The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

Oh Christ.

Effie had had mornings like this before, where the weight of existence took a demi-second before reattaching itself, and she experienced a momentary lightness—the brief float of a sheet being shaken out and straightened in midair above a bed before it gently kisses the mattress once more. Then—the reserves of optimism emptied, the well of memory refilled—Effie’s earthly heaviness would resume.

It had been at its most intense right after James had left, when her old life still existed as living history in the borrowed moments between sleeping and waking, before she remembered he had gone. As she outgrew them, the thump back down to earth grew less bone-shattering with every day; with Ben by her side, waking up was no longer anything to fear.

Except he wasn’t next to her this morning.

Without moving her pounding head, Effie pieced together the room. White sheets, white canopy, white walls. White light gleaming in shafts through the windows—she must have left them unshuttered. A white bridal suite, for a white wedding that hadn’t happened.

How had she ended up in here?

Her mouth was dry, her tongue a rubber bath mat suckered to its roof. Her eyes felt gritty, and her vision swam with pressure flecks when she rubbed at them. Day-old mascaraed lashes cracked and broke clean off under the friction of her fists. Effie’s joints ached; her limbs were heavy. Her heart, tentatively stretching itself awake for the day, returned to its senses and sank that little bit lower into her chest when it, too, realized just how hungover she was.

Effie looked around herself at a too-familiar scene: yesterday’s clothes piled on the floor next to the bed, flung there as an indistinct consequence of actions that she knew, logically, must have happened in order for the garments to have ended up where they had, but one that she couldn’t quite remember being active in. Imagine, yes, but not remember.

In the last six months she had sometimes lurched awake in rooms with the knowledge that something had happened there—an abstract sense of past action, lingering like the final note sung by a lone voice—but no further details. Sometimes there were showreels, teasers almost, to accompany the rooms: flashes of time out of sequence for her to attempt to edit into a narrative. Tears. Fury. Blinkered first-person perspectives of shouting and laughing, their sound muted and the words muffled. Brief and blurry glimpses of light switches, bathroom tiles, faces, mouths. Crying. Retching.

And there were the rooms she woke up in alone, but with the feeling that someone had recently absented themselves, like the March Hare dashing off. A scent, perhaps, or an abandoned item of clothing—a tie, a sock, a cuff link. And a humming, a thrumming; a guilty throbbing or dull, insistent ache between her legs that she felt she could not possibly have signed up for in those moments of half-life, given that she sometimes awoke knowing neither where or even who she was anymore—nor who she had been with—but which she had more than likely invited or embarked upon willingly enough before the blackout curtain fell mid-act.

No, I don’t do that anymore.

Nevertheless, Effie eyed the dent in the pillow next to the one her head was resting on. A crater in the linen that contained within a few stray hairs—short, dark; dark?—and an empty glass on the bedside table adjacent to it. And then she remembered—some, not all.

Drinks by the pool. More drinks by the pool. At some point, drinks in the pool; at another, music. Indoors now and laughter. Swaying to a beat, now spinning, and then collapsing. Words of comfort, screeches of hilarity, then darkness and now here. At Lizzie’s wedding.

How much did I drink?

Stuttering into life, Effie raised herself on bony elbows and saw her skinny naked body reflected in a ghoulish pale blue against the white, white sheets and under the harsh tones of morning in this white, white room. Her hip bones rose like sleigh rails on either side of the empty stomach slung taut between them. James used to cup the one closest to him in his palm as she woke up. “Too nobbly,” he’d say, when she was working too hard and eating too little. They were sharper now than they ever had been.

“Ben?” she tried to ask the room, but her throat was too dry to disturb the silence.

Water.

Effie swung her feet to the floor and stood, allowing the room a moment to finish swaying around her before she took her first steps. She hooked her feet back into yesterday’s skirt and T-shirt, pulled them up and over her, then walked slowly—padding and plodding as though bowed by age or infirmity rather than the stacking sensation of shame upon shame that she was beginning to feel—out of the room and onto the terra-cotta-tiled landing.

The house was silent but for the holiday half-sound of light cotton curtains swirling on currents of warm air as it met the building’s ancient coolness. A door creaked somewhere in a breeze, the sonorous timbre of mature timber only ever heard in old buildings, across flagged floors with no plush carpets to guzzle up the noise. Outside, the tinkling hum of a garden sprinkler puttering water across the lawn to quench its thirst and the low, long-distance hum of an engine in motion—a lawnmower, Effie assumed before remembering that she was no longer in the city. A tractor, then, or an airplane, something mechanical whose buzz and drone matched precisely the one beginning to kick in at the point where her skull sat on the stem of her neck.

She approached the top of the stairs, moving gingerly with her head down, shoulders hunched against the day and its insistence on time passing as usual despite a slowness she felt emanating from her very bones. The ancient coldness of the stone steps seeped through the bamboo soles of her flip-flops, and when she looked up and over