Nine Perfect Strangers

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.