Leaving Mallorca

I arrived in Mallorca as a terrified five-year-old, clutching my mother’s hand and trying not to dissolve into panic. I left at twelve, slightly taller, slightly more sunburnt, and just as terrified—only now I was better at hiding it.

Those seven years reshaped me in ways I didn't have language for at the time. I learned to speak Spanish fluently. I made friends. I formed a gang. I got a motorbike. I dove for octopus and almost electrocuted myself. I discovered adrenaline, affection, betrayal, and what happens when you mix magnesium with saltpetre. I kissed girls, caught lobsters, and found ancient coins in castle ruins and golf course dirt.

In time, Mallorca became home in the truest sense of the word. The smell of pine forests in the heat. The sting of saltwater on sunburnt skin. The freedom of tearing down a hillside on a Bultaco Chispa. It seeped into my bones. For all the chaos in the background—my father’s affair, my mother’s quiet unravelling, the ever-present hum of anxiety—there was something golden in those years. Something I belonged to.

Which is what made it so painful to leave.

It wasn’t just a change of address. It was a dismantling. I’d spent years stitching together a new life, transferring my loyalty stitch by careful stitch from South Africa to Mallorca. And now it was being ripped away. We were going back to Johannesburg—to the country I’d been born into, but not one I remembered fondly.

Back in Mallorca, I remember telling a classmate, “My dad thinks Jimmy Carter will be good for South Africa.” I parroted it earnestly, without understanding the subtext. Without knowing, really, what “South Africa” meant outside of being the place I used to live. What I didn’t grasp then—what I only started to unravel years later—was that my existence, my safety, my family's wealth, had all been made possible by a brutal system that treated most of the country’s population as invisible.

Now, as an adult, I look back on that era with a kind of emotional vertigo. I remember everything: the fear, the freedom, the firework summers. But I also hear my brother, just recently, explaining to his son’s Danish girlfriend that “apartheid was necessary because the blacks didn’t know how to run a country.” I hear it and want to retch. Because the child who left South Africa weeping now lives with the knowledge that much of what felt secure and normal was underpinned by injustice. That my father’s escape, my mother’s sorrow, my motorbike adventures—all played out in a world arranged to suit people like us.

Does that make me loyal? Or just afraid of change?

I still don’t know.

But I do know this: Mallorca gave me beauty and grief in equal measure. It gave me stories. It gave me escape. And it gave me, maybe for the first time, the feeling of having something to lose.

And I did lose it.

More than once.

But that’s another story.