In Eden

Annie hadn't trained for more than a year but she still had an athlete's body. Her long limbs were toned and, after six weeks of apple picking under a hole in the ozone layer, her skin was Mediterranean brown. She stretched out on the stubbled ground and inspected the fading scratches on her shins. On the partly wooded flanks of the hill the grass was soft and vigerous. Here, at the summit, long weeks of tangerine sunshine had compounded the effect of many strolling feet, and many languishing bottoms; the grass was almost worn flat.

Annie had her back to the route she had climbed bare-foot; behind her the city suburbs stretched all the way to the hazy coast, red and white and green, low buildings amongst a profusion of determined leaves. Pulling her five dollar sunglasses up onto her forehead, she gazed towards the heart of the hill; a huge conical crater in the earth, gently curving at it's shoulders but steepening sharply towards the centre. She had climbed right down into it on her first visit, a slow, concentrated descent. Standing at the bottom like a money spider in a plughole, her whole world had become the pumice-pocked crater walls and the burning blue sky. Annie knew she would never get tired of being here.

Her briefly brushed hair was starting to stick to her back; it hadn't been cut since she'd left home, the rogue curls and waves falling past the scooped back of her black vest. Annie pulled at the toggled top of the green canvas day-pack until she could just get her hand in, groping at the contents. Her fingers found a plastic bottle of luke-warm water...the bundled up legs of her zip-off trousers...a blue paper towel bearing a hastily written recipe for chocolate vodka...a wallet containing a photo of her nephews. Auntie Annie; she had been so sad to leave that name behind. But not 'Annie the Fish', 'Annie the Mermaid', 'Annie le Poisson'. Her French tutor had shared the joke for five unoriginal years. But that history hadn't followed her here.

The towelling hair-scrunchie was right at the bottom of the day-pack. Annie tugged it free, then captured as much hair as she could into a loose burnt-toffee knot. Immediately she felt the sun's licentious eye on her freckled shoulders. She was still learning to love her body. A childhood spent in the water had altered it in ways that couldn't be completely undone. On Saturday night a guy at The Wildfire bar had commented on her shoulders; Annie had told him , with drunken sincerity, that she had been a trapeze artist since the age of five. He had laughed, and scribbled his phone number onto a beer mat. The next day she had swum for pleasure for the first time she could remember.