Beach Bodies: Part Two

And her alone hours came to be broken only by one catalyst.

Because physical exercise was always championed at her school for the development of well-rounded young women, and because the PE teacher, Mr Thomas, admired her long legs, she was invited to take part in every sport that she could stand. This found her travelling to schools that fitted the standing of her own, so she could show off her limited ability at hockey and netball, while occasional doting boys enhanced her self-esteem on the side lines; including Mr Thomas and the other school’s equivalent Mr Thomas.

Despite the newfound attentions of others that brightened the corners of her sixth-form years, Dawn continued to ignore any attempts to get her to meet up with any older boys, especially the ones spoken of by the in-crowd, who they had met in that mecca, spoken of in hushed tones: Clapham. She also ignored the stares and contrived collisions of boys her age, and Mr Thomas’ messages on Facebook. Instead, as she started to think about personal statements and UCAS forms, she decided on regular kissing sessions with a boy called Stuart, two years below. This started as experimental touching in the boys’ toilet cubicles, reported by a smaller child as ‘a strange knocking’, an encounter that climaxed in a knock on the door with an authority that could only belong to a teacher. Dawn mouthed an expletive and prepared to pretend she was helping to get something out of Stuart’s eye. The knocking came again. ‘Yes?’ Stuart said, fists clenched in tension. And an assertive voice came back ‘Err, look. I can see two sets of feet. Come out.’

Dawn proceeded with her amateur optician act, blowing into the eye of the shorter Stuart, as he awkwardly opened the door a crack, which was immediately thrown wide open by a pale-faced Mr Thomas, who looked more startled than angry, Dawn noted. Rather than a reprimand, he merely looked momentarily sad, was speechless in contemplation for a moment, then nodded as if in agreement with some private thought only he was privy too. He muttered, ‘Sorry, you can’t’ over his shoulder as he hurried away.

One night as the sun was going down, Dawn met Stuart in a cornfield, with a windmill bearing down on them in a scene she seemed to have contrived from one of those well-thumbed books she found on her mother’s dressing table. Stuart found himself dragged to the ground, and after the passion was done they lay watching the long corn sway in front of the darkening canvas of sky.

‘What are those marks?’ he said.

‘What marks?’ she said.

‘On the back of your arms? Did you do that to yourself?’

‘No, Stuart,’ she said, feeling his brain lurching for some self-harm psycho-drama he’d had impressed on him by an issue-based TV show he’d seen. ‘That’s just my psoriasis.’

She didn’t see him much after that – not by design, it was just that she was spending more away days with her various teams and developing a certain ‘interest’ that she could follow up on Instagram. An interest concerning the girls on other teams. There’d often be at least one, but sometimes two, who’d be particularly striking in some unusual way and she’d find herself trying to talk to them in the dinner hall during the free lunch you got on enemy territory after fixtures. If she didn’t manage to speak to them, she could always get a name, and then she’d follow her interest up later online. It was a method that turned into a system. She had a few favourites, role models really, people who she found classier than the girls at home. The fashionable, the statuesque, the exotic, she learnt, could even be found in girls from nearby counties: Kent, Dorset, Devon. She’d see them wear clothes she particularly liked and asked her mother to order them for her, who appreciated Dawn’s sudden interest in all things aesthetic. She’d think about starting chats with these girls and then delete the DMs, not out of shyness but more because it felt more appropriate for them to be idols, so they could retain their glamour. Obsession would be going too far when describing all this. A powerful word, bolted together by a trinity of syllables. The ‘b’ that brought the lips together, that ‘shh’ that implied a secret. It wasn’t as dramatic as all that, she thought.

And that period would soon be usurped, as often in a long youth, by a time when other preoccupations would rise, prevail, then dominate.

The strings attaching her to her doting parents didn’t stretch long, and at 18 she found herself at the University of Sussex, basing herself in Hove so she could cultivate a deep intellect, sourdough bread and her hypochondria. She made friends, ate better than most, drank even more than most and generally did quite well at making friends and getting older. Then, one morning after reading week, she found it particularly hard to get out of bed. Eventually, after five days bedbound and with no symptoms other than lethargy and neck pain, she was taken back to see Dr Murthy, who she trusted implicitly.

‘Can you feel this pinch?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it painful?’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Can you give it a number out of ten?’

‘Two.’

‘How about… this?’

She saw her mother take an intake of breath, she steeled herself.

‘Still a two.’

‘Well, okay,’ he said, and began tapping hard at his computer.

The tests that followed were unclear and as she was used to her wheelchair for now, her parents and Murthy grew confident the situation could pass. She even heard a mutter through a closed door about it being ‘a symptom of adjustment’, which sent a chill of resolve down her spine, a sense that she must steel herself, but in what direction and how, only her inner parts seemed to know. She was allowed to go back to university without so much as a handful of pills, (‘Don’t know of any that would do her any good’) and to continue going to lectures in pursuit of living a reasonable if not wholly normal life.

As the weeks rolled on and crutches, effortful daily walks and a physiotherapist were employed to help, the situation 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.