Chapter 27

CHAPTER 27

In December they buy a Christmas tree, a real one, guessing at ceiling heights—seven feet, eight?—and Bohai shrugs and says, "Look, I only know metric, but they wouldn't sell them if they didn't fit in houses, right?" and so they get the largest one they can and carry it back through the streets for ten minutes, stopping to change their grip and manoeuvre, almost getting stuck coming up the narrow stairs from the front door. The tree is, it turns out, definitely too tall for the flat until Bohai suggests opening the ceiling hatch and poking the tip through into the attic. Lauren puts the star on top, standing on a chair because there's no room to pull down the ladder, leaning in, tugging the tip of the tree towards her, her other hand thrust up into the attic, the light bulb above her glowing like a star itself until she lowers her arm.

It's so inconvenient: the tree fills half the landing, she has to edge around it to get into her room, the power cable to the lights has to run out from the living room (Bohai tapes it down, says he was a stage manager once, but he can't have been a good one because the tape keeps coming up). Still. It's only for a couple of weeks. She sends a picture around, and her friends pretend to admire their ingenuity, except for Nat who replies with a link to a page about how to keep down electricity costs and prevent heat escaping through the roof.

○○

They kiss, once, after a night out in town: an okay stand-up comedy show and then a late pizza, and then it turns out there's cocktails and an inexplicably 2010-themed pop night in the basement, and they're already out so why not? And when they leave at two it's so cold outside, but she's still hot from the crowded room and a hundred moving bodies, and the air is astonishing on her arms, her face, her breath billows in front of her, and they're laughing down the side street to the bus stop and she turns to tease him about the night's revelation that he knows all the words, all the words, to Enrique Iglesias's "Tonight (I'm Fuckin' You)," even the rap bit. And he's turning as well. And it's not exactly an accident, they both know what they're doing, but they don't turn away, and then they're kissing against a wall. She still hasn't cooled down enough to put her jacket on so she feels the rough chill of the bricks against her skin where her top rucks up at the back, and his skin in the cold air, and his mouth and hands and warm body.

They stop.

And they don't say anything. If they acknowledge what's happening they'll have to decide whether it's a good idea or not, and it really obviously isn't. So instead she leans forward, more gently this time, and he does too. But they're both tense; she can feel it. And after a few seconds she leans back.

"Yes," she says, "okay, bad idea."

"Shit," he says. "Yeah."

He hates London and she has a flat here, he wants kids and she doesn't, he's always leaving dishes soaking overnight and she kind of hates how much space his beloved blue enamel Dutch oven takes up. In some version of the world they met and didn't immediately find out every little detail and incompatibility and they got married and maybe that was good or maybe it wasn't. But in this world they know way too much, they have Post-it notes about each other's ideal partner, for god's sake. And they know they don't match up.

"I'm no good at staying friends with exes," he says.

"Yeah," she says. "Me neither."

And they can't risk not being friends. So they can't risk being exes. So they can't risk kissing in an alleyway.

Afterwards, Bohai starts staying out all night, every now and then. He always messages cheerfully, Having a nice time see you in the morning , and she mostly enjoys having the flat to herself for a change, and it's fine, it's sort of fine, though it's not uncomplicated to spend all her time joking and sharing secrets with a man she fancies enough to have married but who she can definitely not sleep with.

She could go out as well, of course. Once, in a Walthamstow pub for drinks with Rob and Elena, she drinks a bit too much, and gets talking to a stranger; perhaps she can burn off some of her energy on this man who is explaining to her with such delighted intensity that a Campari spritz is vegan and an Aperol spritz is not. Yes, she thinks, why not, but then Elena pulls her away from the conversation and says, "Lauren, what the fuck, what are you doing?" and she remembers in a flush of humiliation that she is, technically, married.

She doesn't try again. But one night, while Bohai's out doing whatever, she stands on a chair and pulls the tip of the tree out of the attic, and then shoves the whole thing sidelong, arms around the prickly branches and kicking at the base until it's budged a couple of feet and she can pull the ladder down.

It's not fair, she thinks, that she is always here waiting, that she is in Norwood Junction for ever, that the husbands come and go and she remains. It's not fair that her lives require their cooperation, that she has to cajole or trick or persuade when she wants them to leave, that she was always here in her old life and she's always here now.

What happens if she climbs all the way up?

Toby went in that one time, and nothing. She called an electrician out, once—nothing.

But the attic acknowledges her like it acknowledges the husbands, it flickers and buzzes.

She should let Bohai know, in case anything happens. He won't like it, but she sends a message— Hey sorry trying the attic —and turns her phone off before he can reply.

And then she climbs up. Just a normal ladder. Just a few steps. Her head through the trapdoor. It's cold, and dark despite the glow of the light bulb as she enters, and the thin fuzz in the air thickens to static, and she stops for a moment with her head in the attic but her legs still on the ladder, in the warmer air of the landing.

She steps up again, and again, and then before she stops to think too much, one last step.

The light bulb above brightens: warm yellow, then brighter, then white. A flicker behind her.

A crackle.

The buzz of white noise sharpens. It's almost a shriek. There's a smell, sweet, dusty, an edge of smoke. And the light above pops, and goes dark, and then starts to glow again.

The smell gets stronger and a smoke alarm starts below and she steps back towards the trapdoor and one foot out, another, quicker, and as she climbs the still-bright light bulb flares again and dies again, and the landing around her is the same as it's been since October, since Bohai crawled out, and she gets a tea towel and waves it below the smoke alarm until it quiets. And nothing has changed.

○○

Bohai gets home an hour later. She hears him coming up the stairs and through the landing. She doesn't get up from where she's lying on the sofa.

"Hey," he says, looking into the living room.

"Hey."

"Didn't work?"

"Nah."

He looks behind him into the landing, glances up towards the attic. She has closed the hatch. The Christmas tree is bowed by the too-low ceiling, half blocking the door to the kitchen. "Do you want me to, you know, leave early?" he says.

"No," she says, "don't, it's not that. I just wanted to know what would happen."

After a moment, he shakes his head. "Come on, let's go out."

That's his answer to everything. "It's one in the morning."

"The really bad chip shop's open till three," he says, and hands her her coat.

In the morning, they use the big bread knife to saw the top off the tree so it can stand upright without them reopening the attic, and Bohai ties the star to one of the outstretched branches.

○○

Christmas, when it comes, is good. She gets him a box of fireworks, and he gets her the big plant she couldn't bring herself to buy from the shop near work. "Plus I'm going on the first of January so there's no way you'll accidentally kill it," he says. "Not in a week."

For Christmas dinner they go to Nat's, where they eat and eat and eat, and give loud extravagant gifts to the kids, a huge box of Lego to Caleb and a toddler drum kit to Magda.

Once they've finished cleaning up they have a Zoom with their mum, who opens the box of one hundred Twixes that Lauren has sent over.

"What an odd gift," her mum says. "You know we have Twixes in Spain? They're much better here, those clever Spanish technicians put something in the chocolate to stop it melting. I'm never going to get all these eaten before summer and once it heats up they're just going to turn into a big brown puddle. But of course it's the thought that counts, darling. Thank you so much."

○○

At home, late evening, Bohai starts assembling two sandwiches out of leftovers. "So your mum doesn't come over for the holidays?" he asks.

"Not really," she says. "Once Dad died and I was out of secondary school she sold up and moved over to Spain. She doesn't come back if she doesn't have to. She's been at all my weddings, though."

"And your grandma left you and Nat this place, and then you both lived here through uni?"

"My university, yeah, but Nat was already working by then." It's weird that they know each other so well but there are such important parts of their lives that haven't come up.

"Oh," he says. "So she was the grown-up while you were figuring everything out for the first time. Is that why she's so…you know?"

Lauren laughs. "God, you'd think so, wouldn't you? But she was like that even when we were little kids. If anything, she eased off once it was just us. Actually, no, she eases off when things are going badly, and the more sorted she thinks my life is the more she tells me what to do. So it's a compliment to you that she's given us a nine-thousand-piece Tupperware set and a bunch of unsolicited advice about batch cooking, it means she thinks I've made good life decisions."

Bohai hands over her sandwich.

"What about your sister?" she says.

"She's a good kid," he says. "A lot younger, she was four or five when I moved out. So we're not super close. I think you two would get on, though. She does that thing you do sometimes of getting super polite when someone says something you think is stupid. Which is a pretty searing critique even from you, honestly, but it's devastating when it's from your teenage sister."

Lauren doesn't think she does that, particularly. "Huh," she says.

"Yeah, exactly," Bohai says. "Just like that. Maybe it's a little-sister thing. You'll see if you meet her."

She will not, of course, get to meet Bohai's family, and that feels like a shame.

○○

On New Year's Eve, they go down to Toby and Maryam's for dinner. After they eat, they set off Bohai's fireworks in the back yard.

"Your side of the garden, though," Maryam says. "God knows what the landlord would do if he found us starting fires on his lawn."

"Yeah, no worries," Bohai says, and reads the instructions three times, and puts his swimming goggles on just in case. He pushes the sticks into the ground, then lights a taper while the rest of them stand around the corner and peer. Lauren can't see what's going on, but after bending over for a minute Bohai runs towards them. As he runs, there's a pip-pip-pip-pip-pap and a shower of green sparks, then a big pink plume, and a fizzing noise and silver. A column of blue-grey smoke. A jagged orange line. A shower of speckled yellow. A moment's pause, then a whistle and four or five little balls of red flame, one after another, sparks of light falling off them as they rise, then another red ball that spirals upwards before exploding at its zenith.

And finally, silence.

"Did you light them all ?" Lauren says.

"That was amazing," Bohai says. "Amazing. Oh my god. Yeah, I lit them all, do you have any more?"

After a calming glass of wine, the four of them go to a party at Bohai's friend Clayton's ("No idea," Bohai says, "but we're in the same WhatsApp group and apparently he has a smoke machine"). Bohai and Lauren hide in the toilet during the countdown so that nobody will think it's weird when they don't kiss at midnight, although it's obviously still pretty weird to stand in a not-very-large toilet laughing and listening to people yell "HAPPY NEW YEAR" outside.

A taxi back at half past three. "My treat," Lauren says. Spend all the money.

They sleep in and then wake up mid-afternoon, hungover, still daylit but only just.Bohai makes toast and looks around. "I feel like I should pack a suitcase or something."

She doesn't want him to go. She tries to keep it off her face, and fails.

"Yeah," he says. "But we have lives to get on with. Husbands to find. Sunlight to escape to—you know it's summer in Australia now, right? Plus I haven't mentioned this because I didn't want you to worry but I kind of ran through my savings and I've taken a whole bunch of money from loan sharks. I cannot express how much I've fucked up my financial life here, probably yours too."

"I did wonder," she says.

"Hoping for a pension plan in the next life. But okay," he says, "what if."

She doesn't even have to think about whether this is something she'd want, because she knows him well enough, now, to see how it would go if she said, Yeah okay, stay, let's see if we can make this work, let's be strange housemates , or even Let's get married for real.

"If you're going to stay," she says, which of course he isn't, "you have to stop complaining about the weather. I know it's cold but I'm not personally responsible."

"No, right, sorry, okay. Just, you know," he says.

None of those are communicative words in the traditional sense. "Yeah," she says.

"I'll visit when I'm back in London," he says. He's memorised her number; his changes a lot, but he's had the same email address since university.

It's her turn to doubt. "What if we forget? Like the husbands do. What if we don't remember each other?" She thinks again about trying to tell Elena, and Toby, and Nat, and her mum, and how lonely those first months were. She doesn't want to go back to it. But he doesn't answer, because there's nothing to say: if they forget, they forget.

○○

They budge the chopped-off tree out of the way again. It's easier with two.

"Hope you get someone who can deal with all your, you know, personality issues," Lauren says. "And who likes wearing suits."

"Same," Bohai says, and pulls the ladder down. "I mean, not the suits. Scarves and rolled-up shirtsleeves for you, right?"

"Well, not simultaneously. To the left," she adds when the ladder sticks.

He stares upwards. Takes a breath. Lets it out. Takes another. And all at once, faster than any husband before him, he climbs, up up up, and she expects him to stop and wave goodbye but he doesn't, and she calls after his disappearing feet, "Stay safe! Let me know when you get there!" and then he's gone.