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

for Anna often enough during her maternity leave—a few hours here or there with Sonny simply so she might spend some time by herself—to see how much of a pleasure those snatched minutes of being unaccountable were for her. I realized then that time alone is as precious as gold—it just looks shinier the less you have of it.

Once I trained myself not to cling to my phone for company in Bangkok but to look up—at the gilt on the temple roof and the gills in the fishmonger’s stall—I felt more in the moment than I had done for most of mine and Guy’s relationship. It is difficult to focus on going for a walk on Hackney Marshes when your heart and your other half are somewhere in the South China Sea.

Alone in the market streets of Bangkok, I watched crabs climb over each other in hollow polystyrene bricks, jumped out of the way of tuk-tuks, and graciously accepted a garland of flowers over my head but declined the lurid green liquid that came with it. I breathed deep the smell of rotten eggs, petrol, and fish guts and, somehow, felt cleansed.

After about an hour, I downloaded a dating app. I know. But I’d had a couple of beers in a rickety lean-to bar, buzzing with younger, hairier backpackers in their sociable, enviable groups. I don’t think I really meant to meet anyone; I was simply exploring the potential. Scrolling through my possibilities felt a more exotic proposition in the spicy hubbub of the Khao San Road than I knew they would from the sofa in my flat, tabbing between men who would probably ghost me and my local pizza delivery service. Besides, all these men were based in Thailand, and I’d had my fill of long-distance love.

I just wanted to see what I might be missing out on.

I chose a picture for my profile and carefully cropped Guy out of it. I flicked through lives like I was dealing cards, a croupier on a bamboo stool. Barely pausing for any of them, I realized that the fascination was not in the caliber but the quantity. It was like reading the phone book, but with pictures.

“Laughter,” “fun,” “socializing”—were any of these really hobbies? Yet more dispiriting: “protein.” Things that seemed to me to be fundamental at best were touted as talents or achievements. Jobs became characteristics, personality types reduced to bare chests. “Enjoys food,” another profile said, but didn’t we all? Was this what I’d given up my pirate for—a future full of men with smiles like party tricks for whom it was enough to eat and commute? Then again: Wasn’t this exactly what I had wanted Guy to do?

It didn’t take long for me to close the app in desolation at the dregs it offered up, and begin to reminisce over the better times I’d had with Guy. Fat tears dripped into my straw-colored lager.

And then a little ping. A light on the screen I had just turned over in disgust. A wink across a room: a match. Or at least the offer of one.

Tapping through to the profile, I noted bright eyes and a smile. A rare clothed torso, and a name, an age. “I came for the cocktails and stayed for the corporate lifestyle,” the tagline read. It ended with a little forehead-slapping emoji: “Doh!”

A joke! And a funny one! Sarcasm seemed to be an endangered species among this live-laugh-love-and-eat-food cohort. I clicked back to confirm the match immediately, and he messaged me right away—a whole stream of comments, popping onto my screen like bubbles in a glass of champagne.

-Hi! I know everyone says they don’t normally do this, but I really don’t. You seem different from the usual crowd on here though?

-I hope that doesn’t sound creepy

-Oh God, it does doesn’t it?

-How about just: would you like to go for a drink?

-(sorry)

I laughed aloud, but everyone else around me was either arm-wrestling or doing shots or some contorted combination of the two, and my peal of delight went unnoticed.

-Not creepy, and sure! I’m on the Khao San Road, where are you?

There was a pause and the dots of him typing his response.

-Oh no, you’re in literally the worst part of Bangkok. Are you new here?

-Kind of…

-In that case, dinner’s on me—meet me at the Banyan Tree in an hour?

17. Effie

By the time Anna, Effie, and Ben returned, Lizzie had gone upstairs to shower. In her absence, furniture was apologetically righted, chairs penitently folded and tucked away in the Hall’s cavernous and secretive corners. Flowers were carefully picked up from the floor and rescue attempts made on the displays, the dirty plates; the cake on its pedestal was whisked away to stay fresh in the fridge. The group moved slowly, the survivors of some great military push. The Hall was busy with battlefield debris, full of wedding.

They stacked and carried, tidied and scrubbed until they heard the midmorning siren wail in the fields: the call to lunch for the laborers picking grapes or scything wheat, digging trenches or plucking fruit from the vines that snaked around the house. Effie imagined the farmhands retreating from the midday sun in aerial view, moving through their verdant lanes like Pac-Man, and she felt her still-empty stomach chomp in protest.

She liked the sensation of being excavated from the inside: a warm churn of righteousness, the intensity settings of which she alone could control. The low hum of hunger matched the din in her head and softened it, distracted from it—when the thoughts became too loud, she simply doubled down on fasting, cranked up the stomach acid to drown them out.

She had always done it, sought agency through her intake and by mastering her meals—or lack of them. As a teenager, Effie had realized that her emotions functioned like a microwave on whatever food she laid eyes on—able either to warm it with joy to a heartiness she could let herself take pleasure in