Julia
After Charlie goes, I push Hadyn’s stroller down past all the stalls that are set up for a Friday market. Later on, on the way home, I meant to browse but right now, it’s a balmy spring morning, the sunlight bright in our faces, and I know Hadyn likes being pushed. As long as we keep moving, he won’t struggle to get out of the stroller. And as long as I keep walking, I can ignore the growing discomfort in my belly at the fact that Charlie’s done it again.
He’s arranged to go off to a meeting with someone else—
be
somewhere else—when he’d already committed to coming out with Hadyn and me later on. Oh, he’s got a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. Charlie always does. He is nothing if not reasonable. But, really, would it have been too much to ask that he spend the evening at home with us tonight? Even if it had not been for Lourdes’ blessed party—which I have zero desire to go to, and which we are only roped into because of his ties with her—he could have spent this evening with me, helping with the packing and the planning. We are leaving on Wednesday, for pity’s sake.
‘I can understand well enough why Daddy needs to honour his promise to help that little girl who needs her operation,’ I say to Hadyn, who isn’t listening. ‘But going out on a leisure trip with your Uncle Rob is not the same, is it?’
It’s hardly the same thing at all.
The man with his big wheeled fridge full of cold bottled water walks by, smiling back at us. I shake my head. No water today, thank you. Several people wave at us or call out in greeting as we go by. They’ve got to know us a little over the past few weeks and months, and we’ve gotten to know them. The woman at the fruit stall always calls me over to pass Hadyn a handful of grapes and a few segments of orange which he takes, but never eats. Today, her stall is piled high with ripe figs and bananas but when she stops us, it’s to hand over a couple of slices of a bright yellow sugar melon, wrapped in a greased brown paper bag.
‘
Para tu hijo’
she says. For my son. She’s got a faint smile in her eyes this morning, and I wonder if she
knows
about us leaving. Or if I should tell her? Knowing the way this town works, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the jungle drums had been busy spreading the word already. While I’m still debating whether to say anything, a customer comes and she turns to serve him. I thank her and we carry on walking , the excitement of my news simmering like an untold secret in my belly along with the growing dissatisfaction that I’ve been feeling for the past half hour that Charlie’s just left me in the lurch over this evening’s party.
We pass on by the next stall—fresh fish—and then the familiar smell of
churros
frying in a deep oil pan wafts down enticingly from the barrow ahead of us. They taste like big, greasy doughnuts and my sister-in-law’s family all like to eat them for breakfast in the morning with lots of sugar. Charlie doesn’t approve of
churro
s, but Hadyn seems to love them, so I stop and buy him a round.
‘You won’t be eating these anymore once we leave Spain,’ I tell Hadyn. He turns his angelic face towards me. Although he makes no response to anything I say, I always get the feeling from something in his wide green eyes that he understands right enough.
‘You won’t, you know.’ I crouch down beside his stroller and touch his arm. ‘You have to say goodbye to this place, Hadyn. After today, we won’t be coming back here anymore.’ As I say it, I realise it is true, and now—along with the shimmer of excitement and happiness of going home—I feel a splinter of unexpected sadness that we will be leaving. I look up and breathe it all in for a moment, all the colours and the smells, the movement of the people and the beauty of it. Directly in front of us, the guy is setting up his stall with his two powder-blue parrots. He lets the tourists pose for a photo with his birds for a fee. From the next stall down comes the warm scent of leather, soft shoes and handbags, and now there is the bright, passionate strains of the
sarsuela
playing on Rafaela’s radio in the corner.
Rafaela is the girl with the long black hair that she always keeps tied back with a silver headscarf. She comes out of her little white tent now.
‘Good morning you two,’ she says in perfect English. She’s been studying languages at Bristol University but she’s back for the summer holidays, and she spends her Fridays here, garnering trade for her grandma’s fortune-telling booth.
‘All on your lonesome today?’ From here, I can peek inside the white tent, and I see her
abuela’s
not there.
‘Just me,’ she grins. ‘I can do it, too, you know. Want to come in?’ She steps out of the way as if to beckon me in now and I can see the set-up inside. One small metal table and two folding chairs. A well-worn pack of playing cards. No candles. No incense burning. No pictures of the Madonna or anything remotely like it. They need to work a little harder on getting the atmosphere right, I think. The set-up in here is nothing like the time when I went to see that clairvoyant Silas when Hadyn was missing, I recall wryly. Now
that
was spooky. Silas brought my Nana Ella through and told me a few things that turned out to be so true. And at the time, reassuring. If it hadn’t been for what Silas told me, I don’t know if I’d have kept on looking for Hadyn as long as I did.
Still. I step backwards. I’m not looking for reassurance now, am I?
‘I’ll pass,’ I say, though a part of me wants to have my fortune told. Not because I believe Rafaela is a psychic, I tell myself—and bearing in mind that Charlie hates all this stuff anyway—but because she is young and friendly and she speaks English so well that I know I could spend a pleasant half hour just chatting to her. ‘I don’t really need to anymore, do I?’ I point towards my son, drowsing now in his stroller, and Rafaela smiles.
‘Apart from anything else,’ I confide, ‘we’ve just heard the news this morning that we’re finally going to be allowed home.’
‘I got the feeling as you approached that you could do with a reading today,’ she smiles confidently at me.
‘Did you?’ I waver. She’s good at this, getting bums on seats. Did she tell me she was studying Languages
and
Psychology, I try and remember now. I bet she’d be good at psychology, this Rafaela. She’s told me before that her ancestors were from Romany Gypsy stock and they have passed on the gift of the Sight, but I remember my dad’s friends in his younger, wilder days, and his Romany friends were all sharp as buttons. Clued in. They didn’t need to use any psychic powers to suss people out.
‘I did. Congratulations on the going home,’ she says. Rafaela’s fetched the cards out and she’s shuffling them thoughtfully. ‘But I always know when people need a reading.’
I laugh. She’s young and probably broke and the twenty-five Euros she’s going to charge me will no doubt be going towards her student expenses next year. Charlie can hardly protest at this, I tell myself. It’s not as if she’s actually going to be doing any contacting of the dead as he sees it. This one is going to be for ‘entertainment purposes only’ I’m pretty sure.
‘Go on, then.’ I duck in under the tent flap, pushing Hadyn’s stroller ahead of me. He’s sitting quite placidly today, almost falling asleep, and I sigh with relief.
‘Choose three cards, please.’
It does feel odd to be in here, though. I came in here for a bit of fun, to help out a student and have a little chat to someone in English, but the minute the tent flap is secured, the ‘Do not disturb’ sign hung up on the outside, Rafaela’s demeanour changes noticeably. For the moment, she’s no longer the lanky girl barely out of her teens with the toothy grin. She’s someone far older suddenly, with a gravitas and a poise that is beyond her years.
She takes the card that I hand her and holds the first one in her palms face down for a few moments, her eyes closed. The space inside the tent seems suddenly very tight and closed up to me. And I realise that I feel ... awkward. I feel strangely exposed, as if this young woman’s going to be able to see right through into the heart of me.
And I don’t want anybody to do that, today. She’ll see that—while I’ve got a smile plastered all over the outside—what I’m really feeling inside is a mixture of far more complex things.
‘This is a time to rejoice,’ Rafaela says, her voice faraway and different somehow.
Of course she’ll say that
. I shiver, involuntarily.
She’ll say that because I’ve just told her we’re leaving.
‘And you are rejoicing, but there is also a ... a fog, like a mist coming in over the sea. A confusion. A sadness. A loss.’
I stiffen. Sit up, alert.
‘You’re saying I have a loss coming?’
‘Not a loss coming,’ she corrects. ‘You are experiencing one. Right now.’
‘No, I’m not,’ I say in a small voice. Then, ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘There has been a fog,’ she repeats, ‘A fog that hasn’t let you see things as they are. I am getting the one word repeated, over and over in my head right now: illusion.’
‘Illusion?’ I feel my heart in my mouth. But she doesn’t mean the name, the woman who had Hadyn, she’s talking about the
experience
of an illusion.
Rafaela picks up the second card.
‘You are going to be shown things the way they really are, Julia. The fog you are experiencing now is going to lift. Be ready for it.’
Be ready? How can I be ready?
Be more specific
, I think. I’m not very good with people who just speak in metaphors all the time, it is infuriating.
But I am only here for fun
, I remind myself. I am not here to take any of this seriously.
‘He can see her, you know.’ Rafaela opens her eyes and her pupils seems wide, unfocussed in the dim light inside the tent. She’s turned slightly towards Hadyn, who’s still half asleep but who does, admittedly, seem preoccupied with one particular corner of the tent.
‘He can see who?’
‘Agustina, of course,’ Rafaela smiles. ‘She says she comes to him all the time. She’s blowing him kisses.’
I fold my hands in front of my lap now, reminding myself that it would be only natural for Rafaela to use whatever she already knows about us and our circumstances in order to get a ‘hit’.
‘I see,’ I say.
‘She thanks you, Julia. She is sending you blessings.’
I nod. ‘That’s very kind of her,’ I say. ‘Anything else?’
‘She is pointing to a statue of the Madonna. I don’t know
why
...’ Rafaela’s eyes crinkle up now, as if she’s having to concentrate very hard to get some celestial message. ‘I think she doesn’t want you to worry. Does this make any sense to you?’
‘Sort of,’ I concede. It does. But it is not proof that Charlie’s
abuela
is really here with us in this tent, talking to this dark-haired girl. Anyone in this town might have told her that the reason I had taken Hadyn to the beach the day he got abducted was to escape my faux pas over shattering Agustina’s precious statue of the Madonna.
‘She’s asking me why it is you are unhappy still?’ Rafaela has picked up the third card now and she’s holding it, not looking at me, but at some inner picture in her mind.
‘I’m not entirely sure what you mean. I
am
happy,’ I insist. God. This was a bad idea. I had no idea she was going to be going into all of this. I had expected some light-hearted banter about the possibility of wedding bells in the near future and how my life was going to settle down fabulously when I got back home. And maybe how Charlie was going to realise he needed to become a bit more attentive and stuff. But this. It’s all a bit personal, isn’t it? What if this girl goes round chatting to all her mates at the market afterwards, telling them that the English girl who found her child is still miserable? What’s that going to look like? How ungrateful does that make me sound?