Ibiza Summer

by Anna-Louise Weatherley

  ‘I’m nothing without the smile on her face, my life without the kiss of her lips, empty and out of place . . .’

  Oh my God, he was quoting ‘Without Her’, my favourite ever Dude Sound track.

  Who was this guy?

  ‘I’m a big fan,’ he said.

  ‘They’re my favourite band!’ I said, and then worried that it had sounded really childish. ‘I’ve been to see them a few times back home.’

  ‘Where’s home then?’ he asked.

  ‘In England,’ I said, laughing. ‘No listen, I’m just being facetious. I’m from London.’ I was chuffed I’d managed to include an adult word like ‘facetious’ into the conversation. I thought it made me sound intelligent and funny, and thankfully he laughed.

  I wanted to ask him where he was from too, because I detected a sort of soft, northern-ish accent, but I couldn’t be sure and didn’t have the courage to ask.

  ‘You been here long?’

  Did he mean at the party or in Ibiza?

  ‘Umm, I’m in Ibiza for three weeks,’ I said, hoping I picked the right answer to the right question. I didn’t really want him to think I was facetious. ‘It’s only my second day here today.’

  ‘Wow! You must be pretty special, getting an invite to one of Alfredo’s infamous parties.’

  ‘Well, my – my friend, she knows him. She’s been to a few of these parties before . . .’ I said, putting on my best ‘I’m always at these kinds of parties having these types of conversations with devastatingly fit men’ voice.

  Something had stopped me from telling him about my sister though. I knew that if I mentioned her he’d probably want to meet her, and when he did he’d instantly fall in love with her like everyone else did and wouldn’t look at me again. Right now, the thought of that was too much to bear, so I kind of lied. Also, he’d know that if she was my sister, I must be younger than her, and I didn’t fancy letting on that I was only sixteen (almost seventeen). He looked a bit older and I didn’t want to put him off me in case he did actually like me a bit – even if that was a remote possibility.

  ‘So, what are your plans for the holiday then?’ he asked, sounding genuinely interested.

  I desperately tried to think of something to say that might make me sound exotic and intriguing so he would want to carry on talking to me.

  ‘Well, I – aside from the sunbathing, cocktails and clubbing, I’m going to check out the beach tomorrow,’ I said, making it up as I went along.

  He looked at me, his head cocked to one side.

  ‘Ah, a beach babe, huh? The beaches here are amazing: Las Salinas, Cala Carbo . . . Playa d’en Bossa . . . My favourite is Cala Jondal, though. I go for a run there every day, blow a few cobwebs away, keep fit, you know . . . Who are you going to the beach with?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, lowering my eyes and finding myself uncharacteristically flirting. I wasn’t surprised that he went running every day. He was so fit and I could tell, even through his shirt, that he had an amazing body.

  ‘I do,’ he said, a smile creeping across his face.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, shyly.

  ‘Me,’ he said, matter-of-fact. ‘You’re going to the beach with me.’

  I met his gaze for a second.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You are.’

  ‘And do I have a choice in that?’ I asked, clearly flirting now.

  ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘None whatsoever.’

  I felt my stomach flip over and my knees go a bit weak. All this flirty banter, it was so not me.

  ‘Do you dive?’ he suddenly asked, breaking the moment.

  ‘Dive? Well, er, no not really,’ I said, not wanting to let on that I was a bit scared of heights and that I always held my nose whenever I jumped into a swimming pool.

  ‘I can teach you if you like.’

  I suddenly had visions of myself spectacularly belly-flopping in front of him, making a total prat of myself.

  ‘I’m a little scared of heights – and water,’ I confessed.

  ‘I promise not to let you drown,’ he said, smiling.

  But I wouldn’t have minded if it meant him rescuing me.

  ‘If you fancy it, we could head down to Cala Jondal beach tomorrow,’ he said.

  In my mind I was screaming Yes! Yes! I’d love to! Let’s go right now! but instead I said, ‘OK, why not? Although I have to tell you, my running is about as great as my diving.’

  He laughed. ‘No running, we’ll just chill out. I could pick you up on my moped maybe.’

  Moped! This conversation was getting better by the second. I’d always fancied a boyfriend with his own transport, even though I knew I was getting way ahead of myself even thinking about him being my boyfriend.

  ‘Listen, give me your number and I’ll call you,’ he said.

  My heart sank a little. I’d been here before with the ‘I’ll call you’ line. Lads would take my number and then I’d wait for a call that never came. Was it something I’d said? Something I hadn’t said? Did they say they’d call because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings, even when they had no intention of actually ever calling?

  ‘Give me yours and then take mine just in case,’ he suggested, as if sensing that I didn’t believe him. ‘I’m DJing at another party at Café Del Sol tomorrow night. It’s more of a chilled thing than tonight – maybe you’d like to come after we’ve been to the beach, you can bring your mates too . . .’ His green eyes were shining and I found myself wondering what it would be like to look right into them up close. I opened my broken bag and reached for my phone, which was covered in silly glitter stickers and photos and pink stick-on gemstones, and suddenly seemed really babyish. I went to ‘add contacts’ and realised I didn’t even know his name.

  ‘It’s Rex,’ he said, ‘Rex Brown,’ which scared me as I really was beginning to think he could read my mind now. I tried to punch in his number, which was proving difficult as it felt like someone had removed the bones from my fingers, making them all floppy like Pot Noodle, but I made sure I saved it before giving him mine.

  ‘Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you,’ he said, suddenly reaching up towards my face with his hand and very gently brushing a strand of hair from my eyes. Even though I was sure this was just a friendly gesture, I was taken aback nonetheless and began tingling all over. ‘I’m really glad I did.’ And I noticed he was giving me a funny look which wasn’t that dissimilar to the look Toby Parker had given me that time I’d told him to follow his heart and his dreams of being a professional footballer. I couldn’t help but take it to be a bad sign. ‘I’ve got to get back as my next set is up and —’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, inwardly cringing about the whole ‘I’m such an indie girl’ cock-up I’d made earlier. I reckon I had more chance of winning the next British Diving Championships than I had of him calling me.

  ‘I’ll leave you with the view then,’ he said, smiling as he turned and began to walk away.

  ‘It was nice to meet you too,’ I called out. I watched him walk off for a few seconds and was mortified when he turned round and caught me still looking.

  ‘Hope to see you soon, Isabelle!’ he called back to me, waving in the distance.

  When he was firmly out of sight I wrapped my arms around my chest and hugged myself, unable to stifle the huge grin on my face. I’d just met an amazing, gorgeous boy – well, man actually – and he was a DJ and owned a moped and was going to call me and take me to the beach. Or so he said. But even if he didn’t, it was nice that he’d said it in the first place, which was almost enough for me.

  I looked out at the view before me again and somehow it seemed even more beautiful than before. The lights seemed to shine even brighter beneath me. I breathed in the air deeply in an attempt to help me to stop shaking and keep calm. It was getting chillier now, but inside I felt a soft, warm glow, quickly followed by panic.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Ellie barked, giving me her
worried face as she came marching towards me. ‘I’ve been everywhere searching for you! I mean it, Izzy, don’t do that. I’ve spent half the bloody night asking people if they’ve seen you. I told you not to slope off on your own.’

  I said I was sorry and that I just got lost on my way back from the toilet, which was sort of true. I didn’t want to tell her about my meeting with Rex. She’d only tell the others and they’d all tease me about it. Besides, he had seemed a bit older than me and he had a moped, and I was worried that Ellie would disapprove of both those things.

  I contemplated texting Willow to tell her what had happened, but was too busy replaying the whole conversation I’d just had with Rex in my head, like you do a favourite scene in a film: what he’d said, what I’d said, his facial expressions, the way he’d gone to brush the hair from my face and how it had made me tingle . . . ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you . . . Hope to see you soon, Isabelle!’

  And it took me a whole five minutes or so of playing it all back in my mind over and over and over again to realise that, actually, I hadn’t even told him my name.

  unlight streamed in through the window the next morning, giving the bedroom a soft glow and making me feel instantly alive and happy. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my phone, which I’d placed on the little table next to my bed so that it was close and I would hear it immediately if it beeped. If it beeped. There were no messages.

  It’s early, I thought to myself. Don’t stress, Izzy, don’t stress. But I knew the only thing on my mind that day would be him and the fact that he’d said he’d call.

  It was pointless staying in bed. I was too full of nervous excitement, so I got up and padded quietly over to the doors that led to the balcony, so as not to wake Ellie, who was asleep in the bed next to me. I squinted as I stepped out on to the cool tiled floor. The sunlight was bright and the sky already blue and cloudless. I leaned over the balcony and took in a lungful of air as I yawned.

  Although the apartment actually belonged to a friend of Narinda’s family, she had not, as you might have thought, pulled rank and nabbed the best bedroom for herself. Instead we had tossed a coin to see who was going to sleep where and it transpired that I would be sharing with Ellie. I couldn’t help but think that Ellie felt like she’d drawn the short straw. She had come on holiday to be with her friends, gossip about men and life and people they knew and stuff – not share a room with her little sister with whom, genetics aside, she had little in common with these days.

  I wasn’t entirely sure why Ellie had invited me to Ibiza in the first place. I knew it was on the pretext of it being my birthday soon and that this was sort of like her present to me, but I felt sure Mum had played a big part in goading her into bringing me.

  I had always thought Ellie was the coolest since I was little. She taught me how to French skip, ride a bicycle and to apply mascara for the first time. My mum delights in reminding me of this one time when I was seven years old – I cried for three days solid because Ellie had gone to stay with a family friend for a long weekend. According to Jackson family legend, for that’s what this story had now become, I had insisted on wearing a T-shirt that belonged to Ellie in protest at being kept from her – even sleeping in it and refusing to take it off until she had safely returned. I doted on her.

  Then when Dad died it was as if I’d lost a sister as well. Ellie was seventeen at the time and had found a new state of independence, namely in the form of a clapped-out old Citroën 2CV car that Mum and Dad had bought for her on her seventeenth birthday. When she wasn’t zipping off with her friends, she was hidden behind her bedroom door, studying or spending hours putting on make-up with her mates just to go to the cinema.

  It wasn’t that she was ever horrible to me; it was just that as her life progressed into adulthood and – as I was now beginning to experience – the complications that this brought with it, she sort of forgot I was there, and I could only watch her breeze in and out of our house, always doing something and going somewhere fabulous, none of which involved me.

  Rejected, I found myself coming up with elaborate ways to get her attention; I’d paint her pictures and make her collages out of pop-star photos that I found in magazines to try and impress her (hey, I was only eleven at the time, OK?) and if that didn’t work I’d steal something from her bedroom so that she would have to talk to me, because being shouted at was preferable to being ignored. Sometimes I would sneak into her bedroom when she wasn’t around and snoop about. Back then, Ellie’s room was a place of forbidden pleasure and delight for me. The make-up and bottles of perfume that cluttered the small dressing table with the mirror; the pop-star posters adorning every inch of wall space; and, best of all, her underwear drawer filled with bras and expensive-looking lingerie (that probably weren’t that expensive at all looking back). Ellie’s room hinted at what life would one day be like for me, and this filled me with apprehension and excitement. The conversations I would have, the boys I would kiss, how I would sympathise with my girlfriends when they’d been cruelly dumped (clearly a predicament that would never happen to me) and how I would cheer them up by giving them a makeover.

  Naturally, none of what I was feeling went unnoticed by our beady-eyed, annoyingly astute mum. ‘As you get older,’ Mum had said, putting a comforting arm round my shoulders, ‘you will catch up with her. And one day, when you’re much older, you’ll be best friends again,’ she had reassured me, softly.

  Now, on my first holiday alone with my sister – in Ibiza no less – I wanted to feel as though I’d finally arrived at that catch-up point. I knew this was my opportunity to show Ellie how much I had changed and who I had become. I wanted her to see that I could be clever and witty too, ‘one of the girls’, a bona fide member of the ‘Ellie Jackson Hip Girl Squad’ who had earned her rightful stripes. Only I didn’t feel like that at all. I was simply Ellie’s little sister, Izzy, and nothing had changed.

  I relaxed on to one of the sun loungers on the balcony and found myself inadvertently smiling. The previous night’s events were still running through my head and I wondered if it was too early to call Willow. I was desperate to tell her all about last night: the villa, the people, the music and – and Rex. Oh God, Rex. Just thinking about him made my skin tingle all over.

  I had felt different since our meeting, lighter and more positive somehow. It was as if I was suddenly full of energy and vitality, high on life. Perhaps this was how you felt when you fell in love – but you can’t fall in love after just five minutes of conversation with someone, can you?

  I pulled my phone out of my robe pocket – it was coming everywhere with me today – and pressed Willow’s number. I knew it was early to call, but being the gossip freak that she is, I figured she’d be so blown away by all my news that she’d soon forget it was only eight a.m.

  ‘Wils?’

  ‘Euuurggh . . .’ there was a groaning sound as she picked up the phone.

  ‘Wils, it’s me – Izzy.’ I found myself whispering so as not to wake Ellie.

  ‘Iz – is that you?’ Her voiced sounded croaky, like voices tend to do first thing in the morning. ‘Oh my God, Iz, babes!’ I heard a muffled noise like she was scrabbling around for something. ‘Jeez, Iz! It’s seven in the morning!’

  ‘Wils, look, I’m sorry, shall I call you back? I totally forgot about the time difference and everything.’

  ‘I’m awake now, you cow!’ she said, and I imagined her sitting up in bed, not a hair out of place as usual. ‘So, come on then, how’s the party capital of the earth? Been clubbing yet? Is it, like, full of dead-fit boys? Tell all, I’m dying here!’ She made a fake choking sound as if she was being strangled.

  ‘We went to a private pool party at a huge villa last night,’ I blathered excitedly, realising in my awestruck state that I had forgotten to take some pictures on my phone and send them to her. ‘It was just the coolest thing ever. Everyone there looked so amazing and the music was brilliant – some of the best DJs in Ibiza were playing. An
d there was this huge great swimming pool in the middle of it all, and later on in the night people stripped down to their underwear and bikinis – can you believe it? – and just dived in. It was crazy, and we didn’t come home until three a.m. and —’

  ‘Slow down!’ Willow shrieked. ‘I’m lost already!’

  It felt weird talking to Willow like this because, as a general rule, it was her who always had the amazing stories to tell. It was like our roles had been reversed, and I sensed that she felt odd about this too.

  ‘So what are your plans today then?’ she sighed. ‘Slink around the pool, get a tan, and watch lots of fit lads playing volleyball on the beach?’

  ‘Got to fit in with Ellie and that, I suppose. But I definitely hope to make it to the beach.’

  Oh God. The beach. Would he really phone me?

  ‘Must be bloody brilliant not having any parents around,’ she mused.

  There was a slight pause and then she said quietly: ‘Joe and I are back on.’

  This was not good news and I felt my heart sink. Since Wils had discovered about this girl Joe had been texting behind her back and dumped him, she had sworn she would rather sit my exams as well as her own before she would ever get back with him. But Joe knew which buttons to press to get back in her good books. He’d give her his sad eyes and promise he would treat her better and gradually he’d chip away at her until she would cave in. Willow was really just a big softy at heart.

  ‘That’s cool,’ I said, although I knew she could probably tell I didn’t really mean it. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d have ever got back with him if I’d have still been at home. Perhaps I could’ve talked her out of it, counteracted his ‘I’ll never mess you around again’ speech by reminding her of all the times he’d let her down and put her second. I felt as though by not being there, to support her in her moments of weakness, I had let her down.