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

spent alone, but for the ebb and flow of other course-mates through the college gates, at lunchtime, in the library. When she met up with Anna every evening, they went to the weekly film night as a twosome or shared a bottle of wine, then went to bed. The following day brought still no Lizzie.

They were not worried so much as intrigued. Lizzie texted them constantly with updates: the man she had met was not gown, a student, but town, a—as Lizzie described him—“real person.” He was older than them, had a job, lived by himself in a small cottage on the outskirts of the city. She tackled our course’s reading list in his garden, having gotten the prescribed books out of a suburban library. She wrote up her study notes at his kitchen table, between cooking meals in an actual oven. In the student halls, their rooms had only two electric burners; on day four, Lizzie roasted a chicken.

On day five, the man’s girlfriend came back early from a work trip. The weather broke and Lizzie walked all the way back to college in the rain, wearing the tight and rather brief minidress she’d been out clubbing in almost a week before. Her blond hair hung in wet streamers around her face; her eyes were red and swollen. Effie and Anna never even found out the man’s name: he was known as Shithead forever more.

Lizzie took it badly, stopped eating and barely got dressed. She had seen a life she wanted and she mourned it, even though it had been a mirage—an escape to ordinary as her finals loomed. The exams were two months away, dissertations due in one.

They took turns looking after her, Anna spooning soup into Lizzie’s mouth as she stared at the walls, Effie dragging her to the showers and persuading her to wash her lank hair. But as time passed, Lizzie grew more lethargic, not less. What little food she forced down settled about her jawline and her waist like an extra layer of bulky clothing. She had agonizing, temple-splitting headaches, and her gums began to bleed. It was only when she theatrically puked on the wall tiles of hers and Effie’s shared kitchen that they recognized the symptoms from TV.

Effie made the appointment and went with her, stroked her hair and brought her hot water bottles for the days afterward as Lizzie lay, cramping, in bed. Anna brought noodles through from her room down the hall, encouraged them to eat vegetables, tried to remind them both to study when they could. Exams were three weeks away, dissertations due in one, and Lizzie had barely started hers.

Effie blinked a tear out of her eye and it rolled over the bridge of her nose, where she lay on her side, and dripped onto the French linen.

She couldn’t help feeling that Lizzie had used her, again.

45. Anna

“Did you put the ring on because you were so unhappy with the one I gave you?”

Steve’s lovely, lined faced was careworn with drying tears. The pain Anna had experienced trying to soap the fucking thing off was nothing compared to this.

After she had left Effie to sleep, Anna had found her husband and told him what she had seen on the wedding night. He had gone very quiet.

She’d thought he would be angry with her for not telling him about the scene she had stumbled across, hazy as her recollection of it was, but his upset at the fact of her having put on the alien wedding ring was far stronger. His tears reminded her of the stormy emotions she often had to contend with during one of Sonny’s tantrums—the little tyrant with Steve’s face could rage for what felt like hours on end if he felt particularly hard done by.

Steve was far better than she was at remaining calm until the storm had passed and Sonny had been put successfully to bed; Steve would wait until he had a cold beer in his hand before blowing the stress away with one heavy out-breath. Now, in the library, his sadness was as noisy and abundant as that of the tiny person they had made together, who Anna was beginning to ache for.

“No, Stevo, I just…I was drunk. I felt like I needed a change.” She spread her hands where she sat, opposite him on a sofa that either he or Iso had slept on and that the two of them had reclaimed in grand style only a couple of days ago.

“A change?” Steve’s eyebrows and Adam’s apple shot up like a fairground high striker. “Is there somebody else?”

“God, no! No, no—that’s not what I meant at all,” Anna sighed and rubbed her face.

She thought of how much she had enjoyed Lizzie’s engagement party, how when she had sat at the bar while Steve packed away his records, she had wondered—briefly—what it might feel like to be going home with someone else. The thought had gone no further; it could never have happened—and yet she had felt guilty for months afterward about what she might have meant in her mind.

Somebody else. She almost laughed at the notion, but stopped herself just in time. She appreciated Steve’s faith in her ability to have met somebody else, but the logistics were hardly stacked in her favor. Her working hours, for one. The fact that when she wasn’t at her desk she was usually with Sonny, for another. She wore funereal suits and a gown for her nine to five; away from work, she haunted supermarkets and soft-play cafés rather than bars.

Christ, Steve is far more likely to meet someone else than I am.

That no man had even glanced at Anna since she’d given birth was one unassailable hurdle to her having an affair—and one she despised herself for even using as a metric for her own sense of self-worth. That the very idea of revealing her deflated, puckered, and battle-scarred body to anyone who wasn’t