The First Time Lauren Pailing Died by Alyson Rudd

Author:Alyson Rudd
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

Lauren

‘I had, to be honest, already imagined the wedding, here, in London, with our London friends, and I most certainly hadn’t imagined a church.’

He was not pouting or even moaning. Lauren could tell he was simply struggling at the prospect of losing control of a project.

She did not want to discuss it. She knew if she started to then it would all descend into bartering. What she wanted was for him to agree to back off, to let Vera take control and create a fairy-tale day. Of course it would be Vera’s fairy tale but, sometimes, other people’s happiness mattered more.

‘You are right, Tim, clearly you’re right, but this is not about being right, it’s about degrees of unhappiness. I believe my mum will be made more unhappy by a London wedding than you will by a Cheshire wedding. We can have a London party separately if you want but there has to be a service and a big dinner up North.’

‘I can be unhappy,’ he said in a mock-competitive voice and she laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You can choose your own best man,’ but she already knew he would be picking Gregory, who was at that moment on his way to their flat with Lydia and Patti. Tim had bought champagne and it seemed an odd sort of celebration, to knit together their engagement and the perusal of her ‘Missing’ art.

She spread it out, propped up along the full length of the skirting board of the living room. Because drawing was her job and her sketches were relentlessly publicly scrutinised, commercially scrutinised, Lauren did not suffer any bashfulness. She felt almost detached from the array of work that came under the ‘Peter Stanning is Missing’ umbrella.

‘I think we can safely say no detective will find this useful,’ she said. ‘I mean, how can a white square and a Christmas turkey help anyone understand what happened to him?’

‘Yeah, but it might help anyone understand why it matters to keep looking,’ said Patti. ‘I mean, it all looks so sorrowful. To me anyway.’

‘There is the excitement of the novelty of it all in the cartoons and then it sinks in and becomes a tragedy,’ Lydia said.

Gregory stood apart, nodding seriously.

‘You should do something with it. A display or something,’ Lydia added, vaguely.

‘That’s interesting… It should definitely be put somewhere. It’s so arresting… And it really makes you think about loss. It tells a story.’ Gregory paused. ‘Lauren, would it be OK with you of we dedicated a wall in the lobby to this? We can use it to highlight the work of the new missing people charity I saw the other day. Make it the official charity of the company maybe. We are in the heart of London, after all – this is where people come and then go missing.’

Tim frowned. He did not want earnest charity people turning up and pinning posters in his lobby. It would emit the wrong sort of vibe. There was something unsettling about the faces, usually faces in blurred photographs, of people who had disappeared.

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