Jessica
Jessica sat on the four-poster bed and tested the mattress with the palm of her hand while Ben stood on the balcony, one hand shielding his eyes. He wasn’t enjoying the beautiful view.
‘I’m sure they haven’t stolen it,’ she said. She meant to sound funny and light-hearted but she couldn’t seem to get the tone of her voice to come out right these days. A hardness kept creeping in.
‘Yeah, but where have they parked it?’ said Ben. ‘That’s what I don’t get. I’d just like to know where it is. Have they got an underground bunker somewhere? Did you notice that when I asked if it was parked undercover, she sort of avoided answering the question?’
‘Mmm,’ said Jessica noncommittally.
She couldn’t bear another fight about the car, or about anything. Her stomach was still recovering from the last screaming match. Whenever they fought she got instant indigestion, and that meant that these days she nearly always had indigestion. Their arguments were like submerged rocks they kept crashing up against. They couldn’t be avoided. Wham. Wham. Wham.
She lay back on the bed and looked at the light fitting. Was that a spider web near the globe? This house was so old and dark and depressing. She’d been aware it was going to be a ‘historic’ house, but she thought they might have, you know, renovated. There were cracks all over the walls, and a kind of damp smell.
She turned on her side and looked at Ben. Now he was leaning dangerously over the balcony railing, trying to see the other side of the house. He cared about that car more than he cared about her. Once, she saw him running his hand along the bonnet and for just a moment she’d felt envious of the car, of the way Ben was touching it so gently and sensuously, the same way he used to touch her. She was going to tell their counsellor that. She’d written it down so she wouldn’t forget. She felt like it was a really profound, powerful thing to mention, quite significant and telling. It made her eyes prickle with tears when she thought of it. If the counsellor ever wrote a book about her experience as a marriage counsellor she would probably mention it: I once had a patient who treated his car more tenderly than he treated his wife. (No need to mention the car was a Lamborghini; if they did, all the male readers would say, ‘Oh, well, then.’)
She wished the ‘intensive couples counselling’ part of this retreat would hurry up and start but ‘Delilah’, their ‘wellness consultant’, had been annoyingly vague about when it would begin. She wondered if the counsellor would ask them about their sex life, and if she (Jessica assumed she would be a she) would be able to hide her surprise when she heard they were down to having sex, like, once a week, which meant their marriage was officially in dire trouble.
Jessica didn’t know if she could talk about sex in front of the counsellor anyway. The counsellor might automatically assume that she was sexually unskilled or that there was something wrong with her, in a very personal, gynaecological kind of way. Jessica was beginning to wonder that herself.
She was obviously prepared to get more surgery (even down there) or do a course. Read a book. Improve her skills. She’d always been prepared to improve, to listen to the advice of experts. She read a lot of self-help books. She Googled. Ben had never read a self-help book in his life.
Ben came back inside from the balcony, lifting up his t-shirt to scratch his stomach. He didn’t bother with crunches or planks and his stomach still looked that good.
‘That author we met is in the room next to us,’ he said. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl and tossed it from hand to hand like a baseball. ‘Frances. Why do you reckon she’s here?’
‘I expect she wants to lose weight,’ said Jessica. Like, duh. She thought it was kind of obvious. Frances had that padded look middle-aged women got. Jessica herself would never allow that to happen. She’d rather be dead.
‘You reckon?’ said Ben. ‘What does it matter at her age?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘What are her books like?’
‘I used to love them,’ said Jessica. ‘I read them all. There was one called Nathaniel’s Kiss. I read it in high school and it was just really . . . romantic, I guess.’
‘Romantic’ was too ineffectual a word to describe the feelings Nathaniel’s Kiss had provoked in her. She remembered how she’d cried big heaving shuddering sobs, and then she’d kept rereading that last chapter for the pleasure of more crying. In some ways, it felt like Nathaniel was the first man she ever loved.
She couldn’t tell Ben that. He never read fiction. He wouldn’t understand.
But was that one of the problems in their marriage? That she didn’t even bother to try to communicate how she felt about things that were important to her? Or did it not matter? She didn’t need to hear him talk about his passion for his car. He could talk about his car with his mates. She could talk about her memories of Nathaniel’s Kiss with her girlfriends.
Ben took a giant bite of the apple. Jessica couldn’t do that anymore, not with her new capped teeth. The dentist wanted her to wear some sort of a mouthguard at night to keep her expensive crowns all safe. It was annoying that the better the stuff you got, the less relaxed you could be about it. It was like the new rug in their hallway. Neither of them could bear to walk on something so astoundingly expensive. They shuffled down the sides and winced when their guests marched straight down the middle in dirty sneakers.
‘That smoothie was pretty good,’ said Ben, his mouth full of apple. ‘But I’m starved. I don’t know if my body can cope without pizza for ten days. I don’t see why we even have to do that part! What’s that got to do with marriage counselling?’
‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s, like, a holistic approach. We have to work on everything: our minds, bodies and spirits.’
‘Sounds like a load of –’ He cut himself off and walked over to the row of light switches by the wall and started playing with the one that made the ceiling fan work.
He put the fan onto cyclonic speed.
Jessica put a pillow over her face and tried to go for as long as she could without saying, ‘Turn it off.’ Once, she wouldn’t have thought about this. She would have just yelled, ‘Oh my God, turn it off, you idiot!’ and he would have laughed and kept it on, and she would have tried to turn it off, and he wouldn’t have let her, and they would have pretend-wrestled.
Did they laugh more before?
Back when she was working in admin and he was a panel beater working for Pete, back when Ben drove a V8 Commodore that didn’t make anyone look twice, and she had B-cup boobs that didn’t make anyone look twice either, back when they thought going to a movie and the local Thai restaurant on the same night was splurging and when the arrival of the credit card statement each month was, like, really stressful and even once made her cry?
She didn’t want to believe it was better before. If it was, then her mother was right, and she couldn’t stand it if her mother was right.
Ben turned the fan down to a gentler breeze. Jessica removed the pillow from her face, closed her eyes and felt her heart race with fear of something unnamed and unknown.
It made her think of the vertiginous fear she’d felt the day of the robbery. It was two years ago now that she’d come home from work to discover their ground-floor apartment had been robbed, their possessions strewn everywhere with aggressive, malicious abandon, every drawer open, a black footprint across her white t-shirt, the glint of broken glass.
Ben arrived home just moments later. ‘What the hell?’
She didn’t know if he immediately thought of his sister, but she did.
Ben’s sister, Lucy, had ‘mental health issues’. That was the euphemism Ben’s lovely, long-suffering mother used. The truth was that Ben’s sister was an addict.
Lucy’s life was an endless rollercoaster and they all had to take the same ride, over and over, without getting off. Lucy was missing. No-one had heard from her. Lucy had turned up in the middle of the night and trashed the house. Ben’s mum had to call the police. They were planning an intervention! But they were going to handle this intervention differently from the last intervention; this time it would work. Lucy was doing well! Lucy was talking about rehab. Lucy was in rehab! Lucy was out of rehab. Lucy had been in another car accident. Lucy was pregnant again. Lucy was fucked up and there would never be an end to it, and because Jessica had never known the Lucy of before, the Lucy who was supposedly funny and smart and kind, it was hard not to hate her.
Lucy was the reason for the underlying tension at every event with Ben’s family. Would she turn up demanding money or screaming insults or crying crocodile tears because she ‘just wanted to be a mum’ to the two children she was incapable of bringing up?
Everyone knew Lucy stole. If you went to a barbecue at Ben’s place you hid your cash. So it was perfectly natural that Jessica’s first thought when she walked into the apartment that day was: Lucy.
She’d tried so hard not to say it but she couldn’t help it. Just that one word. She wished she could take it back. She hadn’t made it sound enough like a question. She’d made it sound like a statement. She wished she’d at least said, ‘Lucy?’
She remembered how Ben shook his head. His face was drawn tight with shame.
She had thought, How do you know it wasn’t her?
But it turned out he was right. The robbery had nothing to do with Lucy. She was on the other side of the country at the time.
So it was just an ordinary happens-to-lots-of-people house robbery. They hadn’t lost much because they didn’t have much to lose: an old iPad with a cracked screen, a necklace that Ben had given Jessica for her twenty-first. It had a tiny diamond pendant and it had cost Ben something like two months’ salary. She’d loved that necklace and still mourned it, even though it had just been a crappy little necklace with a smidge of a diamond, like a quarter-carat. The thieves had rejected the rest of Jessica’s jewellery box, which she found humiliating. Jessica and Ben had both hated the feeling of knowing that someone had walked through their home, sneering, as if browsing through an unsatisfactory shop.
The insurance company paid out without much fuss, but Ben and Jessica had to pay a five-hundred-dollar excess, which they resented because they hadn’t asked to be robbed.
It was just an ordinary robbery, except that it ended up changing their lives forever.
‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ asked Ben. He stood at the end of the bed, looking down at her.
Jessica’s gaze came back into focus. ‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re planning to cut off my balls with a cheese knife.’
‘What? I wasn’t even looking at you. I was thinking.’
He kept chewing the remains of his apple and raised an eyebrow. The very first time they ever made eye contact in Mr Munro’s maths class he did that: a cool, laconic lift of his left eyebrow. It was literally the hottest thing she’d seen in her entire life and maybe if he’d raised two eyebrows, instead of one, she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.
‘I don’t even have a cheese knife,’ said Jessica.
He smiled as he threw the apple core into the bin from across the room and picked up their welcome pack.
‘We’d better read this, hey?’ He ripped open the envelope and papers went flying. Jessica managed to stop herself from grabbing at it and putting it all back in order. She was the one in charge of paperwork. If it were up to Ben they would never file a tax return.
He opened what looked like a covering letter. ‘Okay, so this is a “guide map” for our “wellness journey”.’
‘Ben,’ said Jessica, ‘this isn’t going to work if we don’t –’
‘I know, I know, I am taking it seriously. I drove down that road, didn’t I? Didn’t that show my commitment?’
‘Oh, please don’t start on the car again.’ She felt like crying.
‘I only meant –’ His mouth twisted. ‘Forget it.’
He scanned the letter and read out loud. ‘Welcome to your wellness journey, yada, yada. The retreat will begin with a period of silence lasting five days, during which there will be no talking, apart from counselling sessions, no touching, no reading, no writing, no eye contact with other guests or your own companions – what the?’
‘This wasn’t mentioned on the website,’ said Jessica.
Ben continued to read out loud, ‘You may be familiar with the term “monkey brain”.’
He looked up at Jessica. She shrugged, so he kept reading. ‘Monkey brain refers to the way your mind swings from thought to thought like a monkey swinging from branch to branch.’ Ben made a sound like a monkey and scratched under his arm to demonstrate.
‘Thanks for that.’ Jessica felt the tug of a smile. Sometimes they were fine.
Ben read on. ‘It takes at least twenty-four hours to silence monkey brain. A period of nourishing silence and reflection settles the mind, body and soul. Our aim will be to discover a beautiful state that Buddhism calls “noble silence”.’
‘So we’re just going to spend the next five days avoiding eye contact and not talking?’ said Jessica. ‘Even when we’re alone in our room?’
‘It’s not like we don’t have any experience with that,’ said Ben.
‘Very funny,’ said Jessica. ‘Give me that.’
She took the letter and read. ‘During the silence we request that you walk slowly and mindfully, with intention, heel to toe, about the property, while avoiding eye contact and conversation. If you must communicate with a staff member, please come to reception and follow the instructions on the laminated blue card. There will be guided meditation sessions – both walking and sitting – throughout each day. Please listen for the bells.’
She put the letter down. ‘This is going to be so freaky. We’ll have to eat with strangers in total silence.’
‘Better than boring small talk, I guess,’ said Ben. He looked at her. ‘Do you want to do it properly? We could talk here in our room and nobody would ever know.’
Jessica thought about it.
‘I think we should do it properly,’ she said. ‘Don’t you? Even if it sounds stupid, we should just follow the rules and do whatever they say.’
‘Fine with me,’ said Ben. ‘As long as they don’t tell me to jump off a cliff.’ He scratched his neck. ‘I don’t get what we’re going to do here.’
‘I told you,’ said Jessica. ‘Meditate. Yoga. Exercise classes.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ben. ‘But in between all that. If we can’t talk or watch TV, what will we do?’
‘It will be hard without screens,’ said Jessica. She thought she was going to miss social media more than coffee.
She looked again at the letter. ‘The silence begins when the bell rings three times.’ She looked at the clock in the room. ‘We’ve got half an hour left where we’re allowed to talk.’
Or touch, she thought.
They looked at each other.
Neither spoke.
‘So the silence shouldn’t be too hard for us then,’ said Ben.
Jessica laughed, but Ben didn’t smile.
Why weren’t they having sex right now? Wasn’t that what they once would have done? Without even talking about it?
She should say something. Do something. He was her husband. She could touch him.
But a tiny fear had trickled into her head late last year and now she couldn’t get rid of it. It was something about the way he looked at her, or didn’t look at her; a clenching of his jaw.
The thought was this: He doesn’t love me anymore.
It seemed so ironic that he could fall out of love with her now, when she had never looked so good. Over the last year she had invested a lot of time and money, and a fair amount of pain, in her body. She had done everything there was to do: her teeth, her hair, her skin, her lips, her boobs. Everyone said the results were amazing. Her Instagram account was filled with comments like: You look so HOT, Jessica! and You look better and better every time I see you. The only person without anything positive to say was her own husband, and if he didn’t find her attractive now, when she was her very best self, then he must never have found her attractive. He must have been faking it all along. Why did he even marry her?
Touch me, she thought, and in her head it was an anguished wail. Please, please touch me.
But all he did was stand up and walk back over to the fruit bowl. ‘The mandarins look good.’