And, for some unfathomable reason, I, your retired maths teacher, said: ‘Oh. Thank you. That would be splendid.’
Larger Than Thought
I drove to Cala d’Hort. I parked in the dusty car park and passed a sign by a restaurant that said PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE ANY VALUES IN THE CAR, CAN BE STOLEN.
I reached Atlantis Scuba and looked around for Alberto but he wasn’t there. There was only the black-and-white wide-horned goat, Nostradamus.
He was outside the Atlantis Scuba hut, enjoying a bowl full of oats on the ochre dirt path. Alberto had been right when he said that Nostradamus was a misanthropic soul. His misanthropy wafted towards me along with his musky scent.
It was alarming to realise I could understand him. The thoughts of a goat are difficult to translate into any kind of human language. But I will say that the note of misanthropy is not just grumpiness but a kind of humorous grumpiness. Goats are forever looking at things from an angle. Like they don’t quite fit in and they are just getting on with it. Alberto had also given him the name Nostradamus, I realised, as an ironic gesture. Goats didn’t care about the future. The future and the past were irrelevant to goats. They were always in a disgruntled state of nowness. I left him to his grains and walked to the beach and sat fully dressed on the sand near one of the restaurants.
Everywhere I looked I saw people and felt their thoughts and emotions. I wished Karl was here so I could tell him about all this. That is one great thing about having someone by your side. They are a shock absorber to the madness of experience. And no experience was madder than the one I was currently living.
A boy playing in the sand was wondering who would win in a fight, five hundred small cats or one single tiger. His mother was fantasising about a young man walking across the sand while her husband tried to focus on the thriller he was reading. A rogue CIA agent was in on a plan to kill the President.
I stared out at the rock of Es Vedrà, and its smaller, flatter sister islet of Es Vedranell. The larger islet loomed over the smaller like a protective parent.
I stared at the water around them.
As my mind now seemed to know almost everything, it was only the sea that wasn’t instantly knowable. It still retained its mystery, and it was calming just to stare at it. It was the one thing that seemed larger than my thoughts.
Impossible Life
Sitting on the sand, I allowed myself a quiet chuckle over how ridiculously unlikely my life had become. Or maybe it had always been unlikely. Maybe that’s the truly ridiculous thing, the way we don’t even blink at the sheer improbability of our lives here on this rock spinning through space. The way we exist out of nothing, the way the whole universe exists out of nothing, and here we are, the impossible something that made existence out of the void. Impossible life. A fluke to be cherished.
The Goat Incident
I was sitting quite close to one of the restaurants, and pretty soon I was distracted by the various conversations of the diners, a babbling brook of different languages foaming into each other. I heard two elderly voices I recognised instantly from the plane. It was the old couple who had been studying their guidebook on Ibizan walks. They were eating fish stew and sitting beside a lobster tank and planning their afternoon hike to a nearby Roman settlement.
The woman read a bit from her guidebook. Even though they didn’t say their names, I now knew them. They were called Olive and Michael and they were from a village in the Cotswolds. They had been together most of their lives, and Olive was trying not to think of Michael’s biopsy results that would be waiting for them when they returned home to England. Michael was trying not to think of that too, but he had a bad feeling, and was trying to keep it together, and I felt the exhaustion of that. And I saw the love they had; it seemed the colour of burnt orange, a setting sun, warm and more beautiful for its decline beneath a horizon. Maybe I’m imagining this, I thought to myself. Yes. Maybe I had imagined it all. But if I was imagining it, then why was I also predicting it? Like I had done with the cars. Every next sentence. The moment the waiter would come. Picturing the waiter before turning around to see him. If it was imagination, so was the entire world.
It was quite terrifying really, to have this new sense. I tried to focus on the sea again but heard a shot. Very faint and distant, and no one else seemed to pay any attention to it. I felt a twist in my gut. I saw a boat beyond the pedaloes. To my eye it was just a white speck in the distance, beyond the rock of Es Vedrà. But I pictured it more clearly. I saw it as clearly as if I was floating right beside it. It had a small cabin and the words Eighth Wonder on the side. I remembered the billboard over the road from the house. For an Eighth Wonder resort at Cala Llonga, which was miles from here.
A man was on the deck of the boat. With the naked eye it was almost impossible to see him. Like isolating a strand of hair on a person’s head who is a good distance away.
But I could see the man without seeing him. The way we see memories without actually seeing them. This was a memory that was happening in the present, and not to me. He was squinting under the heavy sun as he stared through the scope of his rifle, across the water, to a goat standing amid the steep limestone of that mysterious rock, Es Vedrà. The goat was a different colouring to that of Nostradamus. Brown and white, not black and white, and its horns were smaller. The man could see through the telescopic lens that the goat was staring directly towards them. The creature had just witnessed another goat die and realised what was happening.
The man was called Nicolau. He was deeply troubled. He was thinking of what his girlfriend would say. Not that his girlfriend would know. He was, after all, under the strictest of orders not to say anything to anyone.
Nicolau had heard somewhere on the internet that goats were very intelligent animals and could recognise human faces and expressions. He hoped he was far enough away for his face to be unseen. He didn’t want to be doing this, but his employer paid well, and this action was sanctioned by the local government. They were to clear the whole rock of animals. It was unclear as to why, as his boss hadn’t told him. But it was obviously for the development – though how a hotel could be built on such a challenging rock, he had no idea. And so, as he felt his colleague Hugo’s hand on his shoulder, he knew what he was about to do.
And I too, paradoxically alone on that crowded beach, knew what he was about to do. And for some reason, I couldn’t let him do it. Because as well as knowing what the man was feeling, I also knew what the goat was feeling. I felt her grief at the death of her fellow. It was like a throbbing darkness. I closed my eyes, as if about to make a wish.
And then I was inside Nicolau’s mind. I was not only seeing it but swaying it.
He held his breath as he went for the trigger. He tried to press down but he couldn’t. He wondered if there was something wrong with the gun. He checked to see if the safety catch was on, but no. He tried again and this time realised it wasn’t the gun that was at fault.
The other man – Hugo – was laughing at him. He wanted to know what the problem was.
Hugo shook his head and took the gun now, but this was harder. I couldn’t get inside his mind. There was a closed door.
Don’t do it, I told him. The voice of his conscience. Don’t pull the trigger. Keep the goat alive.
He blinked and blinked again and shook me away, out of his head, confused as to why he was suddenly having these problems. Then I got momentarily distracted. The young boy near me was starting to wail because his sister had kicked his sandcastle over.
And then the shot came. Even if I’d had the best vision in the world, I wouldn’t have seen it, as it was on the other side of Es Vedrà. And yet I saw it, more vividly perceived in my mind than the beach and the collapsed sandcastle. The goat fell, down the side of the cliff, fast and heavy, hitting the rock two more times before making a final splash.
I felt my gut wrench again.
And Hugo just stared at the water a moment longer, lost in remorse.
The Lobsters
I sat there, cross with myself. I had tried to prevent a creature dying and had failed. And, as I stared at the collapsed sandcastle, the voices from the restaurant started to flow back to me. I heard Spanish voices, Catalan voices, English voices, Dutch voices, and also felt the thoughts and memories around them, or contained within them, like each word was a parcel around a thought that I could instantly unwrap. But there was one voice, one mind, that stood out to me. The voice was harsh, brittle, British. The thoughts were harsh too; I felt them drift to me like smoke.
‘Excuse me,’ said the voice, coming from a man two tables along from the Cotswolds couple. ‘We discovered this in our paella.’
The waiter looked at him, confused. The man held his stare.
‘It’s a hair,’ the man – his name I sensed was Brian – explained, holding the strand up like it was a historical artefact, like he had just plucked it from the burial crypt of Cleopatra. ‘And look, it isn’t any of our hair.’
Brian was not backing down, just as he didn’t back down when he had pushed for redundancies at the insurance firm he worked for back home in London.
‘Oh, sir, I am so sorry. I will tell the kitchen.’
The waiter he was talking to was a man called Vicente. He had a sadness to him. A kind of homesickness that was part of him even before he moved to Spain from Ecuador. An inability to feel anchored. I closed my eyes and saw a fresh memory of his, from yesterday, when he was in his kitchen in Cala Bassa on the west of the island, distant construction noise growling through the window as he stared at the letter from his landlord saying she was selling the small apartment building to a travel company and that he would have to find a new place to live. I knew all this before I even turned to see his tall skinny frame bending forward in a sort of bowing gesture, like a courtier to a tyrannical king.
‘We won’t be able to eat that. We won’t be paying for it.’
