Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

"It's the fucking attic, what do you think it's like," a man calls back. A pile of towels drops straight through the hole and thumps against the bottom of the ladder, then spills across the floor.

She watches the husband (the sixth? seventh?) emerge backwards, sneakers, joggers, a T-shirt, one of those arm straps that holds a phone while you run.

He is tall and pale and angry about something. He starts picking up the towels and refolding them, and stacking them in the spare room, then he turns to leave but she's followed him. He stops and juts his chin, waiting for her to let him out.

"There should be two more towels," she says, yielding the doorway. She'll send him up and replace him with a husband in a better mood.

"They're my fucking towels," he says. "I know how many there are."

"I was sure there were six."

"Well, you were wrong."

Okay, then. "Maybe you could grab the, uh, tablecloth too?"

"What, so now you want to use tablecloths?"

As far as she's aware she has no opinions on tablecloths, but it sounds like they are, somehow, a sore point with this husband. It sounds like a lot of things might be sore points. It sounds like he might be mostly sore points. There is no persuading him to do anything, she can see: no asking him to check for sounds above, no just pop this box up , no promise of a nice surprise.

They are, she supposes, fighting. He goes into the bathroom, and she looks around for a name, something to orient herself; but he's only gone for a moment, not even closing the door, then across to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water from the fridge and back to the landing. He stops.

"What time are they getting here?" he says.

"Uh. I don't know."

"Well, find out, then," he says. His feet are heavy on the stairs; the door at the bottom slams closed, then the outer door a moment later. She heads into the living room, new objects wherever she looks, and watches from the window: he walks then lengthens his stride, accelerating up the road, past the dumpster, away from the house, out for a run.

Her flat is empty again. But everything is wrong. In the living room her original sofa has reappeared, but the junk-shop coffee table she was so proud of finding for ￡10 has gone, the dent in the kitchen wall is back, the television is smaller, strange throw pillows. The hundreds of tiny signs of a new husband. And she has not taken to this one at all.

She checks her messages. He must be Kieran.

Then her photo library, and the video she tried to take of his emergence from the attic isn't there. And it's worse than that, because in her photo reel she finds Elena's pottery party, and the first bar, but not the second, and no late-night chicken shop. As far as her phone is concerned, she came home early.

She scrolls, checks, and it's not just that there are no late-night messages from Elena: there's nothing from her for weeks, nothing to Maryam except a note about a misdelivered parcel, nothing to Toby at all. A few to Zarah at work. Regular enough messages from Nat, but no advice, no instructions, no links to articles she ought to read; just Thinking of you, let's chat soon or pictures of the kids.

When she catches herself in a mirror, she is surely paler than she ought to be this far into summer, paler than she was yesterday, and her hair, pulled up into a bun, is wrong. She loosens the elastic. Yes: usually her hair is cut to shoulder length, but now it falls three or four inches further, and somehow this is the thing that makes the world intolerable, that sends her dizzy even though she is not, in this version of the world, hungover. She is aghast in her own body, she shrinks back from it, feels her fingers trembling, goosebumps, a hollow in her stomach edging up towards her chest.

She wants the long, wrong hair gone so absolutely that she thinks about taking the kitchen scissors and chopping it off. But instead she ties it back up. The husband will go, and the hair with him.

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Everyone has bad days, of course. Everyone yells at their partner sometimes, or so Elena claims; Lauren herself has usually kept it to snippy asides, and her relationship with Amos, her longest, ended quietly on a day four years ago when he was supposed to move in but instead phoned her from a roller-coaster queue at Alton Towers to say that he thought perhaps they were moving too fast.

But nothing about this marriage looks good.

And if she wants to get rid of this guy, she has no time to wonder what's going on, no time to refuse to believe it, to pinch herself, to call one of her reduced number of friends.

The situation, however new to her, is clear. She has been provided with a husband, and each time that husband goes into the attic, he is replaced with a different husband. Where the husbands come from, how many there are, even in some cases their names: mysteries she can address in due course. But the basic mechanics are undeniable, and so is the fact that the current husband is—well, perhaps safest just to say a dud .

○○

Back on the landing, the attic hangs above her like a threat. But she has a plan.

She finds a speaker in the kitchen, a grey cylinder, and connects to it with her phone. Disable Bluetooth, re-enable Bluetooth, press a button, Forget About This Device, start the whole process again. She begins to worry, listening for the door, but the connection eventually works. It's taken her, what, four minutes? Five? It's fine. Plenty of time.

Okay, stage two. She steps up the ladder, one foot and then two, then another rung, then one more. She's holding the speaker in one hand. This is safe, she tells herself, trying to tamp down her fear. The husbands have only changed when they've gone all the way in. But her other hand is clutching tight on to the topmost rung, then she takes a deep breath and sticks her head up into the darkness.

And: it's her attic.

In the murk there is only furniture, and boxes, and a dark shape that she flinches from before realizing it's a half-disassembled Christmas tree. There is no Michael, no naked man with a hemispherical bum, no Anthony, no handsome man looking puzzled. There are no frozen husbands propped against the walls, no golden door through which they exit and enter, no wisps of bright-green smoke, no ghosts sitting around a table playing poker for the chance to exit the attic. No figures hanging upside down from the rafters like bats and breathing, in-out, in-out, in unison. No bodies stacked like carpets to unroll into life.

Only the attic, and the light bulb, which is, admittedly, starting to glow just a little.

Okay. Priorities. It's been…ten minutes since Kieran left? Twelve? How long does she have?

She reaches as far into the attic as she can without stepping any further. The light brightens above. The speaker crackles as she rests it on the floor, then pushes. Back down the ladder for an umbrella, then back up and she uses it to poke the speaker in further, out of arm's reach, another crackle as she pushes it through the dust.Far enough that nobody could reach it without climbingin.

Then she ducks her head back out and gasps for air on the bright landing. The light above her dims.

Down the ladder, and she tries streaming through the speaker from her phone. From above: a quick burst from yesterday's playlist, songs that Elena's friends added during the pottery workshop.

She opens YouTube to search for the right sort of noise.

She finds it.

Back in the living room, she looks for Kieran on the road outside. She doesn't search through her phone for wedding pictures, proof of their life together. Whatever the situation is, she's fixing it. She doesn't need to know.

It's been fifteen minutes, then twenty. Twenty-five. She hates running, the visibility of it, the traffic, the people who run by faster; she doesn't know how long a run is meant to take, but shouldn't he be back soon? He'll be coming from the top of the road, unless he's circled round to the lane.

Which he has: she sees him at last, halfway between the lane and the house. It takes her a moment to recognise him. She has, after all, spent only a few minutes in his company. She was looking for a pale-faced runner but he's walking instead, then leaning over with his hands on his knees, then standing back up, flushed bright red. She has one minute, maybe two.

She's calm. This will work. This will work, won't it? What if the attic refuses the exchange? What if she was only meant to have seven husbands and Kieran is the culmination? Seven is a fairy-tale number, seven feels like the sort of thing that might be true.

No. She can cross that bridge if she comes to it: for now she has no choice but to trust the attic. She starts the video playing, and there's an ad, Is HelloFresh worth the money? Absolutely! But then she can skip and there's the sound of water or, as the video title calls it, Two Hours of Broken Pipes Murmuring Water Rainfall Soothing ASMR playing through the open trapdoor and, yes, when she turns the volume up as far as it goes she can hear it through the flat: drips, a gush, a rattle.

She rushes to the bedroom, heads in and closes the door. She was going to get under the bed but it's a different bed, solid to the ground. The wardrobe, then; Kieran's clothes are in there too, and the smell of an unfamiliar laundry detergent, all wrong, but this is no time to be fussy.

She nestles down, pulls the hanging swag of coats around her, angles herself so the doors sit flat, one leg extended in front, hoping away any cramps. Softness and dark, with a crack of light. Trickling water, muffled but still audible from the attic above. And the door at the bottom of the stairs—she feels the reverberations as it closes, and hears the husband's footsteps coming up, and then, as he steps on to the landing, his breath, loud and fast.