Beach Bodies: Part Two. Ross Armstrong

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ became hardly any better. Dawn even felt an occasional numbness in her hands, a tingle that felt like a threat of things to come. An MRI scan was called for.

      Dawn couldn’t help a feeling of satisfaction that moved from her inner parts to her outer, that the situation was indeed as serious as she had protested it was all along, and that she had continued to fight it off without complaining, waiting patiently for the malady to disappear while knowing all along that something desperate, terrible and terrifying was happening to her. She had a strange sense, she told one of her many new friends who accompanied her on her difficult walks near the sea, that defeating this was in some way ‘her destiny’.

      The tone Murthy took on the day he was charged with relaying the results was one neither Dawn nor her mother had noted before. His sleeves were rolled up, the crumples around his elbows bulging and straining, contorted as if in a struggle to the death.

      ‘Dawn, I feel partly responsible.’

      ‘For what?’ she said. ‘Should I have been given medication?’

      She noted the tiniest hint of triumph in her own voice, just one of the voices in the room she no longer recognised. She felt somehow her coming-of-age had been played out almost entirely in this room.

      ‘No, I feel responsible, because I let this go on so long.’

      Her mother hung her head.

      ‘Bu—’

      ‘But don’t get me wrong. Just because there is no muscular or cerebral issue, it doesn’t mean you aren’t, I mean, that you’re not—’

      ‘But—’

      ‘Let us talk of psychosomatic disease. Let us say that this is no less a disease than any other. A disease of the mind is just as valid as any other, even though the wounds are not observable to the naked eye. Let’s remind ourselves of soldiers who after trauma needed recuperation, some of whom… became poets. Let’s consider that just as a broken bone under the skin requires definite attention, so too does the mind. Let me tell you that the medical profession is only recently agreed on this, historically speaking, but that the public may be more sceptical. Let us agree that the therapies we need to help solve this are more to do with the inside than out.’

      He said other things, but Dawn barely heard them. The inside took over, a kind of glow arresting her, numbing her to the rest of the difficult words that followed, which despite claiming not to invalidate her condition, invalidated her condition in the same way that a piece of paper balled-up then set alight and watched until it turns black can no longer be considered a piece of paper.

      The trip home was silent as her mother sped over speed bumps and through fords, distractions like lambs lying in fields languishing under a strong autumn sun.

      There were no raised voices in her mother’s new kitchen, surrounded by the marble worktops and brass handles. Dawn was not questioned to the point of being asked to prove her illness in the living room, which did not climax in Dawn barely being able to breathe through tears, as her mother pushed her out of her chair and her forehead connected with the newly stripped-back floorboards next to the kitchen island. No, this is not that kind of story.

      Dawn returned to her essays and friends and abundant attentions of female friends, and men who were occasionally invited to take her on dates and even fumble around with her. Each of those men considered themselves better people for wheeling her along the cinema multiplex carpet, despite an attractiveness differential not in their favour that didn’t even occur to them when they were never invited on a third date. ‘She has her issues,’ they recounted to friends, while smiling with saintly looks on their faces. ‘Dawn is brilliant, we had a short but awesome time together.’

      And slowly, in the first weeks of the third term, as exams approached, Dawn began to stand freely again. And when the word miracle was mentioned, she reminded the speaker that ‘This was never going to be forever, I knew it wouldn’t be.’ And when her female friends of that whole era receded into hallway well-wishers, and her male friends swelled as the student body saw that she looked just as good upright, she entered into a new life she barely looked back from. Her chair was donated to the theatre department, and that was that.

      The first one inside the Sex on the Beach villa, Dawn skips past the pool, giggling as she dips her fingers in the chlorinated water, aware that cameras are watching her close, and imbuing her performance with all the day-glo colours of excitement they would expect.

      ‘Oh – my – god – this – is – flames,’ she says, in a kind of chant. ‘I hope that I look okay.’ And as she leans back over the pool like a latter-day narcissus, to catch her reflection, she hears another pair of heels enter the villa. She turns, glances over her left shoulder, feeling particularly grounded and statuesque, and looks up to see another pair of eyes meet hers so perfectly on cue it was as if the whole thing had been staged.

      ‘Oh – my – god!’ says Summer. Her blonde waves of hair look like she’s sitting on the back of a speedboat in front of a sun-soaked ocean.

      ‘You look amaze,’ Dawn says, running over to give her a hug.

      ‘Aw, you too, my love. That neon bikini is TD.’

      ‘Ha – is that good?’

      ‘TD? To die.’

      Dawn squeals and internally berates herself for not getting that sooner.

      ‘What’s your name, darl?’ says Summer.

      A pause. A hint of concealed disappointment. Of course, Dawn realises…Summer doesn’t know who Dawn is. Dawn is just one of five hundred thousand to Summer.

      But Dawn rallies quickly. ‘Dawn. Like the early morning,’ she says. A hand clasp. Summer pulls her in. Bare right shoulder meeting bare left. Dawn squeezes back.

      ‘Summer. Like… what it is now,’ Summer says.

      And she kisses Dawn on both cheeks. Summer smells just like Dawn thought she might. It’s such a coincidence, her being here, but Summer doesn’t think so. Summer doesn’t realise at all, as she runs her hand along the outdoor furniture, the sheen of the hot tub, the kitchen island counter.

      Dawn watches her, recalling those girls she used to admire from sports outings. So competitive on the day. Then with a brush of hair across their reddened faces, they became fast friends. The Maynard School: Summer Charles. How can she forget? She used to stare at those pictures before bed. Just an idol, just a role model, no harm in it.

      ‘Hey,’ Summer says, running back to her to take Dawn’s hands. Is that an embarrassed look on her face? A remembrance, at last?

      ‘When do you think the boys get here?’ Summer says.

      Dawn shakes her head in silence, blowing a curl of flame hair out of her eyes.

      ‘We’ve got the rest of the girls to come first,’ Dawn says.

      ‘Yes!’ Summer says, extracting enthusiasm from every surrounding atom. ‘Oh. Dawn?’

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘I’m really looking forward to us becoming best friends.’

СКАЧАТЬ