Blood, Bombs, and the Return to Mallorca

Remove was grim. South Africa had been a culture shock I hadn’t quite recovered from—and wouldn't for a while. The only thing that kept me going was the promise of August: an entire month back in Mallorca.

My mom had promised me that when we moved, I’d get to continue motorcycling. She even said she'd get me a scrambler. I found a kid at school, Andrew Trow, whose dad took him to scrambling races. But it never happened. Gloria Barclay, Bruce's mum, apparently had some cousin whose kid had died on a motorbike, and she convinced my mother it was too dangerous. So, that dream disappeared.

But Mallorca was on the horizon.

I remember staring out the plane window on final approach, watching the sun-baked fields slide past below, heart pounding. I was going home. My dad had booked a room for the three of us—yes, the three of us—at the Racquet Club Hotel. Full circle. That was where we'd lived at the very beginning of our Mallorca chapter. He was going to share a hotel room with my mum and me, despite being long separated. Why she even came, I’ll never know. She could have just sent me. But she didn’t.

We got in, dumped our bags, and I legged it. Ran out of the hotel, down the first fairway of the Son Vida golf course, crying with joy. I sprinted all the way to Juan Carlos’s house, knocked on the door, and when he opened it his face lit up like it was Christmas. “Joder, Peter!” No warning, no letters, no calls. Just me, back from the dead.

“How long are you here?” he asked. “A month,” I grinned. “Do you have a bike?” “Of course,” I lied.

Technically, my dad had promised he was taking care of my beloved Bultaco Chispa. What he’d actually done was loan it to a Danish mate for his kids to destroy. We drove over to collect it. It was wrecked. I’ve rarely felt so gutted.

Seeing my face, my dad pulled some strings and got me a replacement—not a proper trials bike, not even a Montesa. A moped. The ultimate downgrade. It didn’t stop me trying to keep up. A few days later, we were on one of our old forest tracks. I tried to take a drop I never should've attempted. The moped folded like wet cardboard, and I went over the handlebars. The rear axle smacked me in the back of the head. Blood everywhere.

Juan Carlos and the others rushed me back to the hotel, where my T-shirt soaked through with blood gave my mother the fright of her life. Off to Son Dureta Hospital. A few stitches, a mild concussion, and strict orders to rest.

Which, naturally, I ignored.

Something had shifted, though. At St. John's, I was bottom of the food chain. In Mallorca, I was back with my gang, but I wasn’t quite the same. My bike was shit. I’d already face-planted. So I did what any resourceful exile would do: pivoted to explosives.

My dad drove me into Palma to see if the old apothecary still sold ingredients for bombs. They didn’t. But they did sell serious firecrackers—thumb-sized ones in brown paper with thick black fuses. We bought a sack of them.

That night in the hotel, my dad decided to test one by placing it on a heavy glass ashtray and lighting it. The ashtray shattered across the room. Shards everywhere. Hotel room full of smoke. I was thrilled, these would do.

I ran straight to Juan Carlos with my stash. We found a piece of lead pipe in his garage, crimped one end in a vice, and stuffed the thing full of firecracker guts. Crimped the other end. Punched a hole in the side with a nail, attached a long makeshift fuse using my fly-tying skills, and made our way to a rubbish dump we knew deep in the pine forest.

We stacked soda cans into a massive pyramid—as high as we could reach. Lit the fuse. Ran.

The explosion flung mangled cans so high they were still raining down half a minute later. Some of them looked like they’d been hit with a shotgun. My leadership status: restored.

A few days later, we blew up a porcelain toilet we found behind an embankment. It shattered spectacularly.

Meanwhile, my parents stayed holed up in that hotel room for four full weeks, playing Scrabble. Occasionally, we’d go out on the boat, but for some reason, I never invited my Spanish friends along. I still don’t know why. Maybe I thought those worlds shouldn’t mix. Or maybe I didn’t want them to see my parents.

In hindsight, the weirdest thing about that trip wasn’t the pipe bomb or the head injury. It was that my parents loved me enough to co-exist for a month in a hotel room just so I could see my friends.

They never did get divorced. But by that summer, it was clear we were all just playing out the end of something. Mallorca was still magic. But the seams were beginning to show.