Nine Perfect Strangers (34 page)

Masha behaved as if Frances hadn't spoken. “Now, my sweetie pies, I wish you the best of luck. I shall be back at dawn. Remember to focus your thoughts. Ask the right questions of your clients, and listen with your heart. Convince me why each of
you
deserves to live.”

She looked fondly at Yao if he were her sleeping child, patted his head, and then looked back at the screen. “Let me leave you with these words: ‘Ardently do today what must be done. Who knows? Tomorrow death comes.' The Buddha.” She put her hands together in prayer and lowered her head. “Namaste.”

63

 

Lars

The guests of Tranquillum House stood in a huddled, whispering group in the center of the studio, their heads bent, like a cluster of banished smokers outside their office on a chilly day. Lars could smell acrid sweat and stale breath. Ben and Jessica held hands. Carmel and Frances both chewed at their fingernails. Tony tugged aggressively at his bottom lip, as if he could somehow contort his mouth into providing the correct answers, while Zoe kneaded her stomach and studied her feet, and her parents both studied her.

“I'm sure Yao is fine, don't you think? And Delilah? There is no way Masha would really hurt anyone,” said Frances. “No way in the world. She sees herself as a healer.”

Lars could tell Frances was trying to convince herself. The longer they were in here, the more stripped back she got. Her red lipstick was gone and her blond hair, which had been in a bouncy circa 1995 ponytail, was now slicked back against her head. Lars liked Frances, but she wasn't the lawyer he would have retained, given a choice, if he was on
death row. He didn't know who he would have chosen out of this motley lot. He wasn't sure how much it really mattered. Masha was going to do what she was going to do.

“We just need to make it look as if we're going along with the madness,” he said to the group.

“I agree,” said Napoleon. “We have to play along and take the first opportunity we can to find a way out of here.”

“I believed in her,” said Carmel sadly. “I believed in this.” She indicated her surroundings. “I thought I was being transformed.”

“So I'm representing you,” said Frances to Lars anxiously. “We need to talk. God, I would do anything for a
pen
.”

“Well, supposedly I'm representing you, Frances, in this grotesque …
game
,” sighed Heather. “So I guess we need to talk too.”

“Okay, yes, yes, but just let me talk to my client first,” said Frances, breathing fast. She put a hand to her chest to try to calm herself. Lars smiled at her. She would be the sort to play a game of charades with endearing seriousness and little skill, as if it were a matter of life and death, and now that it truly might be a matter of life and death (surely not!), she was in danger of hyperventilating.

“Let's go have a chat, Frances,” said Lars soothingly. “And then you can go convince Heather why you should live.”

“This is pathetic,” said Heather as they split up into pairs.

“We're an odd number,” said Napoleon. “I'll wait for my turn.” He lowered his voice even further. “I'll just keep looking around for a way out of here.” He wandered off, his hands shoved in the pockets of his dad shorts.

Lars and Frances went to sit in a corner.

“Right.” Frances sat cross-legged in front of Lars. She frowned intensely. “Tell me
everything
about your life, your relationships, your family.”

“Tell her I'm a philanthropist, I do a lot of things for the community, volunteer work …”

“Do you?” interrupted Frances.

“You write fiction!” said Lars. “Let's just make it up! It doesn't actually matter what you say as long as it looks like we're going along with the exercise.”

Frances shook her head. “That woman might be crazy, but she can smell insincerity a mile off. I am going along with the exercise and I'm doing it properly. You tell me everything, Lars, right now. I'm not kidding.”

Lars groaned. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I help women,” he said. “I only represent women in divorce cases.”

“Seriously?” said Frances. “Isn't that discriminatory?”

“I get my clients by word of mouth,” said Lars. “They all know each other, these types of women, they play tennis together.”

“So you only represent wealthy women?” said Frances.

“I'm not doing it for
love
,” said Lars. “I make good money. I just make sure a certain type of man pays a fair price for his sins.”

Frances tapped her thumbnail against her front teeth like an imaginary pen. “Are you in a relationship?”

“Yes,” said Lars. “We've been together for fifteen years. His name is Ray and he would probably prefer I wasn't ‘sentenced to death.'”

He felt a sudden burst of longing for Ray and for home, for music and the sizzle of garlic, for Sunday mornings. He was done with health resorts. When he got out of here he was going to book a holiday for him and Ray, a gastronomic tour of Europe. The man had gotten too skinny. His eyes looked huge in his face. All that obsessive bike riding. Legs spinning in a blur, up and down the hills of Sydney, faster and faster, trying to get those endorphins flooding his body, trying to forget that he was in a relationship where he gave more than he got.

“He's a good person,” said Lars, and he was surprised to find himself close to tears, because it occurred to him that if he were to die, Ray would be snatched up like a too-good-to-be-true deal at the supermarket, and someone else could very easily love him the way he deserved to be loved.

“Poor Ray,” murmured Frances, as if she knew what he was thinking.

“Why do you say that?” said Lars.

“Oh, it's just you're so good-looking. I was briefly in love with a handsome man in my youth and it was awful, and you're just …” she gestured at him, “… ridiculous.”

“That's kind of offensive,” said Lars. There was a lot of prejudice against people who looked like him. People had no idea.

“Yeah, yeah, get over it,” said Frances. “So … no kids?”

“No kids,” said Lars. “Ray wants children. I don't.”

“I never wanted children either,” said Frances.

Lars thought of Ray's mother at Ray's thirty-fifth birthday last month. As usual she'd had “one too many glasses of champagne,” which meant she'd had two glasses. “Can't you let him have
one
baby, Lars? Just one itsy-bitsy baby? You wouldn't have to lift a finger, I promise.”

“Did your psychedelic therapy give you any special insights into your life?” asked Frances. “Masha would probably like it if I mentioned that.”

Lars thought about last night. Some parts had been spectacular. At one point, he realized he could
see
the music coming through his headphones in waves of iridescent color. He and Masha had talked, but he didn't think there had been any particular insights. He'd told her at length about the color of the music and he felt like she might have gotten bored, which he'd found insulting because he'd been speaking very eloquently and poetically.

He didn't think he'd told Masha about the little boy who kept appearing in his hallucinations last night. She would have liked that.

He knew that the dark-haired, dirty-faced kid who kept grabbing Lars's hand was there to remind Lars of something significant and traumatic from his childhood, one of those formative memories that therapists were always so excited about dredging up.

He had refused to go with the young Lars. “I'm busy,” he kept telling him, as he lay back down on a beach to enjoy the colors of the music. “Ask someone else.”

I don't care what my subconscious is trying to tell me, thanks anyway.

At one point in the night he got into a conversation with Delilah that didn't feel therapeutic, more like shooting the breeze; in fact, he was pretty sure he could feel a sea breeze while they chatted.

Delilah said, “You're just like me, Lars. You don't give a shit, do you? You just don't care.”

Did she have a cigarette in her hand at that point? Surely not.

“What do you mean?” Lars had said lazily.

“You know what I mean.” Delilah had sounded so sure of herself, as if she knew Lars better than he knew himself.

Frances banged her knuckles in rapid motion against her cheekbones.

“Stop hitting yourself,” said Lars.

Frances dropped her hand. “I've never represented anyone in court before,” she said.

“This isn't court,” he said. “This is just a silly game.”

He looked over at Jessica, supposedly pregnant.

“Tell Masha that my partner and I are planning to have a baby,” he said flippantly.

“We can't lie,” said Frances. She was clearly exasperated with him, poor woman.

The expression on her face made him think of Ray when Lars had done something to annoy or frustrate him. The compressed lips. The resigned slump of his shoulders. Those disappointed eyes.

He remembered the impish face of that little boy from last night and realized with a start that it wasn't his younger self at all. The kid had hazel eyes.
Ray's
eyes. Ray and his sister and mother all had the same eyes. Eyes that made Lars want to close his own because of all that terrifying love and trust and loyalty.

“Tell Masha if I don't live I'll take out a wrongful death lawsuit against her,” Lars told Frances. “I'll win. I guarantee you I'll win.”

“What?” Frances frowned. “That doesn't even make sense!”

“None of this makes sense,” said Lars. “None of it.”

He saw again the dark-haired little boy with the hazel eyes, felt the tug of his hand and heard his insistent voice:
I've got something to show you
.

64

 

Jessica

Jessica and Zoe sat opposite each other, cross-legged, on a yoga mat, as if they were about to do a joint Pilates exercise.

Jessica would have given anything to be in a Pilates class right now. Even the cheap one she did before they won the money, in that drafty community hall, with all the local mums.

“Do you think this is, I don't know, serious?” Zoe's eyes darted over to her parents and back. Jessica couldn't help but notice Zoe had great natural eyebrows.

“Ah, yeah, I kind of do,” Jessica answered. “I feel like Masha is, like, totally capable of anything. She seems very unstable.” She tried to control her breathing. The fear kept rising and then receding in her stomach, like bouts of nausea on an amusement park ride.

“She wouldn't really, like,
execute
anyone of course,” said Zoe, smiling fiercely, as if determined to show she was making a joke.

“Of course not,” said Jessica, but how did she know what this woman could do? She'd given them drugs without their consent, and who knew
what she'd done to Yao and Delilah. “It's an exercise, that's all, to make us think. It's just a really stupid exercise.”

“I'm worried my mother might antagonize Masha. She's not taking it seriously enough.” Zoe shot a look at Heather.

“Don't worry, I'll do a really good job defending her,” said Jessica. “Your mother is a
midwife
. She helps bring new life into the world. Also, I was on the debating team. First speaker.”
Jessica is a conscientious student.
That was the comment she used to see most often on her report cards.

“And I'll do a good job defending you!” Zoe sat up straighter, with the air of a fellow conscientious student. “So, okay, I thought, first of all, I should obviously mention your pregnancy, right? You can't execute a pregnant woman. That would be against some convention or something, right?”

“That's true,” said Jessica doubtfully, although she wasn't sure why she felt doubtful. Was it because the pregnancy wasn't confirmed? Because it seemed like that was exploiting a loophole? She only deserved to live because her innocent child deserved to live?

And if she wasn't pregnant, why
should
she live? Just because she really
wanted
to live? Because her parents loved her? Because she knew her sister loved her too, even if they were currently estranged? Because her Instagram followers often said she “made their day”? Because last financial year her charitable donations were higher than what had once been her annual income?

“When we won the money, we really tried to, you know, not be
selfish
,” she told Zoe. “To share it, to give to charity.” She ran her fingers through her hair like a comb and lowered her voice. “But we didn't give it
all
away.”

“No one would expect that,” said Zoe. “It was your prize.”

“That's one thing I miss about our old life,” admitted Jessica. “Before we got rich we didn't ever have to think about whether we were ‘good' people, because we didn't have time to be good. We were just paying the bills, getting by, living our lives. It was kind of easier.” She
winced. “That makes it sound like I'm complaining and I promise you I'm not.”

“I've read about lottery winners who go on crazy spending sprees and their relationships end and they lose the lot and end up on benefits,” said Zoe.

“I know!” said Jessica. “When we won, I did a lot of research about lottery winners. So I, like, knew the pitfalls.”

“I reckon you've done a good job of it,” said Zoe.

“Thank you,” said Jessica gratefully, because sometimes she had longed for someone to give her a good mark for how well she'd handled the prize money.

She'd tried so hard to be a well-behaved lottery winner. To invest properly, to share appropriately, to get tax advice, to go to posh fundraiser balls where terrifyingly elegant people sipped French champagne while they bid obscene amounts of money on obscure items at charity auctions: “All for a good cause, ladies and gentlemen!” She thought of Ben tugging at his bow tie, muttering, “Who the fuck
are
these people?”

Should she have spent more at those charity balls? Less? Not gone at all? Sent a check? What would have made her a better person, more deserving of life right now?

If this had happened before the win, what would Zoe have said? Jessica deserves to live because she works really hard at her boring-as-batshit job and she's never even flown business class in her life, let alone first class, so what sort of life is that?

The money defined her now. She didn't even know who she was before the money.

“Ben didn't want to make any decisions except for which car to buy,” she told Zoe. “He didn't want anything to change … and that's just not possible.”

She touched her lips and looked down at her boobs, which were objectively awesome.

Would her defense case be better if she didn't look like this? If she hadn't spent so much money on her body?

“Why would you
want
to look like one of those dreadful Kardashians?” her mother had once asked her.

Because Jessica thought those dreadful Kardashians were stunning. It was her prerogative to think so. Before the money Ben had drooled over images of luxury cars and Jessica had drooled over pictures of models and reality stars, that were maybe photoshopped, but she didn't care. He got his car, she got her body. Why was her new body more superficial than his new car?

“Sorry.” She looked back up at Zoe and remembered that this girl's brother had committed suicide. Zoe had probably never met anyone as superficial as Jessica in her life. “None of that helps you build my case, does it? Why should this girl live? Oh, because she tried really hard when she won the lottery.”

Zoe didn't smile but gave Jessica a very serious, focused look. “Don't worry, I can put a good spin on this.”

She looked up at the television screen where Masha's face had loomed. “What do you think will happen next? After we've played her stupid game?”

“I don't know,” said Jessica honestly. “It feels like anything could happen.”