Ten White Geese (3 page)

*

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.

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.

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 banister 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.

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.

*

The note was lying on the table in the interview room of the nearest police station. He had already admitted arson and had pulled the note out of his back pocket halfway through questioning. ‘I’ll break his neck,’ he said.

‘That’s not allowed,’ said the policeman who was taking his statement.

‘Then I’ll cut his dick off.’

‘That’s definitely not allowed.’ The policeman asked him where his wife was at that moment.

‘I don’t know. She’s gone. That’s all. In her car, and the trailer’s not in the shed any more either.’

Did that leave him without transport?

‘No. We had two cars.’

Had he tried to contact her?

‘What do you think? Of course I have! Her mobile phone just gives the engaged signal the whole time.’

Were things missing from the house?

‘All her clothes and a coffee table, a hideous thing actually, I’m glad to be rid of it. A mattress, duvets. Lamps! And all kinds of odds and ends. Books, quite a bit of bedding, a portrait of Emily Dickinson –’

‘Who?’

‘She’s an American poet. She was writing about her, doing a PhD thesis. Bit late, if you ask me, but she obviously had something to prove. Christ almighty.’

Did they have kids?

That was the only time the husband looked down.

What was the state of their relationship?

‘What’s it to you? What am I doing here anyway?’

The policeman reminded him that he had committed an act of arson in a university building.

‘So what! Just do your job and keep out of my private life.’

The policeman ended up by asking him whether he wanted to register his absent wife as a missing person.

The husband raised his head. ‘No,’ he said after a long pause for thought. ‘No, let’s not do that.’

Would he like some coffee?

He looked at the policeman. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’ While he was drinking the coffee, the policeman waited patiently, a friendly expression on his face. Then the husband said, ‘A single.’

‘What?’

‘The mattress she took was a single.’

She lived in constant expectation of a visitor showing up. Those geese belonged to someone, so did the black sheep along the road. Someone would come eventually, if only a lost hiker. The idea filled her with restlessness. After a few days her foot stopped throbbing and she could see the wound contracting. When it was drying off after the soda bath, she would run her thumb over the itchy teeth marks for minutes at a time, even though she had hardly dared look at it immediately after the bite. Along with the incompatibility
of alcohol and antibiotics, she also remembered hearing that you had to complete a course of treatment, and continued taking the tablets. Her upper arm, which was still stiff, now bothered her more than her foot. It kept raining, but it was gentle rain; she didn’t even put on a coat to go out. One Sunday she heard a few shrieking whistles, from which direction she found it impossible to determine. She got out the map and discovered a railway line not far away, the Welsh Highland Railway. Next to Caernarfon there was a picture of an old-fashioned steam engine. Evidently it ran at weekends.

Several days after the other staff members pulled him out of the pond, her uncle started to make a cabinet. It was actually more of a wall unit. ‘See,’ her mother told her father, who was the uncle’s brother. ‘See. That’s how you do it. You do things. You get on and do them.’ He spent weeks on it, weeks of leave, as the hotel management had told him to come back when he was ‘feeling better’. Sawing, drilling, screwing, sanding, painting; sitting on a chair and staring at what he’d done so far. When he finished, he had a slight relapse. ‘I wouldn’t have put it past him to take the whole thing apart again,’ her mother said. ‘But he didn’t.’

She had bought the secateurs and the pruning saw on impulse because she wanted to do something about the creeper clinging to the front of the house. Cutting back the ivy had been enjoyable. She gazed out through the glass in the front door at the grass rectangle between the stream and the low stone wall the light brown cows sometimes gathered behind. Along the stream were a few overgrown shrubs and some strangely shaped trees. Right in front of the house, the grass ended at a wide, ragged-edged gravel path. No, it wasn’t gravel, she saw when she stepped outside and knelt down for the first time. It was pieces of slate, and she realised that the grey mound behind the house wasn’t just a grey mound, it was a supply of crushed slate. She rubbed her left upper arm and went back into the house to put on her oldest trousers. In the bathroom she pushed two paracetamol out of a strip and washed them down with a mouthful of water.