Alyson Rudd - The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

‘Loz has gone, she’s off,’ she laughed. ‘Loz is going to bite you, Ski.’

Lauren did not hear her, she was looking at a basement flat without any cushions and with Ski having his jeans pulled down by an older muscular man. She gasped and fell back onto her bright orange bean bag.

‘Déjà vu, vu, vu,’ Lauren said, her head spinning. ‘I feel all déjà vu.’

Nina screeched again.

‘I’m nicking that, Loz. That’s my theme. Fuckin’ brilliant. Déjà vu means the same image repeated. Lazy art becomes clever art.’

Lauren sighed. ‘I’m so jealous, I have to solve a bloody unsolvable crime and you get to paint one thing and make copies.’

‘You’ll just have to shag OTB, almost everyone else does,’ Nina said and Lauren stumbled, disgusted, to the bathroom.

Lauren decided cannabis could not be her friend. Ski and Nina had just been extra jolly and relaxed while she had seen strangeness and felt strangeness. The beam bothered her a lot. It felt both peculiar and familiar and the vision she had glimpsed was as sharp as a cinema production. Most odd of all was that she felt possessive about it. It had been her beam, meant only for her, and she had not even wondered if Ski or Nina had noticed anything.

She tried to sketch it but it was impossible. The materials did not exist for her to convey the way the shimmering turned reflective and then transparent. The materials most certainly did not exist for her to convey how she was both fearful and transfixed, how she felt knowing as well as surprised.

She worried about Ski contracting AIDS like the men in the adverts even though she had no evidence, beyond what she had seen through the beam, that he might engage in sex with men. Even when he started dating the diminutive and blandly pretty Coral Culkin, an American student with seemingly wealthier parents than him, Lauren still was concerned for his health. She wondered if the seers and witches of old witnessed the sudden arrival of magic string and were similarly cursed with knowledge they did not want.

Try as she might, Lauren could not convince herself that the image was purely the product of smoking pot. It began to annoy as well as unsettle her. So she devoted herself to the missing Peter Stanning.

‘Would be weird, Mum, wouldn’t it, if he just turned up again?’ she said to Vera over the phone on the wall of the kitchen she shared with those on her floor and which was so clogged by fat fumes and errant marmalade that the dial hiccupped its way back to zero which made making calls a long-winded process. She had been worried about the lack of privacy at first but there was always so much background bustling noise from chitter-chatter and music and the lift clanging and the kettle whistling that she could dial home unperturbed about eavesdroppers.

‘Well, it would for his wife,’ Vera said, ‘as she is supposed to be dating a famous showjumper I’ve never heard of.’

Lauren decided to ignore this as she could not draw horses very well. Instead she produced a painting. Fuchsia reds and russet reds and one small white square representing Peter Stanning. OTB liked it but said it was a bit ‘obvious’.

She returned to her desk and turned the white square into an opened window behind which was an image of a Santa hat. She smiled at the memory of Peter Stanning in costume, with a silky fake white beard, at the Christmas party in her father’s office. She knew now what she would paint next; an advent calendar full of versions of Peter’s fate, building to the climax of crucifixion. It was blasphemous, but she knew that OTB would adore it.

In a bleaker world in which Peter Stanning was not yet missing, and Lauren and Vera were not out shopping, not anywhere at all, Bob was alone in the house that had become the dark house on The Willows. Even the twins would edge away from its driveway. Nobody knew what to say. No one except Peter Stanning, who had seen it coming but had no way of warning Bob, none at all.

One day, Peter drove over with a small casserole prepared by his wife. He fiddled with the oven.

‘Right, that will be warmed though in half an hour so, so in the meantime, let’s look at our options.’

Bob blinked through bleary medicated eyes.

‘I have one option, top of the list,’ Bob said bitterly but not nastily.

‘Yes, of course you have, Bob,’ Peter said stoically and firmly but not unkindly. ‘But allow me to talk through some others.’

He opened a notebook and cleared his throat.

‘One. Sell up, buy a small flat closer to the office, work when you feel like it, come to supper at our place, let the staff be kind, find a new life. Slowly. With our help.

‘Two. Family. You have a sister, anyone else? Maybe family abroad, maybe friends abroad? Sell up and travel to them, see the world, anyway. Find a reason to enjoy life.

‘Three. New career. Leave us if it helps, work for yourself or a new company where they don’t know you. Or retrain, take an Open University course, become a teacher or a librarian or an architect or a permanent student.

‘Four. Do nothing, but know I’ll take you back on at any time. When you are ready.’

He closed his notebook self-consciously.

Bob groaned and then swiftly sat up.

‘I can’t thank you enough, Peter. I, really – could you leave me the list? I’ll think about things, I will.’ Bob summoned a small smile. ‘Maybe after the stew.’

‘We’re eating it together,’ Peter said.

The two men sat in silence for a while, and then Peter emptied the bin and cleared some old food from the fridge before serving up the soupy beef.

‘I think that was nice,’ Bob said, ‘but I can’t seem to taste anything. Actually, Suki, my sister, asked to stay but I told her no. Perhaps…’

Peter seized on the idea.

‘Yes, absolutely, even if just for a few days, Bob. I know it would be better than you being on your own so why not call her now? I can speak to her too if it helps.’

Oddly, Bob thought it would help. He handed the phone to his boss. Between them, Peter and Suki concocted a plan to keep Bob from festering.

‘But she can’t sleep in Lauren’s room,’ Bob said in a sudden panic.

‘No, of course not, Bob,’ Peter said. ‘She’ll do everything required to make the spare room what she needs.’

Bob had been sleeping alternately in his daughter’s room, his and Vera’s room, and the spare room. They were all a bit smelly and somehow Peter knew this. He went upstairs and opened the window to the spare room and stripped the bed. He had told Suki to bring her own bedding.

Suki was a limited cook, but it was hardly appropriate, she decided, for the pair of them to be dousing pancakes with Grand Marnier or flambéing steaks. Suki was a limited housekeeper too, but even she could tell the place needed a good hoover. After vacuuming the entire house, she decided she had been enough of a martyr and called on the neighbours and devised a rota. She would look after Sundays and Monday mornings, but everyone else would have to chip in with something the rest of the week. The mother at No. 2 yelled at her twin boys to offer to wash Bob’s car, and when Suki realised that would be the most she would get from her she accepted the offer with a forced smile.

‘We don’t know him,’ said the couple who had recently moved into No. 17 and found The Willows to be a morose sort of place.

‘In that case, you can just drop off milk and bread on Thursday mornings,’ Suki said. ‘If he doesn’t answer, leave it outside the door.’ And with that she left them gawping, railroaded, and even more regretful that they had chosen this house over the smaller one near the church. Suki found The Willows stifling and dull and told Bob it would be a diversion, and good for him, to sell up. He mumbled something non-committal. Suki smiled, sadly. Bob was the quietest, least interesting person she knew but she was fond of him, always had been, and it angered her that he was being made to suffer.