Nine Perfect Strangers

  Masha put the first Dorito on her tongue and her whole body trembled with the chemical reaction it invoked. She knew exactly how many calories she was about to consume and how much exercise she was going to need to do to burn them off. (Alternatively, she could vomit.)

  She crunched the Dorito between her teeth and opened the jar of salsa with one hard twist of her wrist. Once she had weak, useless arms that would have struggled to open this jar. That sad fat woman in front of the television used to swear and tap away at the lid with a spoon, trying to loosen it.

  In the life before that, there had been a man for opening jars. She used to call for her husband sharply like he was a servant, and he would open the jar, smile and touch her. He was always touching her. Every single day for years and years she was touched.

  But that was someone else. It had been decades now since she was touched with love.

  She thought briefly of Yao’s hand tonight touching hers, and she took another Dorito from the pack and scooped out the red, glistening salsa.

  Yao made a tiny sound like a child. His cheeks were flushed. He looked like a feverish baby.

  Masha put the back of her hand to his forehead and held it there for a moment. He did feel hot.

  She shoved the Dorito in her mouth and began to eat faster and faster, yellow crumbs falling all over her desk and her dress, as she allowed herself to remember the last day of that life of so long ago.

  It was a Sunday. Her ex-husband was out being a ‘laid-back’ Australian. Australians liked to call themselves ‘laid-back’, as if that were a good thing. He had accepted an invitation from his work colleagues to play a game where they shot each other with balls of paint. It would be ‘fun’ and a ‘lot of laughs’.

  Yes, it sounded very laid-back: running around shooting each other. The other wives were going but Masha stayed home with the baby. She had nothing in common with those women, and they dressed so badly it made her depressed and homesick. Masha was a working mother. She had work to do. She was ten times smarter than all the men at the company where she worked, but she had to work ten times harder for the recognition she deserved.

  She was too tall. Sometimes her colleagues pretended not to understand her and sometimes she could tell they really didn’t understand, even though she spoke better English than them. She didn’t appreciate their humour – she never laughed on time – and they didn’t appreciate hers. When she made a joke, often a very funny, sophisticated, intelligent joke, they stared at her with confused, blank faces.

  At home she had many friends, but here she experienced a strange kind of shyness. It made her angry and resentful to feel that way, because back home she would never have been called shy. She held herself stiffly because she could not stand to be laughed at, and here there was always the possibility that she might misunderstand or be misunderstood. Her husband didn’t care when that happened. He found it funny. He had fearlessly dived straight into the social scene before he knew the rules, and people loved him. Masha was proud of him for that, although also a little envious.

  Once, Masha and her husband were invited to her boss’s home for what Masha assumed was a dinner party. She dressed very nicely, very sexy, high heels and a dress. Every single woman but Masha wore jeans.

  The invitation said ‘Bring your own meat’. Masha confidently told her husband: ‘No, no, that is a joke! An Australian joke. Not very funny but most definitely a joke.’ They would not make the embarrassing mistake of taking it seriously.

  But it was not a joke. The women in jeans carried plastic shopping bags looped over their hands. The bags contained packages of uncooked meat. Just enough for two. Two steaks. Four sausages. Masha could not believe her eyes.

  Her husband was quick. He slapped his hand to his forehead. ‘Oh no, we left our meat at home!’ he told the host.

  ‘No worries,’ said the host. ‘We’ve got plenty to spare.’

  So generous of him to spare a little meat for the guests he’d invited to his home.

  The moment they walked through the front door women and men split into different groups as if they were banned from talking to each other. The men stood around a barbecue overcooking the meat for what seemed like hours. The food was inedible. There were no chairs. People sat anywhere. Three women sat on a retaining wall.

  After that day, Masha decided not to concern herself with establishing a social circle in Sydney. What was the point? She had an eleven-month-old baby and a demanding full-time job and a husband. Her life was busy and satisfying and she was truly happy, happier than she’d ever been in her life. It was gratifying to have a baby so clearly superior to other babies in terms of both beauty and intelligence. This was an objective fact. Her husband agreed. Sometimes she felt sorry for other mothers when they saw her baby, sitting so dignified and upright in his stroller, his fair hair shining in the sun (so many other babies were bald, like old men), his little head swivelling from side to side as he observed the world with his big green eyes. When he found something funny, as he often did (he got that from his father), he chuckled, right from his belly, surprisingly deep, and everyone in hearing distance had to laugh too, and at that moment, as Masha exchanged smiles with those around her, real smiles, not polite smiles, she wasn’t isolated at all; she was a Sydneysider, a mother out with her child.

  That Sunday, she had nearly finished her work when the baby woke up. He no longer cried when he woke up. Instead he made a musical ‘aaaah’ sound, as if he was playing with his voice. He let the sound go up and down, up and down. He was as happily tone deaf as his father singing as he stirred a pot on the stove.

  At one point he called out, ‘Ma-ma! Ma-ma!’ He was so smart. Many children of that age did not have a single word in their vocabulary.

  ‘I’m coming, my lapochka!’ she called back. She only needed five minutes more and she would be done.

  He became quiet again. She finished what she was doing. It took less than five minutes. Maybe four.

  ‘Did you get tired of waiting for me, little bunny?’ she said as she opened the door of his bedroom. She thought he might have fallen back asleep.

  He was already dead.

  He’d strangled himself playing with a long white cord from the window blind. It was not an uncommon accident, she later learned. Other women had seen what she saw that day. Their trembling fingers had untangled their precious babies.

  These days there were warning tags on blind cords. Masha always saw them when she walked into a room, even from very far away.

  Her husband said it was an accident and there was nothing to forgive as he stood at the hospital wearing the paint-splattered overalls from his game. She remembered the fine spray of blue dots across his jaw, like blue rain.

  She remembered also one strange moment when she had looked at the strangers all around her and wanted her mother, a woman who had never really liked Masha, let alone loved her, and who would provide no comfort. Yet, for just one moment in her grief, Masha had craved her presence.

  She refused her husband’s forgiveness. Her son called for her and she did not go to him. It was unacceptable.

  She let her husband go. She insisted he find another life and he did eventually, although it took much, much longer than Masha wanted. It was such a relief when he was gone, when she no longer had to experience the pain of seeing the face that so resembled that of their beautiful son.

  Although she refused to read the emails he sent and wanted to know nothing about him, she accidentally discovered many years ago, when she came across a man in a food court who was still friends with her husband, a man who was there on the day they shot the balls of paint, that her husband was healthy and happy, that he had married an Australian girl and had three sons.

  Masha hoped that he still sang when he cooked. She thought that he probably did. In her research, she had read of the hedonic treadmill theory, which said that people returned to a certai
n pre-set level of happiness regardless of what happened to them, whether it was very good or very bad. Her husband had been a simple, happy man whereas Masha was a complex, unhappy woman.

  Masha’s son would have been twenty-eight this August. She probably would have had a difficult relationship with him if he had lived. They probably would have fought like Masha had once fought with her mother. Instead he would always be her singing, chuckling baby and a beautiful young man wearing a baseball cap walking towards her through a lake of colour.

  She should have been allowed to stay with him.

  Masha looked at the empty bag of Doritos. Her fingertips were stained yellow the way her father’s had once been stained by nicotine. She ran the heels of her hands over her mouth, and turned the monitor back on to observe her guests.

  They were all awake, she saw. They sat in small groups, chatting, in that laid-back Australian way. They were too relaxed. This was no dark night of the soul. It could have been a barbecue. These people did not truly believe they were facing death sentences.

  Never once had a member of staff defied her the way these people were defying her.

  The screen of her monitor pulsed as if it were alive. Was there some sort of malfunction? She put her finger to it and felt it quiver like a dying fish.

  She was momentarily confused before she remembered she had earlier taken seventy-five milligrams of LSD to improve her decision-making and mental clarity. This was simply a hallucination. She needed to relax and allow her brain to find all the right connections.

  She looked around the room and noticed a vacuum cleaner sitting quietly in the corner of her office. It was not pulsating. It was quite real. She had just not noticed it before. The cleaners must have left it. They had excellent cleaners here. She only recruited and employed the best. It was important to maintain quality standards at all levels of your business.

  There was something so familiar about the vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, for her father was picking up the vacuum cleaner, clumsily, with both hands. It was such a cumbersome thing. He walked towards the door with it.

  ‘No, no, no!’ she screamed. ‘Papochka! Put it down! Do not go!’

  But he looked back at her sadly and smiled, and he was gone and no man would ever love her the way her father had loved her.

  He was not real. She knew this. It was very easy to see what was real and what was not. Her mind was very sharp, sharp enough to differentiate.

  She closed her eyes.

  Her baby’s voice was calling for her. No. Not real.

  She opened her eyes and he was crawling across her office floor, babbling nonsense to himself.

  She closed her eyes quickly. No. Not real.

  She opened her eyes. A cigarette would calm her.

  She opened her secret cupboard once more and removed an unopened packet of cigarettes and a lighter. The geometry of the pack enthralled her. Each of its four mathematically aligned angles was so pleasing.

  She opened the pack, removed a cigarette and rolled its cylindrical shape back and forth between her fingertips. The lighter was orange, a colour of such depth and beauty it astonished her.

  She ran her thumb across the tiny rough-edged wheel of the lighter. A gold flame burst forth, instantly and obediently.

  She let it go and did it again.

  The lighter was a miniature factory producing perfect flames on demand. There was such beauty in the efficient production of goods and services.

  A thought of crystalline clarity: Masha should forget the wellness industry completely and return to the corporate world. Forget pivoting. She should jump. It would simply be a matter of reactivating her LinkedIn account and within a very short time she would be headhunted, fielding offers.

  The boy in the baseball cap sat on the other side of her desk, dripping puddles of iridescent colour all over her floor.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked him. ‘Should I do that?’

  He didn’t speak, but she could tell he thought it was a good idea.

  No more entitled, ungrateful guests. She would once again conduct multiple departments of a company like an orchestra: accounting, payroll, sales and marketing – it was all coming back to her, the glorious unassailable solidity of a documented reporting structure with her name at the top. She would micro-dose daily to optimise her productivity. Ideally her staff would do the same, although the people in HR would have all sorts of objections.

  She had begun a new life when she emigrated, when her son died, and again when her heart stopped. She could do it again.

  Sell this property and buy an apartment in the city.

  Or . . .

  She studied the tiny, flickering flame. The answer was right there.

  chapter sixty-six

  Ben

  ‘So, Napoleon, I’ve got you,’ said Ben, walking next to the older man as he strode up and down the length of the cellar. ‘I mean, I’m defending you.’

  He felt like he should call him Mr Marconi or Sir. He had that teacher-ish manner. The sort of teacher you still wanted to impress even after you’d left school and bumped into him at the shops looking startlingly short. Not that he could imagine Napoleon ever looking short.

  ‘Thank you, Ben,’ said Napoleon, as if Ben had been given a choice.

  ‘So, okay,’ said Ben. He rubbed his stomach. He had never been so hungry in his life. ‘I guess it’s pretty simple why you deserve a stay of execution. You’re a husband and a father, and, well, I hope it’s okay to include this in my speech – but your wife and daughter have already lost enough, haven’t they? They couldn’t lose you too.’

  ‘You can say that if you like.’ Napoleon smiled sadly. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And you’re a teacher,’ said Ben. ‘So kids depend on you.’

  ‘They do. Yep.’ Napoleon rapped his knuckles on the brickwork. Ben had seen him do this a hundred times since they’d been down here, as if he were hoping that he’d find a loose brick that would give them a way out. Ben knew it was hopeless. There was no way out of here except that door.

  ‘Anything else I should say?’ asked Ben, and his voice cracked. When he’d had to deliver the toast at Pete’s wedding he thought he might pass out. And now it was his job to defend this man’s life?

  Napoleon turned away from the wall and looked at Ben. ‘Mate, I don’t think it matters what you say. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I think we need to take Masha seriously, but not the game itself.’

  ‘You’ve got yourself a dud defence lawyer here,’ confessed Ben. ‘I got lucky. Lars is defending me and he’s appeared in court.’

  When Lars had his ‘meeting’ with Ben, he only asked two or three quick questions before he said, ‘How about this?’ And then he launched into an eloquent speech, like something on television, all about how Ben was a morally upstanding young man on the very cusp of adulthood, about to become a father, deeply committed to his marriage, with so much to give to his wife, his family, his community and so on and so forth. It all just flowed out, without a single ‘um’ or ‘ah’.

  ‘Think that will do the trick?’ he asked at the end.

  ‘Sure,’ marvelled Ben.

  And then Lars had gone off to the bathroom to fix his hair in preparation for his ‘appearance’.

  ‘I get so terrified of public speaking, I can’t even breathe,’ Ben told Napoleon.

  ‘Do you know the only difference between fear and excitement is the exhalation?’ asked Napoleon. ‘When you’re afraid you hold the air in the top part of the lungs. You need to exhale. Like this. Ahhhhh.’ He put his hand to his chest and demonstrated with a long, slow breath out. ‘Like that sound people make after a firework explodes. Ahhhhh.’

  Ben did it with him. ‘Ahhhhh.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Napoleon. ‘Tell you what
– I’ll go first. I’m defending Tony, so I’ll bore Masha to death speaking about his football career. I plan to do a run-down of every game he played. That’ll show her.’ He stopped at the beam near the inscribed brick in the wall. ‘You saw this?’

  ‘The convict graffiti?’ Delilah had shown it to them on their first tour of the house. Ben and Jessica hadn’t really been that interested.

  Napoleon grinned. ‘Fascinating, eh? I read up on the history of this place before we came. These brothers eventually got their tickets of leave and ended up becoming very respectable, highly sought-after stonemasons. Far more successful than they would have been back home in England. They’ve got thousands of descendants in this area. When they were sentenced to be transported to Australia I bet they were devastated. They probably felt like it was the end of the world. But it turned out to be the making of them. The lowest point of your life can lead to the highest. I just find that so . . .’ For a moment he looked profoundly sad. ‘Interesting.’

  Ben didn’t know why he suddenly felt in danger of crying. It must be hunger. It occurred to him that when he got home he owed his dad a visit. Just because his dad had given up on Lucy didn’t mean Ben should give up on him.

  Ben put his fingers to the inscription. He thought about how everyone said it was such fantastic luck that he and Jessica won the lottery, but sometimes it didn’t feel that way.

  He looked over at Jessica. Was he really going to be a dad himself? How could he advise a kid on how to live his life when he hadn’t yet worked it out himself?

  ‘Remember the exhale, mate,’ said Napoleon. ‘Just breathe out the fear.’

  chapter sixty-seven

  Heather

  ‘I’m quite a good friend,’ said Frances to Heather. ‘You could mention that.’ She chewed a fingernail. ‘I remember birthdays.’