Lars
The guests of Tranquillum House stood in a huddled, whispering group in the centre of the studio, their heads bent, like a cluster of banished smokers outside their office on a chilly day. Lars could smell acrid sweat and stale breath. Ben and Jessica held hands. Carmel and Frances both chewed at their fingernails. Tony tugged aggressively at his bottom lip, as if he could somehow contort his mouth into providing the correct answers, while Zoe kneaded her stomach and studied her feet and her parents both studied her.
‘I’m sure Yao is fine, don’t you think? And Delilah? There is no way Masha would really hurt anyone,’ said Frances. ‘No way in the world. She sees herself as a healer.’
Lars could tell Frances was trying to convince herself. The longer they were in here the more stripped back she got. Her red lipstick was gone and her blonde hair, which had been in a bouncy circa 1995 ponytail, was now slicked back against her head. Lars liked Frances, but she wasn’t the lawyer he would have retained, given a choice, if he were on death row. He didn’t know who he would have chosen out of this motley lot. He wasn’t sure how much it really mattered. Masha was going to do what she was going to do.
‘We just need to make it look as if we’re going along with the madness,’ he said to the group.
‘I agree,’ said Napoleon. ‘We have to play along and take the first opportunity we can to find a way out of here.’
‘I believed in her,’ said Carmel sadly. ‘I believed in this.’ She indicated her surroundings. ‘I thought I was being transformed.’
‘So I’m representing you,’ said Frances to Lars anxiously. ‘We need to talk. God, I would do anything for a pen.’
‘Well, supposedly I’m representing you, Frances, in this grotesque . . . game,’ sighed Heather. ‘So I guess we need to talk too.’
‘Okay, yes, yes, but just let me talk to my client first,’ said Frances, breathing fast. She put a hand to her chest to try to calm herself. Lars smiled at her. She would be the sort to play a game of charades with endearing seriousness and little skill, as if it were a matter of life and death, and now that it truly might be a matter of life and death (surely not!), she was in danger of hyperventilating.
‘Let’s go have a chat, Frances,’ said Lars soothingly. ‘And then you can go convince Heather why you should live.’
‘This is pathetic,’ said Heather as they split up into pairs.
‘We’re an odd number,’ said Napoleon. ‘I’ll wait for my turn.’ He lowered his voice even further. ‘I’ll just keep looking around for a way out of here.’ He wandered off, his hands shoved in the pockets of his dad shorts.
Lars and Frances went to sit in a corner.
‘Right.’ Frances sat cross-legged in front of Lars. She frowned intensely. ‘Tell me everything about your life, your relationships, your family.’
‘Tell her I’m a philanthropist, I do a lot of things for the community, volunteer work . . .’
‘Do you?’ interrupted Frances.
‘You write fiction!’ said Lars. ‘Let’s just make it up! It doesn’t actually matter what you say as long as it looks like we’re going along with the exercise.’
Frances shook her head. ‘That woman might be crazy, but she can smell insincerity a mile off. I am going along with the exercise and I’m doing it properly. You tell me everything, Lars, right now. I’m not kidding.’
Lars groaned. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I help women,’ he said. ‘I only represent women in divorce cases.’
‘Seriously?’ said Frances. ‘Isn’t that discriminatory?’
‘I get my clients by word of mouth,’ said Lars. ‘They all know each other, these types of women, they play tennis together.’
‘So you only represent wealthy women?’ said Frances.
‘I’m not doing it for love,’ said Lars. ‘I make good money. I just make sure a certain type of man pays a fair price for his sins.’
Frances tapped her thumbnail against her front teeth like an imaginary pen. ‘Are you in a relationship?’
‘Yes,’ said Lars. ‘We’ve been together for fifteen years. His name is Ray and he would probably prefer I wasn’t “sentenced to death”.’
He felt a sudden burst of longing for Ray and for home, for music and the sizzle of garlic, for Sunday mornings. He was done with health resorts. When he got out of here he was going to book a holiday for him and Ray, a gastronomic tour of Europe. The man had got too skinny. His eyes looked huge in his face. All that obsessive bike riding. Legs spinning in a blur, up and down the hills of Sydney, faster and faster, trying to get those endorphins flooding his body, trying to forget that he was in a relationship where he gave more than he got.
‘He’s a good person,’ said Lars, and he was surprised to find himself close to tears, because it occurred to him that if he were to die, Ray would be snatched up like a too-good-to-be-true deal at the supermarket, and someone else could very easily love him the way he deserved to be loved.
‘Poor Ray,’ murmured Frances, as if she knew what he was thinking.
‘Why do you say that?’ said Lars.
‘Oh, it’s just you’re so good-looking. I was briefly in love with a handsome man in my youth and it was awful, and you’re just . . .’ she gestured at him ‘. . . ridiculous.’
‘That’s kind of offensive,’ said Lars. There was a lot of prejudice against people who looked like him. People had no idea.
‘Yeah, yeah, get over it,’ said Frances. ‘So . . . no kids?’
‘No kids,’ said Lars. ‘Ray wants children. I don’t.’
‘I never wanted children either,’ said Frances.
Lars thought of Ray’s mother at Ray’s thirty-fifth birthday last month. As usual she’d had ‘one too many glasses of champagne’, which meant she’d had two glasses. ‘Can’t you let him have one baby, Lars? Just one itsy-bitsy baby? You wouldn’t have to lift a finger, I promise.’
‘Did your psychedelic therapy give you any special insights into your life?’ asked Frances. ‘Masha would probably like it if I mentioned that.’
Lars thought about last night. Some parts had been spectacular. At one point, he realised he could see the music coming through his headphones in waves of iridescent colour. He and Masha had talked, but he didn’t think there had been any particular insights. He’d told her at length about the colour of the music and he felt like she might have got bored, which he’d found insulting because he’d been speaking very eloquently and poetically.
He didn’t think he’d told Masha about the little boy who kept appearing in his hallucinations last night. She would have liked that.
He knew that the dark-haired, dirty-faced kid who kept grabbing Lars’s hand was there to remind Lars of something significant and traumatic from his childhood, one of those formative memories that therapists were always so excited about dredging up.
He had refused to go with the young Lars. ‘I’m busy,’ he kept telling him, as he lay back down on a beach to enjoy the colours of the music. ‘Ask someone else.’
I don’t care what my subconscious is trying to tell me, thanks anyway.
At one point in the night he got into a conversation with Delilah that didn’t feel therapeutic, more like shooting the breeze; in fact, he was pretty sure he could feel a sea breeze while they chatted.
Delilah said, ‘You’re just like me, Lars. You don’t give a shit, do you? You just don’t care.’
Did she have a cigarette in her hand at that point? Surely not.
‘What do you mean?’ Lars had said lazily.
‘You know what I mean,’ Delilah said. She’d sounded so sure of herself, as if she knew Lars better than he knew himself.
Frances banged her knuckles in rapid motion against her cheekbones.
‘Stop hitting yourself,’ said Lars.
Frances dropped her hand. ‘I’ve never represented anyone in court before,’ she said.
‘This isn’t court,’ he said. ‘This is just a silly game.’
He looked over at Jessica, supposedly pregnant.
‘Tell Masha that my partner and I are planning to have a baby,’ he said flippantly.
‘We can’t lie,’ said Frances. She was clearly exasperated with him, poor woman.
The expression on her face made him think of Ray when Lars had done something to annoy or frustrate him. The compressed lips. The resigned slump of his shoulders. Those disappointed eyes.
He remembered the impish face of that little boy from last night and realised with a start that it wasn’t his younger self at all. The kid had hazel eyes. Ray’s eyes. Ray and his sister and mother all had the same eyes. Eyes that made Lars want to close his own because of all that terrifying love and trust and loyalty.
‘Tell Masha if I don’t live I’ll take out a wrongful death lawsuit against her,’ Lars told Frances. ‘I’ll win. I guarantee you I’ll win.’
‘What?’ Frances frowned. ‘That doesn’t even make sense!’
‘None of this makes sense,’ said Lars. ‘None of it.’
He saw again the dark-haired little boy with the hazel eyes, felt the tug of his hand and heard his insistent voice: I’ve got something to show you.