Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
‘Goddamn it,’ she said, and turned left.
chapter three
Lars
‘This one is my wife’s favourite.’ The vineyard manager, a chunky, cheery guy in his sixties with a retro moustache, held up a bottle of white wine. ‘She says it makes her think of silk sheets. It has a creamy, velvety finish I think you’ll enjoy.’
Lars swirled the tasting glass and breathed in the scent: apples and sunshine and wood smoke. An instant memory of an autumnal day. The comfort of a large, warm hand holding his. It felt like a childhood memory but probably wasn’t; more likely a memory he’d borrowed from a book or movie. He sipped the wine, let it roll around his mouth, and was transported to a bar on the Amalfi Coast. Vine leaves over the light fitting and the smell of garlic and the sea. That was a bona fide happy memory from real life with photos to prove it. He remembered the spaghetti. Just parsley, olive oil and almonds. There might even be a photo of the spaghetti somewhere.
‘What do you think?’ The vineyard manager grinned. It was like his moustache had been perfectly preserved from 1975.
‘It’s excellent.’ Lars took another sip, trying to get the full picture. Wine could fool you: all sunshine and apples and spaghetti and then nothing but sour disappointment and empty promises.
‘I also have a pinot grigio that might appeal . . .’
Lars held up his hand and looked at his watch. ‘I’d better stop there.’
‘Have you got far to travel today?’
Anyone who stopped here would be on their way to somewhere else. Lars had nearly missed the small wooden Tasting Cellar sign. He’d slammed on the brakes because that’s the sort of man he was: spontaneous. When he remembered to be.
‘I’m due to check in at a health resort in an hour’s time.’ Lars held the wineglass up to the light and admired the golden colour. ‘So no alcohol for me for the next ten days.’
‘Ah. Tranquillum House, right?’ said the manager. ‘Doing the – what do they call it? – ten-day cleanse or some such thing?’
‘For my sins,’ said Lars.
‘We normally get guests stopping in here on their way home. We’re the first vineyard they drive by on the road back to Sydney.’
‘What do they have to say about the place?’ asked Lars. He pulled out his wallet. He was going to order some wine to be delivered as a welcome-home treat.
‘Some of them seem a bit shell-shocked, to be honest. They mostly just need a drink and some potato chips and they get the colour back in their cheeks.’ The manager placed his hand around the neck of the bottle, as if for comfort. ‘Actually, my sister just got a job working in the spa there. She says her new boss is a bit . . .’ He squinted hard as if trying to see the word he wanted. Finally, he said, ‘Different.’
‘I’m forewarned,’ said Lars. He wasn’t concerned. He was a health-retreat junkie. The people who ran these places tended to be ‘different’.
‘She says the house itself is amazing. It’s got a fascinating history.’
‘Built by convicts, I believe.’ Lars tapped the corner of his gold Amex against the bar.
‘Yeah. Poor buggers. No spa treatments for them.’
A woman appeared from a door behind him, muttering, ‘Bloody internet is down again.’ She stopped when she saw Lars and did a double take. He was used to it. He’d had a lifetime of double takes. She looked away fast, flustered.
‘This is my wife,’ said the vineyard manager with pride. ‘We were just talking about your favourite semillon, love – the silk-sheets semillon.’
The colour rose up her neck. ‘I wish you wouldn’t tell people that.’
Her husband looked confused. ‘I always tell people that.’
‘I’m going to get a case,’ said Lars.
He watched the wife pat her husband’s back as she moved past him.
‘Make it two cases,’ Lars said, because he spent his days dealing with the shattered remnants of broken marriages and he was a sucker for a good one.
He smiled at the woman. Her hands fluttered to her hair while her oblivious husband pulled out a battered old order book with a pen attached by a string, leaned heavily on the counter and peered at the form in a way that indicated this was going to take some time. ‘Name?’
‘Lars Lee,’ said Lars, as his phone beeped with a text message. He tapped the screen.
Can you at least think about it? Xx
His heart lurched as if at the sudden scuttle of a black furry spider. For fuck’s sake. He’d thought they were done with this. His thumb hovered over the message, considering. The passive aggressiveness of the ‘at least’. The saccharine double kiss. Also, he didn’t like the fact that the first kiss was upper case and the second was lower case and he didn’t like the fact that he didn’t like this. It was mildly OCD-ish.
He tapped in a rude, boorish upper-case reply: NO. I WILL NOT.
But then he deleted it, and shoved his phone back into the pocket of his jeans.
‘Let me try that pinot grigio.’
chapter four
Frances
Frances drove twenty minutes down a bumpy dirt road that jolted the car so hard her bones rattled and her lower back screamed.
At last she came to a stop in front of what appeared to be an extremely locked gate with an intercom. It was like arriving at a minimum-security jail. An ugly barbed-wire fence stretched endlessly in either direction.
She had envisaged driving up a stately tree-lined drive to the ‘historic’ house and having someone greet her with a green smoothie. This didn’t feel very healing, to be frank.
Stop it, she told herself. If she got into that I’m a dissatisfied consumer mode everything would start to dissatisfy her, and she was going to be here for ten days. She needed to be open and flexible. Going to a health resort was like travelling to a new country. One must embrace different cultures and be patient with minor inconveniences.
She lowered her car window. Hot thick air filled her throat like smoke as she leaned out and pressed the green button on the intercom with her thumb. The button burned from the sun and it hurt her paper cut.
She sucked on her thumb and waited for a disembodied voice to welcome her, or for the wrought-iron gate to magically open.
Nothing.
She looked again at the intercom and saw a handwritten note sticky-taped next to the button. The writing was so small she could only make out the important word ‘instructions’ but nothing else.
For goodness sake, she thought, as she went through her handbag for her reading glasses. Surely a good proportion of visitors were over forty.
She found her glasses, put them on, peered at the sign and still couldn’t make it out. Tut-tutting and muttering, she got out of the car. The heat grabbed her in a heavy embrace and beads of sweat sprang up all over her scalp.
She ducked down next to the intercom and read the note, written in neat, tiny block letters as if by the tooth fairy.
namaste and welcome to tranquillum house where a new you awaits. please press the security code 564–312 followed immediately by the green button.
She pressed the security code numbers then the green button and waited. Sweat rolled down her back. She would need to change her clothes again. A blowfly buzzed near her mouth. Her nose dripped.
‘Oh come on!’ she said to the intercom with a sudden spurt of rage, and she wondered if her agitated sweaty face was appearing on some screen inside, while an expert dispassionately analysed her symptoms, her misaligned chakras. This one needs work. Look at how she responds to one of life’s simplest stresses: waiting.
Had she got the damned code wrong?
Once again she carefully punched in the security code, saying each number out loud, in a sarcastic tone, to prove a point to God knows who, and gave the hot green button a slow, deliberate push, holding it for five seconds just
There. Now let me in.
She took off her reading glasses and let them dangle in her hand.
The baking heat seemed to be melting her scalp like chocolate in the sun. Silence again. She gave the intercom a fierce, hard look, as if that would shame it into acting.
At least this would make a funny story for Paul. She wondered if he’d ever been to a health resort. She thought he’d most likely be a sceptic. She herself was –
Her chest constricted. This wouldn’t make a good story for Paul. Paul was gone. How humiliating for him to have slipped into her thoughts like that. She wished she felt a surge of white-hot anger instead of this utter sadness, this pretend grief for what had never been real in the first place.
Stop it. Don’t think about it. Focus on the problem at hand.
The solution was obvious. She would ring Tranquillum House! They would be mortified to hear that their intercom had broken and Frances would be calm and understanding and brush away their apologies. ‘These things happen,’ she’d say. ‘Namaste.’
She got back in the car, cranked up the air-conditioner. She found the paperwork with her booking details, and rang the number listed. All her other communications had been by email, so it was the first time she’d heard the recorded message that immediately began to play.
‘Thank you for calling the historic Tranquillum House Health and Wellness Hot Springs Resort, where a new you awaits. Your call is so important and special to us, as is your health and wellbeing, but we are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment. We know your time is precious, so please do leave a message after the chimes and we will call you back just as soon as we can. We so appreciate your patience. Namaste.’
Frances cleared her throat as wind chimes made their annoying twinkly dinging sounds.
‘Oh yes, my name is –’
The wind chimes kept going. She stopped, waited, went to speak and stopped again. It was a wind-chime symphony.
At last there was silence.
‘Hello, this is Frances Welty.’ She sniffed. ‘Excuse me. Bit of a cold. Anyway, as I said, I’m Frances Welty. I’m a guest.’
Guest? Was that the right word? Patient? Inmate?
‘I’m trying to check in and I’m stuck outside the gate. It’s, ah, twenty past three, twenty-five past three, and I’m . . . here! The intercom doesn’t seem to be working even though I’ve followed all the instructions. The teeny-tiny instructions. I’d appreciate it if you could just open the gate? Let me in?’ Her message finished on a rising note of hysteria, which she regretted. She put the phone down on the seat next to her and studied the gate.
Nothing. She would give it twenty minutes and then she was throwing in the towel.
Her phone rang and she snatched it up without looking at the screen.
‘Hi there!’ she said cheerfully, to show how understanding and patient she really was and to make up for the sarcastic ‘teeny-tiny’ comment.
‘Frances?’ It was Alain, her literary agent. ‘You don’t sound like you.’
Frances sighed. ‘I was expecting someone else. I’m doing that health retreat I told you about, but I can’t even get through the front gate. Their intercom isn’t working.’
‘How incompetent! How unsatisfactory!’ Alain was easily and often enraged by poor service. ‘You should turn around and come back home. It’s not alternative, is it? Remember those poor people who died in that sweat lodge? They all thought they were becoming enlightened when in reality they were being cooked?’
‘This place is pretty mainstream. Hot springs and massages and art therapy. Maybe some gentle fasting.’
‘Gentle fasting.’ Alain snorted. ‘Eat when you’re hungry. That’s a privilege, you know, to eat when you’re hungry, when there are people starving in this world.’
‘Well, that’s the point – we’re not starving in this part of the world,’ said Frances. She looked at the wrapper for the KitKat bar sitting in the console of her car. ‘We’re eating too much processed food. So that’s why us privileged people need to detox –’
‘Oh my Lord, she’s falling for it. She’s drunk the Kool-Aid! Detoxing is a myth, darling, it’s been debunked! Your liver does it for you. Or maybe it’s your kidneys. It’s all taken care of somehow.’
‘Anyway,’ said Frances. She had a feeling he was procrastinating.
‘Anyway,’ said Alain. ‘You sound like you’ve got a cold, Frances.’ He seemed quite anguished about her cold.
‘I do have a very bad, persistent, possibly permanent cold,’ said Frances. She coughed to demonstrate. ‘You’d be proud of me. I’ve been taking a lot of very powerful drugs. My heart is going at a million miles per hour.’
‘That’s the ticket,’ said Alain.
There was a pause.
‘Alain?’ she prompted, but she knew, she already knew exactly what he was going to say.
‘I’m afraid I am not the bearer of good news,’ said Alain.
‘I see.’
She sucked in her stomach, ready to take it like a man, or at least like a romance novelist capable of reading her own royalty statements.
‘Well, as you know, darling,’ began Alain.
But Frances couldn’t bear to hear him hedging, trying to soften the blow with compliments.
‘They don’t want the new book, do they?’ she said.
‘They don’t want the new book,’ said Alain sadly. ‘I’m so sorry. I think it’s a beautiful book, I really do, it’s just the current environment, and romance has taken the worst hit, it won’t be forever, romance always comes back, it’s a blip, but –’
‘So you’ll sell it to someone else,’ interrupted Frances. ‘Sell it to Timmy.’
There was another pause.
‘The thing is,’ said Alain, ‘I didn’t tell you this, but I slipped the manuscript to Timmy a few weeks back, because I did have a tiny fear this might happen and obviously an offer from Timmy before we had anything on the table would have given me leverage, so I –’
‘Timmy passed?’ Frances couldn’t believe it. Hanging in her wardrobe was a designer dress that she’d never be able to wear again because of the stain from a pina colada Timmy had spilled on her while he had her cornered in a room at the Melbourne Writers Festival, his voice hasty and hot in her ear, looking back over his shoulder like a spy, telling her how much he wanted to publish her, how it was his destiny to publish her, how no-one else in the publishing industry knew how to publish her the way he did, how her loyalty to Jo was admirable but misplaced because Jo thought she understood romance but she didn’t, only Timmy did, and only Timmy could and would take Frances ‘to the next level’, and so on and so forth until Jo turned up and rescued her. ‘Oi, leave my author alone.’
How long ago was that? Not that long surely. Maybe nine, ten years ago. A decade. Time went so fast these days. There was some sort of malfunction going on with how fast the earth was spinning. Decades went by as quickly as years once did.
‘Timmy loved the book,’ said Alain. ‘Adored it. He was nearly in tears. He couldn’t get it past acquisitions. They’re all shaking in their boots over there. It was a hell of a year. The decree from above is psychological thrillers.’
‘I can’t write a thriller,’ said Frances. She never liked to kill characters. Sometimes she let them break a limb, but she felt bad enough about that.
‘Of course you can’t!’ said Alain too quickly, and Frances felt mildly insulted.
‘Look, I have to admit I was worried when Jo left and you were out of contract,’ said Alain. ‘But Ashlee seemed to really be a fan of yours.’
Frances’s concentration drifted as Alain continued to talk. She watched the closed gate and pushed the knuckles of her left hand into her lower back.
What would Jo say when she heard Frances had been rejected? Or would she have
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Jo’s replacement turned out to be a child, because children were taking over the world. Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers’ festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes and fitting her bras. When Frances first met Ashlee she had genuinely thought she was there on work experience. She’d been about to say, ‘A cappuccino would be lovely, darling,’ when the child had walked around to the other side of Jo’s old desk.
‘Frances,’ she’d said, ‘this is such a fan girl moment for me! I used to read your books when I was, like, eleven! I stole them from my mum’s handbag. I’d be like, Mum, you’ve got to let me read Nathaniel’s Kiss, and she’d be like, No way, Ashlee, there’s too much sex in it!’
Then Ashlee had proceeded to tell Frances that her next book needed more sex, a lot more sex, but she knew Frances could totally pull it off! As Ashlee was sure Frances knew, the market was changing, and ‘If you just look at this chart here, Frances – no, here; that’s it – you’ll see that your sales have been on kind of a, well, sorry to say this, but you kind of have to call this a downward trend, and we, like, really need to reverse that, like, super-fast. Oh, and one other thing . . .’ Ashlee looked pained, as if she were about to bring up an embarrassing medical issue. ‘Your social media presence? I hear you’re not so keen on social media. Neither is my mum! But it’s kind of essential in today’s market. Your fans really do need to see you on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook – that’s just the bare minimum. Also, we’d love you to start a blog and a newsletter and perhaps do some regular vlogs? That would be so much fun! They’re like little films!’