Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

Lauren wakes before seven to the sound of the husband getting ready. She climbs out of bed quietly, sneaking on tiptoes, twisting the door handle like she's trying not to startle it. She can hear that he's in the kitchen. Is it still him?

"Hey," Jason says. "You're up! How you feeling? Get a good long sleep?" Still the crinkles at the corner of the eyes, a smile when he sees her.

"Not bad," she says.

"Big week for me. You off work?"

"Yeah," she says, "I need a day to rest up."

When he leaves she watches from the living-room window. He gets into a van parked halfway up the road, big logo on the side, a tree in the centre. And when he pulls out at the top of the road and turns right, the tightness in her shoulders dissipates, the tension of holding herself together releases.

The flat is hers again.

She sits on the sofa, lies back, closes her eyes. It's okay. It's all okay.

She wakes again at ten thirty and showers until she feels clean and new; blow-dries her hair, shaves her legs. Her legs themselves may be a little wider than they were, more clearly muscled. She raises and lowers one thigh on the toilet where it spreads against the plastic.

There are hiking boots in the wardrobe, and one of those jackets that's all zips and toggles. But there are some trousers she's owned for years and a green T-shirt she's had since uni, and a shirt she thinks she almost bought once and decided was too expensive. She puts it on.

She starts to pull down the ladder to the attic.

Stops. Feels sick.

Pushes it back up.

She should eat. She toasts some bread and spreads it with peanut butter, but it's a different brand than the normal, thick and too sweet. It sticks to the roof of her mouth. She is calm but beneath the calm something is fluttering. She has to get out of the house. She leaves the toast where it is, one bite taken; grabs her phone.

She looks up at the staircase as she leaves, the green runner, then closes the door.

○○

It's better outside; she breathes deeper the further away she gets. Look: the bus stop again, still where it used to be! The arts centre where she keeps thinking she should see a show at some time. The sky, the road, the cars, the trees, the petrol station. The gentle slope of the hill under her feet as she speeds up.

There's an argument to be made that she should go to hospital. The evidence really does seem to indicate that she's married. She has nothing to support her conviction that on Saturday afternoon she wasn't; the most likely explanation is not that her attic is creating and transforming men but rather that she is in some way ill, that there is—this is one thing the internet has suggested—a gas leak, or that she took something at Elena's party and it's still wearing off.

But she doesn't want to go to hospital. She wants to sit outside and maybe have a coffee.

Or even, she thinks as the hill levels out and the pub at the corner comes into sight, its tables arrayed in the sunlight: a beer. She wouldn't normally drink on a Monday or at eleven thirty in the morning, let alone both, but these are exceptional circumstances. In fact, go big or go home, and she's definitely not going home.

At the bar in the empty pub, she asks about a cocktail menu.

The woman at the bar says, "Yes?," then ducks and rummages, and brings up a laminated sheet. Bright liquids glow from complicated glasses that the pub does not, Lauren is certain, own.

"I will have," she says after a moment of examining the sheet, "a Merry Berry Fascination. And a flat white."

The woman squats below the bar again, and this time brings up a ring binder, flips through printouts of cocktail recipes. "This might—you know what, I'll bring it over."

"Lovely, thank you." Lauren smiles. "I'll be just outside."

○○

She finds a bench that lets her face away from the sun, and waits until the door opens, and the woman brings out a coffee and a bright-pink cocktail in a wine glass. "We're out of the little umbrellas," she says, apologetically.

"Thank you so much," Lauren says. The Merry Berry Fascination is sweet and bubbly. It has a slice of apple in it.

From her bench, Lauren looks towards the crossroads. A man with a shopping bag, standing there like the world hasn't changed. She checks the time in Spain and tries a message to her mum: Hi! Hope everything's okay! Weird question, but what do you think about Jason?

A few minutes later, a reply: Hello darling, lovely to hear from you. I've always liked Jason. He's obviously very fond of you. I'm running short on proper tea bags and marmite, could you send some over.

She thinks about calling Nat again, Toby, even spilling it out to Jason, although that's a bad idea. Probably he wouldn't believe her and he'd go up into the attic to prove her wrong—or worse, he would believe her, and then he'd refuse to go up there ever again. She likes him, but she's not sure she's ready for that level of commitment.

Besides, Elena is the one she tells everything.

Going to Elena's tonight, she sends to Jason, she's really stressed about the wedding .

Next: Elena. Hey I need to talk, can I come over , she sends; it occurs to her belatedly that perhaps Elena will have other plans. Still, it's a Monday night, two weeks out from her wedding. I can help you blow up balloons

She checks the phone's step tracker, numbers occasionally huge from hiking: 28,300; 35,600. A lightning monitor, which she opens, and a flurry of red and yellow dots pop up to the west.

Then she hears back: 7p.m. You will arrange almonds , Elena messages, and you will like it

○○

It's two o'clock when she finally runs out of terms to search on her phone: men appearing in attic (news stories about secret living spaces), attic transformation (expensive renovations), husbands disappearing (more news stories, plus quite a lot of bigamy, which is almost but not exactly the opposite of her own problem). She tries husband magically came out of attic and when he goes back in he turns into someone else. A real mix: a woman who hid a secret lover in her attic; an abusive man; someone writing to an advice column because her husband has realised he's gay; the plot summary for Flowers in the Attic .

She's going to have to pull down the ladder again and look.

But when she gets home, the husband's van is parked back in its spot. The irregular hours of a gardener; and that, she thinks, means no attic investigations. She can't quite hide the rush of relief, the gratitude and fondness she feels about this permission to keep ignoring the overwhelming question. Jason has rescued her a second time.

When she gets inside, he emerges from the bathroom in his underwear, again revealing the tattooed ivy that winds over his shoulder. He is wet-haired, presumably recently showered, and he looks—he always looks—so pleased to see her.

"I was wondering where you were!" he says.

"Yeah," she says, "just out for a walk. I'm so glad you're here! I'm feeling a lot better."

"Oh, are you?" he says, and comes over towards her. "Exactly how much better are we talking?"

"A fair bit," she says, then gets his meaning.

Well. She likes him. She is still flushed with relief that his presence has allowed her to delay investigating the attic. And it's been a few months. Why not?

"A whole lot better," she adds, stepping towards him.

He pushes his underpants downwards.

This is normal, she tells herself as they move to the bedroom. He is naked in front of her and this is normal to him. She unbuttons her shirt and this, too, is normal; as far as the husband knows, she has been naked in front of him hundreds, thousands of times. Only she knows that this has never happened before.

She strips her trousers off and sits on the edge of the bed, her anticipation switching to uncertainty, looking up at him and his grin, this man to whom she is married, and she's slept with people she's just met before, that's not the issue: it's the husband bit . She has never slept with a husband before.

But she lies back as he jumps enthusiastically on to the bed, and then before she can say anything he has rolled over and is diving straight in, his head at her groin.

She lets her legs widen, surprised. She would have preferred a gentler on-ramp, she thinks, looking along her body at his industrious head, but he knows what he's doing. Tongue firm, enthusiastic, efficient, her body is increasingly into it as her mind catches up—yes, there he is, working away; she touches his loose curls with one hand. And after surely less than three minutes, maybe four, she finds herself stretching out in satisfaction, her legs straightening to either side of his shoulders, while in her head she is still thinking about the logistics, about how often he believes he has done this, about the lampshade above her that she has noticed for the first time is the wrong colour.

And then, still grinning, he kneels up on the bed and tilts his head, gesturing towards the penis, a sort of "Hmm?" like he's offering her another chocolate digestive. She nods, and he wriggles into place for his turn at an orgasm.

His takes a little longer, but the whole thing is done in not much more than ten minutes.

Gosh. Married life, she thinks.

○○

She takes her clothes with her to the bathroom and washes, gets dressed. The husband is in the kitchen, still naked, eating the leftover toast she abandoned in the morning.

"That's been there since breakfast," she says. It's mid-afternoon—it can't taste good.

"Waste not, want not," he says.

He's a loud eater, and he isn't quite closing his mouth. This must be what Nat meant about the chewing. She feels her post-coital fondness recede a little.

"When are you going over to Elena's?" he asks.

She'd almost forgotten. The clock says half past three. Is she ready for another couple of hours with the husband?

"We could fit in another Mindhunter ?" he says, and wet nodules of toast are still visible on his teeth as he talks.

No. "I need to pick up a couple of things on the way," she says. "I'll eat at Elena's, don't wait up if you've got an early start."

"Hey, am I back in the bedroom tonight?" he calls out as she's leaving.

At this point, why not? "Yeah, I'm probably over whatever it was."

"Great," he says. "I missed you last night."

He really is enthusiastic.

○○

Lauren gets to Walthamstow at half past four, with two and a half hours to kill before she's meant to meet Elena. She sits down at a cafe to search through her phone again but she can't stand it, so she walks instead, fast and directionless. Past coloured doors, a pawn shop, a cat warming himself on the lid of a black bin, the big murals of a neighbourhood newly determined to be fashionable. Delivery bikes gathered outside the Nando's. A mattress leans against a wall; someone has scrawled LITTERING IS A CRIME MATTHEW on it in permanent marker.

She stops at a dessert bar and gets two scoops of ice cream, rosewater and mint choc chip, and the woman gives her three free wafers. "Have more if you want, love, they're past their best-before so I can't sell them." She eats, then sets off again. She'll say this about the hiking: she walks for two hours and barely notices it, no burgeoning blisters, no tired legs.

And when it's finally almost seven, and she heads to Elena's flat, she is so happy to find it unchanged. Messier, with the wedding so close—the kitchen table is covered with index cards, guest names arranged around notional tables—but the walls, the furniture, the plates are the same as they always were.

"Oh my god," Elena says, flops down on to the sofa and kicks her legs up. "Weddings are terrible. You should have told me how much work this would be. I mean, you did, but you should have made me believe you."

"I guess I should have," Lauren says. She has been listening to Elena's plans and looking at dresses and talking about flowers for months, and it's been fun but also a weird thing to do, single: to help someone plan a party that's all about how they're definitely not like you. How different would it have felt with a husband of her own?

"I haven't cooked," Elena says, "I mean, obviously, you saw the kitchen. I'll order noodles in a minute."

"Yeah, great."

"And we can arrange the almonds after that," Elena adds. "But tell me what your thing is first, sorry. I don't know why I'm like this, the wedding's all I can think about. Why do I care about where the gift table goes? Why do I care about whether the fairy lights are warm white or cool white? Warm's better, right?"

"Yes," Lauren says firmly. "Definitely warm."

"God, I'm doing it again. Tell me your thing." And Elena sits herself up straight, leans forward, pushes her phone away from her on the coffee table. Attentive. Listening.

Now that Lauren's presented with the moment, it's not quite straightforward. You can't just say My weird attic is magic.

"Okay," she says. "My weird attic is magic. It's been creating a whole bunch of husbands, and I don't know what to do."