And just at that moment I felt water lapping at my feet. I looked down. It was glowing that indescribable blue, and rising quickly, beyond any tide.
And when I looked back up everything was gone. The table. The beach. The trees. The people. All except me. Who was carried up inside that pure luminescence, up and up, until I was out in the air. Upright, awake in my bed. Ready, just about, to live and help live.
The Brightness
It was one a.m., and I awoke from my nap as alive as a puppy.
The jar, I observed, was glowing like never before.
The whole room was bright. The kind of brightness you normally would have to turn away from, but somehow I didn’t need to. Granted, there was a lot of peril. Art Butler was still out there. We were all, possibly, in some kind of danger from a man who may not have been a man at all. But I’ll tell you this. I can weather any external storm compared to that internal weather that fogs your whole view. And that fog had lifted now. I asked myself a rhetorical question: what could really be better than a home full of heart, left to you by a distant friend, on the most exciting island in the world?
It took me a second or two to notice, amid the brightness, that the peace lily beside the bed was no longer drab and dying. Its leaves were a deep, succulent green. I felt its existence. Not thoughts, exactly. Plants don’t have thoughts in the way we have thoughts.
The most remarkable thing, though, was the item I was clutching. The necklace and its pendant of St Christopher, right there in the palm of my hand. The gift I had given, returned. I felt the embossed figure of St Christopher carrying the infant Christ across the river. I clenched it tight like the lost treasure it was and turned to the olive jar and said, ‘Thank you.’
And then I had a shower, put on the necklace and chose some clothes. Some smart pleated trousers and a chiffon blouse. I looked in the mirror and I felt ready.
‘Come on, Grace,’ I told myself. ‘It’s time to live.’
Grace Winters Plus Two
The isle was full of noises.
The Amnesia nightclub was just off the main road that connects Ibiza Town in the east to San Antonio in the west. It was, like so many of the nightclubs here, ridiculously massive. The scale of a cathedral or an aircraft hangar. And I must admit it was a little exciting.
I hadn’t been to a nightclub since 1980 – Roxy’s in Lincoln, where a drunk woman had vomited on my shoes to the sound of Kool & the Gang.
A lot of the clubbers lining up were wearing striking outfits. If there was a dress code, it was a difficult one to crack. There was a woman in a bright-green bikini accompanied by bright-green running shoes. And another wearing a long red dress that was pure elegance. There was a young man in a black net top carrying a handbag. There was a slick couple dressed in black, who were holding hands in the queue and wondering if this was their last night together. There were lots of not-strictly-necessary sunglasses. There were more colours than a flowerbed full of hydrangeas. Alberto was wearing his ripped shorts and flip-flops and an open Hawaiian shirt which did little to conceal his forest of unseemly chest hair. His daughter was wearing one of her clever T-shirts – a white one with a tiny blue Earth in the middle of it. Pale Blue Dot was the slogan, in English. I knew – because these days I knew almost everything – it was a reference to a Carl Sagan speech in which he referenced the distant image of Earth taken from the Voyager 1 space probe.
She was wearing yellow plimsolls and green-and-white trousers striped like the leaves of a spider plant. She literally sparkled, thanks to the eco-friendly biodegradable body glitter on her cheeks. And her hair was curled and so fantastically wild that if you squinted she could have passed for a kinder Medusa. In short, she looked great. And rather than feel what I would normally feel next to a fashionable person less than half my age, I didn’t feel at all self-conscious or frumpy. I just felt she looked cool, and that was that.
I followed Marta and her father past the long queue of clubbers standing in front of the building – which was illuminated by moving multicoloured spotlights and the daffodil-yellow Amnesia sign – to the largest of the security guards. He made the iPad in his hands look like a postage stamp.
‘Rafael!’
And the security guard smiled, his face glowing blue from the lighting. ‘Hey, Alberto!’
Rafael hugged Alberto.
‘Papá used to DJ here,’ Marta explained in my ear. ‘In ancient times. Rafael’s known him all his life. He taught him to dive. It’s a small island.’
‘Thank you for the snake,’ Rafael told him. ‘My daughter was grateful.’
‘Ah, my pleasure. That particular snake is a very philosophical, thoughtful creature and wanted good company…’
Rafael humoured him. It was good to know the snake had left the drawer and had a better home. But the guard wasn’t standing aside. He stayed standing in front of us like a closed door.
Alberto’s smile now had a side-serving of perplexity. ‘So…are you going to let us through?’
‘No,’ he said, in contrast to his friendly expression.
Marta swore in creative ways that I understood but will not repeat. I wondered if Alberto was going to use his talents. I wondered if I should. But then I realised there was absolutely no need.
I gave a little polite English wave to Rafael.
He tried to not look too amused by my presence and general appearance, which was kind of him. ‘Sí, señora?’
‘Hello, there, I believe I am on the guest list.’
He looked at me, confused. So did Alberto and Marta, to be fair.
‘Yes. I bumped into Lieke in a garden centre and she kindly said she would put my name down. It’s Grace Winters. Plus two.’
He had a peruse of his iPad. Then he nodded. ‘Yeah. You are right here.’ And then we were beckoned through. ‘Have a great night.’
Alberto was a little put out and mumbled stunned English politenesses – ‘Oh. I see. Yes. Very good.’ – which were quickly drowned out by the wall of sound we were walking towards.
The Workshop of the Forgetful Ones
We walked over terracotta tiles, through the mainly Spanish crowd gathered near the entrance. People shouting in each other’s ears to be heard. Sweating bodies. Thoughts flying around full of jagged, frenetic joy and yearning. I felt at least two centuries too old to be there, though Alberto was obviously reading my mind because he pointed to an old man in a marijuana-leaf T-shirt. ‘That’s Diego. He’s an old guy from the mainland who came in the big summer of eighty-eight and has been here ever since. He’s older than either of us.’
I briefly accessed Diego’s mind but it was a strange psychedelic fog full of abstract thoughts swirling like cows in a cyclone, and so I quickly moved on.
The club was basically two vast rooms. One cavernous, dark room and a lighter – larger – room with glass windows in the roof and a more outdoorsy feel called La Terraza. Lieke was going to be on in half an hour, but first we headed to a relatively quiet area.
‘Like I said, this all used to be totally open-air.’ Alberto pointed to the glass roof while Marta stood at the bar. ‘It was wild. It was like a Fellini movie…a farmhouse where people danced to everything…The Rolling Stones, jazz, hip-hop, mystic rock, Manuel Göttsching, Prince, Art of Noise, Chicago house, reggae, new wave, old Argentine tango, Fleetwood Mac, Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Talk Talk. I love Talk Talk.’ He then got quite excited and started to sing ‘It’s My Life’. He had tears in his eyes. ‘Anything and everything. The Balearic beat. Todo vale was the concept. Anything goes. No boundaries. No boundaries between music or people. Finding the shared rhythm. Every class and culture and identity and sexuality. No narrow genres. No dividing things up. No cliques. It was natural and pure and fun. Just finding the universal in it all. Even the theme from Hill Street Blues.’
‘The theme from Hill Street Blues?’ I thought of Daniel asking to stay up late to watch a repeat of it. How he had loved that theme tune. How he sat forward on the sofa. And how that joy had been real, and stayed real, and was stored somewhere in the memory of the universe.
