Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

"Oh yeah," Elena says. "Like, a hundred husbands? A thousand?"

God, imagine. "Eight or nine. One at a time, though."

"Probably for the best," Elena says. "You've got that spare room, but even so."

This isn't the Oh wow that's so strange but I definitely believe you, tell me more response that she'd ideally have liked, but it's also not the Ah you need to see a doctor immediately that she'd feared.

"So," she says, "obviously I don't really know what's going on."

"No," Elena says, "I can see that. I know we studied different subjects at uni but I don't think either of us covered magic attics."

Their friendship has always been built on Elena's convictions and Lauren's cooperation. Way back in her first weeks at university, Lauren had been so relieved to find a friend who seemed to know what she was doing, and who was willing to make it up if she didn't, to order a particular beer despite not really knowing what a sour was or whether she'd like it (she didn't), to declare that of course sneakers were fine for a night out (they were), to collude in hanging out at a particular table where a particular boy might just happen to walk past, "No, it's a better place to study, it's nothing to do with Nick" (it was). After uni, when Nat moved out of the flat and Elena took over her room, they'd invented the rules of adulthood together, a friendship sustained by never saying "Oh no, that can't be right, that's not how it works. "

She doesn't believe Lauren, of course. But she's joining in anyway. And what's more important? To be believed or to have the conversation?

"I thought you might be able to help," Lauren says. "Like—do you know where I met Jason?"

"At Noemi's party, right? Just after you and Amos broke up."

Four years ago. That fits with what she saw, scrolling back through photos.

"Why did I like him?"

"Oh, huh. Hair? That cheesecake his mum makes? The way he's, you know, constantly adorned with birds and flowers like a Disney princess? That ladybird he rescued from a Pizza Express, which by the way I still think he planted there to impress you. Not that that's a bad thing. Shows dedication."

Lauren tries a different approach. "Did anything weird happen when you got back from your hen party?" she asks.

"Like what?"

"Or while we were out. Did I seem okay?"

"Yeah? What's up?"

"Did I mention Jason?"

"Yeah, there was a full ten minutes where you wouldn't stop talking about how being married was so great and I was going to love it. Why?"

She's going to need to be more direct. "Okay," she says. "I know how this sounds, but I really do have a magic attic and it really is producing husbands for me."

"Yeah, you mentioned," Elena says, still entirely unfussed.

"This is a genuinely true thing and I don't know what to do," Lauren says. She's not sure how much clearer she can be.

Elena looks at her like it's obvious. "You go through them till you find the best one," she says. "Hot, rich, funny, good cook, gets on with his family, you get on with his family too, works as a fight choreographer for mid-budget movies."

"Yeah," Lauren says. "I guess."

"You know the wedding is really, really soon, right?" Elena says. "If this is a complicated way of telling me that actually marriage sucks and I shouldn't do it, you're going to need to be a lot less oblique."

"It's not," Lauren says. "It's not that. It's…" and then she stops.

She could insist.She could cry, say No, this isn't a joke, this is real , say I know it doesn't make any sense . She could really try, and of course Elena wouldn't believe it was happening, but maybe she'd at least accept that it wasn't a joke.

But then that would be it: Elena worried, phoning people, googling things that Lauren has already googled, and of course, of course she'd just assume that her own wedding had prompted some sort of breakdown. And for ever after, this conversation would be a thing Lauren did, just before the wedding. A story she made up, a delusion she suffered.

"No," she says. "You should absolutely get married."

"That's what I thought. But the farm," Elena says, "called today and said they only have a hundred red chair covers. So we need to either pick another colour, or I guess have half red and half white? Does that seem okay? God, I hate that I genuinely care about this. Sorry. Let's order food. And if you're still up for the almonds we could do that while we wait." She gestures at the floor, which is crowded with tulle and ribbons and big plastic bags of sugar-coated almonds in bright colours.

○○

It doesn't take Lauren long to get the hang of it. Five almonds: red, orange, pink, white, gold. Gather the tulle. Tie a bow. While they work, she lets herself drift through wedding chat, paying half-attention: final thoughts on poems for the reading; whether to ask the farm to keep the hens in their coop because it's practical or let them roam free because it's picturesque; brainstorming new entries for the list of songs that the DJ is forbidden to play.

When the noodles arrive, they eat on the only corner of the kitchen table that isn't occupied by the seating plan. Lauren spots herself and Jason at a table to the left.

In the real world it had been a tiny, tiny disappointment to her that she was just a bridesmaid and not the maid of honour. It's a tiny, tiny disappointment that it hasn't changed here, though at least she won't have to give a speech, or have Jason at the head table chewing with his mouth open.

She looks at her neighbours.

"You're okay with Amos and Lily, right?" Elena says, pointing. "Neither of them knows the other guests, and we were at their wedding so we had to invite them. But I've got a special table for people who had kids and regret it—if you want, I could put them there and give them a miserable time."

"No," Lauren says. "It's fine. Whatever's easiest.It'll be good to catch up."

It will not be good to catch up. The thing about having a really judgemental partner, she thinks, is that it's actually kind of great, as long as they like you . If someone hates the world, and you're the only exception, then surely that proves something. When she and Amos had been together, judging people had been a shared hobby and a shortcut to calibrating who she wanted to be. People who boast about never using recipes: judged . People who don't take their empties back to the bar even if they're walking past it: judged. People who take their empties back even if it's out of their way and who make sure the bar staff see them doing it: judged doubly. Amos had particularly deplored people who sighed loudly at train delays, because We're all on this train, you're not special, there's nothing uniquely bad about the delay to your specific journey. But also: people who wore turquoise tights, or velvet anything, or perfume to the cinema. Houses with names. Doorbells with cameras. Sparkling water. Metal birdbaths, for some reason. What a pleasure it had been to find the things that were wrong with the world and label them together, to pass judgements back and forth like gifts.

It's not so much fun to be on the outside of the little conspiracy of judging. She hasn't seen Amos often since they broke up, but every time she has she's been sure that she's unwittingly transgressed some newly discovered rule; that he's still thinking the mean little jokes he used to think, but this time they're about her, instead of for her.

At least with Jason she'll have a plus-one, and won't be sitting on her own with her ex and his wife, listening to poems about how great it is to definitely not be single.

○○

It's past midnight when she gets in, and Jason's an early riser, so she steps quietly up the stairs.

He's left a light on in the kitchen, which is kind. When she climbs into bed, his breathing changes, a tiny puff of air, pffff , an acknowledgement. She lies down behind him, close enough that she can feel his warmth radiate, and she touches his shoulder, near where she knows the ivy must be winding.

He makes another noise, a warm noise of comfort, mmmmph , and wriggles towards her. She can't tell whether he's asleep, but she puts her arm over him and lies close, his body shifting with every breath next to hers.

○○

In the morning she tells him that her cold is back and calls in sick again. The time has come. She can no longer avoid the attic.

She won't climb all the way up, of course; she's seen what that does to the husbands. Instead she looks in and then pulls her head quickly back down, no time for her eyes to adjust, no time to see anything except darkness.

Next she looks more slowly, still standing only halfway up the ladder. The bulb above once again starts to glow. Not full strength, just a little, half lighting what really does seem to be her otherwise normal attic.

She doesn't like it. She ducks her head back out to breathe.

For her third attempt, she takes her phone with her, set to flashlight. But when she raises her arm, the beaming light falters, the phone screen flashes orange. Shit. Back out, and the screen returns to normal.

She has a real flashlight somewhere. It used to be in a drawer, but in this world, she eventually finds it on top of the fridge.

This time she goes further up, waist-deep into the attic; but the flashlight flares even before she turns it on, then goes dark with a loud crack. When she jiggles it back down on the landing, it stays dead.

She finds the mushroom book and adds more notes at the back:

phone and flashlight behave weirdly in attic

??

?????

She conducts a series of tiny experiments:

light in attic still comes on if power off at fuse box

electric toothbrush, kettle, etc., also turn on in attic (without being plugged in)

potato left in attic does not change to another potato

flower left in attic does not change to another flower

impossible to tell if ant left in attic changes to another ant

She thinks, suddenly: snail . Her human eyes can't tell one ant from another but she could put a dab of paint on a snail shell and see if that changes?

She finds a medium-sized snail behind a big terra-cotta pot, winces as she pulls it away from the surface and feels the tension of its slug body clinging on. Carries it into the flat in a plastic bowl. No paint: she uses a dab of mayonnaise instead.

She leaves the snail unaccompanied for three minutes; they are, after all, notoriously slow.

When she sticks her head back up she thinks for a moment that it's vanished, and maybe this is a breakthrough, but then as the light above starts to glow, she sees that it has simply crawled out of its bowl, and still has the same smudge of mayonnaise. She plucks it from the floor and carries it back to the garden.

What next? She could book an electrician, but although she's happy to make and unmake husbands (who have, after all, been created by the attic in the first place), it doesn't seem fair to send a random guy in to maybe get vanished and replaced.

Online, she finds a forum that promises to answer any question. What science fiction story am I trying to remember? What's the best way to clean vertical blinds? How do you make goulash? She signs up with a fake name, and posts: Have you ever heard of a situation where different husbands turn up in your house, one at a time, and the world changes? But when she checks back half an hour later her question's been deleted: Welcome Tallulah Callebaut! This forum is for questions that it's possible to respond to well. A speculative query like this one doesn't really have a good answer, but feel free to try again with something more specific.

It isn't her fault that life has provided her with an excessively speculative query. By this time, however, she's had another go at eating some peanut butter toast (it's easier to swallow than it was yesterday; she gets a half-slice down before it overwhelms her). She has also, deep into the fourth or fifth page of results from one of her searches, found a long essay from a physicist with a theory about the spontaneous creation of life from magnetic fields. She can't follow it, but she sends a message through his contact form anyway. Her fake name again, she's not even sure why.

She's almost stopped believing that the situation she's researching is real: is she just incorrect about what's going on? But there's the crackle of the attic whenever she looks in; and then Jason comes home, his presence as baffling as ever. He has brought her a healing soup from a local restaurant. It's delicious, but he dirties three saucepans, a frying pan and five wooden spoons heating it up, and doesn't wash any of them. Surely if she'd invented him, she'd have invented someone better at cleaning?

On Wednesday morning she emails in sick for a third day, and logs into her fake email. A reply from the physicist.She opens it, trying to tamp down the hope bubbling in her chest. Tallulah , it says, my dear one, the vibrations of the universe have brought you to me. The prism of eternity shines. The seventeenth dimension has wound to where it would always wind. Destiny = Δ eS+iN Γ .

Ah. Back on his web page, looking more closely, she sees that his PhD is from The Sun, The Moon and The Immanence of the World.

A notification: he's written an immediate follow-up. It reads, in its entirety: My dear, do you have any close-up photographs of the skin between your outstretched fingers?

She logs out of the account.

○○

In the afternoon she retraces her Saturday-night steps. The bus back to St.Pancras. Past the commuters and art students to the chicken shop, her face in its mirrored walls. Another bus over to Soho, where the bars they went to are closed during the day but she looks through windows, listens at a closed door while delivery drivers criss-cross on motorbikes and pigeons gather at a loaf of bread that's spilling out of its bag across the pavement.

Nothing.

And on the bus back home, she thinks: she can't call in sick for ever.

So on Thursday she gets up early and goes in to the combination hardware store/garden centre where she supposedly works. It's terrifying to just turn up; she has scoured the company website and her emails but she still doesn't know what she does or how.

She arrives half an hour before opening and stands across the road. Staff members walk through a side gate, roll out trolleys of plants on to the pavement. At least she's admin and not public-facing; she won't have to try to figure out how to work a card machine while a queue of customers stares.

She has tied her hair back, which feels efficient. And a few minutes before she's due to begin, someone opens the main shop door, so she doesn't have to try to sneak in through the side gate and hope there isn't a code. Inside: a counter, where a staff member nods hello as she walks past.A row of saws and hammers and snippers and screwdrivers. A small display of ornamental water features. A door with a sign reading Staff Only , and she summons all her determination to push it open, but it reveals only a small yard with mismatched garden furniture, and a guy with a long beard, smoking. "Morning," he says.

Eventually she finds an unmarked door behind the lengths of wood that leads into a narrow office with small louver windows. Hot, no air-conditioning. She has only been there a couple of minutes, and is still figuring out which empty desk is hers, when a different man comes in with a plastic folder and says, "Oh, you're back, good, could you run this order for me?" then immediately leaves. A phone on maybe-her-desk rings; it's someone called Bev, who wants to know if C040338-14 has come in yet.

"I'll get back to you," she learns to say, "just catching up on the last couple of days!" but she will not get back to anyone. In the next hour, the man with the plastic folder returns twice to hand her more pieces of paper, she can't figure out who her boss is, the beard guy carries in a sawhorse and leaves it half blocking the door and asks her to "sticker it up," and in the end she takes the eleven different forms that she's received over the course of the morning and runs them through the shredder before pushing past the sawhorse to take an early lunch at eleven thirty and then not go back.

That night she's preoccupied, and Jason tries to cheer her up. "Come on, let's go round the corner for a pizza."

And it's nice of him, but the conversation drags and he is again chewing with his mouth open and she's sorry, but she's going to have to send him back.

○○

You can't stay married to someone for ever just because they climb out of your attic one afternoon. He rescued her from Kieran and she's grateful for that, but she's known him for four days, not even very interesting days. All they've done is watch Mindhunter and launder their hiking trousers and drink coffee. She doesn't owe him the rest of her life.

She doesn't want to take him to the wedding, Elena and Rob declaring their eternal love, Amos and whoever the hell Lily is judging his messy eating. And thanks to the attic, she doesn't have to: she can send him away without even having an awkward conversation about it.

So the next morning she ignores the work emails piling up and the replies to her previous off-sick emails, and the four calls that come up on her phone as Christine (work) , and she eats ice cream and lies on the sofa and reads. And now that she knows she's changing everything, that there are no consequences to her actions, she calls Elena just before Jason gets home and has another go at telling her what's going on, The thing I told you about the attic, I know how it sounds , and of course Elena doesn't believe it but she does, eventually, believe that Lauren believes it. And it all happens like she thought it would, the worry, Look, I'm coming over, don't go anywhere, keep the windows open, is there something wrong with the gas? Is Toby working from home, can you go down there?

And then Jason gets back, and the time has come.

"Welcome home," she says.

"You're back early," he says.

"Yeah, I finished early." She is experimenting further with her new this explains everything tone.

"That's great," he says.

"Anyway, I thought I heard something in the attic, I don't suppose you could have a look?" An incantation, a little question.

"Yeah, sure."

"I'll get dinner started while you're up there."

"What are we having?" he says.

"Your favourite." Probably he has one.

She watches from the kitchen doorway as he pulls the ladder down.

"Hey," she says as he's about to go up. "Thank you." And she kisses him on the cheek, avoiding the too-wet mouth.

"No worries," he says, and smiles, and then he's climbing.