Nine Perfect Strangers (16 page)

17

 

Frances

It was only eight in the morning and Frances was hiking.

It was going to be another hot summer's day, but the temperature at this hour was perfect, the air silky-soft on her skin. There was no sound apart from the occasional sweet piercing call of a bellbird and the cracks and rustles of sticks and rocks beneath her feet on the rocky trail.

She felt like she'd been up for
hours
, which in fact she had been.

Today, her first full day at Tranquillum House, had begun before dawn (
before dawn!
) with a firm knock at her bedroom door.

Frances stumbled out of bed and opened the door to find the corridor empty and a silver tray on the floor, with her morning smoothie and a sealed envelope containing her “personalized daily schedule.”

Frances had gotten back into bed to drink the smoothie with a pillow propped up behind her back while she read her schedule with equal parts pleasure and horror:

DAILY SCHEDULE FOR FRANCES WELTY

Dawn:
Tai chi class in the rose garden.

7
A.M.:
Breakfast in the dining room. (Please remember to continue to observe the silence.)

8
A.M.:
Walking meditation. Meet at the bottom of Tranquillity Hill. (This will be a slow, silent, mindful hike giving you plenty of time to stop and contemplate the magnificent views. Enjoy!)

10
A.M.:
One-on-one exercise class. Meet Delilah at the gym.

11
A.M.:
Remedial massage with Jan in the spa.

12 noon:
Lunch in the dining room.

1
P.M.:
Guided sitting meditation in the yoga and meditation studio.

2–4
P.M.:
FREE TIME.

5
P.M.:
Yoga class in the yoga and meditation studio.

6
P.M.:
Dinner in the dining room.

7
–9
P.M.:
FREE TIME.

9
P.M.:
LIGHTS OUT.

Lights out! Was that a suggestion or an order? Frances hadn't been to bed at 9
P.M.
since she was a child.

But then again, maybe she'd be ready for bed by then.

She'd yawned her way through the tai chi class in the rose garden with Yao, silently eaten her first breakfast in the dining room (very good, poached eggs and steamed spinach, although it felt kind of pointless without the essential accompaniment of sourdough toast and a cappuccino), and now here she was with the other guests participating in the “walking meditation,” which was basically a slow uphill hike on a bushland track a short distance away from the house.

The two wellness consultants, Yao and Delilah, were with them. Delilah led the group at the front and Yao was at the back. The pace, set by Delilah, was extremely slow, almost
agonizingly
slow, even for Frances, and if she found it difficult to walk this slowly, she suspected
the Marconis—“exercise fanatics,” according to Zoe—were just about losing their minds.

Frances was in the middle of the group, behind Zoe, whose glossy ponytail swung as she walked behind her dad. The serial killer was directly behind Frances, which was not the ideal position for a serial killer, but at least he'd be obliged to kill her in mindful slow motion, so she'd have plenty of time to escape.

At random intervals the group came to a stop, and they then had to stand and gaze silently at some fixed point on the horizon for what felt like an extraordinary length of time.

Frances was all for a leisurely hike with lots of rests to enjoy the view, but at this rate they would never get to the top.

Slowly, slowly,
slowly
, they filed up the hiking trail and slowly, slowly,
slowly
, Frances felt her mind and body adjust to the pace.

Slow was certainly … slow … but also it was quite … lovely.

She considered the pace of her life. The world had begun to move faster and faster over the last decade. People spoke faster, drove faster, walked faster. Everyone was in a rush. Everyone was busy. Everyone demanded their gratification instantly. She'd even begun to notice it in the editing of her books.
Pace!
Jo had begun to snap in her editorial comments, where once she would have written:
Nice!

It seemed to Frances that readers once had more patience, they were content for the story to take its time, for an occasional chapter to meander pleasurably through a beautiful landscape without anything much happening, except perhaps the exchange of some meaningful eye contact.

The path steepened, but they were walking so slowly that Frances's breathing stayed steady. The trail curved and slivers of views appeared like gifts between the trees. They were getting quite high up now.

Of course, Jo's editing had probably taken on that frenetic tone in response to Frances's declining sales. No doubt Jo could see
the writing on the wall
and that accounted for her increasingly feverish pleas:
Add some intrigue to this chapter. Maybe a red herring to throw the reader off the scent?

Frances had ignored the comments and let her career peacefully pass away, like an old lady in her sleep. She was an idiot. A deluded fool.

She walked faster. The thought came to her that she might be walking a little too quickly at the exact moment her nose slammed straight into Zoe's shoulder blades.

Zoe had stopped dead. Frances heard her gasp.

Heather had somehow veered off the trail and onto a large rock that overhung the steep side of the hill. The ground fell away directly in front of her. Another step and she would have gone over.

Napoleon had his wife's arm in a fierce grip. Frances couldn't tell if his face was white with anger or fear as his hand closed around her thin upper arm and he hauled her back onto the hiking trail.

Heather didn't thank her husband or smile at him or even meet his eyes. She extricated herself from Napoleon's grasp with an irritated shrug of her shoulder and walked ahead, tugging the sleeve of her threadbare T-shirt straight. Napoleon looked back at Zoe and his chest rose and fell in tandem with his daughter's audibly ragged breathing.

After a moment both father and daughter lowered their heads and continued their slow hike up the trail, as if what Frances had just witnessed had been of no consequence at all.

18

 

Tony

Tony Hogburn had just returned to his room after yet another hellish experience of a “guided sitting meditation.” How much more meditation could a man do?

“Breathe in like you're breathing through a straw.” Jesus wept, what a load of absolute horseshit.

He was humiliated to realize that his legs ached from the excruciatingly slow
walking
meditation they'd done this morning. Once upon a time he could have
run
that trail, no problem at all, as a
warm-up
, and now his legs felt like jelly after walking it at the pace of a hundred-year-old.

He sat on the balcony outside his room and yearned for an ice-cold beer and the feel of an old collie's silky, hard head under his hand. It should have been a mild desire for a beer and a sad ache for a beloved pet, but it felt like a raging thirst in the desert and the deepest of heartaches.

He went to stand up for the two hundredth time to get relief for this
pain from the fridge before remembering for the two hundredth time that there was no relief to be found. No refrigerator. No pantry. No TV to turn on for a distracting documentary. No internet to surf mindlessly. No dog he could summon with a whistle, just to hear the obedient patter of paws.

Banjo made it to fourteen years old. Good innings for a collie. Tony should have been ready for it, but it seemed he wasn't. In the first week, great gusts of grief hit him whenever he put his key in the lock of his front door. A grief hard enough to buckle his knees. Contemptible. A grown man brought to his knees by a dog.

He'd lost dogs before. Three dogs over the course of his life. It was part of being a dog owner. He didn't get why he was taking Banjo's death so hard. It was six months now, for Christ's sake. Was it possible that he grieved the loss of this damned dog more than any human he'd lost in his lifetime?

Yes, it was possible.

He remembered when the kids were little and the Jack Russell they gave their youngest, Mimi, for her eighth birthday escaped from the backyard and got hit by a car. Mimi had been devastated, crying on Tony's shoulder at the “funeral.” Tony had cried too, feeling horrible guilt for missing that hole in the fence and sadness for that poor little dumb dog.

His daughter had been such a sweet little thing back then with her soft round cheeks and pigtails, so easy to love.

Now Mimi was a twenty-six-year-old dental hygienist and she looked just like her mother: skinny, with a pinlike head and a rapid way of talking and walking that exhausted Tony. She was hygienic and busy, Mimi, and maybe not so easy to love, although he did love her. He'd die for his daughter. But sometimes he wouldn't pick up the phone for her. Being a dental hygienist meant that Mimi was used to delivering monologues without fear of interruption. She was closer to her mother than to him. All three kids were. He hadn't been around enough in their childhood. Next thing, they were grown-ups and he
sometimes got the feeling that they were doing “Dad duty” when they called or turned up for a visit. Once, Mimi left a sweet, cooing message on his phone for his birthday, and then right at the end of the message he heard her say in an entirely different tone of voice to someone else, “Right, that's done, let's go!” as she hung up.

His sons didn't remember his birthday—not that he expected them to remember it; he barely remembered it himself, and he only remembered theirs because Mimi texted him a reminder on the mornings of her brothers' birthdays. James lived in Sydney, dating a different girl every month, and his oldest, Will, had married a Dutch girl and moved to Holland. Tony's three granddaughters, whom he only saw in real life every couple of years and Skyped with at Christmas, had Dutch accents. They felt entirely unrelated to him. His ex-wife saw them all the time, traveled over there twice a year and stayed for two, three weeks. His oldest granddaughter excelled at “Irish dancing.” (Why were they doing
Irish
dancing in
Holland
? Why were they doing Irish dancing at all? No one else seemed to find this strange. According to his ex-wife, children were doing Irish dancing all around the world. It was good for their “aerobic fitness” and coordination or something. Tony had seen footage on her phone. His granddaughter wore a
wig
and danced like she had a giant ruler duct-taped to her back.)

Tony never expected being a grandfather to be like this: funny-accented little girls talking to him on a screen about things he didn't understand. When he'd imagined being a grandfather, he'd imagined a small sticky trusting hand in his, a slow dawdling walk to the corner shop to buy ice creams. That never happened, and the corner store wasn't even there anymore, so what the hell was wrong with him?

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 grilled 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 this hellhole. That moment of temporary insanity. His appointment with the GP had been at eleven
A.M.
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 turnoff 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” who 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 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, where they learned 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 counselor all those years later? He 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 counselor.

A few months after that counseling 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 practice 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 his 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 had 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 back toward him in the opposite direction wearing a sporty black swimsuit and a sarong tied at her waist. The one with the chunky plait of hair like a horse's tail and brightly colored 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.