The Stranger House (2 page)

That was Sam on the inside looking out. That night, the night of her eleventh birthday, for the very first time she found herself on the outside looking in.

It all had something to do with the play she’d seen on the telly. It went round and round in her head till finally she felt like she’d been in it. She realized for the first time just how small she was and that there were things
out there bigger even than the dray must have looked to Tommo, which could roll over her and not notice, could pick her up and in the twinkling of an eye drop her on to a boat sailing to the other side of the world.

Finally she fell asleep and when she woke it was light and she felt more like her old self again. When she drew back the curtains and saw the sun, she wondered for a moment if maybe her nose would go rotten, but didn’t really worry about it.

That night they showed the second half of the play. Ma tried to send her to bed at her normal time, but Sam chucked a berko and declared she was going to watch whatever anybody said. Her mother yelled after Pa who’d done his usual exit act, and he came back, listened to his wife, looked at his daughter for a moment then said, “Let her watch.”

He never wasted words. Use more than six in a sentence, he thought you were yacking.

Other people got worked up by the play too. Next day the papers were full of it. Sam, after another disturbed night, tried talking about it with her friends, but none of them had seen it, and when she started telling the story, Martie Hopkins stole her thunder by saying, sort of throw-away, “Oh yeah, I know all about those migrant kids. My Aunt Gracie that married Ma’s brother, Uncle Trev, she was one of them.”

That was Martie’s public way of getting back for being knocked off her perch as the only kid in their class to have started her periods. But when privately Sam confided the weird ideas which had started swirling around in her mind, Martie was reassuringly dismissive, saying she’d felt something like that herself when the curse started but it soon wore off.

And she was right. The play was good for a bit of indignation—and Sam was top of the heap when it came to indignation-but soon she found something else to get worked up about. And once she and her mates turned teens, all that stuff on her eleventh birthday got mixed up with everything else that was happening inside and out.

Not that much appeared to be happening outside in Sam’s case. At nineteen on her way to Melbourne University she was still the same slight and skinny figure she’d been at eleven. Maybe you could no longer have served soup on her, but prawn cocktail would have taken its time sliding off. If you cared to look deep into her eyes, which not many people did because the intense concentration of her gaze tended to make them feel uneasy, you might be struck by their colouring which was at the slatey end of blue. But the greater part of her adolescent growth and vitality seemed to have gone into her hair which she carried around like a volcanic eruption on top of a matchstick.

As for inside, she knew the world was a much stranger place than she’d once thought, but alongside the rock of her family on which her two small feet were so securely planted she had discovered a shining ivory tower whose staircase spiralled to the stars. Mathematics. By ten she was doing the family accounts and not long afterwards her pa was using her to double-check the Vinada books. But already it was clear that her abilities went far beyond mere book-keeping. Any disappointment her ma and pa felt that she was lost to the family business they kept to themselves, and it was with their blessing and encouragement that she went off to university after a gap year which (unlike Martie who spent it jetting around Europe
in the company of well-heeled boyfriends) she devoted to exploring Australia.

Now to the established certainty of her own identity and her growing confidence that anything that couldn’t be explained by mathematics probably wasn’t worth explaining was added a proud assurance that she lived in one of the most varied and fascinating countries in the world. At that point in her life she could see no reason why she should ever want to leave it.

At university she quickly established herself as one of the brightest maths students of her year. Nor was there any question of geekiness. She worked hard, but huge natural ability plus an eidetic memory meant she had plenty of time to do all the other things a student ought to do, like getting hammered, and getting a sun-tan, and getting laid, as well of course as getting mad. The first three she did most frequently in the company of another brilliant maths student till his chosen specialist path of cryptography got him recruited by government men so anonymous even their suits had no labels. His fatal error was to try and impress Sam by telling her there were things in his work he could no longer discuss with her, upon which Sam completed the square and got very mad indeed, telling him that maths was about running naked through the streets, yelling
Eureka!,
not whispering behind closed doors with faceless spooks.

After that for a while she opined that men were a waste of space, except for her pa whom she loved, and her granpa Vince whom she remembered with love, and a visiting professor from Cambridge, UK, whose mind she loved, and any young man at a party who didn’t believe he was God’s gift, supported the Demons, and could make her laugh.

So on she wandered towards her inevitable First, more certain than ever who she was and where she was going, and never suspecting, for all her analytical brilliance and eidetic memory, that she was ignoring a message she’d started to hear all those years ago on her eleventh birthday which began in blood and ended in nightmare.

Twelve thousand miles away and some five months before Sam Flood woke to her eleventh birthday, a boy in Jerez de la Frontera in the Spanish province of Cadiz in the region of Andalusia had woken to his sixteenth.

His name was Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, known to friends and family as Mig.

The Elkington came from his English mother, the rest from his father, also Miguel, as had been all elder sons of the Madero family, whose business records outlining their involvement in the Spanish wine trade went back five centuries.

He and little Sam had absolutely nothing in common.

Except wine.

And blood.

But his was flowing from his hands and his feet.

He rolled out of bed and padded across the cool tiles to the bathroom. The hour was early and his parents and younger brother, Cristóbal, still slept. He stood under the shower and let the water flow over his upraised hands, down his arms and the length of his golden brown body till it washed over his feet, bearing with it the bright red stain.

Finally the water ran clear.

He looked at his palms. Nothing to see, no wound, and the pain had quickly declined to a faint prickling deep beneath the skin. The same with his feet.

This prickling he had known since infancy, always in the spring around the time of his birthday, steadily growing in strength over the years till it was felt for a few moments as agonizing pain. But never before had there been blood.

As he dried himself, he felt a presence behind him. He turned, thinking his movements had roused somebody else in the house and expecting to see his young brother, or—worse from the point of view of explanation—his father.

Instead he saw standing in the doorway a young man in the black robe of a priest. He had the face of a Michelangelo angel and his fair hair was lifted by some unfeelable breeze into a kind of halo. His expression was serious, almost frowning. He stretched his cupped hands towards Mig. In them lay what seemed to be a trio of eggs, slightly bigger than hens,’ one white as marble, one slate-blue, the third a sandy red. Then his face relaxed into a smile of great sweetness and he turned and walked away.

Mig made no effort to follow him. This was a vision and there was no point in pursuing visions. His certainty in this matter arose from another of his childish secrets which some instinct had warned him against sharing with adults.

He saw ghosts.

Or rather, in certain places at certain times he felt the presence of departed souls so strongly that it took very little to bring them to the point of materialization. To start with this was a not unpleasant experience, as in the
case of his maternal great-grandfather, a jolly old man who used to sit on his bed and talk to him whenever his English mother took him to stay at her family house near Winchester.

Then a couple of years later on a visit to Seville’s magnificent Gothic cathedral, he had wandered away from his mother who was dealing with an emergency caused by little Cristóbal’s sudden discovery of the pleasures of projectile vomiting. Finding himself in a gloomy and deserted cloister, Mig had become aware of one of what he thought of as his friendly presences. He bent his mind to encouraging it to materialize, which it did, but this time terrifyingly in the form of a wild-eyed and dishevelled old man who had come hobbling towards him with claw-like hands outstretched, an incoherent babble of Latin and Spanish and English spilling from his toothless and drooling mouth.

Mig had been so afraid he would probably have fled blindly and got himself utterly lost in the vastness of the old cathedral. But when he turned to run, he saw a young priest standing a few yards away. The man had smiled and beckoned. He had followed, trotting fast in an effort to come up close behind his guide but somehow never getting any nearer. Then they had turned a corner and there were his mother and brother who hadn’t even noticed his absence.

When he looked to thank the priest, he had disappeared. But he’d never forgotten that young face with its sweet smile.

And now he had seen it again.

Musing on what this could mean, he returned to his room, where he stripped the stained sheet from the bed, checking that nothing had penetrated to the mattress,
then thrust it into the linen basket that stood in the corner. His mother, being English, had been very insistent that her sons were not going to grow up with any
hidalgo
expectation that the world owed them a living.
“Noblesse oblige,”
she said, “Which means you don’t expect other people to pick up your dirty washing.”

Cristina (née Christine) Madero’s elder son now sat on the edge of his bed and contemplated his future. For years the only ambition he’d nursed which ran counter to his preordained lot of running the family business had been to sign on as a striker with, first of all, Sevilla FC and ultimately Man United. At first these strange physical symptoms had only concerned him as possible obstacles to his athletic ambitions. But there seemed to be no long-term effect, and what made him abandon his hoped-for sporting career was the gradual realization that, though he was good, he would never be Best. Anything less had no appeal, and he set aside his football boots with no regrets.

Now it seemed to him that perhaps he had been denied that ultimate sporting edge because another purpose was written for him. To have interpreted this intermittent irritation in his hands and feet as a form of stigmata would have been blasphemously arrogant. But the blood today had changed all that. The blood and the second manifestation of the young priest. The first time the vision had invited him to follow. Now, ten years later, it had offered him a gift. The symbolism of the eggs was not hard to read. In form perfection; in content life. Was not that the essence of a priest’s existence, to strive to be perfect and so reveal life’s true meaning?

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to him clear that this was the message he had been receiving for all his short years.

Yet he was in many ways what is called an old-fashioned child, and he knew that getting other important people to accept his sense of vocation was not going to be easy.

Problem one was his own family.

The Maderos were in the eyes of their bishop the very model of a good devout Catholic family—generous in charity, regular attenders at Mass, both their sons serving as altar boys—but never in the five hundred years since they started to make their name in the wine business had a single man of the family offered himself for the priesthood.

Problem two was their family priest.

Father Adolfo was a hard-headed Catalonian who regarded what he called hysterical religiosity with a cold and cynical eye. His reaction to any suggestion that Mig was specially chosen by God as evidenced by the stigmata was likely to be a cuff round the ear, followed by a recommendation to the family that they seek a good child psychiatrist to nip this childish delusion in the bud.

So when Mig sought an interview with him, he limited himself to the unadorned statement that he felt he might have a vocation. He was glad of his discretion when Father Adolfo’s reaction was to throw back his head and let out a long booming laugh.

When the echoes had faded, the priest said, “Have you talked to your father about this?”

“No, Father,” said Mig.

“Then let’s go and see him now. I’m not having a decent generous man like Miguel Madero saying I’ve been sneaking behind his back, subverting his son and heir.”

Miguel Madero’s reaction had been one of amazement, which he showed, and horror, which, out of
deference to the priest, he tried to conceal. But the shock was too great and it was apparent both to Mig and the priest that Madero Senior could hardly have been more distressed if told his son had ambitions to be a fundamentalist suicide-bomber.

Father Adolfo, though having no desire to appear to encourage what he suspected was an adolescent fancy, was not about to let the dignity of his calling be traduced.

“To be called to the service of God is the greatest honour that can befall a true Catholic,” he said sternly.

“Yes, of course … I was selfishly thinking of the business …”

“The Church’s business comes first. You have another son to look after yours,” said the priest shortly, “You will want to speak further to Mig. So shall I. Let us both pray to discover the truth of God’s purpose.”

The next few months saw Mig’s infant sense of vocation tested to the full.