Alyson Rudd - The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

He did not panic upon surveying the scene. Part of him was instantly envious. His wife had escaped the torment. He was not sufficiently calm, though, to take her pulse. He was loath to leave her to go downstairs to the phone so he opened the bedroom window. The curly-haired twins were throwing conkers at each other.

‘Hey!’ he shouted. They looked up. He asked them to knock on the Harpers’ door. They looked at each other quizzically before running off towards their own house. Exasperated, Bob ran down to the phone, made a call he later had no memory of making, left the front door open, then ran back to Vera.

Her face cloth had slipped onto the pillow leaving it wet as if soaked in her tears. He placed his head on her stomach, hoping she would reach down and run her fingers through his hair. When the ambulance crew arrived Vera’s blouse was damp too, and Bob, for the first time since his daughter died, was unable to stop sobbing.

Vera awoke in a panic. She had dreamed she had taken pills and it had been so vivid. She clutched at her flabby stomach but she felt fine, just disorientated. Bob walked in holding their baby.

‘I’m glad you were able to nap, love,’ he said, ‘but she needs a feed.’

Vera wriggled herself upright against the pillows. It was the most beautiful thing in the world to feed little Hope, and the most emotionally cruel. Hope had been conceived in a frenzy of desperate, angry, escapist lovemaking after the death of Lauren. She had promised herself she would kill herself if she could not have another child and she had doubted it would happen, but it had. The sibling had come along. She was too late to be a real sibling. But she was real.

She looked like Lauren but not too much for constant tears. Hope made everyone happy. Vera and Bob had asked Karen and Julian to be godparents and they had cried and cried and cried about it for days afterwards. Debbie ran endless, unnecessary errands for Vera. Aunt Suki had moved in for a fortnight to ease the load, which meant she made lots of tea and toast and answered the phone and the door and reluctantly pegged out washing.

‘Oh, Bob, I’m so grateful and so angry all at the same time,’ Vera said, ‘and I’m worried Hope will know, she will be scarred or withdrawn or frightened of me or something.’

‘Nah,’ said Bob, smiling. ‘She’s the most loved child in Cheshire and we’ll tell her about her big sister in the right way, of course we will.’

Hope needed to be loved. Her name had the ring of optimism but was drenched in tragedy. Her full name was Hope Lauren Pailing.

Hope’s christening was in the same church as…

That was how they all spoke of it. ‘It’s in the same church as…’ There was no need nor desire to finish the sentence. The service was intimate, and conducted at pace, as if those present were pushing against a great weight and they could only hold their arms aloft for so long to avoid being crushed.

There were more guests back at the house, where Vera was complimented on how slender she looked in her new dress. She even summoned a little twirl for Debbie, who was particularly entranced by the crêpe fabric that fell Hollywood style to reach the floor and the way ribbons of silvery silk were woven through it.

‘You look so lovely in your silvery silky dress,’ Debbie told Vera, in a low voice to avoid making her own mother jealous and she wondered why, when she said so, Vera had blinked rapidly.

Later, sat on the edge of her bed, Vera ran her fingers along the dress which now lay across the bedspread like a willing bride. The silver ribbons glistened in the light from the pair of chintz bedside lamps and she closed her eyes. She had bought the dress three weeks ago. Now she remembered that seven years ago, maybe eight, Lauren had mentioned a silvery silky dress.

Vera smiled sadly. She did not know it while in the shop but she had bought the dress to please Lauren. To fulfil her daughter’s idealised image of her, perhaps. To keep their relationship a tangible thing, not just a painful memory.

Peter Stanning drove over with a hand-carved rocking horse and bundles of strawberry jam. He would have done more, but for the fact that he went missing when Hope was three months old.

Vera and Bob had no idea how helpful Peter Stanning had been until he disappeared from their lives.

‘You know what, Bob,’ Vera said when Peter’s vanishing was less of an intriguing piece of gossip and more a fear for the man’s life. ‘Lauren would have cared about what happened to him. She was so mature, so caring, and she loved a puzzle. She would have been asking us every day, “Any news about Peter Stanning?”, wouldn’t she?’

Bob accepted all his wife’s reminiscences regardless of whether they tallied with his own, but in this instance he really did agree. Lauren would have been fascinated, he was sure of that.

Hope grew up loving her big sister. It was a peculiar kind of love, the sort a teenager has for a distant pop star she has never met. Hope celebrated Lauren’s birthday with enthusiasm, blowing out the candles her sister could never breathe over, eating the cake her sister could never taste, singing the songs her sister could never hear. Her favourite bedtime stories where the ones in which Lauren played a starring role. ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ became ‘Little Lauren in a Red Cloak’. Rapunzel had a name change too. And every night Vera would hold out a photograph of Lauren for Hope to kiss before kissing it herself.

Aunt Suki thought it all sickly sweet and unhealthy, but said nothing. She had kissed a photograph of her niece just the once and it had made her maudlin, uneasy and embarrassed. The role of the dead was unclear, especially when it was a child that had died. There was something both touching and terrible in the way Hope would randomly grab at a framed picture in the lounge and plant wet kisses on the face of her sibling. But it made Vera and Bob smile, so Aunt Suki said nothing.

There was a long queue for brunch in the refectory. It was the queue of friendship. So many art students that first Saturday morning made lifelong pals while waiting for eggs and muffins. Lauren gazed about her. She noticed a tall slim man with wild dark hair wearing a crisp white shirt, its sleeves rolled up, and over it a tightly fitting woollen waistcoat. There were girls with dyed hair and spiked hair, girls with long skirts with wacky hems; one girl, Indian perhaps, who glided about as if in her own palace. Everyone had an identity. There was something distinctive about them all. She looked down at her ballet pumps and her simple dress. Maybe her ordinariness was her shtick.

Lauren’s first queue friend was Ski, a serious boy of Russian descent who was adored by his mother. His father was less impressed by Ski’s desire to study art. But it was Nina, a couple of weeks later, who rechristened Lauren ‘Loz’. Nina was a livewire chatterbox and managed to spread the name Loz as quickly as the wind catches hold of wildfire in a dry forest. Lauren did not mind. She needed an interesting name to compensate for her nondescript image.

Lauren took an instant dislike to her tutor. He was five years too old for his tight green T-shirt and it took a good deal of willpower not to stare too hard at his thick rubbery lips. His name was Ossie Thomas-Blake and he held before him Lauren’s portfolio.

‘I like this,’ he said confrontationally.

He was looking at Peter Stanning is Missing which Lauren had refined – but which was still, essentially, the work of a sixth-former.

‘Too many students fail to find the narrative before they create,’ OTB said. ‘It is not enough to see a pretty sunset and want to capture it. Why do you want to capture it? That’s what matters.’