Nine Perfect Strangers

‘Does Gillian have anything to say to you?’

‘Not really. I told her about the review.’

‘Frances, forget the review!’

It wasn’t professional but Yao couldn’t hide his frustration. Frances kept talking on and on about the review. Shouldn’t authors be used to bad reviews? Wasn’t it just an occupational hazard?

Try being a paramedic. See how you go when a psycho husband holds a knife to your throat while you’re trying to save his wife’s life, which you can’t save, because she’s already dead. Try that, Frances.

Frances pushed up her mask and looked at Yao. Her hair stuck up comically, as if she’d just got out of bed.

‘I’ll have the seafood linguine. Thank you so much.’ She snapped an imaginary menu shut, pulled her mask back over her eyes and began to hum ‘Amazing Grace’.

Yao checked her pulse and thought of a long-ago night after a university party when he’d looked after a drunk girl in someone’s bedroom. Yao listened to her incoherent, slurred rambling for hours and made sure she didn’t choke on her vomit, before he finally fell asleep and woke up at dawn to her face inches away from his, and her sick-sweet breath in his nostrils. ‘Get out,’ she said.

‘I never touched you,’ Yao told her. ‘Nothing happened.’

‘Get the fuck out,’ she said.

He felt like he had taken advantage of her, raped an unconscious girl. It didn’t matter that he would never do such a thing, that he wanted to make a career out of healing; at that moment he was the representative for his gender and he had to cop it on the chin for all their sins.

Guiding Frances on her psychedelic therapeutic journey was nothing like looking after a drunk girl. And yet . . . it kind of felt like looking after a drunk girl.

‘I haven’t had sex in so long,’ said Frances. White spittle gathered at the corner of her mouth.

Yao felt a little ill. ‘That’s too bad,’ he said.

He looked over at Masha, who sat with Ben and Jessica, their three shadows enormous on the wall. Masha nodded as the couple spoke. It seemed like their therapy was going well. Delilah was talking to Lars, who had sat up from his stretcher and was chatting calmly with her, as if they were both guests at a party.

All his patients were fine. He had a crash cart on stand-by. They were all being monitored. There was nothing to worry about, and yet it was so strange because, right now, all his senses were screaming one inexplicable word: Run.

chapter thirty-five

Tony

Tony ran across an endless field of emerald green carrying an oddly shaped football that weighed as much as three bricks. His arms ached. Footballs weren’t normally that heavy.

Banjo ran along beside him, he was a puppy again, bounding along with the same joyful abandon as a toddler, getting in between Tony’s legs, tail wagging.

Tony understood that if he wanted to be happy again, he simply needed to kick this strange misshapen football through the goal. The football represented everything he hated about himself: all his mistakes, his regrets and his shame.

‘Sit!’ he said to Banjo.

Banjo sat. His big brown eyes looked up at Tony trustingly.

‘Stay,’ he said.

Banjo stayed. His tail whooshed back and forth across the grass.

Tony saw the white goalposts rise like skyscrapers above him.

He lifted his foot, made contact. The ball sailed in a perfect arc across a clear blue sky. He knew immediately it was good. That rollercoaster feeling in his stomach. There was nothing better. Better than sex. It had been so long.

The crowd roared as the ball went straight through the middle of the goalposts and the euphoria blasted like rocket fuel through his body as he leaped high in the sky, one fist raised like a superhero.

chapter thirty-six

Carmel