Beach Bodies: Part Two - Ross Armstrong

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8.32 p.m.

       Acknowledgements

       Dear Reader

       About the Publisher

       - Tommy’s head hits the sun-lounger, while his body leans against the Love Nest window high above.

       - Every single contestant on the show is in some way accounted for when it happens.

       - To further the mystery, Tommy is said to be the most universally loved of the group.

       - The only other person in the villa, Simon, their handler and psychiatrist, finally appears from his office below the building to tell them the show is over and they will be picked up in fourteen hours. They just have to see out the night. He tells them that because the motion-intuitive cameras were still feeding back to London, the villa is, as strange as it may seem, the safest place to be.

       - However, during her session with Simon, Justine sees that the live feed is actually down. But has he sold them this lie to keep them safe, or does the fact that Simon was the only one unaccounted for at the time of Tommy’s death make him the prime suspect?

       - Lance doesn’t think it’s the latter. He’s more concerned about Zack, who he senses isn’t ‘being real’.

       - Liv is suspicious that Lance is the only one who saw the body and seemed adamant that no one else should see it.

       - Lance is currently partnered with Dawn, who was previously partnered with Tommy. Dawn seems very close to Summer, who is partnered with Sly, who seems to be admired by Liv, who doesn’t seem to admire her partner Zack at all. But all of them are big admirers of themselves.

       - Justine, who is in an intense relationship with Roberto, is sure she saw Tabs and Tommy talking late one night in the garden. But then she herself has a dark secret she hasn’t even shared with Roberto.

       - It’s Tabs that seems to have had the closest connection with the now deceased Tommy, and is unable to get over the last secret thing he said to her before he died.

       - When we left the villa, a storm was gathering over the island. That meant they couldn’t leave even if they wanted to.

       - The camera tracked along their beautiful faces, its dead eye staring at them, one by one, though the images aren’t feeding anywhere in particular.

       - And then came a knock at the door.

      Dawn’s story can mostly be told in the language of disease. Disease that has left its mark: cave paintings, little signatures on the otherwise smooth turns and straights of her skin.

      The chicken pox pockmarks, thankfully now only visible under her chin after half a life sentence of vitamin E oil, Aloe Vera cream, cocoa butter and oat meal baths. The discolouration of skin, hidden behind her ear, which when found caused a forty-eight-hour panic marathon before she visited her doctor and was told it was ‘non-actionable’ (oh god, inoperable?) ‘and certainly non-cancerous’ (okay, fine).

      The cold sore, which flares up so rarely at this point, earned from a week of kissing a Belgian boy called Bertrand on a Year 10 exchange, who told her it was only a lip zit, a ‘petit bouton’, and received half-a-dozen angry missives weeks after their encounters for his carelessness, messages which detailed the sudden death of their relationship, how there would be no return trip to visit EuroDisney, and how their plans for marriage and a life in a chateau would now be consigned to the recycle bin of rash teenage promises. The anger of words like ‘imbecile’ and ‘saboteur’ undercut by the Care Bear embossed notepaper she used. Love notes which still sit in the bottom drawer of Bertrand’s dressing table, hidden occasionally from his current fiancée because of the hold Dawn’s lips at the disco, the piscine, the bowling alley, still hold over him.

      The psoriasis irks her the most, fully concealable only in long sleeves that don’t suit her. This single Isle-of-Wight-shaped slight on the back of her elbow blights an arm her personal trainer once told her had been made ‘perfect’ by their kettlebell work; the sort of earnest compliment she daydreams of during her long walks she has been prescribed for maladies, inside and out.

      Ah, the inside. The ear discolouration was not the first melanoma-fearing thought to plague her mind and lead her to voyage into the arms of Dr Murthy, the childhood physician she has retained into her young adulthood. At the tender age of 16, her mother was solicited to take her to the good doctor four times that year so he could assess various abrasions, bumps and possible carcinomas. Enough visits to make even the indulgent Murthy utter through his perfect white smile, ‘Perhaps, Dawn, you are just not a happy-go-lucky girl.’ A line delivered with such kindness, but one that would stay glued to her mind whenever she thought of her fundamental self, like a caption under a painting, so succinct was the description of her character: ‘Dawn, 23, just not a happy-go-lucky girl. Died painfully of rare cancer.’

      Horsham, Sussex, gateway to the beautiful South Downs, was an idyllic place to grow a child, particularly if you only intended on having one perfect single one, Dawn’s parents had decided, but the silence of its beauty seemed to take its toll on the young. A gaggle of beautiful infants talking with precise diction, blossoming through the years while talking of how lucky they are to grow up in the countryside, then choosing every spare moment to plan secret trips into London, find secret boyfriends with cars to take them there, and take secret Adderall and Oxycontin at lunch to make the days go faster.

      Sadly for the pill-popping in-crowd, they were unable to secure the services of Dawn, dubbed by them as PGIS (prettiest girl in school) for this exploratory stage in their lives, as she had confided in them that the polluted London air would not be good for her asthma, and that she’d tried ‘most drugs’ and they played havoc with her sinuses; both stories hinting at afflictions and experiences her friends had curiously never heard her mention before. So the in-crowd simply resolved that as they approached the navy-blue period of their youth, that dusk when children tread onto the routes they believe adults take but using the gait only a child would, they would do so without Dawn. But Dawn wished them well with their plans, as only pupils at ‘the most polite public school in the country’ (according to the Sunday Times) can. After all, she told them, her grades were already against her and so was a possible allergy to animal fur she had recently developed, and she would have to solve at least one of those problems if she wanted to achieve her dream of becoming a vet.

      ‘Good luck with your wild adolescence,’ Dawn said in the hall after lunch.

      ‘Good luck with your allergies,’ Fleur Masterson said with a sympathetic smile. Then, in the only moment that bordered on passive-aggressive, she added, ‘and your asthma.’ They had never even seen her with an inhaler, and Dawn had been known to tell tall tales.

      ‘Thanks,’ Dawn said, producing a small blue telescope-shaped item to the girl’s surprised eyes, taking a hit on it as she pulled up her socks and walked away.

      This parting of terms ushered in an extension to the silence of home and gave her even more time to think. She often sat in the living room, her eyes running over lines in her biology textbooks, not really reading, her mind instead wandering to various ailments she’d heard about: flesh-eating viruses, ME, locked-in syndrome. She imagined what they would feel like inside. While she did this, she rubbed her eyes, but her mother noticed that despite Dawn’s claims, this wasn’t when the cat was near, raising the possibility that Dawn was rubbing because she thought she could be allergic to the Siamese, rather than because she ‘felt

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