‘There is a flight to Gatwick this evening. It leaves at seven-fifty p.m. I can check if there is any availability.’
‘Perfect, yes. That’ll be fine.’
I had no real plan. I would return to the bungalow. I would sell Christina’s house remotely. I would donate the money to charity. But that was it. That condition hadn’t been in the lawyer’s letter. These ‘talents’ weren’t really talents. They would just cause more harm. As Gabriela busied herself at the computer I thought of that poor horse and rider I had nearly run into. I thought of a fork sticking out of a leg. Christina had made a mistake. I wouldn’t be a help here, I’d be a harm. Just as I’d always been.
I looked around, wondering if Alberto had left yet. He said he was going to wait in the car park for a little while ‘just in case’. I felt a tinge of sadness. A tiny grief. Some strange part of me wanted to still be sitting next to him. Snap out of it, Grace. This is the right thing to do.
There was a mother with a tired toddler in her arms and a small suitcase as hand luggage. The mother kissed the child’s forehead. I saw a love coloured like indigo. I moved my gaze swiftly away, as I didn’t want to know too much about them and certainly didn’t want to feel what they were feeling. I wanted to feel nothing. I cursed Christina and this fullness she had given me. This duende. I wanted to feel no attachment to anything.
There were minds everywhere, their thoughts scattered through the air like pollen. There was a young woman on her own, looking forward to seeing her family. I so wished I had Karl to go home to. To give me a hug at Gatwick. To tell me he had missed me and that everything was going to be okay.
My eyes fell on a digital image I recognised, as it was almost identical to the billboard over the road from the house. The hotel, complete with the inset photo of a luxury bedroom.
Open now. The latest Eighth Wonder Spa Resort Hotel, Cala Llonga, Ibiza. Visualise your dreams and make them reality.
This triggered a thought. A memory of things that had been said to me. The taxi driver. Sabine. Things began to fall into place. I thought of Christina and Marta, side by side. I thought of the protest. The advert almost seemed like a warning.
Others are in danger…
A man was looking at the advert. I sensed his pride. He was standing next to a suitcase and wearing a linen suit. He had greased-back hair. He was quite young. Under forty. But then, everyone was quite young. (When you hit your seventies the whole world is basically one big crèche and everyone in it an abandoned toddler.) It wasn’t the clothes or hair or face or youthfulness that interested me. Or even his tired and flustered mind, full of jagged airport thoughts and distractions. It was one of the magazines he was holding. DJ magazine. On the cover was a picture of Lieke. ‘The New Queen of Ibiza Takes the Throne’.
‘Just checking the seating availability now,’ said Gabriela, with friendly efficiency.
And as I saw her face focus and her eyes squint towards the computer screen, I saw her hugging her children in her apartment building in Santa Eulalia. She hardly looked older than she did now, save for a strand or two of grey hair. She was trying to reassure the children it was going to be okay.
‘Stop,’ I told myself.
‘Are you okay?’ Gabriela asked me, her face and mind full of concern.
‘Yes. Sorry. Yes. I’m just a nervous flyer.’
‘Oh,’ said Gabriela now, ‘I am sorry to hear that. But it is actually the safest form of transport. Now, we do have some availability on that flight to Gatwick. Would you like to be near the aisle or the window?’
I was hardly listening. ‘You can’t marry him.’
‘Sorry?’
‘In two months you will leave your children with your father and you will go to London and you will fall in love with a man – a banker who is about to retire at the age of forty-two – and he will come with you to Ibiza, and you will end up marrying him. You can’t marry this man. Please. Trust me. You will think he is good for you, but he will not be…’
She stared at me with a confused smile. ‘How do you know I am going to London?’
‘Please. Just trust me.’
And I saw her in a different future now, happy, at the go-kart track with her children, and I understood why Christina had wanted to help people the way she had. If you had the ability to help people, then maybe there was also an obligation to do just that. Just because I hadn’t asked for something didn’t mean I could walk away from it.
Just then I caught sight of a woman I vaguely recognised, heading over to arrivals. A tall woman with a solemn face and ruffled hair like a half-blown dandelion. It was the doctor. The one Alberto had become agitated around, suddenly wanting to leave. She was sipping a coffee and here to pick up her mother, who was flying in from Bilbao. And then it came. The image of her with Alberto. In a small side room at the hospital, in the oncology department, a month ago. Telling him ‘El cáncer es agresivo’ and running through treatment options and Alberto just staring at her, dumbfounded. Then the doctor disappeared out of view.
‘Hello, señora?’ Gabriela said, aware I was in a kind of trance. ‘Señora? Do you still want this flight?’
I smiled at Gabriela. Then grabbed the handle of my case. ‘I’m…I’ve got to go…’
It was no good. I knew I was staying.
Protection
I kept thinking of what Christina said. It is impossible to feel life so deeply and not want to protect it…There was no denying the change inside me. In understanding previously hidden things – thoughts, futures – I was now unable to kid myself with the sad but comforting illusion that the world was done with me. That I could retreat and fade away and it would make no difference.
You can’t stay still in a moving universe. Change had happened. The shelter of grief and self-pity had been lifted. I couldn’t protect myself by doing nothing. Protection is something we can only give, not something we can always receive. And I was going to do what I could to help what needed to be helped.
The Closed Door
I climbed into the car, which was parked a short walk from the terminal.
Alberto had the radio on. He was bobbing his head as Spanish voices rapped to a hip-swaying beat.
‘Reggaeton,’ explained Alberto, as if I had returned for a lesson in musical genres. ‘It’s been around for ever but people are into it like never before…It has a sensual energy to it, no?’
‘Just so long as you keep that sensual energy to yourself,’ I told him, in a clipped way.
Alberto looked at his watch and shrugged.
‘What?’ I asked him.
‘It’s just interesting,’ he said, remarking on my decision to walk out of the airport. ‘I thought you would be twenty minutes earlier.’
‘I really was going to go, you know.’
‘Then why did you come back?’
