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Jenn AshworthA WHALE AND A STORK AT WINDEMERE Lake Windermere, where Oscar and me went on the day that Manchester was hotter than Athens. We did normal things: spread out towels, ate olives and bread and oranges, squinted at the sun coming off the surface, flashing like razors. I had a bikini on, but I was too shy to take my dress off and swim. Oscar swam, and came back with tales of weeds grabbing at his feet from the depths. A woman made her way down the steps cut into the bank, picking over tree roots. She was hugely fat, and we smirked and started watching her. I was trying to make him laugh. ..."I knew I shoudn't have gone out so deep"... "That’s someone you don’t want to see in a bikini."We talked about folds and sweat and boobs, and she, not hearing us, went into the water where it was still shallow, treading gently on the green stones. I was watching her as she leaned over and started washing her face, her skirt hitched up at the back, revealing lardy, blue veined calves. We giggled as she knelt, her pendulous breasts dipping into the water, and finally lay down in the shallows, fully clothed. The water wasn’t deep enough to cover her but she splashed, looked happy, called to people on the bank. "It's wonderful and cool," she giggled, scraping her grey hair out of her eyes with wet fingers, "I’ve done worse." We looked away and snorted, and I saw the mess of our pick-nick and my browning, razor-nicked legs sticking out over the rocks. I took a photograph of her as she rolled and wallowed. There were duck feathers floating curved on the water like junks. Further out, two rocks; posing plinths for gravy-coloured girls in stripy bikinis to wait and dangle limbs in the water. They spoke to each other and their boys in their own language, and I said, "Why would you want to come on holiday to England if you were from Foreign?" and he said, "They probably work in abattoirs," and we laughed some more, up high on our little dry rocks, tiny bit of beach like cat litter crinkling under the white towels. There was someone else in the water near us too, someone who’d been in there for hours, a tall girl in a pink swim suit, little zip-up aqua shoes. She was bending and splashing as if no one else was there, skinny arse in the air, ankles hitting the rocks, weed sticking to white thighs, graceful like a stork. I waxed lyrical, admired her unselfconsciousness. "There’s something a bit mongy about her, isn’t there. I think she’s a mong," he said, looking at her falling, hitting her knees, smiling. "She’s a little girl. Nine or ten. She’s just tall. Look at how straight up and down she is, if she was thirteen or fourteen she wouldn’t be mucking about like that. She’d be sat on the beach with a towel over her legs, cowering." Like me, I thought, feeling jealous, even though I’d finally worked up the courage to take off the dress. Oscar looked up then, to the grassy rise over our heads, and pointed out a man sitting there with a little telescope, not looking at the boats, but staring through it at the gravy-coloured abattoir workers and the stork-girl splashing about on her tummy, chasing a duck, smiling at us unselfconsciously. He pointed him out and we laughed again. "Dirty fucker! Peeping Tom up there!" he said, and took a couple of photographs of him, who didn’t notice, eyes trained down his peeping apparatus. The fat woman had got stuck on her front, and was shouting again to her new friends on the bank, claiming she had her foot stuck between two stones. "I knew I shouldn’t have gone out so deep, I knew I should have stayed in where the stones were smaller," she was saying, pushing herself up on her palms, trying to crawl and then slipping again, dunking the breasts into the water. She and the stork girl and me made a perfect triangle, any one of us at the apex. Peeping Tom was still there. "Why did you fucking get in then?" Oscar said under his breath. "Like fuck she’s stuck, just too fat to get out," I said. A man from the bank waded in, took her hand, tip-toed back to the edge with her clinging onto his arm. Water streamed out of her skirt and stuck to her legs, she thanked him repeatedly, loudly, embarrassingly. "At least I’m cool now," she said, shaking her head and dropping water onto him. "Lovely and cool. I’ll dry out all right before I get back to the coach." "I wonder what she’ll do when she gets home," I said, looking at her laughing at herself, asking to take photographs of the man who’d helped her and the woman he was with. "She’s going to get on the coach and no-one will sit next to her because she’s fat and stinks of algae and she’ll get home and be on her own and cry about it." I felt wretched, wanted to cry. She put her camera away and waved a lot, and finally wandered off. Peeping Tom stayed longer, smoking roll ups and taking off his glasses to look through the telescope every now and then. I stumbled out into the water, swam for a little bit, got scared, flailed back and slipped on a rock. Stork stayed longer than we did, scooting along in the clear water on her belly, sliding down the rocks that the Europeans had vacated, her parents no-where to be seen. Jenn Ashworth wrote the story Twisted which appeared on Un-Made-Up last month. She is still, presumably, a single mother writing a thesis on The Unreliable Narrator. Oscar took the photo. Jenn says, "If you look closely, you can see the Peeping Tom mentioned in the story in the photo." It's true. He's there just to the right of the oak tree. 11:42 AM - 26/7/2006 - post comment
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