He began to leave. I felt a kind of tidal pull. I wanted answers and he knew it.
‘Where are you going?’
He stood at the door. Turned with a smile. His teeth, even without the gap, would have been remarkable. Angled and spaced like uneven headstones. Was he a madman? Was he a murderer? Could a face tell you anything at all? Was it better to follow him, or to stay in a humid hut with no answers and an actual snake? I was thinking of every ominous thing I had heard about him, from Sabine and Rosella. And from the Guardia Civil officer whose words I clearly remembered.
Please stay away from Mr Ribas…
‘I just want to know what happened to my friend.’
‘And you will,’ he said, softly. ‘I promise. But some things can’t be told. They have to be shown. Tomorrow. Midnight.’
Tomorrow.
Midnight.
And then he was gone. And I exhaled for what seemed like the first time in twenty minutes.
The Inescapable Loneliness of Grace Winters
It was a half-hour drive back to the house, much of it over bumpy roads.
I felt tired and worried, and my ankles were the size of volleyballs. I imagined all this stress and heat was not advisable so soon after a vein op.
I wished Karl was with me. He would have enjoyed Ibiza. He would have liked the old hippies and he was better than me in the heat. He always liked an excuse to get his legs out in the sunshine. He believed wearing shorts made him a few degrees happier. He had been one of those terminally British people who gardened in their swimming shorts in April. I pictured him in his greenhouse, tending to his tomatoes, his face as red as one from hypertension. But smiling. Always smiling. A soft, faint smile that was his default expression. Not necessarily indicative of happiness but of stoicism. It was his whole philosophy really. Smile through it. Smile through the grief and pain and loss. A smile that was, I think, for Daniel. Like he felt Daniel was watching and he didn’t want Daniel to feel upset for us or uncomfortable or guilty for our grief.
It was sad, thinking about Karl and Daniel. My boys. But there was a comfort in the sadness. It is hard to explain and I don’t know if you feel the same about your mum, but I sometimes indulged my sadness. I headed towards it. Grief felt like the only way to keep close to them. So my mind headed to sad and bittersweet thoughts – even to a walk in the woods with them both thirty-six years ago, picking dandelions and buttercups – in order to have a kind of company.
I passed the go-kart track. It was a strange place to have a go-kart track, in the middle of nowhere. But it seemed popular. There were so many Ibizas, I realised. There was the family holiday go-karting, horse-riding kind of Ibiza. The party Ibiza. The hippy Ibiza. The spa hotel Ibiza. The scuba diving and beachy Ibiza. There was the expensive, yachty, Michelin-starred Ibiza. The Leonardo DiCaprio Ibiza. The nature trail, star-gazing Ibiza. The traditional Ibiza of folk dances and villages and festivals and churches and old customs. And then of course there was the local, lived, contemporary Ibiza I had caught glimpses of in supermarkets and cafés and amid the dog walkers beside the road. There was seemingly an Ibiza for everyone, except lonely grieving widows.
A line of tourists queued up for the karts. Families and groups of young men. Karl would have liked that too. So would Daniel. I thought of all the people, laughing, in holiday spirits. It all felt so fragile. In this state of mind it was hard to see any living person and not imagine the hole they would cause if they were gone. To see everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.
And then I was there. At the house that wasn’t yet a home. A house I still didn’t feel belonged to me. I opened the door and went inside and made myself a basic supper in that small brown kitchen. I drank some orange juice and ate bread and cheese and tomatoes, and it was all perfectly fine, but I couldn’t really taste any of it. My senses were even more dulled than usual. Even the fresh juice was hardly noted.
I stared at the engagement ring on my hand. At the ruby embedded in it, the second ring Karl had proposed with. The first had been an emerald.
It is funny how, at my age, the sight of something always prompts a memory of something that lay further behind it. There is no such thing as a pure present in this book of life. You can always see the words from the page before, their inky shadows darkening what is in front of you. Or at least dulling it.
A few years before I had cut my ring finger while chopping an onion. The bleeding hadn’t stopped so I’d had to go to the hospital and get the tip cauterised. They burnt the blood vessels to stop the bleeding. And now I couldn’t feel anything on the tip of the finger. So I felt like that is what had happened to me, that grief and guilt and life had cauterised me and there was nothing new to experience. Just a wound to look at and keep prodding for a sign of feeling.
It was a fragile, ragged evening, still light outside but dark and humid in the house. I switched on the TV and watched a Spanish chat show without understanding a word. I sat there. Staring at the TV, then at Christina’s books and her stack of old vinyl records, then at the pictures on the wall. I saw Alberto’s smiling gap-toothed face staring at me from the photographs.
‘What do you want?’ I asked his image.
There was no reply.
Time slipped away. I switched off the TV. Listened to the sporadic swooshing of traffic.
It was late. I lay in bed with my joint aches and ringing ears and heavy sorrows. I couldn’t sleep.
I felt at the bottom of things. I felt that if I passed peacefully away in the night it would be fine. I had thought, foolishly, that coming to Ibiza would shake things up, dust the cobwebs, reduce the mental weight. I thought, basically, what we all want to think when we step on a plane: that I was about to escape.
But no.
The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped. And that was my conclusion. The problem hadn’t been Lincoln, or the bungalow, or my situation. The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.
I wasn’t going to find out what happened to Christina. All I was doing was making a fool of myself, with added humidity. I felt tears form. A kind of progress.
What am I doing here?
And, sooner than I imagined, I was going to receive an answer.
Broken Radios
Now, I have a theory about life, and I am going to be very grand and share it with you here. My theory is an old one, but it is one I have recently found to be true.
The point of desperation is often the point of truth.
When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.
And those first few days in Ibiza brought everything up that I’d managed to keep suppressed. The grief, the despair, the solitude. I was crashing, and I was seeing myself. I was opened up like a broken radio. I was faced with my own faulty coils and circuits and transistors. All the flaws and the inconsistencies. And maybe that was it. Maybe it was because I was lying there, smashed up, paradoxically numb and in pain all at once, that it happened. Maybe when you scream in silence the help arrives silently too. Maybe the universe was listening. Maybe the signal was picked up.
I don’t know.
But something very certainly happened.
And the timing was impeccable.
Glow
