Nine Perfect Strangers

‘You write fiction!’ said Lars. ‘Let’s just make it up! It doesn’t actually matter what you say as long as it looks like we’re going along with the exercise.’

Frances shook her head. ‘That woman might be crazy, but she can smell insincerity a mile off. I am going along with the exercise and I’m doing it properly. You tell me everything, Lars, right now. I’m not kidding.’

Lars groaned. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I help women,’ he said. ‘I only represent women in divorce cases.’

‘Seriously?’ said Frances. ‘Isn’t that discriminatory?’

‘I get my clients by word of mouth,’ said Lars. ‘They all know each other, these types of women, they play tennis together.’

‘So you only represent wealthy women?’ said Frances.

‘I’m not doing it for love,’ said Lars. ‘I make good money. I just make sure a certain type of man pays a fair price for his sins.’

Frances tapped her thumbnail against her front teeth like an imaginary pen. ‘Are you in a relationship?’

‘Yes,’ said Lars. ‘We’ve been together for fifteen years. His name is Ray and he would probably prefer I wasn’t “sentenced to death”.’

He felt a sudden burst of longing for Ray and for home, for music and the sizzle of garlic, for Sunday mornings. He was done with health resorts. When he got out of here he was going to book a holiday for him and Ray, a gastronomic tour of Europe. The man had got too skinny. His eyes looked huge in his face. All that obsessive bike riding. Legs spinning in a blur, up and down the hills of Sydney, faster and faster, trying to get those endorphins flooding his body, trying to forget that he was in a relationship where he gave more than he got.

‘He’s a good person,’ said Lars, and he was surprised to find himself close to tears, because it occurred to him that if he were to die, Ray would be snatched up like a too-good-to-be-true deal at the supermarket, and someone else could very easily love him the way he deserved to be loved.

‘Poor Ray,’ murmured Frances, as if she knew what he was thinking.

‘Why do you say that?’ said Lars.

‘Oh, it’s just you’re so good-looking. I was briefly in love with a handsome man in my youth and it was awful, and you’re just . . .’ she gestured at him ‘. . . ridiculous.’

‘That’s kind of offensive,’ said Lars. There was a lot of prejudice against people who looked like him. People had no idea.

‘Yeah, yeah, get over it,’ said Frances. ‘So . . . no kids?’

‘No kids,’ said Lars. ‘Ray wants children. I don’t.’

‘I never wanted children either,’ said Frances.

Lars thought of Ray’s mother at Ray’s thirty-fifth birthday last month. As usual she’d had ‘one too many glasses of champagne’, which meant she’d had two glasses. ‘Can’t you let him have one baby, Lars? Just one itsy-bitsy baby? You wouldn’t have to lift a finger, I promise.’

‘Did your psychedelic therapy give you any special insights into your life?’ asked Frances. ‘Masha would probably like it if I mentioned that.’

Lars thought about last night. Some parts had been spectacular. At one point, he realised he could see the music coming through his headphones in waves of iridescent colour. He and Masha had talked, but he didn’t think there had been any particular insights. He’d told her at length about the colour of the music and he felt like she might have got bored, which he’d found insulting because he’d been speaking very eloquently and poetically.

He didn’t think he’d told Masha about the little boy who kept appearing in his hallucinations last night. She would have liked that.

He knew that the dark-haired, dirty-faced kid who kept grabbing Lars’s hand was there to remind Lars of something significant and traumatic from his childhood, one of those formative memories that therapists were always so excited about dredging up.

He had refused to go with the young Lars. ‘I’m busy,’ he kept telling him, as he lay back down on a beach to enjoy the colours of the music. ‘Ask someone else.’

I don’t care what my subconscious is trying to tell me, thanks anyway.

At one point in the night he got into a conversation with Delilah that didn’t feel therapeutic, more like shooting the breeze; in fact, he was pretty sure he could feel a sea breeze while they chatted.

Delilah said, ‘You’re just like me, Lars. You don’t give a shit, do you? You just don’t care.’

Did she have a cigarette in her hand at that point? Surely not.

‘What do you mean?’ Lars had said lazily.

‘You know what I mean,’ Delilah said. She’d sounded so sure of herself, as if she knew Lars better than he knew himself.