Hippy Market
Head to the Las Dalias hippy market … and say hello to my friend Sabine. That is what her letter had said. So, having nothing else to do, I did this.
The market was very busy. It was how I imagined San Francisco to have been in 1967. Lots of people with wide-eyed expressions. Incense floating in the air. Stalls selling Balinese jewelry (including ‘opal healing bracelets’), Indian sarongs, white tunics, red-and-black flamenco skirts. Someone was at a stall offering Tarot readings. Someone else was playing Joni Mitchell and smoking a sizeable joint. I saw another stall full of clothes. They were the bright kind. The kind Christina owned. I stood staring at a tie-dyed swimsuit. I had failed to bring a swimsuit with me. I wondered briefly what I would look like in it. Ridiculous, I should imagine. But then I bought it, primarily to ask where I would find someone called Sabine.
‘Over there,’ said the friendly young man behind the stall.
He pointed to a woman sitting behind a table full of paintings of Ibizan landscapes. She was part-covered in shade from the fishing net that hung above her stall, but she was still striking. Wild white hair, with flowers in it, a long floaty white dress, and about seventy bracelets per wrist.
Sabine spoke English with a gentle German accent, and in words so slow and considered I felt she was in a permanent state of meditation. Sometimes she even closed her eyes. I could have really done with a seat. My legs may have been free of varicose veins, but they weren’t trained for detective work.
‘Christina was special,’ she said.
‘Yes. Yes, from what I remember of her, I feel the same.’
She looked at me for a while with a slight sad smile. I felt like I was missing something.
‘Some people, they shine,’ she said, with a deep and mysterious earnestness.
‘Especially in this heat.’
Fortunately for Sabine, she hadn’t seemed to hear my attempt at humor.
‘And Christina, she shone brighter. She shone like a goddess. A Greek goddess. That was the problem.’
‘Problem?’ I asked.
Her eyes were wide open then, as she leaned forward and gave me her answer. ‘It is dangerous to shine. It attracts the crows. And she had a gift.’
There was a long, slow inhale. ‘A power.’ An exhale. Another inhale. It was like she had just invented breathing and was showing off about it. ‘A talent.’
‘Talent?’
‘To help people.’
I remembered the man who called at her house. My house. Whatever. The large man with the bleached hair and face tattoo who had wanted to give Christina a packet of gummy bears.
‘What do you mean by power? What power did she have? Singing? She was very good at it. I remember that.’
She inhaled and exhaled and inhaled again. Her pauses were irritating. Or maybe it was the heat. Maybe the heat was irritating, and it made everything within it irritating. Including me. ‘She was a teller.’
‘Teller?’
She pointed towards another corner of the market. ‘She used to sit over there and tell people’s futures.’
‘Ah yes, for the tourists,’ I said, remembering what Rosella had said.
‘No. This was not some tourist trick. She truly could see the future.’
I tried not to look or sound too surprised or too skeptical. I was aware that I was talking to someone who might herself be prone to some – I’ll put it delicately – eccentric beliefs. But I was a maths teacher to my core. I needed logic and evidence and algebraic justification. I remembered seeing the book on Christina’s shelf. The Ultimate Guide to Psychic Power: Volume 8. I remembered that strange conversation I’d had with the taxi driver on my first day. His words came back to me.
There are things about this island … Things that most people don’t get to see. Things that aren’t easily … explained.
I remembered his car speeding away from Christina’s house, like a mosquito fleeing citronella. I also remembered the water in the jar. The heat, Grace, I told myself, it’s just the heat. It makes you feel strange. It makes your ankles swell and it sends your brain funny.
‘She only started doing it about four years ago, but it began taking over her life quite quickly … I met her years ago, when we were protesting against a golf course in the nature reserve at Cala d’Hort. And then we protested a hotel …’
‘Which one?’
‘The newest Eighth Wonder hotel at Cala Llonga, with her daughter.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering the billboard across the street from the house. ‘I saw that advertised.’
‘That was the only thing they agreed on. The environment. Christina was always very into nature. She was a forest girl really. But then, things changed. She changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘Her whole face changed. It was clenched all the time. And she would always be looking into the distance. I thought it might have been depression at first. But then she started predicting things. Things that ended up happening.’
‘I see.’
‘This island has quite a few tellers and psychics and Tarot readers, but none like her. That’s why she made some enemies. Word got round. She ended up with a queue of people from there to there.’
She pointed somewhere else, further along the narrow row from where Christina’s stall had been. To a stall selling wind chimes and strange vessels for inhaling marijuana.
‘She could tell someone’s future just by looking in their eyes. She told me I had to fly home and see my father. So I got back to Leipzig and had one day with my dad before he died. There was no rational explanation. But this was not the only problem.’
This was so much to take in. I left it all just sitting there in my head like left luggage as I stared at one of her paintings. A giant rock in the ocean. The one I had seen from above. In the image, it looked dark and haunting.
‘Es Vedrà,’ she said, slowly.
‘Yes.’ I remembered Rosella talking about it.
‘Beautiful. But cursed. They are planning to destroy it.’
‘They?’
‘Yes. They are planning to develop it. Build a resort on it. Destroy all its wildlife. And people are against it.’
She handed me a flyer from the pile on her desk. It was very sparely designed. Just typed Spanish words on green paper.
‘It is a protest. Against those that have allowed this to happen. On Thursday. Meeting outside the Café Mar y Sol in Ibiza Town. You should come. Christina helped organize it.’
‘Oh, that’s … oh, I’m … yes, maybe . . . .’ I blustered. Then remembered what I was here for. ‘Was there another problem? With Christina, I mean?’
And I had that feeling I often get with mathematics, where the answer is there, and you know the answer is there, it is in your brain and taking shape but not fully visible.
More elaborate, slow breathing. She closed her eyes, meditatively. I wondered if she had fallen asleep.
‘Alberto Ribas …’ she said, on her third exhalation. ‘That is the person to ask.’
‘So you think he is responsible for her death?’
‘She predicted her own death. She just didn’t know who was going to kill her. The police spoke to Alberto, and nothing happened to him. But …’
Sabine looked at me for a long while after that but. And then it came. ‘I think he is the one person who truly knows what happened to her.’
I nodded. I said thank you. And as I walked away, I kept seeing that necklace at the bottom of the sea. I knew there was now no way I was going to leave the island without first talking to Alberto Ribas. So when I got in my car, I typed ‘Atlantis Scuba’ into the phone. But according to satnav, no such place existed. I just had a list of other diving centers: Divestar Ibiza, OrcaSub Ibiza Diving Centre, Centro de Buceo SCUBA, Anfibios Ibiza. But absolutely no Atlantis Scuba.
So I typed instead ‘Cala d’Hort’ and started driving south.
