In Good Company: Topless Bathing
...Then, splattered here and there between the broken blood vessels are the boil craters that have grown up with me. If I have a ballpoint pen handy – and I usually have – I can amuse myself for hours turning them into eyeballs...
Despite this, Enid Blackburn exposed her skin to the sun.
During a surprise spell of sunshine I allowed my thoughts to dwell on the prospect of forthcoming topless bathing at Brighton.
Newspapers have full of reports concerning the health dangers to which sun wallowers were exposing themselves. An alarmist view, really, when you consider the sunless English weather we are becoming accustomed to. I have never had an all-over tan in my life. Usually I return from holiday wearing a brown triangle at my throat, two short white skin sleeves and brown legs that finish at the kneecaps.
If Brighton goes bare, I thought to myself this morning; what could be the harm in exposing my thighs to this blistering heat in my own backyard. I should explain that my thighs are not the sort you unveil in public. As a keep fit crony succinctly put it, after she had spent most of the session studying them, ‘Your body’s not so bad,’ she decided ‘it’s them,’ as she prodded my overstuffed uppers.
When I wasn’t gnashing my teeth during the latest Miss United Kingdom competition, I couldn’t help noticing how unscarred contestant’s limbs always appear, as if they have all led a charmed, wartless, non-pimpled existence.
Necks are a noted age give-away, but I feel ten years younger when my thighs are covered. Age and exuberance have left their scars.
That bulge on the left for instance, is the result of a joke that misfired. A friend left me at the bus stop while she dashed home for some forgotten article. Hoping to make her believe the bus and I had departed, I stepped into the entrance to the wood at the back of us, meaning to crouch behind the wall. Only it was pitch black and I forgot about the stone steps. When she returned and eventually discovered where the moaning was coming from, the joke took a lot of explaining.
Then, splattered here and there between the broken blood vessels are the boil craters that have grown up with me. If I have a ballpoint pen handy – and I usually have – I can amuse myself for hours turning them into eyeballs.
So it was this morning, with my dress hem tucked indecently into my drawers, my collar pushed unseemly into my bra and my scars fluttering their countless inked-in eyes provocatively, the dog and I fell asleep on a rug in our back yard.
Now when film stars do this a remarkable metamorphosis occurs. Their skin becomes all golden and glistens like satin, when ordinary mortals sunbathe it’s a different story. First the eyelids shrink, and the overheated eyeballs start to bulge, then the lips fold into tiny pleats. Blobs of perspiration boil over into ugly red blotches. You want to swat the fly that is heading for your brains, via your left nostril, but your arms and legs have turned to stone.
The dog and I had just about reached this state of inertia today when a strange man came to read the meter. Covered in confusion, and ink eyes, I tried to spring to my feet, I managed it at the third attempt. With difficulty I unsealed my starched mouth. Something had also happened to my sight. After he had finished I showed him to the back gate and walked into the drainpipe. He ran off without a backward glance.
It is always the same, if ever I decide to uncover my inhibitions – a man appears from nowhere. The last time I crept stealthily out in a pair of shorts, a neighbourly gardener decided to confide his war experiences. I spent all afternoon behind a sheet I had just hung out, with just my head visible above the clothes line. It wasn’t only modesty – the poor chap had a dicky heart and I daren’t risk letting him see me in those shorts. The shock might have killed him.
