Masha made a strange startled sound and pressed her hand to her mouth. It was the first time Frances had observed Masha show any sign of weakness. Even when she spoke about her father, for whom she clearly grieved, she’d still been controlled.
Frances watched Masha swallow convulsively for a few seconds, as if she were choking, but then she regained her composure and carried on listening to Zoe, although her eyes looked a little watery, as if she really had just choked on something.
Zoe looked at the ceiling. The circle of people seemed to tilt towards her with the weight of their useless sympathy.
‘Oh wait, Dad probably didn’t say that Zach hung himself, but if you were wondering, like, what was his method of choice, that was it! It’s popular.’
She smiled and rocked in tiny circles. The silver studs along her ears gleamed.
‘One of his friends said that was so “brave” of Zach – to choose that way to kill himself. Instead of pills. Like he’d been bungee jumping. God!’ She blew out a puff of air and her hair lifted from her forehead.
‘Anyway, once we became, like, total experts on suicide, we stopped telling people how he did it. Because of suicide contagion. Suicide is really contagious. My parents were terrified I’d catch it too. Like chicken pox. Ha ha. I never caught it though.’
‘Zoe?’ said Napoleon. ‘Darling, maybe that’s enough.’
‘We weren’t close,’ said Zoe to the group. She looked at her hands and said it again. ‘Like, sometimes people think because we were twins we were really close, but we went to different schools. We had different interests. Different values.’
‘Zoe,’ said her mother. ‘Maybe now is not the –’
‘He got up really early that morning.’ Zoe ignored her mother. She fiddled with one of the many earrings in her earlobe. Her empty smoothie glass lay on its side against her thigh. ‘He hardly ever got up early. He took out the recycling bin, because it was his turn, and then he went back upstairs and killed himself.’ She sighed, as if she were bored. ‘We took it in turns to take out the bins. I don’t know if he was making some kind of point by doing that. It really pissed me off. Like, thanks so much for that, Zach, good on you, that makes up for you killing yourself.’
‘Zoe?’ said Heather sharply.
Zoe turned in her mother’s direction, but very slowly, as if she had a stiff back. ‘What?’
Heather took the smoothie glass and placed it upright on the floor, out of the way. She leaned towards her daughter and brushed a lock of hair out of Zoe’s eyes.
‘Something is not quite . . .’ Heather’s gaze travelled around the circle of people. ‘Not quite right.’
She turned to Masha. She said, ‘Have you been medicating us?’
chapter thirty
Masha
Focus. Only. On your breathing. Focus. Only. On your breathing.
Masha was fine, perfectly fine, she was under control. For a moment there, when Zoe said what she said, Masha had very nearly lost her focus completely; time slipped. But now she was back, her breathing steady, she was in control.
This information about the brother should have come out in her one-on-one counselling sessions with the Marconi family. They had all freely said they were here for the anniversary of his death, but none had mentioned he took his own life. Masha should have seen through their evasive behaviour. It was not like her to miss this. She was extremely perceptive. They had deliberately misled her and as a result she had been unprepared. She had felt blindsided.
And now this question from Heather: ‘Have you been medicating us?’
Before Heather spoke, Masha had been observing the group, watching their mannerisms become freer, their pupils dilate and tongues loosen. They were clearly losing their inhibitions, speaking fluidly, with refreshing honesty. Some, like Napoleon, fidgeted, whereas others, like Frances, were very still. Some were flushed, others pale.
Right now, Heather was both: pasty white with hectic spots of colour on her cheeks.
‘Have you?’ she demanded. ‘Have you been medicating us?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Masha calmly.
Heather’s question was not ideal and not anticipated, although perhaps it should have been, because Heather was a midwife, the only one of the guests, as far as Masha knew, with any medical expertise. But Masha would handle this.
‘What do you mean, “in a manner of speaking”?’
Masha did not like Heather’s tone. Snappy. Disrespectful.
‘Well, medicating implies . . .’ Masha searched for the right words. ‘A dulling of the senses. What we’re doing here is heightening the senses.’
‘You need to tell us exactly what you’ve been giving us! Right now!’ Heather moved up onto her knees, as if she were ready to leap to her feet. Masha was reminded of a ferocious little dog. One she’d quite like to kick.
‘Hang on, what’s going on here?’ said Napoleon to Heather.
Masha flashed a look at Yao and Delilah: Be ready if needed. They gave her barely perceptible nods, both gripping the discreet medical pouches they had clipped around their waists.
This was not how it was supposed to go.
chapter thirty-one
Lars
In his long history of health resorts Lars had experienced some bizarre and unusual practices, but this was a first. It was ironic because one of the side benefits of coming here was to cut down on his recreational drug use.
‘It’s called micro-dosing and it’s perfectly safe,’ said their esteemed leader, who, as always, sat cross-legged and straight-backed, her incredible long white legs so entwined that sometimes Lars got distracted trying to work out where each leg started and ended.
‘There are multiple benefits: higher levels of creativity, increased focus, heightened spiritual awareness, improved relationships – I could go on and on. Basically, you function just a little better than a normal person. The doses are about a tenth of a normal dose of LSD.’
‘Wait . . . what?’ asked Frances. She laughed uncertainly, as if she’d heard a joke she didn’t quite get. Lars liked her already. ‘Sorry. You’re not saying that we’ve been taking LSD?’
Lars saw most of his fellow guests were staring at Masha with dull incomprehension. This was surely too conservative a crowd to cope with a revelation about drugs, even taking into account the popularity of cocaine in the suburbs. Lars himself dabbled with coke, ecstasy and pot, but never LSD.
‘As I said, it’s called micro-dosing,’ said Masha.
‘It’s called spiking our smoothies with a hallucinogenic drug,’ snapped Heather.
Heather. Before today, Lars would never have picked Heather as her name. It was far too soft a name for this skinny, tanned woman with quadriceps that looked like machine parts and a permanent pained squint as if she were peering straight into the sun. Every time Lars had looked at her during the silence, he’d imagined pressing his thumbs to the point between her eyebrows and saying, ‘Chill.’ Now he felt bad about feeling aggravated, because she’d lost her son. The woman was allowed to frown.
‘It’s called outrageous,’ continued Heather. She wasn’t squinting now. Her eyes were ablaze with fury.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ said her adorably addled husband, a long celery stick of a man, so dorky he was cool. His name was Napoleon, which just added to his marvellousness.
Lars didn’t think he was high. He’d been feeling great, but he generally did feel good on any sort of cleanse. Perhaps the doses were too small to affect him, or he’d built up a tolerance. He surreptitiously ran a finger around the edge of his smoothie glass and licked it. He thought about how, on the first day, he’d drunk his smoothie and said to Delilah, ‘This is so good. What’s in this stuff?’ and Delilah had said, ‘We’ll give you the recipes when you leave.’ Lars had been imagining the recipes would specify the number of teaspoons of chia, not how many milligrams of LSD.
‘But . . . but . . . we’re here to detoxify!’ said Frances to Masha. ‘You’re saying we’ve cut out caffeine and replaced it with acid?’