Page 106 of One Summer

‘Follow me and we’ll do the measuring.’

‘No measuring,’ Caleb insists, putting up his hand.

‘Are you sure?’ the woman says. ‘You don’t want to know your before and after numbers?’

‘Nope,’ I say. ‘We’re just here for the fancy dirt.’

‘And the shell suits,’ Caleb adds, which makes her smile.

‘Okay, get ready to be squeezed like a stress ball,’ she says. ‘The bandages really dig into your organs, which is how you know it’s working.’

‘Sounds amazing,’ Caleb says. ‘Who wouldn’t want that in a spa treatment?’

‘Worth every minute of discomfort,’ the girl says. ‘Believe me. You’ll feel like a new man afterwards, and your buttocks will be like cherry tomatoes.’

Eighty-Eight

Rapt

Forty minutes later, we’re in our mummy outfits, the bandages cooling beneath clingfilm as we try to climb into our huge nylon tracksuits. We have to help each other get into the shell suit trousers, because neither of us can bend at the waist. When we finally manage this feat, Caleb leads me in tiny steps across to a full-length mirror in the far corner of the room, our ribcages straining under the pressure of suppressed laughter, as well as eight layers of fancy expensive mud.

When we get to the mirror, we stand rapt, contemplating our new reflections. Matching neon-pink suits. Faces spattered with mud that smells like wet cat litter. Sumo wrestler silhouettes.

‘What is this?’ Caleb says, eyes streaming from laughing so much.

‘Don’t. Know,’ I say, desperately trying to calm myself, in case I crack a rib.

‘I know she was probably stoned at the time but why did my nan book this package?’ he says, wiping away tears of laughter. ‘Why a detox wrap? Is she trying to tell us something?’

‘Like what?’ I say, feeling giddy, perhaps from the full body compression.

‘I guess that we’re toxic?’ he says.

‘I don’t know!’ I say, my body beginning to shake again. This may be the worst attack of the giggles I’ve ever had in my whole life. ‘Well, it’s a good job she’s so cool,’ I say. ‘Because she needs to work on her grand gestures.’

Caleb raises his hand to his head.

‘I swear I kept an open mind right until the last bandage,’ he says. ‘That was the one that broke me.’

We look up at the mirror again, our faces framed by twin brown bandages wrapped from the top of our heads, around our chins and back up again.

‘Sod it,’ Caleb says, getting his phone out of his jacket pocket and angling it at the mirror. ‘This has to be my new Facebook profile pic.’

*

When we get back home, I see that the wide doors at the base of his house have been flung open. It appears to be a storage space, where one might normally expect to park a car, but since cars are illegal on Loor, this one opens on what looks like a basement. It’s full of junk and, bizarrely, at least twelve surfboards, all in various states of disrepair.

Caleb seems to have forgotten that he left it open and looks embarrassed for a moment. In the corner of the space, there’s a large, empty cage.

‘What’s that?’ I say. ‘I didn’t realise you had pets.’

‘Just one. He mostly free roams now. I started him off in the cage, but he didn’t like it, so I moved it in here.’

‘What kind of animal is it?’

The cage looks too big to be for a hamster, and I wonder if it’s something more exotic. A ferret? A Patagonian mara? A capybara?

‘A rat. He’s too independent to be confined. That’s why I couldn’t look after Ted for you. It’s also why I can’t get my own dog, even though I love them. It would be too much of a risk to Maurice.’

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