to a treasure-hunt lunch at Easter at the home of Peter Stanning, her father’s boss, should have been such a highlight in her life. But there had been plenty of other teenagers around her age there, and also a decadent sort of freedom to it all, with the youngsters permitted to roam as they pleased. Lauren had liked Dominique, a girl home from boarding school, who carried a camera around her neck and took photographs of tree stumps and discarded bikes. Dominique was the daughter of who Mrs Stanning referred to as ‘dear old friends’ and it struck Lauren that this was evidence of a class divide. The Pailing family did not have any ‘dear old friends’ whatsoever. They just had people who they ‘used to know quite well’, like the family who had lived near Lauren’s primary school before moving to Leighton Buzzard.
‘They have eleven bicycles in this shed but thirteen bike wheels,’ Dominique had said to Lauren as they stood before one of the many Stanning outhouses, and Lauren had fervently wished she was capable of noticing such details. Later that evening, she told Dominique that she too was an artist, that she did not have a camera but liked to draw and to paint, and Dominique had replied that she, Lauren, possessed the greater gift. Yes, Lauren, thought, I really like Dominique. But then she disappeared off to boarding school and Peter Stanning did not hint that his wife would be hosting any more such gatherings. Lauren recalled how Mrs Stanning had been a distant sort of hostess, as if she had something much more important to be seeing to, while her husband had been friendly and attentive and had spent ten minutes looking for some Savlon cream to rub into Dominique’s elbow when she scratched it while making space for her camera lens through a lattice of wild and thorny roses. Peter Stanning had looked Dominique in the eye and said, as if speaking grown-up to grown-up, that she should pursue her dream in photography.
In the absence of parties, Lauren increasingly gravitated towards the house across the cul-de-sac spoon where there was noise and the odd raised voice, the squabbling of siblings and the laughter of parents who liked a midweek nip of booze.
She always knocked, but no one ever physically answered the door. Instead Debbie or one of her parents would call out for her to come in, and sure enough the back door was always unlocked. Debbie had begun to sequester herself in the dining room on the basis that her brother had the largest bedroom and it was an insult to expect Lauren to perch next to her on her small bed. They would sit, instead, on uncomfortable dining chairs, trying to feel sophisticated as they leafed through magazines bursting with shoulder-padded women, and swapped gossip or pretended to complete homework as they sipped at too-hot Pot Noodles. Above them could be heard the heavy beat of Simon’s music and muffled lyrics which made Debbie groan and pout.
‘The Cure. Again,’ She would sneer.
As the months passed, Lauren spent more and more time at Debbie’s. She quietly considered The Cure to be intriguing. She inwardly relished the chaos and the fact that sometimes the music would be so loud that the furniture would actually bounce. Furniture never bounced in her house. At Debbie’s, if you wanted to open a tin of hot dogs and heat one up you could do so without anyone telling you it would spoil your appetite. If the terrible twins from No. 2 rang the front door bell, they would not be ignored, as they were in Lauren’s house, but chased down the road and even sometimes called back and asked if they wanted to watch the football on the telly, whereupon they would turn into identical pink-cheeked curly-haired cherubs, dunking their Jacob’s Club biscuits into beakers of milk, glued to the progress of Liverpool in the European Cup.
And should Simon make an appearance in the dining room, Debbie would throw a coaster at him while Lauren would wonder what the music was that had now replaced The Cure in his affections and whether when he smiled at her it was in sarcasm or friendliness.
‘You’re tagging along with us to Cornwall this year, then?’ Simon said one evening as he threw a coaster back towards his sister.
Lauren opened her mouth but could think of nothing to say.
‘Hey, Cornwall’s not that amazing,’ Simon said and walked out.
Lauren and Debbie faced each other, their eyes gleaming.
‘Did my mum speak to your mum?’ Debbie said.
‘I’ll find out,’ Lauren said, feeling as if she were the last to know about the most exciting invitation she had ever received, and she skipped home across the cul-de-sac after giving Debbie a hug, the first hug they had shared feeling like sisters.
‘Were you ever going to tell me?’ Lauren said as she burst through into the kitchen.
‘Of course I was, sweetheart, I was just thinking it through, that’s all. I think perhaps you’re a bit young to be away for a fortnight.’
This was an understatement. In fact, Vera’s instinctive response, when sat at the kitchen table nursing a cup of tea opposite Karen, who was busily dunking her biscuit and burbling about the beauty of the Cornish coastline, had been to laugh it off as a wild and ridiculous suggestion. Vera was as much fun as any thirteen-year-old could ask their mum to be but deep down she was panicked that Lauren was all she had. And, since she was thirty-six, Lauren was likely to remain all she had.
‘It’s not America, Mum,’ Lauren said pleadingly. ‘Can I phone Granny? You do know she thinks I should be busier in the holidays and this will make me much busier.’
Vera had no retort that made any sense. Beryl, her mother, was right. Lauren should be out and about with friends who had siblings. Vera wanted to tag along on the holiday, but Bob was bogged down at the office and would have been wounded had she left him to his own devices every evening for a fortnight. All the same, two whole weeks without Lauren would be torture.
‘She’ll be fine, she’ll have fun,’ Bob said, coming into the room and giving his wife a tight hug.
Allowing her only child to leave for a fortnight made Vera want to burst into tears, but eventually she had taken a deep breath and given her consent. She threw herself into packing a large suitcase with the attentiveness a trip to the Niger Delta would have deserved. Lauren stared at the plethora of ointments and plasters and double quantities of sanitary towels and instead of griping as a teenager might have been expected to, she shouldered the ridiculousness. It was her burden as an only child to indulge such behaviour. Only when on the road with her friend did Lauren make a joke about the fussiness of her mother. Only when she had waved Lauren off did Vera succumb to a couple of heaving sobs of love and self-pity.
Debbie’s family had rented a huge house not far from St Ives. They were joined by Karen’s sister and Karen’s sister’s best friend and her son Brian, who was a gangly twelve-year-old who stuck tightly to Simon as if girls carried infectious diseases. Slowly, they all relaxed and Lauren marvelled at the noise and laughter and the cheating at cards and the arguments over draughts. Other families popped by. Karen’s sister even went on a date. It was all silly and riotous enough for it not to matter when it rained. The adults wandered around in a perpetual state of tipsiness, clutching glasses of wine or beer as Phil Collins played on a perpetual loop in the background. It was hypnotically loud and busy. They all ate when they felt like it and the nightly barbecue lasted for three hours, so that Lauren regularly lost count of how many sausages she had eaten.
On the second evening, Simon was placed in charge of flaming some fatty steaks. As Lauren settled into a canvas chair with a plastic glass of lemonade a thin glistening steel rod appeared in front of her nose. She sharply pulled back her head, fearful of touching it, of the holiday being cut short by the nasty headache such a collision would provoke, and then gingerly leaned forward to spy upon another world. She expected to see simply more sausages and perhaps a new face or two, so unremarkable had been most of her recent peeks through the glass. Instead she saw Simon, wearing a faded red T-shirt that suited him better than the black one he was really wearing, squirting lighter fluid onto the hot charcoal that caused a flame to angrily reach up and slap his face, and setting fire to his clothes.
Lauren closed her eyes as her heartbeat quickened. She breathed in deeply and opened her eyes. The beam was gone and so was Simon but then he emerged, really re-emerged, walking from the shed to the patio, a small can with a spout in his hands. He had changed out of his black T-shirt and was wearing a faded red one.
Lauren