A newspaper hangs over the thin green fence that separates
their boatshed from us—the bronzed, exposed public. A slim, muscular,
latté-skinned man stands facing the sea, the murky green of a tattoo splayed
across his right shoulder. It is a pirate girl who stares out menacingly from
his taut skin, as if in warning. A grimacing welt, slightly bigger than a golf
ball, juts out of his side; he dabs sunscreen on it, pink and grey and
dead-looking. My mind burns.
In
my line of sight, there is another dark body with a female inked into its
back—her eyes are closed, her red lips pursed and her green hair overflowing
with hibiscus flowers. This body puffs at a cigarette, basking in fluoro-green
sunglasses and mint-hued Speedos.
Dewy-eyed
men prowl across the pebbles, sarongs and jewellery and toys draped about them
like Christmas decorations. Between the hot white shore and the warm, salty sea
is a blur of carnival-colour. There is a diverse array of umbrellas: aqua, pink
candy-stripe, rainbow, coral, emerald, South of France sailor-stripe,
tablecloth orange, Hawaiian floral. And hundreds of towels in blinding shades—a
loving contrast to the brown bums that rest upon them.
And
there are boats, sleek James Bond speedboats and grand, tall yachts whose masts
soar upwards like giraffe necks or old Parisian lampshades. There is a sunflower-yellow waterslide
running off a boat into the water with kids in clingy bright bathing suits
hovering by.
Everything
is hot, hot, hot and enclosed beneath the proud, distant Ancona mountains. They
watch over us like an immovable father while we play and sweat in this rainbow
pie with crisp blue crust. Every jigsaw piece of every body has a gleam to it
and there is the scent of sunscreen on skin, then the sound of babies crying
and children pig-squealing and water lapping, lapping, lapping against the
stony, white shore.
There
is no one here who covers up. Liquorice allsorts of bodies are dotted along the
beach—saggy bumps of flesh bulge out from black bather-bottoms and tiny, hairy
calves trot into the waves, towards the mountains.
