I woke at half past ten, and it took me ages to remember where I was. When I did remember, my heart pounded and I had to work hard to keep control of myself.
I was in a five-star hotel, in Madrid, with Natasha, who was still asleep. I got up quietly and went to find my phone.
There were seventeen missed calls, five voicemails and twenty texts, all from Mum. I didn’t listen to the voicemails, but I did read the texts, which were milder than I’d expected and mainly concerned with where we’d stayed last night. I replied to them all with one message.
Mum, I’m sorry. I’m fine. I promise. Got here safely, stayed in a nice hotel, ate food. So don’t worry – have some time and space. It’s fine. I’m finally doing something independently. Maybe when I come back you can tell me what that was about? Libby xxxxx
Then I put my phone on to charge, and had a long hot shower, because the air conditioning was so effective that hot water felt good even though I knew it was forty-seven degrees outside. Natasha woke up, and while she was in the shower I lounged on the bed, trying to work out what I wanted to do. I knew what Natasha wanted me to do, and I also knew what Mum wanted. But what did I want? I had no idea. Today I wanted to be in Madrid. That was the best I could do.
I listened. The shower water was still running, so I picked my phone up again and wrote an email.
Dear Zoe,
So here I am in Madrid. I’ve left Mum and Sean’s for a bit and come to the city with Natasha. She and Mum had a kind of fight and it was all weird, but I’d been feeling for a while that Mum wants a bit of space anyway, and she kept telling me to go off and do things. So I’m in the city with my cousin having an adventure.
So far we’ve been for tapas, and we’re staying at an amazing hotel. No idea what today will bring.
How are you??? I wish I could see you.
xxxxx Libby xxxxx
Natasha and I walked down the road in the sunshine. I was very hungry. The hotel breakfast wasn’t included in our room rate and it was spectacularly expensive, so we hadn’t eaten yet.
As we walked we passed a religious procession. People were dressed in white robes, following a woman at the front who was holding up a cross. They were all chanting. We stood to the side to let them pass. A smell of incense came with them.
‘Mum would like this,’ I said, and Natasha nodded.
‘She would be right at the front,’ she said. ‘Doing everything she could to make it all right. I do understand. The mind is a powerful thing. Everything we experience is processed through our mind. If you can get your mind not to accept the CO2, you won’t be able to experience it.’
‘It won’t stop it happening, though,’ I said. I read the leaflet a robed woman had offered me. ‘These guys think God’s done it as a Last Judgement. They want to go to heaven so I guess they’re cool with it all. Lots of people think that, don’t they? That it’s like Noah’s flood.’
‘Yeah. They all want to be the special ones, chosen to be on the ark.’
I could see the attraction. It must be lovely to have their certainty, their whole-hearted belief that whatever was coming was orchestrated by a higher power. I didn’t think it would take much for me to put on a robe and join them. I wanted to believe in something with all my soul.
They walked slowly and sang their words (possibly in Latin – I wasn’t sure) and they looked peaceful.
Natasha took my arm and pulled me along.
‘Just down here,’ she said. ‘Right. This is perfect. This is the place, here at the end of this square. The exact place I was looking for. We’ll go in and get a coffee and some food and watch everything. Then I might do something I haven’t shown you before. I need to get a feel for it first.’
I walked beside her. It was nearly midday, and the sun was hot, and I was hungry. We were walking through a huge square, a very touristy place indeed, and it was filled with people. It was like the Prado: a pocket of tourism in an otherwise eerily empty city. There were cafe tables round the edge, and people in the middle trying to sell things. A man had a Segway and was offering rides on it for eyewatering amounts of money. We walked straight through and out the other end, past a man in a tight superhero suit for which he didn’t have the figure, offering photos with ‘fat Spider-Man’. He greeted us as if we were his friends, and we walked past waving.
Natasha stopped and reached for her phone.
‘Stay right where you are,’ she said. ‘The way the sun’s on your hair. You look like an angel. I can practically see your guardian angel around you.’
I stopped, self-conscious. Natasha took some steps back and aimed her camera at me. I smiled an awkward smile, pretty sure I didn’t actually look like an angel, and that there wasn’t a guardian angel around me.
She looked at the screen.
‘Perfect,’ she said. As she put her phone away a piece of paper fell out of her pocket. I went to pick it up, but a passer-by got it first, a woman in a big straw hat. She handed it to Natasha with a smile.
‘Gracias,’ Natasha said, and she stuffed it back into her pocket. ‘Look, Libs! Don’t you look adorable?’
It was a nice picture of me; I had to admit that. I decided that I would use it as my profile picture on social media. I hardly ever posted anything anywhere, but it would be nice to have this picture up anyway.
The San Miguel food market was ahead of us. This, Natasha had decided, was where we were going to start. It was a beautiful building made of wrought iron and glass, and even before we crossed the little road to get to it I could see that it was filled with people.
We walked in and looked around. It was clattery and the air smelled of every wonderful thing. There were stalls all round the outside, each one selling something different, and there were people standing drinking glasses of beer or gathered round coffee stands and juice bars. I stood still and stared.
‘Not so busy yet,’ she said, though it looked it to me, and I followed her to a stall where she bought two espressos and something that turned out to be two tiny custard tarts. I felt more lumpen and useless than ever as I followed her to a long table and sat beside her on a high stool. I had thought I was quite good at Spanish. Now I was terrible at it, and I was getting worse.
There were people on all the stools around us. The other table, behind us, was full, and there were only a few free spots down at the end of ours. It was intoxicating being here. The whole place smelled of garlic and fried food and coffee.
I didn’t really know what we were going to do here: unlike that square with the fat Spider-Man, this place was not filled with people interacting with tourists for money. The other customers seemed to be Spanish as much as they were tourists, and it seemed like a place to eat serious tapas, for locals as well as visitors. It was not a place to hustle. All I could really think of, though, was how hungry I was.
The custard tart was wonderful but very small. I sipped the espresso, hating its bitterness, knowing that it would have been too babyish to go and get a hot chocolate instead. Natasha knocked hers back in one gulp and spoke fast, gesturing with her hands, suddenly looking perfectly Spanish. She was wearing a black dress and bright red lipstick, but she looked low-key with it somehow. I was sweaty and graceless in a blue T-shirt and a pair of shorts that had been fine for lounging by a pool, shut off from the world by a metal gate, but which were making me feel self-conscious in a bustling tapas market in the centre of a capital city.
I had looked good in that photo, though. I hung on to that fact.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Watch me. Actually, can you video this? I’d like to be able to look at it afterwards. Continuous self-improvement.’
I thought about my phone. It was in the bottom of my bag. I didn’t want to pick it up because I knew there would be another barrage of messages.
Natasha looked at my face and understood.
‘Use this.’ She took her phone out and fiddled with it. ‘Here you go. Pretend to be texting but try to record the whole thing. You won’t hear the words and that doesn’t matter.’
I sat on the stool and pretended to be scrolling through the phone, even though I didn’t dare look at anything apart from its screen (it would have been interesting, of course, to root around a bit). I pointed the phone at Natasha and pressed record, as she squeezed between the backs of people at our long table and the one beside it, and then turned up directly opposite me at the other side of the table beside ours and, without looking at me, tapped a woman on the shoulder and started to talk.
I was so invested in getting the filming right (I couldn’t mess up my first job) that I barely even wondered what she was doing. I half expected Natasha to pull something from the woman’s ear, or to get out a Svengali notebook, but she didn’t. Instead I watched the woman go from annoyed to sceptical to interested, and although I didn’t even know what language they were speaking (and even though I was still really hungry), for a while the only thing I wanted was to know what on earth you could say to a stranger to have that kind of effect on them. The woman looked around for a stool, and then one appeared from somewhere. Natasha sat beside her and they carried on talking.
Then the woman, looking hesitant, held out her hand to Natasha, and Natasha took hold of it and studied it. She gave the woman a delighted smile and pointed something out. The woman leaned in towards her.
It went on for a long time, and I filmed it all. Occasionally someone tried to take Natasha’s stool even though I had my bag on it, but I hooked my leg round it and kept it there.
Then she was standing up and touching the woman on the shoulder, and the woman pulled her in for a hug. She handed her something, and Natasha tried to refuse, but then accepted with a smile. She walked away but not in my direction, and after a few seconds I stopped filming and went to find her round the back of a grilled prawn stall.
‘Did you get that?’ She didn’t wait for me to answer but carried on speaking. ‘Let’s get some proper food. I’m starving. What do you want? We can get a load of things and go and eat them outside. That was exhausting and I am ready for some serious lunch.’
‘I did get it,’ I said. ‘All of it. Were you reading her palm?’ We stopped in front of a stall. Natasha started chatting in Spanish and pointing to things.
‘Can we get that tortilla?’ I said, because tortilla was my favourite. Natasha added it to the order, and soon we had a collection of dishes on paper plates, all piled into a paper bag.
We sat on a bench, down the road and round the corner, in the full glare of the sunshine.
‘Go on then,’ I said.
She grinned.
‘I told her that I can speak to people in the spirit realm and that I had a message for her. It’s amazing when that happens. I was looking around, and this voice came into my head so vividly, and it sent me to her. It turned out it was her mother who died two years ago. Her mom’s looking out for her, and she thinks she should apply for a new job she’s been thinking about. Also, she doesn’t like Conchita’s boyfriend. That woman was Conchita. We covered loads of other stuff. It’s wonderful when it works out like that. You saw how happy she was. And I’m happy because she gave me twenty euros to get some food. Win–win. Thank you, Conchita’s mom.’
‘You actually heard her mum’s voice?’
I tried as hard as I could to believe this. I longed to accept it, but I just couldn’t. No part of me believed it for a single second.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just like I did with Violet the other day. Clear, in my head, but speaking Spanish. Oh, Lib. I know you’re sceptical. It’s written all over your face. And why wouldn’t you be when it’s not a thing you’ve experienced? I might be a sceptic too, if I were you. I promise, though. It’s a thing we have in the family. You might be able to do it yourself, if you let go. In fact …’
She stopped.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Oh, nothing really. I just wondered about something you said. But don’t worry.’
‘What?’
‘We’ll talk about it later … So I gave her messages and she was very happy, as you saw. I looked at her palm and gave her a bit of a reading while I was at it. That wasn’t anything to do with her mom: it’s just a way of bolstering someone’s confidence and making them feel good. Let’s go over your footage back in the room later. I’ll show you how it works. You have to make them trust you, build up a bit of rapport.’
‘Yeah.’ I speared a bit of omelette with my wooden fork, chewed it, swallowed and continued. I was too hungry not to eat everything straight away. ‘How do you begin then? I mean, you can’t just look at someone across a food market and decide to give them a message from their dead mum. Not when they’re a stranger.’
Natasha grinned. ‘You can! That’s the joy of it. The spirits know where you are, and if you’re near someone they want to talk to, they will go insane until you do what they want. It’s easier, when that happens, just to go with it. I knew what to say to her because I’ve done it a hundred times before, and also because Maria, the mother, was yelling it right at me.’
‘And everything you said to her was right?’
‘More or less. It’s obviously a complicated equation, and sometimes I misunderstand. For one, I was doing it in Spanish. For two, things always get mangled. It’s a strange science. I thought Conchita had a child, but she didn’t. It was the spirits of the children she hadn’t had.’
I looked at her, unsure whether she was being serious, but it seemed that she was.
‘I mean it! Her unborn children are with her mother now. She was pleased to hear that.’
‘I bet she was. Will she get to meet them when she dies?’
‘She will.’
‘Are they …? I mean, was she ever actually pregnant, or are they the spirits of the children she would have had?’
‘Could be either. Not for me to know.’
I didn’t know what to say. I felt Natasha was toying with me, but I was also almost sure that she believed it. She was the most convincing person I had ever met, and in spite of my scepticism I was impressed. I reminded myself that I wasn’t in any position to be certain about what happened after death. There was no reason not to consider every possibility.
Natasha passed me a plate of prawns and I started on them. She was eating with as much joy as I was, completely energized.
‘It makes me feel weird,’ I said.
‘I know it does.’
‘What were you going to say about me?’
She hesitated, then said, ‘You know you told me about Carmen?’
‘She’s not a spirit guide!’
‘Well,’ said Natasha. ‘No, she’s not, of course. She’s a character you assume to make you confident in Spanish. But she is also someone who was alive, who watches over you. She would love to be your spirit guide if you’d let her a bit closer in. Don’t worry. We don’t need to talk about that any more. Not yet.’
‘OK,’ I said, spearing a prawn. That bit was just stupid. ‘So. What’s next?’
‘Street magic. We make enough euros for dinner tonight. Partners in crime. It’s begun.’