Лиана Мориарти - Nine Perfect Strangers

“ What? ”

“Nobody even read the review. I don’t know why I mentioned it. I must have early-onset dementia.”

“You just said it got traction!”

Everyone had read the review. Everyone.

“Send me the link,” said Frances.

“It’s not even that bad,” said Alain. “It’s just this prejudice against your genre—”

“Send it!”

“No,” said Alain. “I won’t. You’ve gone all these years without reading reviews. Don’t fall off the wagon!”

“Right now,” said Frances in her dangerous voice. She used it rarely. When she was getting divorced, for example.

“I’ll send it,” said Alain meekly. “I’m so sorry, Frances. I’m so sorry about this entire phone call.”

He hung up, and Frances immediately went to her email. There wasn’t much time. As soon as she arrived at Tranquillum House she would need to “hand in” her “device.” It would be a digital detox, along with everything else. She was going “off the grid.”

SO SORRY! said Alain’s email.

She clicked on the review.

It was written by someone called Helen Ihnat. Frances didn’t know the name and there was no picture. She read it fast, with a wry, dignified smile, as if the author was saying these things to her face. It was a terrible review: vicious, sarcastic, and superior, but, interestingly, it didn’t hurt. The words— Formulaic. Trash. Drivel . Trite— slid right off her.

She was fine! Can’t please everyone. Comes with the territory.

And then she felt it.

It was like when you burn yourself on a hot plate and at first you think, Huh, that should have hurt more , and then it does hurt more, and then all of a sudden it hurts like hell.

A quite extraordinary pain in her chest radiated throughout her entire body. Another fun symptom of menopause? Maybe it was a heart attack. Women had heart attacks. Surely this was more than hurt feelings. This, of course, was why she’d given up reading reviews in the first place. Her skin was too thin. “It was the best decision I ever made,” she’d told the audience at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference when she gave the keynote address last year. They’d probably all been thinking: Yeah, maybe you should read a review or two, Frances, you old has-been.

Why did she think it was a good idea to read a bad review directly after she’d just received her first rejection in thirty years?

And now something else was happening. It appeared and, gosh, this was just so fascinating, but it seemed she was losing her entire sense of self.

Come on now, Frances, get a grip, you’re too old for an existential crisis.

But apparently she wasn’t.

She scrabbled hopelessly after her self-identity, but it was like trying to catch water rushing down a drain. If she was no longer a published writer, who was she? What was the actual point of her? She wasn’t a mother or a wife or a girlfriend. She was a twice-divorced, middle-aged, hot-flushing/-flashing menopausal woman. A punch line. A cliché. Invisible to most—except, of course, to men like Paul Drabble.

She looked at the gate in front of her that still would not open and her vision blurred with tears and she told herself not to panic, you are not disappearing , Frances, don’t be so melodramatic, this is just a rough trot, a bad patch, and it’s the cold and flu tablets making your heart race, but it felt like she was hovering on a precipice, and on the other side of the precipice was a howling abyss of despair unlike anything she’d ever experienced, even during those times of true grief—and this is not true grief, she reminded herself, this is a career setback combined with the loss of a relationship, a bad back, a cold, and a paper cut; this is not like when Dad died, or Gillian died—but actually it wasn’t that helpful to start remembering the deaths of loved ones, not helpful at all.

She looked around wildly for distraction—her phone, her book, food— and then she saw movement in her rearview mirror.

What was it? An animal? A trick of the light? No, it was something.

It was too slow for a car.

Wait. It was a car. It was just driving so slowly it was barely moving.

She sat up straight and ran her fingers under her eyes where her mascara had run.

A canary-yellow sports car drove down the dirt drive slower than she would have thought possible.

Frances had no interest in cars, but as it got closer even she could tell this was a spectacularly expensive piece of machinery. Low to the ground and shimmery-shiny with futuristic headlights.

It came to a stop behind hers and the doors on either side opened simultaneously. A young man and woman emerged. Frances adjusted her mirror to see them more clearly. The man looked like a suburban plumber off to a Sunday barbecue: baseball cap on backward, sunglasses, T-shirt, shorts, and boat shoes with no socks. The woman had amazing long curly auburn hair, skintight capri pants, an impossibly tiny waist, and even more unlikely breasts. She teetered on stilettos.

Why in the world would a young couple like that come to a health retreat? Wasn’t this sort of place for the overweight and burnt out, for those grappling with bad backs and pathetic midlife identity crises? As Frances watched, the man turned his baseball cap around the right way and tipped his head back, arching his back as if he, too, found the sky overwhelming. The woman said something to him. Frances could tell by the way her mouth moved that it was sharp.

They were arguing.

How delightfully distracting. Frances lowered her window. These people would pull her back from the precipice, bring her back into existence. She would regain her self-identity by existing in their eyes. They would see her as old and eccentric and maybe even annoying, but it didn’t matter how they saw her, as long as they saw her.

She leaned clumsily out the car window, waggled her fingers, and called out, “Helloooo!”

The girl tottered over the grass toward her.

5

Ben

Ben watched Jessica walk like a baby giraffe toward the Peugeot 308—overpriced piece of crap—parked at the gate, engine running. One of the Peugeot’s brake lights was gone and the muffler looked like it was bent, no doubt from that dirt road. The lady behind the wheel was leaning halfway out her window, practically falling out, waving wildly at Jessica as if she couldn’t be more pleased to see her. Why didn’t she just open her car door and get out?

It looked like the health resort was closed. A burst water main? A mutiny? He could only hope.

Jessica could hardly walk in those stupid shoes. It was like she was on stilts. The heels were as skinny as toothpicks. She would twist an ankle any minute.

Ben squatted down next to his car and ran his fingers over the paintwork, searching for stone chips. He glanced back at the road they’d just come down and winced. How could a place that charged eye-watering rates have a road like that? There should have been a warning on the website. He’d thought for sure they were going to bottom out on some of those potholes.

No scratches that he could see, which was a miracle, but who knew what damage there was to the undercarriage? He’d have to wait till he could get it back up in the workshop, take a look. He wanted to do it right now, but he was going to have to wait ten days.

Maybe he should get the car towed back to Melbourne. He could call Pete’s guys. It wasn’t the craziest of ideas, except that he’d never hear the end of it if any of his former workmates saw that he’d driven this car down that road. He suspected his ex-boss would cry, literally cry, if he saw what Ben had done.