Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty Page 0,128
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 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 breakup 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.
61
Napoleon
“Who turned the lights out?”
It was his angriest teacher voice; the one that got even the worst-behaved boy in a class to sit down and shut up. They had agreed the lights would stay on.
“Not me.”
“Not me.”
“Not me.”
The voices came from all around the room.
The darkness was so complete Napoleon instantly lost all sense of up and down. He held out his hands in front of him blindly like he’d done this morning.
“Is that you?” It was Heather’s voice. She had been sitting next to him. He felt her hand take his.
“Yes. Where’s Zoe?”
“I’m here, Dad.” Her voice came from the other side of the room.
“None of us was near the light switch,” said Tony.
Napoleon felt the rapid beat of his heart and took pleasure in his fear. It was a respite from the gray feeling that descended upon him the moment he woke up this morning. A thick fog had spread its soft fingers throughout his brain, his heart, his body, weighing him down so that it was an effort to speak, to lift his head, to walk. He was trying to pretend he was fine. He was fighting the fog with all his strength, trying to behave normally, to trick himself into getting better. It might be temporary. It might be just for today. Like a hangover. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would wake up and be himself again.