Specifically the Dream of a Soulmate Infatuations

The hotel is on a rocky outcrop, half an hour east of Malaga. It has been designed for families and inadvertently reveals, especially at mealtimes, challenges of being part of one.

Rabih Khan is fifteen and on holiday with his father and stepmother.The atmosphere among them is sombre and the conversation halting. It has been three years since Rabi's mother died.

A buffer is laid out every day on a terrace overlooking the pool. Occasionally, his stepmother remarks on the paella or the winds, which has been blowing intensely from the south. She is originally from Gloucestershire and likes to garden.

A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting, It being far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate.

Rabih first sees the gril by the water slide. She is about a year younger than him, with chestnut hair cut short like a boy's olive skin and slender limbs. She is wearing a strapid sailor top, blue shorts and a pair lemon-Yellow flip-flop.

There,s a thin leather band around her right wrist. She glances over at him, pulls deck-chair. For the next few hours, she looks pensively out to sea, listening to her Walkman and, at intervals, biting her nails.
Her parents are on either side of her, mother paging through a copy of Elle and her father reading a Len Deighton novel in French. As Rabih will later find out from guest books, she is from Clermont-Ferrand and is called Alice Saure.

He has never felt anything remotely like this before. The sen-sation overwhelms him from the first. It isn't dependent on words-which they will never exchange. It is as if he has in some ways always know her, as if she holds out an answer to his very existence and, especially, to a zone of confused pain inside him.

Over the coming days, he observes her from a distance around the hotel: at breakfast in a white dress with a floral hem, fetching a yoghurt and a peach from the buffer; on the tennies court, apologizing to the coach for her bakhand with touching politeness in heavily accented English; and on an (apparently) solitary walk around the perimeter of the golf course, stopping to look at cacti and hibiscus

It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even have their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneouse feeling that seems all the more ac-curation and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason.

Read Part 2