andrea’s unwritten rule was to keep her private life private.

  Lauren

  They arrived with boxes of clotted cream fudge and Rosie and Toby hugged them tightly, so Lauren felt less self-conscious about doing the same.

  ‘A moustache, Dad?’ she said, laughing. Bob pouted.

  ‘You’ve liked it well enough the past six months,’ he said.

  ‘I forgot all about it,’ Lauren said lightly.

  ‘I wish I could,’ Vera said, and from that moment Lauren felt her parents were much more feisty than she’d been, deep down, expecting.

  She had been in need of some cosseting but none was forthcoming. Neither she nor Simon wanted to burden them with details of the trips to doctors but Lauren felt even if they had told them the whole sorry tale they would not have been overly concerned.

  ‘You’ll never believe it, darling,’ Vera said, ‘but Ben turned up with a girl in tow. We were speechless, your dad and I, and we spent the whole day trying to act natural but looking right muppets.’

  Bob and Vera laughed conspiratorially, Lauren smiled and waited for her memory to click into gear. Ben. She waited. Ben. And then Ben filled her head. Baby Ben, who she thought of as her own darling possession, whose pram she had struggled to push, whose hair she had decorated with daisies. Boisterous Ben who had run around with plastic guns and burst into her bedroom demanding ransoms and treasure. Ball-mad Ben who had discovered rugby and cricket and whose sporting escapades would mean she never saw her father at weekends, and the Ben she had left at home when she married Simon, and the Bright Ben who went to university and never spoke of any girlfriends and who now it seemed had one.

  ‘Is she nice?’ Lauren asked, surprised by how protective she felt.

  ‘A bit quiet, very pretty, seems to adore him though.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ Lauren said, and she saw that Simon’s expression was a mixture of relief and pride that she had not said anything to unnerve her parents.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he said when they had gone.

  She wanted to say that she was but, really, all that had changed was that she was coping better with the mechanism of delayed memory. The d
ark cloud of elsewhere was, if anything, becoming more doom-laden and she was desperately disappointed by how casual her parents had been. They had not even intuitively noticed their daughter’s displacement.

  ‘I’m still not quite there,’ she said, and he nodded, convinced that before long all the peculiarity of the past weeks would be forgotten, a funny story to tell at his thirtieth birthday party.

  Simon abruptly stood up, left the room, and returned with a box wrapped in bright shiny paper.

  ‘A little pressie,’ he said.

  Lauren ripped at the paper, laughing. He had bought her a new kettle.

  * * *

  ‘We don’t have to do this,’ Simon said. ‘if it makes you uncomfortable.’

  She punched him playfully in his stomach.

  ‘Don’t be daft, I’m looking forward to it.’

  She wasn’t, of course. There was the usual issue of delayed memory but also a nagging fear that something bad was going to happen.

  Vera and Bob hosted it. Their converted barn was ideal for parties and somehow Karen and Julian bore no resentment at how the Pailings had become increasingly well off while they had stagnated and remained in the same semi-detached house where once the two families had briefly shared a party line to keep the phone bill down.

  The bunting declared ‘Simon is 30’ and his friend Matt was turning DJ for the evening, having hired a turntable and a stock of mostly dated dance and rock singles. Matt had a friend who acted as lackey, silently carrying records, bringing Matt drinks, fiddling with the electrics. Lauren thought he looked familiar, there was something sad and small and brow-beaten about him and she pictured him, suddenly, as being bullied at school even though she had no idea who he might be.

  As soon as it turned nine o’clock, Vera and Bob would take Rosie and Toby to Simon and Lauren’s home and babysit, and Simon’s parents would leave too, allowing the evening to turn to drunken revelry.

  ‘I won’t drink too much,’ she told Simon.

  ‘Oh, come on, you love a drink at a party,’ he said.

  ‘Do I?’ she wondered.

  Simon pushed Matt from the microphone.

  ‘Before they leave, I want you all to raise a toast to my parents for being the best ever, and especially my mum, who probably should be lying down after her operation not trying to dance to Roxy Music.’

  ‘Karen and Julian!’ everyone shouted.

  ‘And I want you toast the best-ever in-laws for handing over their wonderful home.’

  ‘Vera and Bob!’ everyone shouted.

  Lauren watched them leave as Ben and his girlfriend arrived.

  Ben, she thought. Do I love you the way all sisters love brothers in that they have to love them – because I really don’t know why I do love you.

  She grabbed a glass of wine to take her mind off it. One ought to be OK. The glitter ball, also hired by Matt, threw patterns onto the walls and across people’s faces. Five blokes began pogo dancing to Nirvana while their wives and girlfriends shrieked in laughter. Debbie pulled Lauren onto the makeshift dancefloor.

  ‘I can’t, my knee will hurt,’ Lauren said.

  ‘What?’ Debbie shouted. ‘What did you do to your knee?’

  Lauren stared at her feet, which were in high heels, and then stared at Debbie. A miniature laser display, Matt’s pièce de resistance, began as he played the Electric Light Orchestra.

  Blue and green beams of light were spinning through the dancers’ bodies. Simon’s forehead was covered in beads of sweat as he leaped about. She knew everyone there, not instantly perhaps, but pretty quickly. She could reel off their names if she had to and state one interesting fact about each one. There was Kelvin, clutching a tankard of bitter, who loved rugby league so much he had married the plainest and dumpiest of girls because her father had played for St Helens and was happy to drive north and east to watch the least attractive of games. There was Wendy, in high white boots and a miniskirt, who had found herself pregnant with twins at seventeen and managed to never tell a soul who the father was. She knew them all and felt varying degrees of warmth towards them, but from a distance that was impossible to explain.

  She smiled at her husband and twisted her hips to show she was having the fun she wished she was having and then a beam of light bounced off the glitter ball like a javelin being thrown and she tensed at the memory of slivers of light through which she used to see things she was not supposed to see. But it was not a memory, not a normal memory. It was old and dark and forbidden and felt as if surrounded by a forcefield that had been temporarily weakened but would rise up again leaving her confused. She clung while she could to the sensation of otherness. She had been somewhere else, lived somewhere else and that explained, without really explaining anything, why she was remembering things so slowly and differently.

  As Phil Collins began singing about two hearts, the memory ebbed.

  Humans cannot have two hearts, she thought, but I think I have.

  Simon grabbed her by the waist.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ he said.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ she said. ‘Happy birthday, handsome.’

  And although they danced and friends pointed at how in love they still were, Lauren was not lost in the moment. The only way she could describe it, if anyone asked, which they did not, was that feeling she had had when Rosie was a newborn and she and Simon had left her with Lauren’s parents and she had known she was supposed to enjoy the freedom from feeding and changing nappies but could not stop fretting at the separation. Yes, she was separated from something or someone – and it was hurting her.

  * * *

  She parked the car on the verge and stood before an attractive stone cottage that had the date 1840 engraved on the stone lintel. The door was opened by a woman in her fifties who wore being in middle age well. She was graceful and her eyes possessed a piercing intelligent kindness.

  ‘Please, call me Miriam,’ she said as she led Lauren to her consulting room which was an elegant study and furnished so beautifully it reminded Lauren of places she had not been.

  Miriam cleared her throat, smiled, and explained the basics to her newest client. She stressed the confidentiality, that she had listened to many and varied experiences, and that Lauren must not worry about sounding silly or sad or threatened or worried.

  ‘Honestly, my dear, you can tell me anything. This is a safe place.’

  Lauren nodded, grateful for the chance to try to gather her thoughts without having to worry about worrying Simon or the children or her parents. Hopefully there were hundreds of people who had her problem, or she hoped at least that Miriam had helped someone in a similar predicament before.

  ‘I do have a note from Dr Haines that confirms you are in fine physical shape, that you have no head trauma but you have suffered disorientation and memory loss. Bear with me, but if you could tell me in your own words when it began and in what circumstances, please.’

  Lauren sighed. Miriam had a soothing manner. It was easy to relate what had happened, to tell her that half of her was missing

  ‘Do you have any sense of what or where the other half is?’ Miriam asked.

  Lauren placed her hands in front of her mouth and rubbed her nose. She no longer felt soothed.

  ‘In another place. It feels dark and I don’t want to think about it. I can’t process it but I can’t shake it off.’

  ‘Is it getting darker or bigger as the days pass?’

  Lauren shivered.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I think someone needs me.’

  * * *

  Miriam had not lied to her patient. She was not shocked but she was perplexed. Lauren was exhibiting all the symptoms of someone who had experienced a deeply disturbing incident – a rape or assault or bereavement or traumatic external event such as a bomb blast or a shooting – and was refusing to recall it, knowing the pain that would follow. But there was no evidence of such an event and in any case most of the detail was peculiar. Lauren might well want her parent
s to live somewhere else if she had been attacked in the family home, but again, there was no evidence to support this.

  She knew she was heading towards encouraging Lauren to access the other place. It had to be confronted if she was to recover but Miriam was reluctant to let a patient become that vulnerable with so little information. On the plus side, the case would be one to present at her annual conference. Perhaps she would submit a paper.

  On Lauren’s next visit, Miriam asked her to lie on the couch and Lauren told her how, that morning, while looking through a photo album with Toby and Rosie, there had been a picture of Lauren aged about nine, the same age as Rosie, looking a lot like Rosie, building a snowman with Ben and Debbie.

  It made her think of a time when she had regularly run across a spoon-shaped road to play with Debbie, but Simon had already mentioned how her family had lived next door to the semi-detached house that his parents still lived in.

  ‘I can’t think why I would remember such an unimportant thing so differently. I mean, what’s the point of that? Why would my brain do that?’

  Miriam had no idea.

  She stood at the door as Lauren climbed into her car. There was something in the way she found her keys and opened the car door that unsettled Miriam. It was like watching someone who had never before seen a car, let alone drive one, trying to seem comfortable with owning one. She made a note to ask Lauren about her driving test but otherwise her notebook was full of exclamation marks, question marks and cross-references that would be of little use to the patient but made Miriam feel a bit better about handling a case that she suspected could become too tricky for her.

  * * *

  The phone rang. It was Bob.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ he said. ‘Just checking about next Saturday and whether you are bringing the kids. I don’t think you should; apart from anything, they’ll be bored and fidgety, don’t you think?’