asked for a lower, cloudier, more comfortable sky. A woman with a strong foreign accent said there were no other skies available! She was very rude about it too! NEVER AGAIN. DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY.
It occurred to Frances that she was possibly quite close to losing her mind.
No, she wasn’t. She was fine. Perfectly sane. Really and truly.
She flexed her hands around the steering wheel, blinked dry eyes behind her sunglasses, and yawned so hugely her jaw clicked.
“Ow,” she said, although it didn’t hurt.
She sighed, looking out the window for something to break the monotony of the landscape. It would be so harsh and unforgiving out there. She could just imagine it: the drone of blowflies, the mournful cry of crows, and all that glaring white-hot light. Wide brown land indeed.
Come on. Give me a cow, a crop, a shed. I spy with my little eye something beginning with …
N. Nothing.
She shifted in her seat, and her lower back rewarded her with a jolt of pain so violent and personal it brought tears to her eyes.
“For God’s sake,” she said pitifully.
The back pain had begun two weeks ago, on the day she finally accepted that Paul Drabble had disappeared. She was dialing the number for the police and trying to work out how to refer to Paul—her partner, boyfriend, lover, her “special friend”?—when she felt the first twinge. It was the most obvious example of psychosomatic pain ever, except knowing it was psychosomatic didn’t make it hurt any less.
It was strange to look in the mirror each night and see the reflection of her lower back looking as soft, white, and gently plump as it always had. She expected to see something dreadful, like a gnarled mass of tree roots.
She checked the time on the dashboard: 2:57 P.M. The turn-off should be coming up any minute. She’d told the reservations people at Tranquillum House that she’d be there around 3:30 to 4 P.M. and she hadn’t made any unscheduled stops.
Tranquillum House was a “boutique health and wellness resort.” Her friend Ellen had suggested it. “You need to heal,” she’d told Frances after their third cocktail (an excellent white-peach Bellini) at lunch last week. “You look like shit.”
Ellen had done a “cleanse” at Tranquillum House three years ago when she, too, had been “burnt out” and “run-down” and “out of condition” and—“Yes, yes, I get it,” Frances had said.
“It’s quite … unusual, this place,” Ellen had told Frances. “Their approach is kind of unconventional. Life-changing.”
“How exactly did your life change?” Frances had asked, reasonably, but she’d never got a clear answer to that question. In the end, it all seemed to come down to the whites of Ellen’s eyes, which had become really white, like, freakily white! Also, she lost three kilos! Although Tranquillum House wasn’t about weight loss—Ellen was at great pains to point that out. It was about wellness, but, you know, what woman complains about losing three kilos? Not Ellen, that’s for sure. Not Frances either.
Frances had gone home and looked up the website. She’d never been a fan of self-denial, never been on a diet, rarely said no if she felt like saying yes or yes if she felt like saying no. According to her mother, Frances’s first greedy word was “more.” She always wanted more.
Yet the photos of Tranquillum House had filled her with a strange, unexpected yearning. They were golden-hued, all taken at sunset or sunrise, or else filtered to make it look that way. Pleasantly middle-aged people did warrior poses in a garden of white roses next to a beautiful country house. A couple sat in one of the “natural hot springs” that surrounded the property. Their eyes were closed, heads tipped back, smiling ecstatically as water bubbled around them. Another photo showed a woman enjoying a “hot stone massage” on a deck chair next to an aquamarine swimming pool. Frances had imagined those hot stones placed with delightful symmetry down her own spine, their magical heat melting away her pain.
As she dreamed of hot springs and gentle yoga, a message flashed urgently on her screen: Only one place remaining for the exclusive Ten-Day Mind and Body Total Transformation Retreat! It had made her feel stupidly competitive and she clicked Book now, even though she didn’t really believe there was only one place remaining. Still, she keyed in her credit card details pretty damned fast, just in case.
It seemed that in a mere ten days she would be “transformed” in ways she “never thought