‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And no.’
I was weak and confused. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This is Salacia. You are seeing Salacia and there are Salacians here. And they have been kind and they look after me. I am in this world. I made it through. I won’t be immortal, but I will be as healthy as I could possibly be for as long as I could possibly be. It is beautiful here. The inhabitants live in a place beyond those trees. And they look after the arrivals so well. They are so good, Grace. They care for the entire universe, the way you once cared for me…’
I was hardly able to speak. ‘I am on another planet?’
‘No. You are not here. But it doesn’t matter. What you are seeing is truth. La Presencia is giving you that gift. This is not a dream, Grace, in any normal sense of the word. This is truth.’
‘So why is it happening? What is this truth for?’
‘La Presencia wanted you to come to Ibiza because it knew what you are capable of. It knew that you could be vital in preserving the living things here. I knew too. That is why I chose you. I knew you could save lives and I knew you could help save the island. And this is how you do it. This is how you become a protector. You do it by freeing yourself first.’
Christina had a bowl now. A bowl full of pineapple slices. I was trying in my confusion to work out if it had just appeared.
She pointed at the translucent, glowing sea.
‘Freeing yourself of doubt. Of guilt. Free of what you have done. You need to be as clear as that sea. You have been good at solving things, Grace. The one thing you really need to solve now is yourself. You are still stuck in your own past.’
‘But—’
‘You understand mathematics, Grace. Negativity has more power than positivity. When you multiply a positive by a negative the product is always negative. You must see things differently. You must make a plus out of the minus.’
‘That is impossible.’
‘So many things you thought of as impossible have become possible. This is the last one.’
‘It’s not just about Daniel,’ I muttered. ‘I was a bad wife as well as a bad mother.’
‘You were a good wife. And an even better mother.’ She laughed a little. It had a soft melody to it. She delicately pierced a slice of pineapple with a fork. ‘I could have chosen anyone. But I chose you. You are the best person I ever knew.’
‘You didn’t know me.’
‘I knew you better than you think. I saw you whole. I saw your future. I saw what you could be.’
‘I am seventy-two. I have so little left.’
‘Wrong. You have been sad and lonely for a long time, Grace. But it doesn’t have to be like that.’
I thought of my life back in England. The one no one saw, the one where I hardly existed. The one where I was the unheard tree falling in the forest.
‘I am a flawed person.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Grace. Everyone is a flawed person. That’s what being a person is.’
‘Not everyone,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, without even a beat. ‘Everyone. Todo. El. Mundo.’
And then she pressed something into my hand. The St Christopher necklace. ‘It’s time to give this back for good.’
And I looked at it.
And when I looked up again, there was no bowl of pineapple. And no Christina. And on the table was a menu for a restaurant called the Raj Pavilion. The restaurant me and Karl went to when we were students in Hull. The one where he proposed for the first time.
Perfect Imperfection
The table was laid now for two people, with the cutlery on napkins, restaurant-style.
I looked at the menu, lying on the tablecloth. And when I looked up he was sitting right there. Karl. The young Karl. The one who loved Jimi Hendrix and wanted to play lead guitar in Black Sabbath. The one with the black hair and the sideburns and the skinny frame and Tiggerish energy that kept him moving in his seat, his head slightly bobbing around as if he was knitting with his nose.
‘The onion bhajis are good, aren’t they?’ he said, picking up the menu.
A waiter appeared from nowhere. ‘Are you ready to order or would you like a moment?’
‘We would like a moment,’ I said, as an indigo-feathered sky creature flew over our heads and the two Salacian children kept playing in the background. I was basically seeing the reality of Salacia overlaid with the reality of my own memory and psychology. All bonded together around the force of truth, imbued into my dream-that-wasn’t-a-dream via the photonic forces in the olive jar. It was, in short, disorientating. And yet my focus was on Karl. I was told once, years ago, after a trip to the Goose Fair and the waltzers in Nottingham that the way to stop feeling dizzy was to stare at a fixed point in front of you. Karl was my fixed point. I focused on him and everything else stilled.
‘Moments are important,’ Karl agreed. He smiled the kind of romantic smile that used to exist in our early years, his eyes shining like Paul Newman’s. ‘They go so quick we don’t always see them.’
‘I was not good for you, Karl.’
He looked at the ring on my finger. A tiny emerald stud on a narrow silver band.
‘Do you know how they tell if an emerald is authentic?’ he asked.
‘The imperfections,’ I said.
‘Yes. Exactly. That’s what the woman said in the jeweller’s. It is the opposite of other jewels. With an emerald, the more inclusions, the more cracks and defects, the more beautiful it can be. An authentic emerald is beautiful for its flaws. They call it perfect imperfection. Only a fake emerald can be conventionally perfect.’
