Five years later
Yao wouldn’t normally have turned on daytime television, but he had just returned home from a stressful time at playgroup where his two-year-old daughter had sunk her teeth into the arm of another child and then thrown back her head and laughed like a vampire. It had been both embarrassing and terrifying.
‘Oh yes, you were a biter,’ his mother told him on the phone. ‘She gets it from you.’ She said this with some satisfaction, as if the propensity to bite was a wonderful trait to pass on to your children.
Yao put his daughter down for a nap and pointed a stern finger at her. ‘Never do that again.’
She pointed a sterner finger back up at him. ‘Never do that again.’
Then she lay down, plugged her thumb in her mouth and closed her eyes. He could still see her dimple, which meant she was just pretending to be asleep, hardly able to suppress her hilarity.
He stood there for a few moments, marvelling at her dimple and the roundness of her baby cheeks, marvelling as he so often did that he had been parachuted into another life, a brand-new life as a stay-at-home dad in the suburbs.
He had received a fourteen-month suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty for his role in the events at Tranquillum House. Masha had insisted to police that she must take sole responsibility for the new protocol they’d attempted to introduce and that her employees were nothing more than oblivious, obedient halfwits. She said she was the one who mixed the smoothies, which was true, but Yao had been right there with her, checking and double-checking dosages. Yao’s mother said if she’d been the judge, he would have gone to prison. Both his parents had been so angry. They could not comprehend his actions. Most days, Yao could not comprehend them himself. It had all seemed so reasonable at the time. The prestigious researchers! The journal papers!
‘That woman had you in a trance,’ his mother said.
His mother vehemently denied that the incident he’d remembered during his psychedelic therapy ever happened.
‘Never,’ she said. ‘I would never leave you alone in a kitchen with something boiling on the stove. Do you think I’m stupid? Would you do that with your child? You had better not!’
She said that Yao’s fear of mistakes came from no-one but himself. ‘You were born like that!’ she told him. ‘We tried so hard to make you understand that mistakes do not matter. We told you again and again that you should not try so hard to be perfect, it did not matter if you made a mistake. Sometimes we purposely made mistakes so you would see that everyone made them. Your father used to deliberately drop things, bump into walls. I said to him, “That’s a bit much.” But he seemed to enjoy it.’
Yao wondered then if he’d been misinterpreting his parents his whole life. When they talked about keeping expectations low to avoid disappointment, it wasn’t because they didn’t believe in dreams. It was because they were trying to protect him. Also, his father was not as clumsy as he had thought.
*
Delilah did not face court, because no-one could ever track her down. Yao thought idly of her at times and wondered where she was; if she was on some remote island, restoring a boat, like the escaped prisoner in his favourite movie, The Shawshank Redemption. (‘That’s every single man in the world’s favourite movie,’ one of the mothers at playgroup had told him once. She knew because she’d tried internet dating.) But Yao suspected that it was more likely Delilah had disappeared into an urban environment and was working again as a PA. Sometimes he still thought of that skirt she wore, a thousand years ago, when she worked for Masha.
Yao was disqualified from working as a paramedic or anything in the health industry. After he left Tranquillum House and the charges were settled, he had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a location virtually equidistant to the locations of his parents’ homes, and he ended up getting a job as a translator of Chinese legal documents. It was dull, laborious work but it paid the bills.
One day he got a call. Afterwards, he wondered if a phone call that is going to change your life has a portentous ring-tone, because when he heard that ring, as he sat alone, eating his sad dinner for one, he experienced the most remarkable full-body shiver of presentiment.
It was Bernadette, his ex-fiancée, calling to say hi. She’d been thinking about him. She’d been thinking about him a lot.
Sometimes your life changes so slowly and imperceptibly that you don’t notice it at all, until one day you wake up and think: How did I get here? But other times life changes in an instant, with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck, with glorious or tragic consequences. You win the lottery. You step out onto a pedestrian crossing at the wrong time. You get a phone call from a lost love at exactly the right time. And suddenly your life takes a violent swerve in an entirely new direction.
They were married within the year and his wife got pregnant immediately. It made sense for her to go back to work and for Yao to stay home with the baby while he continued doing his translation work, which now seemed interesting and stimulating.
Once he knew his daughter wasn’t faking sleep anymore, he went into the living room, sank down on the couch and turned on the TV. He would treat himself to twenty minutes of rubbish television to soothe himself from the stress of the biting incident, and then he’d get in an hour of work before it was time to think about dinner.
The remote slipped from his hand.
He whispered, ‘Masha.’
*
‘Masha,’ said a man on the other side of the same city, a spanner in his hands. He didn’t normally watch daytime television either, but he had come over to do a few jobs around his daughter-in-law’s house, as his son was good with numbers but not much else.
‘Do you know her?’ His daughter-in-law lifted the baby girl she’d been breastfeeding while she watched TV onto her shoulder and patted her back.
‘She looks like someone I used to know,’ said the man, carefully not looking at his daughter-in-law because he did not want to see her breasts, and also because he could not tear his eyes from his ex-wife.
Masha looked so beautiful. Her hair was dark brown with bits of blonde, shoulder-length, and she wore a dress of all different shades of green that made her eyes look like emeralds.
The man sat on the couch next to his daughter-in-law and she glanced at him curiously but didn’t say anything else. They watched the interview together.
Masha had written a book. It was about a ten-day personal development program that incorporated psychedelic drugs, being locked in a room with strangers and undergoing an innovative kind of therapy that involved facing fears and solving riddles.
‘Surely people aren’t falling for this,’ murmured his daughter-in-law.
‘Now, obviously these drugs you mention are illegal,’ said the interviewer.
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ said Masha. ‘But that will not be the case forever.’
‘And I understand you did jail time for supplying illegal drugs while attempting to test out this program.’
The man clenched the spanner he still held in his lap. Jail time?
‘I did,’ said Masha. ‘But I will never regret that time. It was very important to me.’ She lifted her chin. ‘My time behind bars was a transformative experience. I learned so much, and I explain all my experiences in this book, which is available now, in all good bookstores.’ She picked up the book and held it in front of her face.
The interviewer cleared her throat. ‘Masha, what do you say about the rumours that people have been attending these courses you offer, held in different secret locations across the country, and that you are, in point of fact, offering LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to your attendees?’
‘That is absolutely untrue,’ said Masha. ‘I unequivocally deny it.’
‘So you are not running these programs in secret locations?’
‘I am running very unique, tailored, incredibly effective personal development programs to small, select groups of people, but there is nothing illegal going on, I can assure you of that.’
‘I hear there is a waiting list,’ said the interviewer. ‘And that people are paying quite hefty fees to attend.’
‘There is a waiting list,’ said Masha. ‘People should visit my website if they would like to go on the list, or call the toll-free number I believe is appearing on the screen right now. There is a special offer for those who call within the next twenty-four hours.’
‘If there is nothing illegal going on, I wonder why the locations are kept secret and change on a regular basis,’ said the interviewer. She looked at Masha expectantly.
‘Was that a question?’ asked Masha, with a seductive smile straight at the camera.
‘What a nutter,’ said the man’s daughter-in-law. ‘I bet she’s making millions.’ She stood, and held out the baby to her father-in-law. ‘Will you hold her? I’ll make us some tea.’
The man moved the spanner off his lap and took his granddaughter. His daughter-in-law left the room.
Masha was talking about something called ‘holotropic breathwork’, which she said was ‘psychedelic therapy without the psychedelics’.
‘That’s where you breathe fast to get high, right?’ said the interviewer, rather rudely and sceptically.
‘It is a much more complex, sophisticated process than that,’ said Masha.
An image appeared on the screen of Masha at some kind of conference centre, striding about a stage with a tiny microphone attached to her ear, while an auditorium packed with people looked on with rapt attention.
The man held the baby up and spoke in his native tongue into her ear. ‘That crazy woman is your grandmother.’
*
He remembered the day their second son was born, only three months after they lost their firstborn so tragically.
‘He is yours.’ Masha had refused to look at the baby. Her averted face, her sweat-soaked hair flat against her forehead, could have been carved from marble. ‘Not mine.’
A nurse at the hospital said, ‘Mum will come around.’ It was the grief. She was still in shock, probably. Such a terrible thing to go through, losing her son when she was six months pregnant with her second. That nurse did not know his wife’s strength. She did not know Masha.
Masha discharged herself from the hospital. She said she was going straight back to work, that very day, and she would send money. She would make enough money in her job so that her husband could take care of the new baby, but she wanted nothing to do with him.
She spoke very calmly, as if this were a business arrangement, and she only lost her temper once, when the man fell to his knees and clutched her and begged her to let them be a family again. Masha screamed into his face, over and over, ‘I am not a mother! Can you not understand this? I am not a mother!’
So he let her go. What else could he do? She did exactly what she said she would and sent money, more and more each year, as her career became more successful.
He sent her photos. She never acknowledged them. He wondered if she even looked at them and he thought that maybe she did not. She was a woman with the strength to move mountains. She was a woman as weak as a child.
He remarried two years later. His son called his Australian wife ‘Mummy’ and spoke with an Australian accent, and they had two more sons and lived an Australian life in this lucky country. They played cricket on the beach on Christmas Day. They had a swimming pool in their backyard and his sons caught the bus home and on hot summer days they ran straight through the house, tearing off their clothes, and jumped into the pool in their undies. They had a large circle of friends, some of whom dropped by their house without phoning first. His second wife grew up in a small country town, and her accent was from ‘the bush’, broad and thick and slow, her favourite phrase was ‘no big deal’ and he loved her, but there had been occasions over the years when he would be standing in his backyard at the barbecue, turning steaks, a beer in his hand, cicadas screaming, a kookaburra laughing, the splash of water, the smell of bug spray, the early evening sun still hot on his neck, and without warning Masha’s face would appear in his mind, her nostrils flared, her beautiful green eyes blazing with superiority and contempt but also childlike confusion: These people! They are so strange!
For many years he had given up communicating with Masha. He didn’t bother to send photos of their son’s wedding, but five years ago, when their first grandchild was born and he was awash with the fierce, all-consuming love of a new grandparent, he had emailed again, attaching photos of the baby, with the subject heading: please read, masha. He wrote that it was fine that she chose not to be a mother, he understood, but now, if she wanted, she could be a grandmother and wasn’t that wonderful? There was no reply.
He looked now at his granddaughter. He thought he could see something of Masha in the shape of her eyes. He held the baby with one arm and extracted his phone from his pocket with the other, and snapped a photo of her exquisite, sleeping face.
He wouldn’t give up. One day Masha would answer. One day she would weaken, or find the strength, and she would answer.
He knew her better than anyone.
One day she would.