Ten White Geese Read Free Page A

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.

9
    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 theanimal 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