Free Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker

weren’t even Dickinson’s idea. She dried herself and put her clothes back on, walking away from the water long before the last ripples had died down.
    *
    The black cattle were gone, or at least no longer visible from the path along the wooded bank. On the embankment, it occurred to her that this path must have been well used at some stage, otherwise they wouldn’t have put up the signs with the hiker or added kissing gates and stiles. No matter how natural she found its current state of abandonment, walkers must pass by occasionally. Maybe they already had: when she was getting her hair done or shopping at Tesco’s or lying on the divan. She smoked a cigarette on the largest rock in the stone circle and sat waiting until the badger – she always assumed it was the same one, the ‘male’ that had bitten her foot – appeared under the gorse. As before, it looked at her without giving any sign of wanting to leave its hiding place. Maybe it remembered the branch breaking on its back.

26
    After docking at Hull she had visited four different cashpoints with both her credit card and her normal bank card and withdrawn a large amount of money. She was still nauseous – the night boat had pitched and rolled and she had felt somiserable she had resolved never again to travel on such a huge ship – but clear-headed enough to realise that transactions could be traced and know that was something she didn’t want. She started driving, sticking to main roads. Bradford, Manchester, Chester. She was thinking of Ireland. At a Little Chef she had to pull the tarpaulin tighter over the stuff she had in the trailer. ‘Stuff’, that was how she thought of it. The single mattress, the coffee table, things she’d bundled together. Even before she reached Wales, Holyhead appeared on the signs, straight ahead on the A55. She filled up the car and paid with her credit card before she realised what she was doing. In Bangor it finally stopped raining and when she drove onto the Britannia Bridge for Anglesey, she remembered the crossing. No, not another nightmare like that. The strait between the mainland and Anglesey looked magnificent in the damp sun: the steep wooded shores, the two old bridges, big white birds in briny mud, a small island with a white cottage. She turned back and went looking for a bed and breakfast. The next day she ended up at the estate agent’s run by Rhys Jones’s ‘friend’, who said he had the perfect house for her, almost fully furnished and available to rent quarterly. A grey-stone Welsh farmhouse. They went to have a look in his car. He gave her a tour, pointing out the shed with a throwaway gesture and saying ‘pigsty’. After a second night in the B&B, she moved in. He hadn’t mentioned the geese and she hadn’t noticed them. Rhys Jones’s sheep arrived later. She paid until 31 December and still had more than enough money.
    *
    She was wheeling half-loads of slate from the mound to the path very calmly. Every time she rounded the corner ofthe house with the empty wheelbarrow, the five geese cackled quietly. She could hardly bear it and started shovelling faster and faster to cover the sound. After a few loads she was only quarter filling the wheelbarrow. She had removed the cord and the bamboo posts and tipped the grit between the thick alder branches, using the rusty pitchfork to spread it. When she was finished, she slid a kitchen chair up to the cooker, drank a glass of milk, ate a sandwich, smoked a cigarette and thought that, if she really wanted to feel like a gardener, she should start smoking roll-ups. In the afternoon she used a knife to dig weeds out of the slate grit while kneeling on the doormat. She slid slowly from the corner near the pigsty to the corner with the bamboo and the oil tank and carried on all the way to the stream, where she laid the doormat – which said WELCOME – down as a cushion. While working, she didn’t think consciously, all kinds of things just flitted