We were due one. That’s what Sara said. A proper adult evening. No twins. No Lego underfoot. Just grown-ups, food, music that doesn’t make you want to self-harm. We’d been in Ibiza six months and hadn’t hosted anything unless you count Leo’s mate Tom sleeping on the sofa for two nights because his mum went to Mallorca with her yoga instructor. So we invited four couples from the school and one extra pair Sara met at a beach clean-up. She called them “warm energy people.” That should’ve been the warning.
I made ribs. Sara did those little goats’ cheese things she always burns but calls caramelised. The twins went to bed surprisingly easily, which in hindsight was suspicious. Leo disappeared into his room and refused to speak Spanish to anyone, on principle. The first hour was fine. Wine, crisps, someone said the house had “good flow.” But then the warm energy people, Pablo and Tilda, arrived late, barefoot, and carrying what looked like a brown growler wrapped in hemp.
They didn’t put it in the fridge. They put it on the centre of the table like a religious object. Tilda kissed it. Pablo said it was “medicine for the heart.” I thought they meant wine at first. But it wasn’t wine. It was something they’d brewed in the hills with a man called Sacha who used to work in trauma-informed finance. The word ayahuasca didn’t come up immediately. First it was “plant connection.” Then “ancestral remembering.” Then Pablo said it could help us “uncoil the parts we’ve silenced.” I said I didn’t think mine needed uncoiling, just maybe a nap and a cigarette. Nobody laughed.
Sara went full diplomatic. She thanked them, said it looked powerful, and moved the bottle to the sideboard next to the garlic press we never use. But it hung there in the room like a bomb someone forgot to defuse. Every time there was a pause in conversation, someone looked at it. Leo came down at one point to get a charger and Pablo offered him “presence water.” Leo said, “I have school,” and left without blinking.
The rest of the evening went sideways in slow motion. Tilda started crying during dessert. Pablo started singing. Not like a song—just long tones, like he was tuning himself. Someone asked if the twins would be raised “in the path,” and I said yes, the school path, with maths and grammar and mild disappointment. That was the last thing I said all night.
They stayed until two. Didn’t drink. Didn’t eat much. Just glowed and hummed and spoke about “what we’ve forgotten as men.” When they left, Sara sat on the sofa in silence for a long time, just looking at the bottle. Then she got up, opened it, sniffed, and said, “It smells like someone buried a sock.”
We didn’t drink it. She poured it down the sink. The twins came into the kitchen in the morning and asked what the brown sludge was. I told them it was a smoothie experiment that went wrong. Which is technically true.
I haven’t had a cigarette in four days. I don’t know if it’s connected. But I do feel slightly more coiled than usual.