My Fellow Skin (3 page)

H
AVING A BATH
with my father was infinitely preferable to having one with my mother. With her everything had to be done quickly, no messing about. First she stood me in the empty tub to soap me up from head to toe, then she soaped herself. She didn’t seem to care that the cold was chiselling me out of the warm air and the soap was pricking viciously my eyes.

When I huddled against her legs for protection my fingers strayed across the stretch marks on her lower abdomen, feeling the vertical grooves on either side of her navel. I had seen her stand in front of the mirror, pinching the slack skin between her fingers with a little sigh, as if I had caused her body to split down the middle when she gave birth.

How different her sex was, compared to mine and my father’s, which were like spouts with a knobby lid at the end. Hers seemed to be hiding in its own folds. Past the big bush of hair, it lay curled up like a frightened hedgehog in the shrubbery. When she leaned back to soap her buttocks the strange ridge pouted into view, sliding out from its hiding place between her thighs and quickly back again.

She turned on the tap even more brusquely than other mornings. The warm water restored me to the world of warmth and comfort and my eyes stopped prickling.

A faint smile crossed her face when I shrieked with pleasure, but she had no patience for my delight as I clawed the gush of water and squeezed the sponge to make it pour.

She always had dark rings under her eyes. Her chronic fatigue gave her face the look of the finest, most fragile porcelain, but in fact she was tough. She shelled peas, made the beds. Day after day she would lay the table with a loud clatter so the whole house could hear. With each portion of overcooked vegetables she dished out she was proclaiming her domestic pride—to us of course, but especially to the Aunts. Reminding them that it was she who prepared the bean soup, she who kept their blood pressure down by baking salt-free bread especially for them; indeed that it was she who provided the four meals a day upon which their idle lives depended.

“She has no idea,” the Aunts grumbled behind their napkins. “Too hoity-toity she is. Never got her hands dirty either. Never dealt with a farrowing sow.”

My mother towelled me dry, dragged the collar of my shirt over my too-large head, pulled my arms through the sleeves, clicked my braces on to my trousers and tried to stuff my feet into my slippers.

“Don’t curl your toes like that,” she sighed crossly, “or it’ll take all day.”

She let me step into my slippers myself and then brushed my hair into a quiff, even though she knew I didn’t like it.

“You can stay upstairs for a bit, with Aunt Odette.” She put me down on the floor. “Downstairs you’d just get in the way.”

I had never seen Aunt Odette looking so stately, all in black. Cascades of pleats enveloped her skinny frame and she smelled even older than she was. Even dustier. Even drier.

“She’s the sort that snuffs out like a candle,” my father used to say. “The sort you come upon all stiff in a chair, like a dead crow on a branch.”

She had spread an old bedcover on the floor and tipped the building blocks on top.

“Why don’t you build me a fine tower,” she said sweetly, but her smile betrayed impatience. I knew she wanted to have done with me.

She took up one of her old photo albums and began to turn the stiff cardboard pages, and the tissue paper separating them made a soft, pattering sound like raindrops, making me glad to be with her in spite of her aloofness. Aunt Odette rarely addressed me directly, unless I needed chiding, and even then she preferred summoning my father as if he were her servant, but she made strange secret sounds, which intrigued me like the words of a foreign language.

I set about creating the tallest tower I had ever built, merely for the reward of her feigned amazement. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her rise quickly to rummage in the dark wooden cabinet. Thinking she was unobserved, she carefully unwrapped a ruby-red boiled sweet and popped it into her mouth with a practised air, as though it were an extra-large indigestion tablet.

I felt my cheeks burn with indignation. Once she was seated again I heard the click of the sugary gem against her molars. Her lips parted from time to time to emit soft sucking sounds. Soon I was drooling so profusely that my saliva tasted almost as sweet as the real thing.

Aunt Odette breathed serene contentment. Now and then odd-sounding words passed her lips. She was so engrossed in her photographs that she seemed to be in a blissful dream, in
the middle of which she sighed and said, with a rare tremor of ecstasy in her voice, “Yugoslavia,” or “Prague. Such a lovely city.
Praha
, they call it.”

Fired by her emotion, I shouted “
Praha
” in response, accidentally knocking down my tower, at which she gave me a look of affectionate surprise and ruffled my hair with her bony fingers.

“Yes,” she laughed. “
Praha. Praha
is a thousand times lovelier than Vienna.”

I waited for her to doze off. She had already slipped off her shoes and put her legs up on the sofa with a great swish of petticoats, and propped a cushion in the small of her back.

Downstairs was busy. I could make out the tinkle of spoons against teacups and the occasional dull pop of a cork bursting from a bottle-neck.

After a while the noise died away. Aunt Odette had already shut her album. Now her chin sank on to her breast. I got up.

The door gave willingly when, standing on tiptoe, I twisted the handle. There was no teasing little whinge as it swung open.

Of all the doors in the house there were some that colluded with me when I ventured on forbidden forays, and there were others that gave a tell-tale creak as they fell to behind me. There were drawers that responded eagerly when pulled open, as though jumping at the chance, and other obstinate ones that resisted or jammed halfway or refused to budge once they were sticking all the way out like gaping jaws, no matter how hard I tugged. Hidden inside them were entire worlds, compact universes, held together by a logic or gravity that
eluded me. Bits of string tangled up with locks of snipped-off hair. Lame-fingered gloves clawing at frayed collars, perhaps in search of their other half. Loose cuff links. A scattering of stamps, some unused and others heavily postmarked, but all of them yellowed.

How many more treasures were there, hidden away in all the drawers I couldn’t reach? What could be housed on the summits of the storage cupboards? Some of them went all the way up to the ceiling. Even when my father carried me aloft, their contents remained unseen. There were bound to be far more exciting panoramas to observe than the same old rows of plates and glassware that came within my field of vision.

I was on the landing, and it was oddly quiet in the house. Out in the yard voices tailed away. Outside the window at the end of the corridor, the crown of the nut tree burst into flames in the dying sun. In the kitchen someone filled a bucket of water and shut the back door.

From my parents’ room came the sound of my father talking in a low voice to my mother. He had left his shoes by the door. I picked them up, carried them to the middle of the corridor, sank down on the wooden floor and kicked off my slippers.

I placed the shoes side by side. A smidgen of my father’s warmth still lingered inside, a hint of his sweat, when I stepped shakily into his shoes. An odd sort of tremor ran up my calves, as though the strength of his legs were seeping up from the soles into my own muscles. I had a sense of stepping lightly, of being four times as tall, although in reality I advanced with difficulty, dragging my feet. It was time for everything to wake up again.

The objects in the house showed themselves to their best advantage only to people who were bigger than me. Anyone
as small as me, puny even in my father’s shoes, had to make do with a view seen from a low, distorting angle. The ghastly loops of dusty cobwebs between cupboard and wall or under the sink, in which dead flies with devoutly folded legs quivered in the draught. Or the toad that showed up on the back doorstep every night, crawling into the strip of bright light under the door and clearing its throat repeatedly, as if it had a weighty message to deliver. There were the spiders, whose rightful home was out in the pine trees by the chicken run. In the annexe at the back of the house, among rusty milk churns and watering cans, they had spun webs like pointed caps blown off magicians’ heads, from which they emerged in a flash whenever a prey announced itself.

I liked the place best of all in the hours before supper, when everything went quiet and the house draped its walls comfortably about my shoulders. Whenever I ventured into one of the rooms, or when I was in my father’s shoes zigzagging down the corridor, past all the doors behind which I caught the muffled sounds of the small habits in which everyone indulged, it was as though the space that enfolded the house seemed to divide like a cell and keep on doubling, again and again, until there was no end to it and time vanished into an infinity of folds.

The spare rooms at the back of the house, which were normally empty and bare except for the elaborate crocheted counterpanes on the beds that reminded me of the Aunts when they dressed up for special occasions, were now full of suitcases. The wardrobe doors were open, and inside I saw coats and suits which carried the scent of other houses in their seams. There were shoes scattered around the legs of the bedside tables, on top of which lay white handkerchiefs
or piles of folded newspapers crowned by spectacles in awesome frames.

The brass locks of the suitcases shone seductively. How I wished I could reach them on those high forbidding beds, if only to hear the cold mechanical click as they sprung open.

In the last room, at the very end of the passage, I came upon a huge black coat lying on a sofa. It hung over the bolstered arm, with part of the front turned back, as though a sturdy lady’s calf might emerge from it any moment. The collar of dark fur glistened so invitingly that it was impossible to resist. I sank down on my haunches and leaned forward in my father’s shoes at a perilous angle to bury my cheeks, nose and forehead in the soft tickle of myriad hairs. The satin lining smelt sweet in a dry sort of way, and felt like cool water under the flat of my hand.

I was on the point of letting myself fall face down on the coat so as to lose myself altogether in the blissful, caressing sensation when I heard footsteps. Their jaunty pace did not bode well.

I froze, pulled the flap of the coat over my head and wondered what would happen next. The footsteps halted.

The satin was absorbing my body heat fast, and the steam from my breath couldn’t escape. When I stuck my head out for a breath of air, I found myself looking straight into my cousin Roland’s mischievous face.

“Down in the hole. Down in the hole,” he intoned, tapping each of my shoulders several times with his forefinger. “Down in the hole.”

I was desperate to get away. The mere thought of the torture he had inflicted on me a few hours earlier was enough to make my eyes sting with tears.

He skipped across the room and stood in the doorway, all bright and shiny, as neat as he had been at breakfast, except for his trousers, which were streaked with chalk and bits of cobweb. He must have been snooping around the whole house, all the remotest outposts of my very own castle.

The chalk on his thighs could only have come from the walls in the cellar, the one place I had never dared to explore all by myself, where it always smelled of damp and mould and where the weak light bulb flickered as scarily as a candle that might blow out any moment. In winter the ground water oozed up between the tiles, leaving little bumps of salt behind when it dried, as white as the powdery snow that drifted into the attic through the chinks between the roof tiles. The attic and the cellar were the only parts of the house that were not sealed off from the outside world, a condition I found both appealing and daunting.

“Have a look. Come on,” Roland whispered. He was leaning with one shoulder against the door frame, picking at a bit of dead skin around the thumbnail of one hand until he drew blood.

For a second I thought I was supposed to admire him for bleeding, that he took pleasure in administering pain to himself as brutally as to me or his mother. But he raised his thumb to his mouth and licked the wound.

“Come on!” he urged, grabbing me roughly by the arm when I hesitated.

He set off at a brisk pace. I could barely keep up with him. My father’s shoes flew off my feet, tumbled over the floor
and bounced against the skirting board. I felt like screaming, shouting that he shouldn’t go so fast, but I restrained myself. I didn’t want to wake Aunt Odette or alarm my father.

We stumbled down the stairs, through the passage, round the corner, past the grandfather clock, to the annexe. I had been there often enough, but now I was wandering in a foreign place. It didn’t feel right that I was being led, like a visitor, a stranger, but Roland wouldn’t let go of my hand.

He slowed down and stopped in front of a closed door. I knew it well, even though the glass panel was a shield of darkness rather than glowing with the familiar light of the window beyond.

Roland twisted the handle and swung the door wide open.

An unfamiliar chill struck my face. Air that felt unexpectedly fresh, without the merest hint of snuff or pipe tobacco, nor of booze or men fast asleep.

Roland pushed me into the room. It was pitch dark. I only knew where I was when the cold floor underfoot made way for the thick pile of a carpet. Behind me I could hear Roland fumbling along the walls. Something clicked under his fingers and the light went on.

Michel was lying on the bed, motionless in his best suit, eyebrows raised. Even though his eyes were shut I had the feeling he was surprised to see me there, or that he was pretending to be annoyed because I had the cheek to disturb him.

The line of his lips curved up at one corner of his mouth and down at the other, half-smile and half-scowl, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to make me hoot with laughter or cry out in fear. His hands were yellow, his nails blue.