‘Phantom Limb’ by Francesca Reece

It was just like Gareth to do something like this. He was obsessed with this idea that she wanted to be different and that he was going to be the one to enable her transformation. He was always trying to make her do things that were outside of her comfort zone. She remembered going to visit him in London when he’d been working in the restaurant. He took her there on his evening off and had made the two of them sit at the bar so that she’d had to talk to all of his colleagues. She’d felt excruciatingly observed. She’d tried to watch the way the other diners had held their glasses; whether, for each new small plate, they’d used their forks or their hands. She’d been relieved that there hadn’t been chopsticks like the night before, when he’d taken her to a posh Chinese. At Gareth’s restaurant there’d been a French barman called Yves, in a black polo shirt that gripped the contours of his muscular arms. She could always remember their names, and when she asked after them afterwards, long after Gareth had ceased to think about them, she could see that he was judging her. She knew that Gareth thought that she remembered everyone because of the smallness of her own social life. He would shrug, shake his head and say, ‘I dunno Mum. Haven’t spoken to Yves for years. I think he moved back to Sète. I think he’s got a baby these days or something. How do you remember Yves?’

Yves had brought them different glasses of wine to try, and had talked to her about each one as if she understood the differences between chenin blanc and viognier and knew what natural, so a little funky could possibly mean. She’d found herself doing that thing that she did that she knew annoyed Gareth, where she pretended to understand what was going on, where she talked too loudly and repeated snatches of what the other person was saying as if to prove that she was in on it. Gareth would say, ‘Mate, save the wine chat. In my hometown, there’s two choices of wine in the pub – medium and large,’ and then he’d put his arm around Clair’s shoulder (his arms were so big, it never failed to get her, that – the sheer mass of her son’s arms) and even though she’d feel mortified, and she’d hate him for it, she’d also feel proud as Yves, or whoever their interlocutor happened to be, would smile at this overt display of filial affection. Gareth was so easy going. He didn’t mean anything seriously. Everybody liked Gareth.

She opened the window of the spare bedroom and shook the naked duvet out over the bed. It was a fine morning. The gauzy, milk glass mist had dissipated and a low bar of yellow light moved across the pale planes of the mattress. She tried to remember who the last person to have slept here was. When she was a child, Clair’s own mother used to say, houseguests are like fish. They go off after three days. Gareth was always inviting waifs and strays to stay with him though. Even in that tiny flat he’d had in Madrid. Clair hadn’t been there herself, but she’d seen photographs, and he always had someone or other staying over. She smoothed down the bottom sheet with the flat of her palm. Made perfect, hospital corners. The air that came in through the window was sharp but greener than it had been these last few weeks. It was spring now. She supposed that was why this man had been so bothered about coming in the first place. I hear that North Wales is especially lovely in the spring, he’d written in the email, in his polite, brittle English.

Gareth had mentioned him, on the phone, over a year ago now, but she hadn’t paid too much attention. He was always coming up with funny things like this. She hadn’t ever thought that anything might come of it. He’d video called her from a campsite outside Casaglione. It had been the first time she’d heard from him in about a month. He was so bad at keeping in touch.

‘I picked up a hitchhiker the other day,’ he said, as his handsome face disintegrated into pixels. She’d been glad that the internet had chosen that moment to cut so that he couldn’t see her face. She hated it when he did things like pick up hitchhikers. Gareth trusted everyone. He had done since he was little. It was moments like this when she thanked God she hadn’t had a girl. By the time the jagged abstraction of his features became something coherent again, she’d managed to compose her own face into an expression that withheld judgement of his choices. She didn’t want him to think that she was a priss.

‘I lost you there for a sec. Can you hear me?’

‘Yeah. I was just saying about the hitchhiker. Ander. He was sound. He was from the Basque country and he’d let his mate take the car to the next town so that he could stay on hiking. We ended up going and getting a beer in Albertacce afterwards. He was great.’

Clair tilted the phone a little in her hand and took a screenshot. She liked to get the photos of his face when he was most like himself, when he was talking with the same exuberance that used to animate him when he was little. He was so good-looking now. Good straight teeth. Kind eyes. Afterwards, when they hung up, she liked to look at the screenshots. They were so like him.

‘He was dead interesting. From Bilbao originally but he’s doing a PhD in the UK. Proper smart – he knew about everything. We talked about loads of stuff – about books mostly.’

Gareth had said that Ander was a big fan of a Spanish writer that he liked. She could never remember the name. She could never remember if he was called José or Javier, or Jorge, and it was one of those names where, if she had to say it out loud, she could feel the surface of her skin prickle with hot self-consciousness. Feel her tongue dry out.

‘Anyway he was so cool, and he’s really into hiking, so I told him he should go to Eryri. I said he could stay with you. I gave him your email. That’s fine, isn’t it?’

Clair bristled. She said, ‘Snowdonia’s miles from here.’ Her voice had come out sharper than she’d wanted, and she was glad that the line cut again, so that she could arrange herself, and could pretend that she’d be happy to have some absolute stranger stay in her house. It wasn’t as if it was ever going to happen anyway.

When the room had aired a little, she pulled the window closed. It made a noise of air rushing out as it did, as if the glass was gasping for breath. As if she were hermetically sealing the house.

*

She ran into Nan Hughes in the supermarket. She tried to avoid her but it was too late. She’d glanced up from the crate of bagged salads that she’d been rifling through on the reductions end and had made direct eye contact with her.

‘Hiya love,’ Nan said. Her voice was soft and heavy like a newsreader announcing the death of a national treasure. Clair’s face twitched into a defiant smile. She wondered at what point people would stop talking to her like this. She slung the bag of rocket and watercress into her trolley with a little more ferocity than she’d intended.

‘Nan!’ The flat monosyllable fuzzed static with superficial cheer. ‘How’s everything with you? How are your girls?’

She enjoyed Nan’s discomfort when relaying the latest on her daughters’ lives. She nodded and cooed and made the right noises, and then, the inevitable happened. The silence. The awkward void that was the reason she’d rather have avoided these conversations in the first place. She watched the panic set in as Nan scrambled for a neutral topic; watched her eyes alight on the trolley, and what the fact of that trolley implied, and she registered Nan’s relief as she said ‘expecting visitors?’

‘Yes, actually. I am.’

Clair realised that she was glad now that she’d run into Nan, so that she could tell her about Ander. She felt her cheeks flush with pride.

‘It’s a funny story really. He’s some bloke that Gareth picked up hitchhiking.’ She threw her hands up self-effacingly as if to say, typical Gareth! ‘He’s called Ander. He lives in London but he’s from Spain originally. Student.’

She shimmered with satisfaction as Nan tried to retain mastery over the features of her face.

‘Oh. Right. You met him before then?’

Clair only wished that Ander had had a more foreign sounding name. It was Basque apparently. She’d looked it up online. It meant virile, man, warrior. Nan didn’t know about all the emails that Clair had composed and then deleted; about all the speeches that she’d rehearsed in the shower, or cleaning her teeth, or feeding the cat, telling Ander that it just wouldn’t be possible, that right now just wasn’t a good time. Nan was staring at Clair in stunned disbelief, as if she’d just cartwheeled down the aisle in her underwear. It was elating. She reminded herself of Gareth when she smirked and said, ‘Don’t worry Nan, I’m sure he’s not going to murder me in my bed.’

*

It was about half past six when she finally heard the crunch of wheels on the dirt track. She’d finished doing everything she’d needed to do earlier than she’d intended. There was a raspberry Pavlova in the fridge and she had a chilli con carne simmering on the stove. By the middle of the afternoon, the house was spotless and fragrant with the smell of the sweet tomato sauce thickening. She went into her bedroom and put her hair up, and then took it down again. She sat on the edge of the bed and opened and closed a magazine. She went and inspected the stack of CDs. Maybe she should be playing music when he arrived, to take the edge off it. She wondered what kind of music would strike the right tone. She was used to the silence, but he might find it alarming. Absolute silence intimidated some people. It was just like Gareth to get her into something like this. She picked up the photograph of him that she had on the bedside table. Six or seven. On the beach at Aberdaron, grinning at the camera. Clam shell eye patch. Blond hair the colour of wet sand and plastered to his head. She put the photograph down.

Pull yourself together Clair, she thought when she heard the heft of the stranger’s tyres unsettle the surface of the track. Her stomach tightened and she floated outside, disembodied by her own shyness. The man that emerged from the rented Renault Clio was shorter than she’d been expecting. She’d somehow been anticipating someone tall and limby like Gareth, but Ander only had an inch or so on her. There was something strikingly compact about him. He was all tight angles, as if someone had stripped him of any excess matter. A square jaw. A big bony nose. Olive skin stretched taut over the sweeping blades of his face – brow, cheekbone, jaw. Basque, meaning: virile, man, warrior. He was already dressed in hiking clothes, and she felt foolish for having put on perfume and her nice blouse. A bashful smile cracked the solidity of his face. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be nervous too.

In the back garden they sat at the little round table on the patio, and for the first time in a long time, Clair was pleased that she could share it with someone.

‘It’s a beautiful garden you have.’

It was, especially at this time of year. The sun was low over Hendre’s field and the absolute blue of the spring day was veined with the premonition of evening. The pigment of the new leaves was still radiantly novel. The clematis was in bloom. When Clair raised her glass to her lips, she could hear the tonic fizz, as if even that was alive.

‘Topa!’ Ander said.

‘Iechyd da.’

She noticed his Adam’s apple shudder as he swallowed the gin. Basque, meaning: virile.

‘You speak Welsh?’

‘My grandparents did, and Gareth as well. He went to a Welsh school. But my parents didn’t and they didn’t teach me.’

She didn’t know why it had come out like an apology. She was always apologising for things. She’d already apologised to Ander for the track, for the traffic on the M1, for the road works just outside town. She didn’t want to spoil this by minimising herself. She wanted Gareth to be proud of her. She inhaled a lot of the cool, green air and took another drink. The gin glittered on her tongue. She was so un-used to having someone here – a stranger especially – that Ander’s presence felt enormous. The way he disrupted the smoothness of the air. She drank again, and then excused herself to go and check on the chilli. In the kitchen she said to herself sternly, he’s just another human being. Like you. She said the words out loud. She often spoke aloud, to herself, to the cat, to appliances that wouldn’t work, stupid fucking thing. By the time she’d turned on the heat, washed the rice, and stirred the pot, her glass was empty. She couldn’t work out now whether it was the nerves or the booze that were making her head feel feather light and giddy.

When she came back out, Ander was smoking. He caught her eyeing the cigarette.

‘I’m sorry. Do you mind?’

‘No. Of course not.’ She sat down again. Topped up both their drinks. ‘In fact. Do you think ...?’

‘Si, claro. Of course.’ He handed her the cigarette that he’d just lit for himself and took out a pouch from his pocket. ‘Please,’ he said when she hesitated. She hadn’t smoked for years. The taste was rancid but the effect instant and lovely. She caught herself smiling as she exhaled. Blinked. ‘Phew.’ The ripples still. ‘It’s been a while.’ She took another drag and watched Ander’s bony, masculine hands as he began to roll another, the way he pinched it between his forefinger and thumb as he ran his tongue along its spine. It occurred to her that the cigarette she was smoking had been in that kind of proximity to his lips, and she registered that that felt exhilarating rather than embarrassing.

‘To tell you the truth,’ he said as he tapped his lighter on the arm of the chair, cigarette dangling on his bottom lip, ‘I’m a little nervous.’

That was a kind thing for him to have said.

‘Yeah. It’s a strange situation isn’t it?’

He narrowed his eyes at the horizon as he exhaled a fine line of blue smoke. She couldn’t help but picture him smoking with Gareth; sitting in the beer garden of the bar where they’d drunk that pint in Albertacce. She wasn’t sure if they had beer gardens as such in Corsica, but that’s how she’d imagined the two of them, sitting opposite each other on a picnic bench, the daylight blanching out into dusk, something silver, as they spoke. She wanted to ask Ander what they’d talked about. What Gareth had been wearing. She wondered if he knew things about her son that she wasn’t privy to. The kind of thing that you don’t tell your mother. Finally, she said, ‘Do you often hitchhike then?’

Ander shrugged. ‘Sometimes. It’s better in some places than in others. There are some places where you’ll be waiting for hours for a lift. It’s not even worth trying it in England.’

Clair took another long drag of the cigarette. Shook her head. Chased it with the gin and tonic, tangy and medicinal. ‘And have you ever had any bad experiences? You know, with drivers?’

He pulled a face that made it look like he was weighing out the idea in his palm. A kid comparing the smoothness of pebbles on the beach. ‘Most people are nice, you know. But you always hope you’re going to get picked up by someone really nice, and interesting I guess. Someone like Gareth.’

Clair beamed. She was glad that she had replied to Ander’s email. Gareth hadn’t been wrong; it was good to be open.

Over dinner, he told nice stories, with his unusual turn of phrase. A woman at the petrol station in an animal print dress had been tigerous. In London, the sky was too dense and heavy compared to Bilbao, whose sky was somehow all sea. Clair, who had been imagining and dreading this evening for so many weeks now, felt loose and open. Felt as if she were gliding on the strange rhythms of his speech. She didn’t often drink anymore, and the pleasant haze of the gin, along with the idiosyncrasies of Ander’s foreign voice, and the altogether foreignness of the situation, made everything seem like a very pleasant dream. How dreams are in films – fuzzed and golden. Afterwards, when Clair had loaded the plates into the dishwasher, they knelt in front of the hi-fi, and he said to her, ‘What music do you like?’

She cringed. ‘I used to like rock music. I liked Led Zeppelin.’

She felt very young, and very awkward. She’d forgotten that that was the form her shyness used to take, before it manifested itself as embarrassment at her age and her irrelevance.

They went back out onto the patio. The sun had set by now and the mountains were crested with pale, iridescent lilac. The inky silhouettes of the bats flecked the moonlit sky. Clair was worried that Ander would be cold as they sat there, wrapped up in jumpers, coats and blankets, smoking more of his rollies, but he told her that Northern Spain was cold too, most of the time. That the wind bit. That the Atlantic was rageful.

‘It’s much like Wales actually,’ he said. ‘I feel very at home in this country.’ He paused. Tilted his head back and sank into the deck chair. Luxuriated in his audible exhalation. Clair always took the silence for granted.

‘Gareth’s father’s Welsh too?’

She hesitated before she decided to carry on inhabiting the reckless version of herself that had appeared to Nan on the fresh produce aisle that afternoon.

‘I’m not sure.’

She smirked. It wasn’t a lie. Gareth’s father could have been either of them, although she’d always suspected that it was Dave. Something about the way his eyes were set on his face, and a feeling she’d had since Gareth was little; the way his upper lip curled when he was trying to tell a lie. She wished that Ander hadn’t been too polite to ask. That she could have told him what she’d been like when she was young, for the year or two that she’d lived in Manchester and had worked in the bar. She was nineteen when she met Dave. He was a scouser. Dave who called her Clur. She was twenty-one when Gareth was born and she’d had to move back in with her parents. Ander reached back into his pocket for the little pouch of tobacco and said, ‘Do you think you would maybe like to smoke a joint with me?’

She was glad that it was dark now, so that he couldn’t see her blush. She had the impression that she’d passed some kind of test, and that to refuse it would be to fail anew. She’d never been one for smoking weed. When she was a teenager at the end of the ’80s, she used to take ecstasy sometimes with her friends. They’d go to parties all over the place – in the woods, in flat muddy fields grazed for a night with ultraviolet light. Blades of grass shivering as the speakers breathed like giant lungs. She liked the feeling of being porous, and the way that it felt like they all shared a pulse, and a mind, a heartbeat. That hadn’t lasted very long though, of course. She could hardly have pitched up at a party with a pram, could she? When Gareth was born, she shared her pulse with him anyway. The reckless feeling again though. The pleasure she’d taken in shocking Nan.

‘Go on then.’

*

Ander left early the next morning for Betws-y-Coed. The traffic on the A5 would surely be a nightmare. She told him as much as they ate breakfast but he seemed unperturbed. He even tried to convince her to go with him, but to go all that way on Good Friday seemed madness. It’d be heaving with people. Morons going to the beach. She wanted some time by herself to digest everything anyway. She felt pleasantly agitated. Her head was full. The morning was bright and vivid and she felt manageably euphoric.

After Ander had gone, she went upstairs to run a bath. She took her time undressing as the hot water gushed into the tub noisily, and when she was done, she stepped into the pool of light in front of the big mirror and looked at herself. She wasn’t half bad. Often, when Clair caught her reflection she felt a kind of cognitive dissonance, but this morning, the fifty-year-old woman looking back at her was indeed herself. She leant in close to the mirror and pulled the skin of her face across her forehead. When Clair was young, she’d been very beautiful. Often, beautiful people pretend that they don’t realise what they look like, but Clair wasn’t stupid. She saw how people looked at her. How sometimes she’d get preferential treatment. How jarring it had been when that had come to an end. When men had stopped flirting with her in the street. When you’ve spent your whole life being watched, the slow flicker out into invisibility is demoralising. When people see a beautiful young woman they have all sorts of funny notions about her looks being indicative of some kind of intelligence, or humour, or exceptional character. When people saw Clair now – if they ever saw her at all – they saw an indistinct type. Someone’s mother. A uniform component of a homogenous mass of middle-aged anonymity. It was difficult to be known, sometimes. Gareth knew her. It was an effect of the two of them growing up together, and in such close and constant proximity.

In the afternoon, she was doing some work in the garden when she heard the phone screech inside. Her immediate thought was that it must be Gareth. She always thought it would be Gareth.

‘Clair? Is that you love?’

It was Nan Hughes. How transparent. Nan always was an old gossip. Motormouth, that’s what the other mothers at the kids’ primary school used to call her.

‘I just thought I ought to ring – to check your Spaniard hadn’t been an axe murderer after all.’ She giggled.

Clair took immense satisfaction in making the noise of sheer exasperation that Gareth usually put her on the receiving end of. ‘Hardly. Quite the opposite actually.’

‘Oh?’

She let a suggestive silence bloom and then said, ‘Nan, I’ll have to call you back another time I’m afraid. Ander’s waiting for me.’

*

By the time Ander got back it was evening again, and Clair had spent at least an hour sitting at the kitchen table, where you could see the track. The most embarrassing thing, when it got dark, was that her reflection began to appear in the glass of the window, so that the subtle indicators of effort and hope manifested themselves visibly to shame her. The concealer. The mascara. The two empty glasses in front of her. She hadn’t asked him what time he’d be coming home. She hadn’t wanted to sound like his mother. She thought, involuntarily, about the roads between here and Betws – lithe, supple, treacherous things. Sinewy fissures cracking through the woods the way that weeds break out through paving stones. One-car wide; a winding tunnel of green. Gareth was a boy racer when he was a teenager. He loved the country roads where the bends were so sharp that you could never drive as fast as you were allowed. She knew what he was like. He saw them as a challenge.

Of course, when Ander did get back, and she got up to go and answer the front door, she made sure to smooth the agitation out of her face and her voice.

‘I’m so sorry it’s so late,’ he said. ‘I hope you didn’t wait for me.’

‘No. I haven’t even put the chicken on yet. Would you like something to drink?’

‘I picked up some beer. It’s cold.’

She couldn’t put her finger on it but something had changed. Something had snapped. She was embarrassed by the reality of him. She was glad that she hadn’t started on the chicken, so that she had an excuse to go into the other room and be alone. He came and stood behind her though, as she closed the oven door. The particles in the air shifted, reformed.

‘Is everything alright?’ she said brusquely.

‘I wanted to see if I could help with something.’

‘It’s all done now.’

Her father had worked in Snowdonia when she was a child. When he used to come home, he smelt of pine needles and sweat. She wondered whether Ander would smell the same. She wished that she could reach out and touch the fine golden hairs on his forearm. She thought of Gareth again.

‘Was it nice today?’ she said instead.

He sighed. ‘It was very beautiful. But intense at the end. I had a troublesome encounter.’

Troublesome. She looked down at the tiles so she wouldn’t smile when she caught his eye.

‘It’s why I’m back so late. I was waiting for the Mountain Rescue.’

‘Oh my God. Are you alright?’ She’d been right to have been worried then. He did look shocked, now that she thought about it.

‘I’m okay. It was just sad.’ He tilted his head. Ran the edge of his index finger along the stubble that grazed his jaw. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about her all the way back.’

‘About who?’

‘It was this old lady. I was the first person that got to her. She’d slipped coming down from the ridge of Crib Goch and she’d twisted her ankle.’

Clair wondered how old this ‘old lady’ could have been. She couldn’t have been that old for Christ’s sake, if she was climbing Crib Goch.

‘I tried to comfort her, but she was so embarrassed. She was so ashamed that she’d inconvenienced anyone.’

Clair understood that. She’d have been mortified if they’d had to call out the Mountain Rescue for her.

‘She was so embarrassed that for a while I wondered whether I couldn’t just carry her down. But then another hiker called them. I felt so bad for her when he said that the helicopter was on the way.’

Clair grimaced. What a fiasco.

‘When it was just the two of us again, when we were waiting for the chopper, she calmed down a bit and she explained why she was so upset.’

The chopper. He must have learnt that from American films. Clair had an image of a camouflaged Chinook sweeping in over the Menai Strait from RAF Valley.

‘She wasn’t from here, but she’d wanted to come and climb Crib Goch for years. Apparently, when she was a teenager, her brother went hiking there in the winter.’

It was the word ‘winter’ that made it ominous. Clair knew when he specified ‘winter’ that what followed would be bad.

‘He had an accident. He fell. He died.’

She couldn’t make eye contact with Ander. She could hear from the tone of his voice that he was troubled by the story, and she would have liked to have said something comforting but she couldn’t bring herself to speak. Instead she just felt angry at him for spoiling the evening. For inviting death back into the house. What business did he have concerning himself with some stranger’s tragedy anyway? People loved being death-adjacent. It was like that sinister function on Facebook where people could check themselves in as ‘safe’ in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, and thus smugly signal their proximity to the horror of death. What did any of them know about how quiet it was?

Sometimes, Clair wondered if Dave was dead. How old would he be now? Mid-fifties. She wondered if he still had hair. If he’d got that round tummy that old men get, the saggy arse. The thing she noticed with her own father was the legs – the way that they lost definition and became soft and smooth, like bowling pins. She wondered if Dave had had any other children, after Gareth. She wondered if they were all still alive.

Clair didn’t speak much whilst the chicken was roasting. She was so angry that she couldn’t think of anything nice to say. Fine needles of rain had started to fall outside, so they couldn’t go out to the patio again, to watch the horizon turn. Ander sat on Gareth’s side of the sofa, mostly talking to himself. Maybe he’d been this self-absorbed the night before, and the novelty of someone else being there had blinded her to the reality of it. He talked about a book by Caradog Pritchard that Clair had never heard of, that he’d apparently read in ‘anticipation of coming here’. He talked about ‘microdosing LSD’, whatever that could possibly mean. He talked about his great-grandfather, who had apparently been killed by Franco’s men and thrown in an unmarked grave in their village (more death. More bloody uninvited death). Clair – who last night had become so used to the sound of her own voice in the house again, was surprised by the smallness of it, when she told him that the chicken would probably be done by now.

As Ander laid the table, asking where she kept the plates, the cutlery, the glasses, she thought about how when Gareth had left home, she’d moved the cutlery to the drawer below. When he’d come back at Christmas, she’d been so disturbed when he couldn’t find it – in what she insisted was still his house – that she’d moved it back up to where it had always lived.

It was hard though sometimes, when he came home. The anticipation was so exquisite – and then there was that first moment, when she’d see him coming through the turnstile at Rhyl Station, or hear his car in the drive. She’d feel this lightness – a sort of physical wellbeing – as if the sun were warming her face. But that joy was always splintered with the idea that soon, he would leave again. She wished she could be more like he was, and just enjoy things as they happened.

She wondered if she’d been thinking aloud when Ander said, apropos of nothing, ‘You know Gareth never replied to any of my emails.’

Her limbs braced. After Gareth had died – even a long time after, when she’d managed to pull together some kind of semblance of carrying on with her life – the thing that she couldn’t get used to was the silence. That he wasn’t ever going to reply to the last text message. That the phone call, or the wheels on the track, or any of it, would never be him again. That there was no way they could hear each other anymore, making her own voice doubly loud and jarring.

Clair smiled thinly. ‘He’s rubbish at replying.’

From issue #14: autumn/winter 2022

About the Author
Francesca Reece is a Welsh writer based in Paris. She was the recipient of the 2019 Desperate Literature Prize and is currently working on her second novel. Her debut Voyeur (Tinder Press) came out in 2021, and she has had work published in The London Magazine and Elle (UK).