Anyway: we sat for an hour in that narrow alley, drinking pale beer and harpooning olives and observing the politician as she chatted to her husband.
Luckily she was all there, before me. She was facing our direction, but she didn’t see me because I was lost in shadow and she was lost in concern.
Marta had already told me she was the highest-profile politician on the island, who had originally been a bridge between left and right but had since abandoned all pretence of environmentalism. I knew more than I had been told, though, just by looking at her. It was as simple to understand her mind as it was to notice her white linen suit, bouffantish hair and her smile carved in stone. I knew, even though I was too far away to see it, that she wasn’t concentrating on her pomegranate salad or the sea bass.
Despite the smile, she was deep in worry.
Now, worry is incredibly common. Even more common than we imagine. That is one of the first things telepathy had taught me. Along with loneliness it is the polluted air that most minds live in, the thing that deprives us of the present moment, trapping us in the past and future all at once. But her worry had a depth and immediacy that almost burned. Her worry was predominantly about what would happen tomorrow. At the protest. For a flickering moment she even thought of Marta Ribas, someone she’d heard quite a bit about. Marta, she knew, had been one of the main initiators of the Cala Llonga protest and the Talamanca one before that. An astrophysicist and Ibiza native, she was a serious person, who spoke well and had good principles. A politician’s nightmare. But this was set to be far bigger than that. If only she could have a word with her.
I smiled a little.
‘She’d like a word with you,’ I whispered to Marta, who had just put down her phone.
‘She knows I am here?’
‘No. But she would like a word. She sent you an email but there has been no response.’
Marta stood up. But then reconsidered. ‘If I go over there right now, that is all she will be thinking about.’
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘It will ripple the waters. And that is bad for fishing.’
‘We have to play a clever game,’ added Alberto. ‘Let Grace observe her. She will be able to tell us everything. If you go over there, you are placing yourself in more danger. There is nothing you can say to her that will get her to stop…You will just draw attention to yourself…The protest is your way of speaking to her.’
So we all stayed there. Marta kept her head low and posted online about the protest and I ate olives and read Sofía’s mind.
Sofía was now stewing on a meeting she’d had last year with Art Butler. His plans for a hotel on Es Vedrà were going to be revealed to the press and public tomorrow, at the Eighth Wonder in Talamanca, while the protest was taking place.
A luxury hotel on Es Vedrà was a sick joke, thought Sofía. Yet it was one she had agreed to. Indeed, she had been the one to sign off the agreement. She, and her colleagues in Mallorca, had clearly been idealistic in thinking the protection of a nature reserve could be outsourced to a profit-minded corporate entity such as Art Butler Worldwide.
The protest was already all over Instagram and TikTok; the club crowd were getting involved. And she remembered the protests from the nineties, when the islanders had stood together. And she had been there, shoulder to shoulder with the environmentalists. How she had cheered when the area around Cala d’Hort became a protected nature reserve and not a golf course. Now look at her. What a hypocrite they would think she was.
Between gaps in the conversation with Jorge, her mind returned to a villa amid the wooded hills near Cala Jondal. One she hadn’t visited for many months.
A ridiculously opulent, twenty-million-euro villa.
Large and white and cuboid and generically luxurious, with the walls made primarily of windows.
Once upon a time it had been a finca, with a small farm full of pigs and rabbits, but no traces of that were left. An infinity pool merged almost seamlessly with the distant Mediterranean beyond.
‘Are you seeing the villa?’ I asked Alberto, as he chewed on an olive.
‘No. I can’t see anything,’ he said, feeling a bit diminished. ‘I am too far away. I can’t really read her at all. I could read you reading her but that might cause some mental interference.’
‘It’s Art Butler. She is thinking about Art Butler. He really is the one planning to build the hotel on Es Vedrà…’
‘There,’ said Marta. ‘Ahi lo tienes! We were right.’
Alberto’s eyes were as intense and curious as an owl’s. ‘Where is he? Does she know where he is?’
‘I don’t know. Let me focus…’
Art Butler
So there I was, inside Sofía’s mind. Inside the particular corner of it that was housed in a villa belonging to the head of Eighth Wonder Resorts. He had actually given her the chance of meeting him at his yacht, permanently moored at the Marina Botafoch, a short walk away from his favourite hangout, the casino beside the Ibiza Gran Hotel. But somehow, she hadn’t been prepared to do that. She had felt more comfortable meeting him on dry land. At the villa she was now remembering, and the one I was observing. It wasn’t the precise villa. It was an observation of a memory of a villa. A villa twice removed. Every few seconds a detail changed. A vase shifted position, a chair disappeared and then reappeared. But the core details of it remained solid. This was eight months earlier. And I was looking at him – at Mr Art Butler – now. Looking at him simultaneously through my own and Sofía’s mind.
Sofía had always thought that he was peculiar-looking, even by the eccentric standards of British men. A short man. As jowly as a Basset Hound. Haunted eyes. Greying stubble and wayward curly hair that he liked to touch. Blue shirt and chinos and flip-flops. And he had a kind of puffy and overbaked look about him. He was, she supposed, around fifty but there was something fundamentally childish about him. She couldn’t say she had disliked him, before this meeting. There had been something endearing about him. Like a lost little boy pretending he wasn’t lost at all and that everything was perfectly fine.
‘We are going to have to say no to your plans,’ she was telling him, gently, as though delivering the news of a dead relative. ‘It is, I am afraid, impossible even to contemplate a development on Es Vedrà. The protests would be too strong. It’s a changing time.’
He said nothing for a little while. He smiled a soft smile. ‘Ah, but Sofía, this is the new Ibiza. This is exactly what you are after…’
‘The new Ibiza? What’s the old Ibiza?’
Art had laughed a hollow laugh. ‘Everything you have tried to get rid of. You know: the drugs, the drunks, the loud music, the chaos, the cheap package holidays, all the sunburnt hordes…the trash.’
Sofía smiled a little too. The kind of smile that disguised a wince. Trash. He so casually disregarded people. ‘That is the old Ibiza? I don’t know.’ She thought maybe the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians would have something to say about that. Not to mention the Romans and the Arabs and the pirates. Or every single person born here. ‘You are very British. The Ibiza you are talking about has only ever been a perception…’
Art’s phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Raj, I’ll call you back…Yeah. Yeah. The Brazilians gave us a ballpark on it but it’s still too much. We’ll get back on this tomorrow…’
Sofía hadn’t wanted to be there. She had a load of issues that were piling up – the problem of the homeless people having to live in tents near the marina, the anger around people parking where they shouldn’t in Playa d’en Bossa, and the speech she was going to give next Tuesday on the discrepancy between health funding for Mallorca and Ibiza, which would surely enrage the president of the Balearic government. The last thing she needed right now was Art Butler, but still, she had to undo the mess she had made. The protests would end up costing her her job. She had to reverse the Es Vedrà decision.
Art’s call ended. He turned back to Sofía. He seemed a little more tense now, she noted.
‘We are talking vision,’ he said, with big and dominating arm gestures, like a conductor reaching the end of the symphony. ‘Not just the perception of how things are, but how they could be. Ibiza is being transformed. The world is being transformed. And people like us are the ones transforming it.’
‘We are not Dubai,’ Sofía told him. I felt her frustration and distaste and mild fear. ‘We are not Las Vegas. Ibiza is a natural place. It cannot be transformed on the whim of a developer. Even you.’
‘I have brought new ideas. I have added life to the place.’
