The Tall Rock
The Tall Rock
On the plane to Ibiza, I sat in front of a row of young people talking excitedly about nightclubs. It sounded like a new but half-familiar language. A kind of code. ‘So … Ushuaïa tomorrow, Monday DC-10 for Circoloco, Amnesia on Wednesday, Ushuaïa then Hï on Friday, Pacha on Saturday …’
It occurred to me that I had never been young. Even at twenty-one I’d have found that schedule – dancing all night, sleeping on sun loungers all day – exhausting.
They were lovely young people, though. Dressed like rainbows and bouncy as Labradors. They had tried to tot up how much the tickets were going to cost, and I did the maths and told them, and they had a collective gasp and rethought their plans. They were gushingly grateful. When you have been a teacher, you always see the child in everyone. You imagine what they would have been like in class. Especially those who were just one step in front of that childhood.
It was a mixed crowd on the plane.
Immediately on my left was a handsome Spanish man with long hair and flip-flops and a feather tattoo on his forearm and a Zen air of calm, patiently trying to read. To my right, a boaty middle-aged woman with aggressive perfume and upturned collar was talking across the aisle to a cold-eyed person called Valerie, comparing property prices across the Balearics. ‘Ibiza is silly money these days. Silly money. It’s suddenly very chi-chi again. Posh boho. I’d pick one of the other islands. Menorca, not Mallorca, is the place to invest. That’s what Hamish says. Total buyers’ market right now. I know someone who converted a finca there and quadrupled its value. Quadrupled!’
A trio of thirtysomething women, sat in front, were off to an agroturismo retreat for a week of yoga and wellness but wanted to make sure they visited a hippy market and saw the sunset at a beach whose name I forgot the moment they said it. One said she was determined not to post on Instagram or look at TikTok for the entire week.
A young teenage boy was talking in very gentle tones to his mum about TikTokers, YouTubers, a rapper called 21 Savage and other emblems of a new world I couldn’t even hope at that point to understand. He had a sweet relationship with his mother. I tried not to think of Daniel and just be happy for them. The mother was very youthful. They were across the aisle and I could see them clearly with a single glance. She had bobbed black hair and a T-shirt which said ‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ on it. The word ‘eras’ entered my mind and didn’t leave. I thought about how you enter a new one. Not just by stepping back through rows of headstones in a cemetery but in your own living existence. How you need to create a distinct break with what has gone before. In geology it is often after an extinction, isn’t it? The Mesozoic Era ended with the mass death of the dinosaurs via a meteor. I wondered if I was starting a new era or if I was taking too much with me. This is the challenge of life, isn’t it? Moving forward without annihilating what has gone before. Knowing what to clasp onto and what to release without destroying yourself. Trying not to be the meteor and the dinosaur at once.
There was also, in the front aisle nearest the toilet, a couple my age who spoke in polite voices and were attentively studying a book called Secret Walks: Ibiza and Formentera. They were talking to each other about something they’d heard about the island on Radio 4’s Start the Week. I felt a twist of sadness. Oh, to still have someone to share secret walks with. They looked so snug. I thought of a bittersweet nature documentary I’d once watched about Eurasian beavers, and how in order to ensure they had enough tree bark to keep themselves going they mated for life. And if one died early, the other was basically scuppered.
I wished I could squeeze Karl’s hand.
My legs weren’t a problem. There were no real aches, just a mild swelling of the ankles but I was used to that. I did my calf exercises and moved my feet around a bit, a slow unseen tap dance to get the blood moving. My hips were beginning to ache in the seat. I tried not to think about that. Joint pain was like grief. The more you thought about it, the more it hurt, but you couldn’t not think about it because it bloody hurt. Vicious circle.
I felt the weight of my own silent stillness, sitting there, amid such life and noise. I stared down at the rings on my left hand. The wedding band and the ruby of the engagement ring. I remembered him proposing that second time, in the library, sheltering from the rain.
I’d said no on his first attempt, six years before in an Indian restaurant in Hull, because we were too young and someone had to be sensible.
As the pilot gave us an update of our altitude I stared deep into the red gemstone, and the memories it contained. Then I snapped out of it before I went too maudlin.
Speaking of memory triggers, there was a baby being carried up and down the aisle. The mother was kissing his head and bobbing the young chap in her arms. There had been a time when such a sight hurt. A time when I’d wanted to give up teaching simply not to be faced with so many children, alive, riding to school on bikes that never crashed into lorries. I smiled at the baby and tried to mean it. The baby began to cry.
‘Sorry,’ I mouthed to her mother.
She humoured me with a grin and a nod.
A flustered air steward passed by, wheeling a drinks trolley, and I got myself a gin and tonic, which was slightly out of character and probably not advisable given my leg vein situation. Not that I was exactly following doctor’s orders.
I was meant to keep standing up to help my circulation, but I was quite self-conscious, so I stayed sitting down most of the time, surreptitiously doing those exercises.
There was some turbulence. The clubbers seemed to enjoy it.
The baby began to cry again.
We began our descent.
I glimpsed a rocky coastline and rugged green hills out of the porthole. Swathes of golden beaches. A landscape studded with white houses and occasional clusters of mid-rise hotels or apartment blocks. I saw an islet out in the Mediterranean. A vertiginous uninhabited rock I would soon learn to be Es Vedrà. Even then, from the distance of the plane, before everything that was going to happen, it gave me a feeling of both dread and wonder. If I had been more in tune with that feeling, I would probably never have left the airport and taken the first plane home. But back then my senses were dull, and I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.
Eventually, we landed.
As everyone stood and excitedly took their hand luggage from the overhead compartments, about to head off to their known destinations, I sat still for a moment. I took a few slow, deep breaths, just staying there. As if a part of me was still up in the clouds and I needed to wait until it reached me.
When you move a number from one side of an equation to another it is of course called a transposition. I felt like such a number. Like I had not just taken a short flight to another part of Europe, but that I had been transposed. That I had crossed over something unseen and that I would now, somehow, be rearranged. Revalued. And there would be a permutation of elements. I had a vague but not entirely new sense that I had upset the order of things.
The airport was impressive. It was stylish and bright and shone with clean efficiency. And as I neared the exit, passing a row of car rental kiosks, I noticed two women saying goodbye to each other. They were about thirty years old, I would have guessed. One, with her back to me, had blonde hair. The other had glasses and wild, unruly hair, and denim shorts and a T-shirt. I noticed the T-shirt because it had a picture of Einstein on it. The one with him sticking out his tongue. She looked sad. They were in love, but the blonde-haired one was going somewhere the other wasn’t. And I walked slowly past them.
The dark-haired woman saw me looking at her. She smiled, instinctively, rather than be offended by my nosiness. It was a kind smile. It put me at slight ease, in that busy airport. But I had no idea that I would soon know this young person, or that we would eventually become friends. And I often think about how I saw her right there, just after I had landed. How strange it was. How it was part of a pattern that even now I can only glimpse at.
I headed outside and the air blasted me like a furnace.
I looked around, trying to get my bearings. The building had a large sign outside in big stylish letters saying Eivissa. That was Catalan. Ibiza is a Spanish island, and they speak Spanish, though Catalan is also an official language.
Eivissa. It was a good name. It sounded like a promise. I suppose I was about to find out what kind.
I realised how mad I was. What was I doing? I knew absolutely no one on this island. I hadn’t been
abroad in years. I couldn’t speak Spanish except for ‘muchas gracias’, ‘por favor’ and ‘patatas bravas’. And yet, here I was. Undoubtedly here. Undoubtedly transposed.
Abroad. Alone. And already a little bit afraid.
