I saw something lying on the orange sand. Something shining. Not a necklace but a ring. The emerald ring Karl had proposed to me with in the Indian restaurant when we were students. The one I’d said no to at the time.
And just at that moment there was an oceanic roar. Then the sound of a powerful deluge flooding through the trees. It was that glowing water again. The colour of that indescribable blue.
Everything Was Gone
Everything was gone.
Rising, Swirling, Spinning
I was washed up inside that luminescent sea, desperate for breath, and I was rising, swirling, spinning, until I was still, on my back, swathed in clean sheets in a hospital bed, blinking awake.
Knowing Someone’s Name Without Knowing How
I woke up.
Still in my wetsuit but now in a clean white room, lying in bed with a pulse oximeter clipped to my left index finger.
Whatever had just happened, I was now very much in reality. A bright hospital room, complete with the scent of disinfectant and surrounded by bleeping machines. There was a thin orange stripe on the wall. And an orange chair. It’s always interesting, which countries go with which colours. Spain has a big thing for orange. Orange furniture. Orange trees. Even the earth in Ibiza is orange. Tannins from the fallen pine needles.
A nurse was there, a doctor was there, Alberto Ribas was there. They were all pleased to see me wake up. Alberto was still in his wetsuit. He looked ridiculous. I felt a deep desire to slap him. Of course, I didn’t quite know precisely what had occurred but here I was in hospital and whatever had happened was very probably his fault. And so the sparkle in his eyes wasn’t a welcome sight. It was like seeing a lit match in a bush. It was danger.
I was informed I was at the Can Misses hospital on the outskirts of Ibiza Town, and that I had been unconscious for three hours. They had already tested my lungs and to the doctor’s surprise there was no damage from the water.
‘How do you feel, physically?’ the doctor asked, in very good English.
‘Surprisingly fine,’ I said. In fact, and as far as I could tell while lying down, I felt healthier than ever. Once, decades ago, when we had taken Daniel on his one and only foreign holiday – to Corfu – we had been so happy and active, swimming, peddling pedaloes, touring olive farms – I slept better than I had ever slept in my life. And I woke every day feeling almost like a child again. And I never slept like that again, certainly not after we lost Daniel. But now I was back feeling as fresh as I had on that holiday in the eighties.
‘What do you remember before you lost consciousness?’
‘I saw a light,’ I said, realising how pathetic that sounded. I saw a light. Even Alberto seemed to flinch when I said it. Especially him.
‘What kind of light?’
I tried to think. ‘I’m sorry, Paula, it’s hard to explain. A moving light. A cloud and then a sph—’
The doctor went very still. As if I had said something wrong. ‘Sorry. How do you know my name is Paula?’
‘Your name badge,’ I said.
She gave me a suspicious look, placed a stray strand of hair behind her ear. ‘I’m not wearing a name badge.’
This flummoxed me. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I must have heard them talking while I was asleep. I’d heard something on the radio about that. About how much we take in while we are asleep without realising.
Alberto was staring at me.
‘Do you have a history of epilepsy?’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘Well, my grandfather had seizures.’
She nodded. ‘Migraines?’
‘Yes. I have had a few of those.’
She nodded again. ‘This matches the account we have been given by the gentleman.’ She gestured to Alberto. ‘He said that you had a kind of fit and that he had to carry you out of the water. Your blood oxygen levels are very good, but we will need to do some more tests…’
Spikes
Alberto was told to wait in the reception area. He had brought my clothes along to the hospital and I changed into them. They did a blood test. They tested my blood pressure, which was fine. Then they did an electroencephalogram, which looks for any unusual electric activity in the brain. The doctor stuck little sensors to my head, with a kind of paste to seal them on, and stared at squiggly moving lines on a screen. The lines were clearly more frantic than they should be.
She pointed at the screen. ‘These spikes right here are very steep and close together…’
‘So what does that mean?’
The doctor looked at me, and as she caught my eye, I felt like I knew everything about her, like she was an open window, and I could see everything in the room. I saw memories as clear as scars. I could see her carefully talking to her ill brother during his most recent episode of paranoia. I could see her in the Plaza de España in Seville, smiling and holding hands with a husband she now detested. I could see her walking her dog in winter along a deserted Ses Variades, the sunset strip in San Antonio, passing the closed Café del Mar and crying about her dying mother. I could see her on the toilet, worried about a new mole on her forearm. I could see her in her parked car, hunched over the wheel, wondering how she was going to get through another working day. Everything was there, instantaneously. I understood it all but didn’t know how. It was like a feeling I’d once had at the Louvre, when I walked into the gallery of antiquities, full of Greek sculptures, with the Venus de Milo there at the far end of the hall. It was a sudden absorption of intensity. It was too much but also, somehow, entirely natural. Karl had a theory that art and music and everything that ever existed were somehow inside us. A good song or a good piece of sculpture was good because it spoke to something already there within us. Well, that was what it was like. Staring at that doctor’s face was like walking into a gallery of thoughts. And I knew every single one of them like I knew my own.
La Presencia
I was sent for an MRI scan.
There was something about hospitals. Something that made you think of the future and the past all at once. They smelt of school, but more so. The corridors were like a maze and there were arrowed signs everywhere.
Triatge. Radiografia. Neurologia. Ultrasò. Urgències.
I sat in the reception area with Alberto in his wetsuit. He was eating crisps he had just acquired from a vending machine. He is a good man. I had no idea why that thought had popped in my head, and I tried to ignore it. There was another man sitting in there. A frail elderly man smartly dressed in a short-sleeve shirt tucked into belted trousers. He had a dignified smile, a trying-to-be-calm smile. I smiled back at him. The kind of fragile smile you share in hospital waiting areas.
‘I have made a mistake,’ Alberto said, with quiet seriousness.
‘Sorry?’
