Beach Bodies: Part One. Ross Armstrong

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СКАЧАТЬ laughs but he’s secretly really pleased with that. He replies that he likes her lack of tan. She is auburn-haired and mostly tries to avoid the sun altogether. She tells him that a tan is not something she covets anymore…

      ‘I’m working hard on being happy just the way I am,’ she says.

      ‘I’m the right bloke to teach you how,’ he says, looking around the garden. ‘Know why?’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Cos I’m already happy with just the way you are.’

      It doesn’t entirely make sense and is the kind of line Zack might describe as ‘weak chat’. He’s called Lance out on that kind of thing before. But Dawn seems to like it just fine.

      She places her hand on Lance’s large, gleaming arm and nods her head to the pounding bassline of the dreamy music coming from the speakers on the other side of the garden, as she looks into his eyes.

      *

      Tommy’s head hits the lounger, while his body, some metres above, leans limp, halfway out of the Love Nest window. That private camera-less room the couples have to be voted into to spend the night in.

      Every other member of the villa hears the sound and stops instantly.

      The sound of the head hitting the taut material of the lounger caused the comfortable orange polyester to vibrate like a drum. And if the first noise hadn’t drawn their attention, the following bounce back onto the patio slabs definitely would’ve. That heavy thump and tumble, that squelch, both dry and wet, as Tommy’s head slowly rolls to rest.

      ‘What the shit was that?’ shouts Justine through the bathroom window above, as Roberto appears next to her.

      On the decking, Liv pushes back her hair, a cigarette frozen between her red lips, as Sly and Summer dash past the pool, screaming as if there was anyone within hearing distance that might make this situation any better.

      But Dawn’s howls eclipse even theirs, as she gathers her quaking alabaster limbs, moving closer to what she slowly realises is the worst possible thing that could be lying directly in front of her.

      The brutal sun drenches Zack as he sees it, having wandered back outside from the darkness of the diary room; his knees buckle underneath him as his gaze meets Tommy’s vacant eyes.

      Lance, taking a more direct and less scream-y route towards Tommy’s head, quells the other villa dwellers as he approaches like he knows exactly what to do in scenarios such as this. He bends over the head of the best friend he had in this place. The most ‘together geezer in here’, he claimed yesterday, though, of course, the subsequent irony of that statement has inevitably passed him by. With his middle finger and thumb, as softly as he might touch butterfly wings, he pushes Tommy’s eyelids shut.

      Meanwhile, two floors up, Tommy’s feet dangle two inches above the terracotta tiles of the Love Nest, his torso cantilevered against the window ledge, his headless body leaning half in, half out of the villa, having found that perfect balance point, like a can of fizzy drink just full enough to lean on its rim.

      It can be assumed that Tommy’s head has been given assistance in finding itself two floors from his body. As cutting one’s own head off is not only an unusual method of leaving the villa and this fragile existence, but, certainly in this case, physically impossible due to the force required to sever one’s own spine just below the cranium.

      Tabitha, in the pool, barely sees the shadows, having imagined the whack to be something to do with Zack larking about with that watermelon again. The sun swells above her. The feet that beat the grass and concrete, and even the cries of her new friends, are dampened and blurred by the water that engulfs her ears.

      She contemplates that strange thing Tommy said to her just before lunch.

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