Ten White Geese (23 page)

The birds fall silent. Maybe they’ve figured out it’s Boxing Day, or midwinter at least, and not a gorgeous day in spring.
He starts pacing back and forth, bent over in the green-tiled cellar, pressing once more against the trapdoor, which still doesn’t give, of course. Dust falls on the concrete steps. He imagines a little boy, a toddler: on a swing or trying to kick a non-cooperative ball. After a while his back starts to hurt and he lies down on the cushions. He’s no longer cold. If only Sam was here, even if he did always hold something back, looking over his shoulder, never unconditionally his. He unbuttons his jeans and pulls a blanket over himself.

*

Hours later, as he’s eating some more bread and cheese, he hears a car. Not driving away, but arriving. He keeps still and stops chewing. He’d rather be stuck in a cellar than see his father again this soon.
Be sure to have enough cash for the lost geese
. As if the woman is the fox who’s devouring the birds. Car doors open and slam shut, dull and distant, the car hasn’t stopped close to the house. Two male voices. They weren’t supposed to come until 1 January. Footsteps on the path. They’re not speaking Welsh. It sounds like her language: he recognises the harsh gutturals, the strange vowels. He looks around. And again. The flowering plants, the cold lamb, the two wine-bottle candleholders. He puts his boots on and pulls on his beanie. Then he eats another chunk of cheese with a slice of bread, washing it down with a glass of red wine. When he’s finished, he starts to bang on the trapdoor.

*

‘Who are you?’ one of the men asks. A man with short black hair.

‘Bradwen,’ he says. ‘I’m Bradwen Jones.’

‘Where is
Agnes
?’ The other man asks that. He’s got his lower leg in a cast and is on crutches. He’s pronounced the name the Dutch way, at the back of his throat, and Bradwen doesn’t understand.

‘What?’

‘Where is
Agnes
? From Amsterdam?’

‘Is that a name?’

‘Of course.
Agnes
.’

‘There’s no
Agnes
here. Who are you?’

The men stay where they are in the doorway, neither of them answering. The boy is standing on the concrete steps. Blinding yellow sunlight shines between their legs, making him raise a hand to shade his eyes.

‘No
Agnes
?’ says the man with the cast.

‘No.’

‘What are you doing in there?’ The other man says that. The man with hair like his but much shorter.

‘She locked me up in here. Emily.’

‘Emily?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know. Isn’t she in the house?’

‘No. Why did she lock you up?’

The man with the cast starts talking to the other man in Dutch. He gestures and says the name ‘
Agnes
’ again. The man with black hair keeps his eyes on the boy, even when he’s speaking to the other man. He has the wooden slat in one hand. Finally the men step back from the doorway.
‘Come,’ says the man holding the slat. The boy climbs out of the cellar. The man rests the piece of wood against the wall and goes down the concrete steps. The boy smells him as he passes: strong, fresh aftershave. The man with the cast hobbles over to the house on his crutches. The boy waits until the man has come back up out of the cellar and walks ahead of him to the front door, which is wide open. He looks at the rose arch. The single white rose that was little more than a bud is still a bud, and will probably never open.

*

In the kitchen both men carry on talking in Dutch as if they’ve forgotten he’s there. Or as if he’s irrelevant. The man with the cast is holding Emily Dickinson’s
Collected Poems
in one hand. From a lot of incomprehensible sounds, the boy picks out the names ‘Emily’ and ‘
Agnes
’ and a single ‘
ach
’. He’s standing with his bum against the cooker as if he belongs there. The heat feels good after the cellar. The man keeps talking, laying his hand on a sheet of paper on top of the open map. Next to the paper is the brown felt tip, one of the pens they were supposed to use to plan the garden. The men’s bags are on the floor next to the sideboard. The radio is gone, leaving a conspicuous gap. The Christmas-tree lights are on. Now the man picks up a postcard and hands it to the man with black hair. The boy smiles.
Rubbish
, he thinks.
Advertising.
‘Coffee?’ he asks, mainly because he feels like a coffee himself.

‘When did this card arrive?’ the man with the black hair asks.

The boy fills the pot with water and coffee and raises a lid. ‘Yesterday.’

‘Do they deliver here with Christmas?’

‘It was probably already in the letter box. I haven’t seen it before.’

‘Who are you?’

It’s like an interrogation. ‘Bradwen Jones.’ It feels good to say his own name like that, knowing full well that the man’s asking something else. The coffee pot is on the hotplate now, the hottest plate. The boy looks out of the window at the fallen oak. He, too, notices that it’s not right to have the slate path running into the lawn like that. There’s no reason to it, it doesn’t go anywhere. There should be something standing there. He turns round. The man with the cast stares at the postcard, the other man is staring at him again. ‘You a cop?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’ And after a short silence, ‘You’re a smart kid.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Anton.’

‘And him?’

The boy gestures at the man with the cast.

‘He’s the husband of Agnes. Rutger.’

‘Where is she?’ Agnes’s husband asks. He’s talking to the postcard.

The coffee starts to bubble. The boy takes the pot off the heat and gets three cups out of the cupboard.

‘What’s that note on the front door?’ the policeman asks.

‘From my father.’ The boy doesn’t know what else to say about it. He has no idea why his father is coming with an estate agent on 1 January.

‘Geese?’ the policeman asks.

‘There are geese in the field by the drive. Sometimes a
fox takes one.’ He puts two cups of coffee on the table, gets the milk out of the fridge and the sugar from the worktop. Agnes’s husband looks up. He seems to have thought of something. He stands up and digs a rectangular object out of his bag, wrapped in silver foil. He lays it on the table but doesn’t unwrap it. The policeman looks at the boy. The boy looks back, aware of his squint.

*

Later, he’s in the bath. The window is open. The water is hot and smells of Native Herbs. He’s sent the Dutchmen to the stone circle. He told them it was a place she liked. ‘And if she’s not there,’ he said, ‘there’s the reservoir too. A bit further on. She can’t have gone far, the car’s still here, behind the old pigsty.’ He hadn’t mentioned any badgers, and no, he wasn’t going with them, it was easy enough to find, just follow the path. The policeman had asked him not to leave, as if he was the suspect in a disappearance. He’d laughed briefly in response, which made the policeman smile. They were slow, he’d seen that through the kitchen window, even if the man with the cast was faster than he’d expected. Rutger and Anton. He looks at his penis, which is floating in the water and looks bigger than it is. Pregnant, he thinks. He can’t put it out of his head, especially now that he knows there’s a husband. And she wanted it; she didn’t want to use anything. Where’s that radio got to? He closes his eyes and listens to the murmuring of the stream. He weighs up the situation. He could stay. That cop, Anton, wouldn’t mind. He opens his eyes and climbs out of the bath. Drying himself off, he sniffs. Emily said she could smell Mrs Evans. He can smell himself and he smells good.
When he opens the study door to get some clean clothes out of his rucksack, he sees that the mattress is gone.

*

The boy stands at the corner of the house. The big black car the men came in is about fifty yards away. The sun is still shining. A little earlier, from the landing window, he saw the sea glittering. The goose field is in front of him and empty. He starts to walk down the drive, sticking to the field side of the road. Just past the black car, he turns his head because he thinks he’s heard trumpets in the murmuring of the stream. Trumpets. The grass on the goose field is very short, the birds have nibbled every blade down to the ground. The boy climbs over the gate and walks slowly, and ever more slowly, towards the goose shelter. The trumpets weren’t in the stream, they were inside the shelter. Six months ago the sun was shining too. It was a lot warmer then, the oaks green, the gorse bushes in the sheep field yellow. The grass was growing so fast the geese couldn’t keep up with it. He squats down to look in. The planks and chicken wire make it hard to see. He makes out a corner of the mattress; the music is not very loud, but clearly audible. Now he sees that the mattress is lying on a layer of bin bags. The four geese are sitting around the woman. When they notice him, they start to gabble quietly. One goose seems to be resting on her legs and even starts to hiss, as if it’s standing guard. He sees something purple too, she has her beanie on. Enough.

He stands up.
A woman with a very nice, purple beanie. She’s tired. She didn’t make it to the top, but that’s not the end of the world. It’s Christmas, and time she went home. There is cooking and drinking to be done.
He dredged it up
word for word. It was only yesterday after all.
What do you see?
was the simple question, her looking away from him, surly and a little shy, eyes fixed on the water tank. She was indescribably beautiful. He had never seen her like that before. Awesomely beautiful, like a tree or a bush that produces as much blossom or as many flowers as possible the year before it dies. But that was something else he hadn’t told her. Emily.

*

Before climbing back over the gate, he turns round. He looks out over the goose field and the sheep paddocks without any sheep. He thinks of three dead women: two here, one in bed in the house in Llanberis. Just before she died, she said one last thing. He could barely make it out, he was so distracted by his mother’s beauty at that moment. ‘Go,’ she’d said. ‘If you want to, or if you have to, go.’ Then she’d closed her eyes. He looks at the sky, which is blue. He sees the wooden poles with the electricity cables, gorse bushes, oaks, a few crows, a broken orange tub on the grass, a barbed-wire fence. And, of course, the goose shelter with the music still coming from it. Plenty of shade, even next to the orange tub, a lot more than last summer. That’s about it, besides the odd cloud in the distance. Very soft music and the murmur of the stream. He smiles. She hadn’t imagined it like this, he thinks.
Let no sunrise’ yellow noise / Interrupt this ground
.

*

The boy packs his rucksack. It doesn’t take long; not once has he taken everything out of it. Before leaving the study, he looks at the pile of books on the coffee table and puts
The Wind in the Willows
in the top pocket of his rucksack because it has a mole, a toad and a rat on the cover. In the kitchen he looks out of the window. Not a trace of the cop and the husband. He sits down at the table and looks at the sheet of paper. Her handwriting. Her language. The word
bed
stands out in the middle of the first line,
bed met
, but that’s about all. The message on the postcard is just two words but equally incomprehensible,
Ik kom
. For the first time he sees her name, it really does say ‘Agnes’. The name ‘Rutger’ is on the card too. He peels the silver foil off the rectangular object. It’s a kind of cake with dark brown in it. He gets a knife and cuts a piece. It’s delicious; he cuts another. When he’s finished, he wraps it back up. He stands up, looks at the Christmas tree and thinks, a lost tree. His gaze passes from the tree to the men’s bags, next to the sideboard. He hesitates very briefly, then takes forty pounds from each wallet, even though they both have a lot more in them. He puts Rutger’s wallet in Anton’s bag and Anton’s in Rutger’s. With a plastic bag in his hand and the rucksack over one shoulder, he walks out of the house. He changes his mind, sets the rucksack against the wall next to the door, puts the plastic bag on top of it and goes back into the house. Slowly, he starts to strip the Christmas tree, putting the baubles and tinsel and finally the fairy lights in a drawer of the sideboard. After that, he pulls the tree out of the crushed slate and gives the roots a good shake. He carries it outside, down the path that runs into the lawn, fetches the spade from the shed and digs a hole at the end of the new path. Then he puts the tree in the hole and presses down the soil, before returning the spade to the shed. He
takes the plastic bag from his rucksack and goes into the cellar one last time. He puts the bread, the cheese and the bananas in the plastic bag, picks up a bottle of water and climbs the concrete steps. He lays the plastic bag on top of his clothes and clicks the top flap of the rucksack shut, loosens a strap on the side and slides the one-and-a-half-litre bottle of water down through it until it comes to rest in a side pocket, after which he carefully tightens the strap. He hoists the rucksack up onto his back, closes the front door like a good boy and walks through the kissing gate in the stone wall.

*

He crosses the stream. He hasn’t decided yet whether to stay on the path or walk parallel to it, on the other side of the thick wooded bank. He knows he has to hike back a full day. He simply took the wrong direction.
Sometimes a day’s work is for nothing because it leads nowhere
. He told her that himself weeks ago. The long-distance path has to climb the mountain through Llanberis, giving hikers a choice: on foot or by steam train. And descending from the top of Yr Wyddfa to Rhyd Ddu – with a note that walking the ridge is not without danger – before gradually heading towards the coast. Aberystwyth would be a good ending point. It has a train station. Shrewsbury in under two hours. He should have realised before. This is the wrong side of the mountain.

He looks to the south-west. He still has a couple of hours’ light. When he hears voices in the distance, he hesitates, then pushes his way through the wooded bank and squats behind a tree. Someone once told him that nails and hair
keep growing after someone dies. How long, he wonders, would an unformed being continue to absorb blood and nutrition? He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to squat still, doing nothing. He wants to walk, to move. Then he sighs and looks at the meadow in front of him, bordered by a thick hedge. As a kid, when he was sitting here and the wind was right, he could hear his mother’s and Mrs Evans’s voices. He never strayed beyond the range of those voices. In ten or twenty years, not much here will have changed. He doesn’t emerge from behind the old holly tree until the men have moved out of earshot. He starts whistling softly.