Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

"You okay?" Toby says, hands in his pockets, a little awkward.

"Yeah," she says. "There wasn't any wine in the freezer after all."

"Okay," he says, but it sounds like a question, and he glances up towards the attic and the noise.

"It's my phone. Playing drain noises—it's complicated. Look," all of a sudden, before she's even realised she's going to say it, "I want to talk to you about something."

"Okay."

When she tried to tell him before, it didn't go well, but she launches in, one last attempt. "I have a…magical attic."

He looks at the open trapdoor. "Like, Magic Faraway Tree ? Strange worlds?"

"A bit. Like, it creates husbands for me."

"…Huh?"

She decides to start from the beginning. "You know Elena?"

"Elena who did a speech at your wedding that was just reading out all the drunk texts you'd ever sent her? Elena who made me throw my jacket on the bonfire at that party last year because she thought it didn't suit me? Yes, I know Elena."

This sounds plausible, within the range of things Elena might do. "A week ago," she says, "I went to Elena's hen do and when I came back there was a husband here. I was wearing a wedding ring, and so was he, and there were photos of us on the wall. His name was Michael."

"He'd replaced Rohan?"

"No. Before he turned up I was single. I'd never been married. Then this husband appeared. Then he went into the attic and when he came down he was a different guy. Then another different guy. And another one, and eventually Rohan. And maybe I should have kept one of the others because I am not up for"—and she gestures widely—"this? Like, what's going on? Why did you follow me up instead of Rohan? Why is your girlfriend all over my husband? Are we meant to…" and she circles her hand in the air, too embarrassed to even say it.

"Not if you don't want to!" Toby says.

"But we…have? In the past?"

"…usually only on Wednesdays, we rescheduled because Maryam had to swap shifts. Look, Lore, have you really forgotten all this? Do you want some tea? Do you want me to get Maryam?"

Yeah, yeah, Maryam's so wonderful, she's got stethoscopes and those lights for looking at your pupils and she's a great kisser. "I haven't forgotten ," Lauren says. "It just hasn't happened to me. This is new. I met Rohan yesterday. I've never experienced one of your Wednesdays."

She knows how it sounds. People are very often wrong. Attics are very rarely magical. But she is more certain than ever. She's pissed off that her husband—her husband who she doesn't even like that much, but it's the principle—is canoodling with Maryam. She's concerned for Toby, her friend, who she is meant to be canoodling with in turn but who she does not believe is particularly into her or the shared household situation. She feels within her the unlikeliness, the long and slow steps that must have been required to bring her here. The misgivings she must have pushed down, the advice columns she must have read, the conversations with Elena. This isn't something she might have forgotten. If this had happened for real, she would know it.

"Have you looked in the attic?" Toby says.

"A bit."

"Do you want me to check it out?"

"No! What if it changes everyone? What if I get a new neighbour?"

He frowns. "I'll just look."

She thinks. The husbands have only changed when they're entirely inside the attic; she's looked in herself and been fine.

"Yeah," she says. "Okay. But be careful, if it starts doing anything weird then come straight down. Other than the light glowing a bit, that's actually normal."

"Okay." And they look up, and he climbs, towards the hatch and the dripping noise. His head enters. She waits for the light. But: nothing. No flicker, no in-rush of white noise like the sudden tide.

Well. That's new information.

Toby takes his phone out of his pocket and, as far as she can tell, turns the flashlight on. She should get an umbrella and ask him to scrape her dripping-sounds phone back along the floor so she can switch it off.

But when she turns back, umbrella in hand, Toby's climbing again. "No!" she says but it's too late, his foot is disappearing, and he's in there, he's gone, and she shouldn't have let him look, this is her fault. She stares up, panicked.

"What?" Toby says and looks down at her, framed by the darkness.

"Are you okay? What are you doing up there? I said to just look!"

"I am," he says.

"I meant, from the ladder. God. Anything could have happened!" Has he changed?

"Oh," he says. "Sorry. Should I come down?"

It's a bit late for that. "No," she says. "I guess it's fine."

"I'll have a look, then?" His face disappears.

No buzz. Only footsteps. The drain noise playing from her phone stops. A click, and the yellow attic light comes on above her, solid, steady. Normal. And Toby returns to view.

"It looks fine to me," he says.

"That's enough," she says, "turn the light off and come down," and he does: the same shoes he'd had going up, familiar legs, his old face.

"Maybe it's just the husbands that change," she says.

"Yeah?" He holds her phone out. He's wondering, she thinks, whether this is a joke that she's inviting him to go along with, or if he should worry.

"I'm not imagining it," she says. "I'll show you." And she steps up the ladder, two rungs, and holds her arm above her head, into the space of the attic. She's not imagining it, is she? It's real? And as her hand enters: the glow above, fainter than usual but undeniable. The crackle.

"Shit," Toby says.

"See?" It's a relief, suddenly, that he's seen it. She comes down the ladder and heads into the kitchen and rummages, finds the flashlight, unbroken in this world. When she comes back out, Toby has his head up through the trapdoor again.

"What was that?" he says. "Have you had an electrician out?"

"It's," and she doesn't know how many more times she's going to have to say this, "my weird fucking magic attic. I told you. Get down," and he does. She steps up again, raises her arm, flashlight on: its glare grows brighter as soon as it enters the attic, brighter still, then crack , the flare, the noise . She steps down again and holds the flashlight out to Toby.

"God," he says, "you need to get someone to look at that. It seemed fine when I was up there. It can't be safe. When did it start? Has Rohan had a look?"

Has Rohan had a look. She has explained the attic situation as clearly as she can, she has shown him the crackle and the light, and he cannot take it in.

She is, she's surprised to realise, crying, and he steps forward and puts an arm around her in a way he never would normally, too intimate, and his face is too close to hers, and that's wrong too, and how is it this, this , after the week she's had, that has her in tears?

She's annoyed to be so scared. She's annoyed to be crying. She's annoyed that the husband, the not-even-all-that-much-to-her-taste husband, is downstairs with Maryam and cannot be returned immediately to the attic.

She's annoyed that the nice freezer-chilled open bottle of wine is downstairs too. She pulls free of Toby's arm and strides into the kitchen and there's no cold white wine but there's an open bottle of red, for cooking she supposes, but it'll do, and when she can't find a wine glass she pours it into an espresso cup, then downs it and refills.

She's also annoyed, she realises, that Toby has slept with her but she hasn't slept with him, an unjust imbalance of knowledge. This, at least, she can remedy, and she kisses him, which feels like a practice kiss on her own arm, his lips firm but barely responsive, and he hesitates and asks if she's okay, and she says yes, yes, she was worried about the attic but she'll get an electrician in, and fuelled she supposes by her distaste for the whole situation, she takes him to the bedroom where they have deeply, deeply unremarkable sex.

○○

In the bathroom afterwards she thinks about the cliché of people's sexual tastes, that everyone wants what they don't have in life, the CEOs tied up in expensive boudoirs and mocked by women in difficult boots, the shy bookworm who pounces with eager delight in bed, and she thinks: not always. She and Toby are both easily led in real life, amenable, happy for others to make the decisions, perhaps a little too anxious about getting it wrong. And they are non-committal but helpful in bed as well. Polite, certainly, engaged with their partner's intentions; but helpfulness cannot exist in a vacuum, it cannot take the form of a series of expectations mutually imagined and joylessly fulfilled.

Sooner or later, somebody has to want something, and then admit to it.

○○

She is unclear on the etiquette of whether they should go back to Maryam and Rohan now, whether they have breached standard procedures already.

She'll rewrite this whole thing soon, dodge repercussions, summon a new husband and with him a new world. She will ensure that Maryam remains devoted to Toby, and the pair of them will continue to provide their neat model of two people who can be happy.

She's been too vague in her search, too unclear about what she wants from a husband. It's time to focus. No swingers. No am-dram enthusiasts. No open-mouth chewers. Just a nice man to keep for a week and take to a wedding. Not a perfect husband; just a perfect plus-one. She can worry about everything else later.

○○

In the end she allows Rohan to stay until morning; it's easier than launching into a late-night husband loop. She lies next to him in bed, tamping down her fury with the knowledge that he's about to vanish from the world.

In the morning she sends him up; no thank-yous, no goodbye kisses, just flare, flash, buzz.

In return she receives Iain, who is an aspiring painter with large glasses, his canvases ramming the spare room. She likes his bright smears of colour, which make her think of reflections in windows. She considers keeping him, as he is also funny and owns a grey suit. But every half an hour he has a new small complaint: that the ripe-and-ready avocado he bought is neither ripe nor ready, that a sculptor acquaintance won a residency that he missed out on, that his hay-fever medicine isn't in its usual place. No, she thinks.

His replacement is a guy named Normo (stubble, boxer shorts, somehow even larger glasses). He's an expert witness consultant; he finds people who know about printers or gunfire or the origins of different types of wallpaper, and arranges for them to appear in court. She likes him too, but then she goes to the bathroom and finds that (a) her period has just started, not ideal, and (b) the only product she has in the cupboard is a menstrual cup. She looks up a series of instructional diagrams on her phone, fold it like this or like this or like that , and she gives it a go, but the cup keeps springing open when it's halfway inserted, blood spattering across the tiles, and it gets slippier each time. She reads the FAQ, one last attempt, but all she learns is that there are two sizes of menstrual cups and that as a thirty-one-year-old she is recommended to take the larger, and she simply declines to remain in a world that comments immediately on the size of her vagina.

The next husband is a bit of a shock. It happens quickly, the four or five seconds of a climb down the ladder, but it's still slow enough that she goes through a whole multi-step process of realisation.

The husband climbs down, carrying a box.

He's tall, slender, his hair is like Amos's.

He turns around.

His hair is like Amos's hair because he is Amos.

She is married to Amos.

That's one way to solve the issue of who to take to a wedding where she's going to have to share a table with Amos. But: no. "No thank you," she says aloud.

"What?" Amos replies.

"I think I heard a noise up there," she says, and sends him away.

After Amos she gets Tom, who is going through something, red-eyed and straggle-haired, and she feels cruel as she sends him back up, but what she needs is not a husband for better and worse but rather a husband for next Saturday. Tom is replaced by Matthias, one of those nervous Englishmen who are so pale that their noses glow red around the curve of the nostrils, all long thin fingers and knowing how to pronounce the names of obscure villages and reading Lytton Strachey. She does like nervous, but he's going to be terrible at making conversation with strangers. No.

Matthias gives way to Gabriel, who is situated at the hotter end of her husband range, but when she opens the door to the spare room she is shocked to find a child's bedroom. An occasional stepchild? It doesn't look like a room where anyone lives full-time. Marker pens, Lego, a single poster of a dinosaur riding a rocket. She doesn't want children anyway, she's had an IUD in place for years, and she definitely doesn't want to take a divorced dad husband and his kid with her to this wedding.

So Gabriel turns into an even better-looking man named Gorcher Gomble, which is just too embarrassing to say out loud. Meet my husband, Gorcher . But she's struck a handsome vein: the next husband is, if anything, more attractive again, with glossy white teeth and a slow American accent. He is a bewildering presence in her home, which has changed only a little: like he's too relaxed, or the wrong aspect ratio or oversaturated compared to the grey weather. He is wearing a clearly recently ironed dark-blue shirt and, she can see at the neck, an actual real-life undershirt.

She doesn't know anything about him, but she knows he'd look great in a suit. Sure, she thinks. Let's give him a try.