The sun was shining and the grass had dried completely. There was almost no wind. She cut the bamboo poles down to bamboo posts and stuck them in the ground next to the pieces of firewood. She strung cord between the posts. The light brown cows stood in line watching her over the stone wall. The grassy field was at least half a metre higher than the field the cows were in; on their side the wall was much taller. They snorted. With her mind more or less a blank, she used the rusty spade to cut the grass along the line of the cord, then doggedly removed the grass on the path side. She dumped the sods in the wheelbarrow and pushed it along the stream to the back of the house, eventually forming a pile between a couple of shrubs. Afterwards she sat down on top of the mound of crushed slate. She panted, looking around. What could she use to line the path? The geese saw her sitting there and wandered over to the barbed-wire fence, gabbling loudly. She threw lumps of slate at them but they didn’t seem to care. She didn’t have enough strength left in her arm to make it that far.
In the pigsty she found two wooden posts, not nearly enough for the whole path. She descended the concrete steps to the cellar once again and sat down on the bottom step. The tiled floor was a pale green colour. Why was it so clean in here, so freshly swept? It was as if the room were used for something wet. She sniffed; there was nothing about the smell to give her a clue.
The Zuiderbad in autumn, the white changing booths beside the pool, the sandwich she ate on her way back home, the bare shrubs in a blanket of mist in the Rijksmuseum garden, the hum of the canal-side traffic. She thought of her parents in their upstairs flat in De Pijp, saw her mother making her swimming-pool sandwich, boiling potatoes, the window in the narrow kitchen wet with steam, everything lit brightly by the fluorescent light. They still lived there. With central heating now, smooth laminate floors, a new kitchen and a TV that was way too big for the tiny living room. And a message from their daughter. She had kept calling and hanging up until she got the answering machine – her father’s voice, giving only his surname. ‘I’m just letting you know I’m away. There’s no need to worry. Really.’ Thinking about it now, she wasn’t happy with that really. It was completely unnecessary. Homesickness was something you could enjoy, but not always. Sometimes it made you weak, so weak that five concrete steps felt like fifty.
*
Alder branches. The three trees along the stream were alders. She knew because she recognised the small, round cones. It had been a long time since the trees had been pollarded. She knew the word, pollard, even though she’d never used a pruning saw to cut any kind of wood at all. Or did thick ivy stems count as wood? After lying on the divan for a couple of hours, she carried a kitchen chair outside. The chair Rhys Jones had sat on. She set it against one of the trees and climbed onto it in her muddy clogs. It’s a shame I didn’t do this early this morning, she thought. Then he would have had a mucky arse as well as holes in his socks. The saw did its work when she pulled – she felt that – not when she pushed. She also noticed that she had to think carefully about where to stand to make sure a branch didn’t fall on her head. After sawing off five, she felt like she’d done more than enough work for one day and decided to stop. She cut the twigs and thin tops off with the new secateurs and dragged the branches over to the edge of the grass. By removing the sods, she had made a furrow along the path and now she laid the branches in that furrow, one after the other. She sat down on the step. It looked neat. The branches were thick enough to form a real border. Only now did she see that the grassy field was a lawn that someone must have mown relatively recently. The cows were gone. When she stood up, she discovered that they were quite far away. She hadn’t noticed that at all, their walking away. A beautiful way of measuring the passing time: the sun that had suddenly leapt forward and was already quite low, a herd of cows that had silently and serenely relocated. She saw this for the first time and thought of her thesis.