The opening of my new novel. The one I plan to write in a month thanks to the National Novel Writing Month challenge!
Na had noticed the old woman’s expression as she’d arrived for work; glancing over at Na’s bed suspiciously as she settled herself into her own pitch two beds over. Na had looked up and tried to smile at the woman but she had turned her head away as soon as their eye’s met and Na was left looking at the parting in her long black hair. The woman’s hair was young, Na thought, glossy and thick without any curl. Na’s own hair was thick and difficult to manage, she mostly tied it back at the start of each day and only let it down again once she was getting ready for bed. She glanced back over at the woman hoping that she’d caught her off guard and that this time she may be rewarded with a smile or a word of greeting. The woman kept her face down as she leaned over the mattress on her bed fussing the sheet into perfect smoothness and hanging towels and sarongs from the poles of the grass roof. Her face was pinched into sour concentration, she was old, Na saw and realised that was what made her hair so noticeable. Na turned back to her own bed but the sheets were still perfect from when she made them half an hour ago. She’d gotten here far too early but it was her first day and she was nervous.
The pitch had been arranged by her massage teacher. Na had worked hard on the course and her teacher had grown to like her. She had taken her aside on the last day and asked if she had plans for work. Na had told her not yet, she had planned to ask around the salons and beach stands. This had been arranged the next day. Na had met the beachfront owner and agreed that half of her fee from each customer would be paid in rent. It was the usual arrangement and she wasn’t surprised by it. The bed itself was a raised bamboo platform with a grass roof; a mattress could be collected from the owners shed each morning and placed on the bed. Sheets and towels were Na’s responsibility, although there were thin drapes in the shed that could be tied to the roof poles in order to afford the customer privacy. Na understood that this might be quite favourable to a client being massaged on the busy beach. Being prone underneath a strangers touch was not a state she’d like to be observed in herself.
She fiddled with her curtains which for now were tucked back in order to display the clean, empty bed and advertise her availability. There were few people on the beach yet. Most potential customers were still digging into the five star buffet in their gorgeous hotels Na imagined. Fishing boats occasionally chugged past with humming motors but otherwise the only sound was the crashing waves. Na refolded a large white towel and hung it back over the bamboo rail of the bed. Her colleague was squatting in the sand watching the beach and waiting for the first tourists to make a break from their hotels. There was the sound of wood scraping as someone arrived at the nearby bar to open in for business. The bar was just that; a plywood bar area that folded up on itself to turn into a locked wooden box overnight. The owner began unstacking plastic chairs into the sand with a click of plastic against plastic. This was how the sounds broke one on top of each other into the rhythm of the day.
Until Ing arrived. Ing arriving wasn’t a steady layer of sound to add to the others it was an explosion.
