The Signal
I appreciated the gallery on the wall now. The one filled with images of my lost friend. Her smile was sisterly, I felt. And I never had a sister, so I liked that.
I looked at the photo of a very young Lieke holding her teddy bear.
‘You loved her,’ I said. I didn’t really know who I was addressing – Lieke or Christina. Maybe both of them.
A sudden but familiar twinge of mental pain came to me. I thought of my son, back in the eighties, playing with his Luke Skywalker and Han Solo figures. Making light-saber noises. It was a kind of mind cramp, that sort of memory. Because it could never just arrive in a neutral way, but always filtered through the lens of my own shame and self-loathing. So, yes, the place felt different, and I felt different, but I wasn’t completely so.
Even my newfound appreciation of the house came with the guilt that Karl wasn’t there. That was my problem. Guilt arrived with happiness, or trailed closely in its wake.
I stared at the photo of Christina with Freddie Mercury at Pikes Hotel, to try to feel good again. She’d been part of the entertainment that night. I could feel, faintly, the excitement Christina had felt. And the crushing and lonely day that followed. She had been an emotional rollercoaster in those days, either dipping or soaring, but then La Presencia came and saw her potential.
Before bed, I went over to the books and picked up La vida imposible by Alberto Ribas. Impossible Life. Or The Life Impossible. Let’s go with the latter word-for-word translation, because it fitted Alberto quite well. It was ridiculously grand and sentimental and sounded like it dreamed big.
I stared at the illustration on the cover. The sea and Es Vedrà as seen from Cala d’Hort, I realised now. The lines coming from the water were clearly meant to represent La Presencia.
I opened it at page 153 and translated the Spanish automatically:
And even when the evidence was insurmountable, such as with the Manises incident, verified by multiple first-hand witnesses and in now-declassified documents from the Spanish Air Force, people chose not to believe because it is easier to dismiss things than risk a radical shift in worldview…
I flicked on a little further:
Since its arrival, there has been evidence of La Presencia acting in peculiar ways in order to save Ibiza’s natural environment. For instance, there were reports from a fisherman who was saved by ‘a light in the ocean’ and who consequently developed paranormal capabilities, that during an air raid from Franco’s forces in 1936 he felt protected as his capabilities grew stronger. This fisherman was called Joan Bonanova. He reported seeing blue light run through his veins, and also recounted to a journalist how he felt connected to every animal on Ibiza and managed to send them a signal. And others corroborated this report, saying they had seen animals act in a strange manner that night. How creatures of all species that night had acted as one, heading inland, away from the bombardment experienced in Ibiza Town and along the coast. There was even a report – recounted a decade later – of a herd of goats attacking a soldier to his death outside the Església de la Mare de Déu de Jesús, though Franco’s government dismissed this as ‘anti-Nationalist propaganda’.
I put the book down.
A signal, I thought to myself. The kind that Christina had hinted about in her message to me. Now, that was interesting. I dared to wonder if such a power was inside me, and what it would take to unleash it. A power to speak to animals beyond a Dr Dolittle or a Tarzan. To communicate with thousands of them, simultaneously. To bring nature together for the sake of nature. It was, I realised, an interesting work. I was warming to Alberto, but I didn’t want to take him to bed with me, even in book form. So I picked up The Count of Monte Cristo. As I said earlier, I had read it and loved it when I was younger. I realised I didn’t actually need to reread it. I knew it completely. A week ago I wouldn’t have been able to quote a single phrase. Now, I could have given you the audiobook. I could pluck any line as easy as I could pluck a hair from my head.
‘There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness…’
I have found that to be true, Maurice. Everything is comparative. In mathematics, numbers take their value from being higher or lower than their neighbours, while in art Leonardo da Vinci needs the contrasting darkness all around to make the light on John the Baptist appear holy. Chiaroscuro, as Italians and art aficionados say. (I had always known the word, from watching a programme on the Renaissance years ago, but I hadn’t known I had known it until La Presencia brought it out of me.) The contrast of light and shade. Life is all chiaroscuro. Its meaning is derived from relative difference.
Anyway, I put Mr Dumas back and picked up one I definitely hadn’t read. The Ultimate Guide to Psychic Power: Volume 8.
I randomly opened a page. Or maybe it wasn’t so random. Because the page I landed on had the chapter title ‘GUILT AND INTERFERENCE’.
I read a sentence: ‘To truly enhance your abilities, and reach the next level, your mind must be free of mental pollution. And nothing pollutes and clogs a mind as thoroughly as guilt…’
And that was all I read, but it was enough. Because it prompted me to think of what Christina had said about the olive jar. I sometimes place the olive jar beside my bed. Right next to my head. If you do that, it tells you things in your dreams. Things you need to hear. The dreams are the most vivid you have ever known. And they are filled with the kind of truth that heals…
It was that last bit. It spoke loudly to me. The kind of truth that heals. That was precisely what I needed. If I was to help everyone be safe, if I was to help protect Es Vedrà and Ibiza from life-destroyers like Art Butler, I would need to do what I had never been able to. I would need to tackle my guilt head-on.
It was time to face the truth.
Disco Nap
I took the jar full of La Presencia extract, unscrewed the lid and placed it on the small chest of drawers. But before I did so, I tipped a tiny amount of the water into the pot plant, the wilted peace lily, and then I got under the sheets and, despite having so much to think about, I found myself falling asleep.
It came suddenly, the dream.
I was in the ocean again. I was really there, in the cold water, but no diving suit this time. And I saw what I had first seen with Alberto. The arm of light from La Presencia. It shot through barracudas, enlivening them, their thoughts a collective groan of release, and reached me, surrounding me with shifting blue luminescence.
It hooked around my ankles and pulled me across the water at speed towards the glowing, pulsing cloud-sphere, until I was inside it. But the moment I was inside it, I was somewhere else. Somewhere I had been before. The orange beach that wasn’t a beach, beside the glowing sea that wasn’t a sea, and those white-leaved trees. And now I could breathe, or I felt like I could breathe, and the air was pure and sweet.
But in this dream, this vivid too-real dream, I felt my body weakening second by second. I could feel an encroaching physical numbness as my mental pain increased in line with the incessant voice of guilt. The one I’d lived with for too long.
I am a bad person. I have done bad things. I am a bad person. I have done bad things. I am a bad person…
Someone I Recognised
A moment later – somehow – I was amid the trees. The trees were as tall as sequoias, but with smooth trunks, and there were yellow flowers amid their white leaves. In the distance I saw the unfocused, cloudish outline of two Salacian children playing an unfamiliar game and laughing.
Then I saw a table. Very much an Earth table. And someone sitting there. Long hair, gentle smile, eyes shining like coins in a well. Someone I instantly recognised, as fresh as yesterday.
It was Christina.
The Best Person I Ever Knew
This was the young Christina. Carly Simon via Nana Mouskouri. Christina Papadakis, not the Christina van der Berg she would become. The one who sang ‘Rainy Days And Mondays’ to open-mouthed school kids.
Still with that air of glamour, and still wearing a beaded necklace. She was sat at the table, tapping her terracotta-coloured nails against the wood. The table was right there in the forest, surrounded by the trees with the children playing beyond.
I noticed a lamp on the table, with a porcelain pineapple base. A half-full bottle of Blue Nun was there too.
‘Hi, Grace.’
My feet in the sand that felt as real as anything. I walked, exhausted, to the table and slumped down on a chair opposite my old friend. ‘Christina? Is this happening? Are you here?’
