The Woman Who Sold the Future
I noticed a small dark tattoo on Rosella’s arm. A circle and a horizontal line that meet on the top of the vertex of a triangle. Off the horizontal line were two short upright lines on either side. Like the purest, most schematic representation of a person raising their hands.
I have never been a tattoo person. It’s a generational thing, I think. Back in my day, a tattoo meant you were a convict or a sailor or just a general miscreant. Karl liked them, or pretended to, but he’d never dared go and actually get one.
She followed my gaze. I hoped I hadn’t looked too judgmental. ‘It is the symbol for Tanit,’ she explained. ‘Goddess of the moon.’ I remembered the reference to Tanit’s Cave in Christina’s letter. I’d later learn Tanit was quite a big thing in Ibiza. The Punic goddess of the moon, yes, but also rain, fertility, dance, creation, destruction, and a thousand other things which possibly included conversations in grocery stores. ‘The ancient people believed she protected the island.’
‘It’s very nice,’ I said. Like the old person I was. I noticed some bright leaflets beside the till – flyers – advertising nightclubs.
And then she said something I wasn’t expecting. The words as bold as headlights. ‘You are Grace, aren’t you?’
I tried to look relaxed. ‘Oh yes. I am. How did you know?’
‘She told me you would be coming.’
‘Who?’ I said, ridiculously.
‘Christina.’
‘Christina, right, yes.’
‘Before she died.’
‘Obviously,’ I was so stunned I said it twice. ‘Obviously.’
She stopped seeing to my shopping and looked directly into my eyes. ‘She loved the water. She loved to dive. She had only started a few years ago. Such a tragic accident.’
‘Actually, they don’t know for certain what exactly—’
‘She told me to be nice to you. She said you are special.’
‘Right. Um. Well, I hadn’t seen her for years. Decades. We were never really that close … did you know her well?’
What I really wanted to ask was: Did you know she was going to die? After all, I had come to the island because she had died. The house was left to me because she had died. And Christina’s letter itself had implied she knew she was going to die. Yet it didn’t even hint at how. If Christina knew her death was imminent, and yet the Spanish police were looking into it, then that really did raise a host of questions.
I was attempting to piece this all together in my mind to make it make sense. It was like trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis or Goldbach’s Conjecture. It boggled the brain.
‘Yes. She lived on the island a long time. This is my parents’ shop. When I was little, she used to come here. And before she lived here, she lived in Sant Antoni, I think. San Antonio. We call it by the Catalan and the Spanish. But you Brits just call it San Antonio. She used to sing in one of the hotels. She was a good singer. She always came here. She was cool. Had an aura. But she hadn’t been in so much recently. Not since she started working at the hippy market.’
‘Las Dalias,’ I said, remembering Christina’s letter.
‘Yes,’ she said, scanning the freshly squeezed orange juice. ‘That is where she spent a lot of the time.’
‘What did she sell there?’
‘El futuro.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The future …’
‘I don’t understand.’
Rosella laughed. ‘She had … become a …’ She searched for the correct way to say it in English and made an enthusiastic gesture in the air as if words were pets that could come when beckoned. ‘A psychic.’
For some reason, this didn’t entirely surprise me. After all, I had seen that book back at her house. And she had been a music teacher. In my experience of music teachers, they are a little bit prone to eccentricity. And no doubt music teachers who moved to Ibiza at the tail-end of the seventies were more prone than most.
‘Like a fortune teller?’
‘Yes. A fortune teller. I think it was for tourists most of the time. Not the local people. I never asked her too much about it …’
‘Oh. Right.’ And then, without thinking, I asked something instinctively. ‘Did she tell you she was going to die?’
‘No!’ she said quickly. And then a skeptical expression twisted her mouth. ‘No.’
‘But she told you I was coming?’
‘Sí. She said you were coming to stay in the house. She told me what you looked like and wanted me to be friendly.’
Old, I guessed. She told her I was old.
‘And how did she seem, when you last saw her?’
‘Okay. Quiet. But okay.’
A customer entered the shop. A woman in a floaty white dress carrying a woven straw bag.
‘Hola, Camila,’ Rosella said as I started to pack my groceries. They had a brief exchange in Spanish or Catalan or both. Then she turned back to me and resumed scanning my shopping.
‘Who was her husband?’ I asked Rosella.
‘Johan. He was just an old Dutch hippy. They divorced years ago. He moved back to Amsterdam. That is when she stopped singing, I think.’
Then Rosella dropped a bombshell. ‘She had a daughter back in the early nineties. With Johan. She lives in Amsterdam now.’
I remembered the picture of the little girl on the wall. The one holding a teddy bear.
Again, the same thought popped up. Why me? Why didn’t she leave the house to her daughter? Or at least to someone who knew her well enough to know she had a daughter?
‘Did she see her daughter?’
Rosella smiled as she put through the last of the shopping. I felt like I had told a joke without realizing it. ‘Everyone sees her daughter.’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
And then Rosella pointed through the shop door’s window, across the street. ‘Her name is Lieke. Lieke van der Berg. She is very successful. A musician. And a DJ. She still lives in Amsterdam but arrives to Ibiza every summer. She is … over there.’
She pointed again. I looked through the glass of the door to the nearest of the two visible roadside billboards. One of them featured the face of a young woman, exotically lit in blue, with a bobbed bleached haircut.
LIEKE. AMNESIA. EVERY WEDNESDAY.
‘She is playing Amnesia this year.’ Rosella arrived at the correct assumption that I wasn’t an Amnesia type. ‘It is one of the big clubs.’
I stared a little longer at the billboard. Give or take a few details, I could have been staring at Christina in 1979. Maybe the ambition to become Blondie was fulfilled but hopped a generation. And maybe that was why the house wasn’t left to her. A superstar hardly needed a roadside shack.
‘Oh. Wow. So she is a big deal.’
‘Sure is. But I don’t think Christina thought so.’
‘Oh, did Christina not get on with her?’
Rosella shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think there was some pain. I think they had grown apart. When she talked about her she had tears in her eyes. She said she had tried to contact her. Families, eh?’
‘Yes. Families.’
Something rose up from the depths. The day before my son’s funeral. Karl with tears in his eyes slamming the kitchen cabinet. ‘Why did you let him out of your sight?’
‘I think diving made her happy. Have you ever been?’
The question embarrassed me. I don’t know why. ‘No. No.’
‘Christina said there was nothing so calming in the world as diving. You forget everything in the water. She thought you would love it.’
This seemed peculiar. I mean, why had Christina told someone in a supermarket – someone who spoke near-perfect English – to get me to go diving? It felt a little too much. It felt, just slightly, like a set-up. But what I was being set up for, I didn’t know. Yet Rosella herself seemed warm and natural.
‘I am seventy-two. I am too old. And I forget everything just by waking up.’
Rosella laughed, but in the opposite of a hurtful way.
‘No!’ She said some Spanish words. ‘Come on. Too old? Can you swim?’
‘I used to love swimming. But it has been many years.’ Then I tried a bit of Spanish. ‘Muchos muchos años.’
‘Well, then. If you can swim and if you can breathe, you can still dive. You still look quite strong.’
I was being patronized but very gently, so I went with it. ‘Do I?’
‘¡Sí! ¡Está claro! Are you here on your own?’
‘Yes,’ I said. And the sadness leaked out. It was there on my face and in my eyes. Grief was a flood that ran through you and caused others to stand aside. Or at least wind up the conversation.
Rosella seemed to notice. She stiffened a little, my awkwardness rubbing off on her.
‘
That’s forty-seven euros and forty-nine cents.’
I got out the purse Karl had bought me years ago, the once-bright crimson fabric now a dull pink.
‘But if you go diving, don’t go to Atlantis Scuba. It is where Christina went. But she is the only person who has ever said anything good about the place. It is run by a madman.’
‘A madman?’
‘Yes. Alberto Ribas.’
Alberto Ribas.
The smiling pirate.
The Spanish woman Rosella had chatted to was now behind me in the queue. I decided not to take up any more time.
‘It was nice to meet you,’ I said.
Rosella smiled. ‘It was nice to meet you too. Chao.’
I walked out of the shop into the pine-scented heat of the afternoon and stared up at the vast picture of the azure-lit Dutch DJ, wondering what had happened to her mother.
