Alberto nodded. ‘Yes. The cop show. My friend – the legendary Alfredo from Argentina – used to play it a lot at the end of the night. There is nothing more Balearic than the theme to Hill Street Blues…’
Now Alberto’s mind was open to me, I could see it all. He had arrived back on this island in 1976, less than a year after Franco died. He had dropped out of his studies, become a pacifist. He had planned to return to marine biology, but he just wanted a good time. He caught me reading him. So he gave me some footnotes. ‘A philosopher from Madrid had decided to turn an old finca in the middle of the countryside into an outdoor discotheque. He called it El Taller de los Olvidadizos – The Workshop of the Forgetful Ones. It was a bit too long, so it became just, simply, Amnesia. Always go with the shorter way! Everyone who went there had something to forget. It felt like the whole world had been traumatised. Franco or Vietnam or the prospect of a nuclear bomb destroying us all. Dancing was better…Dancing was not just dancing. It was a symbol of freedom…Whoever you were, you could be safe on the dance floor.’
Marta came back with the drinks in glasses, as mesmerising hexagons of light flashed behind her. ‘Nada de plástico. No plastic. Plastic is the devil. It destroys the Earth before and after its existence. Evil little microplastics. Fucking up the fish. And us.’ I had the sense that Marta would go to actual war for the fish. ‘Anyway. Here are your orange juices.’
It was nearly two a.m., so we weaved through the crowds to the terrace room. I passed the girls I had seen on the plane. They were dancing and loving life, their minds luminescent with pleasure. Unlike some in the room, they hadn’t even taken any artificial stimulants. They had slept before coming out and were now dancing their cares away, closing their eyes and jerking their bodies as if part of a wonderful collective exorcism.
Although it was indisputably hot, loud and congested – three things I traditionally wasn’t a fan of – I was really quite enjoying myself. My legs weren’t aching, my hips weren’t entirely stiff, and if my ears were ringing I wouldn’t have been able to hear them. And I was so caught up in the collective energy that I almost forgot what I was there for.
The Joy of Counting Without Counting
Marta elbowed me. And pointed up towards the DJ booth. And there she was. The untouchable goddess from the billboards. The distraught daughter from the garden centre. In the vast booth, with people looking up at her like they would an emperor at the Colosseum.
She was chatting to the preceding DJ while fiddling around with the technology, music filling the room like a pounding herd of invisible beasts. My view was blocked by a large young man with lots of tattoos of different animals. Snake. Cheetah. Turtle. He was called Stefano and he was an Italian tourist from Bologna who was training to be a vet and healing after a messy break-up. Move left, move left, move left, move left…
A few seconds later he took a few steps to the left and continued dancing and left me to study Lieke. But there was so much between me and her, so much space, so many people, so many thoughts and emotions and sensations cluttering the air, it was like trying to isolate a single bee amid a swarm.
It turned out that I really liked the music Lieke played. Techno, apparently.
Which was remarkable, as I normally hated electronic music. Well, I had liked ‘Good Vibrations’ by the Beach Boys in my younger years, and that had contained a theremin, and that is technically an electronic instrument. But you know what I mean. Music that sounds like a robot having a panic attack. Bleep-bleep music. But it turned out I had been missing out.
It had a mathematical beauty to it. I stood at the side of the dance floor as thousands of bodies moved as if they were merely reactive entities, subordinate to the music’s force.
Unusually I understood this music instantly, and felt the collective love for it, golden and pure. Beneath the sound of keyboards there was a repetitive bass drum that kept perfect time. Doof doof doof doof. Heartbeat pacing. And then there was another beat, lighter, above it, twice as fast. And another even fainter one precisely twice as fast as that. Four beats per measure. A perfect ratio, dividing ranges of time into equal parts within each section. Euclid’s algorithm come to life.
It is often said about music that it is the joy people feel when they are counting without realising they are counting. So that is what I realised I was witnessing, as I bobbed my head and scanned the crowd – the collective euphoria of experiencing mathematical harmony in an imperfect world.
Euclid would have loved dancing at Amnesia, I was sure of it. And I loved it too. I loved being amid these dancing people, their bodies breaking free. I loved the two men in love and tenderly kissing each other by the bar. I loved the people on stilts. I loved this space where it seemed everybody could be their true amorphous selves, experimenting with their clothes and hair and bodies, and sex drives, resisting rules and circadian rhythms. I loved the quieter people hanging around the bars all around the room watching the spectacle. I loved the lights and the lasers and even the sudden blasts of cloud from the dry-ice cannons.
I looked up at the balconies that sprawled the perimeter of the room, the VIP area, which had a slightly sad psychic fog hanging over it, as people stood by their tables, self-consciously bopping around their ice buckets and empty bottles of champagne.
Then I stared up at the DJ booth again. And I managed, just about, to catch hold of something. A tender darkness. Grief, maybe. I walked a little closer towards her, through the crowd, trying to avoid all the elbows and enthusiasm. I saw her in the light of day, driving back to her rented apartment in the marina. She was listening to music, but not the kind of music she played. Spanish guitars strumming soft melodies.
Then suddenly, there in the present moment in the club, she looked up from the booth to the crowd and caught sight of me. In fairness, I was probably sticking out like a hamster at a cattery, but she gave me a smile of recognition. And in return I gave her a thought. A memory, to be more accurate. It was the memory contained in Christina’s photograph of her, holding the teddy bear. Her seventh birthday. Love and warmth. Light in the dark.
No. Again I am getting this wrong. I wasn’t giving it her. I was revealing what was already there. And it was as easy as anything. As easy as getting a man to stick a fork in his leg. And once one memory was revealed others followed, branching and branching, and as she was about to transition into the next track she felt a growing need to do something. A need to fulfil her mother’s wish for her to use her platform for good. So instead she selected a different track. Something called ‘Memories Of Green’ by Vangelis, from the Blade Runner soundtrack, which her parents used to play when she was a child.
And then she asked for a microphone, and before anyone knew it she was speaking over the track. Alberto gave me a look. ‘It’s happening…’
I nodded.
It most certainly was.
‘Hello, everybody,’ she said to the bewildered clubbers, in her strangely accented English. ‘I don’t normally do this. I don’t normally talk over the music. I don’t want to interrupt your dancing. But it is just that I have something important to tell you. A month ago my mother died…’
This clearly wasn’t the night out people had been expecting. Most of the people now had their phones out, filming every word she was saying.
‘I didn’t always get on with her…But she was a good person…She cared about this planet of ours…And she believed Ibiza was something to protect…And Es Vedrà…. You know Es Vedrà, right? It’s that cool rock you fly in over…Well, it’s important…’
A wild whoop of affirmation filled the room.
‘It is a sacred place…It is part of the island’s mythology…It’s been untouched for all eternity…And now they want to build on it and destroy all the life on that island…And they want to own everything from there to Cala d’Hort…The whole sea…Including the oldest organism in the world…Seagrass that has been there for thousands and thousands of years…Seagrass that protects the ocean and protects the coast and protects the air we breathe, and they will destroy it…’ It was impressive. She was making a speech about a marine carbon sink that sounded energising. ‘…But that isn’t going to happen, guys…Because tomorrow we are going to protest…We are going to keep Es Vedrà free…My mother was special in lots of ways – ways you wouldn’t believe – but her real superpower was that she cared about people and nature and life…Things that are precious…We must protect what is precious…We will meet at Café Mar y Sol at three p.m. tomorrow afternoon, and we will march through the streets and we will keep them from destroying every piece of land here…So who is going to be there with me? Who is going to spread the word on their socials? Who is going to help make my mother’s dream come true?’
Another enthusiastic roar. Lieke smiled at me.
‘And tell everyone you know! See you tomorrow!’ And she seamlessly blended the music into something faster, and the pounding beat started back again. The track was called ‘Meteorite’. ‘This one is for my mother’s friend who is here tonight.’ And she pointed right at me. ‘Let’s show our appreciation for Grace Winters!’
‘Wow!’ said Marta, patting my shoulder as the whole club gave me some raucous applause. The girls I’d seen on the plane recognised me and clapped their hands above their heads and roared loudest of all.
And Alberto gave me a proud congratulatory smile.
‘Now!’ bellowed Lieke into the microphone. ‘Let’s dance like there is a tomorrow!’
And so that’s what we did, Maurice. We danced. I danced. Right there in my chiffon blouse in the middle of Amnesia. I moved my not-so-tired arms and legs to the music with my two new friends.
And, quite honestly, it had been a very long time since I’d had such fun.
Hermana
Marta and Alberto were convivial people. Alberto danced with the energised chaos of a gorilla who had been shot in the bottom, complete with hairy chest on flamboyant show, while his daughter was gifted with an equal lack of self-consciousness but considerably more rhythm. She was lovely, by the way. When you get into your seventies younger people either ignore you or patronise you. Marta had neither instinct. She treated me like a true friend, and it had been quite a while since I’d had one of them.
We danced for a little while longer, but our work was done. Well, half our work was done. We couldn’t have done more to spread the word about the protest, but there was something else we needed. Not just twenty thousand people, but eighty thousand euros. And by tomorrow. Well, it was already tomorrow. It was half past three in the morning. A time of day I only ever saw if I needed a wee in the night.
But I had a plan. You may remember I was one of those teachers who would do almost anything to get Year Nines to see the thrill of the world’s greatest subject. And so I used to do a lesson on the mathematics of card games. Pyramid solitaire, fraction war, using the order-of-operations rule to get as close to a certain number with four cards, and – of course – every mathematician’s favourite, blackjack (or twenty-one, but even a number fan like me would wonder why anyone would call it that when it can be called blackjack).
‘Ibiza has a casino, doesn’t it?’ I said to Alberto and Marta, as we headed towards the taxis. There was a cool breeze in the air, which was wonderful. The perfect weather in Ibiza in summer happens at half past three in the morning.
‘It does,’ said Marta, a little weary, and wary of the question. ‘At the marina in Ibiza Town. I went there once and lost my entire pay cheque from the university.’
