Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty Page 0,134
Frances was trying to convince herself. The longer they were in here, the more stripped back she got. Her red lipstick was gone and her blond hair, which had been in a bouncy circa 1995 ponytail, was now slicked back against her head. Lars liked Frances, but she wasn’t the lawyer he would have retained, given a choice, if he was on death row. He didn’t know who he would have chosen out of this motley lot. He wasn’t sure how much it really mattered. Masha was going to do what she was going to do.
“We just need to make it look as if we’re going along with the madness,” he said to the group.
“I agree,” said Napoleon. “We have to play along and take the first opportunity we can to find a way out of here.”
“I believed in her,” said Carmel sadly. “I believed in this.” She indicated her surroundings. “I thought I was being transformed.”
“So I’m representing you,” said Frances to Lars anxiously. “We need to talk. God, I would do anything for a pen.”
“Well, supposedly I’m representing you, Frances, in this grotesque … game,” sighed Heather. “So I guess we need to talk too.”
“Okay, yes, yes, but just let me talk to my client first,” said Frances, breathing fast. She put a hand to her chest to try to calm herself. Lars smiled at her. She would be the sort to play a game of charades with endearing seriousness and little skill, as if it were a matter of life and death, and now that it truly might be a matter of life and death (surely not!), she was in danger of hyperventilating.
“Let’s go have a chat, Frances,” said Lars soothingly. “And then you can go convince Heather why you should live.”
“This is pathetic,” said Heather as they split up into pairs.
“We’re an odd number,” said Napoleon. “I’ll wait for my turn.” He lowered his voice even further. “I’ll just keep looking around for a way out of here.” He wandered off, his hands shoved in the pockets of his dad shorts.
Lars and Frances went to sit in a corner.
“Right.” Frances sat cross-legged in front of Lars. She frowned intensely. “Tell me everything about your life, your relationships, your family.”
“Tell her I’m a philanthropist, I do a lot of things for the community, volunteer work …”
“Do you?” interrupted Frances.
“You write fiction!” said Lars. “Let’s just make it up! It doesn’t actually matter what you say as long as it looks like we’re going along with the exercise.”
Frances shook her head. “That woman might be crazy, but she can smell insincerity a mile off. I am going along with the exercise and I’m doing it properly. You tell me everything, Lars, right now. I’m not kidding.”
Lars groaned. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I help women,” he said. “I only represent women in divorce cases.”
“Seriously?” said Frances. “Isn’t that discriminatory?”
“I get my clients by word of mouth,” said Lars. “They all know each other, these types of women, they play tennis together.”
“So you only represent wealthy women?” said Frances.
“I’m not doing it for love,” said Lars. “I make good money. I just make sure a certain type of man pays a fair price for his sins.”
Frances tapped her thumbnail against her front teeth like an imaginary pen. “Are you in a relationship?”
“Yes,” said Lars. “We’ve been together for fifteen years. His name is Ray and he would probably prefer I wasn’t ‘sentenced to death.’”
He felt a sudden burst of longing for Ray and for home, for music and the sizzle of garlic, for Sunday mornings. He was done with health resorts. When he got out of here he was going to book a holiday for him and Ray, a gastronomic tour of Europe. The man had gotten too skinny. His eyes looked huge in his face. All that obsessive bike riding. Legs spinning in a blur, up and down the hills of Sydney, faster and faster, trying to get those endorphins flooding his body, trying to forget that he was in a relationship where he gave more than he got.
“He’s a good person,” said Lars, and he was surprised to find himself close to tears, because it occurred to him that if he were to die, Ray would be snatched up like a too-good-to-be-true deal at the supermarket, and someone else could very easily love him the way he deserved to be loved.
“Poor Ray,” murmured Frances, as if she knew what he was thinking.