Virginia Woolf Narrates Love Island
Tonight… A new bombshell enters the Villa…
Ekin-Su said she would make the coffee herself.
For Davide had been aloof ever since the recoupling. Although he had picked her, surprisingly enough given the tempestuousness of his disposition, just hours before, something in him seemed loath to do it, to even push her name through his delectable, plump, fuschia-coloured lips. And then Ekin thought, what an evening — as glittering and vital as the night sky in Ankara.
She stiffened a little beside the kitchen island, her hand gripping one of the slightly hideous plastic glasses as she recalled those obvious signs of his displeasure. Had he not called her a “liar and an actress,” even “the fakest person he had ever met”? There she perched, remembering, with something of the lioness about her, fitting given the distinction of her astrology — her amber and mahogany colored hair slinking down over her shoulders like a mane, her mouth slightly agape to reveal impressive, professionally altered canines.
Not so long ago, the moon loomed above them, gleaming and polished to an almost exquisite almond whiteness — a vision the producers would no doubt milk for all that it was worth. When Ekin’s eyes had met the Italian Stallion’s from across the firepit the evening before, there was what could only be described as a sudden, particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might simply be the editing of the scene, affected, one must imagine, by the accompanying swell of some recently viral TikTok song).
And yet, the echo of her treachery seemed to languish between them, as thick and choking as a burial shroud. Although the frustration of the public, as it is wont to do, had made itself known, and Jay, her one-time paramore, banished from the Villa, the essence of him stained the place. It had simply been a lark, a plunge! Who, in any rightness of mind, could blame her?
To describe Jay, as he had been upon entering the flower studded walk, one must invoke the help of a novelist or poet. The tan undercurrent of his cheeks was covered with rugged bristles, and his lips themselves were long and slightly drawn back over glossy veneers. Nothing could disturb the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark and thick along the pleasing expanse of his forehead, the masculine urgency of his jaw. Jay, to look at, was cut out precisely for some modeling career. That he should have debased himself to mansplaining finance to the other girls of the Villa was almost unthinkable. They had kissed, one evening in secret, out upon the terrace, the air perfumed with suntan lotion and fake flowers — Jay Younger. He would be back on the outside now, fielding missives from an adoring public, though his chat was awfully dull; it was his well-contoured muscles one remembered; his eyes, his water bottle, his smile, the lilt of his accent, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was! — the way his biceps flexed, slick with sweat under her coquettish gaze.
But she should think of Davide, the man of her present.
He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the brightly colored floral swim trunks did something to disguise it — was in the act of throwing himself down upon one of the neon bean bags that ran along the pool’s edge. Beside him lounged Dami, the sun glinting promisingly off of his single nipple piercing, and Luca, the fishmonger. Sometimes she dreamed of Luca, as he might appear in his later years, with skin of crumpled leather from so much sun and salt, the tragedy of a receding hairline, and always that impossible smirk. Any moment now, Indiyah and Gemma would be along, and if not them, then the shrill, scripted sound of a text– one in a long line of contemporary deus ex machinas.
A few leagues away, Tasha and Andrew canoodled on one of the shaded daybeds. In this light, Tasha’s eyes were like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them. A terrible couple, Ekin remarked to herself, Nothing like her and Davide, before balking at herself.
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young — and not just because of her copious amounts of cosmetic procedures; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she regarded the heat waves and irreverent neon signs upon the visible walls, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to graft for even one day.
Not that she thought herself pompous, but she was much out of the ordinary. She had got through life on the few twigs of ambition, lit into a conflagration that burned as she ascended the ranks of Turkish Soaps, and now, British reality television. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except scripts in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the muscled lads passing; and she would not say of Davide, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that.
