Nine Perfect Strangers

  Masha sighed, as if Carmel were not behaving.

  ‘I know I need to work more exercise into my schedule?’ offered Carmel. Was that what she wanted to hear?

  ‘Yes,’ said Masha. ‘Yes, you do. But I find this also not so interesting.’

  ‘When the kids are older I’ll have more time to –’

  ‘Tell me about when you were schoolgirl,’ interrupted Masha. ‘What were you like? Smart? Top of class? Bottom of class? Naughty? Loud? Shy?’

  ‘I was mostly near the top of the class,’ said Carmel. Always. ‘Not naughty. Not shy. Not loud.’ She thought about it. ‘Although, I could be very loud. If I felt strongly about something.’

  She remembered a heated argument with a teacher who wrote ‘the thunder boomed, the lightening flashed’ on the blackboard. Carmel stood up to correct the teacher’s spelling of ‘lightning’. The teacher didn’t believe her. Carmel wouldn’t back down, even when the teacher yelled at her. She was all-powerful when she knew without doubt that she was in the right. But how often did you know for sure that you were right? Hardly ever.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Masha. ‘Because right now you do not seem like a very loud person.’

  ‘You should see me in the morning when I yell at my kids,’ said Carmel.

  ‘Why have I not seen this “loud” Carmel? Where is she?’

  ‘Um – we’re not allowed to speak?’

  ‘That is a good point. But see – even then, when you made a very valid point, you said it like a question. You put this questioning sound at the end of your sentences. Like this? Your voice goes up? Like you are not really sure? Of everything you say?’

  Carmel squirmed at Masha’s imitation of her speech patterns. Was that really how she sounded?

  ‘And your walk,’ said Masha. ‘That is the other thing: I don’t like the way you walk.’

  ‘You don’t like the way I walk?’ spluttered Carmel. Wasn’t that kind of rude?

  Masha stood and came out from behind her desk. ‘This is how you walk right now.’ She rounded her shoulders, dropped her chin and did a scurrying kind of sidestep across the room. ‘Like you are hoping no-one sees you. Why do you do that?’

  ‘I don’t think I exactly –’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Masha sat back down. ‘I don’t think you always walked like this. I think once you walked properly. Do you want your daughters to walk like you walk?’ It was obviously a rhetorical question. ‘You are a woman in the prime of your life! You should march into a room with your head held high! Like you are walking onto a stage, a battlefield!’

  Carmel stared. ‘I’ll try?’ she said. She coughed, and remembered to turn it into a statement. ‘I will try. I will try to do that.’

  Masha smiled. ‘Good. At first it will feel strange. You will have to fake it. But then you will remember. You will think, Oh, that’s right, this is how I talk, this is how I walk. This is me, Carmel.’ She knocked her closed fist against her heart. ‘This is who I am.’

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘I will tell you a secret.’ Her eyes danced. ‘You will look thinner if you walk like that!’

  Carmel smiled back. Was she joking?

  ‘Everything will become clearer over the next few days,’ said Masha, with a gesture that made Carmel stand up quickly, as if she’d outstayed her welcome.

  Masha pulled a notepad towards her and began to write something down.

  Carmel hovered. She tried to put her shoulders back. ‘Could you just tell me how much weight I’ve lost so far?’

  Masha didn’t look up. ‘Close the door behind you.’

  chapter twenty-five

  Masha

  Masha studied the large man who sat on the other side of her desk, his feet planted solidly on the floor, his hands curled in meaty fists on his thighs, as if he were a prisoner hoping for parole.

  Masha remembered how Delilah had implied there was something unusual or secretive about Tony Hogburn. Masha did not agree. The man was not especially complex. He seemed to her to be a simple, grumpy fellow. He had lost weight already. Men who drank a lot of beer always did lose weight when they stopped, whereas women like Carmel, who had much less weight to lose, took much longer. In truth, Carmel hadn’t lost any weight at all, but there was no benefit in Carmel hearing that.

  ‘How did you come across Tranquillum House, Tony?’ Masha asked him.

  ‘I Googled “How to change your life”,’ said Tony.

  ‘Ah,’ said Masha. As an experiment, she sat back, crossed her legs, and waited for his eyes to travel down her body, which they did, of course (the man was not dead yet), but not for very long. ‘Why do you want to change your life?’

  ‘Well, Masha, life is short.’ His gaze moved past hers to the window behind her head. Masha noted that he seemed much calmer and more confident now than when he had complained about his contraband being confiscated. The positive effects of Tranquillum House! ‘I didn’t want to waste the time I had left.’

  He looked back at her. ‘I like your office. It’s like you’re on top of the world up here. I get claustrophobic down in that yoga studio.’

  ‘So how do you hope to change your life?’

  ‘I just want to get healthier and fitter,’ said Tony. ‘Drop some weight.’

  Men often used that phrase: ‘drop some weight’. They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to ‘lose weight’, with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.

  ‘I used to be very fit. I should have done this sooner. I really regret . . .’ Tony stopped, cleared his throat, as if he’d said more than he wanted.

  ‘What do you regret?’ asked Masha.

  ‘It’s not anything I’ve done. It’s more everything I haven’t done. I’ve just kind of moped about for twenty years.’

  It took a fraction of a second to translate the English word ‘moped’ – a word she didn’t hear much.

  ‘Twenty years is a long time to mope,’ said Masha. Foolish man. She herself had never moped. Not once. Moping was for the weak.

  ‘I kind of got into the habit of it,’ said Tony. ‘Not sure how to stop.’

  She waited to hear what he would say next. Women liked to be asked questions about themselves but with men it was better to be patient, to be silent and see what eventuated.

  She waited. The minutes passed. She was considering giving up when Tony shifted in his chair.

  ‘Your near-death experience,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘You said you no longer feared death, or something like that?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Masha. She studied him, wondering about his interest in this subject. ‘I no longer fear it. It was beautiful. People think death is like falling asleep but for me it was like waking up.’

  ‘A tunnel?’ said Tony. ‘Is that what you saw? A tunnel of light?’

  ‘Not a tunnel.’ She paused, considered changing the subject and putting the focus back on him. She had already revealed too much of her personal life earlier to that Frances Welty, with her bouncy hair and red lipstick, nearly knocking Masha’s glass ball off the desk, like a child, asking her greedy, nosy questions, making Masha forget her position.

  It was hard to believe Frances was exactly the same age as Masha. She reminded Masha of a little girl in her second-grade class. A plump, pretty, vain little girl who always had a pocket filled with Vzletnaya candies. People like Frances lived candy-filled lives.

  But she did not feel that Tony had lived a candy-filled life. ‘It was not a tunnel, it was a lake,’ she told him. ‘A great lake of shimmering coloured light.’

  She had never told a guest this before. She had told Yao about it, but not Delilah. As Tony ran a hand over his unshaven jaw, considering her words, Masha saw again t
hat incredible lake of colour: scarlet, turquoise, lemon. She hadn’t just seen that lake, she had experienced it with all her senses: she had breathed it, heard it, smelled it, tasted it.

  ‘Did you see . . . loved ones?’ asked Tony.

  ‘No,’ lied Masha, even as she saw an image of a young man walking towards her through the lake of light, colour streaming off him like water.

  Such an ordinary but exquisite young man. He wore a baseball cap, like so many young men did. He took it off and scratched his head. She had only ever seen him as her baby, her beautiful fat-cheeked toothless baby, but she knew immediately that this was her son, this was the man he would have and should have become, and all that love was still within her, as fresh and powerful and shocking as it had been when she’d held him for the first time. She did not know if it had been a precious gift or a cruel punishment to have experienced that love again. Perhaps it was both.

  She saw her son for what could have been a lifetime, or what could have been a few seconds. She had no concept of time. And then he was gone, and she floated near her office ceiling, above the two men working on her lifeless body. She could see a button on the floor where they had ripped open her silk shirt. She could see one of her legs splayed at a strange angle, as if she’d landed there after falling from a great height. She could see the top of another young man’s head, the white part in his dark hair revealing a tiny strawberry-shaped birthmark, the dampness of his forehead as he sent electrical pulses through her body, and somehow she felt everything he felt: his fear, his focus.

  Her next conscious memory had been the following day. She was back in the drab confines of her body and a tall beautiful nurse was saying, ‘Hello there, sleeping beauty!’ It was like being returned to jail.

  Except it wasn’t a nurse. This woman was the doctor who had performed her heart surgery: a quadruple bypass. In the years to come Masha often considered how her life would have been different if her heart surgeon had looked like the vast majority of heart surgeons. Her prejudices would have made her dismiss everything he had to say, no matter the accuracy. She would have put him in the same category as the grey-haired men who worked for her. She knew better than all of them. But this woman made Masha snap to attention. She felt strangely proud of her. She too was a woman at the top of her profession in a man’s world, and she was tall; it somehow mattered that she was tall like Masha. So Masha listened attentively as she talked about reducing her risk factors when it came to diet and exercise and smoking, and she listened when the doctor said, ‘Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head.’ She wanted Masha to understand that her state of mind was just as important as the state of her body. ‘When I was on the wards in my first term of cardiac surgery we had something called the “beard sign”,’ she said. ‘Meaning that if one of our male patients was so miserable he couldn’t even be bothered to shave, his chances of recovery were not as good. You must take care of your whole self, Masha.’ Masha shaved her legs the very next day for the first time in years. She went to the cardiac rehabilitation exercise program suggested by the doctor, determined to top the class. She attacked the challenge of her health and her heart in the same way that she had once attacked challenges at work, and naturally she over-achieved beyond all expectations. ‘Good God,’ said the surgeon when Masha went to her for her first check-up.

  She had never once moped. She re-created herself. She did it for the tall attractive doctor. She did it for the young man in the lake.

  ‘My sister also had a near-death experience,’ said Tony. ‘A horseriding accident. After her accident, she changed. Her career. Everything about her life. She got right into gardening.’ He gave Masha an uneasy look. ‘I didn’t like it.’

  ‘You don’t like gardening?’ said Masha, teasing a little.

  He gave her a half-smile, and she saw a flash of a more attractive man.

  ‘I think I just didn’t want my sister to change,’ he said. ‘It felt like she’d become a stranger. Maybe it felt like she’d experienced something I couldn’t understand.’

  ‘People are frightened of what they don’t understand,’ said Masha. ‘I never believed in life after death before that. Now I do. And I live a better life because of it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Tony. ‘Yeah.’

  Again Masha waited.

  ‘Anyway . . .’ Tony exhaled and patted his thighs, as if he were done. Masha would get nothing else of interest out of him. It did not matter. The next twenty-four hours would tell her so much more about this man. He would learn things he did not know about himself.

  A glorious sense of calm settled upon her as she watched him leave the room, hitching up his pants with one hand. Those last remnants of doubt were gone. Maybe it was because of the thoughts of her son.

  The risks were calculated. The risks were justified.

  No-one ever ascended a mountain without risk.

  chapter twenty-six

  Napoleon

  It was dawn at Tranquillum House. The fifth day of the retreat.

  Napoleon parted the wild horse’s mane three times both sides.

  He enjoyed the soft swooping moves of tai chi, and this was one of his favourite moves, although he heard his knees crunch like a tyre on gravel as he bent his legs. His physio said it was nothing to worry about: people Napoleon’s age crunched. It was just middle-aged cartilage.

  Yao led this morning’s class in the rose garden, quietly and calmly naming each move for the nine guests who stood in a semicircle around him, all wearing their green Tranquillum House dressing-gowns. People seemed to be wearing the robes more often than not now. On the horizon behind Yao, two hot-air balloons ascended so slowly above the vineyards it looked like a painting. Napoleon and Heather had done that once, on a romantic weekend away: wine-tasting, antique shops; multiple lives ago, before children.

  It was interesting: when you have children you think your life has changed forever, and it’s true, to an extent, but it’s nothing compared to how your life changes after you lose a child.

  When Masha, an extraordinarily fit and healthy-looking woman, clearly passionate about what she did (his wife mistrusted passion and Zoe was still young enough to find it embarrassing, but Napoleon found it admirable), had spoken on the first day about how this experience would change them ‘in ways they could never have imagined’, Napoleon, once a believer in self-improvement, had felt an unusual sensation of bitter cynicism. He and his family had already been transformed in ways they could never have imagined. All they needed was peace and quiet, and certainly an improvement in their diets.

  While I admire and salute your passion, Masha, we do not seek or desire further transformation.

  ‘The white crane spreads its wings,’ said Yao, and everyone moved in graceful unison with him. It was quite beautiful to see.

  Napoleon, who stood at the back, as always (he’d learned to stand at the back of every audience once he hit six foot three), watched his wife and daughter lift their arms together. They both bit their bottom lips like chipmunks when they concentrated.

  He heard the knees of the guy next to him crunch too, which was pleasing, because Napoleon guessed he was at least a decade younger than him. Even Napoleon could see this guy was notably handsome. He looked at Heather to see if she was maybe checking out the good-looking guy, but her eyes were opaque, like a doll’s eyes; as usual, she was somewhere deep and sad within herself.

  Heather was broken.

  She had always been fragile. Like a piece of delicate china.

  Early on in their relationship, he thought she was feisty, funny, a tough chick, athletic and capable, the sort of girl you could take to the football or camping, and he was right, she was exactly that type of girl. She was into her sport, she loved camping and she was never high-maintenance or needy. The opposite: she found it hard to admit she needed anyone or anything. When they first started going out, she once broke her to
e trying to move a bookshelf on her own, when Napoleon was on his way over and could have lifted that piece of plywood junk with one hand. But no, she had to do it herself.

  The fragility beneath that feisty demeanour came out slowly, in odd ways: a peculiar attitude towards certain foods that may have just been a sensitive stomach, but may have been something more; an inability to make eye contact if an argument got too emotional or to say ‘I love you’ without bracing her chin, as if she were preparing to be punched. He’d thought, romantically, that he could keep her funny, fragile little heart protected, like a tiny bird in the palm of his hand. He’d thought, full of love and testosterone, that he would protect his woman from bad men and heavy furniture and upsetting food.

  When he first met her odd, detached parents he understood that Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you’re starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it. Heather’s parents weren’t abusive, but they were just chilly enough to make you shiver. Napoleon became excessively loving in their presence, as if he could somehow make them love his wife the way she should be loved. ‘Doesn’t Heather look great in this dress?’ he’d say. ‘Did Heather tell you she came top in her midwifery exams?’ Until one day Heather mouthed the words: Stop it. So he stopped it, but he still touched her more than usual whenever they visited her family, desperate to convey through his touch: You are loved, you are loved, you are so, so loved.

  He’d been too young and happy to know that love wasn’t enough; too young to know all the ways that life could break you.

  Their son’s death broke her.

  Maybe a son’s death broke any mother.

  The anniversary was tomorrow. Napoleon sensed its dark, malignant shadow. It was irrational to feel frightened of a day. It was just a sad day, a day they were never going to forget anyway. He reminded himself that this was normal. People felt like this on anniversaries. He’d felt this same impending sense of doom last year. Almost as if it were going to happen again, as if this were a story he’d read before and he knew what lay ahead.