My Fellow Skin (7 page)

O
N A CORNER
of the kitchen table stood a glass of milk and a plate with half a slice of bread on it, left there by my mother. She was already waiting outside, with the others. I knew to expect a cuff on the ear, which would amount to little more than a flutter of the hands, after which she would whip out her comb to restore the side parting to my hair.

The nearer we came to the square the more churchgoers joined our party, making the patter of heels and soles on the cobbles ever louder. Wrinkled faces above snow-white collars, ankles in shiny socks peeping out from trousers that had shrunk, and on the square at the foot of the church tower everything fused into a cloud of mothballs and Woods of Windsor.

In the portal my father held the swing door open for us. My mother extended fingers moist with holy water to hold my hand and Roland’s, and motioned for us to make the sign of the cross.

“We can go upstairs,” I told Roland, digging him in the ribs.

He glanced up at my father, who nodded. “Go along then. You’ll be less bored there.”

Next to the niche where a sleepy-eyed churchwarden sat was a low wooden door. I dragged it open and started up the spiral staircase with Roland in my wake. My heart swelled
with delight at the coolness rising from the stone steps and swirling round us as we wound our way up and up until the glorious moment when I gave the door of the rood-loft a little push and we stepped into the pale golden light cascading in through the window, where the chill gave way to dusty warmth.

Mr Snellaert was waiting by the keyboard. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The rows of chairs and benches in the space between two sets of organ pipes, a bit like a clearing in a leaden forest, were occupied by choristers flapping their song books and sheet music.

“I thought you’d overslept again,” the choir master said.

“I’ve brought someone along. My cousin Roland.”

“Roland… Roland,” the choir master echoed, wrinkling his brow. “You must be Roger’s boy.”

Roland nodded.

“If you can sing as well as your Pa when he was a boy, you’re more than welcome to join us.” The choir master pressed a missal into his hands.

I threaded my way among the chairs and benches to the last row, up against the wall. Roswita was already there, wearing a grass-green blouse that strained to hold her bosom.

She was leaning forward slightly on her seat with her elbows on her knees, perhaps because she wanted to conceal her budding curves, in the midst of which a thin silver necklace quivered.

She wore quite ordinary turquoise studs in her ears, which flashed brightly when she stretched her neck with all the nonchalance she could muster and shook her mane so that everyone might admire her jewellery.

I knew I confused her by pretending not to notice, but she set me on edge, alarmed me even, with all her sighs and little
groans, the hair in constant need of adjustment, the reins that kept slipping, the pleats in her skirt, her collar, the thin silver necklace, the navy-blue knee socks she wore with the sandals in which tiny pebbles got stuck, driving her crazy, so that she sometimes couldn’t help shaking her feet to dislodge them. The sound of them hitting the wooden floor was magnified ten times under the vaulted ceiling.

“Move over a bit,” I said. “From now on there’s two of us.”

She threw me an inquisitive glance as she raised her bottom off the wooden bench and lowered it further along.

“This is my cousin Roland. He’s come to stay with us for a while.”

Her moist eyes lit up, just as I had foreseen. The fevers raging deep inside her flared, beading her downy upper lip with perspiration.

“Where’s he from?” she asked.

“You ask him,” I said meanly. “He can speak for himself, you know.”

“Where are you from?”

“From Ruizele,” Roland replied, averting his eyes.

“Quite a long way away.”

Roland shrugged. “Half an hour by car, that’s all.” He opened the hymn book and started thumbing the pages.

Roswita’s glance slid past me to him, and I felt chuffed.

“Wait till you see him racing on his bike,” I said, for good measure. “He goes so fast he can almost keep up with his father in his Ford Granada.”

“My brother’s a cyclist too,” Roswita said, quite truthfully. He competed in the race at the annual fair, where he would be seen coming up off the saddle for the final spurt, then
kissing blondes on the winners’ platform and waving bunches of artificial flowers.

Roswita waited for Roland to reply, but he was looking down at his missal and seemed engrossed in a psalm, not realising that his flushed cheeks were making her spine tingle. Even my spine tingled.

The door in the portal down below creaked as it swung open and fell to with a thud: the church was filling up. The altar boys lit the incense. Somewhere behind me air rushed through pallets as the organ inflated its bellows.

A bell tinkled.

Mr Snellaert straightened his back and pulled at the stops.

The organ rumbled in its depths. Valves opened, mouths gaped.

The congregation drew themselves up.

Mr Snellaert nodded, placed his feet on the pedal. Bass tones tickled the lining of my stomach. I was dizzy and shut my eyes.

“Now!” cried Mr Snellaert.

Scales of notes rippled forth. Soaring spirals of tremolos lifted me up even higher than the rood-loft, and from my abdomen gushed the words. “Open the heavenly gates, Oh Lord. Come unto us for Thou art the living Word.”

Far beneath me I could hear Roland’s pathetically reedy voice. I had left him way behind. My own voice swelled up like a wind-filled sail in perfect trim, no danger of it flapping out of control in my throat today. I soared up straight towards God’s glory, but when the last tones died away against the vaulted ceiling and I opened my eyes in blissful contentment, all I saw was Mr Snellaert’s stern face.

“Callewijn, if you don’t mind,” he hissed. “This isn’t the opera.”

I blushed deep red and sank down on to the bench.

Roland sniggered.

Roswita grinned, chewing her thumb.

After mass she sat opposite me in the café and kept glancing at Roland while she fiddled absently with the pack of cards I had brought along.

My cousin had not joined us at our table. He was standing beside my father at the bar, holding his glass of lemonade as if it were beer, rocking on his heels in time to the toasts the men proposed to Roswita’s father, a fruit grower who liked to throw his money around.

“Is he staying long?” Roswita asked.

“Dunno. His mother’s not too well. It’s her nerves.”

Roswita said nothing and flicked a lock of hair over her shoulder. Meanwhile, at the bar, things were getting noisy. Red-faced, stabbing the air with his index finger, Roswita’s father was the centre of attention. He made some remark which forced the men to think for a second before roaring with laughter. Roland made a show of laughing along with them and sipped his drink.

“Perhaps he could play football with us,” Roswita said, with a tremor of maternal concern in her voice. Her father was the chairman of the local club.

“Perhaps. He used to play football, I think.” I shrugged and flipped the cards, divided them into piles, shuffled them and laid them out again in a self-invented game without purpose, so as to discourage her from quizzing me further.

In her eyes I was no more than an overgrown toddler, a
not particularly useful guinea pig on whom to practise her flirting skills. On Wednesday afternoons she could be found on a bench in the square by the railway station, holding court in the shade of the plane trees with her ladies-in-waiting casting jealous looks at her precocious figure. All around would be boys practising drop-kicks, dribbles and headers. There was something about her that made me envious, while at the same time I wanted to keep my distance. She could reach you with her invisible tentacles and find out private things. Her presence unsettled the other boys, too, and in her girlfriends, who were otherwise quite ordinary, she inspired a poisonous sort of admiration which made them sullen and prone to lash out with cutting remarks.

I was pleased to see that Roland hardly noticed her when he passed us on his way outside for a pee.

“Tomorrow we’ll be going to school together, him and me,” I said. “I’ve got a new bike so I can ride with him.”

She didn’t respond. Roland had come back. Mumbling about having to ask her father something, she got up from the table and crossed to the men by the bar. Her father stooped willingly when she plucked at his sleeve. She whispered in his ear.

“Is that so?” I heard him say, with a nod in Roland’s direction. “At a club or just for fun?”

I couldn’t make out Roland’s reply, nor whether they were discussing football or cycling, but I noticed him blushing when my father gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“We’ll drink to that!” someone exclaimed.

Glasses were raised yet again.

I squeezed the pack of cards with both hands to make it bulge and glanced at the clock over the bar. Half-past one at
the latest, my mother had said. It was already a quarter past. We’d be having warmed-up steak again, with reproaches for gravy.

It was all set. Toasts had been drunk, his membership of the football club was sealed. Roland would join the team. Practice on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Matches every few weeks on a Saturday.

“And you’ll have your choir practice on Thursdays. You’ll be busy all week,” my father concluded with a satisfied air. My mother was in the kitchen, venting her spleen on the dirty dishes.

“It’d be a good thing for you to take up some sport, too,” she called out to me, still angry about her cauliflower boiling to a pulp and her potatoes getting stuck to the bottom of the pan.

She placed the dishes upside down on the draining rack, rubbed some vaseline on her hands and untied her apron, thereby signalling that it was time for the sultry boredom of Sunday afternoon to take over.

Upstairs in my bedroom, with Roland in the next room lying on his bed with a book, I picked up my new satchel and opened it. It was dark brown with long straps to hang over my shoulders so I could carry it on my back. I inspected the stiff leather at close quarters, unzipped the compartments, checked whether my pencil case fitted inside properly and decided on the best places for my sharpener, ruler, rubber, sheets of blotting paper. Once everything was packed away I discovered that the bag was much too light, totally at odds with the weight of the responsibility that I was about to shoulder in
the world at large. I added two extra volumes of my father’s encyclopaedia and buckled the strap of my satchel, only to discover that it was now so heavy I couldn’t lift it off the floor.

“For goodness sake,” Roland grumbled, “can’t you sit still? You’re driving me up the wall with all your fidgeting.”

They were the first words he’d spoken to me. Even though I felt a twinge of shame, I lapped them up like honey.

“I’ve put too much stuff in it,” I said.

“In what?”

“My satchel.”

He shut his book with a clap. “You don’t need to take anything special tomorrow. Just a pen and a pencil. They’ll give you all you need at school. They’ve got their own exercise books, with the name of the school on the front.”

Trying to make as little noise as possible, I opened the satchel again and carefully took out one of the volumes, but just as I went to put it on the table it slipped from my fingers and crashed to the floor.

I heard Roland get up and leave the room, slamming the door shut.

It didn’t seem a good idea to go after him, however curious I was about what he might be up to.

On his bedside table, next to the imposing alarm clock, lay a book about the Word of God, a gift from an aunt on his mother’s side named Vera. It was hard to imagine him wanting to read it, but it lay on top of another book, which was about salmon fishing in Scotland and had lots of photos, and which looked a little more worn than the other one.

The drawer did not contain any vestiges of boyish ruin. No wheels fallen off toy cars, no popguns or plastic geese from a set of farm animals long since dispersed; none of the stuff I
kept in the drawer of my own bedside table. I clutched them in my fists like amulets when there was a thunderstorm and I felt I was too old to be scared.

What I found in Roland’s drawer was handkerchiefs. All except one, which was stuffed into a corner, lay neatly folded in four little piles. In the compartment underneath there was only an old wristwatch, probably his father’s, and a photo of himself smartly dressed for his Holy Communion. That was all I had with which to get a taste of what it was like to be Roland.

I slunk back to my room with an empty feeling, and was relieved when he reappeared a few minutes later to tell me they were having coffee downstairs.

That evening he sat beside my father watching a sports programme on television. They clapped their hands on their knees in unison when a favourite player missed the goal by a hair’s breadth, and conferred earnestly on the chances of the losing team.

I sat at the table finishing my father’s crossword puzzle.

“You can wear your blue shirt tomorrow,” my mother said. “You want to look smart for your first day.”

Earlier on she had shown me my new sandwich box, which you could squeeze the air out of so as to keep everything fresh. I had nodded admiringly.

Football was followed by a bicycle race. Roland continued to watch with undiminished interest.

My father stood up from his chair. “Join me in a pint, Roland?”

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “All right. Why not?”

My mother rolled her eyes.

“Ma, please,” my father said soothingly. “He’s old enough. Besides, drinking takes practice.”

“I’ll have one too,” I ventured.

He didn’t answer, just laughed condescendingly.

When he returned with only two bottles from the cellar I folded the newspaper pointedly, kissed my mother goodnight and went upstairs.