Ten White Geese Read Free

pruning saw at a hardware shop in Caernarfon.

6
    She took the house as it was. There were a few pieces of furniture, a fridge and a freezer. She bought some rugs (all the rooms had the same bare, wide floorboards) and cushions. Kitchen utensils, saucepans, plates, a kettle. Candles. Two standard lamps. She kept the wood-burning stove in the living room going all day. The kitchen was heated by a typically British cooker that burnt oil from a tank squeezedbetween the side wall and the stream and hidden from view by a clump of bamboo. The enormous contraption doubled as a water heater. The day she moved in she found handwritten instructions on the kitchen table with a flat stone as a paperweight. Whoever wrote them signed off by wishing her
Good luck!
She wondered very briefly who it could be, but soon dismissed it as irrelevant. She followed the instructions on the piece of paper exactly, step by step, and wasn’t really surprised when it fired up. That night she was able to fill the large bath with steaming-hot water.
    It was just those geese; they were peculiar. Had she rented the geese too? And one morning a large flock of black sheep suddenly appeared in the field beside the road, every one with a white blaze and a long white-tipped tail. On
her
land. Who did
they
belong to?

7
    She discovered that the path that led to the stone circle – and went on beyond it, though she’d never been farther – joined her drive where it bent sharply. A kissing gate in a thicket of squat oaks was completely overgrown with ivy. By the look of it, nobody had been through it for years. On the far side of the gate was a field with long, brown grass. There had to be a house somewhere; a chicken coop with a dim light that burnt day and night stood a bit farther down the drive. She cut away the ivy with her new secateurs andsawed off the thick stems close to the ground. The gate still worked. She found an old-fashioned oil can in the pigsty and oiled the hinges. Only then did she realise that the path followed her drive, then crossed her yard before passing through a second kissing gate in the low stone wall and leading across the fields to the wooden bridge over the stream. A
public footpath
, apparently, and she had a vague recollection of that being something British landowners couldn’t do much about. With the hinges oiled, she walked to the road with the oil can still in her hand and turned right. After a couple of hundred metres she found the sign with the hiker, his legs overgrown with lichen. She didn’t dare climb over the stile, scared as she was of coming out at the house she still hadn’t seen. It was the first time she’d turned right. Caernarfon was to the left. She walked a little farther, the sunken road rising slightly. After about ten minutes she reached a T-junction and there she saw the mountain for the first time and realised what a vast landscape existed behind her house and how small an area she had moved in until that moment. All at once, she became aware of the oil can in her hand. She rubbed a blister on the inside of her thumb and quickly turned back. The geese honked loudly at her, as they had every time she’d walked past. The next day she bought an Ordnance Survey map at an outdoor shop in Caernarfon. Scale: 1–25,000.

8
    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