Chapter 22

CHAPTER 22

The new husband likes to nestle the point of his nose at the inside corner of her closed eye, and press. The one after that likes to lick her ears, get his tongue into the crook of the curlicues. The next pretends to play music on her toes. One puts an egg cosy (in this world, she owns egg cosies) on the tip of his penis.

She lets them pass by her like leaves blowing down the road. They enter her life, she spends a day or two with them, and she sends them onwards.

At first she forces herself to do her research with each of them. She checks in on her job, her friends, her favourites, on Carter and Jason and sometimes even Rohan and Felix, to see if they're doing okay (Felix is in prison, once, which shocks her, but only for lying to people about how successful his company was, and honestly she didn't even realise that was a crime). There's always part of her that hopes she'll find Carter lonely and despondent; but he never is. He's usually with the same happy woman, hanging out in the same Denver bars.

Eventually she stops checking. The world will be changing soon enough anyway. She starts spending her sick days, replenished each time the world changes, on baking, or going for a walk, or reading books. She drops in on Elena, back from her honeymoon, on her lunchbreak, or she has coffee with Toby, who she is almost always on good terms with again. Sometimes she takes a day off and heads into town and spends money she doesn't have: tasting menus, elaborate nail art, browsing the designer bags at Selfridges and buying one and then using it to smuggle a burger into the cinema. Once she fakes an unexpected overnight work trip and goes to Alton Towers and rides the roller coasters, to see if Amos was on to something and a post-relationship amusement park might help her get over Carter, and it doesn't, particularly, but she does have a good time.

Eventually she even starts going to work after all, at least when it's at the council, to chat to Zarah and get out of the house. She has another call with the bakery guy. This time he wants to call his bakery Loaf Is All You Need, which she thinks might be copyright infringement but she's not sure. Is it at least better than the original Loaf Is What You Bake It? She thinks hard, and decides: yeah, maybe?

"We Found Loaf," Zarah suggests when they talk after the call.

"In a hopeless place? Not really on-brand with council messaging . Tainted Loaf?"

Zarah looks genuinely blank at that one.

"You know. Ba-doomp-doomp . You must have heard it." She pulls out her phone and plays the first thirty seconds. "Really? Nothing?"

Zarah shrugs. "Sorry, I was born this century."

"It's really famous," Lauren says. "There's a sample of it in Rihanna somewhere."

"I have no idea who that is."

"I'm eight years older than you."

"That's the spirit," Zarah says. "You're only as old as you feel."

○○

Even when she goes into work, she has a lot of spare time. There's no point in exercising: any muscles will melt away the moment she sends a husband into the attic. But she can learn, she thinks, so she studies flowers for a couple of days, thinking back to the version of herself that understood them so well at Felix's. Hydrangea, wisteria, aster, azalea. Different types of climbing roses, until she finds the one that she chose for that red wall. Then she looks up how to take better care of her little succulent, although it turns out the main thing it requires is to be left alone.

She runs out of steam on self-improvement after that, but it's good to know it's possible.

Instead she summons more husbands, and more still.

Sometimes it feels like there's a pattern, something she ought to be able to figure out. Three white Toms in a row, each one taller than the last.Five bald men with beards. Four men from the four countries to most recently win the World Cup. But the pattern always falls apart, and returns to just: men she might have liked, and who might have liked her. Every husband, she's pretty sure, is someone that she might have met, somewhere, somehow, if she'd done things a little differently. Every husband is someone she might have enjoyed spending time with, and who might have enjoyed spending time with her. Every husband is someone that she might—if things had been just a little bit different, if she'd gone to a particular party or worn a particular coat or looked in a particular direction—have married.

Which is not to say that all of them are men it was necessarily a good idea to marry.

There is a husband whose devotion to free speech is wearying. A husband who still goes running four times a week with his ex. A husband who claims not to be susceptible to optical illusions, who stares at the giant moon on the horizon and says that it seems like a small and ordinary moon to him, who looks at lines with angled ends and declares that they are all clearly the same length.

Some of the husbands make noises. They say words over and over. One puts his hand on her forehead as she lies in bed, spreads his fingers out and presses, a compression like all her unruly thoughts are being calmed; she misses it when he leaves, tries to explain it to the next husband but he can't get it right. One husband does forty push-ups every morning, and when she asks him how his day went, he shrugs and says, "At least I did forty push-ups." One of them balances on one leg while he brushes his teeth, she never figures out why. One saves his toenail clippings in a small jar, and jokes (she thinks it's a joke, but she never finds out for sure) that he's going to use them to make gelatine when he has enough.

Her nephew, Caleb, stays with her overnight, once; Nat has never permitted this before, and she wonders if it's because she's more respectable now, married, worth trusting with a child, or just because he's a little older. Time is, after all, still passing.

"I'm too old for fish fingers," Caleb says solemnly, confirming. Then, "I want a sausage," and he starts running from room to room and down the stairs to the front door and back up again, making zooming noises. "And ketchup!" he yells.

One husband eats two figs for breakfast every morning, whole, leaving only their stems pinched between the fingertips of each hand.

It gets colder and colder but the occasional sunlit hour allows her to believe that there are more warm days to come, and anyway, she's finding the cold-weather husbands easier to love. She likes cosy. Hot chocolates. Movies on the sofa. Men in cardigans or scarves, like big teddy bears, encumbered, adorable. In summer the husbands dressed worse, they smelled more, they were more often drunk (to be fair, so was she), they barbecued things ineptly or embarked on small-scale DIY and abandoned it halfway through. For these autumnal husbands, she feels affection more easily. She starts to keep them for three or four days, instead of one or two, and even daydreams about finding someone she would like to keep for longer. Not yet, not yet, she's still not ready. She's still getting over Carter, and making the most of the attic and its resets. But maybe soon.

She phones her mum on Tuesdays. Other than that, she accepts her calendar as it comes. An evening babysitting Magda, who pours a full carton of milk into her bag. A day trip to see her old friend Parris in Hastings, which is nice and there's a great bookshop there, although Parris spends a lot of time pointing out how much cheaper the pints and houses are. "But don't spread it around, we don't want everyone coming in and ruining it for us!" she says, unconvincing. An afternoon picking rubbish out of the Thames with a friend who is new to her; they are given an introductory pep talk which includes the warning that they should go to the doctor if they have a fever or nausea symptoms afterwards, because there's a chance it could be a disease spread by rat urine in the water. London!

A production of Antigone in a multi-storey car park in Peckham, with Rob and Elena and the husband; the audience is invited to chase the actors down stairwells and through mysterious doorways, and she and Rob find themselves trapped with one of the leads in a lift. The actor has a walkie-talkie, and does a valiant job of alerting production staff to the issue while remaining in character.

The husband, who booked the tickets, is annoyed to have missed out on the special individualised experience.

"I don't think it was scripted," she says. "I think the lift just got stuck," and when that doesn't cheer him up, she sends him away.

While he's up there, she heads into the bathroom to fluff her hair and swipe on some lipstick to greet the next husband. It's nice to get the new life off on the right foot. Clatter and buzz and crackle above: back on the landing, legs are emerging, and the husband climbs down and turns and, after a moment, smiles.

He's one of the cute ones. She smiles back. "Hey. Welcome to the landing." It turns out you can just say that to a husband and usually he'll accept it.

"Good to see you too," he says.

He's stocky rather than slender; looks East Asian, about her age. An accent—maybe Australian?

The house around them is tidier than usual, and brighter. A print of an old geology poster in a frame. A new yellow vase with flowers that she recognises from her couple of days of self-improvement: dahlias.

The husband is gazing around the landing as well. "Hey, seeing as I've done all that work in the attic," he says, "I would love a cup of tea."

"I'll bring it through to the living room," she says. Perfect. She can check her phone, look round the kitchen, scope out this life. She glances at a hall table with letters, where she finds the husband is called Bohai Strickland Zhang, and that she is Lauren Zhang Strickland. Yes, that'll work.

He's right behind her, picks up one of the letters, heads into the spare room for a minute then through to the living room.

Phone: a mix of logistical and affectionate texts to Bohai. Toby and Nat and Elena: yep, looks good, although her most recent message from Elena just reads BARRY SPILES , which is a bit of a puzzle. Her job is unchanged.

The kettle (new) boils. The teabags (Yorkshire branded) are out on the counter. Only almond milk in the fridge. She tries milk and no sugar.

When she brings the mugs through, Bohai is on his phone by the window, scrolling. "Tea," she says, and he looks up and smiles. He has a quality only a few of the husbands have had, of seeming to look at her with renewed attention each time instead of seeing her as familiar background. Maybe they're newlyweds.

"So," he says, leaning back into the armchair as she settles on the sofa. "What have you got planned for the week?"

"Nothing special." She pulls up her calendar: dinner with Rob and Elena, not much else. "What about you?"

"Yeah," he says. "Nothing fancy."

He takes another sip of his tea; she echoes the motion, and looks around. The windows seem brighter than usual, almost as if—oh, wait. She looks at the calendar again. For the last eight days, the calendar reads: SHAN .

That's why it's so clean: they had a guest.Photos on her phone show the husband and an older woman out at the park, under an umbrella. His mum? "Did Shan get back home okay?" she asks casually.

He takes another sip of tea. "Yeah, as far as I know. I mean, she'd have told us otherwise, right?"

They sink into silence again but it's not companionable; not tense either, just a little awkward. Maybe they had a big fight and they're both trying really hard, maybe something happened with his probably-mum, maybe they've got a big decision to make that they're avoiding.

"Telly?" he says, and she says "Yes" almost before he's finished speaking. Even more Mindhunter will do.

But the Netflix menu's "Continue Watching" is a documentary on seals, another documentary about pretending to live in the nineteenth century, and Friends. The husband hesitates, then clicks.

It plays: mid-season somewhere, but it's hard to be sure because it's dubbed into French.

This has come up before, husbands with whom she has evidently learned at least a little German or Arabic or Romanian; sometimes as a shared hobby, sometimes so she can say hello to his family and chat for a couple of minutes. Her French vocabulary extends to le train , le billet , la baguette , bonjour and how to count to twenty. This husband might not be a long-termer.

Still, their house is so clean; even if it's only for the sake of their visitor it would be a waste to chuck it away. She can watch twenty-two minutes of a sitcom in a language she doesn't speak. For her husband.

She browses her phone while the Friends cavort. She can't find any wedding photos, not easily—they must have been married a while—and she can't find anything in their messages to explain why things are weird either.

"Hey," the husband, Bohai, says after a few minutes. "Did you hear that?"

She listens. "Hear what?"

"I dunno, a thump? Up in the attic."

Could there be another husband? Surely not. "I didn't hear anything."

"I might check," he says. "Maybe something fell over?"

It's a shame, she thinks. She's tired. It would have been good to head to bed, have a nice sleep, see how things looked in the morning instead of dealing with another new man. Ah well. Some marriages just don't work out.

"Okay," she says. Can she be bothered putting new lipstick on to greet the next husband? She stays on the sofa and listens to this one pull the ladder down, hears him struggling for a moment to get it over the bit where you need to jerk it across at an angle.

It sounds properly jammed. "To the left," she calls out.

"Oh yeah," he says, and she hears it slide.

Huh.

"Thanks," he adds.

She's still figuring it out, she can't think fast enough. "Wait," she says.

"Yeah, just a sec," she hears him call back. She stands up, half-tangled in the blanket, lets it fall and strides through. He's only a step or two up; his head is about to disappear through the hole.

"No," she says.

"I'll just be—"

She steps forward and puts a hand up, grabs his shirt, at the limit of how high she can reach. He looks down, his face outlined by the square of the attic above him. "I'll be back in a moment," he says, annoyed.

"I don't think you should go up there," she says.

"I heard the noise again."

She knows this conversation. But she knows it from the other side.

Is she right? She can't be.

But she is. It's the ladder that gives it away; if he really lived here, he would know how to pull down the ladder. And he doesn't.

"I'll be right back," he says, and tugs the fabric of his shirt out of her hand, and takes another step up, and she's only got a moment before he's gone for ever, so she grabs again, he's two steps higher, and she says, "No, you won't. Right? You won't be back."

The husband looks down. His head is already through the hatch, the light flickering above him.

She keeps talking. "Right? You'll be off in some other attic? In a different house?"

He stops trying to shake her hand free; she keeps clutching the fabric, looking up.

"Oh," he says, and she releases him.

He takes a step down, then another, and then to the ground.

"I'm not your first wife," she says.

"No," he says, carefully.

She nods. "You're not my first husband either."

"How—how many husbands have you had?"

She thinks. "A hundred and sixty."

They're silent.

"What about you?" she asks. "How many wives?"

He nods, hand still on the ladder. "I don't—I don't know exactly. But, four years' worth. Maybe four hundred. Something like that."

"Okay," she says. She looks up into the attic again, and back at him. "If I go and make some more tea, are you going to stay to drink it?"

He's still staring at her, then he steps away from the ladder and hugs her, and she hugs back, and she's laughing and even crying and the relief, the relief , to not be alone in this, the astonishment of it, and she looks at his face, blurred by tears and proximity, looking back.