Nine Perfect Strangers

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.