Mr Brown was eventually removed from the bath and, like a large pink suckling pig stuck on a stretcher, he was carried, grimacing, through the hotel’s maze of green and white corridors and along cacti-lined paths. With its orange lights flashing, but the siren off, the ambulance drove ever so slowly to the island’s only hospital.
I made my way to my windowless office in the hotel complex. Part of my job as the resort manager for the whole of Fuerteventura was to make out a daily report of what happened on this rugged, spectacular Canary island, which is well down the company’s list of top destinations. On Fuerteventura, nothing out of the ordinary was supposed to happen.
Incident forms are in triplicate and designed for idiots to fill out, with just the spaces to be filled in. One up the bum, I thought. Brush up ends in clean out, I wondered. No. This particular company was not known for its humour. My report about Mr Brown’s unconventional use of a lavatory brush was sent back to headquarters labelled simply as ‘anal accident’.
I needed a beer, and left my office for one, slamming the awkward glass office door shut. The vicious Saharan winds that sweep the island filled my ears, eyes and hair with sand once more. The blast furnace heat soon had the sweat running down my back to form a large damp patch round my waist. By the time I reached my local, The Wobbly Dog, my company issue shirt was stuck to me and my tie clung round my neck like a nylon noose.
As the beer had its desired effect, I reflected on the anal accident and how I had come to witness it. And that started me thinking about how I had ended up on an island that resembles the moon with goats and is frequented by hordes of people who would never dream of living there and don’t seem to enjoy themselves much when they are there anyway. It had all started when I was a child.
As a kid, I had been fascinated by stories of people who ran away to sea, joined the Foreign Legion, the circus or simply travelled the world. But by the time I was thirty, I believed that all those romantic notions had passed me by. The most adventure I would get would be a fortnight somewhere hot where millions of like-minded lemmings went. Although I was on the verge of marriage at the time, I was having an attack of nerves. I was scared of the thought of settling down; the idea of comfortable routine made me jittery. Before I was too old, I fancied running off to play for six months.
The holiday brochures I had constantly flicked through stirred my imagination. For a few weeks, I wrestled with my conscience and my fears. Finally, temptation won out over security and, convinced that I was on the doorstep of a life of sunny hedonism, I applied for a job as a tour rep. I confidently looked forward to dealing with throngs of happy holidaymakers and working alongside diligent colleagues to make a package holiday worth every hard-earned penny. So, one damp April afternoon in 1992, Cy the sandpaper salesman became Cy the sun, sea and sand man. The prospect of dealing with car accidents, death, suicide, rape and violence had never entered into my calculations. Neither had the fact that holiday-makers get involved in as much sex, drugs, corruption and criminal activity.
On my last day at work, I went for a drink with my mate Steve at The Railway Tavern next to Liverpool Street station. We had joined the sandpaper company at the same time and were leaving on the same day, but for entirely different reasons. We were both feeling a trifle melancholy, as the firm had been good to both of us. And we were apprehensive about our futures, which were to be poles apart. Steve was going to a better-paid job with more money and security to provide for his family. I was desperate to shag all the girls I had drooled over in holiday brochures. We downed our beers, wished each other good luck, shook hands and disappeared down different tunnels to very different destinies.
During the weeks before I was called up to do my holiday rep training course, my emotions see-sawed. I wanted all that sex; I wanted to get drunk, live in the sun and get paid to do it. But I still could not satisfactorily work out why a sane, logical, thirty-year-old would harbour ambitions to become a lunatic, unhinged twenty-year-old.
I suppose the seed had been sown in the summer of 1988, when I went on the ultimate in sun, sea and sex holidays – a youth holiday to Ibiza. It was the biggest mistake in holiday terms I have ever made. I went with my cousin Mike. We were opposites: he was a mollycoddled mummy’s boy who always had money; I was playing in a rock and roll band churning out the old standard, waltzing through the working men’s clubs of Bristol. His parents loathed me, but could do little to stop us going away on holiday together. We decided to take Ibiza by storm, just as we did Bristol most weekends. We arrived on the island expecting to spend the fortnight in an alcoholic blur interspersed with frequent exchanges of body fluids with all those heavenly bodies the travel agent had mentioned – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
We arrived early in the morning and the coach took us to San Antonio, the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mediterranean, where shagging, clubbing and losing it on drink and drugs were the norm. We could barely contain our excitement – until, that is, we arrived at our hotel. The concrete and breezeblock structure looked as though it had only just survived an earthquake; the food was the stuff that starving refugees would turn their noses up at. But worst of all, there were no available women. Nine out of ten of our fellow fun-seekers were either hardened Estuary boys or dullard Jocks. Both breeds were dangerous and obnoxious when in drink, which was most of the time. There was little scope for two pleasant lads from the West Country to have a good time. As the gloom set in, Mike and I predictably downed bottle after bottle of San Miguel, argued, ogled and took the mickey out of the two tribes from the north–south divide – providing they couldn’t hear us. At the welcome party, the rep smoothly relieved us of half our spending money to pay for trips to the water park, the bucking bronco barbecue, the hillbilly hoe-down, the hypnotist show and a boat trip. The captain’s cruise sounded enticing: a trip to a secluded beach, packed with scantily clad women, water as clear as gin, a feast ashore and bottles of champagne to be dived for on the seabed. A perfect day was in the making.
The trouble was, Mike and I had stayed up until dawn the night before, drinking and arguing about the girls we hadn’t shagged. We were woken at 8am by the sprightly rep and, with hangovers that would have put George Best to shame, we climbed aboard the boat. The sun rose; the heat increased and our heads started to feel like they were being drilled open from the inside.
‘Go and get some water, or a Coke, or something,’ I murmured to Mike – the one with the money.
‘Shit,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve left the fucking bum bag in the room.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I replied, very calmly all things considered. ‘I’ll get a loan off one of the reps.’
The promises of help and understanding they had expounded at the welcome party were still fresh in my fuzzy brain. I found a male rep leaning over the stern, guzzling a cold Coke and feeding a fat sandwich to the seagulls, and explained the situation. He surveyed me with the same revulsion Mike and I had used when we’d tripped over a dead dog on the side of a road outside San Antonio.
‘Tough luck, pal. You’ll have to grin and bear it,’ he chortled. With that, he pushed past me, headed to the bar and bought another Coke. A red mist came down over my red eyes.
The cruise around the delightful island of Formentera was obviously well known in the perfect bay we were headed for. As our boat approached, all other shipping upped anchor. The beach cleared in seconds as around fifty of Britain’s finest examples of yob culture disembarked, shouting, swearing and being sick over each other.
By now our thirst was of biblical proportions as we fried on the shimmering sands. My tongue, I decided, was definitely stuck forever to the roof of my mouth; my lips were like the sandpaper I used to sell. Our heavenly surroundings had become a thirsty hell. Then it was Mike’s turn to have a bright idea. Being a good swimmer, he decided to end our purgatory by diving for a couple of those bottles of chilled champers.