This was home of a sort.
The airport was a blur, made easier with landing at the private runway. No waiting for luggage, no queues for customs, a quick check of my passport and a nod from a custom’s official that I recognised from years of being here, who pretended each time that I was a new face. Then, my summer began.
Lala was waiting for me, dressed in white, her tan already the same bronze as a statue of an island deity. The drive to the villa in Es Cubells was a short one, the perfect amount of time for her sunscreen to soak into her skin, and a chance to say she’d done something productive today.
It was our mother’s mantra: what have you given back to the world today? A question she’d ask of us during the endless summer days when the beach and boys and chilled beats from the parties we were too young to go to strummed through still air.
We were privileged and spoilt, adored and worshipped. Our parents were demi-Gods; Livi the daughter of a viscount, beloved star of the printed media and gossip columns as she grew up. An English party girl who was papped falling out of night clubs and into rehab, spending her late teens coked up and pissed, the heroin-chic arm candy of rockers and actors. Our father had been her cure: Gav Kearney, ten years her senior, the heavenly father of rock music, and front man all guitarists and singers wanted to emulate. Rough, northern, working class, his thick vowel sounds and Mancunian slang were the opposite of Livi’s polished accent and perfect posture, but he was her Jesus in disguise and Ibiza was their haven.
The party island.
Where he took her to dry out.
The irony wasn’t lost on anyone.
“Jameson!” Lara rushed towards me and I dropped the single piece of luggage I was carrying. “It’s so wonderful to see you!” Her accent matched Livi’s; all plums and toffees, sucked and licked with plump pink lips that were the focus of every lens that loved her.
The camera loved my older sister. She grew up in front of a million lenses, adoring the attention from the first day she understood what it was. Part-time model, full time designer, she was Livi’s protégé when they weren’t silently fighting, because Livi’s karma didn’t allow her to argue or scream or shout.
I hugged my sister, her slender frame the mirror of mine. We could’ve been twins; I’d known twins who looked less alike than we did. Tall, slender, blonde hair, high cheekbones and full lips. She was eleven months and ten days my elder and we were in the same year at school. August and July birthdays.
Summer babies.
“How long is it since you’ve been here? It feels like forever.” She smelled of musky florals and lotion. Her face was make-up free and her skin glowed.
“Two years.”
“Two years too long. And you’re here all summer?”
I nodded.
“Promise.”
Another nod. “I’m here until I go to New York in October.”
“That isn’t enough time. We need more time.”
I laughed. She was so beautifully insistent. “It’s May, Lara. We’ve more than five months. We’ll be wanting to kill each other in another week. It’s been years since we’ve spent more than a month together.”
And years since I’d spent a summer at Villa Safir. At eighteen, I’d gone to university. Lara had gone to Paris to study design, which was what you did when you had Livi’s connections.
I’d chosen architecture as a career. Growing up in houses that were artworks in themselves had affected me. I’d ran through rooms and hallways in stately homes and mansions, finding secret rooms and balconies, and as I’d grown a little older, I’d started to notice the quirks of the rooms, the hidden details, and then I’d learned the stories.
In Ibiza I’d explored the fincas that spotted the island, saw them grow, develop; saw the villas with their windowed walls and roof terraces decorate the verges of beaches and the boutique hotels that begged to be different, grow the towns.
People needed roofs over their heads. We all needed that retreat to find sanctuary in.
The summers between years at university, I’d travelled. I’d stayed with relations in Mustique, visited friends in Venice Beach and toured around Middle America, backpacked in Northern India and helped build houses in Tanzania.
Ibiza had been a stop off, a place to visit when I had a long weekend or a week free, to sample the quiet insanity that was my life when I chose to have it.
After my three-year undergrad was complete, I headed to Sweden for a year in industry, and ended staying longer.
Jaipur, Helsinki, Stockholm, Toronto, Havana, Lima, Budapest, Sydney, Bangkok, Goa, Madrid. Every other month it was somewhere new. A new place. New people. New food. A new bed.
Nowhere to call home.
And all the time my big sister courted the press, learning from Livi’s early mistakes and ensuring her image stayed whiter than the lines we’d grown up knowing not to touch. Or inhale.
