Her husband looked confused. ‘I always tell people that.’
‘I’m going to get a case,’ said Lars.
He watched the wife pat her husband’s back as she moved past him.
‘Make it two cases,’ Lars said, because he spent his days dealing with the shattered remnants of broken marriages and he was a sucker for a good one.
He smiled at the woman. Her hands fluttered to her hair while her oblivious husband pulled out a battered old order book with a pen attached by a string, leaned heavily on the counter and peered at the form in a way that indicated this was going to take some time. ‘Name?’
‘Lars Lee,’ said Lars, as his phone beeped with a text message. He tapped the screen.
Can you at least think about it? Xx
His heart lurched as if at the sudden scuttle of a black furry spider. For fuck’s sake. He’d thought they were done with this. His thumb hovered over the message, considering. The passive aggressiveness of the ‘at least’. The saccharine double kiss. Also, he didn’t like the fact that the first kiss was upper case and the second was lower case and he didn’t like the fact that he didn’t like this. It was mildly OCD-ish.
He tapped in a rude, boorish upper-case reply: NO. I WILL NOT.
But then he deleted it, and shoved his phone back into the pocket of his jeans.
‘Let me try that pinot grigio.’
chapter four
Frances
Frances drove twenty minutes down a bumpy dirt road that jolted the car so hard her bones rattled and her lower back screamed.
At last she came to a stop in front of what appeared to be an extremely locked gate with an intercom. It was like arriving at a minimum-security jail. An ugly barbed-wire fence stretched endlessly in either direction.
She had envisaged driving up a stately tree-lined drive to the ‘historic’ house and having someone greet her with a green smoothie. This didn’t feel very healing, to be frank.
Stop it, she told herself. If she got into that I’m a dissatisfied consumer mode everything would start to dissatisfy her, and she was going to be here for ten days. She needed to be open and flexible. Going to a health resort was like travelling to a new country. One must embrace different cultures and be patient with minor inconveniences.
She lowered her car window. Hot thick air filled her throat like smoke as she leaned out and pressed the green button on the intercom with her thumb. The button burned from the sun and it hurt her paper cut.
She sucked on her thumb and waited for a disembodied voice to welcome her, or for the wrought-iron gate to magically open.
Nothing.
She looked again at the intercom and saw a handwritten note sticky-taped next to the button. The writing was so small she could only make out the important word ‘instructions’ but nothing else.
For goodness sake, she thought, as she went through her handbag for her reading glasses. Surely a good proportion of visitors were over forty.
She found her glasses, put them on, peered at the sign and still couldn’t make it out. Tut-tutting and muttering, she got out of the car. The heat grabbed her in a heavy embrace and beads of sweat sprang up all over her scalp.
She ducked down next to the intercom and read the note, written in neat, tiny block letters as if by the tooth fairy.
namaste and welcome to tranquillum house where a new you awaits. please press the security code 564–312 followed immediately by the green button.
She pressed the security code numbers then the green button and waited. Sweat rolled down her back. She would need to change her clothes again. A blowfly buzzed near her mouth. Her nose dripped.
‘Oh come on!’ she said to the intercom with a sudden spurt of rage, and she wondered if her agitated sweaty face was appearing on some screen inside, while an expert dispassionately analysed her symptoms, her misaligned chakras. This one needs work. Look at how she responds to one of life’s simplest stresses: waiting.
Had she got the damned code wrong?
Once again she carefully punched in the security code, saying each number out loud, in a sarcastic tone, to prove a point to God knows who, and gave the hot green button a slow, deliberate push, holding it for five seconds just
to be sure.