Nine Perfect Strangers

So generous of him to spare a little meat for the guests he’d invited to his home.

The moment they walked through the front door women and men split into different groups as if they were banned from talking to each other. The men stood around a barbecue overcooking the meat for what seemed like hours. The food was inedible. There were no chairs. People sat anywhere. Three women sat on a retaining wall.

After that day, Masha decided not to concern herself with establishing a social circle in Sydney. What was the point? She had an eleven-month-old baby and a demanding full-time job and a husband. Her life was busy and satisfying and she was truly happy, happier than she’d ever been in her life. It was gratifying to have a baby so clearly superior to other babies in terms of both beauty and intelligence. This was an objective fact. Her husband agreed. Sometimes she felt sorry for other mothers when they saw her baby, sitting so dignified and upright in his stroller, his fair hair shining in the sun (so many other babies were bald, like old men), his little head swivelling from side to side as he observed the world with his big green eyes. When he found something funny, as he often did (he got that from his father), he chuckled, right from his belly, surprisingly deep, and everyone in hearing distance had to laugh too, and at that moment, as Masha exchanged smiles with those around her, real smiles, not polite smiles, she wasn’t isolated at all; she was a Sydneysider, a mother out with her child.

That Sunday, she had nearly finished her work when the baby woke up. He no longer cried when he woke up. Instead he made a musical ‘aaaah’ sound, as if he was playing with his voice. He let the sound go up and down, up and down. He was as happily tone deaf as his father singing as he stirred a pot on the stove.

At one point he called out, ‘Ma-ma! Ma-ma!’ He was so smart. Many children of that age did not have a single word in their vocabulary.

‘I’m coming, my lapochka!’ she called back. She only needed five minutes more and she would be done.

He became quiet again. She finished what she was doing. It took less than five minutes. Maybe four.

‘Did you get tired of waiting for me, little bunny?’ she said as she opened the door of his bedroom. She thought he might have fallen back asleep.

He was already dead.

He’d strangled himself playing with a long white cord from the window blind. It was not an uncommon accident, she later learned. Other women had seen what she saw that day. Their trembling fingers had untangled their precious babies.

These days there were warning tags on blind cords. Masha always saw them when she walked into a room, even from very far away.

Her husband said it was an accident and there was nothing to forgive as he stood at the hospital wearing the paint-splattered overalls from his game. She remembered the fine spray of blue dots across his jaw, like blue rain.

She remembered also one strange moment when she had looked at the strangers all around her and wanted her mother, a woman who had never really liked Masha, let alone loved her, and who would provide no comfort. Yet, for just one moment in her grief, Masha had craved her presence.

She refused her husband’s forgiveness. Her son called for her and she did not go to him. It was unacceptable.

She let her husband go. She insisted he find another life and he did eventually, although it took much, much longer than Masha wanted. It was such a relief when he was gone, when she no longer had to experience the pain of seeing the face that so resembled that of their beautiful son.

Although she refused to read the emails he sent and wanted to know nothing about him, she accidentally discovered many years ago, when she came across a man in a food court who was still friends with her husband, a man who was there on the day they shot the balls of paint, that her husband was healthy and happy, that he had married an Australian girl and had three sons.

Masha hoped that he still sang when he cooked. She thought that he probably did. In her research, she had read of the hedonic treadmill theory, which said that people returned to a certai

n pre-set level of happiness regardless of what happened to them, whether it was very good or very bad. Her husband had been a simple, happy man whereas Masha was a complex, unhappy woman.

Masha’s son would have been twenty-eight this August. She probably would have had a difficult relationship with him if he had lived. They probably would have fought like Masha had once fought with her mother. Instead he would always be her singing, chuckling baby and a beautiful young man wearing a baseball cap walking towards her through a lake of colour.

She should have been allowed to stay with him.

Masha looked at the empty bag of Doritos. Her fingertips were stained yellow the way her father’s had once been stained by nicotine. She ran the heels of her hands over her mouth, and turned the monitor back on to observe her guests.

They were all awake, she saw. They sat in small groups, chatting, in that laid-back Australian way. They were too relaxed. This was no dark night of the soul. It could have been a barbecue. These people did not truly believe they were facing death sentences.

Never once had a member of staff defied her the way these people were defying her.

The screen of her monitor pulsed as if it were alive. Was there some sort of malfunction? She put her finger to it and felt it quiver like a dying fish.

She was momentarily confused before she remembered she had earlier taken seventy-five milligrams of LSD to improve her decision-making and mental clarity. This was simply a hallucination. She needed to relax and allow her brain to find all the right connections.

She looked around the room and noticed a vacuum cleaner sitting quietly in the corner of her office. It was not pulsating. It was quite real. She had just not noticed it before. The cleaners must have left it. They had excellent cleaners here. She only recruited and employed the best. It was important to maintain quality standards at all levels of your business.

There was something so familiar about the vacuum cleaner.

‘Oh!’ she said, for her father was picking up the vacuum cleaner, clumsily, with both hands. It was such a cumbersome thing. He walked towards the door with it.

‘No, no, no!’ she screamed. ‘Papochka! Put it down! Do not go!’

But he looked back at her sadly and smiled, and he was gone and no man would ever love her the way her father had loved her.