Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

The next morning, Bohai calls into work for her, embroidering elaborate stomach problems.She exchanges the favour by calling his co-worker at, he figures out from his phone, a training school for guide dogs.

"God," he says, "I have no fucking consistency in jobs. I don't even like dogs. Their big eyes."

"You don't like dog eyes ?"

"Too pleading," he says.

They've gone out for breakfast at a cafe a fifteen-minute walk away, on the far side of the park. It's a Thursday morning at elevena.m. so it isn't crowded, and it's warm for October; they find a table outside, sunlight through trees as more leaves drop. The park spreads before them: a lake, a toddler running. Summer was just starting when her first husband emerged.

There's so much Lauren wants to know: where does she start? But Bohai pulls out a piece of paper. "Anyway," he says, "I couldn't sleep last night so I made some notes."

Perfect. "Let's go."

"Okay. First of all, we age, right?" Bohai asks. "Like, it's hard for me to be sure because different lives, different lifestyles. But nowadays I almost always have these," and he leans forward and points at two furrows between his eyebrows, vertical where her own perpetual crease runs horizontally, "and, like, crinkly bits around the eyes if I'm somewhere sunny. Which is something London has going for it actually, way less UV damage, way less squinting into the sunlight because there's no fucking sunlight to squint into."

They're literally sitting in sunlight as they speak, but she stays on topic. "I do look different sometimes," she says. "But I've only been doing this three or four months."

"Yeah, tell me everything about how it started."

She has run through the details so often in her head, the party, the bus, Michael on the stairs. And she's said it out loud a few times as well, and it's gone badly, every time. Even now, as she explains it, she half expects Bohai to start questioning her, to explain that she must be mistaken, to laugh it off.

But: no. "Yeah," he says, "mine was just as weird, honestly. I was on this trip with friends to a holiday house in the country, back in Australia obviously. And the place was massive, so we decided to play hide-and-seek. And not to boast or anything but I'm really fucking good at hide-and-seek. So I squirmed away behind a panel in the back of a cupboard and then this buzzy static noise started so I crawled out as fast as I could and it turned out I was living by the beach with a wife called Margery."

"Huh."

"Yeah, it was a puzzle, I can tell you. I've tried renting the same big house a couple times and going back into the cupboard, just to see. But nothing happens. Then I have to head off for a new world before my husband or whoever finds out I put four and a half thousand dollars on the credit card to go and stay alone in a winery mansion."

The waitress brings their plates out and they fall silent for a minute. Bohai grabs salt and pepper and ketchup from another table.

"Next question," he says. "All husbands, right?"

"Yeah. And you get a mix," she says.

"More than half husbands. Which isn't—like, in my original life I dated more women, so it's a bit weird that it's the other way round now. But I reckon it makes sense because I'm kind of not that into marriage as a concept, you know? So I probably get carried away more with guys? With men you're like fuck it yeah let's get married, take that, those who would deny us, I defy the looming disapproval of the law and a dozen uncles , but with women it's more the burden of history bids me wed you , gross. No offence. And not that I don't do it often enough. Four hundred spouses."

"That's a lot of spouses for someone who's not into marriage as a concept," she says.

"Yeah, I think I've got to accept that I'm absolutely into marriage as a concept, but I'm also into being the sort of person who isn't into marriage as a concept, as a concept. This whole situation makes it hard to trick yourself about what you're like."

He's got a few more things on his list, but she's remembered something from the night before. "You said you have rules for marriages."

"Yeah!" he says. "When I think I might stay for a while, I do my due diligence. No cheating, no children, no visa marriages. What about you?"

"I don't really have any rules yet. Had a visa marriage once but he was great. Top-five husband. And I don't want kids but it hasn't come up much."

"Don't want them yet, or don't want them ever?"

"Not ever, I think," she says. She loves Caleb and Magda but even a couple of hours with them is exhausting. She feels like she did her fair share of caretaking when her dad was sick: Nat had been off at uni by then, so it had just been her and her mum, taking turns for a long six months before hospice care. "You too, from the sound of it?"

He wiggles a hand from side to side. "It's not that. I kind of want kids. No, you know what, I really do. But I want to actively decide I want them, you know? I don't want to go: oh I've got three six-year-olds in this universe and I guess I love them so I've got to stay because if I climb back into the cupboard they'll vanish . Right? When you leave a husband he's still around, he's just not your husband any more. But if you have kids, biological kids anyway, they full-on don't exist if you leave, you weren't there so they're not there either. Early on I turned up once and found out my wife was pregnant, and we didn't get on but I already felt responsible to the future kid, like: I guess I'd better stay or it's gonna vanish . But we were such a bad match. So in the end I left before he was born and it—I don't know—it didn't feel great. I looked the wife up after I left and she had three kids in her new life, so good on her, but obviously none of them were mine. And now if there's any sign of kids at all I leave as soon as I can, before I meet them even, before I find out whether they're stepkids or nieces or mine or whatever. Stick your head out, see Lego, pull your head back in. You miss out on the adult Lego fans as well I guess but, like, you win some, you win some, right?" And he smiles a big smile which, she thinks, he definitely believes to be charming.

"You said you'd stayed somewhere for two years?" she asks. She can't really imagine it; or rather, she can't imagine staying that long and then leaving.

He nods. "Maybe closer to a year and a half. Living in Sydney, which for me is always a good start. Married to this guy called, well, Hanwen, but he went by Jack for the Anglos. Honestly, I haven't found myself with that many Chinese partners, I guess because of the whole, like, lo, with this marriage do I defy my imaginary critics thing. But it was nice."

"What did you do?"

"Oh, lights and tech for a little theatre company, which obviously was all new to me. But theatres were just opening back up again and, you know, closing again and opening again, so everyone was out of practice and I got away with a lot. Then for a while I had a uni student on work experience, and that helped. I pulled a lot of what do you think we should do, talk me through the options , which is a godsend, highly recommended."

"That's really smart," she says.

"Right? Anyway," Bohai says, "there I was, married to Jack, who did finance stuff so I was the glamorous trophy husband, which was obviously good for my ego. We weren't monogamous, and normally that's not my thing—"

She laughs. "Mr. Hundred Spouses a Year? Mr. Slept with His Sister-in-Law?"

"Look, I'm not saying I'm always great at monogamy but I like to try. Anything else, I dunno, I get jealous. But our flat was amazing, my job was a good time once I got the hang of it, and Jack was great, I liked him a lot. We had fun. Didn't fight much. I mean, he never cleaned the kitchen but if that's the worst you can say it's a good marriage, I reckon."

"Why did you leave?"

"Ah." He puts his fork down. "It's a bit of a grim one. Jack was coming to pick me up after a show and he was in a car accident, it was pretty bad. I thought—I mean, it's not that I'm not great," and he gestures appreciatively at himself, "but probably he'd rather not be, you know, touch and go on making it. And I don't know what would have happened if he'd died and then I'd only switched worlds after, if it'd be too late. So, better reset his life for him."

"Wow. I'm really sorry."

"Yeah," he says, "anyway, I look him up sometimes and he's usually doing fine. Went to a bar he used to like till he came in once, which I thought would be just like old times but in the end I learned a few things about his tastes in casual sex that he did not reveal to mere husbands, I can tell you. What about you?"

"Oh," she says. "Well, I'm still new to this. There was an American guy I liked a lot, Carter, and I think he liked me. I mean, I guess they all must have liked me but he seemed really glad that we were together, you know? But he climbed back in the attic while I wasn't looking."

"Oh, wow, that sounds like a fucker," Bohai says. "Sorry," he adds to a woman walking past them with a toddler in a pushchair.

"I mean, maybe we wouldn't have worked out," Lauren says. "Obviously a week's nothing compared to two years." She can't quite imagine how she would have felt if she'd been with Carter that long, and then he'd climbed away.

"It's not a competition," Bohai says, "we can both be really sad about our husbands if you like."

They sit in silence for a minute.

"Honestly," she says, "I'd rather not."

"Yeah, me either."

"Come on," she says with renewed enthusiasm. "What's the weirdest room you've ever climbed out into?"

"Oh," he says. "There was one full of balloons. Like, up to my neck deep. There was one with eight corgis. There was one where my wife was using garden shears to cut my clothes up, that was terrifying."

"Did you figure out why?"

He shrugs. "Just climbed back in, but I dunno, probably the cheating again, right? Maybe gambling, that comes up sometimes. Like I said, seeing your life play out four hundred times is a real shortcut to all the ways you might turn out to be a dickhead. Sorry," he says again, to the same mother, pushing her child back in the opposite direction.

"Shall we head into the park?" Lauren says. The tables near them have filled up, and she doesn't want to talk about this within everyone's hearing, even apart from Bohai's exuberant swearing.

They walk towards the lake and its straggly ducks. "How do you decide when to stop?" She means: how do I decide.

He shrugs. "Still working on that one. You thinking about it, then? Picking one and keeping him?"

Not consciously—she's still been in easy-come easy-go mode, but it's been a long few months of fleeting husbands. There are only so many times she can spend a day skipping work and eating an overpriced lunch and buying something ill-advised and then wiping it all out.

"I don't know," she says. "I might try."

"In that case," Bohai says, "is there a newsagent's somewhere nearby? We're going to need a whole lot of Post-it notes."