Ten White Geese Read Online Free PDF Page A

step by step. For now, the work was done. She took the secateurs and walked around to the side of the house, where some of the bamboo almost reached the roof. She cut it off at shoulder height and, half an hour later, glancing at the pile of bamboo behind her, realised she could cross the stakes off the list. She had uncovered a small window she hadn’t noticed inside, in the kitchen. Since coming outside she hadn’t smoked a single cigarette. Now she would find it difficult to get her right hand up to her mouth.
    *
    Later that day the cloud rose and the sun broke through. She walked slowly to the stone circle with the secateurs in her hand, cutting off branches that were in the way and removing ivy from the iron kissing gates. The path was looking more and more like a real path. After reaching the stone circle and before sitting down on the largest rock, she carried on in the same direction and came to a stile. It was wet here, really wet, marshy. With thick clumps of coarse grass sticking up between small puddles. The path led straight through the bog on a kind of natural embankment with rocks dotted here and there. Tomorrow, she thought. On the map she had seen a larger body of water, rectangular, as if it were man-made.
    She sat dead still, waiting, her arms around her raised knees. No badgers appeared. Two yellow butterflies fluttered over the gorse. Two butterflies, she thought.
Two butterflies went out at noon, / And waltzed above a stream.
An enormous wave of homesickness washed over her. She had felt a milder version a couple of times before in the enormous Tesco’s at Caernarfon, especially in the refrigerated aisles. She’d fought it, but here in the sun with the butterflies and the gorse, the memory of the street in De Pijp was impossible to resist. She saw it before her in black and white: the trees half as big as now, cars with rounded features and bodies, children in knitted cardigans with leather patches on the knees of their trousers, the steep stairs up to the front doors, the heady smell of St Martin’s sweets – St Martin’s Day! Just over a week ago. She released her knees and stretched her legs, hugged her belly and bent forward.
    Shortly after that, the badger shuffled out from under its gorse bush.

16
    When she got back from the stone circle with an armful of tufted grass, there was a piece of paper on the front door.
Came round, nobody home. I’ll be back, maybe tomorrow. Rhys Jones
. The note was stuck on with a piece of chewing gum.
    She turned to look at what would be the garden. I can’t do this, she thought. I don’t even know what those shrubsare called. I don’t know who Rhys Jones is. How can I protect seven geese from a fox? She dropped the secateurs and the bundle of grass. The sun was already low.
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn, / Indicative that suns go down; / The notice to the startled grass / That darkness is about to pass.
Dickinson had seen what she saw now. The homesickness had ebbed. She walked into the living room, poured a glass of red wine, fluffed up some cushions and sat down close to the wood-burning stove. The cigarette she lit tasted like a first cigarette. It grew dark very slowly, as if the light was being sucked out of the window like fine dust. It made her feel a little dizzy. She lit a couple of candles and put three logs in the stove. She had left everything behind, everything except the poems. They would have to see her through. She forgot to eat.

17
    The next morning she stumbled over the bundle of grass. Swearing, she put it in a big glass vase she found in a kitchen cupboard. She left the secateurs lying on the ground. Then she hitched the trailer to the back of the car and drove off in a random direction. This was the UK, she’d be bound to run into a garden centre sooner or later. After about an hour she found herself in a village called Waunfawr. There was no garden centre, but there was a bakery. She bought bread, biscuits and a cream