Nine Perfect Strangers

He stood there for a few moments, marvelling at her dimple and the roundness of her baby cheeks, marvelling as he so often did that he had been parachuted into another life, a brand-new life as a stay-at-home dad in the suburbs.

He had received a fourteen-month suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty for his role in the events at Tranquillum House. Masha had insisted to police that she must take sole responsibility for the new protocol they’d attempted to introduce and that her employees were nothing more than oblivious, obedient halfwits. She said she was the one who mixed the smoothies, which was true, but Yao had been right there with her, checking and double-checking dosages. Yao’s mother said if she’d been the judge, he would have gone to prison. Both his parents had been so angry. They could not comprehend his actions. Most days, Yao could not comprehend them himself. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time. The prestigious researchers! The journal papers!

‘That woman had you in a trance,’ his mother said.

His mother vehemently denied that the incident he’d remembered during his psychedelic therapy ever happened.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘I would never leave you alone in a kitchen with something boiling on the stove. Do you think I’m stupid? Would you do that with your child? You had better not!’

She said that Yao’s fear of mistakes came from no-one but himself. ‘You were born like that!’ she told him. ‘We tried so hard to make you understand that mistakes do not matter. We told you again and again that you should not try so hard to be perfect, it did not matter if you made a mistake. Sometimes we purposely made mistakes so you would see that everyone made them. Your father used to deliberately drop things, bump into walls. I said to him, “That’s a bit much.” But he seemed to enjoy it.’

Yao wondered then if he’d been misinterpreting his parents his whole life. When they talked about keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment, it wasn’t because they didn’t believe in dreams. It was because they were trying to protect him. Also, his father was not as clumsy as he had thought.

*

Delilah did not face court, because no-one could ever track her down. Yao thought idly of her at times and wondered where she was; if she was on some remote island, restoring a boat, like the escaped prisoner in his favourite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. (‘That’s every single man in the world’s favourite movie,’ one of the mothers at playgroup had told him once. She knew because she’d tried internet dating.) But Yao suspected that it was more likely Delilah had disappeared into an urban environment and was working again as a PA. Sometimes he still thought of that skirt she wore, a thousand years ago, when she worked for Masha.

Yao was disqualified from working as a paramedic or anything in the health industry. After he left Tranquillum House and the charges were settled, he had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a location virtually equidistant to the locations of his parents’ homes, and he ended up getting a job as a translator of Chinese legal documents. It was dull, laborious work but it paid the bills.

One day he got a call. Afterwards, he wondered if a phone call that is going to change your life has a portentous ring-tone, because when he heard that ring, as he sat alone, eating his sad dinner for one, he experienced the most remarkable full-body shiver of presentiment.

It was Bernadette, his ex-fiancée, calling to say hi. She’d been thinking about him. She’d been thinking about him a lot.

Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don’t notice it at all, until one day you wake up and think: How did I get here? But other times life changes in an instant, with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck, with glorious or tragic consequences. You win the lottery. You step out onto a pedestrian crossing at the wrong time. You get a phone call from a lost love at exactly the right time. And suddenly your life takes a violent swerve in an entirely new direction.

They were married within the year and his wife got pregnant immediately. It made sense for her to go back to work and for Yao to stay home with the baby while he continued doing his translation work, which now seemed interesting and stimulating.

Once he knew his daughter wasn’t faking sleep anymore, he went into the living room, sank down on the couch and turned on the TV. He would treat himself to twenty minutes of rubbish television to soothe himself from the stress of the biting incident, and then he’d get in an hour of work before it was time to think about dinner.

The remote slipped from his hand.

He whispered, ‘Masha.’

*

‘Masha,’ said a man on the other side of the same city, a spanner in his hands. He didn’t normally watch daytime television either, but he had come over to do a few jobs around his daughter-in-law’s house, as his son was good with numbers but not much else.

‘Do you know her?’ His daughter-in-law lifted the baby girl she’d been breastfeeding while she watched TV onto her shoulder and patted her back.

‘She looks like someone I used to know,’ said the man, carefully not looking at his daughter-in-law because he did not want to see her breasts, and also because he could not tear his eyes from his ex-wife.

Masha

looked so beautiful. Her hair was dark brown with bits of blonde, shoulder-length, and she wore a dress of all different shades of green that made her eyes look like emeralds.

The man sat on the couch next to his daughter-in-law and she glanced at him curiously but didn’t say anything else. They watched the interview together.

Masha had written a book. It was about a ten-day personal development program that incorporated psychedelic drugs, being locked in a room with strangers and undergoing an innovative kind of therapy that involved facing fears and solving riddles.

‘Surely people aren’t falling for this,’ murmured his daughter-in-law.

‘Now, obviously these drugs you mention are illegal,’ said the interviewer.

‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Masha. ‘But that will not be the case forever.’

‘And I understand you did jail time for supplying illegal drugs while attempting to test out this program.’

The man clenched the spanner he still held in his lap. Jail time?