The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker Read Free Book Online Page B

bed. This one doesn't come apart. The front door was easy enough, the turn from the hall into the living room harder. I'd removed my old bed straight after milking. I put the mattress on its side in Henk's bedroom and threw the pieces of the wooden frame on the woodpile next to the muck heap. It's getting pretty big, I might have to have a bonfire on New Year's Eve, if the wind's right and it's not raining. The deliverymen left muddy tracks in the bedroom and the living room, and didn't want coffee because they had more beds to deliver. It was cold in the house for a long time afterwards because no one, me included, thought of shutting the front door during all that messing around in the hall. A cold easterly wind is angling in on the front windows. There'll be a sharp frost tonight.
     
The bed has a Swedish or Danish name I've forgotten, something with dots on an A. It is blue-and-white check and extremely wide; no matter which way I lie, my feet don't stick out over the edge. While I'm making the bed, Father keeps shouting. He's desperately curious. I get a fright for a moment because I think I've forgotten where I put the key, but then I remember leaving it in the keyhole. After slipping a pillowcase onto one of the pillows and laying it in place, I go and sit in the kitchen. If I sit on Mother's chair and lean across the table, I can see into the bedroom through the open doors. Two pillows. What do I want with two pillows? But one pillow looks funny, somehow it makes the big bed look unbalanced. And they weren't cheap. After reading the front page of the paper and drinking a cup of coffee, I walk to the bedroom to put the pillowcase on the second pillow.
     
In the afternoon the livestock dealer's lorry drives into the yard. The livestock dealer is a strange bloke who hardly ever says anything. He wears a tidy dustcoat and a cap, which he takes off when he comes into the house. If he finds me outside or in the shed, he raises his cap. He always makes some kind of remark about the weather and then clams up. It's up to me to say whether I have anything for him. If I don't have anything for him, he leaves again immediately, without another word. He has never – and he's been visiting the house for more than thirty years – sat down at the kitchen table. He leaves his clogs next to the hall door and, when standing on the linoleum in the kitchen, puts one foot on top of the other and wriggles his toes in his knitted woollen socks. Today we are standing in the middle of the yard and I've got something for him. A few sheep.
     
'They been tupped?' he asks.
     
'Yes. I took the ram away at the end of November.'
     
'Three?'
     
'Three. What's a sheep bring these days?'
     
'Hundred and twenty if you're lucky. More likely a hundred.'
     
'That's not much.'
     
'No, it's not much. Have you got them at the house?'
     
'No, they're in the back field.'
     
He's happy to lend a hand, although he could have come back tomorrow. Together we walk into the field and drive the sheep to the causeway gate. He grabs one, I grab two. The other twenty rush off. After opening the gate and releasing his sheep into the next field, he takes one from me. We herd the sheep to the causeway gate close to the yard. I climb over it, fetch two sections of fencing out of the barn and set them up on either side of the lowered tailgate. There's fifteen feet at most between the barriers and the causeway gate. I open it and one of the sheep walks straight up into the back of the lorry. The other two follow. The livestock dealer raises and bolts the tailgate.
     
'That went smoothly,' he says.
     
'For once,' I agree.
     
The livestock dealer raises a finger in farewell and gets into his lorry. He drives slowly over to the causeway, then turns onto the road even more slowly.
     
I shut the gate. The remaining twenty sheep are huddled together near the windmill, in the very far corner of the farm.
     
That night, just before going to bed, I cut my fingernails