PROLOGUE

       August 2006

       Ibiza

      Outside the bar, the silence rings in my head; like the delayed echo of a lone guitar string. The air is warm and gluey and smells of sea salt and those flowers again – they’re everywhere you go. Cancan skirts of frothy pink blooms.

      I kick off my shoes and, carrying them, take the stone steps down to the sand. It’s still warm and sugar-soft after another baking day. Behind me, I can still hear the throb of the music. Ba-doom! Boom! Faint laughter from further down the beach. Lasers streak the sky.

      I’m walking quickly towards the sea now. The moon is high and fat as a pumpkin. It’s bleeding pearly light across the sky and across the water but there’s not much time left for it now, today will soon be gone. And then there’ll be tomorrow. Another brand-new day.

      I don’t bother to take off my clothes at first, I just wade straight in. The water’s cool and delicious around my thighs, my stomach, my chest, and now I am swimming out, out towards the light.

      And it’s beautiful. So beautiful. The cool water; the black, silky sky. At either side of me, the cliffs rise up and glitter in the moonlight, like giant-sized precious stones. The water dances with a million needles of white light. It makes me think of music, of notes alive on paper, and every molecule of me tingles with pleasure, so much that I have to stop and catch my breath.

      Push, glide, I am swimming beneath the water with every stroke now – like a mermaid. Except I’m not a mermaid because my white dress has ballooned around me so that I must look like a giant jellyfish, shifting and morphing, a glowing orb in the middle of the sea; alone but not lonely. Not wanting now. I’m swimming further out now, I slide the straps of my dress down and slip out of it, as if I’m shedding a skin. And suddenly I am totally free, the water caressing every inch of me, my dress floating alongside me, in my hand. I can still hear the throb of the music back on shore and when I put my head beneath the water, the b-dum-dum of my heart. I turn onto my back; I am floating, weightless. I imagine the stars are tiny pinprick holes, windows into another universe, a world where people are dancing and smiling too and don’t know, don’t care, where one day starts and another begins. And then they start to go off – the small explosions, deep in my belly, little bubbles of light working their way to my throat and out across my mouth and I make a mental note that this, THIS is what it tastes like. For the first time ever, I know this is it.

      Life has brought me so much more than I ever imagined. So much more than I ever thought possible. Friends I could marry, whom I’d die for. What did I do to deserve that? I imagine them now, dancing like those in the world above me; one great universe of dancing people and me, in the middle, dancing in the sea. I think of him back at the bar, hands pumping the air now. That grin across his face, the beautiful almond-shaped eyes. Lost in music. It makes me smile.

      I swirl and tumble, feel the seaweed feather my skin. The moon is sending iridescent rays of light through the water; it’s like electricity darting through my legs.

      I should feel tiny out here but I don’t, I feel bigger than ever, every last cell of me filled right up. I imagine the deep green bed beneath me, and the domed sky above, and imagine I am suspended, held in the centre of it all. A tiny being, spinning in orbit.

      The music has stopped now, so it’s just the sound of the waves and me and everything feels perfect. Everything feels right.

      Above me, stars are