Chapter 38

CHAPTER 38

It's coming into June, almost her birthday, which means the anniversary of the first husband is coming up too.

She thinks about whether she wants a party. She has a lot of friends she hasn't seen for a while, preoccupied as she has been by the husbands; and as usual some friends she hasn't seen ever , who she knows about only because they share a WhatsApp group or appear in each other's photos.

She's left it late to organise—a week's notice—but that's easily solved: she makes an exception to her serious-husbands-only stance and switches once, and again, and again, checking her calendar each time. By the day's eighth husband, a light-haired Irishman named Fintan (who she doesn't think she's attracted to, but you can't have everything), she finds that she has a Sunday pub lunch booked for twenty. Twenty! What a good number of friends. Happy birthday to her!

She misses Taj a lot, her constant companion when she was divorcing Amos, but you can't be friends with someone by emailing them and explaining that in a parallel world you got on really well; or even by going into the designer furniture store they work in just before coffee break and trying to strike up a special rapport, as she tries twice. She thinks it's maybe working the second time, they share jokes about a chair, perhaps if she comes in again and actually buys it she can mention Oh, a birthday party with a few friends, you should come , but at the end of the chat she sees Taj rolling her eyes at a colleague, an expression she recognises from when they were friends, God, people . She leaves, stricken with embarrassment and memories of Carter in that bar, barely managing to talk herself out of sending Fintan back straight away and wiping out her humiliation.

If she can't get Taj, at least she can get her plant buddy. She's started picking him up every time she thinks a husband shows real promise, and he's growing faster now that it's summer, more cumbersome each time she buys him. A birthday present to herself, she explains to Fintan, who seems annoyed but never mind, he won't be staying.

○○

On her birthday itself, the Thursday, she and the husband go out for tapas and beer at a new local restaurant. When they get home he gives her a huge unwieldy box: a fruit dehydrator, a puzzling gift that she can only assume she asked for. Sure, she can be the sort of person who dehydrates fruit. She finds a past-its-best apple in the fruit bowl and slices it up and tries to lay the slices flat but ends up eating them instead.

"What happens if we dehydrate something that's already dry?" Fintan says, and they find some dried apricots and put them in the device. It's a good birthday.

And on Sunday they walk the forty-five minutes to the pub that's not the nearby one or even the fancier one down the road but rather the far-away pub that does the nice roasts, and she has a party.

Nat and Adele are the first to arrive, with Lauren's medium-sized nephew and small niece, and both the kids are bigger than she remembered: this is what you get for ducking into another world whenever babysitting threatens. "Oh my god, her enormous cheeks , " she says, squeezing them as she holds the plump baby, toddler maybe, and it's fine: in this world she has been putting in the work and Magda recognises her, gurgles, burps, stands tentatively on the floor and sits on her padded bum and blinks widely, does all those baby things, waves when Adele tells her to then refuses to stop waving and then the waves become big fisty thumps against the ground. Caleb runs in tiny circles and takes a karate pose and demonstrates a kick.

"Not inside," Nat says, then turns back to Magda, who is now leafing through a book. The girl isn't even two yet; one-year-olds can't read, right? And: no. Magda leans forward towards the page, closer and closer, and licks it, one big swipe of the tongue over a growling lion. Then she opens her mouth wider still and bites down, over the roaring lion's mouth, the paper pulling up and bending under her small teeth.

"Nooo," Adele says, "Magda, no, let's eat your lunch first, don't fill up on book."

Lauren resolves that she's going to be a better aunt. And a better sister! It's great to see Nat, who gives Lauren a silk scarf, all greens and blues and scattered pink-red dots, and it's true that she's printed out instructions for fourteen different stylish ways to wear it, which is perhaps not a totally necessary part of a gift, but the pattern is beautiful. Lauren feels a moment of loss at the realisation that she won't get to keep it.

Toby and Maryam next, then a guy she doesn't know called Phil, and a couple called Philip and Tess, and Phil and Philip say, "Phil five!" and slap their hands together, and then Zarah from work and her boyfriend, and, somehow, Michael, two-time-husband Michael, with his own kid, and she's delighted and baffled to see him (when she looks him up on her phone in the bathroom, she finds that they briefly dated before she met the current husband, and that they stayed friends, which is something she has never done with any ex before).

Elena and Rob turn up too, of course, and Parris, who's come up from Hastings, and Noemi. And eventually there are sixteen of them, plus the three children, sat around an awkward collection of mismatched tables, eating roasts and veggie burgers and drinking and going outside to let the kids play and coming back in, and it's—it's so nice. It's so nice. All these people are her friends, even the ones she's never seen before. And Elena gets up and goes to the bar and then comes back and asks for quiet, and the staff bring out a cake, all candles and sparklers, and her friends singing "Happy Birthday."

○○

"That was such a nice afternoon," she says back at home, lying on the sofa stretched out.

"It was," the husband—Fintan, she reminds herself—says.

When he leaves, she thinks, the memory of the day will be gone for everyone except her. She'll never see the Phils do a Phil five again, Caleb won't remember teaching her his newly invented kick, she won't be able to message Elena and say That birthday cake you got me, that was great, where was that from . She'll walk past the pub and think about the nice time she had, but whoever she's with won't remember it, even if they were with her.

June in a couple of weeks. Then she'll have been doing this for a year, a whole year that nobody else will remember and share. She thinks about the blurry picture she took with Carter at Elena's wedding, and it's not even about wanting Carter back, not any more; it's that she'd been so happy to start building a tiny shared history, and then she lost it.

"You okay?" Fintan says.

"Yeah," she says, and opens her eyes.

"Bummed out about the, you know, passage of time?"

She laughs a little, surprised. "I guess."

"That's birthdays for you. Have a twice-dried apricot, that'll perk you right up."

She takes it from him. It is hard and unpleasant, an apricot-flavoured stone. She sucks on it, holding it between her fingers.

It's a shame she doesn't fancy him. She tries to look at him with fresh eyes, imagine she's back on a date perhaps. In this world, her past self must have had chemistry with him, or they wouldn't be married; surely that's still hiding inside her somewhere? His hair is tidy, he's put on a nice shirt for her party, she likes the angularity of his nose. It's rare for her to come across a husband that stirs so little within her. She leans forward and touches him on the shoulder. No. Nothing.

Maybe, she thinks, she's worn out her ability to fancy anyone; but it's not true, she felt it for a moment at the pub, with Michael and again with one of the Phils, just that tiny spark of possibility. So: not this husband, then. But one of them. Soon she'll find someone she can stay with. Soon she'll start filling her phone with pictures that won't vanish overnight. Soon she'll be able to turn to someone and say Hey, remember that thing we did together , and he will, and she will too.