Frances
Frances pulled the headphones from her head. They got caught in her hair. She tugged them free, her eyes still shut.
She was on a flight. The only time she fell asleep wearing headphones was on a flight.
She could hear the sound of far-off construction. A drill. A jackhammer. A digger. Some such thing. It was an intermittent mechanical roar. A lawnmower? A leaf blower. She lay on her side, drew the blanket up over her shoulders, and tried to make herself sink back into deep, delicious sleep. But no, there was the sound again, pulling her inexorably up, up, up, and it wasn’t a machine, it was the sound of a man snoring.
Had she got drunk and slept with a stranger last night? Good Lord, surely not. It had been decades. She didn’t feel any of the symptoms of a hangover, or the shame of a seedy sexual encounter. Her mind felt clear and bright, as if it had been pressure-cleaned.
Her memory clicked into place in one solid block.
She was in the yoga and meditation studio at Tranquillum House, and yesterday she’d drunk a delicious smoothie containing hallucinogenic drugs resulting in an extremely beautiful, remarkably vivid dream that had lasted forever, about Gillian and her dad and her ex-husbands, with many symbols and visual metaphors which she looked forward to interpreting. Yao, and sometimes Delilah, and sometimes Masha, had kept interrupting her lovely dream, asking irritating questions and trying to steer her in certain directions. Frances had ignored them; she was having too much fun, and they were aggravating her. She sensed that after a while they gave up on her.
She’d been in space.
She’d been an ant.
Also a butterfly!
She’d been on a sleigh ride with Gillian across a stunning starlit sky, and more, much more.
It was like waking up the first morning back home in your own bed after a long international holiday to multiple exotic locations.
She opened her eyes to darkness and remembered her eye mask. The sound of snoring got even louder as she pulled it off. Her eyes didn’t feel gritty or blurry. Everything was in crisp colour. She could see the vaulted stone ceiling above her. Rows of downlights. They were all switched on.
She sat up and looked around.
The man snoring was Lars. He lay on the stretcher next to hers, flat on his back, still wearing his eye mask, a blanket pulled up to his chin, his mouth wide open. His body twitched in tandem with each snore. It was pleasing to hear someone so good-looking with such a loud, unpleasant snore. It kind of redressed the balance.
Frances reached over with her bare foot and gave his leg a gentle shove. Henry was a snorer. Once, towards the end of the marriage, he was wearing shorts, and he’d looked down and said confusedly, ‘I don’t know why I’m always getting these bruises right here on my calf. It’s like I keep bumping into something.’ My right foot, thought Frances. She felt terrible about that right up until their last day together when they fought over the division of cutlery.
She scanned the room.
Tony – she would not be calling him ‘Smiley’ – had just sat up on his stretcher. It looked like he had a headache by the way he rested his forehead in his hands.
Carmel was also upright and was attempting to comb her fingers through her black, frizzy hair, which stood out in a wild halo around her head.
She met Frances’s eye. ‘Bathroom?’ she mouthed, although she’d been in the studio as often as Frances.
Frances pointed to the toilets at the back of the cellar and Carmel got to her feet, staggering a little.
Ben and Jessica sat shoulder to shoulder against a wall, drinking bottled water.
Heather and Zoe lay face to face where they had fallen asleep on a yoga mat. Heather was absently caressing Zoe’s hair.
‘Need water?’ Napoleon crouched down with difficulty on his long legs in front of Frances and offered her a bottle of water. ‘I’m assuming it’s not spiked with drugs,’ he said. ‘I guess if we’re worried we could just drink from the tap, although they could do something to the water supply if they really wanted.’
‘Thank you.’ Frances accepted the water, suddenly desperate for it, and drank nearly the whole bottle in one go. ‘Just what I needed,’ she said.
‘I guess it’s a good sign that they left us with water,’ said Napoleon. He straightened. ‘They haven’t completely abandoned us.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Frances. She stretched luxuriously. She was really looking forward to breakfast.
‘We’re locked in,’ said Napoleon apologetically, as if he were the one responsible. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a way out.’