EXTRACT. In the flesh

Section II, chapter six

[…] Vane spoke slowly and precisely. She scanned the young faces before her. ‘Some of you know what to expect at this morning’s Ritual. You’ve been to the Welcome Field before.’

The six young women stared back, their faces impassive, eyes narrowed against the glare. The sky arching over their heads was already blinding blue, even though the sun had only been up a couple of hours. There were no clouds in sight and the air was thick with salty heat.

‘For the benefit of those who are here for the first time,’ said Vane, ‘I will take a few minutes to describe what we are about to do and to give a brief explanation as to why.’

Indicating the patch of bare stone in the grass beside her, she said, ‘Each of you will come up to this stone slab here, face around and… remove your clothes.’ She paused. ‘If you can remove your jewellery and piercings as well we would appreciate it, but we won’t insist.’

[…]

Three [girls] stared back, expressionless: the one with the bright halo of orange hair, the one with the prosthetic arm and the one with the misshapen head, all her hair bunched to one side. The burkha-clad girl, whose face was uncovered, opened her mouth wide in alarm, arching her eyebrows. Of the two with shaven heads, the one with swirling tattoos that reached down to her cheeks, narrowed her eyes and flexed the corners of her mouth: unimpressed. The remaining girl jerked now as if a string had been pulled in her neck. Her eyes opened wide, as if in panic and her eyebrows arched high.

Vane continued as if she had not noticed the reactions. ‘There are two reasons we believe in nudity here. The first is that we consider our bodies to be instruments of social change. By opening our bodies to air and sunlight, we cleanse our spirit. The sun’s light returns us to the condition in which we enter this world. It brings every member of a group within the circle of sameness. Flattens the curve of deceit. Discourages vanity.

‘Now I come to the second reason. It is more complex. You are perhaps aware that your presence on the Island has a specific cause. Whatever you might call it, allow me for the moment to refer to it as a Trauma. A Wounding. An Assault. Some of you — most of you, I should say — have known enormous damage.

‘Even though most of you no longer know exactly what the cause of the damage was, you can see the effects upon your bodies. In your lives before you came here, these once-perfect bodies were turned into prisons for your spirit. Whatever you yearned to achieve in your lives, you could not, on account of social attitudes regarding the container in which your spirit resided: your bodies. Some of you have scars, some of you have missing limbs. But all of you, along with the physical traces of wounds, have invisible wounds, too.

‘Here on the Islands, we follow a policy regarding invisible wounds. We have a process called ‘Memrase’ by which we can heal them.’ Vane paused, as if carefully considering her next words. ‘Some of you know what it is and some of you resent our methods. It is no surprise: there are losses and damage that result from our process too.

‘It is on account of this secondary loss, the losses connected to the Memrase process, that I say: you need to accept your body with all its wounds, scars, weakness and infirmities. You need to own your bodies before you can heal completely. It is the first step you will take towards recovering whatever was lost to you in the course of the experiences that brought you here.

‘So. With this reason held firmly in your minds, each of you will come forward, stand on this platform and bare your bodies to the group that is now your family.

‘I can see, looking into your faces, that for two of you in particular the very idea of being naked in public is humiliating. Degrading. Yet you will each do this as a mark of belonging and respect to each of your companions. In order to inspire and encourage you and to show you that we at the Islands take our own beliefs seriously, I will join you in being disrobed. I will begin.’

Saying which, she slipped her shapeless robe from her shoulders. One moment she was clothed and in the next the garment lay crumpled around her feet, a garland of pink faded cotton. There she stood, a great mountain of naked, sagging flesh, puckered and dimpled with a life-time’s worth of experiences. From the shoulders down to her calves, she was the colour of boiled sago, with moles and blemishes scattered across her body like paint-spatters. Her belly was a billowing expanse, slung from the broad and powerful superstructure of her bones beneath. Her breasts were small, with huge flat nipples raised up like a pair of pale mismatched eyes staring out from her chest, while her navel was a punched-in nose. The grizzled triangle of her pubic hair dangled incongruously from under the vast belly, like a grey goatee beard.

As if an invisible giant’s hand had ruffled a collection of life-sized clothes pegs standing stiff and wooden in the grass, all six young women flinched and murmured. Those who had attended a Welcome before averted their eyes out of politeness. But the girl with the smooth unmarked head clapped her hands to her eyes and let out a fluting squawk. She sank to her knees, bent over double, while emitting short sharp chirps. The girl with the orange hair turned away, curling her lip up at the nakedness of the other’s distress.

Vane smiled.

‘You have all just witnessed the power of nudity,’ she said. ‘It affects some of us more obviously than others. But in the end we are all altered by it. Just as we are influenced, and sometimes diminished, by the layers of clothing we customarily hide behind, we are altered by the act of baring our bodies. Come now. Let us begin.’

Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer, artist and playwright

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