‘Ah, the badger lady.’
She looked up and sighed.
‘Don’t be so dismissive,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m only joking. Come in.’
His desk was empty, there were no documents he had just been working on. She was already so used to people here smoking almost everywhere that she hadn’t stubbed her cigarette out in the waiting room. She did it now, in his half-full ashtray. She looked at the cross, which someone had straightened.
‘Your hair’s nice like that. A bit on the short side.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Shirley is a very experienced hairdresser. What’s more, she’s the last hairdresser.’
She looked at him.
‘So you thought it was necessary now?’
‘What?’
‘Coming to see me.’
‘Yes.’
‘What can I do for you?’
‘Painkillers.’
‘You can get them at the chemist’s. You don’t need me for that.’
‘I’m not talking about aspirin or paracetamol.’ That last word sounded strange. She wasn’t sure it was English.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s for you to say. I have no idea.’
‘Sit down over here first. I need to look at your foot.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my foot. Not any more.’
‘Please.’
I mustn’t be difficult, she thought. It can’t do any harm. She sat on the bed and took off her wet shoe and sock. The skin of her foot was wrinkled. I could just lie down, she thought. Lie down and surrender and see what happens.
The doctor took hold of her foot. ‘That’s healed beautifully. Has it given you any more trouble?’
‘No. Baking soda does wonders. You were absolutely right.’ She stared over the doctor’s shoulder at the wall. Only now did she realise – perhaps because it was lit from a different angle or because she was now looking at it without really focusing – that the HIV poster showed the torso of a dark-skinned man. Not from the front, but from the side, soft focus, a pert arse. Only now did she understand the ‘Exit Only’ at the bottom. The poster must have been ancient. She wondered why this man had a thing like that hanging in his surgery. She couldn’t imagine it striking a chord with many patients in this small town.
The doctor held her hand and felt her pulse with two fingers. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He took her head between his hands, raised the skin above her eyes with his thumbs and looked into her eyes carefully. Then he ran one hand down her arm, while laying his other on her knee. If I were a non-smoker, she thought, his breath would be incredibly foul. ‘Headache?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Is that all?’
‘No.’
‘What else seems to be the problem?’ The bell rang in the waiting room. He glanced at the door and took advantage of the interruption to cough, without raising a hand to his mouth.
She slid down off the bed, standing up against him for a brief instant before he took a step back. There was some forgotten stubble on the Adam’s apple in his scrawny neck. For someone who had just laid a hand on her knee, almost like Sam resting his head there, he jumped out of the way extremely quickly. She sat down on the chair and lit a cigarette. For the first time, she felt she had the measure of this man.
The doctor sat down too and wasn’t going to be outdone. Together they sat there smoking. ‘You do realise that I can’t prescribe strong analgesics just like that?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘There is such a thing as a medical code of ethics.’
‘That didn’t seem to bother you very much the other day in the hairdressing salon.’
‘Aha. You think I shouldn’t talk to Shirley about my patients? That’s not the same as prescribing medicine without a reason.’
‘Without a reason? Who said that?’ She blew a cloud of smoke in his face.
The doctor blew a cloud back. ‘Then I’ll ask again, what’s the problem?’
‘I’m ill.’
‘How ill?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re not being treated? In Holland?’
‘Of course.’
‘So why won’t you tell me what it is?’
‘It’s none of your business.’
‘I’m a GP. I have to abide by rules and I have a conscience.’
‘I’m a coincidental patient. I might leave again for Holland in the morning. That business with the badger was an incident. I’m a tourist.’
‘Where’s the pain?’
‘Everywhere. Sometimes it’s like toothache through my whole body.’
‘Toothache?’
‘As if you go to the dentist because of the pain and you think you know where it is and the dentist goes to work on a completely different tooth, which surprises you, but the next day the pain is gone.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I smell things too.’
‘That can only be healthy.’
‘No. Things that aren’t there. Or things I imagine and then I really smell them.’
The doctor let that go by. ‘If I prescribe this medication for you…’
She looked at him and tried to guess what he was suggesting. ‘I’m a tourist,’ she said again. ‘I’m here by coincidence alone. I could have gone to a doctor in Bangor just as easily.’
‘I can’t allow this.’
She gestured at the ashtray, now more than half full. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re sitting here smoking yourself to death under a cross and a poster of a bare black arse. You even joke about it. Is no one stopping you?’
He looked at the wall. ‘I don’t quite under—’
‘Doesn’t it matter, your smoking? Is it irrelevant?’
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘My wife complains about it.’ He cleared his throat, then started coughing.
‘But you don’t let her stop you?’
‘No. Is anyone stopping you?’
‘No. I’m alone. Completely alone. Did you make a record of my last visit?’
‘Of course.’
‘Destroy it. Forget that I’m here now.’ She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘Is my name on it?’
‘No.’
The doctor didn’t look away. He pulled on his cigarette, which was burnt down almost to the filter, and stared at the ashtray. From the waiting room came the sound of someone moving a chair, clearly audible. He dropped the butt in the ashtray without stubbing it out. Then he opened a drawer and, after shuffling papers and searching, removed a form that he folded twice before tearing it into shreds. The shreds disappeared in the waste-paper basket. He took a pen and began to write a prescription. ‘You know where the chemist is. I’ll give you this, but then I don’t want to see you here again, ever.’
‘The strongest there is.’
Without looking up, he screwed up the piece of paper and wrote a new prescription, which he held out to her. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said.
*
There was a woman in the waiting room. A woman with bleached hair pinned up on top of her head. It looked very thin in the light of the fluorescent lamp. She was leafing through an ancient magazine. ‘Hello, love,’ she said.
Shirley, she thought. If I’d been forced to make up a name for her, it’s the name I’d have chosen. ‘Good morning.’
‘Don’t be so formal! How do you like your new hairdo?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your hair? How do you like it?’
‘What about my hair?’
‘I cut it just the other day.’
‘I’ve always worn my hair like this.’
The hairdresser gaped at her.
‘Free consultation?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘I beg your pardon, I thought you were someone else.’ She opened the door and stepped out onto the snowy pavement. Carefully she shuffled towards the chemist’s. There were alm
ost no lights on in the hairdressing salon, only the lamps around one of the four mirrors. The door was not ajar. The perfumery across the road had a large sign in the window announcing a sale with 50 per cent discount on all items. One day there’ll be nothing but badgers walking around this town. People have already started to go away. She heard the man she no longer knew saying it. Or they simply die, that’s an option too of course. The chemist’s was open. There were even customers waiting at the counter. They weren’t holding a sale here.
The young man who served her peered at the prescription for a long time and then looked up, probably to ask why the patient’s name was missing. She stared at him the way she had just stared at the hairdresser and he went into the back room. Once she had her plastic bag of tablets, she walked back to the car park on the other side of the road. It occurred to her that, as far as the boy was concerned, her hair had always been like this. He didn’t know her any other way. Neither did the dog that apparently saw her as a fellow canine. In the window display of an outdoor shop, the shop where she’d bought the map, there were male heads wearing woolly hats. One of them, bearing the brand name Patagonia, was pastel blue with an edge in various other shades of blue, from very light to very dark, like a bar code. It made her think of the mountain and what the boy had said yesterday morning. She’d heard him, she just hadn’t responded. She went into the shop, bought the hat and asked the shop assistant to gift-wrap it, watching while he fiddled awkwardly with a roll of Sellotape. A muscle in her right leg quivered. She felt hot. The hat was expensive. That doesn’t matter, she thought, I don’t have to worry about that. She said goodbye to the shop assistant – who looked at her with surprise – and left. It wasn’t until she was outside that she worked out what had happened. She must have said it in Dutch, ‘Tot ziens’, even though she was sure she was speaking English. The clock on the arch in the town wall said quarter past eleven.
43
The boy wasn’t home. She laid the hat under the Christmas tree, which was standing in the corner next to the sideboard, already hung with tinsel and baubles and with the fairy lights on. He’d put it in a zinc tub with a load of crushed slate to weigh it down. She climbed the stairs slowly, pushed open the bathroom door, laid the tablets on the shelf above the washbasin and took one without reading the leaflet. The doctor hadn’t quibbled on quantity. The tubes of cough drops were on the shelf too, unopened. She sat down on the toilet. The cramp she had felt in the car came back. And again. Each time she went to tear off some toilet paper, she had to pull her hand back. ‘Goodness,’ she said quietly, elbows on her knees, her head hanging down over the tiled floor. After wiping her bottom, she ran the bath for the second time that day, again adding a good squirt of Native Herbs. The bubble bath had a pungent smell. A real smell. She took off her clothes and sat down in the hot water, thinking about the boy’s monologue and all the things he’d reeled off smoothly, as if he had thought about it beforehand, as if there were a plan behind it. She tried to feel what the tablet was doing inside her body by imagining the journey the active ingredients were making from their starting point in her stomach. Hopefully reaching her head sometime soon. When a pleasurable lethargy began to seep through her, she realised that it would soon be New Year.
*
‘Hello!’ That wasn’t Bradwen, if only because he would have turned it into a question. Rhys Jones. Already through the front door, and her in the bath. The front door led straight to the stairs. In this house, climbing them was a completely natural thing to do. She had to get out of the bath; the door wasn’t even locked. The water splashed loudly. The tablet had done its job: it was her own body that got out of the bath, but with a slight lag. She hadn’t heard a car. She took the towel from the hook on the door and pressed it against her breasts. He knocked on the door, fairly hard. ‘Go away,’ she said. In the silence that followed, she leant her head on the wooden door panel. She thought she could hear him breathing and at the same time she heard the baker’s wife saying something. And if she was still alive she would never have let him eat so much cake. If only she were standing at the baker’s now, fully dressed, with hiking boots on her feet. The bathwater was still settling. It was very clear.
‘I’ll wait in the kitchen.’
She recoiled from his voice, which resonated in the wood. She heard him go downstairs. Slowly she dried herself, leaving the plug in the bath; the gurgling water would make too much noise. Slowly she pulled on her clothes. Cramps in her belly that didn’t really hurt, no pressure behind her ears, a numbness in her head. Before opening the door, she looked out of the small window at the snow-covered drive. What was keeping Bradwen? The geese were huddled together in front of the shelter. In front of it, never inside it. Stupid animals.
*
Rhys Jones was sitting on the kitchen chair closest to the Christmas tree, the gift-wrapped hat in his hands. There was something about him, something different.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I assume you don’t put presents under the tree for yourself.’
‘And?’
‘I was imagining you’d bought this for me.’
‘What?’
‘Who else comes to visit you?’ He squeezed the parcel. ‘It feels like socks.’
‘Put it back.’
‘It’s not for me?’
I could grab a knife, she thought. The heavy frying pan if necessary. ‘No.’
‘You are living here alone, after all? Isn’t that what you told the agent when you signed the provisional rental agreement?’ He laid a special emphasis on the word ‘provisional’.
‘Mr Jones.’
‘Call me Rhys.’
‘Mr Jones, would you be so kind as to put that package back?’
‘Fine, fine, be as uppity as you like.’ He stood up and returned the hat to its place under the tree. He straightened his back, turned round and went into the living room. She heard the front door open.
She looked around. The kitchen was safe for a moment. The three flowering plants on the windowsill, the coffee pot on the cooker, the Christmas tree. She still had a quick look in the cutlery drawer, at the biggest compartment. The front door closed. Rhys Jones came into the kitchen carrying a plastic crate. She looked at his feet and, while looking down, realised what was different about him: his thick greasy hair was a good bit shorter, she’d seen his ears for the first time.
‘Lamb,’ he said, putting the crate on the table.
She looked into it. A few hunks of dark-coloured meat. She raised a hand to her throat. ‘Is that a whole lamb?’
‘No. A half of lamb.’
‘A half?’
‘I was only going to give you a quarter, but that would have been leaving you with hardly any. I’m a soft touch.’ And as he said that, he put a hand on her bum, as if to prove it.
She didn’t grab the hand; it was the one with the torn fingernail. Instead she stepped aside, as calmly as possible, away from the hand, and kept moving. She ended up directly opposite on the other side of the table. ‘Take it away again.’
‘Isn’t it good enough for you?’
‘What do you want?’
‘I’ve brought you a couple of legs of lamb. Completely free of charge.’
‘I don’t want them. Lamb disgusts me.’
‘Too bad. I’m leaving it anyway. I’ve fulfilled my obligations.’
‘You can leave, then.’
‘You look very different from last time,’ he said.
‘You can leave, then.’
‘Have you been to the hairdresser’s? Shirley’s?’
She had put her hands on the back of a chair. Shirley, the doctor, the man opposite her, the baker and his wife; everyone knew each other. Everyone except Bradwen. He was the only one who didn’t fit in. What was keeping him? Although, having decorated the Christmas tree first, he could be gone for a while yet. She looked at the clock. Almost half twelve. I have to do something, she thought. It doesn’t matter what. She went throu
gh to the living room, opened the door of the stove, pushed two logs onto the smouldering fire, and slid them back and forth a little with the poker. She realised that she was standing with her back to Rhys Jones, bent forward. She felt strong.
The sheep farmer had followed her and was now sitting sprawled on the sofa with one arm on the backrest. ‘Don’t I get any coffee?’ he asked. ‘Badger lady?’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, badger lady.’
‘You’re not getting any coffee. You can leave now.’ She stayed where she was, next to the stove, without putting the poker back in the wood basket.
‘My estate agent friend rang up.’
She looked at his socks.
‘They’ve tracked down a great-nephew. Lives in England. Your tenancy won’t be renewed.’
She moved the poker to her other hand.
‘Seeing as my friend’s a nice guy, he realises that it’s very short notice and he’s giving you until 5 January to pack your stuff. We’ll be dropping by on New Year’s Day, though, to check the condition of the house.’
‘No problem.’
‘No?’
‘No. None of this old junk is mine. I don’t need a moving van.’ She looked out of the window. It was as if she sensed that would be the second in which Bradwen would come over the garden wall. He didn’t jump this time, he climbed. Sam jumped, landing next to the oak and alder branches. Apparently he remembered exactly where they were. Strange he’s coming from that direction, she thought. The boy walked across the snowy lawn and stopped at the edge of the dug-up section. She wondered if he could see her. The living room was fairly gloomy with its single window but, as ever, the standard lamp was on. Bradwen gave the dog a command. Sam turned back and sat down against his leg, partly hidden by the rose bushes. Why is he standing there? she thought. Can he see Rhys Jones’s car from there? And what of it?
‘You’ll have enough time to eat the legs of lamb.’
‘I don’t eat lamb.’
‘Please yourself. Mrs Evans loved lamb. She made it to ninety-three on it.’ He looked up. ‘What are you doing over there? Come and sit on the sofa.’
‘It’s time for you to leave,’ she said. ‘You’ve fulfilled your obligations and you’ve delivered your message.’
Ten White Geese (9781101603055) Page 11
