I saw hills, horses, beaches, orchards, churches, salt marshes, sand dunes, caves, coves, cliffs, watchtowers.
I saw an old abandoned nightclub from the seventies, now covered in plants and graffiti.
I saw the giant sundial at the deserted beach at Cala Llentia.
I absorbed the quiet amid the pines at the peak of Sa Talaia.
I spotted a kingfisher.
Everywhere was beautiful.
Most of it, anyway.
But I felt empty.
It was a common feeling, or a common unfeeling.
Anhedonia.
I was blocked.
You see, the problem was this: I sincerely believed I wasn’t a good person who deserved happiness.
I had become who I believed I was. A terrible human. Believing yourself to be bad is very often a prelude to doing bad things. And I had felt that way since Daniel died. He had died on a Saturday, when I was not where I should have been. He had finished watching Superman II on TV and had gone out in the rain and he had wanted me to take him into town. His dad was at the pub, which was where he went every Saturday afternoon in those days. But I hadn’t gone into town because it was raining, and I couldn’t be bothered. So he went out on his bike in a bad mood and I’d stayed in, reading catalogues. I was browsing for hair dryers when my son turned onto Wragby Road and straight into a lorry.
And it was me. It was my fault. It could have so easily not happened if I’d simply said, ‘Hold on, Daniel, I’ll just get the umbrella, then we’ll go to the shops together.’ And that guilt got into my soul and convinced me I was faulty at a fundamental level. And when you believe that, you act on it. Just as Superman knows he is the person who saves people from falling over Niagara Falls, and so continues to do good deeds, I was the person who let the person I loved more than any other die.
Don’t get me wrong. My capacity for guilt pre-dated Daniel. I was always prone to it, even as a child at St Cuthbert’s Catholic school wearing my St Christopher. When you had a childhood surrounded by saints it was easy to feel like a sinner. A teacher once told me if prayers aren’t reaching God, it was because they had been blocked by your own sin. And my parents – who had wanted a boy – always treated me like I wasn’t quite enough. But Daniel’s death solidified guilt as my defining feature. Something I had to carry for ever.
And so, a few years after Daniel died – but still decades ago – I had done something else. I’d been unfaithful. And I never told anyone about it, least of all Karl. And after he died the guilt just grew.
Aidan Jenkins. Mr Jenkins. The history teacher from before your time. After his divorce he had flirted with me in the staff room and in the car park and in corridors. He sensed a chaos inside me. He sensed I was in a permanent spin and could go almost anywhere with the right push. And I had flirted back. It was as thrilling as it was terrible. And the more I scolded myself for being a bad person, the closer I came. And then there was the fateful time we bumped into each other in the stock room.
This was the start of it.
We became clandestine creatures doing something unspeakable amid the piles of exercise books and rows of staplers and surplus copies of Watership Down and Brave New World. And then it happened again. He liked the drama of it. The cliché of it. The teachers’ sex-in-the-stock-room fantasy made real.
(Paper would forever smell like sin.)
There are no real excuses except feelings. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca believed the greatest punishment was to have desire and not declare it out loud. And for that brief moment in my married life I had been burning with desire. Not for Aidan Jenkins necessarily. But for escape. For something that wasn’t grief. It felt like Karl had left me even as he stayed with me. At times he had blamed me. It was like there were ten thousand miles between us even as we sat on the same sofa. I needed air. Something. Anything that wasn’t this lonely stuckness.
And Aidan was single and good-looking and when he spoke I felt his voice reverberate through me. I felt it on my skin. I felt something electric that was exciting. He was also quite heavy with his signals. I was selfish and depressed and couldn’t handle the weight of things. So I acted like an idiot.
I say all this to help you.
Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.
So I am here to say this: I like you, you were a good pupil, you were always kind to me and the others in the class. I remember there was a mix of confidence and meekness to you. You were never afraid to raise your hand if you knew the answer. And you didn’t hesitate when everyone giggled at the teacher’s pet as you recited pi to the first thirty digits. But there was a humility there too. You bowed your head. You said sorry when you didn’t need to. You said sorry for things you hadn’t even done. I always find it interesting when people do that. It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.
Your email was heartfelt. And what I want you to know is that I like you enough that I don’t need you to like me back. I want to be honest with my own mistakes to help you forgive your own.
You wrote in the email that you let your girlfriend down and she broke up with you. It was a bit vague of you, but it also told me everything. It is hard to be young and flawed, especially in a judgemental age. (Of course, every age is a judgemental age, as humans stay humans; it’s just that we move the judgements around like furniture when we want the room to feel bigger.) The one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly. Every single person on this planet is a context and the circumstances of that context can never be seen fully. We are all mysteries, even to ourselves. This world can brutalise us in a myriad of ways, not just the obvious ones. A person can look smart and successful, with a tie and a smile and a shining life and fancy education, yet still hear a distant father screaming abuse in their ear as they drink or gamble or screw that pain away, unable to break the cycle.
I am here to tell you that at some point everyone – and I mean everyone – lets someone down. They might not do it as soap-operatically as me in that stock room but there are a million other ways. But in truth I feel I am particularly guilty. I not only feel responsible for our son’s death, but I was unfaithful to the only man I ever loved.
Anyway, I never really allowed myself any more pleasure after the fling. Or even during it. I’d exhausted my supply, I decided. I would close my eyes afterwards in that stock room and see Daniel’s bloodied face as he lay on the tarmac, as if my soul was solving the equation, transposing a plus from one side to a minus on the other. So, for years, I had barred myself at some deep level from any kind of pleasure again. Even innocent varieties.
I suppose the difference was that it was one thing feeling no pleasure while sitting on a sofa at home and quite another while doing things where pleasure was expected. And I had never been to a place where pleasure was more expected than this Spanish island.
Happiness in June in Ibiza was as common as equations in algebra, but I couldn’t feel any of it.
I was missing Karl. I was missing Daniel. I was missing who I had once been, decades before. The person Christina had known. The me who never wallowed.
I wondered if that me was still there. I wondered if I would ever find her.
Hippy Market
Head to the Las Dalias hippy market…and say hello to my friend Sabine.
That is what her letter had said. So, having nothing else to do, I did this.
The market was very busy. It was how I imagined San Francisco to have been in 1967. Lots of people with wide-eyed expressions. Incense floating in the air. Stalls selling Balinese jewellery (including ‘opal healing bracelets’), Indian sarongs, white tunics, red-and-black flamenco skirts. Someone was at a stall offering Tarot readings. Someone else was playing Joni Mitchell and smoking a sizeable joint. I saw another stall full of clothes. They were the bright kind. The kind Christina owned. I stood staring at a tie-dyed swimsuit. I had failed to bring a swimsuit with me. I wondered briefly what I would look like in it. Ridiculous, I should imagine. But then I bought it, primarily to ask where I would find someone called Sabine.
‘Over there,’ said the friendly young man behind the stall.
He pointed to a woman sitting behind a table full of paintings of Ibizan landscapes. She was part-covered in shade from the fishing net that hung above her stall, but she was still striking. Wild white hair, with flowers in it, a long floaty white dress and about seventy bracelets per wrist.
Sabine spoke English with a gentle German accent, and in words so slow and considered I felt she was in a permanent state of meditation. Sometimes she even closed her eyes. I could have really done with a seat. My legs may have been free of varicose veins, but they weren’t trained for detective work.
