46

She tore off chunks of bread and threw them to the geese. Three birds ate the bread, a fourth watched her every move. There was hardly any snow left, the land was steaming. Between the trunks of the oaks in the wood behind the goose shelter it was already growing dark. A few sheep stood around the hay, most of the others were grazing. ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘At first they disappeared really quickly and now these four have been left for quite a while.’

The boy didn’t speak.

‘They’re not anybody’s. What if I just left?’

‘I’d still be here.’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘You’d still be here.’

The boy cleared his throat.

She looked left. A sound she’d heard before was coming from the oak wood, but she didn’t recognise it until the big brown bird took off from a branch.

‘A kite!’ Bradwen said.

‘A bird,’ she said.

It swooped low over the ground and, like the last time, glided up to disappear over the roof ridge of the house, which it seemed to use as a kind of ski jump. It made the geese restless.

‘It’s a red kite.’

She couldn’t work it out. She knew that it meant something else, this word that the boy had said twice now, but she could only picture a red diamond on a string with a tail of knotted rags. Somewhere in her head, something needed to happen. His English needed to become her English, so that she could simply understand him. ‘Vlieger,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Vlieger. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

Her left temple started to pound. She wanted to say ‘kite’, she was sure of that, her tongue was definitely moving towards the roof of her mouth, slightly to the back, but instead she blew air out between her lower lip and upper teeth and her tongue relaxed, not altogether involuntarily, and came to rest where the roof of her mouth met her teeth. Bradwen began to say incomprehensible things, spitting out sounds. She looked him in the eye, fixing on his squint in the hope that he might somehow be able to explain things to her in some other way, without words, without sounds.

‘There, there.’ That she understood. His arms around her belly as if he were scared that something would fall out, that too was familiar. His breath on the back of her neck. The geese acted like they weren’t seeing anything. They were whiter again, their beaks brownish now, not the bright orange they’d been in the snow. Please go inside for once, she thought. The sheep were almost invisible. Her hands on the top board of the gate. As if she were pushing against it with the boy holding her back. If someone came down the path now, they might think he was raping her. Had the English named man-made kites after that big brown bird? she wondered, and now its Dutch name came to her. The wouw, red or otherwise. He’s not raping me, she thought. He’s taking care of me. He’s a sweet boy. A beautiful gymnast. And he should have left long ago.

‘I need a tablet,’ she said.

‘What kind of tablet?’

‘A tablet the doctor prescribed for me this morning.’

‘In Caernarfon?’

She could stand again. She could talk to him normally again.

The boy rubbed her tummy with his lower arms, still breathing on her neck. Not just a boy now, a son.

‘There’s one thing I want to know,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘This afternoon or this morning, I’ve forgotten which . . .’ I really have forgotten, she thought. Maybe it’s the next day already? She looked at the steaming countryside. Where had the snow got to so quickly?

‘Yes?’

Not the next day then? ‘Why did you come over the stream and the garden wall?’

‘I took a detour via the stone circle.’

‘What for?’

‘To have a look. There was snow. If there’d been tracks, I would have seen them.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing.’

No badgers. No fox. No dog. It was a shame that Sam was gone. If he hadn’t driven off with the sheep farmer, he could have leant against her legs now, or against the gate, to get at her hands. To lick them. The hands of the alpha female.