Beach Bodies: Part Two. Ross Armstrong

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Dawn: Before

      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 an actual itch’. She said as much but Dawn met this suggestion with stillness – a silent chill that had grown in her late teenage years due to her self-prescribed quiet hours in her room – and without saying a word in reply she headed back to her sanctum.

      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