The Stranger House - Reginald Hill

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called to her mother, who came into the bedroom and soon put things right, both inside and out. Lu Flood had a great talent for putting things right. As she sorted her daughter out, she remarked that some of my people reckoned it was lucky to start on your birthday. Lu had worked out she was one-seventh Aboriginal and there weren’t many situations she hadn’t got a bit of my people wisdom for. Her husband just grinned and said she made most of it up, while Sam, who loved playing around with numbers, worked out you couldn’t be one-seventh something anyway, you had to be half or a quarter or an eighth, because everyone had two parents and four grandparents and so on.

      It made no difference to Lu. One-seventh she was, which was a good proportion, seven being a lucky number, and Sam was one-fourteenth, which was twice as lucky.

      Maths apart, Sam quite liked all this weird stuff her mother spouted about my people. It made her feel connected with that great emptiness outside her bedroom window. And if it got scary, which it did sometimes, the one-seventh (or one-fourteenth) weirdness was more than balanced by the comfortable certainties she got from her father’s side of the family.

      She used to stagger to Gramma Ada with her great heavy leather-bound photo album and ask to be told about the folk whose faces stared out at her. She liked it best when they got to the old sepia photos where the men had beards or heavy moustaches and the women wore long dresses and everyone looked like they’d been shot and taken to a taxidermist. Gramma knew all their names, all their stories.

      With history like this, Sam knew for certain who she was, so it didn’t matter when Ma’s stories got a bit frightening, there was nothing in them that those old sepia men with their big moustaches and unblinking stares couldn’t deal with.

      That morning as Lu cleaned Sam up, she recalled that up north where my people came from, when a girl started bleeding, she had to live by herself for a month or so, lying face-down in a hut so she couldn’t see the sun, because if she did, her nose would go rotten.

      ‘So there you are, Sam,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘Your choice. You can either head out to the old brewhouse and lie flat for a few weeks, or you can take your chances, come downstairs and open your prezzies.’

      So, no choice. And no change except that Sam was eleven and on a level with Martie.

      She had a great day, ate as much chocolate as she liked, which was a hell of a lot, and got to stay up late, watching the telly.

      There was only one thing to watch, which was a play everyone had been talking about called The Leaving of Liverpool. Sam would have preferred something that had promise of a bit more life in it, but her mother and Gramma Ada wanted to see the play, so that’s what they settled down to. Except for her pa. He said he had to check some new vines. If it wasn’t cricket or Aussie footie, Pa didn’t give a toss for television.

      The play (as Sam explained it later to her friends) was about a bunch of English kids who got sent to Australia because they were orphans or at least their parents didn’t want them and there was some scheme here to look after them and see they got a proper education. Except it didn’t work out like that. They got treated rotten. Worse than rotten in some cases. They got treated like slaves.

      It was late when Sam went up to bed but she couldn’t sleep. She lay there thinking about the play, and it all got mixed up with the bleeding somehow, and for the first time ever she had a sense of herself as something separate from her context.

      Up till now she’d been Samantha Flood who lived with her ma and her gramma at the winery run by her pa and they all loved her. She went to school, she had a lot of friends, she wasn’t all that pretty but everyone said she had the loveliest red hair they’d ever seen. And she was really bright, particularly at sums. There was no place further away than Melbourne, no time longer than the months between now and Christmas, nothing sadder in recent years than the death of her kitten, Tommo, who got run over by one of the big drays, and nothing surer than that if anyone was going to live happy ever after with nothing much changing, that person was little Sam Flood.

      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

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