And on the fourth day, as I was people watching on the promenade, they did.
72%
Talk about heel dragging. It must have been my tenth day on the island of Lanzarote that I decided I needed to formulate some kind of action plan. What that would be eluded me but I had been going all Edgar Allan Poe on myself, so to lighten the mood I began traversing the streets of Playa Blanca in the belief that if I walked around for long enough something would present itself. But as Mr Dylan may or may not have written before arriving at the actual lyric, how many roads must a man walk down before he knows what the fuck to do?
Calles came and went, some of them sprinkled with the ashy detritus that had once been part of the Hotel Hesperia. It occurred to me, as I sat in El Restaurant Tipico Espanol eating a side salad of lemony squid and spicy aioli, what if there had been guests in the upper rooms of the hotel? My mind grasped at the thought of women and children clinging desperately to balconies as the flames crept toward them, eventually being forced to leap to the ground below to escape the heat. It bothered me so much that I couldn’t finish the bottle of cold Sancerre I had found chilling to perfection in the commercial fridge at the back of the restaurant, and had to hotfoot it back the to the smouldering hotel to check for bodies amongst the rubble. A momentary lapse of reason. Had I actually hoped I would find one? Maybe.
When I found nothing but ashen lumps of concrete amidst the structure I laughed out loud. The sound bit sharply through the dull, lifeless fizz of burning rubble around me, and for a brief moment, a rare shard of hope that lodged in my throat and wouldn’t go down, I imagined somebody else had issued it; that another human had been silently watching me stand amongst the lifeless concrete remains and had been unable to stifle a bark of humour at the sight. Scanning the terrain, I saw nothing but tendrils of black rising upwards to pollute the undefiled blue sky, turning orange as the day gave up and evening stepped in.
I thought about returning to my hotel. I could use a shower and after my three-day bender I needed a sense of familiarity (however strange that may sound) and perhaps a comfortable bed to sleep in instead of sand. But something drew me back to the main drag that ran through Playa Blanca for one last recce before I turned in.
There were rows of souvenir shops along Avenida Papagayo. For a while I just walked in and out of these gaudy money-traps, semi-naked, with my tool belt about my waist, trying on baseball caps emblazoned with varying messages. Most simply said Lanzarote, but I found one that announced I LOVE BIKINIS and decided in a moment of brazen manliness, very unbecoming of an educated man trying to cling to his 30s, to wear it. It gave me a sense of placement, an acceptance that I was but a tourist here even though I was the only one. I suppose you could look at it as a gesture of self-deprecation, of suppliance to my surroundings. As if I was giving in and saying, OK, fine, keep me here if that’s what you want. I was torn between acquiescing to and defying the unseen power that had placed me here.
Was I beginning to feel a curious attachment to this place or was I going mad? Potentially both, I thought. Playa Blanca was definitely not the most attractive tourist resort in the world, but relatively speaking it was still a haven. How many families had stood where I was, in the cramped aisle of a Spanish tourist shop, perhaps scolding excited children as they grabbed at the displays of rubber water pistols and cheap sunglasses, picking up giant loofahs and making jokes about their resemblance to cocks, maybe just trying to escape the heat outside for a few delicious seconds to bask in an icy blast of air conditioning.
I needed a glass of wine or something, I find I think better with a drink, and I needed to sit somewhere and come to terms with this bout of Stockholm Syndrome that seemed to be drawing me closer to this abandoned paradise.
I walked in silence down to the promenade. The sun was setting and casting a beautiful golden glow over the sand. The waves lapped and the breeze cooled. The lights along the strand flickered into life, as they had done the last three nights that I had spent as a vagrant, which at the time I hadn’t even consciously acknowledged. The stuff we take for granted! Never before had I thought to question where the power had come from, even back in my own country. It was just assumed that every evening, as the dark drew in, lights would automatically come on to illuminate the streets and make life as easy as possible for those who expected it. Were they automatic? Who turned them on? I pictured some small old trabajador sitting in a shack somewhere on the island, beside an electric grid station, who was employed every evening at around 7pm to glance up from his novel, check the time and lean over to press the switch that brought light to the streets of Lanzarote, then go back to his chair until sunrise. Perhaps called Juan. Juan the Light Man.
I approached the bar in El Gordo and ordered from an unseen barman, as if I were Jack Torrance.
“Una botella de Rose, por favour Miguel.”
As Imaginary-Miguel nodded approvingly, uncorked and poured I casually glanced around the bar to check out the other patrons.
They were mostly the obligatory Brits Abroad, red faces poking out of football shirts and shaven headed kids eating chicken nuggets, so I took my wine out onto the Promenade and imagined myself doing what the Spanish do best. People watching.
The alcohol made me lethargic, almost tunnel-visioned, and I stared as the people strolled by in the early evening balm. Couples young and old holding hands, parents pushing prams with sleeping children, more trabajadors in paint stained overalls sitting on the stone walls above the beach, smoking and laughing and shouting animatedly at each other, waiters bustling around tables that extended out of open-plan restaurants and encroached onto every spare bit of the promenade that was acceptable, delivering steaming trays of cockles in wine sauce, pork escalopes and huge paellas, old men sitting on benches doing exactly the same as me, drinking wine and watching the world go by. The sound of voices was everywhere in my ears, the scent of perfume and food and sea salt stung my nostrils. People laughing, people shouting, people existing as people had for hundreds of years on this strange volcanic outcrop somewhere off the coast of Africa, but above all people! It was a vision of life as I had known, and perhaps never would again.
And then, just as a gorgeous camarera with flowing black hair and a note pad approached me to take my order, I snapped out of it.
And there I was, alone again, on the promenade, the waves making their incessant march and retreat on and off the sand below me in a world that nobody else inhabited, and I cried. I cried huge salty tears that streamed down my cheeks and plopped into my rose, and I still don’t know why. They weren’t tears of despair, or tears of pain, or tears of sadness. I think they were just tears of disbelief.
Still crying like a schoolboy who missed his mummy, actually blubbing by now, the force of emotion pouring out of me like shit from a sewage pipe, the urge to urinate came over me. Rather than go there on the cobbled street I resolved to act like a human and find a bathroom. I presumed there would be one in the restaurant outside which I now sat, wishing the dark haired waitress would reappear, but as I headed inside something caught my eye. It was a flicker behind the bar, a blue neon light stuttering on and off in the shape of an arrow. It was pointing to the far side of the restaurant. It seemed so out of place, being just an arrow rather than one with a sign above it saying Aseos or something helpful, that I felt compelled to obey it and look where it pointed. There was nothing but a row of indoor plants that separated the restaurant’s main floor from what I assumed to be another dining area that had been closed off due to lack of business that evening. The urge again came over me to investigate. It was becoming a dangerous habit. The last investigatory impulses I had followed through – the hotel alarm, the phone call in the Hesperia – had led to nothing but trouble. Life-threatening trouble at that. But the impulse was too strong.