Lord of the Lies

The wooden door creaked open, and Nora stepped out into the sun, the sand, the surrealism. The sand didn’t vanish beneath her flip flops, her bikini didn’t blow away in the wind, and Dolores didn’t melt into a puddle; she was definitely still there, with that frozen smile and those frosty eyes.

“Oh, orange!” said Dolores, eyeing Nora’s bikini. “It took me a while to figure out my tones, too.”

Nora wrapped her towel around her, taking in Dolores’ brown bikini, her glowing, olive skin. What was her name again?

Nora didn’t try to fill the silence. There was the laughter of seagulls, the distant bark of a dog, the acoustic drum of feet running down the boardwalk.

They trudged across the beach, manoeuvring their way around buckets and sandcastles, in search of a green Estrella de Levante umbrella.

“There they are,” said Dolores.

Nora squinted and slung an arm across her brow.

Antonio and Fabio lay stretched out on their towels beneath the umbrella, their pale thighs shining whiter than the sand.

“Hey,” said Dolores, squatting down and fishing a towel from her bag.

Nora plonked herself beside Antonio and kissed his salty lips.

“You’ve already been in?” she said, picking the sand from his curly beach hair. He smelled of the sea, and she was happy here on his raggedy blue towel.

Antonio nodded yes, scooting over to make room.

Nora lay on the wet imprint and planted a kiss on the back of his warm, sweaty shoulder.

“You brought a book?” said Fabio, as Dolores pulled a green paperback from her bag.

Fabio sat with his knees up about his chest, hugging his hairy calves.

Nora ran a hand down Antonio’s back as she zoned out. She ran a finger over his sunlit blackheads, over the black hair sprouting from his mole like a splinter.

“So few people read these days,” said Dolores. “They don’t even know who Salinger is.” Salinger, Salinger with a hard ‘g’.

Nora’s ears pricked up.

“Yeah, totally,” said Fabio.

“Salinger?” said Nora. “The one about the kids on the beach and their descent into chaos? the one with the pighead?”

No, that was Lord of the Flies, but Dolores didn’t reply.

“And what about Camus?” she said.

“If you read each sentence carefully,” said Fabio, “it’s really powerful.”

Nora couldn’t tell if they were being ironic. They kept swimming around titles and exchanging generic comments.

“I read Don Quixote in one afternoon,” said Fabio.

Nora almost snorted. It was definitely irony, but it was so elaborate you would think it were in earnest.

“Yeah, I read it in an hour,” she said.

“Did you?”

Nora blinked blankly like a goldfish.

None of it was irony, none of it was irony and this realisation formed above her like a storm cloud. She hadn’t played pretend since high school and it all felt a little shallow.

Or maybe she was just arrogant.

“C’est bon,” said Dolores. “I read it when I lived in Korea.”

“You lived in Korea?” piped Nora. “For how long?”

“Two months.”

She’d said lived, hadn’t she? When would the sky turn green? When would the umbrella sprout wings and fly away? Surely this wasn’t real. Why were they trying so hard to be interesting? as though identity were contingent on a list of things they’d supposedly read and done. Nora was twenty-six, she was above this; they all were. But maybe they were nervous. Maybe they sought validation. Maybe they didn’t know they were safe here, that they could relax and be themselves.

Or maybe Nora was too judgemental; that was probably it.

“So, how’s the beach house?” said Fabio.

“Yeah, not bad,” said Antonio, clearing his throat. “I’ve been getting up at 08:15 every morning.”

Lie.

Nora listened intently as she dug sand and sunscreen out from beneath her fingernails.

“Nice,” said Fabio, dusting sand from the bottoms of his feet.

“And I sometimes go for a jog along the beach.”

Another lie.

“That body’s not gonna maintain itself,” said Fabio.

“I know exactly what you mean,” said Dolores, rising to her knees. “My ex said I had a fat ass.” She smacked sunblock into her hands and rubbed it into her chest, her stomach, her thighs.

“I’d put sunblock on my tattoo,” she said, “but it’s already ruined.”

Dolores crawled onto the edge of Antonio’s towel and untied her bikini top.

“See?” she said, cupping her bare breast in one dainty hand.

Nora blinked once, twice, but didn’t wake up; the sand was still white and the water still blue.

Dolores poked at her tattoo as the men leaned in for a glance; it was on the rib beneath her breast. In Nora’s world, she need only lift her bikini slightly to reveal that illegible blot. She almost snorted at the pretext—oh, to show you my tattoo—but mushrooms didn’t sprout from the sand, her hands didn’t melt, the sky didn’t come crashing down. Be kind, she reminded herself.

“And this one,” said Dolores, turning around to pull down her bikini bottoms. She was showing Antonio another illegible smudge of ink, while Fabio the poor thing, alone on his towel, leaned over for a look-see.

Nora expected cats to rain from the sky, for the seagulls to moo, for the sand to turn blue. Why were they all pretending this girl wasn’t flirting with her boyfriend? It wouldn’t surprise her if Dolores slipped and fell on Antonio’s dick, the clumsy, little fawn. It was all quite slapstick, really, and Nora would laugh if she weren’t in love, she’d laugh at the absurdity of it all; but she was very much absorbed in the nightmare and its nonsensical imitation of reality.

Or maybe she was crazy.

Who was this Dolores, anyway? Antonio had met her at a party a fortnight ago, but she was his friend, and friends were his priority, irrespective of whom he arbitrarily attached the label to. Nora was dizzy with dissonance, and it gripped her like seasickness.

The dissonance always began with redefining and reframing. Nora, in pursuit of harmony, would acquiesce and negotiate her own perception, thus allowing Antonio to extrapolate these negotiated definitions/ narratives into valid but generic statements. “Be nice to this girl I met at a party a fortnight ago” thus became “you have to respect my friends.” The latter, of course, granted him more leverage; and Nora was condemned to walk the plank if she dare question it. Her acquiescence, she would later realise, was just as much a pirate as his manipulation; she’d blindfolded herself.

Or maybe she was delusional.

Dolores remained on Antonio’s towel as she readjusted her bikini and rubbed sunblock into her chest.

It was OK, decided Nora. It wasn’t Dolores’ fault she was insecure, that she sought validation by pretending to have read a book she’d never read, to speak a language she couldn’t speak, to have lived in a country she’d only ever visited. And when her attempts at intellectuality failed to garner the attention she craved, she’d resorted to her body.

It wasn’t Dolores’ fault she was trapped beneath that suffocating mask, unable to acknowledge her genuine beauty, the beauty Nora saw in her plump, cherubic face, in her freckled, olive cheeks, in her veiled sadness and sense of inadequacy.

“Yeah, I fuck whomever I want when I want,” said Dolores.

Had Nora zoned out? What was the relevance?

The seagulls snickered. It was hilarious, really, or maybe Nora was hysterical; maybe she had too much water in her ears, and yet she hadn’t been swimming.

“Nora, you look tired,” said Dolores. “We can switch to English.”

“I’m fine,” said Nora. “It’s just that Antonio kept me up all night.”

Woops, she’d taken the bait.

Fabio stared at her blankly. “Is she telling a joke?”

“I don’t know,” said Antonio.

Laughter.

Nora grabbed a handful of sand, watched it trickle through her fingers. This was real, she wasn’t dreaming, and she was drowning here on this raggedy blue towel amongst these faceless creatures.

“My friends didn’t vote,” said Dolores.

“Her friends didn’t vote,” Fabio said to Nora in accented English.

“Just so she understands,” he said to the others.

Laughter.

“Neither did my mum,” said Antonio. “She’s not a real feminist.”

This was the very man who had yelled at Nora just yesterday. He’d climbed onto the bed and into her space, enraged that she wouldn’t engage. She’d cowered in the foetal position, eyes closed, elsewhere, somewhere far, far away from there.

But Nora didn’t think of that now, no, she dug more sand out from beneath her nails. Her mind had erased it to resolve the dissonance, for it was impossible to reconcile that man with this sweet and sandy boy who smelled of salt and sunscreen.

Dolores rose from the towel and brushed the sand from her bust. “We’re gonna go get beer,” she said, looking at Fabio.

He rose and trudged after her through the sand, followed by the swish of his boardshorts.

Nora watched as they entered the heat haze, shimmering like sparks of oil.

“Wanna fuck in the surf shack?” said Antonio, rising from the towel.

No.

“Sure,” said Nora.

***

Nora stumbled after Antonio and into the sunlight, readjusting her bikini as she trudged through the sand. The click of her flip flops followed her, the alarm bells in her head booming like a conch shell.

“Antonio?” she called. “Why’d you tell them you get up at 08:15 every morning?”

Pause. He didn’t turn around.

The click of flip flops, a child’s distant laughter, the thud of a volleyball.

“I said wake up,” he said. “Not get up.”

Pause.

“And why’d you say that you sometimes go jogging?”

Pause. Antonio dropped onto his towel beneath the umbrella.

“I do,” he said. “Sometimes when I come to the beach house, I go jogging.”

He was gaslighting her again.

Or maybe she’d gone mad.

Nora spread her towel out beside his, lay down and stared up at the leaf green umbrella glowing in the sun. She imagined she was wrapped up in a great, big cocoon, that soon she’d emerge stronger, secure, sufficient. It was, after all, her fault.

A sudden kiss on her cheek.

Nora rolled over, and was met with those big, brown eyes.

“You know I love you,” said Antonio, propped up on an elbow.

“I love you, too,” said Nora, leaning in for a kiss.

Her whole body eased into his snug and sunlit aura. She was safe here. This was the man she knew, the man she loved; he was the man smiling softly, sleepy-eyed as she dusted sand from his sun-kissed cheeks, from his beard.

“Are we disturbing something?” called Dolores, cradling plastic cups and a big glass bottle of Estrella de Levante. Fabio lagged after her, balancing another two bottles, a bag of crisps, a tin of olives and a lemon. Swish, swish, sang his board shorts, rubbing between his thighs.

“If we’re disturbing something we can leave,” laughed Dolores, dropping onto her towel where she began unscrewing a bottle.

“This was the last lemon,” said Fabio, kicking off his flip flops.

Dolores began pouring, the audible glug of beer filling the cups.

“How much did it cost you?” asked Antonio.

“An arm and a leg,” said Fabio, ripping open the crisps. He emptied the olives into the packet and gave it a good shake.

“Outside of Murcia, lem—”

Dolores leaned towards Nora, and Antonio’s voice faded into the background.

“Here,” she said.

The foam kissed the lip of the cup, almost overspilling.

“Thank you,” said Nora.

“Did you want us to leave? We can totally leave.”

“No,” said Nora, smiling. “No, not at all.” Maybe this girl wasn’t so bad, after all. How could she be with those doe eyes, that sweet smile? Maybe it was all in Nora’s head, maybe she was imagining things again.

“—the dad!” Both men boomed with laughter, and their voices returned to the foreground.

“Nora wants us to leave,” laughed Dolores, returning to her towel, but both men were still shaking their heads and regaining their breath.

Dolores handed Antonio a cup of beer.

“Oh, none for me,” said Antonio. “Not after that house party.”

“This one always has to pee,” said Dolores. “You and Lucia in the outhouse!”

Nora’s ears pricked up.

“The door wouldn’t close,” said Antonio.

“Toilet buddies,” said Fabio, “like in primary.”

Antonio laughed. “The good o—”

“Remember when we had to take you to bed and undress you?” interjected Dolores. She glanced over at Nora. “It wasn’t sexual, though.”

Hook, line, and sinker.

“I was so dru—” Antonio’s voice ebbed and flowed as Nora zoned in on Dolores.

Dolores leaned back on her towel and crossed her ankles. The crisps packet rustled, and she popped a crisp into her mouth, crunch, then washed it down with beer.

Nora knew she was above all this, above this topsy-turvy world, and yet tears began to swell in her eyes. Why was she here in this odd simulation of reality with all these faceless creatures?

Rustle, crunch. Dolores smiled, her face split in two by the shadow of the beach umbrella.

“I’ll be right back,” said Nora. She rose and dodged a sandcastle, a spade, a bucket. Dolores had endeavoured to peel back her mask, scratch away another layer, but she’d found only flesh and blood beneath her claws; Nora hadn’t worn a mask, and there was no room to be human here.

Peals of laughter, the drumroll of feet against the boardwalk, a distant splash.

Or maybe this was mania. It was always Nora’s fault, after all.

***

Nora stepped back out into the sun, the sand, the surrealism with itchy, pink cheeks and puffy eyes. She saw Dolores and Fabio in the distance, two glistening specks of oil.

“What’s wrong?” asked Antonio.

She shook her head. She knew she couldn’t tell him; she knew her feelings, when vocalised, triggered passive aggression, yelling, abandonment. She would just have to self-regulate.

“Tell me,” said Antonio, his hand on his chest.

She couldn’t, she knew she couldn’t, and yet his brow wrinkled with concern, his voice pleaded, and she wanted to believe him, to believe that she was safe here.

She burst into tears, relieved.

“That made me feel insecure,” she said.

“What, that they treated me like a human being?”

Nora paused. Blinked once, twice. She was so stupid for having expected comfort from this pig-headed boy, and eight months of invalidation came crashing out of her like a wave.

“Fuck you,” she said between tears. “I hate you! What am I even doing here?”

What was she doing here in this dreadful delirium with all these faceless creatures? God, she was dizzy. Was it the heat? Did she imagine his mask scrunch up into a deranged mess of features? Did she imagine it split? Did she imagine that dark and miserable abyss through the rift?

“Stop trying to make me feel guilty!” he yelled, rising from the towel.

Look what she’d done; and now he’d surely leave her again.

Nora didn’t hear much else; she tuned in to the steady ping of a ball against paddles. Ping, pong, ping, pong. She stared across the beach, at the rippling and shimmering figures beneath that burning heat mirage, at the glistening blue water flashing white beneath the sun. Ping, pong.

She registered the faces on the beach, the faces that turned to watch, a swarm of big, black sunglasses like flies’ eyes. Ping. And they twitched, they vibrated, they buzzed amongst themselves. Po—

“Leave!”

This brought her back, and she looked up at this snarling beast towering over her, his back arched as though to pounce.

“You want me to leave?” said Nora.

“Leave!” And it ended as soon as it had begun. He straightened up, readopting the posture of a man.

Nora watched as he stormed off into the heat shimmer, rippling, melting, and merging with the sand, with the other faceless creatures. She wasn’t hallucinating, it wasn’t the heat. She’d just seen evil possess this hollow shell of a man, the man she claimed to love, the man who claimed to love her.

The lifeless swarm of fly eyes looked away and Nora didn’t move. She sat there in the aftermath, in the ringing of her ears, in the thump of her heartbeat, in the screaming silence. Ping, pong, ping, pong. She could hear the whisper of the ocean lapping the shore, the distant squeal of children, the sniggering seagulls; it was as though her ears were stuffed with cotton, as though it were all somewhere far, far away.

Or maybe she’d imagined it.

But the sand was still white, the water still blue; trees didn’t sprout from her fingertips, the gulls didn’t grow arms, the ping-pong paddles didn’t speak. Again, Nora grabbed a handful of sand and watched it trickle through her fingers, just to be sure.

One of the faceless creatures approached, trudging through the sand, rippling beneath the heat mirage.

“Oh, Nora,” said Dolores, dropping onto her towel.

Nora doubted the kindness in her voice, the concern on her brow.

“Did you want to talk about it?” A siren song.

Nora distrusted those murky eyes; there was nothing there but the brown green of stagnant water.

But nor did she trust herself, not after all the brain fog, the cognitive dissonance, this topsy-turvy world in which she knew not right from left, up from down, black from white. She was a fish out of water, gasping for the world she’d known, dying for that vast sea of beauty, for its depth, for its clarity.

“I’m fine,” she said, and smiled stiffly.

She’d just have to adjust to the sun, the sand, the surrealism.