‘Like a fortune teller?’
‘Yes. A fortune teller. I think it was for tourists most of the time. Not the local people. I never asked her too much about it…’
‘Oh. Right.’ And then, without thinking, I asked something instinctively. ‘Did she tell you she was going to die?’
‘No!’ she said, quickly. And then a sceptical expression twisted her mouth. ‘No.’
‘But she told you I was coming?’
‘Sí. She said you were coming to stay in the house. She told me what you looked like and wanted me to be friendly.’
Old, I guessed. She told her I was old.
‘And how did she seem, when you last saw her?’
‘Okay. Quiet. But okay.’
A customer entered the shop. A woman in a floaty white dress carrying a woven straw bag.
‘Hola, Camila,’ Rosella said, as I started to pack my groceries. They had a brief exchange in Spanish or Catalan or both. Then she turned back to me and resumed scanning my shopping.
‘Who was her husband?’ I asked Rosella.
‘Johan. He was just an old Dutch hippy. They divorced years ago. He moved back to Amsterdam. That is when she stopped singing, I think.’ Then Rosella dropped a bombshell. ‘She had a daughter back in the early nineties. With Johan. She lives in Amsterdam now.’
I remembered the picture of the little girl on the wall. The one holding a teddy bear.
Again, the same thought popped up. Why me? Why didn’t she leave the house to her daughter? Or at least to someone who knew her well enough to know she had a daughter?
‘Did she see her daughter?’
Rosella smiled as she put through the last of the shopping. I felt like I had told a joke without realising it. ‘Everyone sees her daughter.’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
And then Rosella pointed through the shop door’s window, across the street. ‘Her name is Lieke. Lieke van der Berg. She is very successful. A musician. And a DJ. She still lives in Amsterdam but arrives to Ibiza every summer. She is…over there.’
She pointed again. I looked through the glass of the door to the nearest of the two visible roadside billboards. One of them featured the face of a young woman, exotically lit in blue, with a bobbed bleached haircut.
LIEKE. AMNESIA. EVERY WEDNESDAY.
‘She is playing Amnesia this year.’ Rosella arrived at the correct assumption that I wasn’t an Amnesia type. ‘It is one of the big clubs.’
I stared a little longer at the billboard. Give or take a few details, I could have been staring at Christina in 1979. Maybe the ambition to become Blondie was fulfilled, but hopped a generation. And maybe that was why the house wasn’t left to her. A superstar hardly needed a roadside shack.
‘Oh. Wow. So she is a big deal.’
‘Sure is. But I don’t think Christina thought so.’
‘Oh, did Christina not get on with her?’
Rosella shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think there was some pain. I think they had grown apart. When she talked about her she had tears in her eyes. She said she had tried to contact her. Families, eh?’
‘Yes. Families.’
Something rose up from the depths. The day before my son’s funeral. Karl with tears in his eyes slamming the kitchen cabinet. ‘Why did you let him out of your sight?’
‘I think diving made her happy. Have you ever been?’
The question embarrassed me. I don’t know why. ‘No. No.’
‘Christina said there was nothing so calming in the world as diving. You forget everything in the water. She thought you would love it.’
This seemed peculiar. I mean, why had Christina told someone in a supermarket – someone who spoke near-perfect English – to get me to go diving? It felt a little too much. It felt, just slightly, like a set-up. But what I was being set up for, I didn’t know. Yet Rosella herself seemed warm and natural.
‘I am seventy-two. I am too old. And I forget everything just by waking up.’
Rosella laughed, but in the opposite of a hurtful way.
‘No!’ She said some Spanish words. ‘Come on. Too old? Can you swim?’
‘I used to love swimming. But it has been many years.’ Then I tried a bit of Spanish. ‘Muchos muchos años.’
‘Well, then. If you can swim and if you can breathe, you can still dive. You still look quite strong.’
I was being patronised but very gently, so I went with it. ‘Do I?’
‘¡Sí! ¡Está claro! Are you here on your own?’
