It was almost impossible to make out the A, the Y and the N; she was probably the only person capable of still deciphering the name. The hull looked rotten, the mooring rope worn, the keel split. No oars, no sail, no engine. The boat looked like an escaped animal that had had a noose looped around its neck and then been forgotten about. At least that was Clotilde’s impression, as she held back the tears that came to her at the sight of this new wreck abandoned on the road of her journey into nostalgia.

The music suddenly stopped. For a moment, the beach was plunged into darkness, before a green laser machine-gunned the crowd and the strobe turned them into epileptic zombies.

Maria-Chjara appeared on the catwalk wearing a long sequined sheath dress, quite decent, apart from the revealing cleavage.

A synthesiser provided the rhythm for her first few dance moves, before her lips approached the microphone to sing the first few notes of ‘Future Brain’, the global hit by Den Harrow, the king of eighties Italian disco … a song completely forgotten ever since.

Or at least that’s what Clotilde thought.

The crowd immediately joined in, chanting the words.

Some hits last forever.

Since returning to Corsica, Clotilde hadn’t been back to Oscelluccia beach. Too many questions haunted her now. Why, since this bit of paradise had always belonged to Cassanu Idrissi, had her grandfather allowed Cervone to put up this squalid nightclub here? Why was this boat still floating here, abandoned and rusty? Why was anyone tolerating this noise that sounded like a bad drug, this mesmerised crowd, these hypnotic lights? Why hadn’t silence won? If it didn’t win here, on Oscelluccia beach, where could it win?

Why hadn’t a big bad wolf come over to this straw house on the beach, a local wolf who was friends with her grandfather, no need even for a balaclava or a bomb, a jerry-can or a lighter, all you’d have to do was blow it down. All it would have taken was a bit more wind; this wind which, rather than sweeping away the straw hut, was carrying the decibels all the way to Calvi.

Maria-Chjara continued. Under the spotlights, with all the shadows and the lights, with all that make-up, it would have been impossible to guess her age.

Forty-five. Precisely. Clotilde knew.

Maria-Chjara was extremely confident. The songs flew by one after another. Italian, English, French, Spanish.

Valou appeared and disappeared again.

Clotilde was getting bored.

After a ‘Tarzan Boy’ continued the endless call and response of the sandy choir, waking up every mammal from the Pelagos animal sanctuary to Monaco, the lights suddenly became less garish, the synths faded away and Maria-Chjara murmured into the mike with a strong Italian accent.