My Fellow Skin (14 page)

He wouldn’t give me any trouble, that was clear.

“So this is to be our kingdom,” Willem said.

“Is it to your liking?” a voice squeaked behind us. It was the landlady, who must have been following us the whole time in her inaudible slippers.

“It’s fine!” I stammered. “Excellent, in fact.”

She descended the stairs at a maddeningly slow pace and showed us out.

Willem found student lodgings in a modern residential hall situated at a busy crossroads. I couldn’t have stuck it there for more than half an hour. The interior was regulation white formica all over the place. His room had two windows, beneath which there was the constant rumble of traffic. But you could see the hospital from it. Sitting at his writing table he had a view of the pavilions, the car park teeming with visitors, the small lawns dotted about where nurses or students stretched their legs and took off their shoes during the lunch hour.

Soon afterwards he left for the seaside, where he was to spend a month helping out at a pastry shop owned by an aunt. I visited him there on one of his few days off. We wandered up and down the tideline on the beach, rolled down dunes and built childish sand castles.

Up in the loft over the bakery stood his narrow bunk. He moved over to make room for me and curled his bony body around mine. I pricked myself on one of his earrings—his aunt wouldn’t hear of him wearing “that junk” in the shop—and in the awkward entanglement that followed we tumbled off
the bed. We held our breath, but the noise was followed only by silence. Clearly his aunt was not a light sleeper.

At the end of July he had to join his father and mother on a trip to Italy. “A tour of the palazzos,” he said, wrinkling his nose. His father was the kind of tourist for whom world cities are life-size illustrations of a travel guide.

A postcard arrived from Verona, saying the weather was hot, that he wished I was there, that he was overdosing on pasta. We would meet again early in September, when the annual fair was held in Ruizele.

T
HE REST OF THE SUMMER
was taken up with lounging about, packing my things and helping my parents to move house, which they did slowly, bit by bit. The whole place smelled of cardboard. There were boxes stacked up like sarcophagi in every room.

My father was getting on for sixty and eligible for early retirement. I think he was relieved to be spared the further decay of the house he was born in, although our new home, on a housing estate and the mirror image of the houses across the road, must secretly have dismayed him as much as it dismayed me.

At the end of August Roswita got married. I climbed up to the rood-loft for my last performance as a chorister. Swathed in raw silk, lace and tulle, she advanced towards the altar down below, where a pale young man wearing a very wide tie awaited her amid fountains of lilies.

The reception was held in her father’s garden. In the marquee she came up to me and asked how I was.

“Fine,” I said. “Great, really.”

We both glanced round, taking in the bobbing hats of the ladies, their lavish frocks, the waiters hovering over the trays of dressed lobsters on the terrace.

“History,” she echoed, with a hint of awe in her voice, when I told her I’d be going to university. “Not my style. I was never one for learning. Can’t sit still long enough.” She smiled apologetically.

The bridegroom came towards us, inquired with whom he had the pleasure. Fortified by drink, he planted a fleeting kiss behind her ear and moved away.

“And how’s Roland?” she asked.

“Haven’t seen him for ages. He’s working, and his mother’s living at home again.”

She nodded, peered down at her glass. We still felt awkward in each other’s company. Observing her as she darted looks at the crowd, greeting people she knew with a little wave, I asked myself if this was a threshold for her: would she cross it and step out into the world or would it be a barrier that she’d welcome for its reassuring finality?

Dotted about the lawn were samples of every stage of her future. Children playing. Infants sated with cereal burping blissfully on their mothers’ shoulders. Teenagers drinking themselves silly. Portly gentlemen and elderly ladies laden with jewellery, their faces bright pink from the holiday in Spain.

In forty or fifty years’ time she’d be just like all those aunts and grandmothers gossiping in the shade of a pine tree, wearing hats designed to make up for lost youthful prettiness, and like them, barely recovered from a hip replacement, she’d hobble over to her grandchildren to pat them on the head.

I smiled at her sheepishly and said the champagne was very good.

She shrugged her shoulders. “You know my Pa. It’s always nothing but the best for him.”

Looking past her I spotted him heading towards us, waving his arm. At the foot of the terrace there was a rollicking crowd from the old football club, yelling “Long live love!” and to my shame, I couldn’t help wondering how many of them had felt her up and groaned in the shadows of the castle drive. I pushed the thought away.

“Your father’s looking for you,” I said, just before he came up behind her and slipped his arm through hers.

She turned to me and waved. “See you later maybe.”

“See you,” I said. “Best of luck.”

This was to be the last night I slept at home. I would be going to Ghent in the morning to settle into my student lodgings, and didn’t intend to return until my parents had moved to the new house.

I took some soup bowls, cutlery, a few cups, and stacked them in a box.

Upstairs I heard the occasional argument.

“But Pa, we can’t keep everything,” my mother cried, and I could hear my father grumble in protest.

The room designated for the items of furniture that were no longer wanted filled up with heartache. Cupboards, cabinets and tables huddled together in docile anticipation of their second-hand fate.

Evening fell. The wind changed direction, and the cooling breeze made the house shrink audibly. The beech came alive as a late-summer flock of starlings settled in its branches, transforming the tree into a great music box pealing out an uninterrupted chorus of twittering and chirping. In
the moonlight I could make out the birds among the foliage preening their feathers and squabbling over the prime perches. Now and then a contingent of them would detach itself soundlessly and alight in the gutter with a soft patter. Towards daybreak the concert would burst forth again, and with the first ray of sunshine the whole flock would whoosh up into the sky.

I drove to Ghent in my father’s car with the back seat piled high with things for my student lodgings. I put up shelves for my books, unpacked my reading lamp, placed a stack of new paper in the drawer of my work table, and surveyed my new home with contentment. The window was open. In the courtyard of an adjacent building I glimpsed a girl in a run-down conservatory modelling something in clay; she had a cigarette in her mouth and the radio turned up full blast. Pigeons swooped around the bell tower. Trams jangled past in the street.

In the middle of the night I heard my fellow lodger crawl out of his burrow and scurry about in the kitchen. He put the kettle on. Soon afterwards he slunk back to his room, no doubt clutching a mug of hot coffee in his paws.

The next morning I went for a stroll downtown and ended up buying several things I didn’t really need. A steel pepper mill with a long handle, for instance, and at the flea market I picked up a small shaving mirror and a few cups. There was an atmosphere of late-summer lethargy in the streets. In the September sunshine, already slanting and coppery, the streets seemed to be sleeping off the intoxication of summer.

I walked past the university buildings just to get a sniff of the place. There were students sitting on benches by the professors’ offices, riffling through their textbooks. The plane trees at the entrance were shedding their first leaves.

I returned to my lodgings and had nearly reached the top of the stairs when a door opened in the hall downstairs and I heard the landlady’s shuffling step.

“Your parents phoned,” she called up to me. “You’re to ring them right back.”

I left my purchases on the stairs and came down, intending to go out and call from a phone box, but Miss Lachaert was holding the door of her parlour open for me and gesturing towards her telephone, which sat on an absurd pedestal beside the fireplace.

I lifted the receiver and dialled my parents’ number. My father answered the phone.

“Bad news,” he said.

His words didn’t sink in. Miss Lachaert was hovering nearby, whisking her feather duster over picture frames and figurines to disguise her eavesdropping.

“I must go and see them,” I told my father.

My mother called from the background, “He mustn’t call on those people without changing into clean clothes. Pa, tell him he mustn’t.”

“I’ll come and see you afterwards.” I put the phone down before he could reply.

The bandstand on Ruizele’s main square was occupied by a brass band playing Glenn Miller, and an evening market
was in full swing. A policeman was diverting the traffic. The high street was thronged with people and hooting cars. I rolled down the window, leaned back and waited. I felt the old resignation mixed with impatience, which I had grown so familiar with thanks to all that sitting around, waiting for Willem in the station restaurant or the café opposite the bus stop, where I’d listen to the buzz of voices and let my thoughts drift along with the waiters calling their orders to the kitchen, taking care not to keep glancing at the clock slowly ticking the seconds away and making me feel more lost than ever.

Families in their Sunday best squeezed past the bumpers of waiting cars. Boys on bicycles rode on the pavement, ringing their bells shrilly and braking suddenly when the traffic policeman signalled for them to dismount.

I clenched my fists round the driving wheel, steeled myself. All I could think of was that I had to see Willem, his father, his mother, all of them, and suddenly I was flooded with panic.

The policeman blew his whistle and spread his arms. The cars in front of me started to move.

I drove around the main square and away, up the hill, into the wood. I parked the car on the side of the road, walked up the drive to the front door framed in withering honeysuckle, and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

I waited for a moment, rang the bell again and was already heading back to the car when someone called my name.

It was Katrien.

I turned round leadenly, at a loss for words to say to her, but she had vanished into the house, leaving the door open.

She was sitting in one of the leather armchairs by the big window, hugging her raised knees. The side table was littered with dirty cups around a tray of biscuits that had not been touched.

“They’re not here,” she said. “They left a while ago, with my aunt. I wanted to be alone.”

“If you’d rather I came back another time,” I mumbled.

Shaking her head, she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s all right.”

She rose, thrust her hands into the pockets of her trousers and crossed to the window overlooking the lawn, the old climbing frame, the roly-poly woman doing her mindless dance.

“When did it happen?” I asked.

“Yesterday, around five. The police came round at half-past six.”

She turned away from the window, started collecting the cups on a tray. “They’re taking him to the mortuary tonight. I don’t know how long they’ll be.”

She picked up the tray and went through to the kitchen. I heard her turn on a tap and rinse the cups.

I didn’t dare stand up. Thoughts raced through my head, jostling and shouting to make themselves heard and bring me to my senses. He must have had a fall, nothing serious, or flown into a rage and slammed the door to the bathroom so hard that the key snapped off and now he’s locked inside. He’s run away from home. He’s climbed to the top of a very tall tree and can’t get down, so they need firemen with ladders to rescue him, but he clings to the branches, shouting, “Just leave me alone, the lot of you.”

I fought back my tears and made for the kitchen, took a tea towel from the hook by the sink and started drying the cups.

“No need for that,” Katrien said absently.

She was wearing her mother’s bright-pink rubber gloves.

I watched her wash the saucers by turning them over and over in the dish water.

“Anton…”

“Yes?”

Her hands sank into the foam, groping for cutlery on the bottom.

“I’ve always known, you know.”

I felt my stomach tighten, heard myself ask, stupidly, “What do you mean?”

“I’m not daft.”

I took a cup from the draining board. “And them? What about them?” I asked, meaning her parents.

She paused, stared blankly at the pot of basil flowering on the window ledge above the tap.

“My mother, maybe. She always used to say, ‘I can’t make him out.’”

“Well, he did keep things to himself,” I said.

A crooked smile crossed her lips. “She was referring to you.”

Not knowing how to react to this, I held the cup up against the light as if it were a glass and asked, “When will it be?”

“Saturday most likely. They’ve got a lot of organising to do for the cremation.”

She peeled off the pink gloves and took the cup from my hands.

“That’ll do fine,” she said, putting it away in the cupboard over the sink.

I leaned back against the kitchen table and covered my eyes with my hands.

She said my name. Her voice caught in her throat.

I heard her leave the kitchen.

When I had calmed down I found her back in the living room on the couch by the window.

“Sorry,” I said.

She shook her head. Lit a cigarette. “Why don’t you go upstairs.”

I looked at her questioningly.

“Take something for yourself. Anything, doesn’t matter what.” She nodded towards the staircase.

The bedclothes were still rumpled, the pillow still faintly dented by his head. There was a kitschy Virgin Mary, a souvenir from Lourdes, with several of his bangles gleaming at the base. His wristwatch lay there ticking softly; he must have forgotten to wear it, as he so often did.

The carpet was strewn with two pairs of discarded socks, a couple of pairs of underpants and a vest, marking a trail from the bed to the laundry basket behind the door. On the desk by the window lay an open anatomy textbook. I clapped it shut.

Propped against the books on the shelves were snapshots of the summer camp where he’d flirted with a boy called Koen and where, on that last night by the farewell bonfire, he’d come on so strongly to some girl that she sent him perfumed letters every fortnight for months afterwards. The picture of our whole group at the foot of a dune shows me sulking. He roars with laughter, throws his arm around my shoulders and shakes me free of my rigidity.

I drew up his chair and sat down, seized with longing to take off my clothes and crawl into his bed, pull the blankets up tight, snuggle down into the sheets wrinkled by him, bury
my face in his pillow and inhale the last vestiges of his smell, and then to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I took the snapshot from the shelf and slipped it into my back pocket.

“Found anything?” Katrien asked when I came downstairs.

“I’d better be going,” I said.

She went ahead of me to open the front door, rose up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek.

When I turned into the yard I saw Roland’s car parked under the beech tree. I went inside, took my shoes off in the passage and paused by the dining room door. I could hear my cousin boasting about some deal he’d struck and my father’s amused laughter.

“How did it go?” my mother asked when I came in. The three of them were having supper.

“How did it go… well, they’re sad, understandably.”

She poured me a cup of coffee. “I hope you passed on our condolences.”

“They weren’t there. Just the daughter.”