The Carer

The Carer

A novella

by

Scott Nelson

Smashwords edition

Copyright © 2014 Scott Nelson

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Cover design © Melissa Alvarez at BookCovers.Us

Cover photography © DepositPhotos.com / ©ivantcovlad, ©giorgiomtb.

For Laurie

We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.

—Frank A. Clark

I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.

—John Mortimer

Chapter One

From 400 feet up, tucked for a few moments more within the relatively comfortable confines of the 747’s cabin, Malcolm McDonald watches London’s pre-dawn lights unroll like a blanket of glow-worms.

Less than 24 hours before, lust and naivety had carried him into a San Francisco clip joint – a last holiday hoorah in a honey trap that had spat him out, frustrated, with only a hard-on and a maxed-out credit card to show for his troubles.

Now, for the second time in his life, he is about to land in London without a job, somewhere to live or so much as a single friend – but this time almost flat broke to boot.

It’s funny, in a way. Since he’d swapped his native New Zealand for England nine months before, he had often found himself wondering why London was home to so many homeless people. After all, as far as he could tell, most of the seemingly ubiquitous beggars crouched beside the city’s cash machines were from here. Unlike him, they presumably had family and friends and knew the lie of the land. Unlike him, most of them must have been entitled to the dole and maybe a few other benefits besides. And if he, an outsider, could come here and find a job and a place to live – to start from nothing and at least stand on his own two feet – then why couldn’t they? Why did anyone in London have to beg – when the place had to import so many people simply to get its buildings built and its pints poured? He knew first-hand how many jobs there were here, even for unskilled workers such as himself.

He had no right to judge the capital’s homeless hordes, he knew. Nevertheless, more than once, he had found himself wondering if some of them hadn’t simply chosen that life over having to get up and out of bed each morning. More than once, as he’d handed over a few quid, he’d been tempted to ask how on earth they had ended up there. To get someone’s story. To get an inkling of the bigger picture around the problem. A predilection for addiction was his best guest.

Now, however, there’s no longer any need for such research. Now he’s about to have his curiosity satiated – poised as he is to see first-hand just how easy it is to fall into homelessness. Anxiously, his fingers find their way yet again to the three £10 notes carefully folded and stowed in the front of his grubby and creased jeans. The cash is the only thing separating him from sleeping rough tonight. Once that’s gone, about this time tomorrow, he will himself be pleading for spare change on the capital’s piss-stained mid-winter streets.

Chapter Two

Do or die. Make or break. Shit or bust.

Exhausted, Malcolm catches the tube from Heathrow to Earl’s Court and checks into a grungy backpacker hostel, trading most of his money for a dorm bed and a locker for storing his pack. Without enough cash for a second night, he has to find work fast. And not just any old job, but specifically the kind that comes with food and somewhere to live. A live-in position. There are actually plenty of those in London. He just has to find – and start – one within 24 hours. It will be a lot harder, he knows, to win work once he’s sleeping rough and hasn’t showered for a week.

For the fourth time that day, he thinks about calling home for help. But his father is dead and his mother is broke. Even if she wasn’t, the funds would take too long to arrive in his account. He is on his own and has to find a way out of this himself. After all, wasn’t that the point of leaving home in the first place? It’s his fault he’s in this mess. He’ll have to get himself out of it.

From the payphone in the hostel’s noisy lobby, he calls his old employment agency – the one that had given him his first and last job in London, a live-in gig keeping an eye on an elderly Jewish gentleman up in Camden Town. The Doc, as Malcolm had called him, had suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s and hadn’t known one day from the next. Malcolm had worked seven days a week for three months. The money had been okay, around twice what he would have earned pulling pints in a pub. And that, combined with having next to no time off, meant Malcolm had within only 12 weeks saved enough to travel around most of the US and much of Canada for half a year.

Not that he actually wants to return to that kind of work. He had come to London, after all, to have fun. And working that kind of job, doing those kinds of hours, made it impossible to make any friends. That job is the reason he still doesn’t know anyone in London, nine months in. Doesn’t have a single friend he can crash with for a few nights. Besides, care work is more than a little gruelling, especially the live-in variety. Having to hang out with elderly folk all day. Having to have the same conversation over and over again. He isn’t a nurse and doesn’t want to be one. Yet here he is – unskilled, unconnected and fast running out of money and time.

A little luck. A possible lead. He gets through to Margaret, his former boss at the agency.

‘Malcolm! Malcolm McDonald. Of course I remember you,’ she exclaims. ‘Doctor Berman’s family are still raving about you. You weren’t easy to replace! Now, let me think…’ A pause, then: ‘Yes, we may well have something for you.’

‘Oh yeah?’ he says, doing his best not to sound desperate.

‘Possibly, yes. In the southwest of the city. Mrs Days. She has dementia. Quite advanced, I’m afraid. Needs watching closely.’ Another pause. He can hear the click of a keyboard. ‘I don’t suppose you could pop down there today? Take a look and let me know your thoughts?’

Suddenly, Malcolm realises that, based on his exemplary record with the Doc, this job is his if he wants it. She doesn’t need to ask twice.

He spends most of his remaining money on a one-day travelcard for the tubes and buses and another two quid on a scoop of greasy fries, the cheapest breakfast he can find. Now he has exactly £9.45. He needs to nail that job. No margin for error. No second chances.

The wind, as cold as a stepmother’s kiss, cuts around the corner and stabs him in the face. Reckless pigeons strut through the scene as if they own it. A gang of girls totter and clop their way to school in clinging mini-skirts, pouting sex and touting phones and attitude. The sky is darkening and coming down like a press. Malcolm races for the tube, getting underground before the rain comes down.

The half-full train carriage offers a cross-section of the capital, a microcosm of the metropolis. A stink of cigarettes, hairspray, dry-cleaning, curry, body odour. It looks and sounds like the world in a tin, six different languages within earshot. Tired and pale passengers hiding behind newspapers and phones in a desperate bid to shut each other out for just a little longer.

He gets off at Wimbledon, the end of the line, and finds his way to the bus stop Margaret had mentioned. The rain has slowed to a light drizzle. On the other side of the road, a skull-shattering shriek of jackhammers breaks up the tarmac, the accompanying bitumen stinking like burning flesh. The bus arrives and he’s stuck standing, hanging on for dear life as the centrifugal force throws him around corners. The bus stops at a light and, through the press of flesh, he glimpses a yellow police sign, black letters appealing for witnesses to an assault. Welcome back to London Malcolm, it seems to scream. How the hell did he up here? Why had he swapped his home, his comfort zone, for this?

The place he came from was, at least on paper, paradise – the paper often being the giant tourism posters he was always seeing plastered on the side of tube platforms deep underground, landscapes from the bottom of the world. He grew up in Queenstown, the South Island’s pristine alpine party town. The home of adventure tourism and of holiday homes owned by Hollywood A-listers, the place was anything but boring.

Yet he’d been compelled to leave, to get out as soon as he could. It was a source of mystery to many if not most of the English people he’d met since landing in London ten or so months ago. Many of them had been to New Zealand or wanted to go. Some even wanted to move there, frustrated with what their own country had become and blown away by New Zealand’s apparent beauty, the warmth of its people and the promise of living a life that was 20 or 30 years behind the UK. Slower. Cleaner. Easier and less crowded.

But they didn’t understand what