Ten White Geese (13 page)

The pots with the rose bushes rattled on the big trolley; she could barely look at them. Her head was aching.

‘All right?’ the redhead asked when she walked past him. ‘Yes, I’ve got help today,’ she said, giving him a sideways glance. She heard Bradwen say, ‘Hi, mate,’ in a rather jovial tone of voice, which undoubtedly meant something. The boy looked away, scanning the car park. Sam, who was sitting in the car, began to bark excitedly.

*

Bradwen drove very carefully up the drive; the snow was an inch deep. She sat with her hands on her lap and counted the geese. All four were still there and now, because of the whiteness around them, she saw how filthy they were, how bright the orange of their beaks. The sheep were much blacker than usual. It was only when she looked ahead at the house that she saw the tyre tracks.

‘Someone’s been here,’ she said.

This time there was no note on the door.

How long since I gave those animals something to eat? she thought. Later, taking the geese a few chunks of bread, she saw that the tyre tracks ran over the field and that the sheep were crowded together near the fence.

In the morning the snow was two inches deep. The leaves of the rose bushes, which the boy had put down next to the freshly turned soil, were white.

‘I have to go to Caernarfon,’ she said after breakfast.
As usual, Bradwen had eaten a lot. The coffee was just ready.

‘What are we doing there?’

‘Me.’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘None of your business.’

‘Do I need to drive?’ He tried not to look hurt.

‘No.’

He didn’t say anything else.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘What do I do?’

‘Please yourself. Maybe you should call your parents for once.’

He sniffed and gestured over one shoulder with a thumb at the staircase on the other side of the wall. ‘Thanks for washing my clothes.’

She lit a cigarette. ‘Light the stove in the living room and make a fire in your bedroom too if you like.’

‘There’s not much wood left.’

‘When it’s gone, it’s gone.’

‘Shall I decorate the Christmas tree?’

‘If you like.’

‘Where?’

She glanced around the kitchen. There was an empty corner next to the sideboard. She gestured with the cigarette. ‘There?’

‘That’s a good spot. Then we’ll see it from the living room too. What shall I put it in?’

She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at him. What do you put a Christmas tree with roots in? She stubbed out
the cigarette. ‘There might be something in the pigsty or out the back. I don’t know.’

‘I’ll find something,’ the boy said.

The dog scrambled to its feet, walked over to her and began to lick her hand. She started to cry.

The boy didn’t get up. ‘There’s no need to cry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you’re crying, and if I asked, you’d only say
“ach”
and that wouldn’t get us anywhere. But there’s no need to cry.’

‘No,’ she said, sniffing.

‘When you get back from Caernarfon, from whatever it is you have to do there, the Christmas tree will be done and the stove will be lit in the living room. I’m going to Waunfawr in a bit, so there’ll be fresh bread too. Not that you’re bothered about eating, but it will be here. And I’m not going to ring my parents. I’m not going to ring anyone, because I’m here now. This afternoon at quarter past five, you’ll sit on the sofa and turn the telly on and watch
Escape to the Country
, and while you’re doing that, I’ll cook. Fish. You’ll eat it and drink two or three glasses of wine to go with it and maybe after tea we’ll plan a garden together or watch a film. The BBC always show great films around Christmas. Afterwards you’ll go to bed. If you like, I’ll light a fire in your bedroom an hour beforehand. I can take the car and trailer and go for new wood any time I like. I can even pay for it. Sam and I will be sleeping two doors along. We’re here. We’re waiting for the lamb that farmer, Rhys Jones, promised you.’

She sat down. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The lamb. He was here yesterday.’

‘I saw.’

‘He brought hay for the sheep.’

‘I saw that too.’

‘I keep thinking you’re a gymnast.’

‘What?’

‘The kind that does floor exercises.’

‘That’s a first.’

‘When you walk, when you sit, when you’re sawing or digging.’ She went to light another cigarette, but didn’t, because then she would have had to smoke it and all she wanted to do was have a bath. To have a bath, then leave. She stood up. ‘You say “we” a lot,’ she said.

‘That’s because we’re here together.’

‘I think that’s what made me cry.’

‘Liar.’

‘Yes.’ She left the kitchen. In the bathroom she pressed the last three paracetamol out of the strip and took them with a couple of mouthfuls of cold water.

*

She drove very slowly; the narrow roads weren’t gritted and she kept a tight grip on the steering wheel going downhill. The dual carriageway to Caernarfon was gritted, but here, too, the few cars she saw were crawling along, as if everyone expected it to start snowing again at any moment. I mustn’t bask in the security, she thought. Curling up by the stove. Allowing him to take charge. Letting the dog lick my hand. She pulled over in a lay-by and got out of the car without putting on her coat. She dragged herself over a fence, walked a good distance through the snow, then turned round. She looked at her footsteps, she looked at the car, she shivered. This is it, she thought. This is the situation. Her shoes were
wet, her toes cold. An empty car by the side of the road, bare trees, hills, cold. A badger that no longer appears; standing in a pond with water up to my waist, no heavy objects in my pockets. The smell of an old woman in my body. This is it. This is the situation.

Once again, there was no one in the waiting room, which was immediately inside the front door. No receptionist; a bell announced that someone had come in. She sat down on one of the four chairs and waited. After about five minutes, when she still hadn’t been called in, she lit a cigarette. She couldn’t hear any voices on the other side of the surgery door. Now and then people walked past the window, looking in inquisitively. There was a clean ashtray and a pile of magazines on a Formica coffee table.

‘Ah, the badger lady.’

She looked up and sighed.

‘Don’t be so dismissive,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m only joking. Come in.’

His desk was empty, there were no documents he had just been working on. She was already so used to people here smoking almost everywhere that she hadn’t stubbed her cigarette out in the waiting room. She did it now, in his half-full ashtray. She looked at the cross, which someone had straightened.

‘Your hair’s nice like that. A bit on the short side.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Shirley is a very experienced hairdresser. What’s more, she’s the last hairdresser.’

She looked at him.

‘So you thought it was necessary now?’

‘What?’

‘Coming to see me.’

‘Yes.’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Painkillers.’

‘You can get them at the chemist’s. You don’t need me for that.’

‘I’m not talking about aspirin or paracetamol.’ That last word sounded strange. She wasn’t sure it was English.

‘What
are
you talking about?’

‘That’s for you to say. I have no idea.’

‘Sit down over here first. I need to look at your foot.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my foot. Not any more.’

‘Please.’

I mustn’t be difficult, she thought. It can’t do any harm. She sat on the bed and took off her wet shoe and sock. The skin of her foot was wrinkled. I could just lie down, she thought. Lie down and surrender and see what happens.

The doctor took hold of her foot. ‘That’s healed beautifully. Has it given you any more trouble?’

‘No. Baking soda does wonders. You were absolutely right.’ She stared over the doctor’s shoulder at the wall. Only now did she realise – perhaps because it was lit from a different angle or because she was now looking at it without really
focusing – that the HIV poster showed the torso of a dark-skinned man. Not from the front, but from the side, soft focus, a pert arse. Only now did she understand the ‘Exit Only’ at the bottom. The poster must have been ancient. She wondered why
this
man had a thing like
that
hanging in his surgery. She couldn’t imagine it striking a chord with many patients in this small town.

The doctor held her hand and felt her pulse with two fingers. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He took her head between his hands, raised the skin above her eyes with his thumbs and looked into her eyes carefully. Then he ran one hand down her arm, while laying his other on her knee. If I were a non-smoker, she thought, his breath would be incredibly foul. ‘Headache?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No.’

‘What else seems to be the problem?’ The bell rang in the waiting room. He glanced at the door and took advantage of the interruption to cough, without raising a hand to his mouth.

She slid down off the bed, standing up against him for a brief instant before he took a step back. There was some forgotten stubble on the Adam’s apple in his scrawny neck. For someone who had just laid a hand on her knee, almost like Sam resting his head there, he jumped out of the way extremely quickly. She sat down on the chair and lit a cigarette. For the first time, she felt she had the measure of this man.

The doctor sat down too and wasn’t going to be outdone.
Together they sat there smoking. ‘You do realise that I can’t prescribe strong analgesics just like that?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘There
is
such a thing as a medical code of ethics.’

‘That didn’t seem to bother you very much the other day in the hairdressing salon.’

‘Aha. You think I shouldn’t talk to Shirley about my patients? That’s not the same as prescribing medicine without a reason.’

‘Without a reason? Who said that?’ She blew a cloud of smoke in his face.

The doctor blew a cloud back. ‘Then I’ll ask again, what’s the problem?’

‘I’m ill.’

‘How ill?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re not being treated? In Holland?’

‘Of course.’

‘So why won’t you tell me what it is?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘I’m a GP. I have to abide by rules and I have a conscience.’

‘I’m a coincidental patient. I might leave again for Holland in the morning. That business with the badger was an incident. I’m a tourist.’

‘Where’s the pain?’

‘Everywhere. Sometimes it’s like toothache through my whole body.’

‘Toothache?’

‘As if you go to the dentist because of the pain and you think you know where it is and the dentist goes to work on
a completely different tooth, which surprises you, but the next day the pain is gone.’

‘Hmm.’

‘I smell things too.’

‘That can only be healthy.’

‘No. Things that aren’t there. Or things I imagine and then I really smell them.’

The doctor let that go by. ‘If I prescribe this medication for you…’

She looked at him and tried to guess what he was suggesting. ‘I’m a tourist,’ she said again. ‘I’m here by coincidence alone. I could have gone to a doctor in Bangor just as easily.’

‘I can’t allow this.’

She gestured at the ashtray, now more than half full. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re sitting here smoking yourself to death under a cross and a poster of a bare black arse. You even joke about it. Is no one stopping you?’

He looked at the wall. ‘I don’t quite under—’

‘Doesn’t it matter, your smoking? Is it irrelevant?’

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘My wife complains about it.’ He cleared his throat, then started coughing.

‘But you don’t let her stop you?’

‘No. Is anyone stopping you?’

‘No. I’m alone. Completely alone. Did you make a record of my last visit?’

‘Of course.’

‘Destroy it. Forget that I’m here now.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Is my name on it?’

‘No.’

The doctor didn’t look away. He pulled on his cigarette, which was burnt down almost to the filter, and stared at the ashtray. From the waiting room came the sound of someone moving a chair, clearly audible. He dropped the butt in the ashtray without stubbing it out. Then he opened a drawer and, after shuffling papers and searching, removed a form that he folded twice before tearing it into shreds. The shreds disappeared in the waste-paper basket. He took a pen and began to write a prescription. ‘You know where the chemist is. I’ll give you this, but then I don’t want to see you here again, ever.’

‘The strongest there is.’

Without looking up, he screwed up the piece of paper and wrote a new prescription, which he held out to her. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said.

*

There was a woman in the waiting room. A woman with bleached hair pinned up on top of her head. It looked very thin in the light of the fluorescent lamp. She was leafing through an ancient magazine. ‘Hello, love,’ she said.

Shirley, she thought. If I’d been forced to make up a name for her, it’s the name I’d have chosen. ‘Good morning.’

‘Don’t be so formal! How do you like your new hairdo?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your hair? How do you like it?’

‘What about my hair?’

‘I cut it just the other day.’

‘I’ve always worn my hair like this.’

The hairdresser gaped at her.

‘Free consultation?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘I beg your pardon, I thought you were someone else.’ She opened the door and stepped out onto the snowy pavement. Carefully she shuffled towards the chemist’s. There were almost no lights on in the hairdressing salon, only the lamps around one of the four mirrors. The door was not ajar. The perfumery across the road had a large sign in the window announcing a sale with 50 per cent discount on all items.
One day there’ll be nothing but badgers walking around this town. People have already started to go away
. She heard the man she no longer knew saying it.
Or they simply die, that’s an option too of course.
The chemist’s was open. There were even customers waiting at the counter. They weren’t holding a sale here.