Gerbrand Bakker: Ten White Geese

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.

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 hadn’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.

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.’