Frances
It was the end of her first day at Tranquillum House and Frances lay in bed, wilfully reading while she drank her ‘evening smoothie’. No-one could be expected to give up wine and books at the same time.
None of the four novels she’d packed to get her through the next ten days had been confiscated, unlike her wine and chocolate – presumably because books weren’t on the ‘contraband list’ (she would never have come here if so) – but a small slip of paper had been placed inside the front cover of each of them: A gentle reminder that we recommend no reading during the noble silence.
What an absolute joke. She didn’t know how to go to sleep without reading. It wasn’t possible.
The book she was reading now was a debut novel that had received rave reviews. There was a lot of ‘buzz’ about it. It was described as ‘powerful, muscular’ and it was written by a man Frances had met at a party last year. The man had been pleasant, shy and bespectacled (not especially muscular), so Frances was trying to forgive him for his lavish descriptions of beautiful corpses. How many more beautiful young women had to die before they could get on with the job of tracking down their murderer? Frances made little ‘tch’ sounds of disgust.
Now the craggy detective was drunk on single-malt whisky in a smoke-hazed bar and a long-legged girl half his age was whispering into his ear, without inverted commas (this being powerful, literary fiction): I want to fuck you so bad.
Frances, who had reached her limit, threw the book across the room. In your dreams, buddy!
She lay back with her hands clasped across her chest, and reminded herself that her own debut novel featured a piano-playing, poetry-reciting firefighter. It was cute that the bespectacled author imagined twenty-something girls ever whispered ‘I want to fuck you so bad’ into the ears of fifty-something men. She would give the author a consoling little pat on the shoulder next time she saw him at a festival.
Anyway, what did she know? Maybe twenty-something girls did that all the time. She would ask Zoe.
She certainly would not ask Zoe.
She reached for her phone on the bedside table to check the news and the weather for tomorrow.
No phone.
Of course. Well. Fine.
The bed was a luxurious one: a good mattress, the sheets crisp with a high thread count. Her back hurt, but maybe a little less thanks to Jan’s giant hands.
She attempted to quieten her ‘monkey brain’, as per the rules.
In fact, her mind felt stuffed with new faces and new experiences: the long drive here; screaming on the side of the road; the serial killer on vacation (it was that damned book’s fault for making her think of serial killers); Ben and Jessica in that car; Yao unexpectedly filling a test tube with her blood; Masha and her near-death experience; chatty Napoleon and his intense wife; lovely young Zoe with her multiple piercings and long, smooth, brown legs, sitting in the Lavender Room telling Frances about her dead brother. That’s why Zoe’s mother had looked so sad on the stairs. She probably wasn’t intense at all. Just sad. The tall, dark and handsome man who’d cried, ‘Gesundheit!’ and the flustered lady with Frances’s glasses.
A lot for one day. Stimulating and distracting. She hadn’t had time for any more existential crises, so that was something. She hadn’t even thought much about Paul Drabble, apart from when she was telling Jan and Zoe about what had happened. She’d be over her internet scam by the time she left. Over the review. Over everything.
And thin! She’d be so thin! Her stomach rumbled. She was starving. Dinner tonight had been possibly the most excruciating meal of her life.
When she took her place at the long dining room table, she picked up a small card propped in front of her plate:
At Tranquillum House we recommend MINDFUL EATING. Please take small bites of your food. After each mouthful, place your cutlery back on the table, close your eyes and chew for at least fourteen seconds, slowly and pleasurably.
Oh God, she thought. We’re going to be here forever.
She put down the card and looked up to share a ‘can you believe this?’ glance with someone. The only ones prepared to meet her eyes were the astonishingly handsome man, who possibly winked at her, and Zoe, who definitely grinned, and responded with a look that said, ‘I know. I can’t believe it either.’
Masha wasn’t in the dining room, but her presence was felt, like that of a managing director or schoolteacher who could turn up at any moment. Yao and Delilah were there but they didn’t sit down to eat with the guests. Instead they stood at the side of the room, at either side of a large candelabrum on an ornate sideboard. The lighting in the room was muted and the candelabrum had three lit candles.
They sat in silence for at least ten . . . endless . . . minutes before the meals came out, delivered by a briskly smiling grey-haired lady in a chef’s hat. She didn’t say a word but nevertheless exuded goodwill. It felt so rude not to thank her. Frances tried to convey warm gratitude with a nod of her head.
Every person at the table received a different meal. Both Heather and Zoe, who sat next to Frances, received delicious-looking steaks together with baked potatoes. Frances’s meal was a quinoa salad. It was excellent, but in Frances’s world she’d call that a ‘side’, and by the time she’d masticated each mouthful for fourteen seconds it had lost all flavour.
Napoleon, who sat opposite Frances, received some sort of lentil dish. He leaned forward towards the bowl and waved the rising steam towards his nose, enjoying the scent. It was clear the poor man was desperate to chat. Frances would bet that in normal circumstances he would have been discussing the history of the lentil.
The serial killer studied his giant bowl of green salad mournfully before picking up his cutlery and stabbing three cherry tomatoes onto his fork with an air of tragic resignation.
The flustered lady with the quirky glasses received fish, to her apparent delight.
The astonishingly handsome man was assigned chicken and vegetables, which he appeared to find mildly amusing.
Ben received a vegetable curry and finished his meal well before the rest of the table.
Jessica was given a really delicious-looking stir-fry, which was the wrong dish for the poor girl. She spent ages laboriously twirling the long noodles around her fork and then dabbing worriedly at her face with her napkin for splashes of food.
Nobody broke the silence or made eye contact. When Napoleon sneezed again, nobody responded in any way. How quickly people adapted to strange rules and regulations!
Heather ate less than half her steak before putting down her knife and fork with a little puff of irritation. Frances had to restrain herself from leaping on it like a wolf.
Throughout the meal, Yao and Delilah stood silent and unmoving. They were like footmen, except you couldn’t snap your fingers and tell them to let Cook know that my lady could do with a larger portion of quinoa, and perhaps a medium-rare sirloin.
The sound of strangers chewing and clinking and scraping their cutlery just about did Frances’s head in. Hadn’t she once read there was an actual disorder where people suffered real psychological distress at the sound of others eating? There was a name for it. Frances probably had that disorder and had never been diagnosed because you were meant to talk while you dined. Something else to remember to Google once she got her phone back.
Eventually they were done, and they all pulled back their chairs and returned to their rooms. You couldn’t even say, ‘Goodnight! Sleep well!’
Now, as Frances drank the last of her smoothie, she thought about the number of silent insufficient meals ahead of her and considered leaving in the morning.
‘No-one leaves early, Frances,’ Yao had said today. Well, Frances could be the first. Set a new precedent.
She thought of her massage therapist’s whispered warning just before the silence began: Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. What did she mean by that? Frances would certainly not do anything she didn’t feel comfortable with.
She recalled what Ellen had said when she suggested this place. ‘Their approach is really quite unconventional.’ Ellen was her friend. She wouldn’t send her somewhere dangerous . . . would she? Just to lose three kilos? You’d want to lose a lot more than three kilos if they were doing something dangerous. What could it be? Walking across burning coals for enlightenment? Frances would absolutely not do that. She didn’t even like walking across hot sand at the beach.
Ellen would have told her if there was walking across hot coals. Ellen was a dear friend.
‘I’ve never trusted that Ellen,’ Gillian once said, darkly and knowledgeably, but Gillian was always making dark, knowledgeable comments about people, as if everyone had secret mafia connections that only Gillian knew about.
Frances missed her greatly.
A wave of exhaustion hit her, not surprising after that long drive. She switched off her bedside lamp and fell instantly sound asleep, flat on her back like a sunbaker.
*
A light shone in her face.
Frances woke with a gasp.