‘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 almost 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.