Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

She spends the rest of the morning in a corner of the conservatory, hunting for more details about Carter, as if the right search terms will open a database of all his possible lives. She tries parallel worlds , alternate husbands , getting nowhere. She takes a break to poke at the coffee machine, which remains uncooperative.

She does, in an alcove in the kitchen, find a screen that flicks through a dozen CCTV views of the house: front door, main hall, two of the living rooms, the driveway where she pauses to watch Jason dig out a weed and check his phone. The kitchen: she can see herself standing, looking at the screen, her stiffening back, movement as she turns to look up. Above the cabinets, a squat grey cylinder is nestled discreetly. She has to force herself to turn away from it and look through the rest of the screens: the conservatory, too, though not from an angle where anyone could tell what she'd been googling, thank god. A shed. A room with a bike and a treadmill and a weights machine which she hasn't seen in the house, perhaps another shed. Nothing in the bedrooms.But she doesn't like it.

She feels worse still when she finds a dropdown that allows her to select "other properties," and pulls up a cottage somewhere, and then the view down her own flat's stairway, and her living room, almost bare, with two strangers on the sofa. She has to stop; there's a hollowness in her stomach and a buzzing in her temples.

Jason knocks on the conservatory door to say goodbye. The clouds are thickening, and the air is warm when she opens the door, rushing in to mix with the cool inside. The rain comes back half an hour later. It thuds on the conservatory roof, first one drop then another and then hundreds, irregular and fast, and then it stops.

Her alarm goes off. Shit, yes, she needs to pick up Vardon, Vardon , what a name. She feels airy, loose, like all the emotions in her body have separated into constituent parts which are floating inside her, unconnected.

She parks a couple of minutes' walk from—well, from the place her phone tells her she often goes at 3:20. Women cluster nearby, and one man. No, another two over by the gates. Most of them are in expensive athleisure, or a Zoom-from-home work-top-with-leggings combo. If she has to do this again she should find her own fancy yoga pants. Maybe she should even do some actual exercise.

After a couple of minutes the boy from the photo comes up to her, sulky-faced. "Vardon," she says.

The boy glares. "I told you, it's Mikey . " Makes sense; if she were a child named Vardon then she would absolutely want to be called Mikey instead.

"I'm sorry, Mikey," she says. He is unplacated. "How was your day?"

"Can we go? I don't want them to see me with you." He keeps glaring as they walk to the car, and then he climbs into the back seat. He is, she guesses, treating her like a chauffeur to make a sulky almost-teenager point. This might, she thinks, be hurtful if she were truly making an effort to connect with him.

"Do you…have any Pokémon?" she tries.

He rolls his eyes and lets out a disgusted uggggghh.

"I dunno, do you have any homework, then?"

"I'm twelve ," he says. What's she supposed to conclude from that? Too old for Pokémon? Too young for homework? The other way round?

"You sure are," she says.

"I want a McDonald's," he says.

"Really?"

"Yes!"

She pulls over and looks it up; there's a drive-thru twenty minutes away. "It'll take half an hour to get there," she says. "Do you want to spend an hour in the car with me for a burger?"

He thumps his small body back against the seat, letting out another grunt of despair. "Just take me home."

At the front door, she realises she still doesn't know how to get through the keypad lock, but Mikey stomps ahead of her and punches in a number. A small light turns green.

Once he's through the door he runs upstairs. That's okay! They don't have to spend time together. He'll have a new stepmother in a week.

Instead, she pulls out drawers in her wardrobe until she finds fancy workout gear. Perhaps this will help her to feel less like she is on the brink of non-existence, of dissolving into the air.

She finds Mikey in his room. "I'm going to be in the gym," she tells him. He stares at her impassively then pulls his headphones back on and returns to his game. "What's the code to get in? I've forgotten."

"It's one thousand shitty fuck fuck," he says.

Okay. "If you don't want me to go to the gym," she says, "we can hang out here and bond."

He lets out a half-grunt, half-wail. "I don't know the gym code, I'm not allowed in case I drown . Look on your phone."

"Oh," she says, "okay." She starts by looking for a special app, which she does kind of find: an icon with a camera and a dial which opens up an interface to their CCTV system. She closes it quickly. The actual entry codes are in a notes file, unencrypted. Felix probably wouldn't approve. One nine-digit string for the house; an eight-digit for the outbuildings.

It's still hot outside. She looks round corners, tries doors; heads to a shed that turns out to be filled with rakes and soil, and another that wasn't on the CCTV and that she doesn't have a code for, before she finally finds the gym.

There's sports equipment, tennis rackets, balls. Machines, weights. A treadmill.

And there's something else: the smell of chlorine.

Mikey did say drown. And: yes. A door on the far side opens on to a pool room. The pool itself, ten or twelve metres long; wicker chairs; three medium-alive plants; glass walls facing away from the house and over browning fields.

An actual swimming pool.

There's half a dozen buttons on the panel by the door, and two of them turn the lights on and off, and one seems to start a gentle wave rocking through the pool, but the cover is still on so she turns the wave off right away. Then another button, and the cover retracts: a slowly growing blue rectangle.

She takes off her yoga pants, and steps in. The water over her ankles is cold for a moment and then perfect. The cover is still retreating before her, and she follows it, deeper and deeper, past her knees, and then she pulls her top off and throws that to the side too and, after a moment's thought and another glance to double-check for cameras, her sports bra. She's in to her knees, her waist, she falls back into the water; she's floating, her hair around her. The tension stretching over her skin relaxes. She stands again, then falls back again and the emotions disarranged inside her float, just a little, into place.

She can't research husbands in a pool. She can't make notes. She can't search for evidence, she can't look up her old workplace or examine a wedding album. She can only be in her body.

○○

She stays for maybe an hour; her fingers are puckering and it's hard to leave, but she can come back with a bathing suit and goggles, and she probably shouldn't leave the kid too long (if anything happens to him, she can reload the world, but even so). Plus, she realises, she's hungry, an uncomplicated physical hunger like she hasn't felt since the husbands came.

○○

There are boxes and boxes of fancy delivered ready meals in the fridge. She calls the kid. "Take your pick," she says to him. He shuffles through and wrinkles his nose and asks for burgers, which they don't have, or ice cream, which they do. "Go for it," she tells him, giving him the carton and a spoon. Parenting is easy! At least if you never have to make any decisions whose ramifications will last for longer than a week! She goes for an apricot-and-chickpea tagine herself because it needs the least amount of time in the oven, and while she's waiting she breaks off a chunk of cheese and eats it straight.

After dinner she sits in the creepy death living room, which doesn't have a camera, presumably because the hanging birds would get in the way. She scrolls through pictures of Carter in Denver with someone else, and closes the page, and opens it again. She calls Natalie, who doesn't answer, and their mother, who does but who only has a few minutes because she has to rush out to the residents' meeting or else Sonia will get her way about the eucalyptus and that'll just be the thin edge of the wedge.

A message appears: a group chat about the kid. His mother is reminding her and Felix that he isn't to have nightshades. She thinks that's okay; she's pretty sure ice cream doesn't have any nightshades in it.

Just before eight o'clock the kid comes downstairs with a long, serious-looking toy gun, all black and green, and he tells her he's going to shoot squirrels.

"Uh," she says.

"It keeps me active," he says.

"I…don't think that's a good idea."

His groan is more disgusted than ever. " Fine. I'll do target practice in the barn."

"I don't…You're twelve," she says. "I don't think you're allowed to have a gun." He's not even allowed in the swimming pool alone.

"I've told you," he says, "it's an air rifle . "

"I think—let me talk to your dad about it." This isn't normal, right?

"What am I meant to do instead?"

Isn't that what cartoons are for? She gets him back to his room by promising that as long as he doesn't leave she won't check up on what he's doing. He agrees reluctantly; refuses point-blank to brush his teeth. He also refuses to let her take his air rifle. "It's mine," he says, "it was a birthday present."

○○

She tries Nat again, who answers this time.

"Hey," Lauren says, "you know Vardon. Mikey."

"Yeah," Nat says. "Look, I know he's lonely but I don't think Caleb had a great time when they hung out. Plus four years is a big age gap when they're that old and Vardon does a lot of stuff Caleb's not allowed to."

"No, it's not that. I guess it's kind of that. He's got an air rifle. Is that normal for a twelve-year-old?"

"It doesn't surprise me," Nat says. "But it's not legal."

"I don't know," she says, "I guess his mum's okay with it? I should just let him do what he likes?"

"Honestly," Nat says, and sighs, "I don't know what to tell you."

○○

When Felix gets back, Mikey is asleep, angelic. Lauren makes raspberry tea, big pyramid-shaped bags, in their upstairs-living-room's kitchenette.

She mentions the air rifle, and Felix laughs. "It's a good break from video games," he says. "I know you don't like it, but Alicia and I both grew up hunting. It's normal in the country. And it's just an air rifle."

It sounds like they've had this discussion before.

"Oh, I bought you something," Felix says. A sports car? Tickets to Coachella? One of those antique machines where the planets circle each other on long rods, encrusted with jewels? But no: it's a packet of American pretzel M he's smiling, affectionate, pleased that she's there. In bed, he lies on his back, one hand extended to rest on her side as they fall asleep on the impossibly comfortable sheets.

○○

The thing about being extremely rich, she thinks, after finding a drawer of bathing suits the next morning and returning to bob in the swimming pool again, is: it's great. After sharing her medium-sized flat with so many unexpected husbands, it's magical to have this much space, the hills before her, the trees, the summer haze. Air-conditioning—it's another hot day today, and if she was at home she'd be dropping ice cubes down her top to cool off. Here, she almost enjoys the heat of the short walk from the main house to the pool.

What does she usually do with her days? It seems she doesn't, for example, wash the sheets or mop the floors; she's in the pool now partly because there's a strange woman in the main house, cleaning, tidying, washing out the mugs from last night's raspberry tea.

Maybe the answer really is: not much?

○○

She can't stay, of course.

Well. She supposes she can't stay.

It's clear that at least one version of her decided that she could stay.

You shouldn't stay with a husband just because he's got a country mansion, it's true, but also, you shouldn't dismiss a potential husband because his house is too nice.

In fact, spurning a husband because of his wealth would be bad for the world, because through this particular husband she has access to money and power. She could donate, say, even half of her clearly enormous clothes budget, and think of how much good that could do. Or her travel budget! She's searched her calendar and email for flights, and found a mix of business- and first-class tickets that have, staggeringly, been forwarded to her by a travel agent, which it turns out is a job that still exists. If she travelled premium economy instead, which would still be much nicer than standard economy, she could donate the difference in cost to good causes, and that would absolutely do more for the world than she could dream of in her old life. So from one perspective, some people might hold that she had a moral obligation to stay.

She's not going to, she thinks, kicking off backwards from the side and putting her arms out and feeling the water surge around her. But she can see how it might have happened before. In theory.