Nine Perfect Strangers

Heather sighed. ‘Carmel, you really need to kind of reframe your thinking about what’s going on here.’

‘I vote for lights off,’ said Frances in a low voice. Napoleon had showed them where the microphones were installed in the corners of the room. He’d told them all, in whispers, that if they wanted to share something they didn’t want heard they should sit in the centre of the room with their backs to the camera and keep their voices as low as possible. ‘I think we should give Masha the impression of total acceptance.’

‘I agree,’ whispered Zoe. ‘She’s exactly like my year eleven maths teacher. You always had to let her think she’d won.’

‘I’d prefer lights on,’ said Tony. ‘We’re at a disadvantage if we can’t see.’

In the end, there were more in favour of ‘lights on’.

So here they all sat. Lights on. Occasional low murmurs of conversation like you’d hear in a library or a doctor’s waiting room.

Long periods of silence.

Frances’s body kept twitching and then she would remember that there was no book to pick up, no movie to switch on or bedside lamp to switch off. Sometimes she’d be almost on her feet, before she realised that the decisive thing she was planning on doing was leaving the room. Her subconscious refused to accept her incarceration.

Carmel came and sat next to Frances. ‘Do you think we’ve gone into ketosis yet?’ she asked.

‘What’s ketosis?’ asked Frances. She knew perfectly well what it was.

‘It’s where your body starts to burn fat because –’

‘You don’t need to lose weight,’ interrupted Frances. She tried not to snap, but she had not been thinking about food and now she was.

‘I used to be thinner,’ said Carmel. She stretched her perfectly normal legs out in front of her.

‘We all used to be thinner,’ sighed Frances.

‘Last night I hallucinated that I didn’t have a body,’ said Carmel. ‘I feel like there was maybe a message my subconscious was trying to give me.’

‘It’s so obscure. What could that message possibly be?’ mused Frances.

Carmel laughed. ‘I know.’ She grabbed the flesh on her stomach and squeezed. ‘I’m stuck in this cycle of self-loathing.’

‘What did you do before you had children?’ asked Frances. She wanted to know if there was more to Carmel than just hating her body and having four children. Early in Frances’s career, a friend had complained that the mothers in her books were too one-dimensional and Frances had thought secretly, Don’t they only have one dimension? She’d tried to give them more depth after that. She even gave them the leading roles, although it was hard to know where to put the children while their mothers were falling in love. When her editorial notes came back Jo had written all over the margins, Who is looking after the kids? Frances had to go back through the manuscript and make babysitting arrangements. It was annoying.

‘Private equity,’ said Carmel.

Goodness. Frances wouldn’t have picked that. She wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. How were they going to find a middle ground between private equity and romance?

‘Did you . . . like it?’ Surely that was safe.

‘Loved it,’ said Carmel. ‘Loved it. It was a long time ago now, of course. Now, I’ve got a part-time, entry-level job which is basically just data entry to try to keep the cash coming in. But back then I was kind of a high-flyer, or on my way to becoming one. I worked long hours, I’d get up at five every day and swim laps before work, and I ate whatever the hell I wanted, and I found women who talked about their weight excruciatingly boring.’

Frances smiled.

‘I know. And then I got married and had kids and I got totally swallowed up by this “Mum” persona. We were only meant to have two, but my husband wanted a son, so we kept trying, and I ended up with four girls – and then, out of the blue, my husband said he wasn’t attracted to me anymore and he left.’

Frances said nothing for a moment as she considered the particular cruelty of this kind of all-too-common midlife break-up and how it crushed a woman’s self-worth. ‘Were you still attracted to him?’

Carmel thought about it. ‘Some days.’ She put her thumb to the empty spot on her ring finger. ‘I still loved him. I know I did, because some days I’d think, Oh, what a relief, I still love him, it would be so inconvenient if I didn’t love him.’

Frances thought of all the things she could say: You’ll meet someone else. You don’t need a man to complete you. Your body does not define you. You need to fall in love with you. Let’s talk about something other than men, C

armel, before we fail the Bechdel test.

She said, ‘You know what? I think you are most definitely in ketosis.’

Carmel smiled, and at that moment the room went dark.