Dianne is no longer smiling like she’s ready for tennis: a haunted look flashes fleetingly across her face, replacing the frozen mask with one of pure grief.
Also good. Rage and grief: an interesting combination to work on.
Only Grazia keeps the smile nailed to her face, but Rose thinks that’s the effect of a lot of Botox and syringes of fillers so that any original movement of her actual face is hidden under all the careful cosmetic workings. Grazia could be howling with inner pain and her face would show the faintly surprised look of the heavily enhanced.
Her husband is doing his best with his trademark grin, but it’s faltering and his upper face has telltale signs of stress. No Botox there.
‘This is a safe space,’ Rose continues. ‘Your space. If you lie, I will know and you will certainly know. I need truthfulness if I am to help you. So …’
Rose pauses. She loves a good pause.
‘… Let’s begin. What trouble brought you all here?’
Chapter Eight
Rose’s words float off into a hint of sea air and are gone.
‘What trouble brought you all here?’
India stares at Rose and a rush of unaccustomed anxiety floods her. This is not what she’d expected.
For a start, Rose is almost unrecognisable from the sharp-suited, glamorous and charismatic woman off the TV. The flowing silvery-grey hair is very cool, though. Her eyes and the voice are the same: kind yet probing.
She will see inside you, India suddenly thinks in alarm.
What have you done?
A week in a glorious luxury villa in Corfu with a world-famous healer had sounded utterly marvellous.
The Talisman Effecthad been twenty-something India’s favourite show.
Plus the pictures of Villa Artemis on Instagram had been blissful: all sunlight flooding a hotel made of cool white walls, with flowing white muslin curtains, exotic plants growing against stone walls and a magnificent expanse of sea from every window.
As for the healing, India had imagined much yoga, sittingon beaches discussing how they needed to be mindful and possibly a bit of manifestation thrown in.
She wants yoga, swimming, things to stimulate the vagus nerve: that sort of thing. With a hint of Tarot or perhaps a night of psilocybin thrown in.
How had she been so stupid? Rose’s show had always been about learning from the past and using those lessons to move forward. No Tarot, no drugs, no yoga.
Shit, shit, shit.
‘If everyone can introduce themselves, that would be great,’ Rose is saying.
Please let it be gentle, thinks India, desperately trying to manifest a retreat she’d like: bright-green and ghastly purple juices that taste like roadkill; massages with oil from millions of squashed rose petals, a recipe first used on Cleopatra.
All ending up with a hint of advice from Rose; maybe during a walk on the beach, Rose would tell India what she’s doing wrong. Nothing intense at all, just a lovely conversation and then India could go back to the yoga and think about how she’d change her life as per Rose’s plan. Instead, Rose looks serious, fancy serious with raisins in it.
‘You’ll have a road map to happiness but it will be up to you to continue the work,’she had said.
She hasn’t mentioned yoga or anything that hints of a shamanic idyll in the evening sun.
No, she’s talked about work.
Working on themselves.
Deep inside India, something is shrieking ‘No!’
‘I’m Keera,’ says the blonde girl with the baseball hat.
