Masha
Masha studied the large man who sat on the other side of her desk, his feet planted solidly on the floor, his hands curled in meaty fists on his thighs, as if he were a prisoner hoping for parole.
Masha remembered how Delilah had implied there was something unusual or secretive about Tony Hogburn. Masha did not agree. The man was not especially complex. He seemed to her to be a simple, grumpy fellow. He had lost weight already. Men who drank a lot of beer always did lose weight when they stopped, whereas women like Carmel, who had much less weight to lose, took much longer. In truth, Carmel hadn’t lost any weight at all, but there was no benefit in Carmel hearing that.
‘How did you come across Tranquillum House, Tony?’ Masha asked him.
‘I Googled “How to change your life”,’ said Tony.
‘Ah,’ said Masha. As an experiment, she sat back, crossed her legs, and waited for his eyes to travel down her body, which they did, of course (the man was not dead yet), but not for very long. ‘Why do you want to change your life?’
‘Well, Masha, life is short.’ His gaze moved past hers to the window behind her head. Masha noted that he seemed much calmer and more confident now than when he had complained about his contraband being confiscated. The positive effects of Tranquillum House! ‘I didn’t want to waste the time I had left.’
He looked back at her. ‘I like your office. It’s like you’re on top of the world up here. I get claustrophobic down in that yoga studio.’
‘So how do you hope to change your life?’
‘I just want to get healthier and fitter,’ said Tony. ‘Drop some weight.’
Men often used that phrase: ‘drop some weight’. They said it without shame or emotion, as if the weight were an object they could easily put down when they chose. Women said they needed to ‘lose weight’, with their eyes down, as if the extra weight was part of them, a terrible sin they’d committed.
‘I used to be very fit. I should have done this sooner. I really regret . . .’ Tony stopped, cleared his throat, as if he’d said more than he wanted.
‘What do you regret?’ asked Masha.
‘It’s not anything I’ve done. It’s more everything I haven’t done. I’ve just kind of moped about for twenty years.’
It took a fraction of a second to translate the English word ‘moped’ – a word she didn’t hear much.
‘Twenty years is a long time to mope,’ said Masha. Foolish man. She herself had never moped. Not once. Moping was for the weak.
‘I kind of got into the habit of it,’ said Tony. ‘Not sure how to stop.’
She waited to hear what he would say next. Women liked to be asked questions about themselves but with men it was better to be patient, to be silent and see what eventuated.
She waited. The minutes passed. She was considering giving up when Tony shifted in his chair.
‘Your near-death experience,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘You said you no longer feared death, or something like that?’
‘That’s right,’ said Masha. She studied him, wondering about his interest in this subject. ‘I no longer fear it. It was beautiful. People think death is like falling asleep but for me it was like waking up.’
‘A tunnel?’ said Tony. ‘Is that what you saw? A tunnel of light?’
‘Not a tunnel.’ She paused, considered changing the subject and putting the focus back on him. She had already revealed too much of her personal life earlier to that Frances Welty, with her bouncy hair and red lipstick, nearly knocking Masha’s glass ball off the desk, like a child, asking her greedy, nosy questions, making Masha forget her position.
It was hard to believe Frances was exactly the same age as Masha. She reminded Masha of a little girl in her second-grade class. A plump, pretty, vain little girl who always had a pocket filled with Vzletnaya candies. People like Frances lived candy-filled lives.
But she did not feel that Tony had lived a candy-filled life. ‘It was not a tunnel, it was a lake,’ she told him. ‘A great lake of shimmering coloured light.’
She had never told a guest this before. She had told Yao about it, but not Delilah. As Tony ran a hand over his unshaven jaw, considering her words, Masha saw again that incredible lake of colour: scarlet, turquoise, lemon. She hadn’t just seen that lake, she had experienced it with all her senses: she had breathed it, heard it, smelled it, tasted it.
‘Did you see . . . loved ones?’ asked Tony.
‘No,’ lied Masha, even as she saw an image of a young man walking towards her through the lake of light, colour streaming off him like water.
Such an ordinary but exquisite young man. He wore a baseball cap, like so many young men did. He took it off and scratched his head. She had only ever seen him as her baby, her beautiful fat-cheeked toothless baby, but she knew immediately that this was her son, this was the man he would have and should have become, and all that love was still within her, as fresh and powerful and shocking as it had been when she’d held him for the first time. She did not know if it had been a precious gift or a cruel punishment to have experienced that love again. Perhaps it was both.
She saw her son for what could have been a lifetime, or what could have been a few seconds. She had no concept of time. And then he was gone, and she floated near her office ceiling, above the two men working on her lifeless body. She could see a button on the floor where they had ripped open her silk shirt. She could see one of her legs splayed at a strange angle, as if she’d landed there after falling from a great height. She could see the top of another young man’s head, the white part in his dark hair revealing a tiny strawberry-shaped birthmark, the dampness of his forehead as he sent electrical pulses through her body, and somehow she felt everything he felt: his fear, his focus.
Her next conscious memory had been the following day. She was back in the drab confines of her body and a tall beautiful nurse was saying, ‘Hello there, sleeping beauty!’ It was like being returned to jail.
Except it wasn’t a nurse. This woman was the doctor who had performed her heart surgery: a quadruple bypass. In the years to come Masha often considered how her life would have been different if her heart surgeon had looked like the vast majority of heart surgeons. Her prejudices would have made her dismiss everything he had to say, no matter the accuracy. She would have put him in the same category as the grey-haired men who worked for her. She knew better than all of them. But this woman made Masha snap to attention. She felt strangely proud of her. She too was a woman at the top of her profession in a man’s world, and she was tall; it somehow mattered that she was tall like Masha. So Masha listened attentively as she talked about reducing her risk factors when it came to diet and exercise and smoking, and she listened when the doctor said, ‘Don’t let your heart be a casualty of your head.’ She wanted Masha to understand that her state of mind was just as important as the state of her body. ‘When I was on the wards in my first term of cardiac surgery we had something called the “beard sign”,’ she said. ‘Meaning that if one of our male patients was so miserable he couldn’t even be bothered to shave, his chances of recovery were not as good. You must take care of your whole self, Masha.’ Masha shaved her legs the very next day for the first time in years. She went to the cardiac rehabilitation exercise program suggested by the doctor, determined to top the class. She attacked the challenge of her health and her heart in the same way that she had once attacked challenges at work, and naturally she over-achieved beyond all expectations. ‘Good God,’ said the surgeon when Masha went to her for her first check-up.
She had never once moped. She re-created herself. She did it for the tall attractive doctor. She did it for the young man in the lake.
‘My sister also had a near-death experience,’ said Tony. ‘A horseriding accident. After her accident, she changed. Her career. Everything about her life. She got right into gardening.’ He gave Masha an uneasy look. ‘I didn’t like it.’
‘You don’t like gardening?’ said Masha, teasing a little.
He gave her a half-smile, and she saw a flash of a more attractive man.
‘I think I just didn’t want my sister to change,’ he said. ‘It felt like she’d become a stranger. Maybe it felt like she’d experienced something I couldn’t understand.’
‘People are frightened of what they don’t understand,’ said Masha. ‘I never believed in life after death before that. Now I do. And I live a better life because of it.’
‘Right,’ said Tony. ‘Yeah.’
Again Masha waited.
‘Anyway . . .’ Tony exhaled and patted his thighs, as if he were done. Masha would get nothing else of interest out of him. It did not matter. The next twenty-four hours would tell her so much more about this man. He would learn things he did not know about himself.
A glorious sense of calm settled upon her as she watched him leave the room, hitching up his pants with one hand. Those last remnants of doubt were gone. Maybe it was because of the thoughts of her son.
The risks were calculated. The risks were justified.
No-one ever ascended a mountain without risk.