A true‑story interlude from The Holographer’s Atlas (COMC universe), set between Book VII and VIII.

I was nineteen.

I want to say that first, before anything else, because nineteen explains a great deal and excuses nothing and is simply the truth of who was standing on that beach when Paloma said, estos son nuestros amigos italianos, and a group of young men turned around in the Spanish sun.

I love Italians, and they loved me. They have a particular quality of attention — they look at you the way other nationalities look at paintings, with the assumption that you are worth studying. The group on the beach were loud and golden and immediately charming, and I liked them all.

But Guido was from another category.

Tall, with the kind of stillness that doesn’t need to perform itself. Handsome in the way that comes from good bone structure rather than effort — the kind of face that will still be handsome at sixty and knows it without vanity. He was at university. His father had a factory in a village above Milan. He had driven down to Benidorm in his Mercedes, alone, which told you something about the family and something about the man. He shook my hand and asked me something in careful English and looked at me with those dark green eyes as if he had already decided something and was simply waiting to see if I would catch up.

I was nineteen and Dutch and had been dancing on a block in a purple silk suit with my big Ibiza hat in a disco the previous night and had not been thinking about catching up with anything.

We fell into each other’s orbit the way things fall in summer — gradually and then completely.

Paloma and Cristina — I’m giving them names now because memory requires handles — had found me on the beach on day three, the way cats find the one person in the room who doesn’t want them. They were dark-haired, gold-laden, draped in the particular confidence of women who have never once doubted their own welcome. They wore their family money the way other people wear skin. I was Dutch, blonde, alone, and apparently this made me exotic enough to collect.

Their apartment occupied an entire floor of a building on the Avenida del Mediterráneo. Five hundred square metres of carved wood, velvet, ceramic floors the colour of old blood, a salon that could have hosted a minor diplomatic function. Their mother’s portrait hung above the fireplace — imperious, excellent cheekbones, a woman who had clearly never approved of anything. I slept in a room with its own dressing room. We exchanged clothes, perfume, gossip. We went to every terrace bar on the strip. They lent me dresses, I lent them my foreignness. It was a fair trade, for a while. For approximately three weeks, it was genuinely lovely.

The sisters approved, which should perhaps have been a warning. Cristina in particular seemed pleased with herself for having engineered the introduction, as if she had arranged a successful trade agreement between two countries. What she had actually arranged, though she didn’t know it yet, was her own eventual humiliation. But that comes later.

For now there were evenings on terraces and afternoons on the beach and the particular social world of Benidorm in 1989 — loud, neon-lit, gloriously unpretentious, a place where the whole of Europe came to be young and stupid together in the sun. Guido moved through it with a kind of tolerant amusement, as if he had consented to the circus but preferred the company to the spectacle. His friends were the spectacle. He watched me.

One night I was dancing on a high block in the middle of the floor — that occasion a purple silk dress, the music going, completely inside myself the way you can be at nineteen when you are not yet self-conscious about taking up space. I wasn’t dancing for anyone. I was just dancing. And when I came down and found him, he was exactly where he’d been when I went up, glass in hand, looking at me with an expression I didn’t have the vocabulary for yet.

I have it now. It means: there you are.

He asked me to go for a drive.

Behind Benidorm the Spanish interior opens up into something dry and desolate — ugly road bars, scrubland, the kind of landscape that tourists drive through with the windows up. We drove through it at night with the windows down and the warm air coming in and whatever was on the radio, and it didn’t matter that it was ugly because we were making progress faster in time to catch up with our hearts.

He asked me questions. About Holland, about my family, about what I wanted. Not performance questions — real ones, with silence after them where he actually waited for the answer. I was not accustomed to being listened to by men. I talked more than I intended to.

At some point he reached across and took my hand and kept driving.

His hotel room was clean and simple — suitcase open on the floor, a bottle of Veterano on the nightstand, a paperback in Italian I didn’t recognise. The room of a man who travels with intention and doesn’t need much around him.

We lay on the bed in the dark with the Benidorm neon coming through the curtain gap and he held my hand and asked more questions and I answered them and somewhere in the middle of all that he turned toward me and kissed me in a way that was also a question, and I answered that too.

I was not sexually very open at nineteen. This is simply true — not damage, not shyness exactly, more that I was still learning the difference between wanting something and being ready for it. He seemed to understand this without being told. There was no push, no sulk, no performance of patience designed to wear me down. Just attention. His hands were careful and curious and when he pressed a finger somewhere that made me say, quite clearly, you are way off — he smiled and moved his hand and that was that. No drama. No wounded pride.

That smile. That easy retreat. That is still, decades later, my working definition of a man who is actually confident.

We lay there for a long time. Him asking, me answering. His thumb moving slowly across my skin in the dark. The neon through the curtain turning the ceiling pink and then green and then pink again.

I think I understood even then that this was not ordinary. I just didn’t have the equipment yet to know what to do with it.

After a few days he asked me to call my father.

I.Ph.