I soon discovered that Santa Gertrudis is very pretty. Wide streets, geometrically pleasing houses, whitewashed buildings, pink bougainvillea and cafés full of laid-back people. Everything perfectly designed for the hard blue sky above. I drove around. I passed a vegan café and a Pilates studio and eventually reached a shop that looked like it sold food. A window had posters advertising beer and olive oil. I parked somewhere near the kerb at an angle that would have interested Pythagoras.
I walked the three little aisles with a basket. It was a whole new world. I felt like I was a university student again, learning how to think about the things you need to live. The autopilot had been on for decades. Since I’d been widowed, I’d hardly ever changed the weekly shop. It was quite scary to be starting afresh. I walked around. There were signs above the produce, written in chalk. Frutas y verduras ecologicas, for instance, above cardboard boxes of nectarines and mushrooms and the plumpest tomatoes I had ever seen. I put one of the tomatoes in the basket and continued down the aisle. I soon encountered a strange-looking machine next to a stack of empty bottles. The machine had a spiralling metal chute descending into a transparent cylinder. Beside it, there were a lot of oranges. I rolled a few down the chute and waited patiently as the trickle of juice slowly made it into the bottle I was holding. After a couple of minutes I had a bottle of (very) freshly squeezed orange juice. Then I filled the rest of my basket with a baguette and cheese and biscuits and coffee and washing-up liquid and shower gel and toilet roll and gin and tonic water. Above the humming of refrigerators and a fan, and quiet but bouncy pop music on a radio, I had a conversation with the lively checkout person, whose name badge read Rosella.
The shop was empty of people and Rosella was clearly in the mood for talking. Her English was great. She had lived in England – in Brighton – for a couple of years and had moved back.
‘This island is a magnet,’ she said, as she scanned the coffee. ‘Do you know Es Vedrà?’
‘Es Vedrà? No. I am new here.’
‘Ah. Well, Es Vedrà is a rock. A large high rock that sticks out of the ocean. You can see it from Cala d’Hort. A beach in the south.’
I remembered the slightly ominous feeling I’d had looking at the tall rocky islet from the plane window. ‘I think I saw it when I flew in.’
She nodded. ‘Yes. They say it is the third most magnetic point on Earth. There is something special about it there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. There are good stories and bad stories. Years and years ago there was a hermit who lived there. In a cave. A religious man. A priest. He wrote about lights he saw in the water. Lights that lit up the whole sea. And since then, they have been seen at other times. They nearly caused a plane crash once…And now the rock gives off a strange vibe. It feels scary sometimes. I always feel something is there. Inside it.’
It was quite a dramatic conversation to be having in a supermarket. I tried to be polite. ‘Oh well, it’s an interesting island.’
The Woman Who Sold the Future
I noticed a small dark tattoo on Rosella’s arm. A circle and a horizontal line that meet on the top of the vertex of a triangle. Off the horizontal line were two short upright lines on either side. Like the purest, most schematic representation of a person raising their hands.
I have never been a tattoo person. It’s a generational thing, I think. Back in my day, a tattoo meant you were a convict or a sailor or just a general miscreant. Karl liked them, or pretended to, but he’d never dared go and actually get one.
She followed my gaze. I hoped I hadn’t looked too judgemental. ‘It is the symbol for Tanit,’ she explained. ‘Goddess of the moon.’ I remembered the reference to Tanit’s Cave in Christina’s letter. I’d later learn Tanit was quite a big thing in Ibiza. The Punic goddess of the moon, yes, but also rain, fertility, dance, creation, destruction, and a thousand other things which possibly included conversations in grocery stores. ‘The ancient people believed she protected the island.’
‘It’s very nice,’ I said. Like the old person I was. I noticed some bright leaflets beside the till – flyers – advertising nightclubs.
And then she said something I wasn’t expecting. The words as bold as headlights. ‘You are Grace, aren’t you?’
I tried to look relaxed. ‘Oh yes. I am. How did you know?’
‘She told me you would be coming.’
‘Who?’ I said, ridiculously.
‘Christina.’
‘Christina, right, yes.’
‘Before she died.’
‘Obviously,’ I was so stunned I said it twice. ‘Obviously.’
She stopped seeing to my shopping and looked directly into my eyes. ‘She loved the water. She loved to dive. She had only started a few years ago. Such a tragic accident.’
‘Actually, they don’t know for certain what exactly—’
‘She told me to be nice to you. She said you are special.’
‘Right. Um. Well, I hadn’t seen her for years. Decades. We were never really that close…did you know her well?’
What I really wanted to ask was: Did you know she was going to die? After all, I had come to the island because she had died. The house was left to me because she had died. And Christina’s letter itself had implied she knew she was going to die. Yet it didn’t even hint at how. If Christina knew her death was imminent, and yet the Spanish police were looking into it, then that really did raise a host of questions.
I was attempting to piece this all together in my mind to make it make sense. It was like trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis or Goldbach’s Conjecture. It boggled the brain.
‘Yes. She lived on the island a long time. This is my parents’ shop. When I was little, she used to come here. And before she lived here she lived in Sant Antoni, I think. San Antonio. We call it by the Catalan and the Spanish. But you Brits just call it San Antonio. She used to sing in one of the hotels. She was a good singer. She always came here. She was cool. Had an aura. But she hadn’t been in so much recently. Not since she started working at the hippy market.’
‘Las Dalias,’ I said, remembering Christina’s letter.
‘Yes,’ she said, scanning the freshly squeezed orange juice. ‘That is where she spent a lot of the time.’
‘What did she sell there?’
‘El futuro.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The future…’
‘I don’t understand.’
Rosella laughed. ‘She had…become a…’ She searched for the correct way to say it in English and made an enthusiastic gesture in the air as if words were pets that could come when beckoned. ‘A psychic.’
For some reason this didn’t entirely surprise me. After all, I had seen that book back at her house. And she had been a music teacher. In my experience of music teachers, they are a little bit prone to eccentricity. And no doubt music teachers who moved to Ibiza at the tail-end of the seventies were more prone than most.
