‘Yesterday afternoon.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. Isn’t she in the house?’
‘No. Why did she lock you up?’
The man with the cast starts talking to the other man in Dutch. He gestures and says the name ‘Agnes’ again. The man with black hair keeps his eyes on the boy, even when he’s speaking to the other man. He has the wooden slat in one hand. Finally the men step back from the doorway. ‘Come,’ says the man holding the slat. The boy climbs out of the cellar. The man rests the piece of wood against the wall and goes down the concrete steps. The boy smells him as he passes: strong, fresh aftershave. The man with the cast hobbles over to the house on his crutches. The boy waits until the man has come back up out of the cellar and walks ahead of him to the front door, which is wide open. He looks at the rose arch. The single white rose that was little more than a bud is still a bud, and will probably never open.
*
In the kitchen both men carry on talking in Dutch as if they’ve forgotten he’s there. Or as if he’s irrelevant. The man with the cast is holding Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems in one hand. From a lot of incomprehensible sounds, the boy picks out the names ‘Emily’ and ‘Agnes’ and a single ‘ach’. He’s standing with his bum against the cooker as if he belongs there. The heat feels good after the cellar. The man keeps talking, laying his hand on a sheet of paper on top of the open map. Next to the paper is the brown felt tip, one of the pens they were supposed to use to plan the garden. The men’s bags are on the floor next to the sideboard. The radio is gone, leaving a conspicuous gap. The Christmas-tree lights are on. Now the man picks up a postcard and hands it to the man with black hair. The boy smiles. Rubbish, he thinks. Advertising. ‘Coffee?’ he asks, mainly because he feels like a coffee himself.
‘When did this card arrive?’ the man with the black hair asks.
The boy fills the pot with water and coffee and raises a lid. ‘Yesterday.’
‘Do they deliver here with Christmas?’
‘It was probably already in the letter box. I haven’t seen it before.’
‘Who are you?’
It’s like an interrogation. ‘Bradwen Jones.’ It feels good to say his own name like that, knowing full well that the man’s asking something else. The coffee pot is on the hotplate now, the hottest plate. The boy looks out of the window at the fallen oak. He, too, notices that it’s not right to have the slate path running into the lawn like that. There’s no reason to it, it doesn’t go anywhere. There should be something standing there. He turns round. The man with the cast stares at the postcard, the other man is staring at him again. ‘You a cop?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’ And after a short silence, ‘You’re a smart kid.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Anton.’
‘And him?’
The boy gestures at the man with the cast.
‘He’s the husband of Agnes. Rutger.’
‘Where is she?’ Agnes’s husband asks. He’s talking to the postcard.
The coffee starts to bubble. The boy takes the pot off the heat and gets three cups out of the cupboard.
‘What’s that note on the front door?’ the policeman asks.
‘From my father.’ The boy doesn’t know what else to say about it. He has no idea why his father is coming with an estate agent on 1 January.
‘Geese?’ the policeman asks.
‘There are geese in the field by the drive. Sometimes a fox takes one.’ He puts two cups of coffee on the table, gets the milk out of the fridge and the sugar from the worktop. Agnes’s husband looks up. He seems to have thought of something. He stands up and digs a rectangular object out of his bag, wrapped in silver foil. He lays it on the table but doesn’t unwrap it. The policeman looks at the boy. The boy looks back, aware of his squint.
*
Later, he’s in the bath. The window is open. The water is hot and smells of Native Herbs. He’s sent the Dutchmen to the stone circle. He told them it was a place she liked. ‘And if she’s not there,’ he said, ‘there’s the reservoir too. A bit further on. She can’t have gone far, the car’s still here, behind the old pigsty.’ He hadn’t mentioned any badgers, and no, he wasn’t going with them, it was easy enough to find, just follow the path. The policeman had asked him not to leave, as if he was the suspect in a disappearance. He’d laughed briefly in response, which made the policeman smile. They were slow, he’d seen that through the kitchen window, even if the man with the cast was faster than he’d expected. Rutger and Anton. He looks at his penis, which is floating in the water and looks bigger than it is. Pregnant, he thinks. He can’t put it out of his head, especially now that he knows there’s a husband. And she wanted it; she didn’t want to use anything. Where’s that radio got to? He closes his eyes and listens to the murmuring of the stream. He weighs up the situation. He could stay. That cop, Anton, wouldn’t mind. He opens his eyes and climbs out of the bath. Drying himself off, he sniffs. Emily said she could smell Mrs Evans. He can smell himself and he smells good. When he opens the study door to get some clean clothes out of his rucksack, he sees that the mattress is gone.
*
The boy stands at the corner of the house. The big black car the men came in is about fifty yards away. The sun is still shining. A little earlier, from the landing window, he saw the sea glittering. The goose field is in front of him and empty. He starts to walk down the drive, sticking to the field side of the road. Just past the black car, he turns his head because he thinks he’s heard trumpets in the murmuring of the stream. Trumpets. The grass on the goose field is very short, the birds have nibbled every blade down to the ground. The boy climbs over the gate and walks slowly, and ever more slowly, towards the goose shelter. The trumpets weren’t in the stream, they were inside the shelter. Six months ago the sun was shining too. It was a lot warmer then, the oaks green, the gorse bushes in the sheep field yellow. The grass was growing so fast the geese couldn’t keep up with it. He squats down to look in. The planks and chicken wire make it hard to see. He makes out a corner of the mattress; the music is not very loud, but clearly audible. Now he sees that the mattress is lying on a layer of bin bags. The four geese are sitting around the woman. When they notice him, they start to gabble quietly. One goose seems to be resting on her legs and even starts to hiss, as if it’s standing guard. He sees something purple too, she has her beanie on. Enough.
He stands up. A woman with a very nice, purple beanie. She’s tired. She didn’t make it to the top, but that’s not the end of the world. It’s Christmas, and time she went home. There is cooking and drinking to be done. He dredged it up word for word. It was only yesterday after all. What do you see? was the simple question, her looking away from him, surly and a little shy, eyes fixed on the water tank. She was indescribably beautiful. He had never seen her like that before. Awesomely beautiful, like a tree or a bush that produces as much blossom or as many flowers as possible the year before it dies. But that was something else he hadn’t told her. Emily.
*
Before climbing back over the gate, he turns round. He looks out over the goose field and the sheep paddocks without any sheep. He thinks of three dead women: two here, one in bed in the house in Llanberis. Just before she died, she said one last thing. He could barely make it out, he was so distracted by his mother’s beauty at that moment. ‘Go,’ she’d said. ‘If you want to, or if you have to, go.’ Then she’d closed her eyes. He looks at the sky, which is blue. He sees the wooden poles with the electricity cables, gorse bushes, oaks, a few crows, a broken orange tub on the grass, a barbed-wire fence. And, of course, the goose shelter with the music still coming from it. Plenty of shade, even next to the orange tub, a lot more than last summer. That’s about it, besides the odd cloud in the distance. Very soft music and the murmur of the stream. He smiles. She hadn’t imagined it like this, he thinks. Let no sunrise’ yellow noise / Interrupt this ground.