Beach Bodies, Part 2

by Ross Armstrong

  Liv’s father was incredibly proud and kept every issue, even framing her first and last in school. And it was the last that was to draw the most attention.

  Mr Kane worked long hours and only believed in blanket praise as he said he had all his arguments at work. But Liv felt she could press her mother – born in Pune, India but raised in Atlanta, Georgia – for some constructive criticism that might take the Tribune to the next level.

  ‘Criticism is for adults,’ she had said. ‘You’ve done a cool thing, be a kid.’

  Then she took a long draw on her Silk Cut and laughed at one of the jokes on the back of the paper.

  What’s brown and sticky? A stick.

  ‘I’m not a kid, I’m 15. And it’ll never get any better if everyone keeps patting me on the head and telling me I’ve done a good job.’

  ‘God, you’re intense,’ her mother said, taking another drag. ‘Don’t you want a blog? Get a blog, review… clothes. Get a fan base, subscribers, you can make money. I thought you kids were all ruthless moneymakers these days.’

  ‘I’m not interested in that shit,’ Liv says.

  ‘Don’t…’ Her mother made to correct her swearing, but realised she and Mr Kane swore with such wild abandon around the house it’d be closing the stable door after the ‘motherfucker’ had bolted. ‘Okay, you want criticism, I’ll go there, but it’ll be like we’re in the office together. I’ll grind your gears, the way I grind the ones in my own head and everyone else’s to make the copy better. You really want that?’

  Liv nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I want actually.’

  After a long toke, her mother explained to her that Liv’s work was essentially worthless, though not in so many words. The way Liv heard it, her mother was suggesting her paper was nothing like a real newspaper because real newspapers challenged people, whereas she couldn’t challenge anything or she’d be expelled. She was essentially working under an oppressive regime, like in a communist state, where only official news was sanctioned. And the question for her was whether she wanted to be someone who stood with or against authority.

  ‘Real newspapers,’ her mother said, ‘rabble rouse, make people outraged, make them argue. Occasionally even bring them together. But always against a common evil. Every time you edit out a dirty joke you’re acting against every instinct I ever learnt.’

  Liv breathed in her mother’s smoke and thought.

  ‘But how do I make waves without letting them know I’m doing it?’ Liv said.

  ‘That’s the game,’ her mother said. ‘That’s exactly it.’

  And that was how it began.

  Liv informed Mitch that they’d no longer be writing puff pieces about how good school dinners were, they’d be dismantling the regime, piece by piece.

  The problem came when they brainstormed exactly how they would do that. And the answer arrived in the form of a small piece of a paper slipped under the Tribune’s office door. (A broom cupboard in the drama department.)

  What do you do if you come across an elephant? Apologise and wipe it off.

  Mitch didn’t even like the joke, but Liv snorted from sheer surprise and started to wonder, if she were to insert it in the middle of a heap of safe jokes, would the teachers notice?

  The answer was a resounding no. But the reaction from the school was an enormous ‘Yes!’ leading Liv to conclude that the teachers never read the Tribune anyway. As soon as the other students cottoned on to this, they were all determined to keep this hilarious, illicit new prank away from anyone that would shut them down. Liv, always popular because of her daring fashion choices (long leather macs, fake fur stoles, fashion turbans), was now seen as a ringleader of a renegade alliance. There were low fives in the dinner hall, winks and subtle smiles wherever she went. So this was what it felt like to start a revolution, she thought.

  A man suggests to his wife, ‘Darling, shall we try swapping positions tonight?’ ‘That’s a great idea,’ she replies. ‘You stand by the ironing board while I sit on the sofa and break wind.’

  The next week they snuck in two jokes and still no one noticed. In fact, the head of English, Ms Herbert – poised, long-limbed and fond of retiring into trances – when asked if she’d enjoyed the Tribune that week, said she enjoyed it very much. They were turning their lack of pastoral care on its head, and Liv was reaping the rewards. She imagined herself as a hero in a movie about censorship. And now she had the students’ attention, what came next would seal her position as a voice of the people.

  And this is where things turned so sour, so quickly.

  It had long been mooted, that Ms Herbert may not always have been a woman. The rumour had even made the girls’ toilet wall – ‘Ms Herb is a bloke’ – and Liv thought that even if this were true, the way her fellow students were trying to make this salacious was a ludicrous state of affairs. Online, Liv inhabited a world where difference was celebrated, she commented on LGBTQI matters and signed petitions on more liberal issues than she had previously thought there were liberal issues. Her plan was ambitious. But the hubris her success had gifted her made her think it was possible. She wanted to get out ahead of the news. Get Ms Herbert to talk about her past, her sexuality, her politics, openly. If what students believed was true, it would be an opportunity to celebrate the diversity within her school and have frank conversations she felt the school should be ready for.

  That was how it began.

  Liv approached Ms Herbert after class and asked her to do an interview about her ‘private feelings’. Ms Herbert, not seeming to grasp the intent, asked for more details.

  ‘I want to do an honest series of interviews with teachers. Things you feel you failed at. Things you wished you’d known. Who you were then. Who you are now. It’s an opportunity to be intimate,’ said Liv. And Ms Herbert’s eyes said she didn’t like that at all.

  ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate,’ says Ms Herbert. ‘In an educational… context.’

  Tactfully, Ms Herbert excused herself, explaining she had marking to do.

  You could say this marked the middle of the episode. But it was a middle that played out mostly over one night, with Liv searching the internet and her soul, chewing over what the most tasteful next move might be. Then pitting it against the most effective one. Wondering which one a real journalist would choose.

  Much to Mitch’s disapproval, a photograph from Ms Herbert’s previous life, sourced from social media, was printed out and hidden within the pictures of well-dressed Londoners with a question mark over a handsome-looking skinny guy at an art exhibition. The picture instantly went viral, albeit in a physical sense. It was fixated on at lunch, torn out and stuck in secret places: toilet cubicles, lockers. And finally it found its way to the headmaster.

  At this point in Liv’s fantasy, she had imagined the news making its way to Ms Herbert, who would make an emotional address, confirming the rumours and giving a noble speech about trans issues and decisions that define who you are in your soul. The assembly hall would be filled with heart, and Ms Herbert would be held in great esteem for her bravery.

  In reality, Liv’s parents were called to school and were practical about the decision. Whatever was said in the room while Liv waited outside – she had already spent a tearful afternoon in the office herself – it ended in her being saved from expulsion, and her father’s nonplussed face saying one single word: ‘Happy?’

  Nothing else was said in the car, her father seemingly unaffected. At home, just before Liv ran to her room, her mother merely said with a shrug:

  ‘I hope the story was worth it.’

  Liv didn’t end up leaving school. But Ms Herbert did. And, unsurprisingly, every effort Liv made to get in touch with her fell flat. Until eventually, after a month-long campaign of fruitless apology, a message appeared in her email account…

  Ms H here.

  Liv. I don’t want you to feel bad. I really wish you hadn’t done that, but I truly believe you’re not a bad person. It may have seem
ed innocuous to you. I can believe that, in some way. But my identity and my private life is important to me, and when you took that privacy away, it hurt.

  Everything I knew of you didn’t suggest you were that person. Perhaps it’s you who had her secret inner life revealed! I don’t know. Either way, it was time for a new start.

  Whatever you do with your life,

  Good luck.

  Ms H

  The sense of respect Ms Herbert showed Liv, when she had offered her none in return, still haunts her to this day.

  In fact, she sometimes dreams about it. She did during the first week in the villa. Most people’s nightmares involve them running away from someone with a knife, but in Liv’s dreams she’s the one with the weapon, chasing people down mercilessly while another part of herself feels the guilt of the act; dark dreaming in a wash of muted colours and doom and hollowness.

  That night, she dreamed she was stabbing someone, in the back, over and over and over again.

  ‘Liv! You okay?’

  She almost screamed on waking. Tommy was above her holding her arms down. But she felt strangely calm. She looked around and saw he was the only other one in the communal bedroom in which they all slept who was awake.

  ‘Nightmare,’ Liv said, still half in it.

  ‘I noticed. You okay now?’

  She gave a silent nod. She was just pleased she wasn’t sleep walking, talking, or even climbing. She had done that last year in her old bedroom and ended up sprawled on the floor, her father looking down at her.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ Tommy said. ‘Fancy a chat?’

  She looked up at Tommy and saw no harm in it, so secretly they tip-toed away and downstairs.

  Tommy began by asking how bothered she was about Summer and Sly. She had tried to crack on with Sly when he entered the villa, a mix of swagger and shyness, but he had eventually chosen Summer instead of her, forcing Liv to sit back and watch Summer get what she wanted again.

  ‘It’s not about that. I’m not bothered about that,’ she said.

  During a truth game she had been shown the montage that had been made of Sly and Summer as they kissed, the camera pulling back to show a scorned Liv watching on each time. She’d also seen a clip of the chat show that accompanies each episode of Sex on the Beach, where a comedian claimed she was ‘a woman spurned, who will get her revenge’ as the audience laughed and cheered. She had blanched when shown it and Summer and Sly looked awkward for the first time.

  ‘It’s just a game,’ she said. ‘I have other things to worry about.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ Tommy said. ‘I’ve had some of the deepest chats of my life in this place. Though that’s not saying much for me.’

  ‘Ha,’ Liv said. ‘Yeah, there’s nothing to do but talk in here. And we’ve all got stuff to talk about. We’ve all got our fair share of demons.’

  ‘Ha. You’re good with words,’ he said, as his hand reached for hers.

  Liv was not so much angry at how her character was being depicted, as interested. It fed into her interest in the media. In many ways, she was a wolf in tight clothing in here. The others would most likely pursue careers as models, Instagram stars and minor celebrities. But she hoped to write a book about this experience, and as such had spent as much time in the villa looking for her angle as she had looking for love.

  She looked at Tommy, both invested in their moment, and contemplating how this night-time encounter would come across. Tommy’s partner, Dawn, was asleep somewhere upstairs.

  She wondered if she was, at heart, one of life’s bad people. Whenever she needed proof, she returned to the Ms Herbert episode. But she didn’t know if her parents’ ruthless streak had taught her to become so, or if that was unfair on them, and it was just that she was made that way.

  But then she stopped her wondering, because suddenly Tommy’s mouth was on hers, her hands still by her side, as a warmth filled her up and she breathed him in.

  6.16 p.m.

  Liv tucks her hair behind her ears, approaching with manic energy.

  Roberto and Justine, Tabs, Zack, Sly and Summer all flinch in their own way.

  ‘Listen, we need to check upstairs,’ she says, in a whisper.

  The noise of the fire crackles as they think.

  ‘Not being funny, Liv, but we need to stick together,’ says Sly.

  The subtext is clear. If we’re safer here, why are you trying to break us apart? And Liv didn’t think Sly did subtext.

  ‘Yeah, I’m not being funny either, but I don’t want to go up there,’ says Tabs.

  The villa was designed to be a big enough space so that ten people living on top of each other for six weeks wouldn’t go insane. The bedroom is two flights of stairs up and feels an awfully long way from the apparent safety of the living room.

  ‘Why do we need to go upstairs, Liv? Cos I’m listening, but I’m telling you now, I’m already pranging out,’ Zack says, keeping his voice soft.

  The others will be descending nearly two floors below them, but discretion is something they’ve got used to practising within the paranoid walls of the villa. ‘You don’t mean… to see the body?’ Zack says.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she says. Which is greeted by groans of dissent.

  ‘No way. I don’t want to see that,’ says Summer.

  ‘Then you don’t have to go. But some of us should do something,’ says Liv.

  They take Liv in, a hurry about her that the others don’t share, making her seem edgy.

  ‘You need to do something, you mean? Before they see on that tape you didn’t cut your hand?’ says Roberto, who gets an immediate dig in the ribs from Justine.

  ‘You want to look at the body, Liv?’ she says. ‘See if there’s anything we can tell from it? I understand.’

  Liv gets a little closer, while downstairs, Simon, Dawn and Lance approach the door of Simon’s quarters.

  ‘Lance is the only one that saw the body,’ Liv says, softly, the kind of soft that can shiver the spine. ‘Why are we taking his word for it? What if there’s something he’s not saying? It’ll take a while to look at those tapes. Let’s check it out while he’s down there.’

  ‘We’ve no reason to not trust Lance,’ Roberto says. ‘You’ve been digging him out from the beginning, you don’t the like the lad, we get it.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I’m willing him to have killed someone!’ says Liv.

  ‘Shh,’ says Sly. ‘But it’s a prejudice isn’t it, Liv? Trust me, Lance is a peng sort. If he says Tommy’s up there, lying in a pool of blood, I’m not putting myself in a dark spot just to prove the obvious.’

  Liv laughs and shakes her head. ‘So it’s a boys’ club, is it?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s because you’re being hysterical,’ Sly says, without a shred of irony.

  ‘There it is,’ says Liv, keeping her voice down this time. ‘There it is. A mad woman, crazy, suspicious paranoid. The same shit whenever you want us to shut up. And it always suits you for us to shut up. Well, I’m going up there myself.’

  Roberto makes to stand.

  Heading up there isn’t safe, and in Simon’s absence Roberto feels implicitly he should be the one to keep them together. He’s a strategist after all. An IT strategist. Well, actually a social media strategist. He thinks the others think that means he can fix computers, or broadband, or anything really. He can’t. But it still involves the word strategy. And you know who else uses strategies: war commanders. Anyway, Liv shouldn’t go upstairs. Even if she is approaching hysteria, which he thinks she is, a war commander doesn’t let a soldier with shell-shock charge into no-man’s-land.

  But Roberto doesn’t know how to communicate all these thoughts, so he sits back down.

  Liv who has turned, eyes the women in the room, who she might’ve hoped would support her – ‘girl code’ they used to call it, but no one seems to be abiding by the code anymore. She heads silently towards the stairs.

  ‘All right, I’m coming,’ says Sly, when Liv is
a couple of paces up the stairs. But he wants to make sure people know his primary concern is not her safety. ‘If we let Liv go up there, and she did it, she can clear up anything incriminating.’

  Liv gives a bloodless smile and looks to the ceiling.

  ‘Or at least, that’s what someone could say. If we’re going to take risks, let’s take them together,’ says Summer, walking over to where Sly is. ‘Then someone is always keeping an eye on each of us. And also, you know, girl code.’

  Summer squeezes Liv’s hand. Liv gives her a smile that would’ve been more whole-hearted if it wasn’t delivered within a haystack of other insinuations.

  Then, as they start to ascend, Roberto’s voice stops them in their tracks.

  ‘Hey. There’s always the cameras. So, if you are worried, remember that. And, if you are… up to no good, remember that too.’

  ‘The cameras aren’t on in the Love Nest,’ says Sly, which sounds a little like a threat. And for a moment Liv wonders if she’ll be safe, alone with this alliance that is currently following her upstairs. Sly and Summer have already screwed her over once inside this house.

  The others watch them go. And only when they’re out of sight does Justine start to speak in a deep hush…

  Down past the cables and wires. Lower, lower. These narrow corridors are not only to save space and keep Simon’s quarters discreet. The design is based on a Swedish women’s prison and is artfully made so narrow it’s difficult to swing an object or even a punch in anger. Simon didn’t request this, saying he doubted the sessions would get that out of hand, but the producers were convinced that his area should be a safe space in all ways. The door is thick, and while they stopped short of making it fireproof, it’s strong enough to keep out any intruder.