‘No. I will tell her,’ Alberto said. ‘About my illness. I promise. But not today.’
I sighed. It was his decision. I got out of the car. The early evening sun, if anything, burned even hotter here, and it seemed to radiate from the hills all around the pine-coated valley.
‘Hola, Grace, welcome. It is lovely to meet you.’
She was quite different to her father – less out-there and gregarious, more introverted. No. Not introverted. It is wrong to call the most successful environmentalist in Ibiza’s history introverted. Someone who, I would soon discover, could stand in front of thousands of people and talk about the perils of ecological destruction – her passion for the environment was an offshoot of her astrophysicist’s curiosity for the universe – and make them act to change it. But what I mean is there was a quietness to her. She had no need to make unnecessary noise. When she spoke, and she spoke quite a bit, it was for a reason. She had his wide smile as she looked up at us from the large cardboard sign she was in the middle of painting.
I had seen Marta before. The woman with glasses and wild hair that I had seen at the airport wearing the Einstein T-shirt. And in the visions with Christina. She was wearing cut-off denim shorts, like her father, and a faded T-shirt that said Space on it. Space was the name of a former nightclub but also apt for an astrophysicist. Marta had a lot of great T-shirts, I would discover. She also had a partner – an architect from Switzerland called Lina – but she was away. It was the woman she had been saying goodbye to the first time I saw her.
‘I think I saw you,’ I said, ‘at the airport…’
Marta gave me a curious smile. ‘Really?’
It was probably still too early to tell her I had also seen her in visions given to me by touching a steering wheel.
There was a three-legged cat who seemed to like me. He rubbed his head against my calves and thought warm feline thoughts.
Marta was easier to mind-read than her father. Every smile was an open door. It was a very intricate mind, an overgrown mental garden backlit by golden warmth, but there was a nervousness, a sense of incompleteness. No. That’s not quite it. You see, people are like pieces of music. We don’t hear their songs because very few people play them out loud. But minds play their own notes, and Marta felt stuck in a minor key. There was a theme to her, as there is a theme to everyone. My theme had always been guilt. Hers was of being overlooked, unchosen. Something underlined to her by the fact that La Presencia had never come to her, despite diving so often near it and spending much research time on it. But Alberto looked at her with pride whenever she spoke, seeing nothing but pure magic in his daughter.
We sat in the small garden beneath the shade of one of those fig trees. Marta brought out a jug of red wine. Music from the radio travelled to us from the kitchen window. ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. I stared at the words on the sign she was painting: NOS ALZAMOS COMO EL OCÉANO. We rise like the ocean. There was an attentively painted picture of a globe on it.
‘Bob Dylan lived in Formentera for a couple of years,’ Alberto told me. ‘He lived in the lighthouse…’
‘Papá, I don’t think Grace wants to talk about Bob Dylan.’ Her voice was soft but firm enough. ‘Tell us, Grace – how are you feeling? I have heard everything. You have had quite the time.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, honestly. ‘Overwhelmed, I suppose. I like your sign.’
‘Ahh, muchas gracias. I am a bit of a messy artist. There is going to be a protest.’
‘Yes. I’ve heard.’
Her mind fell into shadow. ‘Christina had wanted to be there. It will feel lonely without her. But she is in Salacia now. I truly believe that. And now you are here.’
‘Yes.’
I sipped the wine, tasting sunshine and earth.
‘I have found it a bit of a challenge,’ I told her. ‘The whole “being given alien powers” thing. I very nearly went home. Back to England.’
‘What stopped you?’
Before I had time to answer the cat jumped onto my knee.
‘That’s Sancho,’ Marta said. ‘He doesn’t normally like strangers. You are honoured.’
I felt the love emanating from the creature. I know there is a common misconception that cats are somehow less loving than dogs. This is nonsense. The love a cat can give you is sudden and warm. It is just that a cat’s love comes completely free of any moral or ethical principles. It is love for the hell of it. It is an entirely recreational love. In-the-moment love. But it is still, somehow, love.
‘The protest is about the hotel they are building in Es Vedrà, right?’
‘Yes.’
Marta went back to painting her sign. She was working on her second globe. ‘On the subject of aliens…are you familiar with the concept of “dissipation-driven adaptation”?’ Her English was, if anything, even better than her dad’s.
I shook my head. It was very possibly in my head somewhere. The way everything was now. But some things still took effort. And astrophysics seemed to be her safe space, just as mathematics was mine, and I liked to hear her talk about it.
‘Well, basically, it explains how life is inevitable. You see, traditionally people believed life was a general impossibility and Earth was the exception to the rule. Humans were flukes. The Second Law of Thermodynamics said disorder increases in any system.’
‘I worked in a school,’ I said, staring at a fresh fig hanging from the tree. Bulbous and purple and beautiful. ‘I have seen that play out.’
I turned back to Marta. She smiled and pushed her glasses up her nose. There was a tiny dab of green paint on her chin. ‘And life was seen as unlikely because it requires the opposite of disorder. Life is order out of chaos. Life is cold becoming warmth. So alien life was seen as scientifically unlikely. But then came a new hypothesis that says no, actually, as heat is added to groups of atoms those atoms organise to receive that energy. Order, not disorder, happens. So what that means is life is the order of things. Life eventually happens. Life is now seen as the logical thing. It used to be that idiots believed in aliens and intellectuals dismissed it. Now it is the other way around. You see? Life is inescapable if this process occurs many millions of times over. And La Presencia is basically an intergalactic activist. It is here to protect things. It also has organised itself. Just as we need to. That is what the protest against this stupid hotel will be. People organising themselves like atoms for the sake of life.’
‘Like atoms,’ mumbled Alberto.
His daughter stared at him, a little worry floating across her face. ‘You have been wearing the sunscreen I brought you?
Yes. Yes. I wear it every day. I am not a lotion person, Grace. I have never had a beauty routine. The sea is my bath. But Marta worries about me. And I wear it because I like the smell of coconuts.’
This satisfied her.
‘We are in a galaxy with roughly a hundred billion stars, each with at least one planet orbiting it, so there are a lot of planets out there,’ she said. She was getting animated now. I could feel her emotion. I focused on her face and I saw a memory of hers, of being laughed at in school for reading a book on UFOs.
‘And ten billion of those stars are like our sun, and two billion have exoplanets on which the conditions for life are pretty much like ours. Two billion.’ Alberto looked at his daughter now with not just pride but something else. Sadness glistened in his eyes. ‘Papá,’ Marta said. ‘¿Estás bien?’
‘Yes. Yes. I am fine. It is nothing.’
Alberto’s voice scratched with emotion. He stood up and twisted a fig from the tree. The one I had been staring at. ‘La vida imposible is not so impossible. Aliens are everywhere. And many on Earth have seen them with their own eyes. But they are never believed.’
He handed me the fig. I stared at it.
