My Fellow Skin (13 page)

Roland sat down at the table.

“No,” he said, “worse than that.”

My father gave a short laugh.

Not long afterwards, maybe a quarter of an hour, the phone rang. My father answered it.

“Ours has conked out too,” I heard him say. “The anti-freeze isn’t strong enough to deal with this kind of weather… No, never mind… We’ll think of something… No problem. I’ll get him…”

“It’s your Pa,” he told Willem. “His car’s broken down. Mother, we have a guest for the night.”

“Well, I hope I’ve got enough bedding,” she replied.

After supper Roland went straight upstairs. My father remained seated at the table for quite a while, chatting to us. He didn’t usually talk much, but when he did he would talk in bursts. He wanted to seize the fullness of past summers before it slipped like sand through his fingers. I could sense the images flitting across his retina, of trees in the orchard cut down years ago, and of the garden in its prime. The garden, which was
so vast that you could get lost in it. That was when he was a boy, when in the summer holidays his mother would pack a surprise picnic for the children to take on their exploring expeditions round the world that existed within the confines of the farm.

My mother joined us. “I’ve had to use a tablecloth as a bottom sheet,” she said. “Not ideal, I know, but it’s got a pretty floral pattern.”

“Can’t tell the difference in the dark anyway,” Willem said.

I hoped she wouldn’t start telling him about me. She would do that occasionally—go off at a tangent about how she’d tried breastfeeding me but had to give up after two weeks because I gave her a rash, which meant I was getting more blood inside me than milk. I was afraid this was going to be one of those occasions. She’d had a drink of gin and the stove was purring.

“His favourite place was his potty,” she told Willem.

Here we go, I thought.

“He could spend hours on it, quite happily. If he was any trouble, all I had to do was sit him on his potty. And he’s still the same, really…” she giggled.

“Ma!”

“It’s true isn’t it? Reading the paper on the lav. Just like your Pa, you are…”

“I do that too, sometimes,” Willem said pleasantly.

He could tell I was ashamed of her. “I’d better be getting to bed,” he said.

“Anton will show you the way.”

My mother had prepared one of the old spare rooms. It must have been years since it had last been used. It smelt a bit stuffy, and it was freezing cold in there. She had laid an old sleeping bag on the bed as extra blanket.

Willem put his hands in his pockets. I noticed him shivering.

“It’s all a bit makeshift here,” I said apologetically.

“It’s fine.”

“If you’re cold you must say so. I can get you an extra pullover.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Night,” I said.

“Night.”

I came upon Roland in the bathroom, inspecting the inside of his lower lip in the mirror.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I just bit my tongue, that’s all.”

I started brushing my teeth.

He held his head under the tap and dried himself with a towel.

“Right, see you in the morning.”

“See you.”

Everyone had gone upstairs. All the lights were out. The stove was still warm, and I sat down in the dark.

I didn’t feel sleepy, I never did when it snowed. This was a throwback to when I was little, when I waited for weeks for the snow to arrive, and when it came at last I’d slip out of bed at night and cross to the window to check whether I
could still see the flakes falling in the cones of light cast by the street lamps on the dyke road.

The wind buffeted the walls. The limbs of the beech tree tapped against the shutters. I remembered the cosiness that went with stormy weather in the old days, when I’d struggle to stay awake as long as I could so I’d feel safe all through the night.

Someone came down the stairs. I could hear bare feet thumping on the treads.

“Anton?”

“Over here,” I said.

“I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

He hopped from one foot to the other. “Where’s the toilet down here?”

“Sorry,” I said, “Down the passage, turn right, it’s the second door.”

He padded out of the room.

Another six days or so and I’d sink back into boredom again. The idea paralysed me. Sometimes it started on the Saturday morning, when the prospect of having to get on my bike to undergo dreary lessons, teachers, discipline, being spied on and humiliated all over again would put me in a bad mood all weekend. School and I were not meant for each other. I simply did not exist. Just some little runt in cheap clothes, bought so I could grow into them, and I was tolerated because I behaved myself, because I let them ram all their lessons down my throat so I could cough them up again when required, but in reality they trusted me as little as I trusted them, and there were no generous donations from my father to make up for it.

I noted his crossword lying on the table, my mother’s copy of the Women’s Union magazine with free knitting patterns,
the unopened envelopes behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and became acutely aware of the house that was home: dilapidated, old, emptier than ever.

The wind seemed to be digging out the foundations and lifting up the walls. The notion came as a relief. If only I myself could blow away in the wind like a lost letter fluttering across the fields, and once the thaw set in I’d let all my garbled sentences and nonsensical words leak away into the melted snow. I was reminded of the time in class when we were given yet another form to fill in and I simply put a tick in the box next to the word “born”, whereupon Mr Vaneenooghe gave me extra homework for punishment, although it made perfectly good sense to me.

I heard a door opening behind me and falling to.

“In one of your moods again, are you,” Willem said.

He lolled against the back of my chair.

“I know. I’m a pain sometimes.”

“Who isn’t?”

I said nothing.

“C’mon. Let’s go to bed.”

I stayed where I was.

He slipped his hands under my collar and leaned forward.

P
ARIS
. Soissons. Senlis. Summer 197*, the last school trip before our final exams and going off to university. Pointed arches, triforia, triptychs. Willem leaping in front of my camera lens going
boo
, time after time. Me pretending to be annoyed by his tomfoolery and striding ahead to stay close to our guide. I was going to study history, and didn’t want to miss anything. He found it all very boring and would duck into niches to pose among statues of prophets or ape the attitudes of martyrs and holy virgins. Not once did I press the shutter.

Nearly nineteen. When I try to recall the way I was then, with my long hair and the long white shirts I wore loose and flowing so they felt almost like a dress; when I look at old Polaroids of parties or outings and see that thin, lanky body harbouring passions that shattered like mirrors, shoulders invariably hunched, defensive, with Willem leaning against me, flaunting his beloved jangly armbands and necklaces, pulling faces and grinning and pointing his finger at the camera—what do I see? How can that be me?

He might have been my son, were he not one of the annual growth rings that have become ingrained in me along with what counts as “the past”, in a blur solidifying by the day. I catch myself contemplating his likeness with the melancholy
satisfaction of a father observing his child, still young enough to enjoy simple, frivolous pleasures. Or should I not think of frivolity but of the unmitigated, boundless joys we thought would never end, even as time was grinding us down?

You can already tell where the first lines will be etched around the eyes. Lurking at the back of the smile, wide and angular, which seems almost to tear the face in two, there is already a hint of the grief that will come back like a boomerang to collar him as he hears himself roaring with laughter and thinks: here I am, I’m having a good time, life is being kind to me.

That apparently inescapable footnote of sorrow, chasing each moment of pleasure more doggedly year by year, sometimes hard on the heels, sometimes at a discreet distance—where does it come from? A tap on the shoulder from the dead, maybe, which I never felt when I was young and feckless. There, far away on the horizon, waving their black handkerchiefs, the dead stand out ever more sharply against the sky.

Perhaps it has something to do with the feeling that everyone in the pictures is dead. Not just the sense of unreality and emptiness that fills me as I go through old photographs and come upon myself at some party or other, engaged in animated conversation with someone whose existence has shrunk to a cardboard shape. It’s also seeing myself holding a glass in mid-air, halfway between the table and my mouth. Or sitting on a bench in a park somewhere, looking up in the tender light of spring at whoever was with me at the time.

It needn’t have been Willem who took that photograph. But the image has the elegant composition that seemed to come naturally to him, and there’s the bird’s eye perspective—a
device he fancied. My face, all smiles, looks like the centre of a flower supported by the narrow stalk of my torso.

It can’t possibly have been taken by Roland. Photography didn’t interest him much, and the few times he did pick up a camera he managed to decapitate entire wedding parties at a stroke. He managed to slice me down the middle once, when I posed for him leaning against a tree.

He left school two years before we did. His results weren’t brilliant, but they weren’t bad either. He opted for a career in business, and from then on drifted from one branch of casual trade to the next: Oriental rugs, baby clothes, whirlpool baths, army surplus. The police were after him at one point and he kept having problems with customs inspectors, but he always managed to keep his head above water.

There must be pictures in the family albums of him wearing that slightly shady grin of his. Macho, square-jawed, hair cropped short. There’s a snapshot of the day his mother came home: Roland resting both hands on the back of her chair, in her eyes the glazed look of the heavily sedated. Surrounded by family members wreathed in dutiful smiles, his mother gazes down at the enormous slice of cake on her plate as though dreading the prospect of having to eat it. Roland stands behind her, stooping slightly to form a sort of little roof to protect her, but at the same time his eyes are raised and seem to say, “Yes, this is my mother. This is the sad creature who bore me. Poor, dear, half-witted Mama. Just as well I’m not a softie, and there’s still the inheritance to look forward to.”

The tip of his tie—as a self-proclaimed whizz-kid he went around formally dressed in a suit and tie—rests on her shoulder, giving the picture an entirely fortuitous note of intimacy.

There were a few occasions, later on, when his visits to my parents coincided with mine, and each time, as I watched him lift his little daughters from the back seat of his car and open the boot to take out push chairs, bags with nappies and baby bottles, I felt a slight pang of disappointment. In the end he got himself a perfectly insulated house in one of the new settlements that were springing up around the old villages all over the country, the kind of place where the wind plays listlessly in acacia trees and scatters lawns with the resigned sort of happiness that cowers behind tall reed fences, for fear of getting hurt.

I don’t enjoy coming face to face with myself in pictures of me with shoulders hunched, conversing with one of the many girlfriends he had over the years. A Lydia maybe, or a Natalie. Fair-haired or dark. Shy or rattling on and on like an alarm clock you couldn’t switch off. Sometimes he’d bring a girl home with him to spend the night at our house. A better place for a shag, I imagine, than that gloomy villa his parents lived in. Although it was grand enough to impress his sweethearts, there was always the risk that his mother would spend half the night shambling up and down the corridor like a drugged bear or put the roast in the oven at half-past two in the morning.

Of the pain caused by the noises of his lust, the knife being twisted in the wound with every thrust of his body, there is no visual record. He was brimming with life. Alive in every fibre of his being, each gland in his body on the alert, a bundle of convoluted surfaces: lungs, gut, veins under the outer layer of skin. He drew the breath of life with workmanlike intent, drank it to the dregs, and belched. Life no longer slipped tormentingly through his fingers.

The human body does what it is programmed to do with quiet purpose, it brooks no contradiction. It grows, provides ready-furnished rooms for you to inhabit and make your own, whether you like them or not. Had he been punier, he’d have played the piano, loved Liszt and fought hard not to weep during the
Lacrimosa
. Had I been heftier, I’d have shot thrushes out of the cherry tree and wrung their necks when they fell to the ground, without flinching, just for the heck of it.

I remember the day he discovered a litter of kittens, a few weeks old. Cats were a plague in the empty stables. He smashed their skulls one by one with a heavy chisel. I turned away so as not to vomit. When it was all over he stood with bloody hands looking down at the mess of split skulls and bulging eyes without a trace of pity, rather with interest, as if this were just another demonstration of how little death meant.

One day he found a woodcock in the orchard, caught in a length of barbed wire. He spent the entire Wednesday afternoon searching cellars and pantries for a suitable bottle, and subsequently for a cork that fitted tight. He filled the bottle with sand and tied a piece of string around the neck at one end and around the bird’s legs at the other, after which he made for the bridge over the canal.

When he got there he leaned over the railing and saluted as he dropped the bird into the water.

For the next few days he kept saying, “Must be rotting nicely down there. Unless the rats got to it first.” The grim satisfaction in his voice sent shivers down my spine.

The older a photograph, the less familiar the people in it will appear, but for me, curiously enough, it works the other way round. Aunt Odette’s albums—she was already pasting in photographs before my father was born—transport me directly to the frozen clamour of family gatherings long ago. Quite who is being congratulated or mourned in the shade of the beech tree, the same place where my father would set up the folding table when I was a boy, makes little difference. It is the same happiness, the same sorrow, passing through an ever-changing array of figures. Whether anniversary or funeral, whether the garden is festooned with flags or with black draperies, the lawn breathes the calm, domesticated atmosphere that goes with the dead long since laid to rest.

Dried edelweiss. Snow-capped mountains. Aunt Odette in a long dress by the lake at Geneva, brimming with expectations as yet unsoured. In Cologne, by the Cathedral, and on the steps of the Sankt Gereon as yet undevastated by war, carrying her jacket over her arm, her eyes shaded by the brim of her little hat.

The towers of Prague (a thousand times lovelier than Vienna) viewed from the Charles Bridge. The banks of the Vltava. Unter den Linden. The Champs Elysées. Standing by a hotel entrance, Aunt Odette looks happy, as though expecting the offer of a gentleman’s arm. The motor cars she gets in and out of are benign, glossy beetles. Time seems to have been differently organised then, with minutes still being minutes, but in less of a hurry. The figures peopling those busy boulevards seem always to be strolling, heading nowhere in particular. Aunt Odette must have felt herself in an ocean of time, standing on the deck of a royal steamship without a single sandbank or iceberg in sight.

Here she has posted herself beside the front door, unaware of Flora and Alice in the doorway with their arms around each other, puffing up their cheeks and sticking out their tongues. The next snapshot shows her dismay at catching the girls poking fun at her. Then there is a third picture, in which the three of them pose side by side trying not to laugh, for being photographed was not to be taken lightly in those days.

In that final photo of us on the monastery steps, taken on the day our school diplomas were awarded, it is not as sunny as the day when my father posed there. Willem and I are both grinning from ear to ear.

Our collars itched. I felt I was being slowly throttled by my tie. The ceremony was accompanied by string music in the refectory. Our priestly principal was in such good humour that he resembled a well-fed blue tit fluttering this way and that on the podium, so beside himself with pride that he almost lost his balance.

One lad was taking mathematics at university, another would be reading economics. The priest fiddled blissfully with the lapels of his jacket, not without relief, I suspect, that the good name of the school had survived the year untarnished.

Mr Bouillie, in a rush of uncharacteristic geniality, proposed drinks at the Christian community centre on the square, for some man-to-man talk for a change. Willem and I did not join them. Directly after the official presentation we leapt on our bikes and made for the woods. We very nearly flung our diplomas into a ditch out of sheer bravado. To shed all excess baggage.

We soared in the June air. The caprices of spring were over. Now was the time for sprinklers tapping out their steady circular showers on rich people’s lawns. Whooping for joy, Willem swerved crazily on his bike across the road in an attempt to force me into the verge.

Of the pair of us, I was the more dutiful. I was the one who stopped at crossroads, I hardly ever ignored a red light and always stuck out the correct arm to signal a left or right turn.

“Did you pass?” his mother cried from the carport when she heard us come in.

“Passed!” we shouted in unison.

Loud kisses were planted on our cheeks. Katrien came down briefly, a little downcast because she still had her piano exam to do later in the day. Arpeggios draped themselves like feather boas around our shoulders.

Out on the terrace, under the awning, Willem’s father popped a bottle of champagne and raised his glass in a toast.

“Here’s to our diploma!” Willem yelled. “To freedom!”

“And to the future,” said his father.

History was certainly an interesting choice, everyone agreed, but the fact that Willem had chosen to study medicine made them visibly proud.

“I might even get rid of that ache in my shoulder,” his mother joked.

“Not if it’s cancer,” Willem laughed, “I expect it’s terminal.”

Heady with wine, she gave him a few playful slaps, then made for the kitchen to baste her joint of beef.

We went to Ghent together to hunt for student lodgings. We were in this together, but not entirely. Willem thought we’d distract each other too much if we shared a flat. I was put out at first and then agreed with him.

We found a place for me in an old town house by the River Schelde, close by the university. The ground floor, a neo-baroque showcase stuffed with sombre armchairs, was the domain of the elderly landlady, Miss Lachaert, who seemed to be constructed of floor-sweepings tied together with a little apron of felt.

She circled all around me, shuffling in her quilted slippers, then put her enormous glasses on her nose and scrutinised me at length, as if my entire life were written in neat paragraphs across my forehead for her to read.

“No visitors after ten p.m.,” she said finally. “And the first time you have female company will be the last.”

“Have no fear, Madam,” Willem said innocently. “He’s far too serious for girls.”

She handed over a key. Third floor, second door on the left, she told us.

The room was rather small, formerly occupied by domestic servants. The wallpaper was in the bold stripes of old-fashioned pyjamas, and you could tell by the stuffiness of the place that it would get very hot in summer. But I liked it. The window looked out on a bell tower from which a carillon pealed out every quarter hour.

There was a bathroom and a narrow kitchen which I was to share with the only other lodger, a student with greasy hair who sat like Samson between pillars of books, poring over his chemistry textbooks, and who barely raised his eyes in greeting. His room had the look of an underground lair in which he was hibernating on a permanent basis.