Nine Perfect Strangers

by Liane Moriarty

  She remembered how Ben shook his head. His face was drawn tight with shame.

  She had thought, How do you know it wasn’t her?

  But it turned out he was right. The robbery had nothing to do with Lucy. She was on the other side of the country at the time.

  So it was just an ordinary happens-to-lots-of-people house robbery. They hadn’t lost much because they didn’t have much to lose: an old iPad with a cracked screen, a necklace that Ben had given Jessica for her twenty-first. It had a tiny diamond pendant and it had cost Ben something like two months’ salary. She’d loved that necklace and still mourned it, even though it had just been a crappy little necklace with a smidge of a diamond, like a quarter-carat. The thieves had rejected the rest of Jessica’s jewellery box, which she found humiliating. Jessica and Ben had both hated the feeling of knowing that someone had walked through their home, sneering, as if browsing through an unsatisfactory shop.

  The insurance company paid out without much fuss, but Ben and Jessica had to pay a five-hundred-dollar excess, which they resented because they hadn’t asked to be robbed.

  It was just an ordinary robbery, except that it ended up changing their lives forever.

  ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ asked Ben. He stood at the end of the bed, looking down at her.

  Jessica’s gaze came back into focus. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’re planning to cut off my balls with a cheese knife.’

  ‘What? I wasn’t even looking at you. I was thinking.’

  He kept chewing the remains of his apple and raised an eyebrow. The very first time they ever made eye contact in Mr Munro’s maths class he did that: a cool, laconic lift of his left eyebrow. It was literally the hottest thing she’d seen in her entire life and maybe if he’d raised two eyebrows, instead of one, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.

  ‘I don’t even have a cheese knife,’ said Jessica.

  He smiled as he threw the apple core into the bin from across the room and picked up their welcome pack.

  ‘We’d better read this, hey?’ He ripped open the envelope and papers went flying. Jessica managed to stop herself from grabbing at it and putting it all back in order. She was the one in charge of paperwork. If it were up to Ben they would never file a tax return.

  He opened what looked like a covering letter. ‘Okay, so this is a “guide map” for our “wellness journey”.’

  ‘Ben,’ said Jessica, ‘this isn’t going to work if we don’t –’

  ‘I know, I know, I am taking it seriously. I drove down that road, didn’t I? Didn’t that show my commitment?’

  ‘Oh, please don’t start on the car again.’ She felt like crying.

  ‘I only meant –’ His mouth twisted. ‘Forget it.’

  He scanned the letter and read out loud. ‘Welcome to your wellness journey, yada, yada. The retreat will begin with a period of silence lasting five days, during which there will be no talking, apart from counselling sessions, no touching, no reading, no writing, no eye contact with other guests or your own companions – what the?’

  ‘This wasn’t mentioned on the website,’ said Jessica.

  Ben continued to read out loud, ‘You may be familiar with the term “monkey brain”.’

  He looked up at Jessica. She shrugged, so he kept reading. ‘Monkey brain refers to the way your mind swings from thought to thought like a monkey swinging from branch to branch.’ Ben made a sound like a monkey and scratched under his arm to demonstrate.

  ‘Thanks for that.’ Jessica felt the tug of a smile. Sometimes they were fine.

  Ben read on. ‘It takes at least twenty-four hours to silence monkey brain. A period of nourishing silence and reflection settles the mind, body and soul. Our aim will be to discover a beautiful state that Buddhism calls “noble silence”.’

  ‘So we’re just going to spend the next five days avoiding eye contact and not talking?’ said Jessica. ‘Even when we’re alone in our room?’

  ‘It’s not like we don’t have any experience with that,’ said Ben.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Jessica. ‘Give me that.’

  She took the letter and read. ‘During the silence we request that you walk slowly and mindfully, with intention, heel to toe, about the property, while avoiding eye contact and conversation. If you must communicate with a staff member, please come to reception and follow the instructions on the laminated blue card. There will be guided meditation sessions – both walking and sitting – throughout each day. Please listen for the bells.’

  She put the letter down. ‘This is going to be so freaky. We’ll have to eat with strangers in total silence.’

  ‘Better than boring small talk, I guess,’ said Ben. He looked at her. ‘Do you want to do it properly? We could talk here in our room and nobody would ever know.’

  Jessica thought about it.

  ‘I think we should do it properly,’ she said. ‘Don’t you? Even if it sounds stupid, we should just follow the rules and do whatever they say.’

  ‘Fine with me,’ said Ben. ‘As long as they don’t tell me to jump off a cliff.’ He scratched his neck. ‘I don’t get what we’re going to do here.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘Meditate. Yoga. Exercise classes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ben. ‘But in between all that. If we can’t talk or watch TV, what will we do?’

  ‘It will be hard without screens,’ said Jessica. She thought she was going to miss social media more than coffee.

  She looked again at the letter. ‘The silence begins when the bell rings three times.’ She looked at the clock in the room. ‘We’ve got half an hour left where we’re allowed to talk.’

  Or touch, she thought.

  They looked at each other.

  Neither spoke.

  ‘So the silence shouldn’t be too hard for us then,’ said Ben.

  Jessica laughed, but Ben didn’t smile.

  Why weren’t they having sex right now? Wasn’t that what they once would have done? Without even talking about it?

  She should say something. Do something. He was her husband. She could touch him.

  But a tiny fear had trickled into her head late last year and now she couldn’t get rid of it. It was something about the way he looked at her, or didn’t look at her; a clenching of his jaw.

  The thought was this: He doesn’t love me anymore.

  It seemed so ironic that he could fall out of love with her now, when she had never looked so good. Over the last year she had invested a lot of time and money, and a fair amount of pain, in her body. She had done everything there was to do: her teeth, her hair, her skin, her lips, her boobs. Everyone said the results were amazing. Her Instagram account was filled with comments like: You look so HOT, Jessica! and You look better and better every time I see you. The only person without anything positive to say was her own husband, and if he didn’t find her attractive now, when she was her very best self, then he must never have found her attractive. He must have been faking it all along. Why did he even marry her?

  Touch me, she thought, and in her head it was an anguished wail. Please, please touch me.

  But all he did was stand up and walk back over to the fruit bowl. ‘The mandarins look good.’

  chapter eight

  Frances

  ‘When did the pain start?’

  Frances lay naked on a massage table, a soft white towel draped over her back.

  ‘Everything off and then under this towel,’ the massage therapist had barked when Frances arrived at the spa. She was a large woman with a grey buzz cut and the intimidating manner of a prison guard or a hockey coach, not quite the soft-voiced, gentle masseuse Frances had been anticipating. Frances hadn’t quite caught her name but she’d been too distracted following instructions to ask her to repeat it.

  ‘About three
weeks ago,’ said Frances.

  The therapist placed warm hands on her back which seemed to be the size of ping-pong bats. Was that possible? Frances lifted her head to see them but the therapist pressed against Frances’s shoulder blades so her head fell forward again.

  ‘Did anything in particular set it off?’

  ‘Not anything physical,’ said Frances. ‘But I did have kind of an emotional shock. I was in this relationship –’

  ‘So no physical injury of any sort,’ said the therapist tersely. Clearly she hadn’t got the Tranquillum House memo about speaking in a slow hypnotic voice. In fact, she was the opposite: it was like she wanted to get any speaking over and done with as quickly as possible.

  ‘No,’ said Frances. ‘But I feel like it was definitely connected. I had a shock, you see, because this man I was dating, well, he disappeared and – I remember this very clearly – I was actually phoning the police when I felt this kind of sensation, like I’d been slammed –’

  ‘It’s probably better if you don’t talk,’ said the therapist.

  ‘Oh. Is it?’ said Frances. I was about to tell you a very interesting story, scary lady. She’d told the story a few times now, and she felt that she told it quite well. She was improving it with each telling.

  Also, she didn’t have long before she had to stop talking for five days, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope with so much silence. She’d only just avoided that terrifying abyss of despair in the car. Silence might tip her over again.

  The therapist pressed her giant thumbs on either side of Frances’s spine.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Focus on your breathing.’

  Frances breathed in the citrus-scented essential oils and thought about Paul. How it began. How it ended.

  Paul Drabble was an American civil engineer she met online. A friend of a friend of a friend. A friendship that turned into something more. Over a six-month period, he sent her flowers and gift baskets and handwritten notes. They talked for hours on the phone. He’d Facetimed with her and said he’d read three of her books and loved them, and he talked expertly about the characters and even quoted his favourite excerpts, and they were all excerpts that made Frances feel secretly proud. (Sometimes people quoted their favourite lines to her and Frances thought, Really? I thought that wasn’t my best. And then she felt weirdly annoyed with them.)

  He sent her photos of his son, Ari. Frances, who’d never wanted children of her own, fell hard for Ari. He was tall for his age. He loved basketball and wanted to play it professionally. She was going to be Ari’s stepmother. She’d read the book Raising Boys in preparation and had a number of brief but pleasurable chats with Ari on the phone. He didn’t say much, understandably – he was a twelve-year-old boy, after all – but sometimes she made him laugh when they Skyped, and he had a dry little chuckle that melted her heart. Ari’s mother – Paul’s wife – had died of cancer when Ari was in preschool. So sad, so poignant, so . . . ‘convenient?’ suggested one of Frances’s friends, and Frances had slapped her wrist.

  Frances was planning to move from Sydney to Santa Barbara. She had her flights booked. They would need to get married to secure her green card, but she wasn’t going to rush into things. If and when it happened, she planned to wear amethyst. Appropriate for a third wedding. Paul had sent her photos of the room in his house that he’d already set up as her writing room. There were empty bookshelves waiting for her books.

  When that terrible phone call came in the middle of the night, Paul so distraught he could barely get the words out, crying as he told her that Ari had been in a terrible car accident and there was a problem with the health insurance company and that Ari needed immediate surgery, Frances didn’t hesitate. She sent him money. A vast amount of money.

  ‘Sorry, how much?’ said the young detective who carefully wrote down everything Frances said, his professionalism slipping for just a moment.

  That was Paul’s only misstep: he underplayed his hand. She would have sent double, triple, quadruple – anything to save Ari.

  And then: terrifying silence. She was frantic. She thought Ari must have died. Then she thought Paul had died. No answers to her texts, her voicemail messages, her emails. It was her friend Di who made the first tentative suggestion. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Frances, but is it possible that . . .?’ Di didn’t even need to finish the sentence. It was as if the knowledge had been lurking away in Frances’s subconscious all along, even while she booked non-refundable airfares.

  It felt personal, but it wasn’t personal. It was just business. ‘These people are getting so smart,’ the detective had said. ‘They’re professional and polished and they target women of your age and circumstances.’ The sympathy on his handsome young face was excruciating. He saw a desperate old lady.

  She wanted to say, ‘No, no, I’m not a woman of age and circumstance! I’m me! You’re not seeing me!’ She wanted to tell him that she had never had any trouble meeting men, she had been pursued by men all her life, men who truly loved her and men who only wanted to have sex with her, but they were all real men, who wanted her for herself, not con artists who wanted her money. She wanted to tell him that she’d been told on multiple occasions by multiple sources that she was really very good in bed, and her second serve caused consternation on the tennis court, and, although she never cooked, she could bake an excellent lemon meringue pie. She wanted to tell him she was real.

  The shame she experienced was extraordinary. She had revealed so much of herself to this scammer. How he must have sniggered, even as he somehow responded with sensitivity, humour and perfect spelling. He was a mirage, a narcissistic reflection of herself, saying exactly what she so obviously wanted to hear. She realised weeks after that even his name, ‘Paul Drabble’, was probably designed to begin the act of seduction by subconsciously reminding her of Margaret Drabble, one of her favourite authors, as she had posted for all to see on social media.

  It turned out many other women had been planning lives as Ari’s stepmother too.

  ‘There are multiple ladies in the same situation as you,’ the detective said.

  Ladies. Oh my God, ladies. She couldn’t believe she was a lady. That sexless, gentrified word made Frances shudder.

  The details of each scam were different but the boy’s name was always ‘Ari’ and he always had a ‘car accident’ and the distraught phone call always came in the middle of the night. ‘Paul Drabble’ had multiple names, each with a carefully curated online presence, so that when the ladies Googled their suitors – as they always did – they saw exactly what they wanted to see. Of course, he was not the friend of a friend of a friend. Or not in the real-world way. He’d played a long game, setting up a fake Facebook page and pretending an interest in antique restoration furniture, which had got him accepted into a Facebook group run by a university friend’s husband. By the time he sent Frances a friend request, she’d seen enough of his (intelligent, witty, concise) comments on her friend’s posts to believe him to be a real person in her extended circle.

  Frances met up with one of the other women for coffee. The woman showed Frances pictures on her phone of the bedroom she’d created for Ari, complete with Star Wars posters on the wall. The posters were actually a little young for Ari – he wasn’t into Star Wars – but Frances kept that to herself.

  The woman was in a far worse state than Frances. Frances ended up writing her a cheque to help her get back on her feet. Frances’s friends spluttered when they heard this. Yes, she gave more cash to yet another stranger, but for Frances it was a way of restoring her pride, taking back control, and fixing some of the trail of destruction left by that man. (She did think a thankyou card from her fellow scam victim might have been nice, but one mustn’t give only in expectation of thankyou cards.)

  After it was all over, Frances packed away the evidence of her stupidity in a file. All the print-outs of emails
where she’d spilled her foolish heart. The cards that accompanied real flowers with fake sentiments. The handwritten letters. She went to shove the folder into her filing cabinet and a sheet of paper sliced open her thumb like the edge of a razor blade. Such a tiny, trite injury and yet it hurt so much.

  The therapist’s thumbs moved in small, hard circles. A liquid warmth radiated across Frances’s lower back. She looked through the hole in the massage table at the floor. She could see the therapist’s sneakered feet. Someone had used a sharpie to doodle flowers all over the white plastic toes of her shoes.

  ‘I fell for an internet romance scam,’ said Frances. She needed to talk. The therapist would just have to listen. ‘I lost a lot of money.’

  The therapist said nothing, but at least she didn’t order Frances to stop talking again. Her hands kept moving.

  ‘I didn’t care so much about the money – well, I did, I’d worked hard for that money – but some people lose everything in these kinds of scams whereas I just lost . . . my self-respect, I guess, and . . . my innocence.’

  She was babbling now, but she couldn’t seem to stop. All she could hear was the therapist’s steady breathing.

  ‘I guess I’ve always just assumed that people are who they say they are, and that ninety-nine per cent of people are good people. I’ve lived in a bubble. Never been robbed. Never been mugged. Nobody has ever laid a hand on me.’

  That wasn’t strictly true. Her second husband hit her once. He cried. She didn’t. They both knew the marriage was over in that moment. Poor Henry. He was a good man, but they brought out something terrible in each other, like allergic reactions.

  Her mind wandered off down the road of her long and complicated relationship history. She’d shared her relationship history with ‘Paul Drabble’ and he’d shared his. His had sounded so real. It must have had some truth to it? So says the novelist who makes up relationships for a living. Of course he could have fabricated his relationship history, you idiot.

  She kept talking. Better to talk than to think.