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

The two weeks became six because Madrileñas know how to make you feel chosen.

Paloma and Cristina — 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.

Then one evening, Cristina brought home her boyfriend.

He was Italian. Of course, he was Italian. Dark, loose-limbed, with the kind of face that has caused administrative problems across several centuries of Mediterranean history. He stood by the rooftop pool in the pink neon light with his jacket slung over one shoulder and looked at me the way Italians look at things they’ve decided to acquire, and I looked back the way Dutch women look at things they know are a bad idea and are going to do anyway. Across the table, Paloma was already watching. These things announce themselves before they happen, if you know how to read a room. I knew. I proceeded.

We were subtle about it for perhaps forty minutes.

Paloma found us on the balcony. I won’t reconstruct what was said — the Spanish talent for operatic fury deserves more space than I have here, and my Spanish at the time was good enough to understand ladrona and puta holandesa and the specific register of a woman who is not going to forgive this, not in this lifetime, possibly not in the next. What I remember most clearly is how quickly the mood of the entire building changed. One moment, Cristina was still inside, oblivious. Next, both sisters were standing together — that ancient female solidarity that transcends the particular grievance and becomes something tribal — and two men I had never seen before were moving through the salon with the purposeful unhaste of people who do this professionally. Men on a retainer. Men who didn’t need to run.

We went out the service stairs.

He was in flip-flops. I was in Paloma’s white blazer over my bra and the jeans I’d grabbed off the chair, one sandal buckled and one held in my hand. We ran down the Carrer de Gerona past Bar Piscina and the Play neon signs, past tourist restaurants still serving dinner, past a man walking a very small dog who watched us with complete composure, as if people fled through here regularly, which perhaps they did. Behind us, not running — just walking, which was worse. Men who walk when they chase you have already calculated the outcome.

We lost them in the crowd outside Disco Ibiza, where Locomía were performing. If you don’t know Locomía — and outside Spain in 1989, most people didn’t — they were four men in white suits carrying fans the size of small doors, dancing a kind of hypnotic slow-motion choreography to Italo disco while the fans opened and closed like something ceremonial. They had a following in Benidorm, the way minor gods have followings: local, devoted, slightly inexplicable to outsiders. The crowd outside was thick with people carrying their own fans in imitation, which was our salvation. We took two from a vendor at the door — his idea, I paid — and walked in holding them open in front of our faces, which was either brilliant camouflage or the most conspicuous thing two people fleeing bouncers have ever done. The man in the black jacket scanned the entrance and moved on. He found this funnier than I did. He was laughing into his fan, shoulders shaking. I was watching the door.

His hotel was three blocks away. Clean room, suitcase open on the floor, a bottle of Veterano on the nightstand. He showered. I looked through what he had — he travelled light, one spare shirt, toiletries, a paperback in Italian I didn’t recognise. And at the bottom of his bag, folded small, a dress. Sequined, silver, unmistakably Cristina’s, which answered at least one question about the nature and duration of this relationship. I held it up. He came out of the bathroom and looked at it and then at me and said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say. I put it on. It fit perfectly. Of course it did.

We went to Space.

Space in 1989 was not yet what it would become — the legend came later, the mythology, the international pilgrimage. That summer it was simply the best disco in Benidorm, which was sufficient. The floor was coloured tiles, the mirror ball threw light like something generous, and they were playing Italo disco at a volume that precluded both thought and consequence. We danced until the sweat had ruined what little of the evening’s dignity remained, and then we danced some more. He had changed into a tropical shirt from his case. I was still in Cristina’s dress, which seemed right — wearing the evidence of the whole situation, sequined and unrepentant on a dancefloor in the Costa Blanca at two in the morning.

I didn’t think about Paloma’s face. I thought about it later — have thought about it at intervals ever since, the way you return to small moral failures the way you probe a loose tooth. The specific expression of a woman betrayed not by a stranger but by a guest. That’s the one that stays. You can excuse yourself a great deal in the field of human behaviour, but the violation of hospitality has weight. The Romans knew it. Every culture with a concept of the sacred threshold knows it. I knew it too, which is perhaps why I danced so hard.

We came out into the morning sometime around seven, the light already white and indifferent, the street scattered with the evidence of other people’s nights. He lit two cigarettes and gave me one, and we leaned against the wall in the alley beside Space and smoked without talking, because everything had already been said or would never be said, which amounts to the same thing.

Then we walked back along the seafront in the early heat, and somewhere around the Playa de Levante, he stopped walking.

He reached up and unclasped the chain from around his neck. Gold, thin, with a small medallion — St. Christopher, patron of travellers, given to him at his first communion by someone who had presumably intended it to keep him safe from exactly this kind of situation. He put it around my neck and fastened it without ceremony, the way you hand someone an umbrella when it’s already raining.

Then we went in different directions, and that was that.

That morning had the same feeling as leaving Space — walking hand in hand, already walking alone, the party over. He had to go back to his country. I had to face the music; the sisters had evacuated me from their penthouse with considerable efficiency, and I had nowhere to sleep.

That last afternoon, I walked proudly, the gold chain with his saint at my throat, and I belonged entirely to the wish of forever. Little solace that knowledge gave me, because forever was not long to last. It was much later that I learned to yearn for my own company when surrounded.

The Piaget went. The Cartier went. The rings from the personal jeweller of the former King of Morocco went. Things of weight and value, gone the way things go.

The communion medallion I still have.

I.Ph.