‘Of course. I am so sorry.’
‘It’s really not good enough, I’m afraid.’
Vicente looked blank for a moment. This infuriated Brian. His jaw clenched, he was angry, but it was a strange kind of anger, viewed like a purple cloud in my mind, a cloud of pomposity and superiority and the desire to hurt.
‘Are you listening to me?’
Brian’s wife had her hand on his arm as Brian waved his fork. I tried to access her mind, but it was like trying to see a person in deep shadow.
‘Yes, absolutely. I will report this to the kitchen and—’
‘And what?’
I felt anger inside me. It swirled in my mind, and normally such emotion has nowhere to go. It stays, it circles, it picks up dead leaves. But of course I was no longer normal. My mind now was equivalent to a body, and just as bodies can move around in physical space this mind of mine suddenly seemed able to actively roam into other places and ignore barriers the way the wind ignores traffic lights. In other words, the information I was getting wasn’t just being received. It could be played with. I could pull against it. Like the energy of a wish now came with power.
And as Brian kept talking, waving his fork at the poor waiter – about seeing the manager, about health and hygiene regulations, about refusing to pay for their entire meal, about leaving a one-star review on TripAdvisor, about how Vicente should feel ashamed to work for a place like this – I felt a wish rise up.
The wish was this: Shut up, Brian.
It was a very consistent wish. Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up, Brian, just shut up.
‘I mean,’ said Brian, as I saw nothing but purple in my mind, ‘this just isn’t on. It really isn’t. To expect people to pay seventeen bloody euros for a—’
And that was it. The purple changed to ocean blue. Brian stopped talking. I can’t emphasise how astounding it was. My thoughts made manifest. The internal shaping the external with such ease.
His lips were sealed closed. He was trying to talk but he couldn’t. He started making a strange humming sound, as though he had a particularly severe case of constipation.
‘Brian?’ said his wife. ‘Brian, are you okay? Brian?’
Charlotte. Her name was Charlotte. It came to me, fleetingly, amid all this commotion of my own making.
But Brian wasn’t okay, because now the fork he was holding seemed to have a life of its own. He seemed to be struggling with it in the same way he was struggling to talk. Like it was a living thing. Like it was somehow against him.
I knew nothing about telekinesis at this point. I didn’t know that iron is a particularly receptive material for telekinetic powers, and as stainless steel is an alloy made primarily with iron, a simple light item of cutlery like a fork is easy to manipulate. That was a surprise. The fork he’d wagged at the waiter was now being jabbed, by his own hand, into his thigh. Oh no. Poor Brian.
And everyone in the restaurant stopped drinking their wine and stopped dunking bread into aioli and stared.
Charlotte was a strange fusion of shock and concern and anger. ‘Brian, what the hell are you doing?’
And it was then that I let go. And Brian let go too, his mouth unclenching and opening wide to howl as he stared down at the fork sticking out of his leg. ‘Faaaaaaaggggghhhh,’ he said.
And as he screamed in pain, I felt my own internal scream as I saw Brian as a child. He had fallen into a bed of nettles. No. No, he had been pushed. And I could see the other children laughing at him as he scrambled to get up, they were taunting him, and as I saw this the fork flew out of his leg and across the floor and Brian’s wife and the waiter tried to calm him. I felt guilty. But I was also distracted by something else. A feeling of total fear and claustrophobia and anguish. And I realised it wasn’t coming from me. It wasn’t even coming from Brian, or the waiter.
It was coming from the lobster tank.
The terror built inside me, and my heart was racing and my breathing was suddenly very laboured. I once heard something on the radio about how crustaceans, including lobsters, feel pain and seek out safe spaces when stressed.
The only time my body had known this much intensity as a result of my mind was when I had kneeled on the tarmac on Wragby Road, howling and praying for Daniel to still be alive.
I stood up and walked away, across the sand, towards the car, but the feeling from the creatures in the tank was becoming too much. The sensation of a lobster in a tank is panic fused with a tragic sense of interruption. They have an enzyme that protects their DNA. Telomerase, it is called. I don’t know why I knew it, but I knew it. But more importantly I felt their tragedy. These are creatures that don’t age. They could be immortal if we left them to it. They don’t weaken naturally. They’d had their infinity stolen, and no one wants their infinity stolen. They wanted to be free. And I wanted them to be free. I felt their yearning and their powerlessness. I felt it overwhelm me now and I was turning again, towards the restaurant. I stood on the path between the dining area and the beach, staring at the creatures in the tank, in a kind of trance. I must have looked like a madwoman.
The feeling was building and building and growing and growing. Then the glass cracked and burst. A torrent of water, complete with shards of glass and a dozen hard-shelled decapods, suddenly animated, was unleashed across the tiled floor.
The diners, who had already become a bit agitated over Brian and the fork, were now in palpable shock. They stood up, some even stood on their chairs in order to escape the lobsters.
The crustaceans started walking on their spindly legs, amid the chaos, towards the beach. Their claws suddenly free from their bands, their antennae twitching wildly. They had a clear run, past the various waiters, who were occupied with pacifying Brian and various wailing children while also trying to sweep and mop some order back into their picturesque seaside restaurant. I saw one of the lobsters exactly as I had seen it in my mind, running across the sand.
What have I done? I thought as I pulled myself out of the trance.
‘Too much,’ came a voice behind me. I turned to see Alberto, standing right there on the walkway. Dodgy denim shorts and an old-devil smile. ‘Now,’ he said, staring at the lobster scuttling across the beach. ‘Please. Follow me. This time, no questions.’
And I was about to ask one, but he was already walking away.
The Scent of Alberto Ribas
‘This is nonsense,’ I was saying. We were in the Fiat. I was following the chaotic hand flaps that passed for Alberto’s directions. And yet I seemed to understand everything and could absorb the whole landscape with a single glance. Nature sang with beauty everywhere I looked, and I was absolutely terrified. ‘This is nonsense.’
‘And yet,’ said Alberto, patting the hairy chest beneath his open shirt, ‘this is not nonsense.’
‘I don’t want this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want this power. Why am I feeling like this? Two days ago, I was dead inside. Empty. I couldn’t feel anything. And now it is the opposite. I feel everything. And I didn’t sleep at all last night.’
‘Yes, this is a usual side-effect. I haven’t slept for more than one hour a night in fifteen years. Very often I don’t sleep at all. Christina used to sleep ten minutes a night. It’s like we are dolphins now.’
‘Dolphins?’
‘Yes. Dolphins. I used to study them. The thing with dolphins is that they split their brain in two. So part of their brain sleeps while the other part stays awake. Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. Actually, most sea mammals do this. And humans are on the sleepier side of mammals. Elephants and giraffes hardly sleep at all. But it is nothing to worry about. In real terms, you have just extended your waking life by about a third. That’s good news, right?’
‘Don’t you think you should have told me all this? You know, before?’
