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.
‘A great big out-of-control pet dog.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jessica. ‘Yeah. That’s right.’ She paused. ‘Why is it like a dog?’
‘So, it’s like we got a dog, and it’s the dog we always wanted, we dreamed of this dog, this dog is our dream dog, but it’s changed everything about our lives. It’s, like, really distracting, it barks all through the night wanting our attention, it won’t let us sleep, we can’t do anything without taking the dog into account. We have to walk it, and feed it, and worry about it, and . . .’ He scrunched up his face, working it out. ‘See, the problem with this dog is that it bites. It bites us, and it bites our friends and family; it’s got a really vicious streak, this dog.’
‘But we still love it,’ said Jessica. ‘We love the dog.’
‘We do, but I think we should give the dog away,’ said Ben. ‘I think it’s not the right dog for us.’
‘We could get a labradoodle,’ said Jessica. ‘Labradoodles are so cute.’
Masha reminded herself that Jessica was very young.
‘I think Ben is using the dog as a . . . story to explain how the lottery win has impacted your lives,’ she said. ‘A metaphor, that is.’ The word metaphor came to her a fraction later than she would have liked.
‘Yeah,’ said Jessica. She gave Masha a sly, shrewd look and tapped her nose with her forefinger. ‘If we’re going to get a dog we should get it before the baby comes.’
‘What baby?’ said Masha.
‘What baby?’ said Ben.
‘I’m pregnant,’ said Jessica.
‘You are?’ said Ben. ‘But that’s awesome!’
Masha reeled. ‘But you never –’
‘You gave my pregnant wife drugs,’ said Ben to Masha.
‘Yeah, I kind of feel really angry about that,’ said Jessica to Masha. ‘Like, I think you should go to jail for a very long time for this.’