Alyson Rudd: The First Time Lauren Pailing Died

It ought to have been a place simmering with social tension and envy, but The Willows was nestled in aspirational Cheshire and, as the years rolled by, the residents socialised with ease. Every Christmas morning, the Harpers in the grandest house welcomed them all, even the family at No. 2 with their boisterous twin boys who fought each other from the moment they woke to the moment they fell, exhausted, asleep, for sherry and mince pies. Meanwhile, on sunny days, the children would pile into the centre of the spoon and whizz around on tricycles or roller skates. The summer of 1975, when it rolled around, was dominated not only about speculation on the whereabouts of the murderer Lord Lucan and the rise of unemployment, but also by the Squeezy Bottle War. Empty washing-up liquid bottles were turned into water pistols and many a child would scream as the contents, still soapy, were squirted into their eyes. With the exception of water fights, however, The Willows was a place of utter safety.

One Thursday after school the following summer, Lauren was sat in her bedroom on her sheepskin rug, making a birthday card for her mother and sipping occasionally from a plastic tumbler full of cream soda, each sip evoking the seductively sweet smell of Lennie’s van. She was immensely proud that her rug was white; white like a sheep and not dyed pink like the one in the bedroom of her friend Debbie.

Lauren’s current obsession was to create pictures with complicated skies. She was using the stencil of a crescent moon when, to her right, a thin beam appeared, which to most observers, had they been able to see it at all, would have looked like a sharp shaft of sunlight. Lauren knew better.

She sighed, and tried to ignore it by pressing her nose against her artwork and wondering how paper was manufactured and how so much of it was stored in her father’s big steel desk which sat incongruously in the spare bedroom. She had once covered the desk with stickers of stars and rainbows and was still not sure if her father had been cross, or had pretended to be cross but quietly found it as loving a gesture as she had hoped. Grown-ups, she thought, were always secretive. They were so secretive that it was possible they all saw special sunbeams which, if peered through, granted tiny windows into other worlds, too. Lauren doubted it. But she, on the other hand, had been visited by these peculiar, dangerous sunbeams for as long as she could recall.

Two years ago, when Lauren was six, a steel sunbeam had appeared in the kitchen, and Lauren’s mother had walked straight through it. Lauren had caught her breath, waiting for her mummy to clutch her head and sit down trembling, perhaps even to fall through to another place, but nothing had happened – and so, over time, Lauren came to understand that the curious metal, rod-straight beams belonged to her and only to her. Experience also taught her that it had been a mistake for her to turn to her best friend, Debbie, one day and say, ‘Look at that.’ Debbie had looked and, seeing nothing, had called Lauren Ghostie Girl for an hour or so before forgetting, as six-year-olds tend to do, why she was saying Ghostie Girl at all.

The Christmas after the Ghostie Girl incident, during the school nativity – dressed as an angel and feeling so happy about it that she suspected she might just be capable of flight – Lauren had seen a plethora of beams slice across the heads of the audience. It was as though Baby Jesus were sending the school his approval for their efforts to make his stable cosy with a fanfare of light, and Lauren had turned her head to her fellow angels, expecting to see her own awe mirrored in their eyes – but she saw only glassy tired eyes or vain eyes or look-at-me eyes. No one saw what she saw.

But the unease never lasted long, and the next day, the whole of the next day, was spent choosing, then buying, then decorating the Christmas tree with felt Santas, silk angels, frosted glass icicles – no tacky tinsel – realistic feathery robins and white twinkling lights. Vera, Lauren’s mother, had looked on, feeling inordinately proud that she did not have a child who wanted to throw a dozen plastic snowmen at the tree but could see Yuletide in an aesthetic way.

By seven, Lauren had noted the way adults responded to her sunbeam stories and had learned to avoid mentioning them. She had also noted how her school friends were ignorant of these gleaming gateways, and that to insist they were real was to be met with teasing, laughter or annoyance. Still, it was hard for her to remain silent when sometimes such lovely things happened through the miniature windows.

‘You look nice in a silvery silky dress, Mummy,’ Lauren had said one night when her bedtime story was finished. She’d started to care about clothes, started to notice that her mother dressed a little more elegantly than the mothers of her friends. Fashion was such a grown-up thing and she wanted to show she could make sense of it – that she might only be seven, but she had style – and a light beam on the stairs that morning had revealed her mother smoothing down a magical-looking skirt. Vera did not own a silvery silky dress and she frowned as she closed the book.

‘You mean, darling, that I would look like nice in a silvery silky dress.’

Lauren had been sleepy and off-guard.

‘No, you do look nice, and the dress is more gorgeousy than anything the Bionic Woman wears.’

Vera considered herself to be a devoted, sensible mother but allowed herself to feel occasionally undermined by her daughter’s murmurings. She wondered if Lauren wanted a different sort of mother, a prettier one perhaps or one that constructed more elaborate cakes. Vera wondered if being at home meant her daughter took her for granted. Then, she would wonder if, on the contrarty, Lauren resented her having a Saturday job, or if her daughter was simply lonely.

Vera was occasionally disconcerted by her only child. When Lauren had been much younger, she had watched her tilt her head and squeeze her eyes as if peering through a crack in the wall, a crack that was not there. Quietly, stood to one side, Vera would watch her daughter peer, watch her smile or grimace, watch her sigh, watch her turn away. While Lauren was mesmerised, Vera would vow to take her to the doctor, to speak to Bob, her husband, to investigate what might be happening, but as soon as Lauren turned away and carried on with being a child, Vera scolded herself for worrying and did and said nothing.

Lauren, sitting proudly on her white sheepskin rug, studiously ignoring her sunbeam, was now the wise old age of eight, and had long absorbed the peculiarities of her life in the way that most children can be hugely accommodating of anything; be it abuse, poverty, neglect or boredom. She knew that up close the sunbeam currently piercing her carpeted bedroom floor appeared to be a streak of mirrored glass but that, when viewed closer still, so close she almost touched it, there would be no reflection whatsoever. She also knew, she had known for a long time, not under any circumstances to touch the mysterious ray of light.

For while it looked heavy and solid and glistening, her hand could glide straight through it as if it were indeed a sunbeam. She could even walk through it unimpeded, but to do so was to feel instantly cold with a sharp, nasty headache that lasted for hours and made it impossible for her to do anything but lie down and moan. As this had once prompted her parents to take her to hospital she knew better than to let it happen again.

It was not her headache that had so worried her parents as the fact Lauren had mumbled through her pain about her other mummy. Her parents had stared at each other, perplexed and a little scared. If they, too, saw the beams, then they would surely not have been so frightened.