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.