Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

They're talking fast as they settle back in the living room, sitting at the table.

"It's been years— "

"It started this summer—"

"All of a sudden—"

"Just climb out into a new marriage—"

They trail into silence and start again.

"I thought something was wrong with me, I kept going to hospital—"

"It's so hard to keep track—"

And again, they stop. Bohai looks around the room, and back at Lauren.

"So," Lauren says. "To be clear. You've spent the last four years climbing into attics, then coming down, and every time you do you've got a different wife in a different house."

He nods. "It's not always an attic. Sometimes it's a shed or a cupboard? Or a wardrobe, pantry, you get the idea. And it's—not always wives? But yeah."

"So physically, how does that work? Like, do you see it change? Does it happen as soon as you go in or when you come out? Do you get the electricity thing? I always get this crackle with the husbands, and the light comes on. But if anyone else goes up it's fine?"

"Yeah!" he says. "I get that! Like any electronics, Christmas tree lights, phones, old hard drives, they all come on. Started a little fire once, which was terrifying, ran straight back into another life and I didn't know what country I was in so I couldn't even search the news to make sure I hadn't burned the whole house down."

"Wait," she says, catching up, playing back things he's said. "They're not always wives. Girlfriends? Fiancées?"

"Nah," he says, "you know, husbands?"

"Oh! Wow, right, sorry." Should she stop prying, is she being rude? In this specific case it's probably okay.

Bohai's still talking. "So you get new husbands from the attic. Always the attic? Always husbands?"

"Yeah," she says. "Old husband goes up, new husband comes down. Wait—did all my husbands know what was going on? Were they faking it?"

"Nah, mine for sure don't," Bohai says. "I've tried telling them a few times. When we got on really well, or one time she was really into science fiction and I thought she might understand."

"No luck?"

He shakes his head.

"Yeah," she says, "I tried telling a couple of people and it doesn't go well."

"Can't blame 'em."

"God," she says, "I don't even know where to start. Wait, why were you going back up into the attic so fast?" Usually she exchanges the husband: it's a bit of a blow to find that the first husband with a choice was eager to exchange her.

"It felt weird. I try not to stay long if I think it's not working."

He's not wrong: it did feel weird.

"You'd know," she says. "Four years."

"Yeah, four and a half maybe," he says.

"And four hundred wives? Partners, sorry. So one a week?"

"Not really? Mostly I stay with them for maybe a day, then I move. But the longest was a couple of years."

Years! She can't really imagine it, sticking with one husband for so long and then just leaving for another world. She starts to ask for more details, but he's talking again: "Sorry, do you mind if I look around?"

"Oh," she says. "Yeah, of course."

He looks in the kitchen, and the bedroom, and the spare room. The staircase. The living room again.

He walks to the window and looks out. "This is the UK?"

"Norwood Junction. South London. You're not always in London?"

He shakes his head fast. "God no, thank fuck. Maybe one time in five. Mostly Sydney? Or Bordeaux for some reason, I guess there's something about it I like but it stresses me out because the version of me that lives there must speak French, but with my actual brain I absolutely don't."

"Wait, so you didn't understand the—"

"The telly? Nah. Did you?"

"Not a bit."

They laugh. "Yeah, sometimes I turn up and someone speaks to me in French and I go straight back into the attic. Honestly, I should just learn—I did try but every time I change worlds all my Duolingo progress resets."

"And the cities aren't random?"

"It's got to be places I might have ended up somehow, I think? Places I like? Well, sometimes I'm in Melbourne or Brighton, and they suck, but I guess love brought me there or whatever. Sometimes Singapore. Got to Perth a couple times in 2020 and stayed for a while, not usually my kind of town but it was hard to look past Oh nobody here has Covid and everything's open, let's get brunch. New York once, fucking amazing city, everyone there thinks it's the centre of the world and it's not, but they believe it so hard, I love it, stayed for months, but my husband was a dick and we had cockroaches in the kitchen, so. Hated San Francisco, loved LA, keep hoping I'll end up in Buenos Aires or Tokyo or something for a change but nah, not yet anyway."

"I'm always here." In her house, waiting for someone to descend from the attic.

"Makes sense. Not like you're going to wake up one morning and the attic's in Bucharest, right?"

"Yeah, I just—it'd be nice to have a change." Imagine: new things, new worlds, choosing to step through into another life whenever you want instead of tricking someone into doing it for you.

"So what happens if you go up there yourself?" Bohai asks.

"You know what," she says, "I haven't tried. It's always felt too dangerous. But it does the electricity thing if I put my head up, and it doesn't do that for anyone else except the husbands. God, maybe I should give it a go."

"Yeah, dunno," Bohai says. "It's good, obviously. Travelling without going through airport security. But with your way, you get to keep your stuff, right? Like, this is all—objects you own?" He gestures around the house.

"Some of it," she says. "A lot of it'll be yours."

"Yeah, clothes, some books; when we were in the kitchen I saw this big Dutch oven I have sometimes. But I can never rely on it. And I never know how the buses work."

She does like having Toby and Maryam downstairs, whoever's in the house with her; and she hasn't been going to her job all the time, but it's reassuring when it's there.

"That said," he continues, "a few years back I was in a cave—like, it'd never been a natural formation before, usually it's attics or sheds or big cupboards—anyway, this time it was a cave under a fucking waterfall pouring into a blue lagoon, and it was hot and we had this house on sticks, the middle of nowhere. And I'd never ever have gone there if it wasn't for the, you know." He gestures with a twiddle of his hand, magic attic or whatever .

"You didn't stay?"

"Nah, it was a bit much."

"Oh, come on," she says. "You couldn't adjust because your life was too idyllic and the waterfalls were too beautiful?"

"Yeah, I mean also it turned out I was having an affair with my sister-in-law which I did not want to have to keep up for more than a fortnight."

She leans back. "You were having an affair with your sister-in-law. "

"I know!" he says. "I don't know what I was thinking. What the fuck, Bohai, right? It was a while back, I guess, I was young. I'm not usually having any affairs these days so I guess most of the time I've learned my lesson? And if it does look like I'm cheating I head off to a new life. It's one of my rules."

"You were going to leave here," she says. "Are you cheating on me ?" She's mostly joking, but only mostly.

"I don't think so. I haven't had long to look into it, though. It's hard to tell sometimes, I'm really good at covering my tracks." He shrugs, apologetic.

She can't deal with the influx of new information; she keeps running back sentences in her head, trying to catch up with everything in every direction at once. "One of your rules," she says. "What are the other rules?"

"Hey," he says, "would you mind if I had something to eat? I don't know if we had dinner or not before I turned up but I'm super hungry."

"Yeah," she says. "Good call. Me too, actually." It's later than she realised, coming up on nine. They investigate the kitchen together, opening the fridge and the cupboards. Bohai lifts the lid on a big enamel pot on the oven and puts it back, pats it gently. There's half a frittata in a container in the fridge. Perhaps she's back in the habit of making them.

"Takeaway?" he says.

She checks her bank balance, and it's not too bad. No joint account; a payment from Bohai once a month, and she sorts out bills from there. "Sure."

They go through the options. "The pizza's decent," she says, "dumplings are okay, the sushi's bad, there's an okay burger place."

He keeps scrolling. "Burritos?"

"Yeah, they'll close soon, though, so choose fast." She's been through this process with so many husbands, ordering delivery, balancing their tastes and her own.

"Can you keep stuff when the world changes?" he says, while they wait for the order to arrive. "Make notes?"

"God, if only. No. For a while I wrote a list of names whenever I started a new husband but now I just try to keep count and remember the important ones." Her formal number is a hundred and sixty, but she probably missed or double-counted a few. "What about you?"

"Oh." He lights up. "I actually—I have a little song. I add the partners as I go. I didn't start till number thirty so it's a bit vague at the start and there was a month where I was just going through them fast.But the important ones."

"A song."

"Yeah"—he's so delighted at getting to explain this—"so it's rhyming couplets but also each rhyme word from the second line in the couplet is the first word in the next couplet, to make it easier to remember. Except then sometimes I really can't make it work so I just start a new verse." He clears his throat. "Shit, I've never done this out loud to anyone before. I'm a terrible singer. Okay. Here's a bit from the middle:

Look, it's Lachlan up in Brizzy,

Me and them got plenty busy.

Busy too with Afan A,

But in a painting kitchens way.

Way too young was student Bea,

Way too grumpy Hayden Three.

Three or four then quickly passed:

Some were nameless, Bim the last.

Last with Liz I might have stayed,

Except she lived in Adelaide. "

"How long is this song?" Lauren says.

"I don't have, like, a whole line for everyone. It's more about how much time I spent there, you know? If I think I owe them." He shrugs, a little sheepish.

She starts asking for more details, but the burritos arrive. They compare food stories while they eat, his worst takeaways, her husbands and their least-inspiring dishes.

"A fried lettuce thing," she says, that was an early husband. "A big baguette stuffed with cheese and chopped-up fake bacon and microwaved, god, it was disgusting. Oh, and so many of them have a special bolognese recipe. And it's never good." Usually when this happens the husband has an Italian ex-girlfriend from whom he learned a supposedly authentic yet surprising recipe, with one special touch: anchovies (twice), Worcestershire sauce (three times), coffee (once), buttermilk (once, particularly bad).

"Oh yeah, some of mine have that too. Like, their high-school girlfriend Maria whose sexy aunt told them to put coriander in it or something."

"Look," Lauren says, and leans forward. "You're going to stay for a few days, right? I'll make up the spare room and we can call in sick in the morning?"

"Yeah," he says, "of course. Of course. I mean, apart from anything else, I'd love to not meet another new wife tonight. You were the fourth, I had a bad run. Kids everywhere."

"You had—no, never mind. Let's get everything set up."

The bed in the spare room has been stripped, presumably after Bohai's mum's visit, but there are more sheets in the cupboard. She can't, however, find any men's pajamas.

"I do sleep naked a lot," he says apologetically, looking in drawers. "I might not have any. Shorts?"

She finds some underpants (boxers, it turns out) and a T-shirt, passes them over.

"Weird, isn't it," he says. "Happy to lie with no clothes on next to a wife I've never met before, but as soon as we're both in on it I want to stay dressed and take the other bed."

It's true: she's had plenty of strange naked men in the house lately, but this one knows he's a strange man, and that makes all the difference.

"Night," he calls out from the spare room, through the open door and the landing and into hers, "sleep well."

"You too," she calls back. "Hey, have you had any other wives called Lauren?"

He laughs. "I don't think so. Had a Laura."

"That's acceptable," she calls back. It's like a sleepover, like camp. If she strains, she can hear him breathing as she falls asleep.