‘I would like to go again,’ she told the man operating the machine and put down coins.

Every night, she went to a different club, each one a whole new solar system. She did complicated dancing. The music was loud, harsh and she knew it as the music from her past – music of abandoned houses, no parental supervision, reckless parties. She threw back electric colour after electric colour. The stamps of the clubs remained on her wrists all week, unwashed by the seawater. She re-adjusted her bikini in the dark. It was nylon. One night, she met a stag party and, without knowing why, stayed with them for hours. They cut up lines and shared them with her.

‘I’m in exile,’ she shouted over the music.

They nodded as if this was profound.

She woke up that morning, the Wednesday, in a heap on her balcony. She was really, despite the sun, attached to the green coat, especially now it came with extra layers of dirt.

On her fifth day, she went to the hotel buffet. She had her first taste of a fizzy drink that was close to champagne. ‘This,’ she announced seriously to an empty room, ‘is all I will ever drink now.’ That morning she woke up on the cement of her bed beside a man she had no recollection of meeting.

‘Are you having a good holiday?’ she asked.

‘I work here.’

It was the receptionist. He took her out in his beat-up car. She pushed the seat back and stuck her head out the window. She watched the sun set, sitting on a rock.

‘It’s so beautiful on earth,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen much of the outside world.’

‘Have you been in prison?’

‘Sort of.’

She waded out into the water. It was clearer even than the water outside the hotel. ‘I’m trying to figure out who I am,’ she shouted back at the receptionist.

The receptionist thought for a while. Lucy could see him thinking on the rock. ‘I have to get back to the desk now,’ he said.

That night, her second last, she walked home from the club through the crowds and rubbish-filled streets. All the apartments looked broken down; the town was angry and tense. It looked like a mouth with teeth removed. She went for a burger. She chose an option from the menu above her head, laid out in flat illustration. She spent a long time at the till. When she sat down an older man caught her eye. His face said, ‘I just want to talk to you. What’s wrong with that?’

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘I’m on holidays.’

‘What are you really doing here?’

Lucy put down her food. ‘I’m letting my life fall apart.’

There was something demonic about him. He had shimmied out of a dark corner somewhere. His reflection seemed to move around the restaurant.

‘That’s more like it,’ he said.

Outside on the street, amid the giggles and the shrieks and the dull noise, she bent over with stomach cramps. She bought a bottle of vodka, opened all the doors and windows in her hotel room and listened to the other lost souls, pounding away above and below her. The lift moved up and down, letting people in and out. She thought about waking up beside her ex. Even when she wasn’t thinking about him, she was thinking about him. She thought about waking up alone. She thought about not waking up at all. She passed out as the voices continued to float up to her room.