Nine Perfect Strangers

by Liane Moriarty

  Oh, Carmel, of course he stopped being attracted to you! What were you thinking? How could he possibly be attracted to someone who looks like you? She lifted her hand to slap her face once more.

  There was a gentle knock on the door. Carmel jumped. She pulled on the Tranquillum House dressing-gown and went to open the door.

  It was Yao. His head was bowed. He didn’t make eye contact or say a word. He held out a small card.

  Carmel took it and Yao immediately backed away. She closed the door.

  It was a square of thick, creamy cardboard like a wedding invitation. The handwriting was in thick, black, authoritative ink.

  Dear Carmel,

  Although you are currently scheduled for free time, we ask that you please report immediately to the spa for the Tranquillum House Ultimate Relaxation and Rejuvenation Signature Facial. It’s a ninety-minute treatment and will be completed just before dinner. Your therapist is waiting for you.

  Yours,

  Masha

  PS Yao is your assigned wellness consultant, but please know that I will also be doing everything in my power to deliver you the health, healing and happiness you need and deserve.

  It was at that moment Carmel Schneider gave herself to Masha with the same voluptuous abandon that novice nuns once surrendered themselves to God.

  chapter twenty-two

  Yao

  It was 9 pm. The guests had all been fed and were safely in their rooms, hopefully sleeping soundly. Yao, Masha and Delilah sat at a round table in the corner of Masha’s office with notepads in front of them. They were having their daily staff meeting, at which Yao and Delilah were required to give status updates.

  Masha tapped her fingertips on the table. There was always a discernible difference in her demeanour at these meetings. You could see her former corporate identity in the language she chose, the crispness of her speech and the stiffness of her posture. Delilah found it laughable, but Yao, who had never worked in that world, found it charming.

  ‘Right. Next item on the agenda. The silence. Has anyone broken it today?’ asked Masha. She seemed brittle. It must be nerves about the new protocol. Yao was nervous himself.

  ‘Lars broke it,’ said Delilah. ‘He was trying to get out of the daily blood tests. I told him not to be a baby.’

  Yao would never say that to a guest. Delilah just said what she was thinking, whereas Yao, sometimes, felt just a little . . . fraudulent. Like a performer. For example, he would be helping an ill-mannered guest do a plank and giving them gentle, patient encouragement – ‘You’ve got this!’ – while thinking, You’re not even trying, you rude lazy motherfucker.

  ‘Frances wrote me a note,’ said Yao. ‘She asked if she could please skip the blood test as she’d had a nosebleed. I told her that was all the more reason to do the test.’

  Masha grunted. ‘Nobody likes blood tests,’ she said. ‘I don’t like them! I hate needles.’ She shuddered. ‘When we were applying to come here all those years ago we had to do many blood tests: for AIDS, for syphilis. Your government wanted us for our brains but our bodies had to also be perfect. Even our teeth were checked.’ She tapped her finger against her white teeth. ‘I remember my friend said, “It’s like they are choosing a horse!”’ Her lip curled at the memory, as if her pride had been hurt. ‘But you do what you have to do,’ she said, without looking at either of them. It was if she were speaking to someone else not in the room.

  Yao looked at Masha’s collarbone beneath the straps of her simple white sleeveless top. He had never thought the collarbone to be an especially sensual part of a woman’s body until he met Masha.

  ‘Are you in love with this woman or something?’ his mother had said to him on the phone, just last week. ‘Is that why you work like a dog for her?’

  ‘She’s nearly the same age as you, Mum,’ Yao told her. ‘And I don’t work like a dog for her.’

  ‘More like a puppy,’ Delilah told him. ‘You have a crush on her.’ They were in bed at the time. Delilah was beautiful and sexually very skilled and he liked her very much, but their hook-ups always felt kind of transactional, even though no money changed hands.

  ‘I’m grateful to her,’ Yao said, his hands behind his head as he looked at the ceiling, considering this. ‘She saved my life.’

  ‘She didn’t save your life. You saved her life.’

  ‘My supervisor saved her life,’ said Yao. ‘I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.’

  ‘And now you loooooove her,’ said Delilah, putting her bra back on.

  ‘Like a sister,’ said Yao.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Delilah.

  ‘Like a cousin.’

  Delilah snorted.

  He did care very deeply for Masha. Was that so strange? To love your boss? Surely not so strange when you lived and worked together, and when your boss looked like Masha. She was interesting and stimulating. He found her exotic accent as attractive as her body. He would admit he had a significant crush on her. Perhaps his crush was strange and indicated some flaw in his personality or dysfunctional consequence of his childhood, even though it was just the ordinary, happy childhood of a shy, earnest boy who could get a little too intense about things but mostly slipped under the radar. His parents were softly spoken, humble people who never pushed him. Yao’s parents believed in keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment. His father had said that out loud once, without irony: ‘Expect to fail, Yao, then you will never be disappointed.’ That’s why Yao found Masha’s egotism so refreshing. She was bigger than life. Self-deprecation was something she had never practised and did not understand in other people.

  And Masha had saved his life.

  After her heart attack, she had written letters to both Finn and Yao, thanking them and talking about how her ‘near-death experience’ had changed her forever. She said that while she floated above them, she had seen the tiny red birthmark on Yao’s scalp. She had described it perfectly: strawberry-shaped.

  Finn never answered Masha’s letter. ‘She’s a nutter. She didn’t need to float above our bloody heads to see your birthmark. She probably saw it when she was sitting at her desk, before she collapsed.’

  But Yao was intrigued by her near-death experience. He emailed her, and over the years they kept up a sporadic correspondence. She told him that after she recovered from her heart surgery, she’d given up her ‘highly successful’ (her words) corporate career and cashed in her company shares to buy a famous historic house in the countryside. She was going to put in a swimming pool and restore the house. Her initial plan had been to start an exclusive bed and breakfast, but as her interest in health had developed, she changed her mind.

  She wrote, Yao, I have transformed my body, my mind, my soul and I want to do the same for others.

  There was an element of grandiosity to her emails he found amusing and endearing, but really she was not especially important to him. Just a grateful ex-patient with a funny turn of phrase.

  And then, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, all his dominos toppled: bam, bam, bam. First, his parents announced they were divorcing. They sold the family home and moved into separate apartments. It was confusing and distressing. Then, in the midst of all that drama, his fiancée, Bernadette, broke off their engagement. It came without warning. He thought they were deeply in love. The wedding, reception and honeymoon were booked. How was it possible? It felt like the foundations of his life were collapsing beneath his feet. A break-up wasn’t a tragedy and yet, to his shame, it felt cataclysmic.

  His car got stolen.

  He began to suffer from stress-related dermatitis.

  Finn moved interstate and the ambulance service transferred Yao to a regional area where he knew no-one, where the call-outs mostly involved violence and drugs. One night a man held a knife to his throat and said, ‘If you don’t save her I’ll slit your throat.’ The woman wa
s already dead. When the police came, the man lunged at them with the knife and he was shot. Yao ended up saving his life.

  He went back to work. Then two days later he woke up just a few minutes before his alarm, as usual, but the moment it went off something catastrophic happened to his brain. He felt it implode. It felt physical. He thought it was a bleed on the brain. He ended up in a psychiatric ward.

  ‘It sounds like you’ve been under a lot of pressure,’ said a doctor with dark shadows under his eyes.

  ‘Nobody died,’ said Yao.

  ‘But it feels like they did, doesn’t it?’

  That was exactly how it felt: like death after death after death. Finn was gone. His fiancée was gone. His family home was gone. Even his car was gone.

  ‘We used to call this a nervous breakdown,’ said the doctor. ‘Now we’d call it a major depressive episode.’

  He gave Yao a referral for a psychiatrist and a prescription for antidepressants. ‘A well-managed breakdown can turn out to be a good thing,’ he told Yao. ‘Try to see it as an opportunity. An opportunity to grow and learn about yourself.’

  The day after he got home from the hospital he received an email from Masha in which she said that if he ever needed to escape ‘the rat race’, he was very welcome to visit and try out her new guestrooms.

  It felt like a sign.

  Your timing is good, I haven’t been well, he wrote to her. I might just come for a few days for a rest.

  He hadn’t recognised Masha when he arrived at the house and a goddess in white walked out onto the veranda; a goddess who took him into her arms and said into his ear, ‘I will make you well.’

  Each time he walked out of Tranquillum House to greet new guests he wanted to create that same experience for them: like the sight of land when you’ve been lost at sea.

  Masha nurtured Yao like a sick bird. She cooked for him and taught him meditation and yoga. They learned tai chi together. They were alone in that house for three months. They didn’t have sex but they shared something. A journey of some kind. A rejuvenation. During that time his body changed; it hardened and strengthened as his mind healed. He became someone else entirely as he experienced a kind of peace and certainty he’d never known in his life. He shed the old Yao like dead skin.

  The old Yao only exercised sporadically and ate too much processed food. The old Yao was a worrier and an insomniac who often woke up in the middle of the night thinking of all the things that could have gone wrong in his working day.

  The new Yao slept through the night and woke up in the morning refreshed. The new Yao no longer thought obsessively about his fiancée in bed with another man. The new Yao rarely thought of Bernadette at all, and eventually completely eradicated her from his thoughts. The new Yao lived in the moment and was passionate about ‘wellness’, inspired by Masha’s vision for Tranquillum House. Instead of just patching people up, like Yao had done as a paramedic, the plan was to transform people, in the same way that he himself had been transformed. It felt like religion, except everything they did was based on science and evidence-based research.

  His parents visited separately and told him it was time to return to Sydney and get his life back on track, but within six months of his arrival Masha and Yao opened the doors of Tranquillum House for their first guests. It was a success. And fun. A lot more fun than being a paramedic.

  A few days had become five years. Delilah joined the staff four years ago, and together the three of them had all learned so much, constantly refining and improving their retreats. Masha paid generously. It was a dream career.

  ‘Tomorrow, I begin one-on-one counselling sessions,’ said Masha. ‘I will share my notes with you.’

  ‘Good, because the more we know about each guest, the better,’ said Yao.

  This particular retreat would set new precedents for the way they did business. It was natural to be nervous.

  ‘I want to learn more about Tony Hogburn’s past,’ said Delilah. ‘There’s something about him. I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘It’s going to be fine,’ murmured Yao, almost to himself.

  Masha reached across the table and grabbed him by the arm, her incredible green eyes ablaze with that energy and passion he found so inspiring.

  ‘It’s going to be more than fine, Yao,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be beautiful.’

  chapter twenty-three

  Frances

  It was now day four of the retreat.

  Frances found she had settled into the gentle rhythm of life at Tranquillum House with surprising ease. She rarely had to make decisions about how to spend her time.

  Every morning began with tai chi in the rose garden with Yao. Her schedule always included at least one, sometimes two, remedial massages with Jan. Some days she had to go to the spa on multiple occasions – if, for example, she was ‘assigned’ a facial. She did not find this onerous. The facials were divinely scented, dreamlike experiences that left Frances rosy and glowing, with her hair sticking up like the petals of a flower. There were yoga classes in the yoga and meditation studio and walking meditations through the surrounding bushland. The walking meditations got brisker and faster and steeper each day.

  In the early evening, when it got cooler, some guests went running with Yao (the Marconi family seemed to do nothing but run, even during free time; Frances would sit on her balcony and watch the three of them pelting up Tranquillity Hill as if they were running for their lives), while others did a ‘gentle’ exercise class in the rose garden with Delilah. Delilah seemed to have made it her personal mission to get Frances to do push-ups on her toes like a man, and because Frances wasn’t allowed to speak, she couldn’t say, ‘No thank you, I’ve never seen the point of push-ups.’ She now understood that the point of push-ups was to ‘work every muscle in her body’, which was supposedly a good thing.

  Frances meekly allowed Yao to take her blood and check her blood pressure each day, before hopping mutely on the scales so he could record her weight, which she still avoided looking at but which she assumed was plummeting, probably in freefall, what with all the exercise, and the lack of calories and wine.

  The noble silence, which seemed so flimsy and silly in the beginning, so arbitrary and easily breakable, somehow gained in strength and substance as the days passed, like the settling in of a heatwave, and in fact the summer heat had intensified. It was a dry, still heat, bright and white, like the silence itself.

  At first, without the distraction of noise and conversation, Frances’s thoughts went around and around on a crazy, endless, repetitive loop: Paul Drabble, the money she’d lost, the surprise, the hurt, the anger, the surprise, the hurt, the anger, Paul’s son, who was probably not even his son, the book she’d written with delusional love in her heart, which had subsequently been rejected, the career that was possibly over, the review that she should never have read. It wasn’t that she’d found any solutions or experienced any earth-shattering revelations, but the act of observing her looping thoughts seemed to slow them down, until at last they came to a complete stop, and she’d found that for moments of time she thought . . . nothing. Nothing at all. Her mind was quite empty. And those moments were lovely.

  The other guests were silent, not unwelcome figures in her peripheral vision. It became perfectly normal to ignore people, to not say ‘hello’ when you found someone else sitting in the hot spring you were visiting but to instead step silently into the bubbling, eggy-scented water with your head averted.

  Once, she and the tall, dark and handsome man sat in the Secret Grotto hot spring for what seemed like an eternity together, neither saying a word, both gazing out at the valley views, lost in their private thoughts. Even though they hadn’t spoken or even looked at each other, it felt like they’d shared something spiritual.

  There had been other pleasant surprises too.

  For example, yesterday afternoo
n, as she had passed Zoe on the stairs, the girl brushed against her and pressed something into the palm of her hand. Frances managed to keep her eyes ahead and not say anything (which was remarkable, as she was very bad at that sort of thing; both her ex-husbands had informed her that they could think of no-one who would make a worse spy than her, while they, in spite of their differing personalities, were both apparently eminently qualified to join the CIA at a moment’s notice), and when she got to her room she had found a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in her hand. She had never tasted anything more divine. Apart from Zoe, Frances didn’t have much interaction with anyone else. She no longer startled when Napoleon sneezed. She noted that Tony’s hacking cough gradually lessened and lessened until it disappeared, and indeed her own cough disappeared around the same time. Her breathing became beautifully clear. Her paper cut vanished and her back pain got better every day. It really was a ‘healing journey’. When she got home she was going to send Ellen an effusive thank-you card for suggesting this place.

  According to today’s schedule she had a one-on-one counselling session with Masha straight after lunch. Frances had never had any form of counselling in her life. She had friends for that. They all counselled each other and it was generally a two-way process. Frances couldn’t imagine sitting and telling anyone her problems without then listening to their problems and offering her own sage advice in return. She generally felt that the advice she offered was superior to the advice she received. Other people’s problems were so simple; one’s own problems tended to be so much more nuanced.

  But the silence and the heat and the daily massages had all combined to create a peaceful sense of resignation. Masha could ‘counsel’ Frances if it made her happy.

  Frances’s lunch that day was a vegetarian curry. She had stopped noticing the sound of everyone chewing and had begun to take the most extraordinary pleasure in her food – extraordinary because she thought she already took quite substantial pleasure in her food! The curry, which she savoured tiny mouthful by tiny mouthful, had a hint of saffron that just about blew her mind. Was saffron always that good? She didn’t know, but it felt like a religious experience.