by Alyson Rudd
Naomi detested shopping and hoped that just by being prepared to spend £30 in a relatively classy shop would result in her finding, without really looking, an acceptable present. Her eye was caught by some silk scarves, which caused her to quietly gasp. The scarves were blue-grey and orange with small black squares which revealed themselves on closer inspection to be windows in a cityscape.
Naomi pulled one off the rail and laid it out on a shelf of silver-threaded white woollen scarves. There – in one of the black-framed windows – was a woman with long sleek golden-brown hair. Naomi pulled a second scarf off the rail and laid that one out as well. There she was again, the woman with golden-brown hair.
She stood, motionless, wondering if she was supposed to laugh or cry. Or perhaps she had found the perfect message now.
Dearest Donna, I hate to break it to you, but you are in the window on lots of scarves, love, Naomi (not my real name).
She looked at the price. It was £30. She bought it for Sylvie.
After mulling it over for two days, Naomi decided there was a chance, albeit a small chance, that Donna had fallen for a con man who pretended to have designed a one-off scarf for her and a slightly bigger chance that her lover had intended the design to be unique only to sell it to whoever bought patterns for scarves. It was far more likely that Naomi had been spun a yarn but, just in case, she did not send the message. There was no need to hurt the woman, who had, after all, spent around £150 that evening and not accepted a penny from her new friend. Naomi would have to learn to file that Sunday as a surreal and wonderful time with a mystery attached that she would probably never solve.
Chapter 30
Sometimes Ryan and Sylvie walked to the station together. She preferred temping, not least because it meant she could find time for some blitz marketing for Vinyl Vibes. Her sacking had been a footnote while trapped underground but, now she was back at work, she found it difficult to trust whoever was in charge. And she was recovered, fully recovered, but sad from time to time, still wondering what must have been going through Jaya’s head when they looked into each other’s eyes that day. Sylvie might have understood a little of what Jaya felt, for the teenager had been living a life on autopilot, functioning, but only in the way a prisoner functions.
Jaya knew she needed to get out of bed, change a nappy, feed a baby, ask her husband if he wanted anything… only she didn’t have a husband. Ghosted. She had been ghosted. She knew she was supposed to adore the baby but sometimes she saw just a bundle of blankets and no one feels anything towards a bundle of blankets. The numbness was terrifying. She was sure she used to laugh with her sisters, tease them even, but she could not remember what that felt like. Her body was, to her, a lump of dough, her brain was a soggy lump of dough that had just the one brainwave. As she could not drive, Jaya thought the best way for the baby to sleep was to take it on the train. And it worked. The baby became warm and sluggish and so did Jaya. The only problem was she had to return home at some point and the thought of it filled her with bitter boredom and acute fear.
She tried to be useful and would sometimes find herself staring at a tub of ghee not knowing why it was there, why she had opened its plastic lid, and somewhere in the background the baby would wail as if on TV. It was not real to her, this life. Mondays were just like Thursdays which were just like Sundays. It was a monotony that frightened her.
She opened her eyes. The train was pulling into King’s Cross. She had no idea where King’s Cross was. She had never been before and had never intended to visit it but she left the carriage, worried she had strayed too far from home. She wondered if she should she follow the exit signs but they were very complicated and featured with words like ‘international’ and that sounded far too far away from Harlesden. She cursed that she had woken up. Sleep was best. She would like to sleep forever. She pondered this idea. No more pain, no more anguish. She could step in front of a train and have done with all of it. The notion brought her some peace, some relief, but she was slightly feverish again today and wandered the tunnels, looking for a sign that would tell her the right place to fall asleep. She used to be superstitious and was reluctant to do anything significant without a sign. Not that her falling asleep forever was significant. She was but a speck of dust in the universe, a speck of dust that was hurting.
There was a poster advertising a theatre production of Death and the Maiden. She stood in front of it, entranced. This was surely a sign. It was, she thought, pretty unambiguous. She at last moved away from the poster to the end of the platform, away from the other passengers, concerned they would smell both her worthlessness and her intentions. They might not be able to see her but she must surely stink. She could not remember the last time she’d bathed. She remembered bubble baths. She had liked them once but now they were too much effort. It was too much effort to answer when her mother said, ‘Shall I run you a bath?’
The baby made a snuffling noise and Jaya gazed down at her, perplexed. Should the baby go with her? She considered placing it on the platform but it all seemed too complicated. Someone might step on it as they left the train or accidently kick it onto the track. Or someone would notice her placing the baby on the ground and run over and stop her jumping. She had to be with her baby, that must be the right way. She rubbed at her temples, she was hot, and so tired. If they jumped together would it end the way she wanted it to? Her body might offer the baby some protection and Jaya might be gone but the baby could lose a leg or an eye and that would be so unfair. Her head hurt now, a pounding headache of stress and worthlessness. Sleep was the answer. Death and the Maiden. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and upon opening her eyes saw an angel walking towards her. She had seen her before, on a birthday card perhaps, her long, wavy, nearly red hair rippling in the Underground’s breeze. She sighed in relief. The angel had come if not for her, then for the maiden’s child.
They could not sit together so chose to stand. Sylvie was working at a fashion chain’s head office near Oxford Street, covering not for maternity leave but a stroke. No one was very friendly but that suited her just fine. Ryan, on a whim, rubbed her nose with his nose, knowing she would blush but also smile. Behind her, leaning on the driver’s door, a girl in a cable-knit sweater pouted at him in mock disapproval.
He exhaled; he frowned.
‘What?’ she said.
‘She’s here,’ he said. ‘Behind you.’
Sylvie had hoped they would be in Cotton Lane or in the park when it happened, not on a crowded train but she had made a vow to herself and so she turned around. She breathed in deeply. She felt the nerves of every actor on first night, of every public speaker. She bit her lip and swallowed slowly.
‘He loves you, Ellen,’ she said. ‘If you were really here, you would be together. I know that I can only love him because you are gone. I’m truly sorry for Ryan and for you that you are gone but I want you to know I will try to make him happy, not the way you would have made him happy, but another way. I’m older, he’s older. He saved me and I want to save him from the losing of you.’
The train had eased to a halt between stations and Sylvie’s voice was the only sound to be heard above the low churning hum of the engine. Someone clapped; a few commuters strained to see who the slight, pale-faced woman was addressing. An amused voice shouted, ‘You tell her, girl!’
Ryan held his breath. Ellen bent down and did not stand up again. She was replaced by a schoolgirl wearing a white plastic raincoat.
They enjoyed Florida more than either of them expected to and Sylvie found her parents to have softened, as if they now appreciated the subtlety of their daughter’s many attributes when contrasted with the brash dazzle of Franklyn’s new social network. Ryan smiled more than he ever had, amused and amazed by his girlfriend’s brave speech on a crowded train, but mostly convinced that it had worked. His grandfather had not been wrong. Ellen wanted him to find happiness and Sylvie had convinced her that he had done so while accepting he would have found it with
her.
They returned to another January of light sleet and biting winds and, most days, they commuted in together when possible, but some weeks Sylvie had to start off much earlier than Ryan and on such days she liked to scan the carriage, not looking for someone who needed saving but for someone who might be her and someone who might be Ryan. On this day there was a young woman with bold pink lipstick who was reading a book entitled Marxism and Patriarchy. Sylvie smiled and wondered if anyone else had noticed at her smooth bare legs and sleek hair, and then gulped and turned away upon recalling what book she was engrossed in. Ryan always blushed when she brought up Mrs Henry Wood but he might have been deterred from pursuing her at all if she had been reading something so evidently feminist.
She alighted at Green Park, not noticing that in the seat opposite to Ms Marxist Lipstick was another young woman, pulling nervously at her fingers, trying to find the right words, failing and then grimacing self-deprecatingly as the sleek-legged one left the carriage without either of them speaking at all.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the HQ Stories family and, in particular, Katie Seaman, my wonderful editor. Thank you, also, Jon Appleton, my diligent copyeditor, and I am so pleased that the famously meticulous Sarah Coward could be involved.
I am grateful to Clio Cornish for being so supportive at the very start and for the wit and wisdom of Oli Munson, my agent at AM Heath.
Make sure you’ve read Alyson Rudd’s debut novel
‘Stylish, alluring, utterly gripping’ Lisa O’Kelly, Observer
Laure Pailing is a teenager born in the sixties, and a child of the seventies. She is thirteen years old the first time she dies.
Lauren Pailing is a teenager in the eighties, becomes a Londoner in the ninenties. And each time she dies, new lies begin for the people who loved her – while Lauren enters a brand new life, too.
But in each of Lauren’s lives, a man called Peter Stanning disappears. And, in each of her lives, Lauren sets out to find him.
And so it is that every ending is also a beginning. And so it is that, with each new beginning, Peter Stanning inches closer to finally being found …
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LAUREN
Lauren Pailing lived in The Willows, a Cheshire cul-de-sac that was shaped like a dessert spoon and as warm and cosseting as any pudding. Every Wednesday morning, sometime between eleven and twenty-past eleven, a big cream van would park at the corner of The Willows and Ashcroft Road. Seconds later, Lennie, who drove the van, would spring out of the driver’s seat, open the double doors at the rear and lower the wooden steps so that the residents of The Willows and Ashcroft Road could climb in and choose their groceries.
The contents of Lennie’s van were unpredictable, so the housewives of The Willows relied on the local mini-market for the bread or biscuits or tinned ham they needed. But when the van arrived, they all made sure to purchase at least one item as a means of ensuring that it was profitable for Lennie to keep them on his route. So it was that Lauren and the other children of the two streets came home from school on Wednesdays to Watch with Mother and a whole array of unnecessary treats: bottles of cream soda, slightly soggy Battenberg cakes and gooey peppermint creams.
To the children of The Willows’ dismay, Lennie took a break over the long summer school holiday – so generally speaking Lauren had to be off school unwell, but not too unwell, in order to jump into his van herself. And this she loved to do. Everything about Lennie enchanted Lauren: the twinkle in his eyes, his creased forehead, his Welsh lilt, the way he added up the bills on a small pad of paper with a too-small pencil. She liked that the van was stocked with as many extravagances as essentials, that the whole operation involved adults behaving like children. It was make-believe shopping; grown-ups pointing at a bag of sherbet dip as if it were a serious transaction.
The very best part, though, was the smell. To enter the van was to be instantly transported to a new world, one that was permeated with the scent of stale custard creams and old and broken jam tarts. Lauren supposed the van had never been cleaned, for there was not one whiff of disinfectant. It smelled only and seductively of years of cakes. It was so old-fashioned that there were no lamps in the back – so the labels of the packets and the bottles were illuminated only by daylight from the open doors or the light that filtered in through the thin curtain that separated the shelves of food from Lennie’s cabin. This was why Lauren’s favourite time to visit the van was on sunny days: when the tiny food hall would be filled with dust sparkling from its contact with icing and sponge fingers.
It was, for Lauren, safe light. Delightful light. She had been inside the van only four times but always felt completely protected. No Santa’s Grotto would ever compare, no Santa’s Grotto ever smelled as lovely. Above all, thought Lauren, no Santa’s Grotto could resist the temptation to overdo the lighting. In the van, Lauren would stick out her tongue, and Lennie would smile because so many children tried to taste the floating sugar splinters, but Lauren seemed to be tasting the light itself.
The Willows was not unreasonably named, as three of the houses had willow trees near their front doors. The street comprised two rows of small semi-detached houses which fanned out to make room for five detached homes, the grandest of which sat at the apex, as if keeping a patrician eye on them all. The grandest house of all had a tall narrow pane of green and red stained glass depicting tiny sheaves of golden wheat above the front door – just in case anybody was in doubt as to its status – and its front and back gardens were twice the size of the rest. Lauren, along with her parents, Bob and Vera, lived at No. 13, the first of the detached houses on the right.
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.
