The Olive Jar
I walked around the place. I was looking for answers, but I couldn’t find any.
I saw a dried and probably dead potted plant in the bedroom on the chest of drawers, drooping and brown. A peace lily, I think. I noted the bed. It looked fine. It had new clean sheets. Then I headed back into the living room and clocked an old eighties hi-fi and rows of cassettes and stacks of vinyl.
And quite a few books.
I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest bookshelves, not the fancy ornamental kind. And there was nothing fancy or ornamental about this place.
There was an assortment of books, some on shelves, some on the floor near the shelves. Some in English, some in Spanish, and one or two in Greek. Of those in English there were translations of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and a copy of the Tao Te Ching.
A guide to the flora and fauna of the Balearic Islands. A couple of Agatha Christies.
She had a classic that I had read and loved when I was young. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. (Have you ever read The Count of Monte Cristo? You really should. It’s the best book I have ever read. It is about revenge and forgiveness, and it includes a prison escape. I have always loved a good prison escape. As a teen I read all of Dumas, as well as Frankenstein and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You know. Proper stories.) There was also Zorba the Greek, not in Greek, and the poems of Cavafy, this time in Greek. In Spanish she had more poems (Pablo Neruda) and a Carlos Ruiz Zafón and a well-thumbed Isabel Allende.
And then I saw a jarringly out of place book on clairvoyancy called The Ultimate Guide to Psychic Power: Volume 8. The title caused me to release a little awkward laugh. Music teachers, I thought to myself.
There was another book that also stood out. This was another one of those in Spanish. La vida imposible by Alberto Ribas. Impossible Life. It had a crude cover. A badly drawn illustration of the sea and a rocky islet. A view from a beach. The water had lines coming from it, like it was shining. There was a photo of the author on the back cover. A sun-leathered man with a wild beard wearing a T-shirt with an octopus design on it. He had a big smile and a missing tooth. He looked like an elderly pirate.
I had a strange feeling I had seen him before. And it was because I had seen him before. About a minute before, in fact, staring out from the wall. The photo of Christina and the man with the wild beard and big smile.
She knew this man. I went back to look. It was definitely him. I stared at the photos some more. I could see in one of them she was wearing the St Christopher necklace I had given her back in 1979. She had it in the other pictures too. Even at the party where she met Freddie Mercury.
There was a slight fusty smell. Not quite fetid, but far from pleasant. And perfume. Very faint. Her ghost in the air.
My stomach grumbled. I went to the little kitchen and opened the refrigerator and there was nothing except a carton of gazpacho that was out of date. In the cupboard some biscuits. There was also, strangely, an olive jar, minus olives. It was a normal modestly sized vessel – a fraction narrower than a standard jam jar – but it was full of water. I knew it was an olive jar because it had an illustration of green pimento-stuffed olives on the label, along with the words ‘Olivos del Sur’. I twisted the lid and opened it up and gave it a sniff. It had a briny, mildly sulphurous scent but not the kind of brine you normally would get in an olive jar. This water had a lot going on. It had a shifting, complex look to it. Maybe it had some algae in it. I didn’t know, though it didn’t seem like ordinary seawater. But I was pretty sure it was of no use to me, so I walked to the front door, opened it, poured the water onto a parched piece of ground and went back inside and noticed something else.
A card on a little shelf in the hallway.
The card was a drawing of flower petals spelling out ‘MUCHAS GRACIAS’.
A letter fell out of it. Here it is, I thought to myself. Maybe this would tell me everything.
