Chapter 6

CHAPTER 6

The birds, the insects, the distant thrum of traffic, the husband chewing his chocolate digestives. She takes it in, relaxes into having solved the Kieran problem; she deserves a break before she deals with the more challenging question of the husbands at large. She sneaks glances at this one, his broad fingers.

"Garden's looking good," she says.

"Yeah," he says. "The hydrangea's really come round."

"I…agree."

"It's over there," he says, and points.

"I knew that."

"Sure you did."

He doesn't seem annoyed, though; maybe this is a thing they have, a running joke. If you live with someone for years you must make your fun where you can. "Love that humbrudger," she says, testing, and he smiles, and they lapse into silence again.

She watches him out of the corner of her eye.

He slaps at a mosquito.

She takes another sip of the coffee.

"This coffee is good," she tries.

"Yeah," he says, "it's the end of the packet we got from that cafe."

It's difficult to make conversation with a husband whose name she doesn't even know. But, fortunately, it doesn't seem necessary. The husband is happy to sit and sip his coffee.

"Oh, I paid the plumber," he says once.

"That's great," she says, which seems to be the right response. "Thanks for sorting that out," she adds, experimentally.

She can't keep from smiling at him as he sits there, though, so pleased and thoughtful, and he smiles back.

○○

She lingers in the garden when he goes back in; pulls out her phone, tries Nat again. "What? What's happened? Are you okay?" Nat says on answering, which is fair; they aren't usually spur-of-the-moment-phone-call sisters.

The sun has clouded over, but the day is still warm. "Yeah," Lauren says. "I'm fine. I just wanted to catch up."

"Uh. Maybe tomorrow? I'm on my way to get Caleb from karate and I'm trying to get Magda in the car and she"—she whispers the next word—"she bit me this morning. Obviously I love her."

"Yeah," Lauren says. "Sure. Just quickly," deep breath, "you know my husband?"

There's a moment's silence.

"What, Jason?"

Jason! Yeah, he looks like a Jason.

"Jason," she says. "Do you like him?"

"What? Yes, of course. Why?"

"Oh, I'm just—testing something out." Perhaps a convincing tone matters more than what she's actually saying. "Is there anything bad I should know about him?"

"I mean, the chewing, I guess? But we've talked about that. Magda, no ," the sound of rustling, "she thinks she can eat keys. Did I tell you she got fired from nursery?"

The chewing? What chewing? "You didn't."

"At one and a half years old! I've had to take next week off and we're trying to find somewhere else for her but they have waiting lists . Waiting lists, to sit in a room and lick Duplo. Look, I have to go—"

"Okay," Lauren squeezes in. "One more thing, did you ever notice anything weird about the attic here?"

"What? No. Is there a problem? Is it the water tank? I've told you, you have to call someone immediately when it makes those noises, you can't wait till it breaks. Come on, you should know all this. I'm not your landlady."

"Does that mean I can stop paying you rent?" Wait, she thinks: in the old world she paid Nat monthly for her half of the flat, but what if it's different here?

But no, it seems like she's got away with it. "Yeah," Nat's saying. "Very funny. Look, I have to go and pick up my non-biting child, but I'll drop you a line tomorrow."

She tries Elena next, but doesn't get an answer, which makes sense; Elena's always been a sleep-through-the-hangover girl. And Toby: Hey, have I ever had a cat? The husbands don't know they're appearing and disappearing, Maryam knows nothing about Gladstone, but will Toby remember their talk from the morning?

○○

Inside she discovers, looking through papers piled on the kitchen counter, that the husband is called Jason Paraskevopoulos, and that she's kept her own surname, perhaps for political reasons or perhaps for ease of spelling.

"I've still got a bit of a headache," she says, rinsing out the mugs, looking into the darkening garden below. It's loud with birds, louder than she's used to, louder than she'd like even at this late stage of a hangover.

"What, a headache like a bad case of having been extremely drunk last night?" Jason says.

"Yeah, I dunno, feels different." She is preparing the ground for separate beds, trying to make it natural. She likes Jason, but she isn't ready to share a bed with him as husband and—she swerves away again from the thought wife —as husband and her. "I hope I'm not coming down with anything."

Jason is sceptical, but allows the possibility. "Maybe it's your turn with that cold I had," he says, generously. "It should only last a couple of days."

"I suppose I was bound to get it."

This is so plausible that he brings her Panadol and orders a curry ("The usual?" he asks). While they wait, they watch Mindhunter , which they are four episodes into. She doesn't think much of it but perhaps there's backstory she's missing. The curry arrives halfway through, and her "usual" turns out to be chickpeas. She was hoping for paneer, but at least it's vegetarian.

She needs time to think. What's the earliest she can get away with going to bed? Once they've cleared up the takeaway containers the sun has set, at least. "I'll sleep in the spare room," she says. "Feels like I'm going to be pretty restless."

"Nah, you're the sick one," Jason says. "I'll take it. Plus I have some emails I need to sort out before the week kicks off. Monday tomorrow, early start for me."

Ten almost unbearable minutes—thanking the husband for the peppermint tea he makes her, then for the splayed-open book on the history of mushrooms she's supposedly reading—before he finally runs out of questions to ask or things to offer. Is that it? She thinks that might be it.

"Good night," she says.

He leans in through the door to kiss her and she looks at his curls and his smile and decides, fast, that she's okay with it, and tilts her face towards his; but then at the last minute he swerves: "Oh wait, if you're sick we'd better not."

"Yeah, good point." She is, she realises, a little disappointed.

He steps away and closes the door.

○○

He's still there, she knows he's still there (and she can hear him, flushing the toilet, fetching something from the kitchen). But in the bedroom, it's just her, lamplit and secret.

Clothes are still spilling across the floor from when she climbed out of the wardrobe and sent them awry. She shakes out the bridesmaid dress for Elena's wedding, crumpled inside its garment bag; almost two weeks to go until the day, though, plenty of time to iron it later. Everything else she just shovels in and closes the door on; she can sort it out in the morning.

One of the mismatched tables by the bed has a hair tie and the right sort of charging cable, so she supposes that side is hers. She sits delicately, and switches off the lamp.

In the darkness everything is familiar again. The moonlight from outside falls as it ought to across an almost correct room.

She does not sleep.

First, she scrolls through the photos on her phone, back and further back.

Plenty of them look familiar. Maybe not the exact photos she took, but close enough. A particularly good sunset, glimpsed between two blocks of flats. Nat's wife, Adele, on a picnic blanket, smiling and looking down at tiny Magda, whose baby face is contorted into an enormous scowl. Nat and Caleb standing ankle-deep in the fountain at the V graffiti on the floor of a tube carriage reading two dozen eggs please . The biggest difference is that she keeps finding hills, big jagged hills, a picnic laid out in fog on a hill, a large bird in a thorny bush on a hill, her on a hill, her and the husband, her and strangers, all on a hill. It's looking suspiciously like she's taken up hiking.

She scrolls back through three or four years of photos before the world starts to look more like she remembers. Caleb as a toddler; her and Amos in a park; her and Elena and their friend Parris, back before Parris moved out of London. She switches the lamp back on and writes a list of husbands in the back of the mushroom book:

MICHAEL

(HANDSOME)

(SLIPPERS)

(NAKED)

ANTHONY

KIERAN

JASON

She stares at it, then remembers (Feminist Apron) , who was either before or after (Naked) .

She's not sure what to do with that information. She'll come back to it.

She writes: when they go into the attic, they change

And: the light comes on, there's a sound

And: something is different in the past, maybe

That's not getting her anywhere either.

She goes to her phone again and checks her emails, to see if anything important has changed in her day-to-day life. And: shit. She no longer works at the council. Instead, she is an office manager for the big hardware store and garden centre down the road. A hardware store! She doesn't even know whether a Phillips-head screwdriver is the one with a cross or the one with a line. She does at least know that a Phillips-head screwdriver is a thing that exists, but that probably doesn't count as extraordinary specialist expertise.

Monday morning tomorrow. She searches her sent mail until she finds one from six months earlier, calling off sick; she sends the same message again, to the same address. Food poisoning, apologies. She can worry about work on Tuesday.

Back to her investigations. She searches for Jason Paraskevopoulos and finds his website: Garden Design and Maintenance.

She reads through WhatsApp, messages to friends, a Discord filled with strangers making jokes about flapjacks and tagging her. She has an Instagram account but the last time she posted was eighteen months ago, a picture of a foggy graveyard, and two months before that a cinnamon swirl. When she flicks through the people she follows it's mostly names she doesn't recognise and it feels like freedom: she doesn't need to look .

○○

She had not expected, heading out on Saturday afternoon, that Elena's party would be the least eventful part of her weekend. It's three o'clock in the morning, not quite twenty-four hours since she got on that night bus. She stands and walks out on to the landing towards the just-ajar door of the spare room. Pushes it a crack further, until she can see a dark mound on the bed. Another push, a half-step forward. The husband is breathing, in and out, and clutching one of his pillows to his chest.