Beach Bodies, Part 3

by Ross Armstrong

  Taroon looks to Simon, who looks to a baffled Mr Knight.

  ‘You go back to sleep. We have screens that show dreams to you. I’d explain the technology but I doubt you’d understand it unless you have a working knowledge of hybothonics. Just take my word for it, the dreams are very pleasant. Reasonably pleasant. Everyone’s except Tabs’.

  ‘And what will happen to her?’ says Liv.

  Taroon and Simon exchange a glance. ‘A very difficult one,’ says Simon. ‘Our board once raised whether murders in there should count against you, as, it’s true, it’s a pure expression of what you’re capable of, but I forbid the discussion. However, divulging a crime of old, one that we have already verified through the analysis of surrounding events of the time… well, the production team will have to meet. She may have to be arrested on waking. If she ever does wake…’

  Zack feels a leak from Liv’s ear. Zack too feels a melting sensation inside his head. ‘What’s going on? Am I frozen? How am I awake?’

  ‘Well,’ says Taroon, ‘it’s so difficult to explain if you don’t know hybothonics. You’re awake, but if you don’t sleep soon you’ll succumb to the disease that killed you in the first place. We need to get you back frozen, or that could be it. No dreams. No dish. Nothing.’

  ‘What if that’s what we want?’ says Liv. ‘What if we’d rather die than go back to sleep to dream our blank dreams?’

  ‘Listen!’ says Taroon, possessing a passion never felt before. It must be infectious. He tries to speak to them on their level. ‘No one is trying to mug you off. We’re working on your behalf. You’re the shareholders, in effect. You paid to be here. When we’ve cured your diseases, you’ll be awoken and resume your real lives.’

  ‘To some other time we won’t understand?’ says Zack.

  ‘And when will that be? We’ve been here an age already,’ says Liv.

  ‘It’s true, there have been delays,’ says Taroon. ‘You must bear with us. Question the clouds, for instance. You look up at them and you see beauty. You see whites drifting across deep blue. But really it’s just high water vapour. Nothing amazing about it. Your eyes have just judged it so. How real is anything? Why not go back to a world that is simpler, with just as much graphic detail, none of the woe of the real world that seemed to particularly disturb your millennial age?’

  ‘We’re trapped animals,’ says Liv, her lip drooping and feeling numb.

  ‘No!’ says Simon. ‘I care. I care about each and every one of you. Why do you think I’m in there myself? It takes a human touch.’

  ‘Why? You’re just getting kicks out of it like any gamer. Couldn’t this all be controlled by AI or something, by now?’ says Zack.

  The other three burst into laughter that soon is stifled when they realise the impossibility of them knowing what they know now. They use their linked feelings to tell each other to tread carefully and explain.

  ‘The AI years were a complete disaster,’ says Taroon.

  ‘In short, we had to delete,’ says Simon. ‘You should see how primitive they are. Like Neanderthals. You met a few. They were the others on the island. Like that fisherman. That bloody useless bunch of zeroes and ones who could barely remember his part, let alone the plot. I almost thought I’d have to pause and rearrange everything. And then sometimes things get deleted by accident. Tommy’s body for instance, the words in that book, the video that didn’t show Liv cutting herself at first. Tommy even woke up and started walking back around, it’s the AI that’s supposed to be in charge of continuity. Trust me, you don’t want that lot looking after you.’

  ‘This is too much,’ says Zack. A sadness comes over him the other three have never seen. It moves them. ‘I don’t want to live. I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Oh, no one really dies,’ says Knight, staring at the black water longingly.

  At which point, Liv stares into Zack’s eyes and he brings her face to his for a kiss.

  ‘Do you trust me?’ he whispers.

  ‘I trust you,’ she says.

  He makes to jump and finds his arms bound by the others, who appear in front of him in an instant.

  ‘Wait,’ says Simon. ‘Please wait. We have a bargain. This word is right, yes? We don’t have them here, but for you we have to make an exception.’ He glances at Taroon and smiles. A true grin he hasn’t used for a long while. ‘Live? Die? Forget it. I have an idea that could solve everything.’

  Far away. But not so, so far…

  Roberto kisses Justine at the end of an aisle. She’s dressed like a trashy Disney princess and he’s in a tuxedo because he likes ‘how the Americans do it’. It’s a fairy-tale wedding. All their friends are there.

  R and J: Next Chapter has been commissioned for a series and everything must be caught on camera. All the darkest events from the villa have been erased from their memories of course, the tape rewound, no one thinks themselves a psychopath, no one told their deepest secret, no one even died. The show continued without the murder mystery Taroon had insisted on to push the boundaries of what they could find out about the race they called ‘the desperate young of the 2020s’. Their loves played out as they otherwise would have done. Lance and Dawn were the first to go, the public warming to Dawn very much, but not so much to ‘the brute’ as they were told Lance was known on Twitter. Sly was next, left alone when Liv opted to stay with Zack in the aftermath of Tommy and Summer’s coupling, who went next, finishing in third place – leaving Zack and Liv to come in a commendable second, despite Zack’s sudden change of character. Which left Justine and Roberto to be crowned winners.

  Not that any of them remember the specifics. Whenever they do, their mind fugs. In fact, while they never discuss it with each other, R and J find themselves privately embarrassed they can barely remember who else was even on the show. And when they do their faces lie just out of reach.

  Which is just as well, because sitting in the front pew, filming their first kiss, is Sly. A reliable and genial cameraman, who will follow them everywhere over the next few months. He even strikes up a romance with Justine’s suave and charming agent, Tommy. Every soul must be repurposed. This was part of the deal Zack and Liv managed to strike.

  Two rows back and on the other side of the aisle, Justine’s long-suffering hair-stylist, Summer, gives an ironic look to the camera, as Roberto pushes his hand into Justine’s hair and ruins her morning’s work. Her palm lands on her forehead soon after.

  But the pathos of the show is really with the woman next to her, hands clasped together, breath held at the romance of it all. Justine’s make-up artist, Dawn. The show’s secret heroine. Who eventually, in an emotionally charged season one finale, will strike up a relationship with Roberto’s best friend from home, Fat Lance who is sitting just one row behind her, and at this moment has no idea what fate holds for him.

  All of which is much to the chagrin of the forlorn-looking face the camera never sees. The soundman, Simon, who follows Dawn everywhere, whenever he can get away from holding the boom mic and other duties he’s supposed to be doing. People often ask him why he never seems to go home. He simply says he’s chosen the show over all things.

  Through a stained-glass window of Mary and her halo, the show’s director can be seen leaning against the church wall, her mobile stuck to her ear, as it perennially is. Intense, but well respected and thoroughly charming, Tabitha sometimes talks of the other work she’d like to get into if only she could. True-crime docs she would like to get to the dark heart of, if only she could get out of this reality TV bubble.

  Not that that’s likely any time soon. The early buzz for the show is huge. The producers say it’s one that could run and run and run.

  Liv wakes in a hammock. The sun glinting in her eyes as she gently rocks. When she does wake it’s because a green and red bird has landed on her bare foot and is squawking as it stares right at her.

  She rises and puts out her finger, on which it obediently lands. She beams as she watches it fly away into the high tre
es, looking down at the cloth she’s wearing that loosely covers her body.

  Not so gracefully, she slips out of the hammock after a couple of failed attempts. She hits the grass hard, and feels the pain of the contact in her knee. She decides she’ll walk it off, looking for a friend.

  He’s not by the tranquil river, on which an empty boat drifts past. He’s not by the sandy beach, around two hundred metres to the east. And after another decent walk, she finds he’s not on the small hill, that holds the house where she assumes they live, which looks down to a valley so beautiful she couldn’t have imagined it better.

  Then, a presence behind her. Zack, just as she remembers him in the villa. Young, cheek-boned, wild of eye and hair, looking into her with the same kind of questioning urgency he had when he woke her in the white room. She remembers all of that too. She has good post-dish recall, they said.

  She feels the presence of her youthful muscles she worked hard to tone, so many years ago. She feels the sensation of her body. And takes in his, sheathed in a white loin cloth.

  He takes her face in his hand. She closes her eyes, anticipating his mouth drawing close.

  ‘I found you,’ he says, instead. Real Zack. That voice he found when he was truly being himself. She opens her green eyes. But his eyes seem to be dulled, without recognition.

  ‘Here I am,’ Liv says. Looking for him inside there. All the history they’ve been through together in the last hours and days and times and rooms.

  And then he smiles, whispers of him returning with every breath, like a ghost assembling himself in smoke, until every mannerism stands there in front of her. ‘Where shall we go?’

  Perhaps he’s lost some recall, she thinks. They laid out their plan quite clearly.

  ‘Wherever we want,’ she says.

  He turns to see the valley and the waterfall, swivelling back to where the beach and the river wends its way into the forest. He knows every part of this open world by instinct, birds and insects drifting on sunbeams just above his head.

  And suddenly he is in her arms and they are holding each other tight under an electric blue sky, thinking of nothing for a moment, then considering the lifetime stretched out in front of them. Fields, forests, wild swimming, tilling the land, wood craft, building fires, building a home. It starts to feel a lot like hard work.

  But no screens, that was their main stipulation. No screen anywhere and never the possibility of a screen in the future. In perpetuity. For ever and ever. Amen.

  ‘You are all I’ll ever need,’ says Zack.

  She pulls back to touch his face. ‘You too, for real,’ she says, analysing every dip and line of his perfect features.

  ‘So,’ he says, shoulders rising as he sucks in a lungful of beautiful clean air, like he’s breathing for the first time. ‘What the hell do we do now?’

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, as ever, to Catherine, who generic superlatives cannot hope to describe and who lights up my life with everything she does.

  To my parents, Chris and John Armstrong, who will go through a draft of this with a fine-tooth comb long after it has been signed off, print it out and send it to me, annotated with all the errors they’ve found, only for me to tell them I had an excellent copy editor called Dushi Horti whose job it was to catch all those for me. But seriously, Mum and Dad, thank you for all your care and all that you do and please never stop. I literally couldn’t do this without you.

  To my brothers, Al and Jim, who have in no way contributed to this book, but generally deserve a mention for forcing The Smiths, The Clash, The Wonder Stuff and so much other inspiring culture on me that probably in many ways forced me into this ridiculous and precarious life, which I love so much.

  Thanks to my wonderful editor, Dominic Wakeford, who has superb taste, a formidable knowledge of literature and film, and is generally just a fantastic person to work with.

  Thanks to my brilliant agent Juliet Mushens. A champion and friend who always has good advice and always make me laugh.

  To everyone at HQ who has supported me from the early days (well, 2016) and are such an amazing, dynamic and award-winning team. And in particular Kate Mills, who concocted this book with me at the Caskie Mushens Summer Party. Thank you so much, this is really all your fault.

  I really do feel very lucky to be able to write these books, it’s something like a dream, and so to all reviewers, bloggers and anyone that makes the industry tick, thanks so much for all that you do. And special thanks to all the readers who ever give my novels a go in this chaotic and brilliant hurricane of culture that currently has us surrounded.

  And a sincere thanks to all those brave souls that enter the reality TV ring. Those endlessly entertaining and often admirable people looking for love, fame and perhaps a bit of reality. You are entertainers who don’t get enough credit. You are not to be taken lightly. You deserve to get all you want from these experiences and more. And once it’s all over, I hope you look after yourselves and are well looked after.

  Dear Reader,

  Reality has changed quite a bit.

  When I was 16 I got a Sony Discman for Christmas and couldn’t believe how little silence there now was in my life. This was good for me as I had already acquired tinnitus, a high-pitched ring in the ears from standing too close to the speakers at rock concerts. Silence for me was far louder than quiet. And loud was even more calming. The distracting sounds of Parklife, Definitely Maybe, and oddly, the soundtrack to the Nic Cage and Meg Ryan film City of Angels, all jostled for heavy rotation on my new machine. I would never be alone again. Nor would I be bothered by my troublesome thoughts or collapse into boredom on my walks to school through the small Midlands town that was the walls of my Truman Show world. My reality had changed significantly.

  Things got louder and louder after that, accelerating to a point where I wish I had time for my own thoughts a bit more, but sadly they are mostly taken up by reading sad political news, writing books I’m proud of and listening to podcasts about Jungian psychiatry.

  But wait, let’s back up a bit. In the days of the early reality shows things were still boring. So much space, we had. We didn’t need to create calm by meditating or doing yoga, calm was where we lived. We were so calm we had time to watch the housemates on Big Brother while they slept if we wanted to. And strangely, we sometimes wanted to. But we always said we hated it. Hated Big Brother. Hated it, hated it, hated it. Or at least everyone at my school did. Reality TV was fake, and at a time when we were trying work out which T-shirt described our personality best, there was nothing worse than being fake.

  Remember though, the reality TV project encompassed anything that involved real people really. Real people who previously only had letters read out on TV or appeared as disconnected voices who had called in to ask a pop band a question on breakfast TV. Actual real people were deemed too ugly and confusing for TV. Until reality TV came along and changed all that. Real people were everywhere suddenly. Having their houses painted in primary colours behind their backs and returning home to try to appear happy about it. Being murdered in ways we couldn’t solve. And mostly, as I remember it, singing.

  Singing shows, I believe, have become the dominant force in Western culture over the last twenty years. It rendered the ‘us on screen’ no longer confusing. They would sing well and that. But also they’d tell you that they were only singing because their grandma had died a year ago, which seemed to make sense at the time. These real people were no longer confusing, they had these special (usually tragic) reasons why their personality was important and we learnt to root for them, these amorphous blobs of skin, they became people we wanted to do well, because they didn’t fit the mould, or because they did and so really had the right to be famous, but mostly because they were well branded. Before social media we probably couldn’t describe ourselves in so few words, with an accompanying picture, but we can now, and we were taught to do it by the singing shows.

  Added to the branding was drama, because o
f the duress and stress they were all so obviously under. All the classic acting and writing fundamentals were there: They had objectives, needs and obstacles. They had Chekhovian pistols inside their personalities that would be shown in episode one and might go off in later rounds when they had to sing ‘Take On Me’ which we worried was a bit too high for them at home and Louis Walsh had even said so in an earlier episode.

  It’s difficult to underestimate the power of singing shows. They’re the thing that means you always have to talk about the creators’ place in art as something they’re lucky to have and is their dream. And if you don’t use these words, if you fail to ally the importance of what you’re doing to your fundamental life force, to the life of your grandma and the rest of the whole planet, then it doesn’t seem so important.

  If you ever forget to say you’re lucky and this is your dream, then you’re ungrateful. Even as people read this, they’ll probably think that about me. And I very much crave public approval. So remember, I actually am lucky. Really lucky. So lucky. And this has always been my dream since my premature birth.

  But enough about inauthenticity. That’s so 2001. We figured out their reality wasn’t so real a long time ago, so there’s no point in me going on about it now. I watch these shows, I like them, and they aren’t so different to crime writing in many ways. It’s reality, cut to pieces. Like a body on a slab. And we know it’s not real love, just like we know there never was a real Morse (ooh sorry). But if we can put the pieces together in the right order, or if the unseen hand of the director can order the images well enough for us, we might just figure out something about ourselves, just as we might just be able to figure out who the murderer is before Poirot or Morse or Tom Mondrian does. (Hang on, who is Tom Mondrian?)

  Everywhere is loud now. My phone seems to call to me even when it isn’t in the room. People take conference calls in the park and fill every dog walk with a quick stare at their best palm friend. But I’m not pointing the pistol at reality TV anymore. Sure, it’s got weirder, somehow less and more predictable (like the news on my sad phone), but sometimes I wonder why I find little pieces of reality in it that are hard to fake. Or truths that only reveal themselves because they are stitched from something so fake. Or something like that.