Ten White Geese (15 page)

The husband moved his leg. That was what it felt like. Before, he’d only had to move his foot, but in the last few days the plaster cast had grown heavier and his leg cumbersome. Unable to drive, he’d taken a no. 4 tram to De Pijp, where he had arranged to meet the policeman in the bar on the Van Woustraat. He was glad he didn’t have to go to his parents-in-law’s by himself. Between the bar and their house the snow hadn’t been cleared off the pavement and the streets hadn’t been gritted; the policeman had to save him from falling more than once. The TV was on – long-distance ice skating – the commentators’ voices were a mumble in the background. One of the skaters was the one he’d seen advertising bread on the poster at the tram stop. His father-in-law was making tea; the policeman preferred it to coffee. Next to the TV was a Christmas tree decorated
with tinsel and candles. His parents-in-law liked to do things the old-fashioned way and didn’t light the candles until Christmas Day itself. The triangle on the windowsill
was
lit, the flames adding an orange tint to a white amaryllis.

‘How’d they figure that out?’ the father asked.

‘No idea. “That information is confidential.” That’s what the woman who phoned me said.’

‘A woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wales. How’d she end up there? What’s in Wales?’

‘An English-speaking country’s an obvious choice, of course.’

‘And what’s it got to do with you?’

The policeman glanced at the husband before answering. ‘He can’t drive,’ he said, gesturing at the cast. ‘I’ve got some time off saved up. If I don’t use it before the end of the year, I lose it.’

‘When are you going?’

‘Next week.’

‘For Christmas?’

‘Yep. It’s Christmas everywhere.’

‘Don’t you have a wife? Kids? How do they feel about it?’

‘Oh, it’s fine by them,’ the policeman said. ‘They’re used to me being on duty.’

‘Hmm,’ said the father.

‘Unbelievable,’ said the mother.

‘What?’

‘That Kramer’s a monster. He’s even accelerating.’

‘Did you hear a word we said?’

‘What do you think? I was never really worried.’

‘Well, I was.’ He poured them all a second cup of tea. ‘I’ve had to take valerian at night,’ he told the policeman. ‘I could barely sleep otherwise.’

‘That’s good stuff,’ the policeman said. ‘I take it too sometimes.’

‘Do you?’

‘Have you been in touch with her?’ the father asked.

‘No. I wouldn’t know how,’ the husband said. ‘I still haven’t been able to get through on her mobile.’

‘But you’ve got her address?’

‘Yes. Kind of. I’ve got the name of a house.’

‘Then you could send her a letter.’

‘I could.’ The husband watched the TV for a moment. ‘It really is unbelievable, them tracking her down.’

‘That’s what they do,’ the policeman said.

The husband stood up. ‘I’ll just go to the loo,’ he said, grabbing a crutch and hobbling from the living room out into the small hallway. In the toilet he closed the lid and, after some effort, managed to sit down. With the door shut, he didn’t really have enough room for his foot. He couldn’t think about his wife in the living room and he had to decide what to say to his parents-in-law. Whether to tell them. Strange people, totally impervious. The way his father-in-law had just told the policeman about taking valerian to get to sleep. His mother-in-law nursing the exercise book she used to jot down the lap times. He wondered how long it was since he’d written a letter and realised how old-fashioned all that was: a pen, paper, envelope, stamp, postbox. His armpit was a bit chafed where the policeman had gripped him those three or four times. He turned the
tap on and then off again. He couldn’t think about his wife here either. He found it completely impossible to imagine her in a house in the country.

A lot had changed in the last two months. Being alone didn’t even feel strange any more. After a couple of days at home with his foot up on a stool and a beer within reach, he had called the practice. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He’d sworn at them, and they’d put him through to the doctor. She too had kept silent and remained icy calm. He asked her about the results of the fertility test, something he’d completely forgotten during his visit. They were confidential too. Just before he rang off, she’d asked him how his foot was. That made him laugh out loud and he was still laughing when he hung up on her. He didn’t know anything. There was nothing he could really tell his parents-in-law. He hauled himself upright.

‘You were gone a long time,’ the mother said.

‘Yeah.’ He gestured at the cast.

‘We’re so happy. Really, very happy,’ the father said. ‘That she’s been found.’

‘Shouldn’t we open a bottle of something?’ the mother asked. The skating was finished, there were commercials on TV, the sound was turned right down. She’d laid the exercise book on the windowsill.

‘Good idea. Help yourself to a glass of white,’ the father said. ‘The bottle’s in the fridge. It needs using up.’

‘Men? A drop of genever?’

‘Sure,’ said the policeman.

Men
, thought the husband.
A drop
. ‘I’ll have one too while you’re at it.’

‘Could you slice up a dried sausage?’ the father said to the mother’s back. ‘Was it expensive?’

‘Yes,’ said the husband. ‘Very.’

The father looked at him. The husband thought he was going to offer to pay a share of the investigation fee. Instead the father turned his attention to the policeman. ‘How come you didn’t put him in prison?’ he asked.

‘Because he’s such a nice guy.’

*

‘You misinformed me,’ the policeman said. They were negotiating the slippery pavement on their way back to the Van Woustraat. After two shots it seemed a lot easier.

‘I know,’ the husband said. ‘They’re a strange couple.’

‘Things like that have a knock-on effect.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I could start questioning the truth of what else you’ve said.’

‘You’re not a detective, are you?’

‘No, I’m just a simple police officer. But I’m also human.’

The husband’s crutches slipped out from under him – he had to put his cast down on the ground. He didn’t fall over – the policeman already had him in a firm grip.

‘Never,’ the policeman said. ‘You can never tell exactly what someone’s thinking or feeling.’

‘You want to eat?’ the husband asked. ‘I haven’t got anything at home.’

‘OK,’ the policeman said. ‘There’s a Turkish place just up the road. You can make it that far.’

‘Can you just stay away like that? What will your wife think? Won’t your kids miss you?’

The policeman smiled.

I need a kind of shoulder pad, thought the man, but in my armpit. An armpit pad. He’d got into a good rhythm, pushing the crutches deep into the snow. I could send a card with a priority sticker on it. Old-fashioned, but the only way.

She tore off chunks of bread and threw them to the geese. Three birds ate the bread, a fourth watched her every move. There was hardly any snow left, the land was steaming. Between the trunks of the oaks in the wood behind the goose shelter it was already growing dark. A few sheep stood around the hay, most of the others were grazing. ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘At first they disappeared really quickly and now these four have been left for quite a while.’

The boy didn’t speak.

‘They’re not anybody’s. What if I just left?’

‘I’d still be here.’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘You’d still be here.’

The boy cleared his throat.

She looked left. A sound she’d heard before was coming from the oak wood, but she didn’t recognise it until the big brown bird took off from a branch.

‘A kite!’ Bradwen said.

‘A bird,’ she said.

It swooped low over the ground and, like the last time,
glided up to disappear over the roof ridge of the house, which it seemed to use as a kind of ski jump. It made the geese restless.

‘It’s a red kite.’

She couldn’t work it out. She knew that it meant something else, this word that the boy had said twice now, but she could only picture a red diamond on a string with a tail of knotted rags. Somewhere in her head, something needed to happen. His English needed to become her English, so that she could simply understand him. ‘
Vlieger
,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘
Vlieger
. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

Her left temple started to pound. She wanted to say ‘kite’, she was sure of that, her tongue was definitely moving towards the roof of her mouth, slightly to the back, but instead she blew air out between her lower lip and upper teeth and her tongue relaxed, not altogether involuntarily, and came to rest where the roof of her mouth met her teeth. Bradwen began to say incomprehensible things, spitting out sounds. She looked him in the eye, fixing on his squint in the hope that he might somehow be able to explain things to her in some other way, without words, without sounds.

*

‘There, there.’ That she understood. His arms around her belly as if he were scared that something would fall out, that too was familiar. His breath on the back of her neck. The geese acted like they weren’t seeing anything. They were whiter again, their beaks brownish now, not the bright orange they’d been in the snow. Please go inside for
once, she thought. The sheep were almost invisible. Her hands on the top board of the gate. As if she were pushing against it with the boy holding her back. If someone came down the path now, they might think he was raping her. Had the English named man-made kites after that big brown bird? she wondered, and now its Dutch name came to her. The
wouw
, red or otherwise. He’s not raping me, she thought. He’s taking care of me. He’s a sweet boy. A beautiful gymnast. And he should have left long ago.

‘I need a tablet,’ she said.

‘What kind of tablet?’

‘A tablet the doctor prescribed for me this morning.’

‘In Caernarfon?’

She could stand again. She could talk to him normally again.

The boy rubbed her tummy with his lower arms, still breathing on her neck. Not just a boy now, a son.

‘There’s one thing I want to know,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘This afternoon or this morning, I’ve forgotten which…’ I really have forgotten, she thought. Maybe it’s the next day already? She looked at the steaming countryside. Where had the snow got to so quickly?

‘Yes?’

Not the next day then? ‘Why did you come over the stream and the garden wall?’

‘I took a detour via the stone circle.’

‘What for?’

‘To have a look. There was snow. If there’d been tracks, I would have seen them.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing.’

No badgers. No fox. No dog. It was a shame that Sam was gone. If he hadn’t driven off with the sheep farmer, he could have leant against her legs now, or against the gate, to get at her hands. To lick them. The hands of the alpha female.

Buying, writing and sending a card was hardly straightforward. Just choosing one, for starters. The local Bruna had seven revolving racks full of them. The shop was incredibly busy too; he had to deploy his crutches – ‘Careful, Josje, that man wants to get past!’ – to reach them. Everything had significance, she could read something into every picture. In the end it came down to a choice between a hippo and a dog. He pulled the card with the dog out of the rack, mainly because she’d never been crazy about pets and could misinterpret the hippo. A neutral card. He’d already started to pay when he remembered stamps and priority stickers.

*

The student. She had told him herself, very coolly. Here in this living room, on a Sunday evening. He’d just got back from a run and was about to shower. It had been over for ages, she said. It was the real reason she’d been fired. During his run, he’d smelt the change of seasons and looked forward to competing in drizzle. The autumn races. Still sweating
and with his chest expanded, he had stood there in the living room. Her confession was matter-of-fact; he had listened calmly. Now he knew that there was something else she had kept quiet. They had spent a week avoiding each other, then she’d disappeared. Two days later, he noticed an empty spot in the living room. After doing a circuit of the house and discovering that other things were missing too, he went through her desk drawers and found a number of notes:
Our ‘respected’ Translation Studies Lecturer screws around. She is in no way like her beloved Emily Dickinson. She is a
heartless
Bitch
. He went looking for her. He visited his parents-in-law and drove to the university. In a corner he found one more note and then he knew for certain that they had been hung all over the building. In her office, which was empty but unlocked – trusting people, academics – he had finally imagined this student, a boy whose name he didn’t even know, who had probably been there in that very place, maybe with his jeans down around his ankles. That image got to him. Not an image of his wife, no, the boy. Without being fully aware of what he was doing, he had torn up a couple of books and hurled them under a desk. With a box of matches he’d found in a pen tray, he’d initiated a book-burning. When it got out of hand – he felt the heat of the flames on his face – he opened the door and shouted, ‘Fire!’ He was confused, definitely, but he wasn’t a pyromaniac.

*

He stared at the dog on the card for a long time. It wasn’t going to tell him what to write. A group of cyclists rode by, giggling girls, wobbling across the full breadth of the road, mobile phones at the ready. Ring-necked parakeets squawked
in the small park on the edge of his neighbourhood. Being at home alone wasn’t unpleasant. There was a glass of red wine in front of him on the coffee table. He felt calmer, more at ease. From the Bruna, he’d hobbled to the flower stand, where he’d bought a large bunch of yellow tulips. Not Christmas but spring. The spring races were beautiful too; he’d have to concentrate on them now. He saw himself going out the door alone, returning alone, no hellos or goodbyes, no sighs. He’d already addressed the envelope and stuck two stamps on it; in the shop he hadn’t thought about the difference between domestic and European. Now he just had to write something. What did he want to say to her? If he was very honest, not much. ‘I’m coming,’ he wrote, with her name above it and his underneath. He quickly slipped the card into the envelope and licked it shut. Then he drained the glass and called the policeman.