Touch me, she thought, and in her head it was an anguished wail. Please, please touch me.
But all he did was stand up and walk back over to the fruit bowl. ‘The mandarins look good.’
chapter eight
Frances
‘When did the pain start?’
Frances lay naked on a massage table, a soft white towel draped over her back.
‘Everything off and then under this towel,’ the massage therapist had barked when Frances arrived at the spa. She was a large woman with a grey buzz cut and the intimidating manner of a prison guard or a hockey coach, not quite the soft-voiced, gentle masseuse Frances had been anticipating. Frances hadn’t quite caught her name but she’d been too distracted following instructions to ask her to repeat it.
‘About three
weeks ago,’ said Frances.
The therapist placed warm hands on her back which seemed to be the size of ping-pong bats. Was that possible? Frances lifted her head to see them but the therapist pressed against Frances’s shoulder blades so her head fell forward again.
‘Did anything in particular set it off?’
‘Not anything physical,’ said Frances. ‘But I did have kind of an emotional shock. I was in this relationship –’
‘So no physical injury of any sort,’ said the therapist tersely. Clearly she hadn’t got the Tranquillum House memo about speaking in a slow hypnotic voice. In fact, she was the opposite: it was like she wanted to get any speaking over and done with as quickly as possible.
‘No,’ said Frances. ‘But I feel like it was definitely connected. I had a shock, you see, because this man I was dating, well, he disappeared and – I remember this very clearly – I was actually phoning the police when I felt this kind of sensation, like I’d been slammed –’
‘It’s probably better if you don’t talk,’ said the therapist.
‘Oh. Is it?’ said Frances. I was about to tell you a very interesting story, scary lady. She’d told the story a few times now, and she felt that she told it quite well. She was improving it with each telling.
Also, she didn’t have long before she had to stop talking for five days, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope with so much silence. She’d only just avoided that terrifying abyss of despair in the car. Silence might tip her over again.
The therapist pressed her giant thumbs on either side of Frances’s spine.
‘Ow!’
‘Focus on your breathing.’
Frances breathed in the citrus-scented essential oils and thought about Paul. How it began. How it ended.
Paul Drabble was an American civil engineer she met online. A friend of a friend of a friend. A friendship that turned into something more. Over a six-month period, he sent her flowers and gift baskets and handwritten notes. They talked for hours on the phone. He’d Facetimed with her and said he’d read three of her books and loved them, and he talked expertly about the characters and even quoted his favourite excerpts, and they were all excerpts that made Frances feel secretly proud. (Sometimes people quoted their favourite lines to her and Frances thought, Really? I thought that wasn’t my best. And then she felt weirdly annoyed with them.)
He sent her photos of his son, Ari. Frances, who’d never wanted children of her own, fell hard for Ari. He was tall for his age. He loved basketball and wanted to play it professionally. She was going to be Ari’s stepmother. She’d read the book Raising Boys in preparation and had a number of brief but pleasurable chats with Ari on the phone. He didn’t say much, understandably – he was a twelve-year-old boy, after all – but sometimes she made him laugh when they Skyped, and he had a dry little chuckle that melted her heart. Ari’s mother – Paul’s wife – had died of cancer when Ari was in preschool. So sad, so poignant, so . . . ‘convenient?’ suggested one of Frances’s friends, and Frances had slapped her wrist.
Frances was planning to move from Sydney to Santa Barbara. She had her flights booked. They would need to get married to secure her green card, but she wasn’t going to rush into things. If and when it happened, she planned to wear amethyst. Appropriate for a third wedding. Paul had sent her photos of the room in his house that he’d already set up as her writing room. There were empty bookshelves waiting for her books.
When that terrible phone call came in the middle of the night, Paul so distraught he could barely get the words out, crying as he told her that Ari had been in a terrible car accident and there was a problem with the health insurance company and that Ari needed immediate surgery, Frances didn’t hesitate. She sent him money. A vast amount of money.
‘Sorry, how much?’ said the young detective who carefully wrote down everything Frances said, his professionalism slipping for just a moment.
That was Paul’s only misstep: he underplayed his hand. She would have sent double, triple, quadruple – anything to save Ari.
And then: terrifying silence. She was frantic. She thought Ari must have died. Then she thought Paul had died. No answers to her texts, her voicemail messages, her emails. It was her friend Di who made the first tentative suggestion. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Frances, but is it possible that . . .?’ Di didn’t even need to finish the sentence. It was as if the knowledge had been lurking away in Frances’s subconscious all along, even while she booked non-refundable airfares.
It felt personal, but it wasn’t personal. It was just business. ‘These people are getting so smart,’ the detective had said. ‘They’re professional and polished and they target women of your age and circumstances.’ The sympathy on his handsome young face was excruciating. He saw a desperate old lady.
She wanted to say, ‘No, no, I’m not a woman of age and circumstance! I’m me! You’re not seeing me!’ She wanted to tell him that she had never had any trouble meeting men, she had been pursued by men all her life, men who truly loved her and men who only wanted to have sex with her, but they were all real men, who wanted her for herself, not con artists who wanted her money. She wanted to tell him that she’d been told on multiple occasions by multiple sources that she was really very good in bed, and her second serve caused consternation on the tennis court, and, although she never cooked, she could bake an excellent lemon meringue pie. She wanted to tell him she was real.