The First Time Lauren Pailing Died. Alyson Rudd

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

      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.