Free Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker Page B

The next morning his foot was swollen blue and yellow, so swollen the smallest toes were no longer recognisable as separate digits. After looking up the number in his address book, he phoned their GP. They were able to fit him in straight away, but he had to look up the address on the Internet first. He pulled on running shoes without doing up the laces and tried to avoid changing gear as much as possible; depressing the clutch was torture. He wouldn’t be training any time soon. It was no problem to keep the car in third as the route from home to the practice was all within his own neighbourhood. On the way he called work, playing it safe by telling them he was worried it might take all day. He found it hard to believe it wasn’t broken.
    *
    He didn’t recognise the doctor when he went in, a woman, when he’d been almost certain his doctor was a man. She shook his hand firmly, told him her name and sat down, half hidden by a computer screen.
    ‘Fertility test,’ she said. ‘Requested November last year.’
    ‘Um, yes,’ he said.
    ‘Carried out at the VU hospital.’
    ‘Is this an exam?’ he asked.
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘I’m familiarising myself with your history.’
    ‘A box landed on my foot. A very heavy box.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘I mean…’
    ‘Who are you, anyway?’
    ‘I just told you my name.’
    ‘Yes, I heard you, but my doctor has a different name.’
    ‘Since 1 January this has been a group practice. That means that several –’
    ‘I know what a group practice is.’
    ‘Your foot, you said.’
    ‘Yes.’ He pulled off his shoe and sock.
    ‘Could you come over here and sit on the bed, please?’
    While the doctor examined his foot, and none too gently, he tried to read the computer screen over her head. The bed was too far from the desk. I must be less irritable, he thought. Minutes later he was sitting opposite her again. She wrote a referral.
    ‘Back to the VU?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s easiest.’
    ‘I think it’s just severe bruising, but I don’t have X-ray eyes.’
    ‘No,’ he said.
    She handed him the letter. ‘You can go straight there.’
    ‘That information,’ he said.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Is that just mine or is it ours…together?’
    The doctor peered at the screen. ‘Everyone living at your address. For instance, it says here that your wife – or girlfriend – also had a fertility test.’
    ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.
    She stared at the screen and either typed something or used the arrow keys; he couldn’t see. ‘July.’ She read something, then met his gaze directly. ‘How is she now? In the middle of treatment?’
    ‘It’s going OK,’ he said.
    ‘It’s not often that something else shows up during a fertility test. They’re not looking for that kind of thing.’
    ‘No,’ he said. Keep talking, he thought. Please, keep talking.
    She was still staring straight at him. ‘You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
    ‘No. Yes.’
    ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say anything else. I’m afraid I’ve said too much already.’
    ‘She’s my wife!’ he said.
    ‘Yes. That’s what makes it so peculiar. Your not knowing.’

28
    Mist. The world stood still. There was hardly any noise, even the stream sounded as if the water was being sieved through gauze. She was working in the garden all the same. The first alder was now cut back completely and she had already lopped a couple of thick branches off the second. She set about it very calmly. When she felt that she was tiring, she carefully climbed down off the kitchen chair and went inside to sit for a while in front of the cooker. It was only after drinking a cup of tea, having a snack and smoking a cigarette that she went out again. She stripped the side twigs off the branches and stacked them against the garden wall on the short side of the lawn. In weather like this, Dickinson would have sat inside coughing and