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

trawling round the high street. That, Anna pondered bitterly, was what people needed “content creators” for.

She remembered first following Iso’s sun-drenched account by the half-light of her dimmed reading lamp during one bleary, predawn feed with baby Sonny, and her stomach clenched with bitterness. Anna would have preferred her insecurities remain within the pixels of her phone screen, rather than following her on holiday. If she hadn’t met Iso—if Iso hadn’t met her husband—would Anna have clicked through on Instagram to buy that kaftan in the hope of resembling this limby burnished girl? Anna checked with her fingertips that her permanently pink face was still slick with factor 50 sunblock. Probably. Although it would have looked like a traveling circus’s big top on her.

Anna’s relationship with her Instagram account was a Mobius strip of envy and self-loathing. She tried not to use it—had taken it off her phone twice—but regularly found herself scrolling before dawn when she woke up airless and anxious about the day ahead. For every hundred or so posts she saw that made her feel terrible—fat, old, left out, joyless—she’d pop a shot of Sonny up there—cute in a raincoat, foamy and adorable with an oat-milk babyccino (ugh)—and bask in the warm glow of likes from people she barely knew.

From her spot in the queue she watched Iso contort herself so she looked even thinner in the already roomy dress. Here she was leaning back against the cliff, one arm extended beyond her head, eyes closed in sunlit ecstasy; there laughingly “balancing” a distant outcrop of rock on the end of one finger. Anna knew that these shots would go up with captions like “Be true to yourself” or “So summery RN” or maybe just a little row of peace-out finger emojis.

And then there were the posts Anna thrived on, both for their earnestness and for their ridiculousness: the most elaborately staged, waspishly-waisted, sucked-in cheekbones, and carefully angled, waifishly skinny arm-legs would be accompanied with a blurb about how insecure the influencer was feeling within herself, how thorny a subject self-esteem could be, how Instagram wasn’t real life and they should all be kinder to each other. It would be sponsored by a brand of muesli, and Anna would “like” it as though clicking the little heart was a means of expelling some of the poison that had built up inside her.

More like squeezing a pimple with dirty fingers.

After the improvised shoot, Iso took her phone back from Charlie and began busily paging around its screen, lightening, filtering, framing, composing.

Behind them, from the mouth of the cave, Effie plunged through the crowd and out into the daylight.

The shift into daylight took its toll on her pupils, and she staggered slightly as she met a midday sun made even brighter as it reflected off the white-gray stones of the cliffs on all sides. As her gaze adjusted—to the primary-colored tourist T-shirts, the azure blue of the sky overhead, the navy-gray asphalt of the tarmac—the people closest to her came into focus.

“We were wondering where you’d got to!” cried Anna, breaking off from the circle and stepping toward her friend.

“And what you and Ben might be getting up to in the dark, eh, Eff?” Charlie gave his finest imaginary mustache-twisting leer from behind expensive sunglasses.

Effie scowled reflexively and spun around. “Where’s Ben?” she panted.

A few yards away, Lizzie was standing just beyond Anna, laughing about something with Steve, who was pointing toward the village on the cliffs above. Her face was creased in a smile and was pretty in the sunlight, less drawn than it had been, more alive than they’d seen her for what felt like many months. Her short white dress clung to her brown thighs in the languid heat.

Behind Effie, Bertie appeared in the cave’s empty and light-absorbing mouth.

“You’re here,” he said, shielding his own unaccustomed eyes from the glare of daylight. “You and Ben ran off so quickly! What happened in there?”

Anna switched off her smile and saw the rest of the group’s eyes swivel toward her friend curiously. Expectantly. “Effie? Are you okay?”

“Errr,” she began.

But before she could say more, she heard her name behind her, on the path from the cave’s mouth. Ben. He walked briskly toward them, eyes darting from the road below to the group and back again. When he reached them, he bent and braced his hands against his knees, drawing hot breath from the even hotter air.

“We need to go back to the house,” he said. Smoothly, but in a way that would brook no dissent.

“Ben…?” Effie started toward him, one hand outstretched to lay on his broad back.

“Now,” he said, his smile fixed and tight. “I think Dan is here. I think I saw him in there.”

Lizzie’s smirk faded. Her expression changed as abruptly as a channel on a television, zapped from life into standby. Closed, quiet, numb. Her dark eyes went black with shock.

“Let’s go,” she said, turning and beginning a brisk march in the direction of their cars.

None of them moved, not quite sure what was going on. The shift had been so swift, so immediate that Steve’s face was still caught in an uncertain grin.

Striding down the driveway, a hundred yards ahead of them, Lizzie spun on her heel. Her face was streaked with tears and red with rage as she spat back a shout at them:

“Now!”

32. The Wedding Night: Lizzie

It’s what every girl dreams of, isn’t it? A man so devoted that he’ll follow her to a foreign land to prove it and win her heart?

What sounds romantic during the years we while away in teenage bedrooms longing for a knight to find us turns out to be something very different when you’re old enough to realize women aren’t Rapunzel, they’re Joan of Arc. And that the men who pitch up at the foot of the tower are more likely to burn you as a witch than want you for a wife.

I realized, too late, that