Frances
Frances drove twenty minutes down a bumpy dirt road that jolted the car so hard her bones rattled and her lower back screamed.
At last she came to a stop in front of what appeared to be an extremely locked gate with an intercom. It was like arriving at a minimum-security jail. An ugly barbed-wire fence stretched endlessly in either direction.
She had envisaged driving up a stately tree-lined drive to the ‘historic’ house and having someone greet her with a green smoothie. This didn’t feel very healing, to be frank.
Stop it, she told herself. If she got into that I’m a dissatisfied consumer mode everything would start to dissatisfy her, and she was going to be here for ten days. She needed to be open and flexible. Going to a health resort was like travelling to a new country. One must embrace different cultures and be patient with minor inconveniences.
She lowered her car window. Hot thick air filled her throat like smoke as she leaned out and pressed the green button on the intercom with her thumb. The button burned from the sun and it hurt her paper cut.
She sucked on her thumb and waited for a disembodied voice to welcome her, or for the wrought-iron gate to magically open.
Nothing.
She looked again at the intercom and saw a handwritten note sticky-taped next to the button. The writing was so small she could only make out the important word ‘instructions’ but nothing else.
For goodness sake, she thought, as she went through her handbag for her reading glasses. Surely a good proportion of visitors were over forty.
She found her glasses, put them on, peered at the sign and still couldn’t make it out. Tut-tutting and muttering, she got out of the car. The heat grabbed her in a heavy embrace and beads of sweat sprang up all over her scalp.
She ducked down next to the intercom and read the note, written in neat, tiny block letters as if by the tooth fairy.
namaste and welcome to tranquillum house where a new you awaits. please press the security code 564–312 followed immediately by the green button.
She pressed the security code numbers then the green button and waited. Sweat rolled down her back. She would need to change her clothes again. A blowfly buzzed near her mouth. Her nose dripped.
‘Oh come on!’ she said to the intercom with a sudden spurt of rage, and she wondered if her agitated sweaty face was appearing on some screen inside, while an expert dispassionately analysed her symptoms, her misaligned chakras. This one needs work. Look at how she responds to one of life’s simplest stresses: waiting.
Had she got the damned code wrong?
Once again she carefully punched in the security code, saying each number out loud, in a sarcastic tone, to prove a point to God knows who, and gave the hot green button a slow, deliberate push, holding it for five seconds just to be sure.
There. Now let me in.
She took off her reading glasses and let them dangle in her hand.
The baking heat seemed to be melting her scalp like chocolate in the sun. Silence again. She gave the intercom a fierce, hard look, as if that would shame it into acting.
At least this would make a funny story for Paul. She wondered if he’d ever been to a health resort. She thought he’d most likely be a sceptic. She herself was –
Her chest constricted. This wouldn’t make a good story for Paul. Paul was gone. How humiliating for him to have slipped into her thoughts like that. She wished she felt a surge of white-hot anger instead of this utter sadness, this pretend grief for what had never been real in the first place.
Stop it. Don’t think about it. Focus on the problem at hand.
The solution was obvious. She would ring Tranquillum House! They would be mortified to hear that their intercom had broken and Frances would be calm and understanding and brush away their apologies. ‘These things happen,’ she’d say. ‘Namaste.’
She got back in the car, cranked up the air-conditioner. She found the paperwork with her booking details, and rang the number listed. All her other communications had been by email, so it was the first time she’d heard the recorded message that immediately began to play.
‘Thank you for calling the historic Tranquillum House Health and Wellness Hot Springs Resort, where a new you awaits. Your call is so important and special to us, as is your health and wellbeing, but we are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment. We know your time is precious, so please do leave a message after the chimes and we will call you back just as soon as we can. We so appreciate your patience. Namaste.’
Frances cleared her throat as wind chimes made their annoying twinkly dinging sounds.
‘Oh yes, my name is –’
The wind chimes kept going. She stopped, waited, went to speak and stopped again. It was a wind-chime symphony.
At last there was silence.
‘Hello, this is Frances Welty.’ She sniffed. ‘Excuse me. Bit of a cold. Anyway, as I said, I’m Frances Welty. I’m a guest.’
Guest? Was that the right word? Patient? Inmate?
‘I’m trying to check in and I’m stuck outside the gate. It’s, ah, twenty past three, twenty-five past three, and I’m . . . here! The intercom doesn’t seem to be working even though I’ve followed all the instructions. The teeny-tiny instructions. I’d appreciate it if you could just open the gate? Let me in?’ Her message finished on a rising note of hysteria, which she regretted. She put the phone down on the seat next to her and studied the gate.
Nothing. She would give it twenty minutes and then she was throwing in the towel.
Her phone rang and she snatched it up without looking at the screen.
‘Hi there!’ she said cheerfully, to show how understanding and patient she really was and to make up for the sarcastic ‘teeny-tiny’ comment.
‘Frances?’ It was Alain, her literary agent. ‘You don’t sound like you.’
Frances sighed. ‘I was expecting someone else. I’m doing that health retreat I told you about, but I can’t even get through the front gate. Their intercom isn’t working.’
‘How incompetent! How unsatisfactory!’ Alain was easily and often enraged by poor service. ‘You should turn around and come back home. It’s not alternative, is it? Remember those poor people who died in that sweat lodge? They all thought they were becoming enlightened when in reality they were being cooked?’
‘This place is pretty mainstream. Hot springs and massages and art therapy. Maybe some gentle fasting.’
‘Gentle fasting.’ Alain snorted. ‘Eat when you’re hungry. That’s a privilege, you know, to eat when you’re hungry, when there are people starving in this world.’
‘Well, that’s the point – we’re not starving in this part of the world,’ said Frances. She looked at the wrapper for the KitKat bar sitting in the console of her car. ‘We’re eating too much processed food. So that’s why us privileged people need to detox –’
‘Oh my Lord, she’s falling for it. She’s drunk the Kool-Aid! Detoxing is a myth, darling, it’s been debunked! Your liver does it for you. Or maybe it’s your kidneys. It’s all taken care of somehow.’
‘Anyway,’ said Frances. She had a feeling he was procrastinating.
‘Anyway,’ said Alain. ‘You sound like you’ve got a cold, Frances.’ He seemed quite anguished about her cold.
‘I do have a very bad, persistent, possibly permanent cold,’ said Frances. She coughed to demonstrate. ‘You’d be proud of me. I’ve been taking a lot of very powerful drugs. My heart is going at a million miles per hour.’
‘That’s the ticket,’ said Alain.
There was a pause.
‘Alain?’ she prompted, but she knew, she already knew exactly what he was going to say.
‘I’m afraid I am not the bearer of good news,’ said Alain.
‘I see.’
She sucked in her stomach, ready to take it like a man, or at least like a romance novelist capable of reading her own royalty statements.
‘Well, as you know, darling,’ began Alain.
But Frances couldn’t bear to hear him hedging, trying to soften the blow with compliments.
‘They don’t want the new book, do they?’ she said.
‘They don’t want the new book,’ said Alain sadly. ‘I’m so sorry. I think it’s a beautiful book, I really do, it’s just the current environment, and romance has taken the worst hit, it won’t be forever, romance always comes back, it’s a blip, but –’
‘So you’ll sell it to someone else,’ interrupted Frances. ‘Sell it to Timmy.’
There was another pause.
‘The thing is,’ said Alain, ‘I didn’t tell you this, but I slipped the manuscript to Timmy a few weeks back, because I did have a tiny fear this might happen and obviously an offer from Timmy before we had anything on the table would have given me leverage, so I –’
‘Timmy passed?’ Frances couldn’t believe it. Hanging in her wardrobe was a designer dress that she’d never be able to wear again because of the stain from a pina colada Timmy had spilled on her while he had her cornered in a room at the Melbourne Writers Festival, his voice hasty and hot in her ear, looking back over his shoulder like a spy, telling her how much he wanted to publish her, how it was his destiny to publish her, how no-one else in the publishing industry knew how to publish her the way he did, how her loyalty to Jo was admirable but misplaced because Jo thought she understood romance but she didn’t, only Timmy did, and only Timmy could and would take Frances ‘to the next level’, and so on and so forth until Jo turned up and rescued her. ‘Oi, leave my author alone.’
How long ago was that? Not that long surely. Maybe nine, ten years ago. A decade. Time went so fast these days. There was some sort of malfunction going on with how fast the earth was spinning. Decades went by as quickly as years once did.
‘Timmy loved the book,’ said Alain. ‘Adored it. He was nearly in tears. He couldn’t get it past acquisitions. They’re all shaking in their boots over there. It was a hell of a year. The decree from above is psychological thrillers.’
‘I can’t write a thriller,’ said Frances. She never liked to kill characters. Sometimes she let them break a limb, but she felt bad enough about that.
‘Of course you can’t!’ said Alain too quickly, and Frances felt mildly insulted.
‘Look, I have to admit I was worried when Jo left and you were out of contract,’ said Alain. ‘But Ashlee seemed to really be a fan of yours.’
Frances’s concentration drifted as Alain continued to talk. She watched the closed gate and pushed the knuckles of her left hand into her lower back.
What would Jo say when she heard Frances had been rejected? Or would she have had to do the same thing? Frances had always assumed that Jo would be her editor forever. She had fondly imagined them finishing their working lives simultaneously, perhaps with a lavish joint retirement lunch, but late last year Jo had announced her intention to retire. Retire! Like she was some sort of old grandma! Jo actually was a grandmother, but for goodness sake that wasn’t a reason to stop. Frances felt like she was only just getting into the swing of things, and all of a sudden people in her circle were doing old-people things: having grandchildren, retiring, downsizing, dying – not in car accidents or plane crashes, no, dying peacefully in their sleep. She would never forgive Gillian for that. Gillian always slipped out of parties without saying goodbye.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise when Jo’s replacement turned out to be a child, because children were taking over the world. Everywhere Frances looked there were children: children sitting gravely behind news desks, controlling traffic, running writers’ festivals, taking her blood pressure, managing her taxes and fitting her bras. When Frances first met Ashlee she had genuinely thought she was there on work experience. She’d been about to say, ‘A cappuccino would be lovely, darling,’ when the child had walked around to the other side of Jo’s old desk.
‘Frances,’ she’d said, ‘this is such a fan girl moment for me! I used to read your books when I was, like, eleven! I stole them from my mum’s handbag. I’d be like, Mum, you’ve got to let me read Nathaniel’s Kiss, and she’d be like, No way, Ashlee, there’s too much sex in it!’
Then Ashlee had proceeded to tell Frances that her next book needed more sex, a lot more sex, but she knew Frances could totally pull it off! As Ashlee was sure Frances knew, the market was changing, and ‘If you just look at this chart here, Frances – no, here; that’s it – you’ll see that your sales have been on kind of a, well, sorry to say this, but you kind of have to call this a downward trend, and we, like, really need to reverse that, like, super-fast. Oh, and one other thing . . .’ Ashlee looked pained, as if she were about to bring up an embarrassing medical issue. ‘Your social media presence? I hear you’re not so keen on social media. Neither is my mum! But it’s kind of essential in today’s market. Your fans really do need to see you on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook – that’s just the bare minimum. Also, we’d love you to start a blog and a newsletter and perhaps do some regular vlogs? That would be so much fun! They’re like little films!’
‘I have a website,’ replied Frances.
‘Yes,’ said Ashlee kindly. ‘Yes you do, Frances. But nobody cares about websites.’
And then she’d angled her computer monitor towards Frances so she could show her some examples of other, better behaved authors with ‘active’ social media presences, and Frances had stopped listening and waited for it to be over, like a dental appointment. (She couldn’t see the screen anyway. She didn’t have her glasses with her.) But she wasn’t worried, because she was falling in love with Paul Drabble at the time, and when she was falling in love she always wrote her best books. And besides, she had the sweetest, most loyal readers in the world. Her sales might drop but she would always be published.
‘I will find the right home for this book,’ said Alain now. ‘It might just take a little while. Romance isn’t dead!’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Frances.
‘Not even close,’ said Alain.
She picked up the empty KitKat wrapper and licked it, hoping for fragments of chocolate. How was she going to get through this setback without sugar?
‘Frances?’ said Alain.
‘My back hurts a great deal,’ said Frances. She blew her nose hard. ‘Also, I had to stop the car in the middle of the road to have a hot flush.’
‘That sounds truly awful,’ said Alain with feeling. ‘I can’t even imagine.’
‘No you can’t. A man stopped to see if I was alright because I was screaming.’
‘You were screaming?’ said Alain.
‘I felt like screaming,’ said Frances.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Alain hurriedly. ‘I understand. I often feel like screaming.’
This was rock-bottom. She’d just licked a KitKat wrapper.
‘Oh dear, Frances, I’m so sorry about this, especially after what happened with that horrendous man. Have the police had anything new to say?’
‘No,’ said Frances. ‘No news.’
‘Darling, I’m just bleeding for you here.’
‘That’s not necessary,’ sniffed Frances.
‘You’ve just had such a bad trot lately, darling – speaking of which, I want you to know that review had absolutely no impact on their decision.’
‘What review?’ said Frances.
There was silence. She knew Alain was smacking his forehead.
‘Alain?’
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’
‘I haven’t read a review since 1998,’ said Frances. ‘Not a single review. You know that.’
‘I absolutely know that,’ said Alain. ‘I’m an idiot. I’m a fool.’
‘Why would there be a review when I don’t have a new book out?’ Frances wriggled upright in her seat. Her back hurt so much she thought she might be sick.
‘Some bitch picked up a copy of What the Heart Wants at the airport and did an opinion piece about, ah, your books in general, a mad diatribe. She kind of linked it to the Me Too movement, which gave it some clickbait traction. It was just ridiculous – as if romance books are to blame for sexual predators!’
‘What?’
‘Nobody even read the review. I don’t know why I mentioned it. I must have early onset dementia.’
‘You just said it got traction!’
Everyone had read the review. Everyone.
‘Send me the link,’ said Frances.
‘It’s not even that bad,’ said Alain. ‘It’s just this prejudice against your genre –’
‘Send it!’
‘No,’ said Alain. ‘I won’t. You’ve gone all these years without reading reviews. Don’t fall off the wagon!’
‘Right now,’ said Frances in her dangerous voice. She used it rarely. When she was getting divorced, for example.
‘I’ll send it,’ said Alain meekly. ‘I’m so sorry, Frances. I’m so sorry about this entire phone call.’
He hung up, and Frances immediately went to her email. There wasn’t much time. As soon as she arrived at Tranquillum House she would need to ‘hand in’ her ‘device’. It would be a digital detox, along with everything else. She was going ‘off the grid’.
SO SORRY! said Alain’s email.
She clicked on the review.
It was written by someone called Helen Ihnat. Frances didn’t know the name and there was no picture. She read it fast, with a wry, dignified smile, as if the author were saying these things to her face. It was a terrible review: vicious, sarcastic and superior, but, interestingly, it didn’t hurt. The words – Formulaic. Trash. Drivel. Trite – slid right off her.
She was fine! Can’t please everyone. Comes with the territory.
And then she felt it.
It was like when you burn yourself on a hotplate and at first you think, Huh, that should have hurt more, and then it does hurt more, and then all of a sudden it hurts like hell.
A quite extraordinary pain in her chest radiated throughout her entire body. Another fun symptom of menopause? Maybe it was a heart attack. Women had heart attacks. Surely this was more than hurt feelings. This, of course, was why she’d given up reading reviews in the first place. Her skin was too thin. ‘It was the best decision I ever made,’ she’d told the audience at the Romance Writers of Australia Conference when she gave the keynote address last year. They’d probably all been thinking: Yeah, maybe you should read a review or two, Frances, you old has-been.
Why did she think it was a good idea to read a bad review directly after she’d just received her first rejection in thirty years?
And now something else was happening. It appeared and, gosh, this was just so fascinating, but it seemed she was losing her entire sense of self.
Come on now, Frances, get a grip, you’re too old for an existential crisis.
But apparently she wasn’t.
She scrabbled hopelessly after her self-identity, but it was like trying to catch water rushing down a drain. If she was no longer a published writer, who was she? What was the actual point of her? She wasn’t a mother or a wife or a girlfriend. She was a twice-divorced, middle-aged, hot-flushing/flashing menopausal woman. A punchline. A cliché. Invisible to most – except, of course, to men like Paul Drabble.
She looked at the gate in front of her that still would not open and her vision blurred with tears and she told herself not to panic, you are not disappearing, Frances, don’t be so melodramatic, this is just a rough trot, a bad patch, and it’s the cold and flu tablets making your heart race, but it felt like she was hovering on a precipice, and on the other side of the precipice was a howling abyss of despair unlike anything she’d ever experienced, even during those times of true grief – and this is not true grief, she reminded herself, this is a career setback combined with the loss of a relationship, a bad back, a cold and a paper cut; this is not like when Dad died, or Gillian died – but actually it wasn’t that helpful to start remembering the deaths of loved ones, not helpful at all.
She looked around wildly for distraction – her phone, her book, food – and then she saw movement in her rear-view mirror.
What was it? An animal? A trick of the light? No, it was something.
It was too slow for a car.
Wait. It was a car. It was just driving so slowly it was barely moving.
She sat up straight and ran her fingers under her eyes where her mascara had run.
A canary-yellow sports car drove down the dirt drive slower than she would have thought possible.
Frances had no interest in cars, but as it got closer even she could tell this was a spectacularly expensive piece of machinery. Low to the ground and shimmery-shiny with futuristic headlights.
It came to a stop behind hers and the doors on either side opened simultaneously. A young man and woman emerged. Frances adjusted her mirror to see them more clearly. The man looked like a suburban plumber off to a Sunday barbecue: baseball cap on backwards, sunglasses, t-shirt, shorts and boat shoes with no socks. The woman had amazing long curly auburn hair, skin-tight capri pants, an impossibly tiny waist and even more unlikely breasts. She teetered on stilettos.
Why in the world would a young couple like that come to a health retreat? Wasn’t this sort of place for the overweight and burnt out, for those grappling with bad backs and pathetic midlife identity crises? As Frances watched, the man turned his baseball cap around the right way and tipped his head back, arching his back as if he, too, found the sky overwhelming. The woman said something to him. Frances could tell by the way her mouth moved that it was sharp.
They were arguing.
How delightfully distracting. Frances lowered her window. These people would pull her back from the precipice, bring her back into existence. She would regain her self-identity by existing in their eyes. They would see her as old and eccentric and maybe even annoying, but it didn’t matter how they saw her, as long as they saw her.
She leaned clumsily out the car window, waggled her fingers and called out, ‘Helloooo!’
The girl tottered over the grass towards her.