My Fellow Skin (15 page)

She pushed the bread basket in my direction. “Go on, take.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“He was always a bit of a weirdo,” Roland said. “Attention-seeker, he was. All of them, really. I mean, that house of theirs, who’d want to live in a place like that?”

“You think everything’s weird,” I said.

“Now you two…” my father said soothingly.

“It’s time you decided which clothes you want to take,” my mother said. “You can leave the rest. I’ll pack them for you.”

“I’ll do it later.”

I went upstairs.

Roland made himself useful shifting furniture. There were still a couple of wardrobes and cabinets upstairs waiting to be moved to the back of the house.

“Watch out for that skirting board,” I heard my mother cry. “We don’t want to damage the wall. Anton, why don’t you give us a hand.”

I didn’t respond.

“It’s all right,” my father said, “leave him be.”

I set about taking down my posters. They were faded and reminded me too much of school. Patches of wallpaper came away with them, laying bare the pattern of my boyhood bedroom, the pale-blue clouds, lemon-yellow canaries, those grinning aeroplanes with propellers on their noses.

After stuffing the posters in the wastepaper basket, I turned to the wardrobe, but couldn’t bring myself to sort through my shirts and sweaters because of all those invisible stains they bore which would be impossible to remove, so I shut the door again.

The others were sitting outside on the bench by the wall. Bottles were uncapped.

“Do you want a drink?” my mother called.

“No, Ma. Just leave me alone.”

The starlings returned, flocking thickly around the tree and settling on the branches with a loud rustling like heavy rainfall.

“I can’t get enough of watching those birds,” I heard my father say.

I stood up, undressed, searched out my own warmth in the sheets, turned on my side and listened to the birds until I fell asleep.

I
WAS A LITTLE BOY
again sitting in my high chair at the head of the table, out in the garden under the beech tree. It was a rainy day, the sky was overcast. Afternoon or early evening, could be either. But the overweening greyness, which might turn into drizzle any minute, did not match the happy atmosphere reigning all around me.

I saw myself banging my empty milk beaker on the tray of my high chair, to the rhythm of Alice and Aunt Odette clapping their hands. I remember my surprise at the sensation of the old comfort and warmth coming over me again, like a warm coat, a thick blanket, and the pleasure of seeing the Aunts’ white hair coiffed with tortoiseshell combs over their ears and the intriguing little brooches of salamanders set with rubies climbing up the glossy black fabric of their blouses.

My father was conversing amicably with Michel, who’d hung his walking stick over the back of his chair. At my feet I could feel the dog wagging its tail under the table. It was only after I had glanced round all the faces there, gladly recognising each one above the table laden with dirty dishes and glasses with greasy fingerprints, that I noticed Willem sitting at the far end. He was wearing a dark suit and clinked his glass loudly against Flora’s. They were laughing.

Then his eye caught mine. He nodded, nodded again and raised his glass to me. I could tell he was saying something, even as he laughed. His lips moved as if to ask, “Get it?”

He shook his head when Flora made to refill his glass.

“Willem!” I cried, but Aunt Odette hushed me with her hand on my arm.

“Just carry on,” she murmured. “Go on, eat.”

I drew back my arm, stood up in my chair, called his name a second time. Again I saw his lips move, and I shouted for him to speak up. He glared back at me.

“Hurry up,” said Aunt Odette. “The food’s getting cold.”

She began to feed me soup by the spoonful, which seemed to take for ever, no matter how quickly I swallowed.

All around me people were rising from the table and putting away their folding chairs.

Raindrops fell on my bare arms. Someone grabbed me. I struggled to resist and felt as though I were falling.

I woke up on the edge of my bed. Outside, the horizon flashed with lightning. I got up, shut the window and went downstairs.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, in the light of a flickering lamp.

“Can’t you sleep either?” she asked. “I’m getting to be just like my mother. She had trouble sleeping as she got older.”

I passed behind her towards the cupboard, in search of a mug.

“Like some warm milk?”

“Yes, not too much, though.”

There were some chocolate biscuits left in the tin, which I set down on the table.

“It’s that friend of yours, isn’t it?”

I nodded, chewed the inside of my cheek, dunked one of the biscuits into my milk.

“Ma?”

“Yes, lad?” She sniffed. In the lamplight her crows’ feet seemed more deeply etched than ever.

“It’s nothing really.”

She sipped her milk. “Your Pa’s snoring again. As soon as his head touches the pillow he’s off.”

I stared at her nose, which had a little dent halfway down it, just like mine, and at her lips, which she would press together and relax by turns when she was mulling things over, as if her thoughts were tweaking her facial muscles. My mother. The joints in her fingers were giving her trouble. Surgery hadn’t helped. The growths kept coming back. I gazed at her blue-grey eyes, the remains of mascara on her lashes and thought: You don’t know me. You’re my mother, but you don’t know me. You pressed me out of your body. I was a lump inside you, hanging on to your arteries, ruining your figure for the rest of your life, and you don’t know me. You cleaned up my shit, powdered my bum. Ironed my shirts. Read the stains in my sheets like letters. Swaddled me, brushed my hair, cuddled me, mopped me up. And you don’t know me.

“I’ll be glad when we’re out of this place for good,” she said.

The thunderclouds had drifted away. I straightened the bedclothes, but slept fitfully. Towards morning I started awake
from a dream in which I was in a café in the market place in Ruizele, propping up the bar with a couple of classmates and Mr Bouillie. The atmosphere was joky, until the door opened and we saw Willem standing there in the harsh light, stark naked.

“What are you doing here?” I burst out in amazement.

He shot me one of his haughty looks, flicked little clouds of ash off his shoulders and said, “I’m back. Changed my mind.”

Roland was having breakfast with my mother when I came downstairs.

“There’s a letter for you,” she said.

She had laid it beside my plate. I recognised the school crest. A blossoming branch entwined with the words
Saint Joseph.

I ripped open the envelope and skimmed the letter from the corner of my eye: “tragic accident… snatched before his time… express our deepest sympathy for his parents… you are invited to attend the funeral service in class formation, as a fitting tribute to your fellow former pupil.” It also suggested we bring one hundred francs to go towards a wreath.

I tore the letter into four pieces.

My mother was shocked. “You will be going, won’t you?”

“I’ll go on my own. I’ll ask Pa for the car. He won’t be needing it on Saturday, what with moving house.”

“It’s in the paper,” Roland said. “It happened at the seaside. He’d been with relatives, I think.”

“His aunt,” I said.

“You should have seen that photograph, with the lorry, and that bike of his. Not a pretty picture.”

“I want to go and see him… pay my respects,” I said. “They brought him to the mortuary yesterday.”

“Why don’t you wait until your father gets back,” my mother said. “He can drive you there.”

“I don’t want to wait until tonight. I’d rather go before it gets busy. It’ll be quiet there now.”

“You bet it will,” Roland said, grinning.

I glared at him.

He cleared his throat, drank down his cup of coffee, and said in an apologetic tone, “You know what? I’ll take you there if you like.”

The antechamber of death. A low pavilion with a glass entrance flanked by rose beds and a sign saying
MORTUARY
planted among flowering lavender bushes.

A hall with a floor of gleaming granite and a counter behind which sits a young woman wearing demure make-up. At the request of each mourner she makes a brief call to some remote place in the depths of the building, where the dead are assembled on hard, straight-backed chairs, passing the time with back issues of magazines and desultory exchanges about the weather.

“I’ve come for De Vries,” I said. “Willem de Vries.”

Roland’s shoes squealed on the floor behind me.

The young woman flicked the pages of a register, lifted the receiver and dialled an extension. She said we were to wait over there, in the waiting room across the corridor.

I heard her murmuring into the phone and noted a certain urgency in her tone, as if she were talking to him in person,
telling him to comb his hair, to be sensible and mind his manners, and no, he was to put that comic away, he could return to it later.

The walls of the waiting room were decorated with photographs of hazy parkland landscapes. A little stack of solemn brochures lay on the table.

Thoughts at the graveside.

Callest Thou, Oh Lord?

On the cover a drawing of a hand and a heart crowned with thorns against a background of flames: See, I make everything whole again. Roland stood with his back to me, staring out of the window at the car park.

People trooped down the corridor. Sniffling, coats being buttoned up. I heard the young woman intoning her professional condolences.

“It’s them,” Roland said. “I can see that sister of his. What’s her name? Katrien…”

He swung round and moved away from the window.

The young woman came to fetch us. She accompanied us down the hall, until it branched off in a long corridor. “Sixth door on the right,” she said, turning on her heel.

A soft drone of mournful music poured from speakers fitted in the ceiling. The doors were painted a dingy blue, with pearl-grey plastic handles that made me think of the reserved neutrality of doctors’ surgeries; as if the dead might be holding office there for their relatives, with their hands loosely folded on the desk in front of them, smiling amicably and saying, “I was just watering my radishes. It started up here, in my chest. Can I offer you something to drink?”

Sixth door on the right. My courage sank to my shoes. My heart pounded in my throat.

Roland lagged behind. His eyes glinted anxiously in the dimly lit corridor. “If it’s all the same to you I’d rather wait outside.”

Looking the other way, he said, “Not my thing, to be honest. Freaks me out.” He strode ahead to the end of the corridor, where a plant languished in a pot. “Sorry about that.”

Him, scared. The killer of kittens. Squasher of butterflies.

I pushed open the door. From the ceiling emanated the same mournful music, seemingly to blot out the possibility that the dead might still be breathing, exhaling the last lingering air, like bubbles rising from a sinking bottle.

He lay in his coffin with purple cloths draped across his stomach and hands bandaged like stumps. They had dressed him in a cream-coloured shirt, which he wouldn’t have been seen dead in when he was alive, not even for an exam—indeed, he used to go out of his way to buy the most garish Hawaii-print shirts he could find and equally ghastly ties, just to rile the teachers. There was something odd about the way the pale fabric was stretched taught across his chest, as if there were planks propping it up underneath.

His mouth was held shut with a bandage round his chin. His fair hair was for the most part tucked away, and in the glow of the spotlight illuminating his face, his cheeks showed signs of bruises and scratches under the generous coating of powder.

His skin was puffy, his lips swollen like the mouth of a river god in a Roman wall fountain. His forehead was creased, his eyebrows faintly wrinkled, as though he were sunk in thought about the extraordinary situation in which he found himself.

Next to a vase of arum lilies on a pedestal stood a glass of holy water and a palm frond. For a moment I pictured him blinking crossly at having water sprinkled on his face, sitting up, tearing off the bandage and raging, arms akimbo, “Hey you, what’s going on?”—which was what he always did when I was offended and turned away to sulk and wallow in self-pity.

There was a timid knock on the door. From the corridor came the sound of Roland coughing and rattling his car keys.

I wiped my tears, leaned over and put my lips to Willem’s forehead. The cold was unbearable.

I stepped out of the room, pulled the door behind me and left him to think things over.

T
HIS BODY
, it could be the body of a stranger. It was only because it mimicked my every move so slavishly in shop windows and mirrors and revealed more and more of my father’s face each time I shaved that I was moved to think: don’t I know you? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before.

This face staring back at me has the same closed, self-absorbed look as the house used to have on summer evenings when all the shutters were closed and, up at the top, under the roof, were the shadows of children having pillow fights and tripping across the floorboards long past bedtime.

Willem would be nearly forty now. Balding like his Pa, maybe, or sleek like his mother, settling contentedly into a looser-fitting body, spreading and warm like a well-worn sofa.

In death he is nineteen. Just left school. Passed his driving test. Proud of his first car. As if it would be any use to him now, in that place without echo or response.

My mother must have cut the photograph out of the paper, and I never got round to throwing it away. It turns up occasionally between the pages of books, sometimes fluttering down on to my lap. The reporter did not lack an eye for drama, for the picture shows the truck driver being led away by the police. There are several vans and an ambulance. A
passer-by, hands clapped to her cheeks, surveys the white sheet on the kerb with a trouser leg plus trainer poking out from underneath, and the twisted wreck of his bike which is partially hidden by the wheels of the truck.

It can’t have been more than half an hour after it happened. The body has yet to be released, the officers have yet to make their inquiries as to the cause of the accident. Someone has hastily covered him with the white of a shroud or christening robe.

For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to imagine what he must have looked like lying under that sheet, even though I had seen him in his coffin afterwards. I clung to the idea that he had let himself fall backwards, the way he flopped on to the lawn at his parents’ house on Fridays after school, with that enviable ability he had to exchange one world for another without a thought. It was like a miraculous postponement, like those few seconds of fierce concentration on the diving board during swimming class, before leaping into the air and falling into the chalice of water.

I still dream of him some nights. The images are becoming blurred, but the body is unmistakably his. His arms draw me close. His chest heaves calmly against my back. I feel the old rush of pleasure as his arms tighten their grip, gently but firmly, and then I wake up, only to find myself in the same bleak emptiness as on that Saturday when Roland drove into the yard in the early morning.

He had rented a van for transporting the heaviest items of furniture. I had lain awake most of the night, and watched the day dawn in its accustomed, lethargic way, peeling the darkness off the walls so that the place became awash with the vibrant red of an early autumn morning, quiet and compelling.

I got out of bed and went over to the window. I saw my cousin clamber down from the front of the van. He was wearing brown overalls with a zip up the front, and he whistled as he went round to unlock the back. My mother was already up; I’d heard her dry little cough as she passed my door on her way downstairs. Soon afterwards the smell of coffee floated from the kitchen through the rooms, most of which were already bare.

They noticed my sadness. Roland rambled on about which items would have to be loaded first and whether there were sufficient blankets and ropes to hand, while I sat and stared vacantly at the table in front of me, astounded that things could go on as if nothing had happened, that the world didn’t stop and hold its breath, not even for a second. I could barely swallow a mouthful.

There was a silence when I left to go back upstairs, and I knew my father would be laying his hand on my mother’s, that he would look at her and no doubt heave a deep sigh once I turned my back.

I sat on the edge of my bed. I could hear my mother going from room to room opening boxes, rummaging in them and shutting them again.

She pushed the door open and said, “I’ll press a suit for you to wear, shall I?”

I could tell she was upset, and nodded.

“I’ll do your grey one. It suits you so well. And you’d do better to wear your black shoes—I’ve given them a polish. They’ll look better than the brown pair.”

On my way to the bathroom, I passed Roland and my father in the passage, heaving a dresser between them. Roland was in front, and my father, red-faced, begged him to slow down by the step.

She’d put out an extra towel, and there was a bottle of eau de Cologne on the shelf beneath the mirror.

I turned on the taps and listened intently to the water rushing in the pipes, gurgling past the occasional bubble of trapped air. Then I poured soap into the tub and stirred the water to make foam.

My body hesitated as I stepped gingerly into the bath, avoiding contact with the tiles on the wall, and gave a little shudder as the warmth chased goose pimples up my arms.

I stretched out. Let myself slide under water, heard my skin rub against the sides.

“The first load’s ready to go,” Roland called out from downstairs. The doors of the van slammed, the engine revved, then the sound died away over the dyke.

They must have closed the coffin by now, I thought. Probably yesterday evening, last night maybe, who knows, perhaps it was happening at this very moment, with everyone there, his father, his mother, Katrien, all of them watching the shadow sliding across his forehead as the lid was lowered, without him raising his bandaged hands to fend it off.

I tried to lie completely still, like him, with the water covering me like a shield. I listened to the beating of my heart, until suddenly my body lunged upright with a great splash and my lungs filled themselves to bursting with an abandon that left me distraught.

I stood up and slipped my bathrobe on. Crossed over to the washbasin. Wet my cheeks. Rubbed shaving soap on them. Took the razor in my hands.

In the mirror I saw a haggard face with a snow-white beard. A body that seemed versed in being old and bent, shuffling down a corridor in a home somewhere in soggy slippers,
dressing gown untied, complaining bitterly to the nurses for being late with breakfast. In his eyes a look of resignation which, over the years, had dulled every glint of former happiness and made it futile.

Willem loomed in my mind’s eye. I became very angry. You’ve robbed me, I thought. You’ve stuffed my days in your inside pocket as if they were old letters, and next you’ll hurl yourself on the fire like an old handbag.

I was almost done when there was a knock at the door and my father called my name.

“Come on in,” I said, “I’m nearly ready anyway.”

He had slung his vest over his shoulder, and was sweating profusely.

“That cousin of yours seems to think I’m a lad of twenty,” he chuckled, and went on, “Take your time. I can wait.”

I sat down on the lavatory seat, stared at nothing, rocked to and fro. I felt my testicles shrink, my stomach contract.

In spite of everything I felt sort of hungry. I’d have a slice of bread, I thought. Have a crap before leaving. Have another wash tonight. Cut my nails for the umpteenth time. Wipe my armpits with a towel. Brush my teeth. Routinely reflect that my ears were far too big. Time and again. Twice daily the small irritations of the oldest marriage in my personal history.

“Anton?”

My father was towelling himself dry.

I raised my eyes.

Our eyes met in the mirror.

“It’ll pass, you know,” he said.

My eyes prickled.

He bundled his towel on the rack self-consciously. Came towards me, took my chin in his hands.

After a pause he said, “Nothing you can do about it.”

“I know.”

He tried to strike a lighter note. “The least you can do for that poor boy is get a decent shave.”

His thumb slid across my jaw, my lower lip.

“There’s still some stubble.”

He wet his hands, took the tube of shaving cream from the shelf and spread a fresh layer on my face.

“Chin up.”

He steered my face to the right with his fingertips, then laid the razor against my cheek.

“You should just go with the flow. Follow the natural line, then you won’t cut yourself so easily.”

He touched the skin beneath my ear lobe and showed me his fingertip smeared with blood. He fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette paper to staunch the flow.

“I’ll put some aftershave on it later,” I said.

He knocked the foam off the razor, held it under the tap, resumed shaving. I could see his eyes narrowly following his fingers.

One day I would tell him things that would pain him as superficially as cuts from a razor blade, although the wounds would sting for longer. He would be left with questions that would itch like old mosquito bites every time he saw me arriving alone in my car, no kids to be scooped up from the back seat and hung around his shoulders like a garland of flowers. From that day on, too, he would suffer from niggling insecurities in his chest about having said
too little to me or too much, while his silences spoke more volumes than entire libraries, enough for me to read for the rest of my life.

I watched him put the razor away and hold his hands under the tap. His stomach sagged over his trouser belt. The hair on his chest seemed to be thinning. He was a smooth, marbled pebble, all the sharpness worn down, gleaming in the sunlight. A safe place for him would be in the palm of my hand. I’d take good care of him.

He shook the drops off his fingers.

“At least you look respectable now,” he said. “You’d better rinse that foam off your ears.”

I stepped past him to the washbasin. Leaned over. He laid his hand on my back.

When I looked up he had gone.

The grey suit lay at the foot of my bed. It evoked a sense of expectation, the buzz of weddings or garden parties, which I found disturbing as I slipped my arms into the sleeves of the jacket with the shoulder pads that made me look twice as broad.

I put my shoes on. Double the lace to make a loop, tie the other end around it and pull it through to make a bow-knot. I could see myself in the changing room at school with Willem at my side, making fun of my embarrassment, showing me how.

I passed my mother in the corridor.

“I’ve taken your Pa’s blue tie.”

She turned up my shirt collar and laid the tie around my neck.

I felt myself turning into my father. As slim as he was on that day in October almost thirty years ago, when he strolled arm in arm with my mother in the gardens of the castle and stared at her veil melding with the mist rising from the grass by the lake. She was never younger than in that photograph.

I shivered, worried sick that my knees would buckle, later on, when the coffin slid away between the curtains into the furnace.

“Ma, why don’t you come with me?” I asked, and regretted it instantly.

I saw her chewing her lower lip as she straightened my collar and tucked the end of the tie into my waistcoat.

“I don’t think we’d want to go there, Anton. Anyway, we don’t really know them very well, do we?”

I noted her shame. His father was an architect. Whenever my father found himself in the company of “posh folk”, he would fold himself up like a newspaper left lying on a sofa.

“Forget it,” I said.

She stood behind me, buffing the back of my jacket with a clothes brush.

“Spic and span.”

I went downstairs.

“Here you are,” my father said, handing me the car keys.

I stepped outside. Got behind the wheel. Switched on the ignition, reversed under the beech tree and rolled out of the yard.

By the gate stood my mother, signalling me to stop.

I wound the window down.

She leaned over and tucked a condolence card in my breast pocket.

“Don’t forget to give this.”

She patted the hair on my forehead.

“When will you be back? I’ll keep some supper for you.”

“That’s fine, Ma.”

“It’ll be the other place.” She was referring to the new house. “Mind you don’t forget to go there, you don’t want to be coming here by mistake. I know what you’re like.”

“All right.”

I wound up the window. Waved. Drove out through the gate and up the road on the dyke. Sped away.

In the rear-view mirror I saw them both standing in the verge. My father had his arm around her waist.

He raised his hand. Shouted something.

I saw the pair of them receding gradually in the oblong mirror, the crown of the beech tree dwarfing the stables, and then, in a final glance before turning on to the motorway, it was all gone.