D. Mitchell - The King of Terrors

It wasn’t long before his manager’s patience and understanding, and that of his girlfriend, crumpled into impatience and incomprehension. Then, totally unplanned, as Gareth sat at his desk, staring hard at the telephone as if it were an alien life form, the pile of paper in his in-tray as something ominous and meaningless in equal measure, he came to a decision and went into his manager’s office and told him he was resigning with immediate effect.

He didn’t hang around for a reply. He didn’t want to risk being talked out of it, even if the chances of that were slim. His decision was, perhaps, by this stage in the game mutually beneficial. In the end his never knowing gave him a modicum of satisfaction that he’d made a stance against the firm, in his own small and barely significant way. More likely, his throwing himself upon his career sword was a means of atonement for the cruel way he treated Fitzroy and his family, and the cowardice he felt he’d exhibited throughout.

Whatever his motivation, Gareth was now without a job. Soon after he was without a girlfriend. She made it clear in no uncertain terms that he’d gone mad and said she could no longer live with the uncertainty he’d thrown at her. ‘You’re sick, do you know that, Gareth? You need your head looking at!’

It did not bother him half as much as he used to think it would, being without her. He felt strangely free, uninhibited and terrified all at once.

What he did possess was money set aside. Before he left the firm he sourced and secured a sizeable but comparatively inexpensive cottage in Wales, on the Pembrokeshire coast. Inexpensive compared to his London flat, that is, which he sold at a tidy profit thus enabling him, after first taking advantage of the housing slump to drive the price down still further, to buy the old cottage outright.

He traded in the Mercedes for a 1970s Land Rover and bought a repair manual with the sincere intention of learning how to keep the ancient thing on the road, a manual which was destined never to be opened in anger with his ignorance of all things mechanical remaining just that. He packed up a few basic things and flogged the rest of his stuff on eBay or handed it in to the local charity shops. He was aware he was wiping away the remaining vestiges of the person he’d been and was determined to manufacture a new one to stand in his place. If only it were that simple, he thought gloomily. But for now it seemed like half a plan and he felt lighter with every bag of useless crap he took out of the flat.

Deller’s End was a bluff old farmhouse, early nineteenth century in date, standing alone in the remaining few acres of land that hadn’t been sold off when the farm closed twenty years before. It stood but a quarter of a mile from the beautiful, majestic Pembrokeshire coast, an unspoilt stretch of low windswept heather, with steep, craggy cliffs that tumbled down to the sea many metres below where the waves could be heard booming endlessly, like the retorts of a battery of cannon at their base. The cottage’s address put it as part of a village which was in reality a handful of similar cottages sprinkled out far and wide in all directions, served by a single narrow road that was both exit and entrance. But in truth the cottage was too far removed to be a part of anything and that suited him fine. The cottage and he already had something in common. Gareth, too, felt too far removed to be part of anything. They were meant for each other. The last thing he needed was to be surrounded by people.

The village had a solitary general store and post office that opened for business at unpredictably bizarre times following no plan that he could see; a hair dressers run from a small cottage that always had a closed sign hung in the door; and a small, generally empty pub run haphazardly by an affable pit-bull of a landlord. It was the nearest thing to urban for miles.

He initially fretted the contrast between London and the middle of nowhere might be too great and that, like many a city dweller with sugary visions of moving to a country idyll, he’d soon be stir crazy and packing up his bags to head for the nearest Starbucks. But he needn’t have worried. He hadn’t realised how much he needed this until he experienced it.

He had quite a bit of savings still, but given the work the old place needed doing to it, and that he didn’t have a job, it wouldn’t last long. So he decided to turn his hobby into a business. He had been interested in photography for a long while, and in the past had used some of his London gallery contacts to sell the odd-print or so. He built upon that, and, though it took time to get off the ground, with one website and the buttering up of a few people back in the Smoke he managed to get close to break-even. Close but no cigar. He even learnt how to throw a few pots, invested in a small kiln and before long he was a regular tree-hugger, all anoraks and five-day stubble. He lived cheap and simple, uncluttered by the demands of a world he felt ground you up and spat you out. OK, he thought, it wasn’t all sweetness and light. It was cold in winter, he always seemed to be hungry, and he never had the money up front to pay the Council Tax, going to the dentist was a luxury he couldn’t afford and he missed having a hot shower. Swings and roundabouts.

The village store, when it opened for business as such, was run by two women. They were, by large, his only frequent human contact apart from the occasional visits from the postman. They were sisters, allegedly — the Cavendish sisters — both in their late fifties to early sixties and both as different in appearance from one another as it was possible to get. The most talkative, Patricia (never Pat) was tall, slender to the point of being alarmingly thin, with long dark hair still striping her mostly grey locks; she had a long nose to match, wide eyes like a frightened doe and a sour pout. Her sister, on the other hand, was small, overweight, a button nose and her voice was deeper; her general expression was one of permanent standoffishness and suspicion. The only thing they had in common was their sour pout. Gareth fancied they were ‘sisters’ after another fashion, a view shared by one or two locals he spoke to. One old farmer told him how he’d heard they’d called themselves after the banana, the Cavendish, as some kind of in-joke. They’d been here since 1966, apparently, and the old-fashioned, lacklustre store reflected their long tenure. They treated Gareth with mistrust for ages. In fairness, he thought, he must have looked like some backwoods hermit to them, even by comparison with other local backwoods hermits, and it took a long while for them to smile at him, at which turning point he felt partially accepted, or deemed harmless enough to encourage.

Gareth Davies was alone, but he wasn’t lonely. Even on nights when the wind rattled something loose on his leaky old roof and the arthritic wood burner struggled to fight back the damp amid the cold of a Welsh winter, he did not miss the company of others. In the beginning he rather thought that he would, but it wasn’t to be so. He realised he had always been something of a loner; he did not make friends very easily, and there were few people with whom he forged a close emotional bond. Perhaps it was because he was adopted, he thought, and he was fearful of getting too close to anyone and then having to suffer separation. Who knows?

He remembered he did not cry when his adoptive father died, and same too for his wife, his adoptive mother, following hot on his heels a year later. He was naturally sad, yes, but not enough for it to squeeze tears from him. It wasn’t their fault. They tried their best. He simply never forgave them for telling him the truth about his beginnings. It was like a razor to his heart when his mother sat him in front of her, a kid of about ten years old, his father telling them he had to go out to the garden and leaving her (rather cowardly, he felt, but who was he to talk?) to break the news they’d been dreading ever since they decided he must know. He was devastated. The words they must have agonised over for so long, for genuinely benign reasons, created a rift that would never heal till the day they died.