Nine Perfect Strangers

After a moment both father and daughter lowered their heads and continued their slow hike up the trail, as if what Frances had just witnessed had been of no consequence at all.

chapter eighteen

Tony

Tony Hogburn had just returned to his room after yet another hellish experience of a ‘guided sitting meditation’. How much more meditation could a man do?

‘Breathe in like you’re breathing through a straw.’ Jesus wept, what a load of absolute horseshit.

He was humiliated to realise that his legs ached from the excruciatingly slow walking meditation they’d done this morning. Once upon a time he could have run that trail, no problem at all, as a warm-up, and now his legs felt like jelly after walking it at the pace of a hundred-year-old.

He sat on the balcony outside his room and yearned for an ice-cold beer and the feel of an old collie’s silky, hard head under his hand. It should have been a mild desire for a beer and a sad ache for a beloved pet, but it felt like a raging thirst in the desert and the deepest of heartaches.

He went to stand up for the two-hundredth time to get relief for this pain from the fridge before remembering for the two-hundredth time that there was no relief to be found. No refrigerator. No pantry. No TV to turn on for a distracting documentary. No internet to surf mindlessly. No dog he could summon with a whistle, just to hear the obedient patter of paws.

Banjo made it to fourteen years old. Good innings for a collie. Tony should have been ready for it, but it seemed he wasn’t. In the first week, great gusts of grief hit him whenever he put his key in the lock of his front door. A grief hard enough to buckle his knees. Contemptible. A grown man brought to his knees by a dog.

He’d lost dogs before. Three dogs over the course of his life. It was part of being a dog owner. He didn’t get why he was taking Banjo’s death so hard. It was six months now, for Christ’s sake. Was it possible that he grieved the loss of this damned dog more than any human he’d lost in his lifetime?

Yes, it was possible.

He remembered when the kids were little and the Jack Russell they gave their youngest, Mimi, for her eighth birthday escaped from the backyard and got hit by a car. Mimi had been devastated, crying on Tony’s shoulder at the ‘funeral’. Tony had cried too, feeling horrible guilt for missing that hole in the fence and sadness for that poor little dumb dog.

His daughter had been such a sweet little thing back then with her soft, round cheeks and pigtails, so easy to love.

Now Mimi was a twenty-six-year-old dental hygienist and she looked just like her mother: skinny, with a pin-like head and a rapid way of talking and walking that exhausted Tony. She was hygienic and busy, Mimi, and maybe not so easy to love, although he d

id love her. He’d die for his daughter. But sometimes he wouldn’t pick up the phone for her. Being a dental hygienist meant that Mimi was used to delivering monologues without fear of interruption. She was closer to her mother than to him. All three kids were. He hadn’t been around enough in their childhood. Next thing they were grown-ups and he sometimes got the feeling that they were doing ‘Dad duty’ when they called or turned up for a visit. Once, Mimi left a sweet, cooing message on his phone for his birthday, and then right at the end of the message he heard her say in an entirely different tone of voice to someone else, ‘Right, that’s done, let’s go!’ as she hung up.

His sons didn’t remember his birthday – not that he expected them to remember it; he barely remembered it himself, and he only remembered theirs because Mimi texted him a reminder on the morning of her brothers’ birthdays. James lived in Sydney, dating a different girl every month, and his oldest, Will, had married a Dutch girl and moved to Holland. Tony’s three granddaughters, whom he only saw in real life every couple of years and Skyped at Christmas, had Dutch accents. They felt entirely unrelated to him. His ex-wife saw them all the time, travelled over there twice a year and stayed for two, three weeks. His oldest granddaughter excelled at ‘Irish dancing’. (Why were they doing Irish dancing in Holland? Why were they doing Irish dancing at all? No-one else seemed to find this strange. According to his ex-wife, children were doing Irish dancing all around the world. It was good for their ‘aerobic fitness’ and coordination or something. Tony had seen footage on her phone. His granddaughter wore a wig and danced like she had a giant ruler gaffer-taped to her back.)

Tony never expected being a grandfather to be like this: funny-accented little girls talking to him on a screen about things he didn’t understand. When he’d thought about being a grandfather, he’d imagined a small sticky trusting hand in his, a slow dawdling walk to the corner shop to buy ice-creams. That never happened, and the corner store wasn’t even there anymore, so what the hell was wrong with him?

He stood. He needed something to eat. Thinking of his grandchildren had created a crater of misery in his stomach that could only be filled with carbohydrates. He would make a toasted cheese – Jesus Christ. No bread. No cheese. No toaster. ‘You might experience something we call “snack anxiety”,’ his wellness consultant, Delilah, had told him with a gleam in her eyes. ‘Don’t worry, it will pass.’

He slumped back in his chair and thought back to the day he booked himself into this hellhole. That moment of temporary insanity. His appointment with the GP had been at 11 am. He even remembered the time.

The doctor said, ‘Right. Tony.’ A beat. ‘About those test results.’

Tony must have been holding his breath because he took an involuntary gusty gulp of air. The doctor studied the paperwork for a few moments. He took off his glasses and leaned forward, and there was something in his eyes that reminded Tony of the vet’s face when he told him that it was time to let Banjo go.

Tony would never forget the shocking clarity of the moment that followed.

It was like he’d been walking around in a daze for the last twenty years and suddenly he was awake. He remembered how his mind had raced on the drive home. He had been so clear and focused. He needed to act. Fast. He could not spend the short time he had left working and watching TV. But what to do?

So he Googled. ‘How to change . . .’ Google finished the sentence for him. How to change my life. There were a trillion suggestions, from religion to self-help books. That’s when he came across an article about health resorts. Tranquillum House was top of the list.

A ten-day cleanse. What could be so hard about that? He hadn’t taken a break in years. He ran a sports marketing consultancy and he’d made one of the few excellent decisions of his life when he hired Pippa as an office manager. She was better than him at basically every aspect of his job.

He would drop some weight. He would get himself together. He would make an action plan. On the drive from the airport he’d felt almost optimistic.

If only he hadn’t made that stupid last-minute decision to stock up on emergency supplies. He’d already taken the turn-off to Tranquillum House when he did a U-turn and headed back to the nearest town, where he’d seen a drive-through bottle shop. All he’d got was a six-pack of beer (light beer) and a bag of chips and some crackers (what the hell was wrong with crackers?).

If he hadn’t turned around he would never have met Loony Woman on the side of the road. He’d thought she was in some kind of trouble. What other logical reason would there be to sit on the side of the road screaming and banging her horn? When she opened the window and he saw her face, she had looked seriously ill. Was menopause really that bad or was this woman a hypochondriac? Maybe it was that bad. Once he got out of here he’d ask his sister.

Now she appeared perfectly normal and healthy. If he hadn’t seen her on the side of the road, he would have picked her as one of those bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ‘super mums’ that bounded about like labradors when Tony’s kids were at school.

He was kind of terrified of her. She’d made him feel like a moron. It brought back a long-buried memory of a humiliating incident from childhood. He’d had a thing for one of his older sister’s friends and something happened – he’d said something or done something, he couldn’t quite remember – but he knew it was to do with periods and tampons, something he hadn’t understood at the age of thirteen, something innocent and trite that had seemed like the end of the world at the time.