My First Goose by Amy

The next thing I know, I’m sitting on this boat, the engines booming and thundering sickeningly below me, the giant beast rolling through the water, carrying with it the sweet smell of petrol and cold macaroni cheese. The passengers do not seem to notice this phenomenon: that the monster is systematically progressing through the icy sea, with no mind working inside it but an array of cold machinery. On the table in front of me are several blue plastic bags, filled with bottles of water. The paper strips around the bottles have been partly ripped off, leaving a sticky dirty glue coating the sides. The rest of my family are looking out of the window, somewhat desperate for this journey to end. My mother is frantically pointing out famous cliffs and sea stacks, telling the haunting story of the old man of Hoy. Her voice is at least three tones higher than usual.
“Once”, she says, “there was a giant who was very greedy and cruel.”
My brothers, Magnus and Jack, are paying no attention, and discreetly eating polo mints.
‘He wanted to come across to Orkney, and kill all the people there so that he could have the island to himself.’
The boat lurches particularly sickeningly and my dad grabs the nearest person for support, causing them both to stagger into a plastic sculpture. I notice a placard with the title “Mither of the Sea”. While they are regaining their balance, the sliding doors slam shut in the face of a member of the crew. My mother gives in and lies on the floor, where she is immediately infested by small children. The boat lurches once more, and a hardly distinguishable voice speaks on the tannoy, telling passengers that they will soon be required to disembark.
We are all silent in the car, anticipating the moment when we will become part of a new place. This place has a winter unlike any I’ve ever known, with an extraordinary bleakness which is only broken by the long strings of barbed wire fences. The darkness is grey and gloomy, almost like thick fog, and is only distorted by the occasional lights of houses, which skim past. The lines in the middle of the road show us the way, mocking us in our ignorance, and twisting impossibly into flat meaningless shapes. We turn up a steep hill and suddenly stop. It takes me a while to realise that we have arrived.
Everyone moves at once, Magnus throwing himself over from the boot on top of Jack, who immediately screams and starts to cry. We tumble out into the night. There are no lights on, so we stumble around for a while with a dim torch, looking for the key in obscure places, until we realise that it has been left in the keyhole. The lock is stiff, and when we open the door, the silence and darkness of the house sucks us in, as if it is some immense black hole with no past or future, just a gaping present.
‘Where are we?’ says Magnus.
“This is our-” says Jack, leaving me to fill in the huge gap, “- new house.”
Jack looks around in disgust. The walls have lumps of plaster hanging from them, two of the rooms don’t have floors, and the rats can be heard clearly skittering and scuttling in the attic. “Such a beautiful dead house,” Jack murmurs, under his breath.
We stay shivering in the kitchen, while my dad goes to find the caravan that has been arranged in case of emergency. Eventually we all tumble out into the night again, to sleep in the rusty caravan, strewn with black bin bags full of meaningless belongings.
That night I dream, I dream of strange, eerie landscapes, with no sign of life. But I’m always trying to get to the horizon, where I can feel that something is waiting for me. And now I can see something on the horizon, there are birds, tall and graceful, circling the skies and calling to each other remotely. 
In the morning I throw on old clothes, and go out early, leaving the family to look for bowls and food in amongst the mess. The long grass in the paddock looks dead and wiry, and as the wind blows over it, caressing the edges with its steely touch, the grass seems to shiver and stretch. I turn into the first shed. It smells of oil and chicken droppings, and there is one solitary egg lying in the nesting boxes to one side. I touch the shell, feeling the coldness of the past in this one piece of evidence that this place once lived. I push another door leading from this shed and come into a much bigger shed, full of rusty pieces of iron and old tins. There is a giant wooden machine, the workings of which are a mystery to me, although on careful inspection, a few pieces of old dry grain give me a clue. There are two children’s bikes on top of this machine, one only a skeleton frame, another too far back to see.
I come out of this shed into the open air, into a yard covered with pieces of broken stone. In front of me is the gritty back of the house, and its windows stare emptily at me. I quickly turn into another shed, which evidently used to be a stable, as it has two stalls and a very old leather saddle hanging over a rafter. One corner of the dark shed has a mountain of small pieces of damp coal. On the way out, I notice a horseshoe on the door, a sign of good luck.
When I return to the caravan, I find that they have already left to look at the house, so I traipse back across the boggy field to join them.
“Are there geese here?” I ask my mother, who is attempting to dress both my brothers simultaneously at the same time as fiddling with the radio.
“I doubt it”, she says, “they’ll go further south than this I would assume.”
I go to the Book of British Birds and flick through the pages. The only goose in the book is a Canadian goose, but the picture has been smeared with something like butter and there is a large coffee stain over the map which points out the areas where they live. After some careful examination, it is clear that they can breed in Scotland, “but this is unlikely due to unwelcoming birds such as swans and seabirds like Great Skuas.” I don’t have a lot of trust in this book, it was free in a Kellogg’s Cornflakes packet several years ago, and is notoriously incorrect.
Back in the kitchen, I suddenly feel angry.
“Why did we come here?” I ask my mother, “I didn’t want to come.”
“You’ll be fine”, she says.
I look at her with disgust and storm out of the house, sitting on the roof of the shed until I grow tired and hungry, and move back to the artificial warmth of the house.
Later, I have a sudden urge to be outside. I am waiting for something. For some reason, the loch looks alive, and the faint mist which hangs in the air is laced round the edges of the water, holding a mystery which I cannot begin to imagine. I walk down the hill, not taking my eyes off the loch. The air is so still and the place is silent. The silence seemed cruel yesterday. As I stand beside the loch, gazing out over its fine surface, I hear a coarse solitary call, which I have only ever imagined. I look up, and see, flying above me, a goose, wings outstretched. It is brown, with a white ring around its neck, and it flies with such grace and steadiness that it takes my breath away. I suddenly remember a song I once knew, about Freya, the goddess of beauty and love-
‘In the land of the gods where the arctic winds blow, her voice thaws the glaciers her smile melts the snow’.
I watch as Freya circles, eventually coming to rest on the loch, and crying once more her lonely, haunting cry.
Climbing over the barbed wire fence, into a field adjoining the loch, it occurs to me that this must be the start of spring.