Nine Perfect Strangers

He’d been too young and happy to know that love wasn’t enough; too young to know all the ways that life could break you.

Their son’s death broke her.

Maybe a son’s death broke any mother.

The anniversary was tomorrow. Napoleon sensed its dark, malignant shadow. It was irrational to feel frightened of a day. It was just a sad day, a day they were never going to forget anyway. He reminded himself that this was normal. People felt like this on anniversaries. He’d felt this same impending sense of doom last year. Almost as if it were going to happen again, as if this were a story he’d read before and he knew what lay ahead.

He’d hoped that doing this retreat might make him feel calmer about the approach of the anniversary. It was a marvellous house, so peaceful and, yes, ‘tranquil’, and the staff seemed kind and caring. Yet Napoleon felt skittish. At dinner last night his right leg had begun to tremble uncontrollably. He’d had to put a hand on his thigh to still it. Was it just the anniversary? Or the silence?

Probably the silence. He didn’t like having all this time with only his thoughts, his memories and regrets.

The sun rose higher in the sky as the Tranquillum House guests moved in unison with Yao.

Napoleon caught a glimpse of the profile of the big chunky guy who had tried to smuggle in the contraband. It had seemed like he might be a troublemaker, and Napoleon had kept his teacher’s eye on him, but he appeared to have settled down, like one of those students you thought was going to be your nemesis for the whole year but then turned out to be a good kid. There was something about this guy’s profile that reminded Napoleon of somebody or something from his past. An actor from some old TV show he used to enjoy as a child, perhaps? It felt like a good memory, there was something pleasant about the feelings he invoked, but Napoleon couldn’t put his finger on it.

Somewhere in the distance a whipbird called. He loved the sound of the whipbird: that long, musical crack of the whip that was so much a part of the Australian landscape you had to leave the country to realise how much you missed it, how it settled your soul.

‘Repulse the monkey,’ said Yao.

Napoleon repulsed the monkey and remembered three years ago: this day, this time. The day before.

It was around this time three years ago that Napoleon was making love to his sleepy wife for the last time in their marriage. (He assumed it was the last time, although he hadn’t given up entirely. He would know if she was ever ready. All it would take would be a look. He understood. Sex felt cheap now, tawdry and tacky. But he’d still be up for some cheap, tawdry sex.) She’d fallen asleep again – she used to love her sleep back then – and Napoleon had quietly left the house and headed for the bay. He kept the surf ski on the roof rack of his car throughout the long summer holiday. When he came back, Zach was eating breakfast at the sink, shirtless – he was always shirtless – hair sticking up in tufts. He looked up, grinned at his father, and said, ‘No milk,’ meaning he’d drunk it all. He said that he might come with Napoleon for a paddle the next day. After that Napoleon worked for a few hours in the garden and cleaned the pool, and Zach went to the beach with his friend Chris, and then Napoleon fell asleep on the couch, and the girls went out – Heather to work, Zoe to a party. When Zach came home, Napoleon did ribs on the barbecue for the two of them, and afterwards they had a swim in the pool and talked about the Australian Open, and Serena’s chances, and conspiracy theories (Zach liked conspiracy theories) and how Chris had told Zach he wanted to go into gastroenterology. Zach was gobsmacked by the bizarre specificity of Chris’s career plans because Zach didn’t even know what he wanted to do tomorrow, let alone for the rest of his life, and Napoleon told him that was fine, there was plenty of time to settle on a career, and these days no-one had just one career anyway (he absolutely told him it was fine; he’d double-checked his memory about a thousand times), and then they played table tennis in honour of the tennis, best of three, Napoleon won two, and then they watched a movie, The Royal Tenenbaums. They both loved the movie. They laughed a lot. They stayed up too late watching the movie. That’s why Napoleon was tired the next morning. That’s why he hit the snooze button on his phone.

It was a split-second decision he would regret until the day he died.

Napoleon knew everything about that day because he’d examined his memories over and over, like a homicide detective combing through the evidence. Over and over he saw it: his hand reaching for the phone, his thumb on the snooze button. Over and over he saw the other life, where he made a different decision, the right decision, the decision he normally made, where he didn’t hit snooze, where he turned off the alarm and got out of bed.

‘Grasp the bird’s tail,’ said Yao.

It was Heather who found Zach.

The sound of his wife’s scream that morning was like no sound he’d ever heard before.

His memory of running up the stairs: it seemed like it took a lifetime, like running through mud, like something from a dream.

Zach had used his new belt to make the noose.

It was a brown leather belt from R.M. Williams that Heather had bought him for Christmas, only a few weeks earlier. It cost ninety-nine dollars, which was ridiculous. ‘Expensive belt,’ Napoleon had said to Heather when she showed it to him. He remembered fishing the receipt from the plastic bag, raising his eyebrows. She shrugged. Zach had admired it once. She overspent every Christmas.

You broke your mother, mate.

The kid did not leave a note or a text. He did not choose to explain his actions.

‘Carry the tiger over the mountain,’ said Yao, who was a young man, maybe only ten years older than Zach. Zach could have worked somewhere like this. He could have grown his hair long. He would have looked good with one of those beards they all had these days. He could have lived a fantastic life. So many opportunities. He had the brains, the looks, the facial hair. He was good with his hands. He could have done a trade! He could have done law or medicine or architecture. He could have travelled. He could have done drugs. Why didn’t he just do drugs? How wonderful to have a son who made bad choices but not irreversible bad choices; a kid who did drugs, who dealt drugs even, who got arrested, who went off the rails. Napoleon could have got him back on the rails.

Zach never even owned his own car. Why would you choose to die before you knew the pleasure, the spectacular pleasure, of owning your own car?

Apparently, that young bloke in front of him drove a Lamborghini.

Zach had chosen to turn his back on this beautiful world of whipbirds and Lamborghinis, long-legged girls and hamburgers with the lot. He chose to take a gift from his mother and use it as a murder weapon.

That was a bad choice, son. It was the wrong thing to do. It was a really bad choice.

He heard a sound and realised it was him. Zoe turned to look at him. He tried to smile at her reassuringly. I’m fine, Zoe, just yelling at your brother. His eyes blurred.

‘Needle at the bottom of the sea,’ said Yao.

My boy. My boy. My boy.