Ten White Geese Read Free Page B

and shocking the badger so much it jumped, half turning in mid-air in an attempt to get away. It landed on her left leg, her foot blocked its escape route and it bit into her instep. She had time to grab a branch up off the ground and swung it, bringing it down hard on the badger’s back, so hard it snapped with a dry sound that made her gasp, despite the fright, and think, Oh God, I hope I haven’t crippled him. The badger writhed and growled and lurched off under a gorse bush. A few birds took flight. After that it became very quiet again. Blood ran down her foot and dripped onto the stone, but it didn’t hurt too much and she thought, Let it bleed for now. She lay down again. The stone no longer gave off any warmth. She let one hand rest on her groin; her body seemed to have come back to her. Strange that she hadn’t realised that last night. And peculiar that she automatically thought of an animal that attacked her as ‘him’.
    *
    Lacking a first-aid kit, she cut up an old T-shirt, quarter filled the bath and soaked her foot in the hot water until the skin was wrinkled. Then she tied a strip of material around it. Later she pulled
The Wind in the Willows
out of the pile of books on the small table next to the divan and rediscovered how gruff and solitary badgers can be, an animal that ‘simply hates society’. That night her foot started to throb.

10
    She had left her mobile phone lying there in the cabin weeks before when the ferry docked punctually in Hull, so the best she could come up with now was to drive to the tourist information centre in Caernarfon to ask about a doctor. Driving was difficult. Her foot was swollen, she couldn’t get it into a shoe. Pulling on a pair of jeans proved equally impossible and that was why she was wearing a skirt. Letting out the clutch, the pedal felt as hard as a rock, hard and rough. Veils of thin rain passed over the windscreen. She thought of the stove in the living room and wondered if she should have put it out. And she worried that the last GP might have left Caernarfon, that it would say
FOR SALE
on his window too. The helpful tourist ladies would send her on to Bangor.
    *
    ‘Holiday?’ the doctor asked.
    ‘No, I live here,’ she said.
    ‘German?’
    ‘Dutch.’
    ‘So what’s the matter with you?’ The doctor was a thin man with yellow hair. He was sitting there smoking away in his surgery.
    ‘May I also smoke?’ she asked.
    ‘You may. We all have to die of something.’
    While lighting up, she thought about the inadequacy of English personal pronouns. This man’s ‘you’ sounded informal to her, whereas the woman at the tourist information counter had said it in a more formal way, like a Dutch ‘
u
’. Listeners had to decide for themselves how they were being addressed and respond accordingly. She drew hard on her cigarette to clear the rising image of the first-year student.
    ‘Your foot?’
    ‘Yes. How do you know that?’
    ‘I saw you walk in. There was a degree of difficulty. And most people who come through that door wear two shoes.’
    ‘I was bitten by a badger.’
    ‘Impossible.’ The doctor stubbed out his cigarette.
    ‘But I was.’
    ‘Liar.’
    She looked at the man. He really meant it.
    ‘Badgers are meek animals.’
Meek?
    ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.
    He pointed to a cross on the wall next to a crooked poster warning against HIV infection: an obscure shape she couldn’t quite place and the words
Exit only
.
    ‘And yes, one day there will be nothing but badgers walking around this town. People have already started to move away. Badgers and foxes. Or they just up and die, that’s an option too of course. Could you perhaps tell me how you possibly came to be bitten by such a meek animal?’
    Not enough personal pronouns and an excess of roundabout verb constructions, she thought. ‘I was asleep.’
    ‘Did the animal get into your house? Do you live here in town?’
    ‘I live up the road. I was outside, lying on a big