Nine Perfect Strangers

She could always trace back the causes. This time it was hearing Masha’s mad thoughts on the wonderfulness of her near-death experience. It had made Zoe remember the poem her Uncle Alessandro had read at her brother’s funeral, ‘Death Is Nothing at All’. Zoe had started thinking about how much she hated that poem, because it was all lies: her brother had not just gone into another room, he was gone, so gone, so silent, not a text not a post not a tweet not a word, and next thing she was struggling for breath and all she could think was, Get out.

She felt bad about breaking the noble silence, especially after her dad’s sneezing had created havoc in the room. The people at this retreat had no idea that those were her dad’s most subdued sneezes. One of his students had once made a three-minute film called ‘Mr Marconi Sneezes’ which was just a montage of her dad sneezing at different times with a soundtrack. It had gone a bit viral.

‘Did someone go through our bags?’ said a man’s voice from behind the door.

She’d put money on it being the seedy-looking guy who was nearly as tall as her dad and twice as wide. Zoe couldn’t hear the response.

She climbed the narrow stone staircase and shoved hard to open the second heavy door that led back into the main part of the house.

She couldn’t disappear for too long because her parents would worry, which wasn’t at all suffocating. Ever since Zach died it was as if Zoe’s life was in permanent jeopardy and only her parents’ secret, ongoing vigilance would save her. Her mum and dad truly believed that if Zoe didn’t get the flu shot, if her car brakes weren’t checked every six months, if she didn’t have a plan for getting home, she would die. It was as simple as that. And when they so casually asked a question like, ‘Are you getting an Uber?’, their faces averted, their hands busy doing something else, they couldn’t disguise the dread beneath their words, and so she didn’t brush them off, she didn’t walk away when her mother stood next to her and tried to secretly listen to her breathing, even though unlike Zach, who’d had asthma from when he was a child, Zoe had never had asthma in her life. She clamped down hard on her irritation and let them listen to her breathe and gave the answers and constant reassurance they needed.

She wouldn’t disappear on them now. She’d just take ten minutes for herself and then she’d sneak back in and hopefully Mad Masha would have got everyone under control by then and they’d all be silently meditating.

There were no staff about as she wandered into the Lavender Room. It was lavishly lavender. There were multiple tall vases stuffed with sprigs of lavender, the soft furnishings and cushions were all in various shades of lavender, and just in case you’d missed the point, pictures of lavender adorned the lavender-coloured walls.

Zoe went over to the window which looked straight out onto the rose garden, a rectangle of lush green grass bordered by high hedges, with garden beds of abundant white roses. This was where they would do tai chi at dawn tomorrow morning.

This place was all very nice, if dull – but it was kind of shocking if they really had searched the bags! Luckily Zoe had taken precautions, just in case. She knew how to get alcohol into alcohol-free parties. She’d wrapped up her contraband like a present, using bubble wrap to disguise the wine-bottle shape, complete with a gift tag that said: Happy Anniversary, Mum and Dad! She’d checked when she got to the room and the present was untouched in her bag.

On Zach’s twenty-first birthday Zoe was going to toast him at midnight with a glass of wine. When she and Zach were born the maths teacher at her dad’s school had given them each a bottle of Grange, strange presents for babies. The bottles were probably meant to be in a temperature-controlled cellar but Zoe’s family weren’t big on alcohol. The wine had been sitting in the back of the linen cupboard, behind the bath towels, all these years, waiting for their twenty-first birthday. According to the internet, this particular vintage had a ‘beautiful limp aspect with a melange of dried fruits and spices and a long, imperious finish’.

Zach would have found that description funny: ‘A long, imperious finish.’

Her eyes followed the softly curved silhouette of the blue-green hills along the horizon and she thought of her ex-boyfriend and how hard he’d tried to convince her to join him on a surfing trip to Bali with a group of friends. He couldn’t believe it when she insisted it was impossible. ‘I have to be with my parents,’ she’d told him. ‘Any other time, just not January.’ In the end he got angry, and then all of a sudden they were taking a break and next thing they were broken up. She’d kind of thought she had loved him.

She banged her forehead gently against the glass of the window. Did he think she wanted to be here with her parents? Did he think she wouldn’t prefer to be in Bali?

Last January had been terrible, like her parents were burning to death from the inside, their internal organs liquefied while they pretended that everything was just fine.

‘Hello there. It’s Zoe, isn’t it? We met earlier. I’m Frances.’

Zoe turned from the window. It was the strawberry-blonde lady with the bright red lipstick whom her dad had accosted on the stairs. She was adjusting an old-fashioned giant tortoiseshell clip in her hair and she looked flushed in the face.

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‘Hi,’ said Zoe.

‘I know we’re not meant to be speaking, but I feel like this has turned out to be an unplanned interlude in Masha’s noble silence.’

‘What’s going on down there?’

‘It’s all got very awkward,’ said Frances. She sat down on one of the lavender couches. ‘Oh dear, this is one of those swallow-you-up couches.’ She shoved two cushions behind her back. ‘Ow. My back. Ow.’ She wriggled about. ‘No. I’m okay. That’s better. Well. You know the man, the grumpy-looking one with the hacking cough? Not that I can talk. Don’t come too close to me, I don’t want to infect you, although I feel like my germs are nicer than his germs. Anyway, he’s getting very worked up because apparently he smuggled in a whole minibar, by the sound of it, and, well, this is embarrassing, but they took some things from my bag too, and I kind of felt like I should have been supporting the grumpy man. You know, like, that is a breach of privacy, you can’t do that, we have rights!’ She punched a fist in the air.

Zoe sat on the couch opposite her and smiled at the fist-punch.

‘But I got embarrassed because I didn’t want everyone to know I also brought in contraband that was confiscated, and I know this isn’t an episode of Survivor, but I didn’t want to form an alliance with that man, because he seems so . . . well . . . so I said I needed some air too, which I feel like was one of the bravest things I’ve ever done.’

‘I brought in contraband too,’ said Zoe.

‘Did you?’ Frances brightened. ‘Did they find it?’

‘No, if they searched my bag they missed it. I wrapped it up like a present for my parents.’

‘That’s genius. What is it?’

‘It’s a bottle of wine,’ said Zoe. ‘Really expensive wine. Oh, and a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I’m addicted.’

‘Yum.’ Frances sighed. ‘Congratulations. I like your ingenuity.’