Banquo appeared and rubbed against my ankles.
‘What about your ancestors?’ I asked. ‘Which side were they on in the Civil War?’
The cat ignored this patently ridiculous question (cats don’t take sides, they only look out for themselves) and strode through the open kitchen door. I followed him and shook some dried food into his bowl. Then I sat on the terrace and thought about the heartbreak that the family had suffered. And I felt ashamed of my self-inflicted problems, which paled into insignificance beside the atrocities of the past.
The clouds were heavier and darker the next day and the air was close and sultry. Having received Ana’s blessing to paint the inside of the house, I drove into Beniflor and visited the DIY store. Sergio greeted me with a casual ‘buenas’ and then helped me carry my purchases to the car. Then I wandered down to the plaza to see how that day’s preparations for the fiesta were coming along. The entire town square had been taken over by trestle tables where huge paella pans were being watched over by a variety of townspeople.
I stood in front of one of them and almost immediately felt my mouth water at the rich, complex aromas coming from the pan.
‘Hi, Juno.’ Rosa came up behind me. ‘I didn’t expect you to come to the paella competition.’
‘I didn’t realise it would be on in the middle of the day,’ I said.
‘Paella is always eaten in the middle of the day,’ she told me. ‘My money is on Roberto Bertana. He’s won it a couple of times. Or Ronaldo Marcean.’
‘What about the women?’ I asked. ‘It’s all men behind those pans.’
Rosa grinned. ‘It’s like barbecues,’ she told me. ‘The men like to think of themselves as the experts.’
I laughed and then the mayor got up and announced that Roberto was the winner, and everyone clapped and then joined the queue to taste the different offerings. I tried not to look at the snails, which seemed to be a component of most of them. I was thinking that the authentic paella was quite a bit different to what was served at the tapas bars back in Dublin.
The weather was beginning to deteriorate as we ate. The sky grew even darker and there were mutterings about an imminent storm. I hadn’t heard anything about a storm because, owing to the generally sunny skies, I never bothered to check the weather app on my phone. But Rosa said it had been forecast for that evening and that festivities were being curtailed as a result. And indeed, most people were beginning to leave the square – which, I reckoned, wouldn’t have happened if the skies had stayed blue and cloud-free.
I said goodbye to Rosa and hopped into my car. By the time I got back to the Villa Naranja an occasional drop of rain was plopping on to the tiled part of the garden. It was still warm and muggy, so after I’d unloaded my paint I sat in the wicker chair on the patio and took out my iPad.
I suddenly felt as though I could look at the medical books I’d downloaded. But even as I opened the app, my time as a radiographer seemed like another life, another me, and the titles of the books were almost meaningless.
Then I saw the PDF document. I’d downloaded it a few months earlier. It was a paper on methods for renal segmentation from MRI imaging and had been co-authored by Brad. Just seeing his name, seeing the words he’d written, brought it all back again.
I put the iPad to one side and stared towards the mountains. I couldn’t study. I wasn’t ready.
The tears slid down my face.
It didn’t matter that my grief was less worthy than that of the Perez family. It was still very real. And we all hurt in different ways.
It started to rain more heavily. At first it was lazier rain than Ireland’s needle-sharp version. The fat, laden drops seemed to slump from the clouds in an exhausted fall, as though they were simply too heavy to stay above the earth. But slowly and surely they gathered pace until they were pummelling into the ground, turning the ungravelled and untiled areas of the garden into puddles of sticky yellow mud.
I liked the no-nonsense way the rain seemed to be going about its business. The earth needs water, it said. Well, here it is. Lots of it. A relentless torrent. There was an enthusiasm to it that was almost infectious, although I felt sorry the fiesta had turned into a complete washout for the evening.
Even though it normally didn’t get dark until well after eight thirty, it was already gloomy. The incessant rain had drawn a veil over the valley and it was now impossible to see further than the orange grove. I went inside and made myself a coffee. Banquo, who’d appeared at the first heavy drops, wound his way around my legs and mewed plaintively.
A sudden roll of distant thunder startled both of us and I almost tripped over him as he spun around with fright. I enjoy a good storm, and this promised to be one, so I took my coffee and a Magdalena cake on to the terrace with me. It was still dry there, apart from some splashes around the steps. Banquo didn’t join me. He burrowed into the recycling box and covered his ears with his paws.
I took out the iPad again. I ignored the books on nuclear medicine and selected something light and frothy instead. But I was conscious that Brad’s paper on MRI imaging was just a couple of clicks away, even as I stayed resolutely focused on the page in front of me. All the same, I read it half a dozen times and still didn’t know what the hell was going on.
The next crash of thunder was still distant, but louder and a good deal more violent. Almost unbelievably, the rain began falling even harder. As I moved into the house my phone buzzed.
Are you OK?
Pep had sent a WhatsApp message. A warm glow enveloped me.
Of course, I responded.
No problem with rain?
I’m from Ireland, I typed. I’m good with rain.
He sent back a laughing emoji.
I poured myself a glass of Navarro wine and went back to my iPad.
Two hours later, the rain was still falling and the once-distant thunder was now almost overhead. Spectacular flashes of lightning ripped across the dark skies as I stood at the door and watched in delight. The force of the storm was energising me and I’d abandoned the iPad to concentrate on it.
Banquo, however, was clearly miserable and had forsaken the recycling box to disappear upstairs. Normally I’d shoo him down again but I decided that, if he was happier up there, he was better off. But, I thought, as the loudest roll of thunder so far and the brightest flash of lightning illuminated the room, I should go and check on him.
I couldn’t find him anywhere. What I did discover, however, was that the roof of the Villa Naranja had a leak. A steady drip of water was coming in about a foot away from the base of my bed. And when I went to the bathroom to get something to mop it up with, I was met by an assortment of leaks there too.
‘Crap,’ I muttered and went to check the rest of the rooms. ‘This isn’t good.’
I’d noticed on one of my walks around the house that a couple of the roof tiles seemed damaged, but the fact that the skies had remained clear and blue for the duration of my stay so far had put them out of my mind. Actually, I hadn’t even considered that they might be broken or cracked enough to allow water in. But unless I did something right now, the bathroom would soon be a lake and my bedroom wouldn’t be much better.
I went back to the kitchen and brought a selection of pots and saucepans upstairs. I also had two fairly large buckets and was hopeful they’d contain the worst of the rain. I took a couple of large towels from the cupboard on the landing and used them to mop the bathroom floor. Then I placed the biggest bucket under the most persistent leak and arranged the pots strategically around the room. Tinny sounds rang out as the raindrops fell into them.
After the bathroom was relatively protected, I went to my bedroom and placed the second bucket at the foot of the bed. I was pretty confident that it would do the job, but I worried that if the rain didn’t let up the buckets and pots would all be full before morning. In fact, I mused, when I went back to the bathroom again, it would only take a few hours to fill some of them.
But there
was nothing more I could do. I’d have to hope for the best. Meantime, I decided I’d watch TV. What with all the thunder and lightning, and the deluge of rain, the Villa Naranja was beginning to regain its formerly spooky atmosphere. And even though I didn’t believe the ghost of Ana’s grandfather roamed the house, I felt that a little bit of light-hearted entertainment would help to put any ideas of restless spirits out of my head completely.
It was the first time I’d switched the TV on. Every other evening had been far too warm and beautiful to waste it sitting in the rather dingy living room watching telly. Rather stupidly, though, I’d forgotten that there wouldn’t be any English TV in the Villa Naranja. All the channels that I could access seemed to either be news stations, or showing children’s cartoons. From the news, I could see that there was some political-type crisis going on, thanks to the pictures of serious-faced people in suits clustering around an important-looking building, but I hadn’t the faintest idea of what was actually happening. However, before abandoning it for one of the apps on my iPad (and I suddenly remembered I’d have to renew my Netflix subscription if I wanted to watch anything half-decent), I decided to stick with the news channel on the basis that it might give me a more detailed weather forecast than I was getting on my phone. I was hoping for something a little more cheery than the row of grey clouds, lightning flashes and one hundred per cent chance of rain the weather app was showing. Not that there was much I could do about it anyhow, but it would be nice to know.
About thirty minutes after I’d turned the TV on, the weather forecast began. The presenter spent a lot of time showing different weather conditions over various parts of the country before focusing on Valencia and the ‘tormentas’ that were currently afflicting the region. The report switched to people’s home videos of rainwater swirling down streets, in some cases taking parked cars with it, while the presenter was clearly urging people to stay at home. She was getting no argument from me there. You’d want to be nuts to even step outside.
I got up from the chair and walked on to the patio, hoping that Beniflor was safe from flooding. The garden was in darkness, but looking towards the pool it seemed to me that the water level was extremely high. I grabbed a towel from the kitchen counter, forgot that I’d thought going outside was nuts, and used the towel to protect my hair as I scurried towards the pool. Clearly the pool itself wouldn’t flood – it was capturing the rainwater as much as it could – but such a quantity of rain had fallen that the level was now up to the very edge. If this kept on, the garden would be under water; although I comforted myself with the fact that it sloped away from the house, and so the Villa Naranja itself was very unlikely to be flooded.
I was still comforting myself with this assessment when everything suddenly went dark. The lights of the house and the only visible lights further down the valley had all disappeared.
The power was off and I was on my own.
Chapter 13
No matter how little you believe in ghosts or spirits, I’d defy anyone not to have found the total darkness unnerving.
I hurried back to the house and stumbled around the living room trying to locate my phone so that I could use the torch app, but I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. My early-generation iPad didn’t have a torch but at least opening it would give a little light. I felt my way to the table where I’d left it and flicked it open. The simplest thing to do, I thought, would be to send myself a message and I’d hear it arrive at the phone. But of course the Wi-Fi was off, and my iPad didn’t have a SIM card, so that idea didn’t work. However, I used it to light my way to the kitchen, where I found the lemon-scented candles Catalina had given me, and lit them thankfully.
But even though the scent was lovely, their flickering light made the house creepier rather than cosier. I continued an increasingly frantic search for my phone and eventually found it on the mantelpiece in the living room. I switched on the torch and went upstairs, where Banquo almost gave me heart failure by scurrying out of my bedroom and doing his best to trip me up again.
‘It’s a real house of horrors tonight, isn’t it?’ I asked him when my heartbeat had settled down. ‘Are you going to come into the bathroom with me?’
Somewhat surprisingly, he did. He watched me empty the half-full pots of water down the sink and replace them beneath the leaks. And then my phone died.
‘Fuckity-fuck,’ I cried, annoyed by the fact that I hadn’t bothered to charge it overnight.
I made my way cautiously downstairs again. Banquo was following me closely.
When I got to the kitchen, I felt around for the phone charger and plugged it in, forgetting that no power meant no charge. I told myself that it didn’t matter – I wasn’t likely to be getting calls from anyone, anyhow – but no matter how little I sometimes use it, I feel like someone’s cut off my arm when I don’t have a working phone. And, of course, I felt more cut off than ever in a deserted house in the hills where a man had once been hanged in the garden.
‘I guess we just have to curl up and ride it out,’ I told Banquo as I sat on the sofa. ‘And we won’t talk about the atrocities of the Civil War and men being strung up in the garden.’
He mewed and jumped on to my lap. I scratched his head and picked up the iPad, glad of its light. This time I couldn’t stop myself from opening Brad’s paper. It was full of jargon but it was jargon I was familiar with, so understanding it wasn’t a problem; the problem was hearing his voice as I read the words. It was as though he was beside me, talking to me. When I looked around, I expected to see him sitting on the sofa, an earnest expression on his face as he discussed MRI and segmentation of internal renal structures.
A flash of lightning lit up the room and the loudest crash of thunder yet broke overhead. Any minute now, I thought, the ubiquitous marauder (or zombie) would appear.
‘You’re totally losing it, Juno Ryan,’ I muttered to myself. ‘You need help.’
And then I heard a different noise. The loud, insistent parping of a car horn being continually pressed. It was close by. Maybe even just outside.
The everyday sound snapped me back to reality. My first concern was that there’d been a road accident. The track to the Villa Naranja was twisting and narrow, and heaven only knew what it was like in the rain. But as I hurried out of the house and into the deluge I realised that nobody should be coming down the track in the first place, and I hesitated. Then I saw the lights of a car and ran towards the gate.
There was a figure standing outside, lit by the car’s headlights. I held up my arm to shield my eyes from the glare.
‘Juno!’ he cried. ‘It is me. Pep Navarro.’
‘Pep.’ I felt a surge of relief. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘My mother sent me to check if you are OK.’ He peered at me through his wet hair. ‘There is no power in the valley. There is much water everywhere. She was worried for you. I was worried for you too. Your phone did not receive my message.’
His words warmed me. It didn’t matter that I was a couple of thousand kilometres from home. People I hardly knew were concerned for me. Pep was concerned about me. It was a good feeling.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘The battery on my phone died, and obviously I can’t charge it. Why didn’t you come in – oh!’ I realised that without power, the electric gates wouldn’t work.
‘My mother suggests that you come to us,’ Pep said. ‘We have a . . . a . . . we have our own machine for the light.’
‘A generator?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded.
‘Even if I could open the gates, I can’t leave the house,’ I told him. ‘The roof is leaking.’
‘The roof is what?’
‘Leaking,’ I said. ‘Water is coming in.’
‘I will come in to you,’ he said.
‘You’re not going to try and climb over, are you?’ I looked at him in disbelief.
‘There is a key for the gate,’ he told me.
‘Where?’
‘In
the box. On the wall.’
I looked around, and then I saw it. A little structure attached to the boundary wall. I’d thought it was some kind of mail box and hadn’t dreamed of opening it.
‘It is key to . . . to little gate,’ said Pep.
I’d completely forgotten about the pedestrian gate, which I’d never needed to use.
I opened the box and took the large key from its hook. The rain was dripping down my face as I inserted the key into the lock. It was too stiff to turn. I looked at Pep in frustration.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said as another crack of thunder rolled overhead and a dazzling flash of lightning lit up the sky. ‘You can see that I’m fine.’
‘Give her to me,’ he said.
I passed the key through the gate and he put it in the lock and turned it firmly. The gate creaked open.
‘Oh, well done!’ I cried.
‘No problema.’
He went back to the car and took out a large torch before he switched off the engine.
‘It is bad this water in the house?’ he asked when he returned.
‘I’m not sure.’
It was nice not to be alone. And it was even nicer to have some light. Pep’s torch was a lot brighter than the one on my dead iPhone had been. He flashed it around the living room. Banquo, sprawled along the sofa, opened eyes that now gleamed emerald green in the beam.
‘Not down here, upstairs,’ I told Pep.
He went ahead of me, lighting the way. I showed him into the bathroom. The pots and saucepans were half full again.
‘Mierda,’ he murmured.
‘Hopefully, it’ll stop raining soon.’ I shivered involuntarily.
‘You are wet,’ said Pep unnecessarily.
‘So are you.’
We exchanged looks and he grinned suddenly.
‘Perhaps to change your clothes?’ he said. ‘You do not want to be ill, no?’
The Hideaway Page 13