The Carer Read online

  Phoebe’s thing with Torren was still going on. Eighteen months and she still didn’t know what to call it, though her brother had a word.

  ‘Still seeing your fuckbuddy?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of malarkey?’

  Despite the sneer, Phoebe detected a note of envy. Only natural, when you’d been married as long as he had.

  Torren lived in a hut in the middle of a wood a few miles out of town. He’d built it out of old doors, corrugated iron, mahogany panelling someone had thrown out, stuff he’d found in skips. It was rather charming. Inside it was carpeted with offcuts; there was a bed, mismatched chairs, a kitchen area with a Calor Gas stove. He had a generator for electricity. Even a rudimentary toilet. And masses of CDs, which he could play as loudly as he wanted, with nobody to disturb but the birds. Captain Beefheart, Grateful Dead.

  There were plenty of old hippies around, in Phoebe’s part of Wales. They’d migrated from London in the seventies and this was where they’d run out of petrol. So they’d stayed put, living in yurts and caravans and rotting Mercedes vans up in the hills, doing this and that, doing what they’d always done, and still smoking monster spliffs despite the condition of their teeth, or lack of them. You had to admire the stamina.

  Torren was still handsome in a leathery sort of way. Dreadlocks, skinny body, a startling loud laugh and eyes that, like Mick Jagger’s, twinkled with slightly suspect merriment. He was unusual in that he was born and bred in Wales and had inherited the wood from his uncle. At one point he’d tried to make a living growing blueberries, and the bushes could still be glimpsed, now engulfed by brambles. He’d had various other schemes but he didn’t seem perturbed when they failed. In a clearing, there was still a tattered polytunnel from his days as the local drugs lord, but it was now choked with nettles. There was some hydro-electric scheme, long abandoned, which consisted of a dam and various lengths of plastic piping. But as he lived off-grid he didn’t have to earn much money and survived on the odd carpentry job. Phoebe had no idea what he did all day. In this sense he resembled her brother.

  She knew what Robert was supposed to be doing in his hut, of course: writing his novel. But what did he actually do ? Three years was a long time with nothing to show for it. She knew it was set in her part of the world. When prodded, Robert said it was volume one of his Radnorshire Trilogy. He wouldn’t be drawn, however, on what it was about. Phoebe suspected gnarled farmers and a lot of Welsh Wuthering. That Robert lived in a multimillion-pound house in Wimbledon was neither here nor there, such is the power of the novelist’s imagination. And Robert did have some connection to the place. Only twenty miles away, towards Crickhowell, was where they had spent summers in their holiday cottage. This countryside had powerful atavistic memories for him, as it had for Phoebe. It was the reason she had returned here to live, drawn back to Wales by the siren call of her childhood.

  In January Phoebe had a phone call from her brother. ‘You know your friend Torren?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder if you could do me a favour.’

  ‘What sort of favour?’

  ‘Ask him for some help.’

  ‘Help?’

  ‘It’s about my novel.’

  ‘Hmm . . . I’ve been wondering about that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he snapped.

  ‘Just . . . I was wondering how it was getting on.’

  ‘It’s getting on fine!’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘Once you have the characters, you see, once you know them as well as I do, living with them day after day, they start to write it themselves.’

  ‘That must be great.’

  ‘It’s like, they’re telling me their story.’ Robert’s voice quickened. ‘V. S. Pritchett said there’s no such thing as plot, only characters. Once they’ve become living, breathing human beings, you see, you leave it up to them. You don’t have to be frightened that you haven’t got a story because they are the story.’ He paused. ‘If they’re interesting enough.’

  ‘And yours are interesting?’

  ‘God, yes.’

  He stopped, breathing heavily. Phoebe was pleased for him, of course. If he made a success of this, his pride would be restored. His wife might even – God forbid – treat him with some kind of respect instead of the usual borderline contempt.

  ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’m having a slight problem with what they actually say. My characters.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Of course, I know what they mean to say. I just don’t know how they put it into words.’

  It turned out that they all spoke in nineteenth-century Radnorshire dialect. That was the problem. Torren, born and bred in the area, might be able to help.

  ‘If I send you a list, perhaps you could give it to him? He could translate it into Radnorshire-ese or whatever they call it. I’m sure it hasn’t changed much over the years. I’ve got to make it sound authentic.’

  There was a note of desperation in his voice that touched Phoebe. She said she’d give it a go.

  ‘Thanks, sis,’ he said. ‘You’re a star.’

  The next day she drove up to Tan-y-Wynt, Torren’s wood. It was in a steep valley and in the winter months plunged permanently in shadow. It was still beautiful, however, always beautiful, a secret cleft in the world filled with ancient trees furred with moss. She had Little Feat playing, full volume, and sang along to ‘Feel The Groove’.

  Funnily enough, she was looking forward to her task. It gave her a reason to visit Torren, and something for them to talk about. Their relationship, if she could call it that, had somewhat stagnated. Her visits to his hut were so disconnected from her normal life – that was the problem. They were a one-night stand, multiplied many times, with no continuity and nothing to grow from. She sometimes saw Torren in Costcutter buying a bottle of vodka but they had no friends in common, no common ground. No conversation, to be perfectly honest.

  Oh, there was talk, plenty of that. But it was he who did the talking while Phoebe sat on the floor, wedged between his legs, gazing at the flames of his log-burner. In the beginning she found this liberating. It reminded her of her past; she was young again, being lectured on extra-terrestrials by some stoned stranger with whom she’d just had sex. In fact, to be perfectly honest, she sometimes wondered if she only persevered with this sort of malarkey to prove that she could still do it. Catch other women her age traipsing out to a rotting hut just to get laid! This might sound smug but what the hell? It beat the Defibrillator Awareness Evening at the Memorial Hall.

  They’d met when she was struggling through the bracken in what turned out to be his wood. She’d lost her way and was trying to get back to the road. He stood in a clearing – a skinny, wild-looking man, digging a hole.

  ‘Looking for something?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Am I?’

  She was not usually so Zen; blame it on his dreadlocks. He didn’t seem to mind her trespassing, anyway, and told her he’d just seen an otter.

  This was thrilling, of course, so he led her down to the stream and they sat there, waiting for it to reappear. He said the water was the purest in Wales so she scooped up some and drank. He banged on for a while about lichens, how many varieties grew in his wood due to the lack of pollution, but she wasn’t listening. It was a drowsy day in midsummer; nature was sunk in torpor and she couldn’t be bothered to exert herself. The bank rose up steeply on the other side of the stream. It was crowded with hart’s-tongue ferns – shiny straps, brilliantly green. She said she was an artist and would love to paint them, so Torren said come back any time.

  And she did. The very next day, in fact. Scrambling down the bank, she set up her easel and started work. Torren knew she was there because she’d parked her car near his hut, but she didn’t see him for hours. All she heard was the sound of an axe, and later on some music.

  Then something crashed through the undergrowth. A dog tore down the bank and shoved its no
se up her skirt.

  It was some sort of mongrel, matted and shapeless, the sort of dog that looks the same back to front. A patch of fur had been shaved off, revealing pink skin and a row of stitches.

  Torren appeared and sat down on a tree root.

  ‘Nice dog,’ she lied.

  ‘Had a tumour in his spine, poor fucker,’ he said. ‘They kept him in for three days and he nearly tore the place apart.’ The dog withdrew its head from her crotch and Torren gave it a stroke. ‘Nice one, Ziggy.’

  He started rolling a spliff. As he did so she thought of the last time she’d had sex. It was, humiliatingly, eight years earlier. She had a suspicion that quite soon she might be having it with Torren. There was something about the way he lounged there, presumptuously eyeing her bare legs, that seemed promising.

  The industrial-strength skunk helped. Phoebe hadn’t smoked dope for years and though she knew it had mutated into something more powerful she had no idea what it would do to her brain and indeed her inhibitions. They somehow got to his hut and onto his disordered bed. God knew when he had last washed the sheets; luckily the light was fading so she couldn’t see them clearly – more to the point, he couldn’t see her clearly as she pulled off her clothes with what she hoped was careless abandon. Mind you, he was no spring chicken either and gratifyingly spongey around the midriff.

  So there she was, naked in bed with a naked man. The first moment was painful, like pushing open a rusty door on a long-disused shop. She’d read about this problem with older women but hadn’t put it to the test. He took it slowly, however – he was surprisingly considerate – and soon lust took over and their bodies were moving together in that miraculous conversation she thought she would never have again, the dog nipping their toes until Torren kicked him out.

  Afterwards they both burst out laughing. It was a lovely moment, that – the laughter. Phoebe was young again. Young.

  That was how it started. As the months passed, however, she realised Torren knew nothing about her life and indeed expressed no interest in it. She didn’t mind, it was not as if they were friends, but it did seem somewhat lopsided when he’d told her so much about himself, so she was looking forward to something more resembling a conversation.

  It was raining when she turned off the road. Torren had erected a sculpture at the entrance to his wood: a driftwood totem pole, stuck with nitrous oxide capsules and topped with a sheep’s skull. She drove down the track, tyres skidding in the mud. Now it was winter, various objects were revealed, rotting in the undergrowth – the carcass of a rowing boat, a pile of motorbike entrails, the skeleton of an ancient caravan, blackened with mould. As usual, Phoebe felt pleasantly lawless. Imagine Farida here! Imagine her face!

  Torren’s dog no longer barked at her arrival. She considered this a sign of acceptance. Outside the hut lay a dead rabbit, its head bitten off; sometimes Ziggy brought her his victims and dropped them at her feet, an act that she found strangely flattering even though the bearer was so repulsive.

  The rabbit, wet and matted, lay there like an empty glove. Bye, baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a’hunting. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin, to wrap the baby Bunting in. When she was little Phoebe loved that nursery rhyme; it made her feel safe. Her father was so affectionate, like the father in the song, but then he too kept leaving – not hunting, in his case, but disappearing into an unknowable adult world of Conferences and Abroad.

  Torren came out of his hut and hugged her. He smelled pleasingly of roll-ups and wood smoke.

  ‘I bet your father went hunting,’ Phoebe said. ‘The real thing, rabbits and crows and whatnot.’ It wasn’t far away, the farm where he was brought up – just over the hill towards Llandrigg.

  ‘Yeah.’ He sat down, groaning. His arthritis was playing up. ‘Bloody rain, bloody Wales.’

  ‘You should have got used to it by now.’

  He took out a bottle of cloudy liquid. ‘Been drinking this to numb the pain.’

  It was some sort of hooch. He said his mate Bendicks made it by hanging up marrows and draining them through ladies’ tights. Torren poured some into a mug and passed it to her. ‘Eighty per cent proof; it’ll knock your socks off.’

  He said that Bendicks lived in a showman’s wagon in the next valley and had been in and out of gaol.

  ‘Why’s he called Bendicks?’ she asked. ‘Is it some old Welsh name?’

  Torren shook his head. ‘’Cos that’s what he stole.’

  ‘Bendicks Bittermints?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I don’t blame him,’ she said. ‘They’re delicious.’

  ‘No, sweetheart. Bendix. The washing machines.’

  ‘Goodness. Aren’t they a bit heavy?’

  ‘Not if you got a five-ton lorry.’

  ‘Still, seems an awful lot of effort.’

  He shrugged. ‘He’s a nutter. When we were in Amsterdam, back in the day, we went on this massive bender. First we dropped some acid, then we went for the magic mushrooms and his brain, like, exploded. So he’s jumping into the canals and freaking out . . .’

  Phoebe drifted off. Once Torren started on these legendary acid trips it could go on for ages, as meandering as a Norse Saga and just as incomprehensible.

  She took a sip. The hooch tasted like battery fluid. She decided to stop Torren mid-flow and ask him Robert’s questions, otherwise there wouldn’t be time for a fuck before her choral group. They were practising ‘Thanks for the Memory’. Now that was romantic, so wonderfully romantic it made her swoon. She felt a lurch of sadness that Torren would never sing that about her. Nor, indeed, would she sing it about him.

  ‘I’ve got a brother who’s writing a book about Radnorshire,’ she said. ‘I know it’s called Powys now, but his book is set a hundred years ago when it was still the old name.’ She rummaged in her bag. ‘It’s a trilogy, apparently.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘But he’s only on volume one.’ She found a sheet of paper and passed it to him. ‘Seeing as your family has been farming here for ages, he wondered if you could help him with some words.’

  Torren looked startled. He held the paper at a distance, as if it might explode. She realised he was pretty drunk.

  ‘Could you do it?’ she asked. ‘Translate them into dialect?’

  ‘No problemo.’

  He blinked, gathering his wits. Phoebe sat down beside him and pointed out the words. Wind, rain, sleet, snow, virgin, still-birth, epileptic fit, umbilical cord, castration, axe, seizure, death . . .

  ‘Sounds like a laugh a minute,’ said Torren.

  Each word had a space next to it, for Torren her fuckbuddy to fill in.

  The word fuckbuddy still annoyed her. Only a brother could be so contemptuous. On the other hand she was grateful to him for tasking her with this project and introducing another element into her whatever-it-was-called, her thing, with Torren. In future, she decided, she would call it an off-grid relationship – disconnected from the mains of emotional dependency. That was an improvement.

  Torren put on his specs; the first time she’d seen him wearing any. Instantly he looked more intelligent. Borrowing her biro, he started scribbling down the dialect translations, word by word.

  Phoebe was astonished at his speed. ‘Wow, you know them all?’

  ‘Most of ’em. My nan, my dad, they all spoke this shit.’

  She looked at his scrawl: withmass, llanslab, sythe, curmudden. ‘What a beautiful language,’ she said.

  ‘Normal for me, doll,’ he replied, still scribbling away. He finished with a flourish and grabbed her. ‘Now let’s get those panties off.’

  Half an hour later Phoebe drove back up the track. The light was fading and the rain had stopped. Sex hadn’t been so painful this time; it seemed the pessaries were working. But then there was the dreaded cystitis, which was almost worse. Her father said, Old age is not for cissies, but the same could be said for being a woman, especially a woman of sixty. The only positive thing was that she couldn’t get preg
nant. Gone were the days when she fumbled with her diaphragm in some pub toilet, hands slippery with spermicidal jelly and, on one occasion, catapulting the blasted thing across the room. Not to mention the torture of having a coil inserted. How undignified are the foundations for rapture, and how dearly bought! Men have no idea.

  Phoebe was thinking this as she turned onto the road and started driving down the hill. A car appeared, approaching from the opposite direction. It looked familiar, and she realised it belonged to her neighbour Pam, a matronly quilt-maker.

  Pam passed her and for some reason Phoebe glanced in the rear-view mirror. Maybe she suspected something, who knows?

  For Pam’s brakes lights came on. Then her indicator winked left, and she drove into Torren’s wood.

  Robert

  There were two women in his life who scared Robert. One was his sister and the other was his wife. They both knew him too well, that was the problem. Such different women, so vastly different, but they had this in common. That narrow-eyed look, their heads tilted sideways – he knew, of course, what they were inspecting. It was him. Him. The naked, cowering, cringingly inadequate human being, still curled in a foetal ball.

  The children were different because he was their dad. However much they might complain, a dad’s a fully formed adult. He’s the constant; it’s they who have the licence to change and grow, and change and grow they must. But they simply had no idea, no idea at all.

  Robert was mulling over this as he took his afternoon walk. He missed his dog – still, after all this time. Without Bismarck on the lead his arm hung as useless as a flipper. He missed those moist brown eyes and unconditional love. Bismarck saw right into his quivering soul but unlike Robert’s nearest and dearest he remained utterly devoted.

  Did everyone feel this way? That if somebody cut them open they’d be appalled at what they found? He couldn’t ask Farida; she’d dismiss it as the self-indulgent blathering of someone with too much time on his hands. His sister would be equally dismissive. She’d blame it on their parents but claim that she’d been more damaged than him, that he’d been the favoured one because he was the first-born, and a boy. It would bring that old chestnut up again. If anything, their rivalry had worsened over the years.