Лиана Мориарти - Nine Perfect Strangers

“ 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 color 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 color 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 optimize 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.

66

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 had 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 defense 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 standing 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,” marveled 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 rundown 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.”

67

Heather

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