Keeper by Andrea Gillies

Author:Andrea Gillies [Gillies, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71913-3
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

PEOPLE ARE OFFENDED left, right, and center. They’re not accustomed to being headed off at the pass. Perhaps they categorize my unwillingness as indicative of neglect? Perhaps, in their training, their trained way of seeing the world, my being flippant is considered a marker of something. I don’t know. They must be accustomed to other sorts of people being caregivers, I decide. Perhaps they’re used to people who like this endless going over things. It must be seen as therapeutic, cathartic. It’s supposed to be bad to bottle things up, isn’t it, unhealthy? I, however, am of the opposite view. I don’t relate to the lanced-boil metaphor. I tend to think that a problem shared is a problem doubled. Or quadrupled. A problem shared, hereabouts, is generally a problem that’s gossiped about.

March brings its usual last blast of winter to blow away the spring. We find ourselves snowed in for almost a fortnight, transport canceled, schools closed, the world quiet in that uniquely quiet, snow-muffled way. We don’t get that much snow, but the little that falls is blown impressively into drifts sufficient to immobilize a bus, and subzero temperatures freeze the slush on the roads, and that brings the whole region to a halt. We can get no farther than the village shop. Potatoes, cabbage, frozen fish, bacon: these become, temporarily, a big part of the diet.

In late March I have a new project. I organize myself a whole other life. A house in Turkey. We’ve sold our ruin in Normandy that we bought to renovate and never will, and want spring and autumn sun. The project starts as a house in Bulgaria, as I have seen houses on eBay going for £8,000, though Bulgarian trawling ends in a cul-de-sac. It’s Greece we want but we can’t afford Greece. I go online across the water into Turkey, and find that a tiny cement house by the sea is possible at the £25,000 level. And so I spend two weeks doing nothing but chasing leads, drawing up a short list, pestering agents. The in-laws, Chris, and the children are kept at arm’s length. Dealing with the inevitable, inescapable day-to-day slog, unpaid and thankless—running the household, dealing with Morris’s mild but needling hostility, coping with Nancy’s bizarre and darkening world—all of that, I can deal with because round the corner, in laptop-land, life-changing things are afoot.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.