Benidorm

The Mediterranean was still. A poor omen. With the sails slack, they unhooked the oars. Dark hair, dark eyes, forearms lean and corded with muscle. Salt-crusted skin in mineral blooms. Ahead of them were the sides of a wide bay, white rock formations cresting at either edge like breaching whales. A cloudless sky, and the bright sun of Al-Andalus. Land of sweet oranges and dark, fermented fish.  

Oars chopped into the brine. The qārib drew closer. Built of Aleppo pine and cedar in the Phoenician style, it still smelled of pitch and sap, of sawdust under hot sun. The sailors were silent. The boat slid into the mouth of the bay. Clots of Neptune grass dragged against the hull, trailing acquisitive, dark-green fingers across it before sliding back into the ocean, spurned.  

The air buzzed. Marwān shifted uncomfortably. Slender Marwān, always uncomfortable, he of the bony arse, and sharp elbow, tendons as tight as an ūd string. Always the first to be uncomfortable, but rarely the last. Idrīs blew out his cheeks. The stillness was oppressive, because through the stillness they all felt something growing, scratching, an invisible presence.  

Sa'īd threw down his oar first. 

“Jinn,” he said flatly, releasing into the air what they were all thinking. Had the sun grown hotter? Was their skin beginning to crisp? All began to notice a strange taste in the back of their mouths. A dark, vegetal, bitter flavour.  

The buzzing was cohering, textures pressing against the silence. Did the fingers of seaweed grow fatter, pinker? Yes, surely jinn, who had becalmed the vessel and were now coming to claim their bounty of souls. It almost sounded like words, though not words in any language the men recognised. Lumpen, blocky words, like chunks of masonry hitting the sand.  

Yes…there it was! Words, for certain. From the sand, and the sea, and the air, on the eastern coast of Al-Andalus, near the cities of Balansiya and al-Laqant, echoing backwards, as the sailors rowed away as fast as they could, back to safe, sanctified places.  

“...football’s coming home…”

+++ 

In the excitement of an 18-year-old having his first shot as an adult, a pint of Heineken is spilled down my back. He looks extremely bilious. He didn’t want to have the shot at all. I didn’t want to have a pint spilled down my back either. Everyone is very apologetic. I try to pay at the bar with a 20 euro note. The landlady asks if I have anything smaller.  

“Show her your willy,” the man next to me suggests. 

My back was already damp from sweat, and now it’s damp from beer, and I can’t change my shirt because I only bought it thirty minutes ago from one of the dozens of knock-off football shirt gift shops which line the old town of Benidorm.  

It says Bellingham on the back. 

England are scheduled to kick off at 2am local time, but a cataclysmic storm in Mexico delays it by an hour. By the time I arrive, the atmosphere has already soured. I invite a man to play a game of pool, but the table isn’t working. It looks like someone has tried to jam a pound coin into it. He starts lifting and dropping the table in order to shudder it free. The bar manager comes over to tell him to desist. “If he keeps talking to me like that, I’ll cave his skull in,” my friend says, with the eerie, crystalline calm of an executioner. 

The skull stays convex, but the mood doesn’t improve. On the big screen, Wayne Rooney does his best to fill the dead air. Wayne Rooney is not a natural talker. I think Wayne Rooney, affable as he is, struggles to fill even live air, and this air is barely still twitching. Bright-eyed and brittle, Kelly Cates tries to nudge them into holding forth on something, Jesus, anything, which might offer an insight into the coming game, draw from the lips of these hard-faced men, men who are not and have never been voluble, despite being paid to speak professionally on the television.  

A man with a shirt which reads, “Sounds gay - I’m in!”, has prevailed on the bar staff to let him do karaoke, and he’s howling out the Kings of Leon with the vigour of the damned. The bar has, in fact, emptied. I don’t know where they’ve all gone. Do they think that the football starts earlier somewhere else? Maybe they just didn’t have the stamina. It’s 2:40am and some will have been drinking for about 14 hours. For God’s sake - someone get these lads some cocaine! 

And then, finally, blessedly, the football starts. There is a half-hearted roar. The missing people have come back. But the energy isn’t there. The atmosphere had curdled into something more like grim determination, a kind of end-of-the-afters bloody mindedness. I don’t think people are even drinking that much. There is no queue at the bar. There are tables full of empties, threatening to overbalance. Opened packets of crisps. A plume of vape smoke. The occasional, “Come on England!”, but delivered in the tones of someone trying to encourage children to clap. The children don’t want to clap.  

“Come on England!” in those same sing-song tones as always, the sounds of arms folded across chests, the England band piping through the ITV feed, slumped on your sofa while your mum asks well-meaning questions and you wonder how many years you'd get. No judge would convict.  

“Come on England!” 

It’s hot. It’s hot in the day, and it’s hot in the night. Sticky, neon, smell of fag ends and sweat, spilled beer, deodorant, suntan lotion. The tension is awful. The game is cagey, England falling into their usual muted, grinding mode, the Premier League style, the English way, physical and robust and sweating through their shirts. What is more English than to suffer? It is Protestant football.  

Jude Bellingham scores. The first release is wild and desperate. A man who can find nobody to hug simply picks up his stool and begins smacking it repeatedly on the floor. The atmosphere is suddenly scoured clean, refreshed, like a hot day after a downpour. The dust and humidity has been purged from the air, and it is sweet to breathe again.  

And then Jude Bellingham scores again. A high turnover that happens before anyone is really paying attention, the Mexican defence included. The roar acts as a warning this time. Heads jerk around. Someone screams, “Go on!”, before she can even see what’s happening, her voice cracking, sensing only that something is happening, and then it happens, and so soon after the first, the reaction isn’t so much celebration as laughter and disbelief. I get a round in for the men at the table I’m sharing. I’m clapping every back I see. Backs are getting clapped like they’ve never been clapped before. Giddy is the usual word, but woozy is maybe better. Impaired. Feverish.  

After this, the match in my recollection takes on the hazy quality of trauma. Periods of a kind of woozy blindness, pacing, alongside occasional, sharp moments of nasty clarity. A red card for England. A penalty for Mexico. Time distends. Nobody even seems to have it in them to get angry. The nerves express themselves in mute stares, working jaws, slow shakes of the head. No fear that the atmosphere might turn unpleasant. Unpleasantness still requires the will. The second half instead acts as a paralytic. Extremities turning numb. Lips thick. The humidity in the air rises once more. Breath sours.  

And then, like a drowning man breaching the surface, the game ends. England 3 - 2 Mexico. Last orders. Every bar on the strip disgorges its puddle of fans out onto the streets. I’ve stopped anticipating trouble at this point, because there isn’t any. There is a convivial, cheerful, post-match atmosphere, it’s just taking place at 5am. There is singing, and more hugging. People seem, unaccountably, fairly sober. They can't be sober. I'm not sober. I am paddling in the warm waters beyond. But there is an exhausted dignity, a post-adrenaline crash.  

They eat their kebabs, they buy a bottle of water, they file back to the hotels. I’m sure there are parts of Benidorm where roving groups of England fans are pissing on war memorials or throwing each other through windows, but it isn’t happening here. After such a marathon, draining evening, it feels more like post-orgasm clarity.  

Unwilling to go home yet, I take my own kebab to the beach. Nobody else seems to have had the same idea. I am on my own. The sand is pleasantly cool. The sea looks black in the gloom. In the distance, a man diligently cleans sweat and suncream from the loungers, where the day's almost mineralised deposits look greasy in his head-torch. They sit lined-up in neat rows for the next day’s sunbathing, like the scales of a lizard. Out to sea, I see the flashing light of a passing tanker.  

+++ 

On the beach, Josep watched the visitors leave. One by one, he piled stones atop each other. Sometimes they were ill-fitting. Pebbles not yet sea-smoothed into uniformity. When they did not fit, they tumbled back down in a shingle chord, the music of the earth. This did not upset him. He worked another into the sand, and started again. 

Lined up in front of him, through bulbous, glistening eyes, the creatures of the sea watched, and they waited.