At least they put Betty, who lived over in Perth, in touch with Gracie. Gracie really didn’t want to know. The past was outback to her. You could get lost there. So after a few letters, Betty gave up and settled for being on Gracie’s Christmas card list.

And Gracie gave me her address. Betty McKillop her married name is.

I dropped her a line, told her who I was, asked if we could meet and talk. I got a letter back from her daughter saying Betty was in the UK, place called Newcastle, where her own mother was very ill. But the daughter said she’d spoken on the phone and Betty remembered my gran very well and would love to talk with me when she got back. Naturally I said I was on the way to England myself very shortly and maybe we could meet up there. And she came back to me with a phone number to ring when I got here.

I rang a few days ago but it was a bad time. The old lady had just died. The funeral’s today and Betty’s flying home tomorrow night. I said I was sorry and maybe we could just fix a time to talk on the phone, but she said no, she’d rather see me. She said she’d be through by lunchtime tomorrow, so if I could get up to see her early afternoon before she set off for the airport, that would be fine. When I checked the map, I saw that it wasn’t that far over from Cumbria. And I recalled the last thing Gracie had said to me.

She’d gone into a kind of trance, and I was feeling real shitty for making her go back somewhere she didn’t want to be. So I got up to leave. Then she looked up at me and said, “I’ve been racking my brains for anything else I can recall. Most of us had these labels to start with, like we were bits of luggage, with our names and the address of the orphanage we came from. Sam didn’t have one of these, just a bit of paper which she kept folded up in her pocket. If anyone spoke to her, she was so shy she’d just bring out this bit of paper. That’s how we knew her name. But there was an address on it too.”

“An address?” I said. “Gracie, can you remember what it was?”

She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry. I only ever saw it once and it was all creased and hard to read. I think the place was Ill something. Maybe Illthwaite, but I can’t be sure. I’m sorry, the harder I try to remember, the vaguer it becomes.”

She was almost in tears. I calmed her down and told her she’d been great, which she had. And when I got home, I dug out my old world atlas and looked in the index.

The only thing which came close in the whole world was where we are now, Illthwaite in Cumbria, England.

Of course Aunt Gracie might have got it completely wrong. In fact, if you met Gracie, you’d put odds on it. Betty sounds a much safer bet.

But I was impatient to be doing something. I’d spent a few nights in London, crashing out on the couch of some Melbourne Uni mates in Earl’s Court, getting over the jet lag. Now I was ready to be off. I thought, I’ve got to go to Newcastle to talk with Betty McKillop, why not check out this Illthwaite place en route?

So I rented a car and set out.

And here I am. It’s been a complete waste of time. Not only that, it’s got me sitting in a hole in the ground, which terrifies me, making my confession to a priest.

OK, I know you’re not, but that’s what it feels like. Pa would have a fit!

And you were right about one thing at least.

I think it has made me feel a bit better.

Anyway, that’s me done and dusted. Now it’s your turn in the box.

My full name is Miguel Ramos Elkington Madero, though in England I am known as Michael Madero. In both countries my friends call me Mig.

So I have two names. And two passports.

Sometimes I think that in fact I am divided into two people, except that when you put the halves together you do not get a whole.

I am the elder son of Christine, née Elkington, of Hampshire, England, and Miguel Madero of Jerez de la Frontera, Andalusia, Spain. Jerez is where the English word sherry derives from. For five centuries the Maderos have been in the wine business, a little longer than the Floods, I think. You may have encountered our rarest fino, El Bastardo? No? Ah well. Australasia has never been one of our strongest markets.

There is little you need to know about my childhood except that from time to time, usually in the spring, I felt a certain discomfort in my hands and feet which in my teens became unmistakably, so I thought, the stigmata, which as I’m sure you know means the appearance of wounds equivalent to those inflicted by crucifixion. Not quickly, but perhaps inevitably, I decided that their message was that I should enter the priesthood.

Oh, and there’s something else which I am reluctant to mention in our present circumstances, but it is relevant to my story.

I seem to be able to conjure ghosts, a talent incidentally which I was surprised to find not much valued in would-be priests.

Be reassured. I shall try to keep it in check.

Anyway, after overcoming many doubts, internal and external, I began my formal studies for the priesthood. I was still troubled by ghosts, and by girls too, but that’s a problem shared by most ordinands. And whenever my doubts returned, I reassured myself by thinking of my stigmatic experience. What else could it mean?

Then, for me as for you, a family loss proved a turning point. On New Year’s Day last year my father died unexpectedly.

After the funeral I sat alone in the twilight on the veranda of our family house and let memories of Father sweep over me. His kindness and his care, also his strong discipline. His old-fashioned courtesy toward women, mocked by some advanced feminist thinkers of his acquaintance, but nothing they ever said could provoke him into behavior he would have felt unbecoming in an hidalgo. His pride in the family business and his narration of episodes from family history which were the fairy tales of my childhood. His delight when I grew to share his passion for exploring remote regions and for mountain climbing. His love for my mother and for all things English, except their ignorance of the true glories of sherry wine.

And I also recalled his unconcealable disappointment when I told him I definitely wanted to enter the priesthood. I felt I had let him down and nothing I told myself of God’s will could bring consolation.

I felt my father so close, it seemed easy to bring him before me visibly. But at the seminary I had come to accept that such traffickings with the afterworld were perilous, so I rose and went downstairs and found company and broke the spell.

The head of my seminary, Father Dominic, a good man and a good friend, told me to take time off to come to terms with my loss. I went into the Sierra Nevada, to an area where I spent many happy holidays climbing with my father. Solo climbing is dangerous sport at the best of times, but now it was the middle of winter and the weather was foul. Yet one morning I found myself attempting a climb we had once done together, not a difficult ascent for two experienced climbers in decent conditions, but folly for a man alone in a disturbed mental condition.

I should have turned back as the weather worsened, but something drove me on. The wind grew stronger, driving flurries of snow into my face and seemingly trying to rip me off the cliff face which was covered in ice. I could see no way to advance. But going down wasn’t going to be easy either.

Needs must when the devil drives, and I began to descend. I had only managed a few feet when I slipped. Desperately I scrabbled for foot-and finger-holds. Somehow I managed to arrest my descent, but every single point of contact with the cliff face was minimal and temporary and deteriorating. A few more seconds and I would fall.

I was too terrified even to pray.

Then I saw another climber, a snow-spattered figure on a broad ledge a little above me and to my right. I called to him. He turned and reached out a hand. All I had to do was grab it and lunge sideways and upward, and his strength and my momentum should see me safely on to the ledge. I took my hand off the cliff and reached out. At the same time I saw his face.