Therapy

in a good mood for a while, but it soon wore off. I’m not much of a swimmer and Laurence has to be careful because of his knee, and the pool which looked all right from the balcony was actually rather unpleasant to swim in, the wrong shape and overcrowded with boisterous children and reeking of chlorine. I read somewhere that it’s not the chlorine itself that makes the smell but the chemical reaction with urine, so those kids must have been peeing in the water for all they were worth, and kept going back to the Coke machine to refuel. After we’d had our dip, there wasn’t anything to do except read, and the loungers weren’t really designed for reading, they were that cheap sort that you just can’t adjust. The tubular steel frame bends upwards a bit at the end, but not enough to support your head at a comfortable reading height, so that you have to hold the book up in the air and after about five minutes your arms feel as if they’re going to drop off. I’d brought A. S. Byatt’s Possession with me, and Lorenzo had something by Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling I think it was called, which didn’t sound very appropriate to the occasion. You could tell what kind of people the other guests in the hotel were by what they were reading: Danielle Steel and Jeffrey Archer and the English tabloids which had arrived in the middle of the morning. Most of them looked to me like car workers from Luton but I didn’t say so because Laurence has a thing about metropolitan snobbery.
    Neither of us had brought swimming-towels from home, thinking that a four-star hotel would provide them, but this one didn’t, and there was only one smallish bathtowel per person in the room, so we decided to go for a walk and do a little shopping. We needed sunhats, too, and rubber flip-flops, because the concrete round the pool was hot as hell by this time. So we got dressed again and out we went into the noonday sun, which was beating off the pavement and bouncing off the walls of the timeshare apartment buildings like laser beams. According to the hotel’s streetplan we were only a couple of blocks from the sea, so we thought we’d walk in that direction and look for a beach shop, but there was no beach and no shop, just a low wall at the end of a cul-de-sac, and below it a narrow strip of what looked like wet cinders being churned by the sea. We turned round and walked back to the main road where there was a little shopping centre, built underground for some reason, a dismal tunnel of shops selling souvenir tat and tourist requisites. It seemed impossible to buy anything that hadn’t got the word “Tenerife” blazoned on it, or a map of the island printed on it. Something in me rebelled against buying a towel I wouldn’t be seen dead with once I got home, so we followed the main road into the centre of the town to see if we could find a wider selection. It turned out to be a walk of well over a mile, almost completely devoid of shade. At first it was boring, and then it got horrible. There was an especially horrible bit on the Avenida Litoral called the Veronicas, densely packed with bars and clubs and restaurants offering “Paella and chips” and “Beans on the toast”.
    Most of these places had disco music blaring into the street from the loudspeakers to attract customers, or else they were showing at maximum volume videos of old British sitcoms on wall-mounted television sets. It seemed to sum up the total vacuousness of Playa de las Americas as a holiday resort. Here were all these Brits, sitting on an extinct volcano in the middle of the sea two thousand miles from home, buying drinks so they could watch old episodes of Porridge and Only Fools and Horses and It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. “Did you ever see anything so pathetic?” I said to Laurence, and just then we came up to a café that was showing The People Next Door. It wasn’t getting a very good audience rating, I’m afraid. In fact there were only four people in the place, a middle-aged couple looking like scalded giant crabs, and a pair of sulky young women with punk hairstyles. Of course, Laurence had to go in. I never knew a writer yet who could avert his eyes from a television screen when his own work is being shown. Laurence ordered a beer for himself and a g & t for me, and sat there mesmerized, with a fond smile on his face, like an infatuated parent watching a home movie of his infant son’s first steps. I mean, nobody is more of a fan of Laurence’s