I was sitting next to Natasha. She and I shared a surname, thanks to the patriarchy. We were family, although we didn’t look alike. She was brave. She made things happen. I was the hostess here; I needed to speak to her. Mum was inside making fresh coffee and Sean was getting out breakfast stuff, and I looked at her and I had so much to say and my mind was blank.
‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Libby Lewis! So. Favourite colour?’
‘Yellow,’ I said. I was looking at the golden tinge of the sunlight on everything. ‘Sometimes it’s red. Or green for growing things. I don’t know. It changes. Yellow right now.’
‘Good choice.’
‘Yours?’
‘Oh, any of the bright ones. Yellow, orange, red. The bolder the better. Also, gold and silver. The vulgar, blingy ones. Nothing subtle.’
I knew she was getting me to talk. I could remember nursery teachers trying the same tactics a million years ago. I tried to step up.
‘Have you been to Spain before?’ I said, and I thought that I sounded like the Queen making conversation.
‘Are you kidding? I’ve never been to Europe. I’m so glad I’m here. I speak Spanish, though. I’ve spent time in Mexico. I already love being here. I love everything about it.’
‘I speak Spanish too,’ I said. ‘A bit.’
‘Yeah, I know. Remember, Libby? We’ve been speaking to each other for months.’
She laughed, and I did too. I thought that quite soon I might be able to relax.
When Mum and Sean came back, Natasha made a show of leaning back in her chair and looking around, and I saw the garden, the pool, the morning light through her eyes.
‘This place,’ she said. ‘Oh my God. It’s like the Garden of Eden. The most perfect place. So, are you going to stay here through September? Does it have a bunker?’
‘No,’ said Mum. ‘We’ll go back. Libby’s dad’s in Winchester, as you know, and it would be harsh for her not to –’
‘Bunker?’ Sean interrupted, echoing my thoughts. ‘Is that a thing people are actually doing?’
‘Sure,’ said Natasha. ‘You get a compressed air supply and kit it out. People have it worked out so they can live underground for years and years. Or not underground necessarily, but in an air-tight bunker where you just breathe from your own supply.’
‘Oh God.’ It made me feel faint.
‘We’re not into anything like that,’ said Sean. ‘Absolutely not. And we’re avoiding the news exactly so we don’t have to hear about that kind of thing.’ He and Mum both glanced at me. I took a sip of juice and avoided their eyes. I would not think about bunkers. I wouldn’t.
‘Right?’ said Natasha. ‘Me too. Can you imagine those years? Knowing that everything was dead outside. And then you die anyway, as your air slowly runs out. I mean, why would you do that? Just waiting it out in some kind of apocalyptic hellscape? No thanks.’
‘Natasha,’ said Mum. ‘Please don’t.’ Her voice was sharp.
I could imagine all that. I knew that dwelling on this was not good for me, that I needed to divert my thoughts elsewhere. I took deep breaths and focused on what was in front of me.
Natasha was in front of me.
I could feel Mum looking at me. I needed to change the subject.
‘How did you find our house?’ I said. I knew I hadn’t given her the address.
Natasha paused, a crust of bread in her hand.
‘Good question. It’s weird of me to walk round the corner when all I knew was that you were somewhere near Madrid and you would kindly meet me at the rail station.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum. ‘How did you do that?’
Natasha looked at each of us in turn with a witchy smile on her face. I looked at the curve of her neckline, where she had put her hair up. She was like a ballerina.
‘Right. Bear with me on this. The first thing I did was I emptied my mind and looked at a map. Then I put a picture of Libby into my head. Just that. Nothing else. And I closed my eyes and let my finger land on the map. My finger actually came down right here. Moralzarzal.’ She said the word with a perfect Spanish intonation. ‘Or close enough. Pretty much the right place. That was cool.’
I looked at Mum, who looked confused, her eyes darting around. Sean laughed.
Natasha laughed too. ‘However,’ she said, ‘remember that I was also staying with Uncle Ben and Anneka at the time, and they had your exact address, so that might have helped a bit too. It was easy to find a bus that came out here, and then I saw Sean coming out of the shop. I recognized him from Libby’s social media. Job done.’
‘How was my dad?’ I said. Even though I knew that she had visited them first because her ship went into Southampton, and they were just up the road, I was suddenly jealous. I imagined her chatting away to him, asking his favourite colour, getting him to open up to her in a way he couldn’t with me. ‘It must be a bit weird. I mean, he’s not the easiest, is he, and …’ He looks like your dad, I wanted to say. I wanted to say it, but I didn’t.
Natasha turned her smile on me and it was like the sun.
‘Bit of an oddball, right?’ she said. ‘And so very like his brother in looks. Entirely different in character. I mean, I think he was pleased to see me under all the awkward. Anneka was lovely – and those babies! How adorable? I’ve got so many photos of them. I wanted to put them all over my stories, but Anneka asked me not to.’
I tried not to bristle. Sofie and Hans-Erik were mine.
‘They kept asking for you, Libby,’ she said, reading my mind again. ‘I think they knew I was something to do with you. Sofie said that she had a secret to tell me, and it turned out to be that you’d shared your chocolates with them so they had to brush their teeth again and that you’d let them watch TV after bedtime. That’s quite some secret! I was just a curiosity who spoke in a strange accent and threw them in the air.’
Mum reached across and touched Natasha’s hand.
‘I’m pleased you’re here,’ she said, but there was something guarded in her tone. She hadn’t liked Natasha’s thing about emptying her mind. ‘I know what went on between your father and Libby’s father was difficult, and it feels like the right time for you two to heal things. I know you’ve already got to know each other by email, and I’m glad we’re able to have you here with us for this week.’
Natasha squeezed her hand back. ‘It’s the best thing in the world for me,’ she said. ‘You are all amazing. Thank you so much for the invitation. I swear I wouldn’t have got on that ship without it. You brought me here!’
‘Your mother,’ Natasha said later. ‘She’s OK with me being here, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ I reached the end of the pool and stopped to talk. I had been trying to do fifty lengths of this little pool three times a day. I liked the way it made me feel. ‘Of course. She told me to invite you as soon as we found out about you.’
‘Yeah, before she met me. I was wondering. Is she … spiritual? I mean, you said she started going to church, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘She’s very spiritual now. She wasn’t before. It’s one of those Creep things. I think she freaked out, but she couldn’t properly freak out because, you know, she’s in her forties and she’s a mother. She focused it all on looking for a solution instead. She can’t solve the science, so she started going to church. And then she scrolled through a lot of churches. Tried a bit of everything. Synagogue. Mosque. Hindu temple. But she was worried about cultural appropriation, and patriarchy, and things like that.’ A part of my brain was listening to me, talking and talking and talking to someone I had only just met, and marvelling at it. Congratulating myself. ‘She’s ended up with meditation and yoga. She goes to a class in this village every day. They’re part of some bigger movement. I don’t know.’
We started swimming again, side by side. Natasha, in her swimsuit, was more toned than me, and generally, I thought, better than me. We were, as she had said, exactly the same height: in every other way she was better. We swam, though, in the same way, at the same speed.
I had calculated that one hundred and fifty lengths a day was about a mile, and a mile of swimming every day had to offset the bread and cakes and general lounging that filled my life the rest of the time.
We swam another length: number eighteen.
‘So she’s interested in the afterlife?’ Natasha said when we reached the other end. ‘That’s her solution? If the scientists don’t come through, reset what you thought death was, right?’
‘I guess. Pretty much. Like you?’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘You might hate this. She might hate it. I don’t know. I’m not sure whether she’d be receptive.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
She took a deep breath, looked at me and looked away.
‘You know I believe in spirits. You know I know there’s another realm after we die. Well, my dad is in it. I have conversations with him. I hear his voice in my head. I tell him everything. I listen to him.’
‘OK.’ I started swimming again, but Natasha stayed where she was, at the shallow end, and I went all the way up and down the pool and then stopped again, feeling a bit silly (twenty lengths). ‘Do you …? I mean, do you feel like you hear his … real voice from the afterlife? Or is it, like, a way you comfort yourself?’
That didn’t make sense, but she knew what I meant.
‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘Real him. He’s talking to me from … whatever you want to call it. The other side.’
‘Heaven?’
Natasha looked up at the deep blue sky and waved. ‘Yeah. He’s not up there perched on a cloud. If there were any clouds. He’s not down there either, in the flames, though he should be in some ways. He’s all around, like the air. But I’m not sure whether I can say this in front of your parents. That’s why I was wondering. I’m sensing that Aunt Amy believes in a different kind of spirituality from mine, but I’m hoping we can find common ground. We’re looking at the same thing after all.’
‘Are you psychic? Like … like your mother?’
‘Always have been. I didn’t spell it out in my emails because people can have odd reactions. I’ve been listening to Dad ever since the day he died. In fact, I knew he had died because I heard his voice screaming in my head.
‘He told me to come to Europe. Straight after that, you and your dad both kind of invited me to visit. I knew I was meant to do it. I was like, but, Dad, there’s no planes! And he was all, Hey, you can get the ship, honey. What an adventure! Before Dad – I mean, before he was in that realm, I had my normal spirit guide. Walter. He’s been with me for years.’
‘Wow.’ That was all I could manage. Wow. How pathetic. Part of me wanted to say: ‘You have a normal spirit guide called Walter?’ But I pretended it was a perfectly usual thing for someone to say.
We swam beside each other, turned at the end of the pool, and started swimming back, and I knew I had to say something to show that I wasn’t having an odd reaction, even though I wasn’t sure what I thought. ‘So … how do you talk to him?’ I said. ‘Your dad. Or … Walter. How does it work?’
When we reached the shallow end again (twenty-two) she stood up, slicked the hair back from her face, looked at me with clear blue eyes. ‘It’s a hard thing to talk about because everyone thinks you’re deluded. You secretly do, but you won’t say so.’ I tried to arrange my face to look more open-minded. ‘Only my mother understands, and she’s a bit … unavailable right now.’
‘Have you always been psychic?’
‘I knew you were going to say that!’ She grinned. ‘Not really. It took me a while to tune in, but there were things I thought everyone could do. I would dream something and then it would happen, that kind of thing. I told Mom, and she explained that she did that too but that we were unusual. I had to work on it and then I found I could channel the gift. I found my spirit guide, or rather opened my mind so he would find me, and there was Walter. He’s a bit put out because my father’s taken over his spot. And you know what? Right now talking to my dad is the thing that keeps me strong. He wishes he’d met you. I do too. He says, Hello, little niece. Believe in yourself.’
‘Believe in myself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. Thanks. You too.’ Oh my God, that sounded stupid, but I managed to keep talking. ‘Does he …?’ I started swimming again, because it was easier not looking at her. ‘Does he have any thoughts about, you know? The future?’
She sighed and plunged into the water next to me. ‘I wish! But no. He doesn’t see the future any more than we do. Everyone asks that. When I’m doing readings. They think I’m seeing the future when I’m not. But I don’t like to say that none of the spirits know either, so I just say it won’t happen. It’s not healthy to be waiting for civilization to suffocate. Much better to say, no, as long as we start to behave better, it’ll be OK. Our scientists have got this. We’ll carry on with a new appreciation of the majesty of life. I tell everyone that. I almost believe it myself, because you might as well. It’s just better to believe in life, isn’t it? To swerve away from looking at death. What I believe isn’t going to change anything, so it’s better to be cheerful.’
I imagined how incredible it would feel to wait for the air to go, but to carry on breathing anyway. It would be a portal into a new universe.
‘Do you hear his voice?’ I said. ‘Like his real voice, or is it like you have thoughts and you know it’s from him?’
‘Oh, his voice,’ she said. ‘One hundred per cent, his voice. I hear him, but not with my ears. It’s the oddest thing. I hear it with my brain. You know how our ears pass the info to our brain, about what we hear, and it’s our brains that interpret it into words and noises and music? Well, my brain interprets these signals into words in my dad’s voice, but they don’t come from my ears. They come from somewhere else. The signals are all around us, and not all of us can decode them.’
I swam slowly, battling scepticism, an urge to laugh and a desperate desire for this to be true. I knew Natasha believed it. That was a start.
‘I think my mum would get it,’ I said. ‘Better than me actually. I think it would have an overlap with the meditation stuff she’s doing. She’s open to things now.’
A year ago my mother would definitely have thought all this talk of afterlives and voices from the other side was rubbish. Now I didn’t know what she’d think. I looked across to the house and saw her cross-legged on the shady part of the terrace, with her back against the stone of the house. She was far away, but I knew that her eyes were shut and she would be repeating her secret meditation words under her breath.
‘Good,’ said Natasha. ‘I felt that too, but I don’t really know her so I thought I’d check.’
‘Sean will be fine with anything.’
‘Yeah, he seems that way.’
I reached the end and turned and swam back again.
Later I wrote to Max.
My cousin Natasha is here. And she’s psychic. She talks to dead people. Like her own dad.
Like fuck she does! What a load of shite.
I laughed. I wouldn’t have said it so bluntly myself.