Then suddenly the rain started. Big, heavy, pounding droplets that weren’t there one instant but bombarded from the very firmament of heaven the next soaked me to the core within seconds. The disinfectant smell got stronger as the clouds approached. They were close enough now that I could see finger-like tendrils of vapour preceding them, almost as if reaching out like antennae to gauge whether it was worth the clouds continuing. They swept over the dusty ground ahead of them in anticipation of reaching man-made construction, and in that second I knew that’s what they wanted.
That, and me.
Less than 10 meters from the glass doors to the reception area (thank god thank god thank god I left them open after jimmying them) the first fingers reached me. I swore I could hear a small, high pitched laugh as they wrapped around my legs. I waited to be yanked into the air and consumed whole by a purple Pac Cloud but I pushed on, my legs feeling like they were wading through treacle. I was within touching distance of that wonderful safe vestibule when the cloud reached me. For a split second I felt totally calm, resigned almost. The preceding desperate dash to safety and the knotted stomach tension that went with it disappeared, no longer relevant, as my fate had now been decided. I realised my feet were no longer touching the ground. I was suspended, inches off the pavement, the purple cloud underneath my feet blurring the white tiles into unrecognition. Without warning, I felt a sharp burst of pain in my side, like a shark had attacked from nowhere, as I was propelled through the doors. I felt the glass shatter around me in a million tiny shards and my whole body being thrown inwards. I braced for the impact of the ground but didn’t even feel it when it came.
My last thought was that the shattered glass looked like a galaxy of beautiful stars. Then, again, blackness.
62%
Some unknown force didn’t want me to leave Playa Blanca, that I was now sure of. Had I been successful in getting a car started it wouldn’t have mattered. That clouds would undoubtedly still have got me as I raced out of town, and I would probably have ended up rolling the car into a ditch or a jagged gully of lava rock and been ripped to shreds… instead of waking up in the Sun Royal again, on my bed in room 704, seemingly totally unharmed.
Whatever was going on, it was… unnatural.
Look at it rationally. There was the food situation. After coming to, this time with 62% of my time remaining, I headed to the reception area to assess the damage caused. Again I had no idea how long I had been unconscious, but the sun was almost all the way across the horizon in the east so I assumed it must be late afternoon. Late afternoon when, I didn’t know. The restaurant was as I had left it. Everything was still fresh, and just as tasty as it had been the first day I discovered it. I was hungry, but not ravenous, so I estimated I had been out for a maximum of a day or two.
The reception area looked like it had been hit by a bomb. And in a way it had. The glass doors had been completely shattered (by my body no less), and shards of milky glass lay everywhere on the floor. The decorative plants were lying on their sides, gravel strewn around them like blood at a murder scene. The sofa had been upended and lay upside down. Papers were everywhere, presumably from behind the desk. The computer had been blown off its perch and the screen had smashed. The cloud was nowhere to be seen. The evening was as clear and sunny as any other I had experienced on the island. The disinfectant smell that had accompanied the cloud had totally dissipated. The air was thick again, muggy, with that pleasant zing of aloe vera plants and foliage. I inhaled deeper, hoping to catch a waft of decay or human sweat, car fumes or spoiled food or anything that would signify the presence of other life. Just aloe vera and the faint tang of chlorine from the pool.
It was Groundhog Day.
Why Lanzarote? Why not Ko Pha-Ngan or a nice little atoll in the Seychelles? I mean there’s nothing wrong, geographically, with The Canaries in general. But there’s a stigma associated with them, isn’t there? Bleached white Brits turning into blood red Brits in 30 degree heat, knocking back weak lager and gobbling Full English breakfasts while their offspring weave in and around the tables like sugar-pumped sharks… wasn’t that the deal?
That’s what I’d been given to believe anyway. The irony is, take away that visceral stereotype of the Western Tourist and what’s left is achingly beautiful. I should count myself lucky, I suppose. My knowledge of the islands was woefully lacking because I’d never been gripped with the desire to find out more about them, and this was solely down to my own prejudices.
Given the nature of my predicament, wasn’t Lanzarote, with its moon-like craterous landscape, year-round clement weather and isolated position in the middle of the Atlantic perhaps the perfect place to live out the Apocalypse? If the rest of the world had turned into a zombie infested, disease ridden, post nuclear hell planet, then yes. If at this very moment the Prime Minister was a mile underground in London, relying on air and water filtration and canned beans until it was safe enough to emerge in a few years and attempt to rebuild society then, by comparison, my situation was positively chipper. On this island, there were no marauding cannibal gangs trying to roast my head for meat, no biological or chemical agent or clouds of radiation to make my flesh melt off at the slightest breath, no blood-driven, rage-consumed mutants around every corner, hibernating by day and hunting by night, no herds of man-eating dinosaurs, no survival of the fittest, no bunker-dwelling, shotgun-toting Judgement Day peddlers, no lawyers…
Lanzarote just… was.
At least, I hope it was. I could be proved very wrong of course. Was my skewed vision of the end of the world drawn from watching too many post-apocalyptic Hollywood representations? Any one of the above scenarios (well, apart from the dinosaurs and part of me still believed… wanted to believe… that Jurassic Park could happen) was a very real possibility given the state of the planet. If humans were really hellbent on destroying civilisation then it was only a matter of time. If global warming was to be the downfall of humanity then it had better get a damn move on, because as things were it wasn’t rising sea levels and melting glaciers we needed to be worried about, but fingers on nuclear buttons. Chemical attacks in unpronounceable regions of countries many people couldn’t even point out on a map.
Maybe that’s what had happened. It was perfectly possible that I wasn’t on this island at all, but strapped to a gurney in a makeshift field hospital, convulsing and hallucinating the whole thing. Maybe the guy on the stretcher next to me was having the same recurring nightmare, except instead of drinking rum and going slowly crazy on an abandoned Atlantic island he was climbing Kilamanjaro with Marilyn Monroe or caddying for Jack Nicklaus on endless rounds of Augusta National. Happiness is relative after all.
So was I in a dream or a nightmare? Was I happy here? Should I be counting myself incredibly lucky, or a victim of a cruel trick of fate. Only time would tell, and I just hoped I would know a hell of a lot more by the time my number (0%) was up…
Happiness is relative.
Health, I had. Nourishment, I had. Pleasure, I had. I was free to explore, eat, drink and sleep my way to whatever awaited me in however many percentage points I had left. I wasn’t bound by responsibility, no bills, no family, no job. Should I be taking advantage of this fact while I had the chance?