Frances
Frances twirled an empty water bottle on her finger, round and round, until it flew off and skittered across the floor.
‘Stop that,’ said Carmel severely, and Frances could tell that was the voice Carmel used when one of her little girls was being annoying.
‘Sorry,’ she said at the same time as Carmel said, ‘Sorry.’
It was, according to Napoleon’s watch, 9 pm. They had been in here now for just over thirty hours. They hadn’t eaten for over forty-eight hours.
People had begun complaining of headaches, light-headedness, fatigue and nausea. Waves of irritability swept the room at intervals. People bickered, then apologised, then snapped again. Voices quivered with emotion and skidded into hysterical laughter. Some people drifted off to sleep and then woke with a loud gasp. Napoleon was the only one who stayed consistently calm. It felt like he was their unofficially appointed leader, even though he wasn’t issuing any instructions.
‘Don’t drink too much water,’ Heather had told Frances when she’d seen her returning from the bathroom after filling her water bottle yet again. ‘Only drink when you’re thirsty. You can die from drinking too much water because you flush out all the salt in your system. You can go into cardiac arrest.’
‘Okay,’ said Frances resignedly. ‘Thank you.’ She’d thought drinking lots of water would stave off the hunger pangs, although she wasn’t as hungry as she thought she would be. The desire for food had peaked just before they’d found the useless Russian doll package and then gradually begun to wane until it became more abstract; she felt like she needed something, but food didn’t seem to be the answer.
Her friend Ellen was a fan of intermittent fasting and she’d told Frances that she always experienced feelings of euphoria. Frances didn’t feel euphoric, but her mind felt scrubbed clean, clear and bright. Was that the drugs or the fasting?
Whatever it was, the clarity was an illusion, because she was having difficulty differentiating what had and hadn’t happened since she’d got here. Did she dream of her nosebleed in the pool? She hadn’t really seen her dad last night, had she? Of course she hadn’t. Yet the memory of talking with her father felt more vivid than her memory of the nosebleed in the pool.
How could that be?
Time slowed.
And slowed.
Slowed.
To.
A.
Point.
That.
Was.
So.
Slow.
It.
Was.
Unsustainable.
Soon time would stop, literally stop, and they would all be trapped in a single moment forever. That didn’t seem too fantastical a thought after last night’s smoothie experience, when time had elongated and contracted, over and over, like a piece of elastic being stretched and released.
There was a long, heated discussion about when and if they should turn the lights out.
It had not occurred to Frances that there was no natural light down here. It was Napoleon who’d figured it out; he’d been the one to find the light switch this morning when he woke up. He said he’d crawled around the room on his hands and knees and run his hands around the walls until he found it. When he flicked the switch to demonstrate for them, the room was plunged into a thick, impenetrable darkness that felt like death.
Frances voted for the lights to go off at midnight. She wanted to sleep: sleeping would pass the time, and she knew she’d never sleep with those blazing downlights. Others thought that they shouldn’t risk sleeping; they should be ‘ready to take action’.
‘Who knows what they’re planning next?’ Jessica shot a hostile look at the camera. At some point she had scrubbed off all her make-up. She looked ten years younger, younger even than Zoe; too young to be pregnant, too young to be wealthy. Without the make-up, the cosmetic enhancements looked like acne: a teenage blight that would pass when she grew up.
‘I don’t think anything sinister is going to happen in the middle of the night,’ Carmel said.
‘We were woken up for the starlight meditation,’ said Heather. ‘It’s entirely possible.’
‘I liked the starlight meditation,’ said Carmel.
Heather sighed. ‘Carmel, you really need to kind of reframe your thinking about what’s going on here.’
‘I vote for lights off,’ said Frances in a low voice. Napoleon had showed them where the microphones were installed in the corners of the room. He’d told them all, in whispers, that if they wanted to share something they didn’t want heard they should sit in the centre of the room with their backs to the camera and keep their voices as low as possible. ‘I think we should give Masha the impression of total acceptance.’
‘I agree,’ whispered Zoe. ‘She’s exactly like my year eleven maths teacher. You always had to let her think she’d won.’
‘I’d prefer lights on,’ said Tony. ‘We’re at a disadvantage if we can’t see.’
In the end, there were more in favour of ‘lights on’.
So here they all sat. Lights on. Occasional low murmurs of conversation like you’d hear in a library or a doctor’s waiting room.
Long periods of silence.
Frances’s body kept twitching and then she would remember that there was no book to pick up, no movie to switch on or bedside lamp to switch off. Sometimes she’d be almost on her feet, before she realised that the decisive thing she was planning on doing was leaving the room. Her subconscious refused to accept her incarceration.
Carmel came and sat next to Frances. ‘Do you think we’ve gone into ketosis yet?’ she asked.
‘What’s ketosis?’ asked Frances. She knew perfectly well what it was.
‘It’s where your body starts to burn fat because –’
‘You don’t need to lose weight,’ interrupted Frances. She tried not to snap, but she had not been thinking about food and now she was.
‘I used to be thinner,’ said Carmel. She stretched her perfectly normal legs out in front of her.
‘We all used to be thinner,’ sighed Frances.
‘Last night I hallucinated that I didn’t have a body,’ said Carmel. ‘I feel like there was maybe a message my subconscious was trying to give me.’
‘It’s so obscure. What could that message possibly be?’ mused Frances.
Carmel laughed. ‘I know.’ She grabbed the flesh on her stomach and squeezed. ‘I’m stuck in this cycle of self-loathing.’
‘What did you do before you had children?’ asked Frances. She wanted to know if there was more to Carmel than just hating her body and having four children. Early in Frances’s career, a friend had complained that the mothers in her books were too one-dimensional and Frances had thought secretly, Don’t they only have one dimension? She’d tried to give them more depth after that. She even gave them the leading roles, although it was hard to know where to put the children while their mothers were falling in love. When her editorial notes came back Jo had written all over the margins, Who is looking after the kids? Frances had to go back through the manuscript and make babysitting arrangements. It was annoying.
‘Private equity,’ said Carmel.
Goodness. Frances wouldn’t have picked that. She wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. How were they going to find a middle ground between private equity and romance?
‘Did you . . . like it?’ Surely that was safe.
‘Loved it,’ said Carmel. ‘Loved it. It was a long time ago now, of course. Now, I’ve got a part-time, entry-level job which is basically just data entry to try to keep the cash coming in. But back then I was kind of a high-flyer, or on my way to becoming one. I worked long hours, I’d get up at five every day and swim laps before work, and I ate whatever the hell I wanted, and I found women who talked about their weight excruciatingly boring.’
Frances smiled.
‘I know. And then I got married and had kids and I got totally swallowed up by this “Mum” persona. We were only meant to have two, but my husband wanted a son, so we kept trying, and I ended up with four girls – and then, out of the blue, my husband said he wasn’t attracted to me anymore and he left.’
Frances said nothing for a moment as she considered the particular cruelty of this kind of all-too-common midlife break-up and how it crushed a woman’s self-worth. ‘Were you still attracted to him?’
Carmel thought about it. ‘Some days.’ She put her thumb to the empty spot on her ring finger. ‘I still loved him. I know I did, because some days I’d think, Oh, what a relief, I still love him, it would be so inconvenient if I didn’t love him.’
Frances thought of all the things she could say: You’ll meet someone else. You don’t need a man to complete you. Your body does not define you. You need to fall in love with you. Let’s talk about something other than men, Carmel, before we fail the Bechdel test.
She said, ‘You know what? I think you are most definitely in ketosis.’
Carmel smiled, and at that moment the room went dark.