‘Well, we’ll see how strong they really are, won’t we?’

‘What time do we start?’ I hear Eva asking Max as we arrive back.

‘We start here in thirty minutes,’ Max says. ‘Now the bar is emptying, I’ll set everything up.’

‘Okay,’ Eva says excitedly. ‘I’ll just pop back to the villa to get a cardigan. It’s chilly now.’

‘It is,’ Max replies. ‘They say there’s going to be a storm tonight.’

Given everything I’ve learned about these after-hour Mr & Mrs Valentine Island games, and who is going to be competing, I don’t doubt it.

29

There’s something in the air tonight. A thickness, making it hard to breathe.

I keep hearing about this storm that is coming, but I don’t think it’s that. It’s the atmosphere here, at the after-hours Mr & Mrs Valentine Island that has been, so far, so X-rated.

It’s a funny feeling, down to a combination of things. There’s a tension here, amongst us all. The regular Mr & Mrs Valentine Island is just competitive but what we’re doing now… it’s a combination of terrifying and exciting. I feel so nervous, in that awful, stomach-churning way when you know something bad could happen, as well as that buzzing, excited feeling when it feels as if something amazing is on the horizon.

There are ten of us here, coupled up in the deserted beach bar in the small hours of the morning. Max and Ali are our gracious hosts, competing together where possible, and of course there are me and Freddie, and Daniel and Eva.

Then we have the two couples I don’t know: Gunnar and Rosa and Phillip and Annie. Gunnar and Annie both work here. Gunnar is the island photographer, a tall, blond Icelandic chap, who circulates snapping pictures at island events as well as working in the photo studio where couples can go to have corny portraits taken. Rosa is one of the new girls in the hotel. Her English is so good you could be forgiven for thinking she’d spoken it all her life. It seems as though, as some kind of grim welcoming tradition, Gunnar is trying to sleep with her.

And then we have Phillip and Annie, a very lovely couple in their late thirties who I am absolutely certain agreed to play these games with us by mistake, and now they’re just too polite to leave. They’re really nice, with clean Oxfordshire accents and sensible clothing. They definitely don’t belong here, playing with the likes of us.

I first had my suspicions about Phillip and Annie when we were all given team names – a combination of our first names, to give us our couples’ names. Max and Ali became Mali, Freddie and I because Frila, Daniel and Eva became Deva, Rosa and Gunnar became Runnar, and Phillip and Annie… were named Phannie. And everyone found this absolutely hilarious apart from them. Sure, it’s juvenile, but it’s been the tip of the iceberg for far.

The first round was a sort of sexy version of charades. It soon became apparent that it wasn’t your regular game of charades when we realised that all the titles involved had room for sexy interpretation, as far as physically describing them went. So we’d work in our teams, guessing movies, TV shows, songs and books with titles like Moby Dick, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Blow and Commando. Not only did we have Phillip and Annie cringing their way through some of the more sexual gestures, but Daniel had a proper go at Eva in front of everyone, because she kept guessing Free Willy when the answer was actually Moby Dick. I think the kicker for him was when, straight after, when Freddie and I were up, the card we chose had Free Willy written on it, so we managed to get it in record time.