Nine Perfect Strangers

  ‘Are you on your steep bit yet?’ asked Tony.

  ‘I am,’ said Frances. ‘But listen to my breathing! I’m not puffing at all.’

  ‘You’re an elite athlete,’ said Tony. ‘Have you murdered anyone yet?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Frances. ‘Did it yesterday. Murdered my first character ever. He totally deserved it.’

  ‘Did you enjoy it? Hello, Bear.’

  Bear was a chocolate labrador that Tony often passed on his walks. Tony didn’t know Bear’s owner’s name, but he always said hello to Bear.

  Tony told her about his upcoming trip to Holland to see his son and grandchildren.

  ‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ said Tony. ‘I’ve only been once. I’m hoping it’s not going to be as cold as last time I went.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances again.

  There was a long pause. Frances stopped on the side of the street and smiled at a lady wearing a straw hat, watering her garden.

  Tony said, ‘Would you like to come to Holland with me, Frances?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I would.’

  Their first kiss was in the Qantas lounge.

  Three months later

  Heather sat on the end of her bed and rubbed lotion into her dry legs, as Napoleon set the alarm on his phone for the next day.

  He’d been seeing a psychiatrist, and he seemed to be doing well, but he didn’t talk much about what went on in those sessions.

  She watched as he put the phone on the bedside table.

  ‘I think that you need to shout at me,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He looked up at her, startled. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘After the retreat, we’ve never properly talked about it again – the asthma medication.’

  ‘I wrote all those letters. It’s on the record.’ Of course, Napoleon had done the right thing. He’d found the right contacts through Dr Chang. He’d documented it all. There was never any intent to sue but he needed to make sure that what happened was on the public record. He’d written to the authorities, to the pharmaceutical company: My son, Zachary Marconi, took his own life after being prescribed . . .

  ‘I know,’ said Heather. ‘But you never said anything about . . . what I did.’

  ‘You are not to blame for Zach’s suicide,’ said Napoleon.

  ‘I don’t want you to blame me,’ said Heather. ‘But I just feel like you’re allowed to be angry with me. You’re allowed to be angry with Zoe, too, but you’re not going to shout at Zoe –’

  ‘No, I do not want to shout at Zoe.’ He looked horrified at the thought.

  ‘But you can shout at me. If you like?’ She looked up at him, where he stood by the side of the bed, his brow furrowed in pain as if he’d just that instant stubbed his toe.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he said, in his pompous schoolteacher voice. ‘That’s ridiculous. That achieves nothing. You lost your son.’

  ‘Maybe I need you to be angry with me.’

  ‘You do not,’ said Napoleon. ‘That’s . . . sick.’ He turned away from her. ‘Stop this.’

  ‘Please.’ She got up on her knees on to the bed so she could look him in the eyes. ‘Napoleon?’ she said.

  She thought about the home she grew up in, where nobody ever yelled or laughed or cried or screamed or expressed a single feeling, except for a mild desire for a cup of tea.

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Stop this nonsense,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Shout at me.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not. What next? Should I hit you too?’

  ‘You’d never hit me in a million years. But I’m your wife, Napoleon, you’re allowed to be angry with me.’

  It was like she saw the anger shoot through him, from his feet to the top of his head. It flooded his face. It made his whole body tremble.

  ‘You should have checked on the fucking side effects, Heather! Is that what you want to hear?’ His voice rose on an ascending scale until he was shouting as loud as she’d ever heard him shout, louder even than when Zach, at nine years old, old enough to know better, nearly ran in front of a car to chase a ball, a ball he’d been told to leave behind, and Napoleon shouted ‘STOP!’ so loudly that every single person in that car park stopped.

  Heather’s heart raced as Napoleon held his hands on either side of her shoulders and shook them violently, as if he were shaking her hard enough to make her teeth rattle, except he didn’t touch her.

  ‘Does that make you happy? Is that what you wanted to hear? Yes, I am angry because when I asked you about side effects for a medication you were giving my child you should have checked!’

  ‘I should have checked,’ she said quietly.

  He grabbed his phone from the bedside table. ‘And I shouldn’t have pressed snooze on this fucking piece-of-shit phone!’

  He threw it against the wall.

  Heather saw tiny shards of glass fly.

  For a long beat neither of them said anything. She watched his chest rise and fall. She watched the anger leave him.

  He sank onto the bed, facing away from her, put his face into his hands and spoke in a hoarse, heartbroken voice with only pain and regret left, so softly it was barely above a whisper, ‘And our daughter should have told us there was something wrong with her brother.’

  ‘She should have told us,’ agreed Heather, and she laid her cheek against his back and waited for both their hearts to resume their normal pace.

  He said something else but she didn’t catch it. ‘What?’

  He said it again. ‘And that’s all we’ll ever know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Heather.

  ‘And it will never, ever be enough,’ said Napoleon.

  ‘No,’ said Heather. ‘No, it won’t be.’

  *

  That night Heather slept deeply and dreamlessly for seven hours straight, something she hadn’t done since Zach died, and when she woke she found herself moving across the invisible, un-crossable expanse that had separated her and Napoleon for the last three years, as if it had never been there in the first place. She had made some bad decisions in her life, but saying yes to a freakishly tall, nerdy boy’s polite invitation to see a ‘well-reviewed film called Dances With Wolves’ was not one of them.

  You’re not meant to think of your children when you make love. Sexuality between married parents is for behind closed doors. And yet, that morning, as Napoleon took her so tenderly into his arms, she thought of her family of four, of both her children, of the baby boy who would never become a man, and the baby girl who was a woman now, and the powerful currents of love that would always run between them: husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, brother and sister. So much love that came about because she said yes to a movie invitation.

  And then she thought of nothing at all, because that nerdy boy still had the moves.

  One year later

  Ben and his mother had imagined it so many times that he thought they would surely be prepared when it finally happened, but they weren’t.

  Lucy died of an overdose during one of her good periods, which is often the way, just when everyone thought that maybe this time she was going to make it. Lucy had started an interior design course. She was driving her kids to school. She’d been to a parent–teacher night for her eldest son, which was unprecedented. She had her eyes on the future.

  Ben’s mother found her. She said she looked strangely peaceful, like a little girl having a nap, or a thirty-year-old who gave up battling the monster that just refused to let her be.

  Ben thought first about ringing Jessica. They were on very good terms, although he still squirmed with embarrassment when he thought about the post she’d put on Instagram ‘announ
cing’ their split, as if they were a celebrity couple who owed it to their public to let them know the true story before the media began hounding them. She wrote: We’ll always be best friends but we’ve decided the time has come to lovingly separate.

  Right now, Jessica was in the middle of auditioning for the next season of The Bachelor. She said it wasn’t so much that she wanted to find love, and she doubted she would, but it would be great for her ‘profile’ and it would guarantee her so many thousand more Instagram followers. He couldn’t laugh too much because she was an ‘ambassador’ for multiple charities and her Instagram account was filled with photos of glamorous lunches and balls and breakfasts that she and a new group of society friends were so ‘honoured’ to have organised.

  Ben was back working with Pete. The guys gave him a hard time in the beginning – ‘You short of a buck, mate?’ – but eventually they gave up and forgot he was rich. Ben still had the car, and a nice house, but he’d put a lot of his money into a foundation run by his mother to help support families of addicts.

  Lars helped them split their assets without vitriol and without going to court. That was one thing they’d gained from their retreat at Tranquillum House: meeting a great family lawyer.

  Ben didn’t ring Jessica to tell her about Lucy straight away. He couldn’t bear to hear the lack of surprise in her voice. Instead, he dialled Zoe’s number. They’d become online friends and occasional texters since the retreat but they’d never actually talked on the phone.

  ‘Hello, Ben,’ she said cheerfully. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m calling –’ He found he couldn’t speak. He tried to remember to exhale.

  Her tone changed. ‘Is it your sister?’ she said. ‘Is it Lucy?’

  She was there at the funeral. His eyes kept seeking her out.

  chapter seventy-six

  Five years later

  Yao wouldn’t normally have turned on daytime television, but he had just returned home from a stressful time at playgroup where his two-year-old daughter had sunk her teeth into the arm of another child and then thrown back her head and laughed like a vampire. It had been both embarrassing and terrifying.

  ‘Oh yes, you were a biter,’ his mother told him on the phone. ‘She gets it from you.’ She said this with some satisfaction, as if the propensity to bite was a wonderful trait to pass on to your children.

  Yao put his daughter down for a nap and pointed a stern finger at her. ‘Never do that again.’

  She pointed a sterner finger back up at him. ‘Never do that again.’

  Then she lay down, plugged her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes. He could still see her dimple, which meant she was just pretending to be asleep, hardly able to suppress her hilarity.

  He stood there for a few moments, marvelling at her dimple and the roundness of her baby cheeks, marvelling as he so often did that he had been parachuted into another life, a brand-new life as a stay-at-home dad in the suburbs.

  He had received a fourteen-month suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty for his role in the events at Tranquillum House. Masha had insisted to police that she must take sole responsibility for the new protocol they’d attempted to introduce and that her employees were nothing more than oblivious, obedient halfwits. She said she was the one who mixed the smoothies, which was true, but Yao had been right there with her, checking and double-checking dosages. Yao’s mother said if she’d been the judge, he would have gone to prison. Both his parents had been so angry. They could not comprehend his actions. Most days, Yao could not comprehend them himself. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time. The prestigious researchers! The journal papers!

  ‘That woman had you in a trance,’ his mother said.

  His mother vehemently denied that the incident he’d remembered during his psychedelic therapy ever happened.

  ‘Never,’ she said. ‘I would never leave you alone in a kitchen with something boiling on the stove. Do you think I’m stupid? Would you do that with your child? You had better not!’

  She said that Yao’s fear of mistakes came from no-one but himself. ‘You were born like that!’ she told him. ‘We tried so hard to make you understand that mistakes do not matter. We told you again and again that you should not try so hard to be perfect, it did not matter if you made a mistake. Sometimes we purposely made mistakes so you would see that everyone made them. Your father used to deliberately drop things, bump into walls. I said to him, “That’s a bit much.” But he seemed to enjoy it.’

  Yao wondered then if he’d been misinterpreting his parents his whole life. When they talked about keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment, it wasn’t because they didn’t believe in dreams. It was because they were trying to protect him. Also, his father was not as clumsy as he had thought.

  *

  Delilah did not face court, because no-one could ever track her down. Yao thought idly of her at times and wondered where she was; if she was on some remote island, restoring a boat, like the escaped prisoner in his favourite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. (‘That’s every single man in the world’s favourite movie,’ one of the mothers at playgroup had told him once. She knew because she’d tried internet dating.) But Yao suspected that it was more likely Delilah had disappeared into an urban environment and was working again as a PA. Sometimes he still thought of that skirt she wore, a thousand years ago, when she worked for Masha.

  Yao was disqualified from working as a paramedic or anything in the health industry. After he left Tranquillum House and the charges were settled, he had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a location virtually equidistant to the locations of his parents’ homes, and he ended up getting a job as a translator of Chinese legal documents. It was dull, laborious work but it paid the bills.

  One day he got a call. Afterwards, he wondered if a phone call that is going to change your life has a portentous ring-tone, because when he heard that ring, as he sat alone, eating his sad dinner for one, he experienced the most remarkable full-body shiver of presentiment.

  It was Bernadette, his ex-fiancée, calling to say hi. She’d been thinking about him. She’d been thinking about him a lot.

  Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don’t notice it at all, until one day you wake up and think: How did I get here? But other times life changes in an instant, with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck, with glorious or tragic consequences. You win the lottery. You step out onto a pedestrian crossing at the wrong time. You get a phone call from a lost love at exactly the right time. And suddenly your life takes a violent swerve in an entirely new direction.

  They were married within the year and his wife got pregnant immediately. It made sense for her to go back to work and for Yao to stay home with the baby while he continued doing his translation work, which now seemed interesting and stimulating.

  Once he knew his daughter wasn’t faking sleep anymore, he went into the living room, sank down on the couch and turned on the TV. He would treat himself to twenty minutes of rubbish television to soothe himself from the stress of the biting incident, and then he’d get in an hour of work before it was time to think about dinner.

  The remote slipped from his hand.

  He whispered, ‘Masha.’

  *

  ‘Masha,’ said a man on the other side of the same city, a spanner in his hands. He didn’t normally watch daytime television either, but he had come over to do a few jobs around his daughter-in-law’s house, as his son was good with numbers but not much else.

  ‘Do you know her?’ His daughter-in-law lifted the baby girl she’d been breastfeeding while she watched TV onto her shoulder and patted her back.

  ‘She looks like someone I used to know,’ said the man, carefully not looking at his daughter-in-law because he did not want to see her breasts, and also because he could not tear his eyes from his ex-wife.

  Masha
looked so beautiful. Her hair was dark brown with bits of blonde, shoulder-length, and she wore a dress of all different shades of green that made her eyes look like emeralds.

  The man sat on the couch next to his daughter-in-law and she glanced at him curiously but didn’t say anything else. They watched the interview together.

  Masha had written a book. It was about a ten-day personal development program that incorporated psychedelic drugs, being locked in a room with strangers and undergoing an innovative kind of therapy that involved facing fears and solving riddles.

  ‘Surely people aren’t falling for this,’ murmured his daughter-in-law.

  ‘Now, obviously these drugs you mention are illegal,’ said the interviewer.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Masha. ‘But that will not be the case forever.’

  ‘And I understand you did jail time for supplying illegal drugs while attempting to test out this program.’

  The man clenched the spanner he still held in his lap. Jail time?

  ‘I did,’ said Masha. ‘But I will never regret that time. It was very important to me.’ She lifted her chin. ‘My time behind bars was a transformative experience. I learned so much, and I explain all my experiences in this book, which is available now, in all good bookstores.’ She picked up the book and held it in front of her face.

  The interviewer cleared her throat. ‘Masha, what do you say about the rumours that people have been attending these courses you offer, held in different secret locations across the country, and that you are, in point of fact, offering LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to your attendees?’

  ‘That is absolutely untrue,’ said Masha. ‘I unequivocally deny it.’

  ‘So you are not running these programs in secret locations?’

  ‘I am running very unique, tailored, incredibly effective personal development programs to small, select groups of people, but there is nothing illegal going on, I can assure you of that.’