Ten White Geese (9781101603055) Read online

  6

  She took the house as it was. There were a few pieces of furniture, a fridge and a freezer. She bought some rugs (all the rooms had the same bare, wide floorboards) and cushions. Kitchen utensils, saucepans, plates, a kettle. Candles. Two standard lamps. She kept the wood-burning stove in the living room going all day. The kitchen was heated by a typically British cooker that burnt oil from a tank squeezed between the side wall and the stream and hidden from view by a clump of bamboo. The enormous contraption doubled as a water heater. The day she moved in she found handwritten instructions on the kitchen table with a flat stone as a paperweight. Whoever wrote them signed off by wishing her Good luck! She wondered very briefly who it could be, but soon dismissed it as irrelevant. She followed the instructions on the piece of paper exactly, step by step, and wasn’t really surprised when it fired up. That night she was able to fill the large bath with steaming-hot water.

  It was just those geese; they were peculiar. Had she rented the geese too? And one morning a large flock of black sheep suddenly appeared in the field beside the road, every one with a white blaze and a long white-tipped tail. On her land. Who did they belong to?

  7

  She discovered that the path that led to the stone circle – and went on beyond it, though she’d never been farther – joined her drive where it bent sharply. A kissing gate in a thicket of squat oaks was completely overgrown with ivy. By the look of it, nobody had been through it for years. On the far side of the gate was a field with long, brown grass. There had to be a house somewhere; a chicken coop with a dim light that burnt day and night stood a bit farther down the drive. She cut away the ivy with her new secateurs and sawed off the thick stems close to the ground. The gate still worked. She found an old-fashioned oil can in the pigsty and oiled the hinges. Only then did she realise that the path followed her drive, then crossed her yard before passing through a second kissing gate in the low stone wall and leading across the fields to the wooden bridge over the stream. A public footpath, apparently, and she had a vague recollection of that being something British landowners couldn’t do much about. With the hinges oiled, she walked to the road with the oil can still in her hand and turned right. After a couple of hundred metres she found the sign with the hiker, his legs overgrown with lichen. She didn’t dare climb over the stile, scared as she was of coming out at the house she still hadn’t seen. It was the first time she’d turned right. Caernarfon was to the left. She walked a little farther, the sunken road rising slightly. After about ten minutes she reached a T-junction and there she saw the mountain for the first time and realised what a vast landscape existed behind her house and how small an area she had moved in until that moment. All at once, she became aware of the oil can in her hand. She rubbed a blister on the inside of her thumb and quickly turned back. The geese honked loudly at her, as they had every time she’d walked past. The next day she bought an Ordnance Survey map at an outdoor shop in Caernarfon. Scale: 1–25,000.

  8

  On a cold night she decided to test the small fireplace in her bedroom. She had to open the window. Not to let out smoke, but heat. Even with it open, the room was so hot she had to lie naked on top of the duvet. And instead of thinking about her uncle, she saw the student, the first year. She parted her legs and imagined that her hands were his hands. After a while she turned on the light, not the main one, but the reading lamp on the floor next to the mattress. Her breasts looked monstrous on the white wall, his hands even larger. It was as if the burning wood was sucking all the oxygen out of the small room; she couldn’t help but pant. Although there were no neighbours, she kept seeing the dark uncurtained window and herself lying there. Aroused woman alone, fantasising about things long past, things she would be better off forgetting. That unspoilt body, lean and lithe, the powerful arse, the hollows behind the clavicles, the jutting pelvis. The selfishness, the energy and thoughtlessness. Anyone who cared to could look in through the uncovered glass, at least if they took the trouble to lean a ladder against the wall and push aside a few of the creeper’s tendrils. Afterwards she smoked a cigarette in the study, still naked. She saw herself sitting there, shivering in the cold. She blew smoke up over her face and thought about him sitting in front of her later, among the other students, one of many, with the face of a sulking child. A spiteful egotistical child, and as ruthless as children can be.

  9

  The next day the sun was shining. The weather here was nothing like she’d expected; it could be very still and quite warm, even now, deep into the year. Around noon she went to the stone circle. The badgers weren’t there. That didn’t strike her as strange, almost certain as she was that they were nocturnal. On the detailed map she’d bought she had found a green dotted line running up her drive and across her yard. It even gave the name of her house. The house that belonged to the chicken coop turned out to be less than a kilometre away; there were several farmhouses in the immediate vicinity. The stone circle was indicated by a kind of flower with stone circle written next to it in an old-fashioned font. The mountain was Mount Snowdon. At the stone circle she felt like someone was watching her, whereas before it had been almost as if she had discovered it. She took off her clothes and lay on the largest boulder like a cold-blooded animal. It warmed her back. She fell asleep.

  For a few nights now the rushing stream no longer calmed her: noises – creaking boards, the shuffling of what she hoped were small animals, and an almost unbearably plaintive cry from the woods – kept her awake, and awake she started thinking. She got wound up again, defiant and angry. She sighed and tossed and turned, imagining what was happening to her body. She also tried to localise the mild, nagging pain. Nagging and not, as she had expected, gnawing: like dozens of tiny beaks slowly but surely eating their way through her insides. Maybe she just responded well to the paracetamol she was taking. She grew anxious too. Last night, looking at herself smoking, she saw her face change into a stranger’s: a voyeur rather than a reflection. It was November; in December the days would be even shorter. Curtains, she had written on the piece of paper lying on the table in front of her. It was the first word she wrote down. She went back to the bedroom, closed the window and lay there gazing at the bare glass for quite a while, her heart pounding as if she’d been running up and down the stairs.

  *

  When she first woke she didn’t understand what was happening down at her feet. She thought of the wind and gorse bushes. Whatever it was touching the soles of her feet, it wasn’t sharp. Very carefully she raised her head from the stone. First she saw a white stripe, a stripe through black patches to either side of it – she immediately thought of the heads of the black sheep. Small dark eyes peered up from between her feet. The badger was staring straight at her groin. Her neck muscles started to quiver, her forehead pricked beneath her hair. The animal looked at her and she wondered if it could really see her, if a badger understood that eyes were eyes. It was as motionless as she was, but with the vertebrae at the top of her back pressing painfully against the stone that wouldn’t last much longer. Then the animal began to climb slowly up onto the rock, between her calves and knees. It raised and turned its head and started sniffing, nose slanted, looking straight ahead. She shot up, moving both hands to cover her groin and shocking the badger so much it jumped, half turning in mid-air in an attempt to get away. It landed on her left leg, her foot blocked its escape route and it bit into her instep. She had time to grab a branch up off the ground and swung it, bringing it down hard on the badger’s back, so hard it snapped with a dry sound that made her gasp, despite the fright, and think, Oh God, I hope I haven’t crippled him. The badger writhed and growled and lurched off under a gorse bush. A few birds took flight. After that it became very quiet again. Blood ran down her foot and dripped onto the stone, but it didn’t hurt too much and she thought, Let it bleed for now. She lay down again. The stone no longer gave off any warmth. She let one hand rest on her groin; her body seemed to have come back to her. Strange that she had
n’t realised that last night. And peculiar that she automatically thought of an animal that attacked her as ‘him’.

  *

  Lacking a first-aid kit, she cut up an old T-shirt, quarter filled the bath and soaked her foot in the hot water until the skin was wrinkled. Then she tied a strip of material around it. Later she pulled The Wind in the Willows out of the pile of books on the small table next to the divan and rediscovered how gruff and solitary badgers can be, an animal that ‘simply hates society’. That night her foot started to throb.

  10

  She had left her mobile phone lying there in the cabin weeks before when the ferry docked punctually in Hull, so the best she could come up with now was to drive to the tourist information centre in Caernarfon to ask about a doctor. Driving was difficult. Her foot was swollen, she couldn’t get it into a shoe. Pulling on a pair of jeans proved equally impossible and that was why she was wearing a skirt. Letting out the clutch, the pedal felt as hard as a rock, hard and rough. Veils of thin rain passed over the windscreen. She thought of the stove in the living room and wondered if she should have put it out. And she worried that the last GP might have left Caernarfon, that it would say FOR SALE on his window too. The helpful tourist ladies would send her on to Bangor.

  *

  ‘Holiday?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘No, I live here,’ she said.

  ‘German?’

  ‘Dutch.’

  ‘So what’s the matter with you?’ The doctor was a thin man with yellow hair. He was sitting there smoking away in his surgery.

  ‘May I also smoke?’ she asked.

  ‘You may. We all have to die of something.’

  While lighting up, she thought about the inadequacy of English personal pronouns. This man’s ‘you’ sounded informal to her, whereas the woman at the tourist information counter had said it in a more formal way, like a Dutch ‘u’. Listeners had to decide for themselves how they were being addressed and respond accordingly. She drew hard on her cigarette to clear the rising image of the first-year student.

  ‘Your foot?’

  ‘Yes. How do you know that?’

  ‘I saw you walk in. There was a degree of difficulty. And most people who come through that door wear two shoes.’

  ‘I was bitten by a badger.’

  ‘Impossible.’ The doctor stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘But I was.’

  ‘Liar.’

  She looked at the man. He really meant it.

  ‘Badgers are meek animals.’ Meek?

  ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.

  He pointed to a cross on the wall next to a crooked poster warning against HIV infection: an obscure shape she couldn’t quite place and the words Exit only.

  ‘And yes, one day there will be nothing but badgers walking around this town. People have already started to move away. Badgers and foxes. Or they just up and die, that’s an option too of course. Could you perhaps tell me how you possibly came to be bitten by such a meek animal?’

  Not enough personal pronouns and an excess of roundabout verb constructions, she thought. ‘I was asleep.’

  ‘Did the animal get into your house? Do you live here in town?’

  ‘I live up the road. I was outside, lying on a big rock.’

  ‘Did the badger bite you through your shoe?’

  ‘Do you have time for all this talk? I’d rather you look at my foot.’

  ‘It’s quiet this morning. You sound a little hoarse. Trouble with your throat?’

  Hoarse? Did she sound hoarse? ‘Maybe I have a temperature.’

  ‘Are you tired too?’

  ‘Dead tired. But that –’

  ‘You weren’t wearing any shoes?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, I’d taken off my shoes.’

  The doctor looked at her, but let it slide. ‘Show me.’ He gestured at a bed.

  She hopped over and struggled up onto it, as it was quite high. She pulled the thick sock off her injured foot.

  ‘Ouch,’ the doctor said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s damn painful.’

  He took her left foot and squeezed it cautiously. Then he ran a hand up her shin. ‘There are scratches here too,’ he said.

  She tried to restrain the blush rising from her throat, but knew how pointless that was. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

  ‘The badger?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He rubbed her knee. ‘Not just the shoes.’

  ‘The sun is still very strong here even in November,’ she said.

  ‘We have a marvellous climate.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Any other complaints?’

  Before answering, she glanced around the surgery once again. ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘People don’t come here for a splinter in their eye. They use it as an excuse to casually mention all their aches and pains.’

  She kept her eyes on the cross. Like the poster, it was slightly crooked. The doctor finally took his hand off her knee.

  ‘If you’re sure it was a badger, I’ll need to give you a tetanus injection.’

  ‘It was a badger.’

  ‘I’ll leave the wound. Soak it two or three times a day in hot water with a couple of teaspoons of baking soda dissolved in it. It’s an old remedy. And I’ll put you on antibiotics.’

  The injection hurt like hell. After throwing away the phial and needle, he immediately lit up a fresh cigarette. With the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and one eye watering, he wrote out the prescription. ‘Do you know where the chemist is?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Six houses along.’ He looked at his watch. ‘He’s open now.’

  She stood up and accepted the prescription. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘If the wound’s no better after about four days, come back.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And watch out for badgers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Badgers and foxes. Foxes have a nasty bite on them too.’

  ‘They’re too busy with my geese,’ she said.

  The doctor started to cough.

  *

  My geese, she thought on the way to the chemist’s. Now they’re my geese all of a sudden. Hopping was too difficult: she could hang the sock in front of the stove at home and if she wore a hole in it, she could throw it away. A young couple were walking towards her, laughing and talking loudly, arms around each other’s waists. When they passed her, the girl looked at her as only girls who think the world is theirs for the taking can, lost in the happiness of the moment and insisting on making others party to their bliss. It was almost offensive: unadulterated happiness that would very soon come undone. Share my joy! the girl beamed. She met her gaze with indifference, ignoring the boy. Having young women half her age walking around at all was unbearable enough. Seconds later she pushed open the door to the chemist’s. There was no queue at the counter.

  Along with the antibiotics she had been prescribed, she bought a full first-aid kit, five boxes of paracetamol, hand cream, a tube of toothpaste and a couple of tubes of cough drops. ‘Holidays?’ the woman behind the counter asked.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘German?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sore foot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The chemist’s assistant completed the transaction in silence.

  It was still raining. She drove back to the house at a snail’s pace.

  11

  That evening she could hardly move her arm and her foot was still throbbing. She boiled some potatoes, then fried them up with a couple of onions and five cloves of garlic. Two glasses of wine with dinner. She felt like drinking more but remembered hearing that alcohol and antibiotics were a bad combination. The doctor hadn’t mentioned it. No surprise there, he was too busy smoking himself to death in a surgery with a cross on the wall. After dinner she climbed the stairs like an old woman, a weak hand on the baniste
r and dragging her leg. There was still a little light coming in through the two windows and she lay down on the divan in the study. Flowers, she thought. This room needs flowers. A phone would be handy too. A badger had bitten her on the foot – she could have broken both her legs. The doctor hadn’t said anything about a stiff arm either. A radio. It was so quiet she could hear the individual sheets of rain passing the windows and, between them, the bamboo scraping against the oil tank at the side of the house.

  She smoked a cigarette.

  She lay there. The heartless bitch.

  It was 18 November.

  12

  The husband had been past every noticeboard in the English Department. In a blind spot on the wall between two offices, he had found another note half hidden behind a list of exam results. It was exactly the same as the one in his hand. Our ‘respected’ Translation Studies Lecturer screws around. She is in no way like her beloved Emily Dickinson: she is a heartless Bitch. He realised that the same message must have hung on a lot of boards. He walked to her office. It was very quiet in the long, narrow corridors of the university building. On the door, under his wife’s name and the name of a colleague he had heard of, there was a new plastic plate with a man’s name and the title: Lecturer, Translation Studies. He hesitated, finding it hard to imagine they’d already cleared away all her stuff. Computer, books, notes – surely they’d still be here? As far as he knew she was no longer employed as a lecturer, but maybe they still let her work on her thesis in the office. He went in; there was no one there. Shortly afterwards he came back out into the corridor and started shouting. Two men put out the fire with a hose on a reel, managing to contain it to this one office. When the fire brigade arrived ten minutes later, there was nothing for them to do. The husband waited calmly for the police to show up.