Beach Bodies, Part 2

by Ross Armstrong

  ‘Oi! What’s this, Si?’ says Lance, leaning over Simon, no remorse visible.

  Simon struggles to catch his breath.

  ‘You lied to us,’ Dawn says, feeling slightly less bad about the assault that’s just occurred in front of her. ‘The cameras aren’t on, there’s no one watching over us. We’re alone out here.’

  Lance sprawls his hand over his mouth, taking a moment to drink this in.

  Then Dawn starts flicking through camera angles, each with their own time stamp.

  ‘What you looking for?’ says Lance.

  ‘Checking Zack was where he said he was during that blackout hour,’ says Dawn. ‘We should find out who did this, because no one else is coming.’

  ‘Yes they are,’ comes a croaking voice from below. ‘They’ll be here tomorrow. We just have to hold out until then.’

  ‘What was it you told me during our sessions in here?’ says Lance. ‘One night’s a long time in television. I’d rather find this person before they find us.’

  ‘But…’ says Simon, using the desk to struggle to his feet.

  ‘That’s if we trust you at all,’ Dawn says, eyes on the screen. ‘I’m not sure you’ve been telling us the whole truth about anything that’s happening here.’

  Simon’s answer gets stuck in his mouth as Dawn taps away.

  ‘I was trying to keep you all safe. Don’t touch that, it’s the only evidence we have. It’s precious,’ Simon gasps.

  But his voice cuts off. Dawn has brought up a spread of cameras around the house, all of which are black at that time but for the one showing Zack, time stamped to exactly the moment he said he was there. The perfect alibi.

  ‘Okay, fine,’ says Simon. ‘That’s established that. Now let’s get…’

  Lance hushes Simon with a flick of his hand as Dawn winds the cameras back minute by minute, every angle visible on screen and described by its position in the villa: Upper hall, bedrooms, living room, garden one, garden two, garden three. Dawn seems to be able to work this system even better than Simon. Almost as if she’s used it before.

  Even Simon closes in to look when Dawn finds the final minutes the cameras caught before dying. The last moments before the blackout hour.

  Dawn and Lance see themselves first. Grabbing a quiet moment to lay out on the sofa and kiss. Simon looks pretty comfortable. Lance puts his hand on hers while they enlarge and watch but Dawn pulls her hand away.

  Next, they close in on Roberto and Justine, beginning a passive-aggressive conversation in the bedroom, which will end in the bathroom.

  ‘That domestic lasted a good ninety minutes. Roberto cried, Justine watched. An atom bomb could’ve gone off and neither would’ve noticed,’ says Dawn, winding the tape back, then forward, time collapsing at her whim.

  They see Tabs dangle her feet in the pool, just in then out of that cool blue water.

  ‘She was practically by the pool the whole day,’ says Dawn.

  Liv and Summer sit in the smoking area deep in conversation, overlooking the whole garden. ‘They said they were there the whole afternoon,’ says Lance.

  For a moment they forget that Sly should be there too. But he doesn’t stay unaccounted for for much longer.

  There’s some action in the top right of the multi-screen. Sly and Tommy in the hallway, whispering to each other. So Dawn enlarges the picture. A conversation that becomes heated fast. Sly is turning away as Tommy stands open-palmed in defence of something. But Sly shakes his head, hand over his mouth, sweat beading on his skin.

  ‘He said he was out there with Liv and Summer the whole time,’ says Simon.

  ‘Someone was telling porky pies,’ says Lance. ‘Jesus.’

  Simon’s hand goes uneasily back to his neck as he watches what the other two see. Sly slaps Tommy in the face. A real cuff with the back of the hand. ‘Play it again,’ Lance says. ‘Can you get sound on this thing?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll do it. Don’t bloody touch anything,’ says Simon, flicking on the small speaker. And Lance is partially impressed. People rarely keep up any kind of attitude after he’s dealt with them physically. But then, Simon isn’t like most people.

  The sound kicks in, but the voices are too soft. They’re trying not to be heard. But nothing goes unnoticed in here. Simon turns up the sound until their ears are bombarded with white noise. Then…

  ‘One rule for you, one for everyone else,’ says Tommy, his brogue blurred, whispering eerily into Simon’s office from beyond the grave.

  Simon turns up the sound as high as it goes. The blare of static like a tiny storm.

  Sly straightens up, bearing over Tommy, but Tommy doesn’t back down.

  It’s loud enough that Sly’s foot scraping on the floor sounds like thunder as he approaches. He sniggers. Breath high in his chest. He nods, trying to calm himself, then he turns back to Tommy and the noise of the slap comes as a sonic boom.

  ‘You’re dead,’ Sly says, his voice echoing into the lunge.

  ‘Can’t believe this. I thought he was an absolute boy,’ Lance says. ‘Go back, back. What was it about?’ Dawn’s fingers tap to rewind the image. Sly approaches him in the hallway with intent: ‘Ay. I’ve heard—’

  Then darkness. Lights out in the office. And the grey fade of what once was a working screen with evidence emblazoned is the only dwindling light.

  Simon doesn’t wait. He reaches for something heavy on his left.

  When the lights go out in the living room, the glowing embers of the fire take over. The remaining group hear the slamming of a door upstairs.

  ‘This was only a matter of time,’ says Justine.

  Then a scream from above.

  A slamming of a door below them.

  ‘Who was that?’ says Roberto, holding Justine close, apparently for her benefit.

  ‘I’ll go check,’ says Tabs.

  ‘No, no. We stay here,’ says Justine.

  ‘We never should’ve split up,’ says Roberto.

  Tabs puts a finger over her mouth and crouches close to them. Despite their efforts not to be cleaved apart, the noises from above and below have prompted them to stay quiet, hiding their movement from each other. The three groups have inadvertently drawn lots and taken sides.

  Simon, Dawn and Lance downstairs.

  Summer, Liv and Sly upstairs.

  Justine, Roberto and Tabs here.

  And Zack, all on his own somewhere outside.

  Such fractures tend to make one a little paranoid. Especially in the dark.

  ‘We should stay together,’ says Tabs.

  ‘Agreed,’ says Roberto. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

  ‘I need to bring them back down,’ says Tabs, calmer than the other two. ‘So we can all be together.’

  Roberto looks to the beautiful French woman to his right for help then turns back to Tabs.

  ‘Sorry, love. Are you saying we need to split up, to stay together?’

  The fire kicks up a little, stoked by the oxygen from the door slam that creates a billow effect.

  ‘I understand,’ says Justine, standing and freeing herself from Roberto’s grip. ‘I’ll go downstairs, gather up the others.’

  And suddenly Roberto is facing the possibility of being left all alone, like a sitting duck, while everyone else is determined to wander around the villa in the dark. Fuck it, he thinks. He’ll take his chances with the dark.

  ‘Okay, we’ll get everyone together. But I don’t want you going towards that scream, Tabs. It don’t sound safe.’ And the act is good enough to convince her this is genuinely his priority. ‘Tabs, you stay here.’

  After a moment’s stand-off, Tabs throws up her hands and sits on the sofa. She coughs, then watches the hand that covers her mouth shake as Justine pulls the piece of mirror out of the wall revealing the stairs that go down to Simon’s lounge, and Roberto and Justine disappear in different directions.

  Left alone, Tabs’ hand becomes perfectly still.

  Simon holds the heavy blue moleski
n in his left hand, bringing it down to his side deftly. But not as deftly as he intended.

  ‘What is that?’ says Lance.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Simon. ‘What matters is that we can count Liv and Zack’s alibi’s safe. But Sly—’

  ‘It’s your notebook, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sly is a different matter,’ says Simon, breezing past that comment like it was a weak right hook. ‘We need to get to the rest of the group and ask Sly some questions. Take my lead on this.’

  ‘I’m sorry, doctor—’ says Lance.

  ‘I’m not a doctor,’ says Simon.

  Silence in the dark room.

  ‘I thought you were. You said you were,’ says Dawn. Her soft voice entering the room like warmth.

  ‘I may have implied I was,’ says Simon. ‘But I didn’t complete my doctorate studies. Didn’t graduate. I was only a matter of months away, but… an opportunity in television came up.’

  ‘Then we should take this,’ says Lance. ‘These are doctor’s notes aren’t they? Ones you’ve been taking on us. And if you’re not a real doctor, then they don’t really count.’

  Lance pulls the book, but Simon hangs on. ‘Don’t. Listen,’ says Simon. ‘We’re close. Roberto and Justine were upstairs together. Tabs and Summer can verify each other’s whereabouts. And I imagine you two will swear by each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lance says, still pulling at the book. ‘We can.’

  ‘So give me that back, and we can—’

  Lance gets his fingers around Simon’s side of the book. It’s a playground scene Simon’s embarrassed by, but he can’t let go. Then Dawn, not knowing exactly what’s in it either but deeming it important grabs onto it too. It’s a tug of war that doesn’t last long. Simon lets go, sending Lance stumbling back a few steps with the moleskin. Just enough as it happens.

  It’s a tactical error Simon takes full advantage of.

  He lunges forward, slamming and locking his office door. Which leaves Lance stranded out in the hallway. And Simon and Dawn locked away, alone.

  Summer manages to hold back a second scream when the hand takes her by the elbow. At first she was startled by the dark itself and then by what seemed to be lurking in it.

  Somewhere in the rest of the villa, she hears a door slam and flinches again.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Liv says. ‘Just help me look in the bedroom.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Summer says, hearing her voice come from low down.

  ‘Checking for that body. We might not get another chance. There’s a little light from the bathroom window, I just want to check there’s no sign of him. Then Lance can’t say a damn thing when we confront him about it not being here.’

  ‘You okay, Sly?’ Summer whispers to his outline.

  But Sly gives no reply in the half-light.

  Then they hear another noise, like distant breaking of glass.

  A hand over Summer’s mouth. Luckily, it’s her own. She’s fighting the urge to scream again.

  ‘What was that?’ says Liv’s voice, crawling below.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Summer. ‘Sly?’

  But still the outline ahead of her says nothing, so she creeps towards it. And when she reaches out to touch it, she falls. Summer was so sure that Sly would be there to take her hand. But he doesn’t seem to be there at all.

  ‘Nothing,’ says Liv, her eyes appearing through a slanting dim light that spills through the window. ‘Tommy isn’t here. I don’t think he ever was.’

  Liv clutches Summer’s arm and pulls hard. Summer tries to pull away but can’t.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says Summer. ‘Please. No. Don’t—’

  ‘Sorry, I just needed some help getting up.’

  Liv presses her face to Summer’s and brushes her cheek with her hand, which she eventually brings to rest on her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Liv says. ‘I’ve got you.’

  Summer catches Liv’s eyes, as hers ripple and fuzz, straining to stay close and see her friend in the dark as they move to the exit.

  Then the door flies open, a figure standing there, and this time she can’t stifle her scream.

  Sly: Before

  Sly sees himself in Manbij, Syria. He sits on the brow of a hill in uniform, rucksacks slung down as he rests with his fellow troops, taking a long drink of water, drips of which fall glinting like jewels in the sun, as the boys look at the yellow sand of the valley below.

  Kicking up dust and cutting through the terrain, a US vehicle powers away as a white civilian van heads in its general direction, some metres away. Sly’s breathing stiffens as he sees the two vehicles below get closer to each other. The men watch in silence, too far away to do a thing if one were to crash into the other.

  The two vehicles pass each other, some way away as it happens. And Sly notes in himself a little bit of reality falling away. When he came here, he saw the possibility of tragedy and it stilled his pulse. An explosive stepped on couldn’t be deactivated with your fear – if you’re gonna go, you’re gonna go. Best to be vigilant, but head into every situation like it’s an everyday task. He used to believe that. That worldview used to be possible.

  This is the moment he notes in himself, when even the everyday, two trucks passing in the distance, has become a flash point. A potential trigger.

  It’s completely understandable given his circumstances. But it’s not optimal, as the Lance Corporal would say. He should tell someone.

  He has heard of civilian trucks slamming into army vehicles at night, some laden with explosives that didn’t go off, some just doing things analogue. Metal on metal. A rogue bad actor hoping to find someone to slam into so they can at least take a life or two with them.

  But he has never seen anything like that himself.

  He’d wanted to be stationed in Manbij, the area near Turkey that they call Little London, because of the amount of British-born ISIL fighters in the city. He’d trained as a carpenter but joined the army when he heard about the beheadings of British aid workers. A news story ignited this fire in him that couldn’t be quenched. In truth, he never thought he’d end up there. It felt like the equivalent of a musician having a poster of some rock star on their wall, then growing up to duet with them at Wembley Stadium.

  ‘When Manbij happened – course I was overawed. Pumped. Proud. But I also couldn’t believe my luck at first,’ Sly once told Simon.

  The reality was a little different.

  Fourteen days in, he found a dog. Actually, he found five in the rubble after an explosion, but the other four didn’t make it. He heard a whimpering, lifted up a concrete slab and there was the puppy. It wasn’t keen at first but he plied it with meat, love and water. Took it back to the camp. Trained it for what became hours every day. Made it a teddy bear out of jeans. The puppy kept him sane.

  Twenty days later, a friend of his was the first British troop to die over here. He stepped on a roadside IED. It blew him apart.

  Sly wasn’t there with him when it happened, but was close enough to hear it. They got a message on the radio. Ordinarily they would have run, but this time decided to tread carefully. The area should’ve been cleared by the disposal unit but whoever laid it was cunning. They’d put two next to each other using different materials. The Military Working Dog found one, but missed the other.

  Like everyone that passes away in such circumstances, it would be disseminated in the papers, at first as an unnamed soldier, then later as a man described as brave, loved by all, and looking forward to life after all this was over. In this soldier’s case, every word of it was true.

  They drink to him, on the brow of the hill. They say his name a lot whenever they get to sit and rest together in the day. It’s a bit of ceremony that helps with the fear. Sly watches his drinking hand shake, and he knows he has to get back to his dog. And he knows he can’t do much longer out here. And he knows he has to tell someone about the shakes. But he’ll wait, just a little longer.

  ‘S
ounds like you’re a very brave man,’ says Simon.

  Sly has told Simon broadly about where he was stationed and when, but it’s three weeks into his time in the villa before he gets specific. Simon listens, like he always does. Making notes in that blue moleskin of his.

  ‘That’s not for me to say. I chose it. Then there I was,’ says Sly.

  ‘But you chose something that was harrowing. Something that made you a hero. In many people’s eyes. You understand that?’

  Simon has talked about honesty with one’s self being more and more important in the current climate. There’s so much content, so many ways to sell your image, that you can fool even yourself if you’re not careful.

  ‘Holding on to who you are, begins with the truth,’ says Simon.

  ‘I’m being as truthful as I can,’ says Sly.

  Simon wants to say that he demands a higher standard of truth. He wants to ask how Sly would react to that statement. To see if he would agree that there are truths, and then there are better, even more honest, truths.

  But he doesn’t say that, he says something else.

  ‘What was it that made you join up? Change your life, take those piercings out. A lot of training, work, commitment, even before you get out there,’ says Simon.

  Sly shifts the position of his head on the leather lounger. Pushes a breath out through his lips.

  ‘I told you. So I was reading about beheadings, in a paper, in a caf. Started to do some research. I even watched one of the snuff videos. Wish I hadn’t. Once it’s in there it’s difficult to get rid of.’

  Sly taps his head, listening to the sound of Simon writing. He has to wait a while for the scratching sound to finish.

  ‘And how did you feel after your friend was killed?’

  Sly stares up at the white ceiling, searching for the right way to put it.

  ‘I felt an injustice when I signed up. Wanted to right wrongs. Take some names. But it wasn’t about hurting anyone, wasn’t about payback. Wasn’t about race, or identity or, you know, religion. Or Britain.’ Simon writes down each of these words. ‘But then, after he died, that all changed. Seems odd, cos I knew what that would feel like, had trained for it. And I’d seen other people die, seen some terrible things already, but not one of us. And once that had happened, it’s funny, they say we shouldn’t go over there, intervene, cos it can galvanise people. One death pinned on us, or even just our presence, could make martyrs. But it turns out, it works the other way too. See what I mean?’