The taxi driver from the airport took one look at my suitcase and said, "You moving here or just on holiday?" I laughed politely, not realising this was his standard opening gambit with every tourist. By the time we reached Playa Blanca, I'd learned about his cousin's failed fish restaurant in Arrecife, his opinions on British breakfast habits, and precisely why he refused to drive past the old lighthouse after dark. "Ghosts," he said, completely deadpan. "Spanish ghosts. Very particular."

I tipped him too much. I always tip too much when someone tells me about ghosts.

The villa itself sat on a quiet residential street, the kind where every other house seemed to have a terracotta pot with a struggling palm and a sun-bleached lounger that had seen better decades. I fumbled with the key safe, dropped the code, dropped my phone, and somehow managed to scrape my knuckle on a wall that appeared to be made entirely of volcanic rock. Lanzarote, I reminded myself. Everything here is volcanic rock. The island is basically one big volcanic rock with tapas on top.

My neighbour appeared over the wall while I was still swearing at the bleeding. "First time?" she asked. Her name was Brenda, she was from Barnsley, and she'd been "wintering" in Playa Blanca for eleven years. "You're bleeding on the path," she observed. "That path's been here since before Franco. Don't bleed on it."

I liked her immediately.

She helped me find the actual front door, which I'd walked past twice because it was painted the exact same colour as the wall. "Architect thought he was being clever," Brenda said. "Died last year. Very clever man, apparently." She said "apparently" the way people do when they mean "not apparently at all."

Inside, the villa opened into a bright living space with white walls and terracotta floors that stayed satisfyingly cool under bare feet. French doors led to a terrace with a small pool, currently covered, and beyond that, a glimpse of sea that made me forget my throbbing knuckle entirely. I stood there like a fool, holding a bleeding hand and grinning at the Atlantic.

Brenda had followed me in without invitation. "Pool man's Thursday," she said. "Don't get in before he comes. Last bloke did, turned out there was a frog situation." She left me with a spare bin bag and the number of a doctor who "doesn't ask questions about how things happened."

I unpacked badly, too quickly, leaving clothes in wrong rooms and my toothbrush in the kitchen. The villa had that particular holiday rental smell of recent cleaning and distant other people's cooking. I found a faded guidebook in a drawer from 2007, its pages stuck together with something orange near the section about Timanfaya. I decided not to investigate.

By evening I'd walked to the nearest supermarket, where a teenager stacked shelves with the theatrical exhaustion of someone who'd rather be anywhere else. "Playa Dorada beach?" I asked. He sighed from somewhere deep in his soul and pointed left without looking up. "Twenty minutes. Don't feed the cats. They're not stray, they're just rude."

The cats, I discovered, were indeed rude. Three of them occupied a wall near the villa, watching me with the contempt of creatures who'd seen my type arrive and depart for decades. I tried to make friends with a bit of ham from my shopping. The largest one took it, bit my finger gently, and walked away without acknowledgment.

That night I sat on the terrace with a cheap bottle of wine and the distant sound of someone else's barbecue party. Brenda's lights were on next door, and through her open window I could hear her arguing with a radio programme about Spanish politics. She was losing, passionately.

I thought about the taxi driver's ghosts, the frog situation, the architect who thought he was clever. I thought about how I'd scraped my hand on an island made of hardened lava, how a cat had mugged me for ham, how I'd already been adopted by a Yorkshirewoman who wintered here and defended paths from British blood.

This was only day one. I hadn't even made it to the beach yet, hadn't seen the famous papagayo coves, hadn't done any of the things people do in Lanzarote. But I was already collecting people, or they were collecting me, and I suspected that was rather the point of coming somewhere like this. The volcano could wait. The volcano, after all, had been waiting for millions of years.

I poured another glass and listened to Brenda shout at the radio. Somewhere, presumably, the pool man was sleeping peacefully, unaware of the frog situation that preceded him. The Atlantic did whatever the Atlantic does at night. I had a week here, and already it felt like the beginning of something, or perhaps the continuation of something that had been happening in this white-walled villa long before I arrived with my bleeding hand and my overpacked suitcase.

The taxi driver had asked if I was moving here. For a moment, sitting in that warm darkness with my cheap wine and my neighbour's distant opinions, I understood why someone might.