chapter forty-two
Napoleon
He would do anything for his girls, anything, so he took the dreadful, heavy secrets they’d been carrying and he saw the relief with which they handed them over, and now he had his own secret, because he would never tell them how angry their secrets made him, never ever, never ever ever.
The walls continued to pulsate as his wife and daughter held his hands and he knew this nightmare would last an eternity.
chapter forty-three
Masha
Ben and Jessica sat cross-legged on cushions facing each other. Their hands gripped each other’s forearms as if they were on a narrow beam and trying to maintain their balance. It was glorious to see. Ben spoke directly from his heart and Jessica listened, transfixed by his every word.
Masha guided only when necessary. The MDMA was doing exactly what it was meant to do: dissolving barriers. They could have spent months in therapy to get to this point. This was an instant shortcut.
‘I miss your face,’ Ben said to Jessica. ‘Your beautiful face. I don’t recognise you. I don’t recognise us or anything about our lives. I miss our old flat. I miss my job. I miss the friends we lost because of this. But most of all I miss your face.’
His words were crisp and clear. There was no slurring. No equivocation.
‘Good,’ said Masha. ‘Wonderful. Jessica, what do you want to say?’
‘I think that Ben is body-shaming,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m still me. I’m still Jessica. I’m still in here! So what if I look a bit different? This is the fashion. It’s just fashion. It’s not important!’
‘It’s important to me,’ said Ben. ‘It feels like you took something precious and fucked it up.’
‘But I feel beautiful,’ said Jessica. ‘I feel like I was ugly before and now I’m beautiful.’ She stretched her arms above her head like a ballerina. ‘The question is: who gets to decide if I’m beautiful or not? Me? You? The internet?’
Right now, she did look beautiful.
Ben considered for a moment.
‘It’s your face,’ he said. ‘So I guess you should decide.’
‘But wait! Beauty is . . .’ Jessica pointed at her eye. She began to laugh. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
She and Ben laughed and laughed. They clutched each other, repeating ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ over and over, and Masha smiled at them uncertainly. Why was that funny? Perhaps it was an inside joke. She began to feel impatient.
At long last they stopped laughing and Jessica sat up and touched her lower lip. ‘Look. Fair call. I might have overdone it on the lips last time.’
‘I liked your lips before,’ said Ben. ‘I thought you had beautiful lips.’
‘Yeah, I get it, Ben,’ said Jessica.
‘I liked our life before,’ said Ben.
‘It was a shitty little life,’ said Jessica. ‘An ordinary shitty little life.’
‘I don’t think it was shitty,’ said Ben.
‘I feel like you love your car more than me,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m jealous of your car. I was the one who scratched it. That was me. Because I feel like your car is a slutty girl having an affair with my husband, and so I scratched her slutty face.’
‘Wow,’ said Ben. He put both hands to the top of his head. ‘Wow. That is . . . wow. I can’t believe you did that.’ He didn’t sound angry. Just amazed.
‘I love the money,’ said Jessica. ‘I love being rich. But I wish we could just be rich and still be us.’
‘The money,’ said Ben slowly, ‘is like a dog.’
‘Mmm,’ said Jessica.