Nine Perfect Strangers

  He stood. He needed something to eat. Thinking of his grandchildren had created a crater of misery in his stomach that could only be filled with carbohydrates. He would make a toasted cheese – Jesus Christ. No bread. No cheese. No toaster. ‘You might experience something we call “snack anxiety”,’ his wellness consultant, Delilah, had told him with a gleam in her eyes. ‘Don’t worry, it will pass.’

  He slumped back in his chair and thought back to the day he booked himself into this hellhole. That moment of temporary insanity. His appointment with the GP had been at 11 am. He even remembered the time.

  The doctor said, ‘Right. Tony.’ A beat. ‘About those test results.’

  Tony must have been holding his breath because he took an involuntary gusty gulp of air. The doctor studied the paperwork for a few moments. He took off his glasses and leaned forward, and there was something in his eyes that reminded Tony of the vet’s face when he told him that it was time to let Banjo go.

  Tony would never forget the shocking clarity of the moment that followed.

  It was like he’d been walking around in a daze for the last twenty years and suddenly he was awake. He remembered how his mind had raced on the drive home. He had been so clear and focused. He needed to act. Fast. He could not spend the short time he had left working and watching TV. But what to do?

  So he Googled. ‘How to change . . .’ Google finished the sentence for him. How to change my life. There were a trillion suggestions, from religion to self-help books. That’s when he came across an article about health resorts. Tranquillum House was top of the list.

  A ten-day cleanse. What could be so hard about that? He hadn’t taken a break in years. He ran a sports marketing consultancy and he’d made one of the few excellent decisions of his life when he hired Pippa as an office manager. She was better than him at basically every aspect of his job.

  He would drop some weight. He would get himself together. He would make an action plan. On the drive from the airport he’d felt almost optimistic.

  If only he hadn’t made that stupid last-minute decision to stock up on emergency supplies. He’d already taken the turn-off to Tranquillum House when he did a U-turn and headed back to the nearest town, where he’d seen a drive-through bottle shop. All he’d got was a six-pack of beer (light beer) and a bag of chips and some crackers (what the hell was wrong with crackers?).

  If he hadn’t turned around he would never have met Loony Woman on the side of the road. He’d thought she was in some kind of trouble. What other logical reason would there be to sit on the side of the road screaming and banging her horn? When she opened the window and he saw her face, she had looked seriously ill. Was menopause really that bad or was this woman a hypochondriac? Maybe it was that bad. Once he got out of here he’d ask his sister.

  Now she appeared perfectly normal and healthy. If he hadn’t seen her on the side of the road, he would have picked her as one of those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ‘super mums’ that bounded about like labradors when Tony’s kids were at school.

  He was kind of terrified of her. She’d made him feel like a moron. It brought back a long-buried memory of a humiliating incident from childhood. He’d had a thing for one of his older sister’s friends and something happened – he’d said something or done something, he couldn’t quite remember – but he knew it was to do with periods and tampons, something he hadn’t understood at the age of thirteen, something innocent and trite that had seemed like the end of the world at the time.

  Now he was fifty-six years old. A grandfather! He’d seen his wife give birth to their three children. He was beyond feeling embarrassed by the dark mysteries of a woman’s body. Yet that’s how Loony Woman had made him feel.

  He stood, agitated, his chair scraping back. There were two hours of ‘free time’ to fill before dinner. At home the hours between work and bed glided by in a haze of beer and food and television. Now he didn’t know where to go. This room felt too small for him. There were too many cutesy ornaments. Yesterday he’d turned around and knocked a vase off a side table, shattering it, causing him to swear so loudly that whoever was in the room next to his probably heard. He hoped it wasn’t an antique.

  He leaned over the balcony and studied the grounds. Two kangaroos stood in the shade of the house. One of them was grooming itself, twisting around in a very human way to scratch. The other one sat still, ears alert; it looked like it was carved in stone.

  He could see the gleaming aquamarine of a huge kidney-shaped pool. Maybe he’d go for a swim. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been for a swim. The beach used to be such a big part of his life when the kids were little. He took all three to Nippers every Sunday morning for years, to learn how to be surf-safe. Meanwhile, his three pale-skinned grandchildren had probably never caught a wave in their sad little Dutch lives.

  He went to his suitcase and pulled out his board shorts, trying not to think of a stranger’s hands rifling through his clothes, searching for contraband, noting his faded underwear. He needed new clothes.

  His ex-wife used to buy all his clothes. He never asked her to buy his clothes, she just did it, and he wasn’t interested in clothes, so he got used to it. Then, years later, during the divorce, it appeared that was one of the many, many things she did for which she felt ‘taken for granted’. He ‘never once said thank you’. Didn’t he? Could that be true? Jesus. And if it was true, why wait twenty-two years to mention it? Surely he said thank you. But why not tell him he was being an ungrateful pig at the time, so he didn’t have to feel like the worst man in the world sitting there in front of that counsellor all those years later? He’d felt so ashamed at that moment he literally couldn’t speak. This turned out to be an example of him ‘shutting down’, ‘being emotionally distant’, ‘not giving a shit’ – and on it went until he no longer did give a shit and he was numbly signing the papers.

  What was that phrase his wife used to describe him? As if it were funny? ‘Amateur human being.’ She’d even said it to the counsellor.

  A few months after that counselling session it occurred to him that there were various things he’d done in that marriage for which he was pretty sure he’d never been thanked or acknowledged. He took care of everything to do with her car, for example. The amateur human being kept her car filled with petrol. He’d often wondered if she thought it had some sort of self-filling mechanism. He got her car serviced once a year. Did her tax return.

  Wasn’t it possible they both took each other for granted? Wasn’t it possible that taking each other for granted was one of the benefits of marriage?

  But it was too late by then.

  Now it was five years since the separation and they were the best five years of his ex-wife’s life. She was back in touch with her ‘true self’. She lived on her own and did evening courses and went on weekends away with a gaggle of blissfully divorced women. In fact, they often came to places like this. His ex now had a ‘daily meditation practice’. ‘How long do you practise before you get it right?’ Tony had asked, and she’d rolled her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t get stuck there. Whenever she talked to Tony these days she kept stopping to breathe deeply. Come to think of it, she looked like she was breathing through a straw.

  Tony pulled up the board shorts.

  Jesus Christ.

  They must have shrunk badly. He’d probably washed them the wrong way. In cold water. Or hot water. The wrong water. He tugged at the fabric with all his strength and slid the button through the buttonhole.

  Done. Except he couldn’t breathe.

  He coughed and the button pinged free, skittering across the floorboards. He laughed out loud with disbelief and looked down at the huge, hairy bulge of his stomach. It seemed to belong to someone else.

  He remembered a different body. A different time. The almighty roar of an ecstatic crowd. The way the sound used to vibrate in his chest. Once there ha
d been no barrier at all between his mind and his body. He thought ‘run’ and he ran. He thought ‘jump’ and he jumped.

  He rolled down his shorts so that they sat beneath his belly, and thought of his ex-wife, six months pregnant, doing the same thing with an elastic-waisted skirt.

  He picked up his room key and put a white bath towel over his shoulder. Were these towels allowed outside? There was probably a clause in the contract about it. Old mate the beanstalk would be able to tell him. Presumably a lawyer. Tony knew all about lawyers.

  He left his room. The house was as quiet and still as a church. He opened the front door and walked out into the afternoon heat and down the paved path that led to the pool.

  A woman walked towards him from the opposite direction, wearing a sporty black swimming costume and a sarong tied at her waist. The one with the chunky plait of hair like a horse’s tail and brightly coloured cat’s-eye glasses. Tony had her pegged: intellectual left-wing feminist. She would write Tony off after five minutes of conversation. Still, he’d rather be ignored by the feminist than interact with Loony Woman.

  The path was too narrow for them to pass each other, so Tony stood to one side, which hopefully would not offend her feminist principles, like that time when he’d held open a door for a woman and she’d hissed, ‘I can open it myself, thanks.’ He’d thought about letting it slam in her face, but he didn’t, of course, he just smiled like a gormless goon because not every man was capable of violence towards women, even if they did have the occasional violent thought.

  This woman didn’t make eye contact, but lifted her hand in thanks as if she were lifting it from the steering wheel of a car to thank him for letting her into his lane, and it was only after she’d gone past him that he realised she was weeping quietly. He sighed. He couldn’t stand to see a woman cry.

  He watched her go – not a bad figure – then walked on towards the pool, tugging at his shorts to make sure they didn’t fall at his feet.

  He opened the gate.

  For fuck’s sake.

  Loony Woman was in the pool, bobbing about like a cork.

  chapter nineteen

  Frances

  For heaven’s sake, thought Frances. The serial killer.

  The mechanisms of the pool gate had bamboozled her for about five minutes but, naturally, he had no problem at all. He lifted the little black knobby thing with one meaty hand and kicked the gate hard with the ball of his foot.

  Frances had already had to endure Flustered Glasses powering up and down the pool creating a wake like a speedboat. Now him.

  The serial killer dropped his bath towel on a deckchair (you were meant to use the stripy blue-and-white towels from reception, but rules didn’t apply to him), walked straight to the edge of the pool and, without even bothering to put in his toe to check the temperature, dived straight in. Frances did a sedate breaststroke in the other direction.

  Now she was stuck in the pool because she didn’t want to get out in front of him. She would have thought she was too old to worry about her body being observed and judged in a swimsuit, but apparently this neurosis began at twelve years old and never ended.

  The problem was that she wanted to convey strength in all her future interactions with this man, and her soft white body, especially when compared to Masha’s Amazonian example, damn her, didn’t convey anything much except fifty-two years of good living and a weakness for Lindt chocolate balls. The serial killer would no doubt be the type to rank every woman based on his own personal ‘Would I fuck her?’ score.

  She remembered her first-ever boyfriend of over thirty years ago, who told her he preferred smaller breasts than hers while his hands were on her breasts, as if she’d find this interesting, as if women’s body parts were dishes on a menu and men were the goddamned diners.

  This is what she said to that first boyfriend: ‘Sorry.’

  This was her first boyfriend’s benevolent reply: ‘That’s okay.’

  She couldn’t blame her upbringing for her pathetic behaviour. When Frances was eight years old, a man patted her mother’s bottom as he walked past them on a suburban street. ‘Nice arse,’ he said in a friendly tone. Frances remembered thinking, Oh, that’s kind of him. And then she’d watched in shock as her five-foot-nothing mother chased the man to the corner and swung a heavy handbag full of hardback library books at the back of his head.

  Right. Enough was enough. She would get out of the pool, at her own pace. She would not rush to grab up her towel to throw over her body.

  Wait.

  She didn’t want to get out of the pool! She was here first. Why should she get out just because he was here? She would enjoy her swim and then she would get out.

  She dived down and swam along the pebbly bottom of the pool, enjoying the dappled light and relishing the ache in her legs from the hike that morning. Yes, this was so lovely and relaxing and she was fine. Her back felt quite good – after her second massage with Jan – and she was definitely a little transformed already. Then, apropos of absolutely nothing, the words of the review slithered snakelike into her mind: Misogynistic airport trash that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

  Frances thought of how Zoe had said she would read Nathaniel’s Kiss just to be nice. The last thing that sad beautiful child needed to read was misogynistic trash. Had Frances accidentally been writing misogynistic trash for the last thirty years? She came to the surface with an undignified gasp for air that sounded like a sob.

  The serial killer stood at the opposite side of the pool, breathing hard, his back against the tiles, his arms resting on the paving. He stared straight at her with something like . . . fear.

  For God’s sake, she thought. I may not be twenty years old, but is my body really so unattractive it actually scares you?

  ‘Um,’ he said out loud. He grimaced. He actually grimaced. That’s how disgusting he found her.

  ‘What?’ said Frances. She squared her shoulders and thought of her mother swinging her handbag like a discus thrower. ‘We’re not meant to be talking.’

  ‘Um . . . you’re . . .’ He touched under his nose.

  Did he mean, ‘You smell’?

  She did not smell!

  Frances put her fingers to her nose. ‘Oh!’

  Her nose was bleeding. She’d never had a nosebleed in her life. That review had given her an actual nosebleed.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said coldly. Both times she’d interacted with this man she had been at a terrible and most mortifying disadvantage.

  She tipped her head back and dog paddled towards the steps.

  ‘Head forward,’ said the serial killer.

  ‘You’re meant to put your head back,’ snapped Frances. She waded up the stairs, trying to stop her swimsuit from riding up with one hand while attempting to stem the flow of blood with the other. Great clots of blood slid from her nose into her cupped hand. It was disgusting. Unbelievable. Like she’d been shot. She was not good with blood. Not really very good with anything remotely medical. It was one of the reasons why having babies had never appealed to her. She looked up at the blue sky and a wave of nausea hit her.

  ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ she said.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he said.

  ‘I have low blood pressure,’ she said. ‘I faint a lot. I could easily faint.’

  ‘I’ve got you,’ he said.

  She clutched his arm as he helped her out of the pool. He wasn’t rough exactly, but there was a detachment to his touch, and a kind of concentrated grunting effort, like he was moving an ungainly piece of furniture through a narrow doorway. A refrigerator, perhaps. It was depressing to be treated like a refrigerator.

  The blood continued to gush from her nose. He led her to the deckchair, sat her down, put one towel around her shoulders and the other in front of her nose.

  ‘Firmly pinch the bridge of your nos
e,’ he said. ‘Like this.’ He pinched her nose and then directed her hand into the same spot. ‘That’s it. You’ll be right. It’ll stop.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re meant to put your head back,’ protested Frances.

  ‘It’s forward,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the blood runs down the back of your throat. I’m not wrong on this.’

  She gave up. Maybe he was right. He was one of those definite people. Definite people were often annoyingly right about things.

  The nausea and dizziness began to ease. She kept pinching her nose and chanced an upward glance. He stood solidly in front of her so she was at eye level with his belly button.

  ‘You okay?’ he said. He coughed his phlegmy plague-ridden man cough.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m Frances.’ She kept one hand on her nose and held out her other hand. He shook it. Her hand disappeared into his.

  ‘Tony,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks so much for your help,’ she said. He was probably a nice man, even if he had treated her like a refrigerator. ‘And you know – for stopping on the road when I was . . .’

  He looked pained by the memory.

  ‘I’ve never had a bleeding nose before,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know what brought it on, although I guess I have had a bad cold. Actually, you sound like you’ve had quite a bad –’

  ‘I might get going,’ Tony interrupted her impatiently, aggressively, as if she were an old lady who had accosted him at a bus stop and wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise.

  ‘Places to go, people to see?’ said Frances, deeply offended. She’d just been through a medical crisis.

  Tony met her gaze. His eyes were light brown, almost gold. They brought to mind a small endangered native animal. A bilby, for example.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just thought I should . . . get dressed for dinner.’

  Frances grunted. They had plenty of time before dinner.

  There was an awkward moment of silence. He didn’t leave.