Ross Armstrong - Beach Bodies - Part One

‘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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