My Fellow Skin (10 page)

“I’ll wait for you here,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

I sped away, pedalling hard to catch up with Roland.

T
HE DAYS SHORTENED APACE
. The dusk, which was already gathering when Roland and I went home after school, deepened each day. At home, the flames in the stove leaped higher and higher behind the sooty window, while the kettle sang that it was winter. We all moved closer together as the weather got colder.

Those were the weeks when the sky switched direction. Orion rose to its zenith, there was turbulence in the air, and gusts of wind buffeted the walls and hooked their fingers behind the shutters, making the woodwork rattle on its hinges.

Autumn was never my favourite season. From the end of August on I felt as if the summer were unwinding, like knitting being unravelled to save the wool, which would be rolled up into balls and stored away out of reach. As it was, the autumn showers and early storms seemed to be in tune with my soul, similarly in a state of flux.

One evening my mother came into the bathroom just as I was towelling myself dry. “Pardon,” she said, and left quickly. Later on I heard her on the phone to one of her sisters, saying that I was getting to be a big lad and that I was an early starter, seeing as I was only just twelve.

“Oh well,” she said. “Our Alois was rather forward, too,
and so were you: your periods started when you were eleven, didn’t they?”

“Early birds, eh,” I heard her say with a chuckle before replacing the receiver.

When I saw myself in the mirror I looked pretty much as usual from the waist up, except maybe for some blotches on my forehead. But if I lowered my gaze and contemplated the dark curly hair of my crotch, a dense thicket surrounding that thing between my legs, I felt as if a macabre joke were being played on me: I was turning into an animal.

I wondered whether I was the only one to be plagued thus, whether anybody else was obliged to shift around in their seat like me, when my veins started throbbing for no apparent reason, when the lining of my stomach tingled and the thing in my underpants insisted on swelling up. However tightly I clenched my thighs, I couldn’t stop it from poking out from under my waistband and stretching the elastic in a way that made me shudder.

When this happened in class I sat very still for a time, glancing round to see if anyone had noticed, especially Willem, who never seemed to be bothered by these things.

Mr Vaneenooghe had mentioned “certain changes”, and had announced a special slide-show entitled “Growth and Tenderness”, but it didn’t amount to anything more exciting than boys and girls holding hands as they strolled down meadows and country lanes.

The images were accompanied by a cassette tape with trumpets and a soppy voice-over. For the rest, God’s top priority appeared to be personal hygiene. Mr Vaneenooghe had pronounced the words as if he had a hair stuck between his teeth.

During the school medical examination the doctor had pulled down my underpants, told me to blow on my hand, and then kneaded me with cold fingers. He ticked a box on the form, muttering, “That looks fine.”

I had asked Willem if the doctor had said the same about him. But Willem had frowned, and I didn’t dare pursue it any further.

The whole afternoon had been awful. First a nurse made me open my mouth wide so she could tap an instrument against each of my teeth in turn. Then she made me bend over, whereupon she drew my buttocks apart with her thumb and index finger. Then she put earphones on my head and went half-crazy when I had trouble telling left from right.

She heaved a sigh and pushed me into a lavatory. There was a hatch in one of the walls with a glass measuring cup, which I took in my hands doubtfully. It was only after several minutes, when she knocked on the door asking, “Still not done?” that the penny dropped.

If only I could leave it all behind, find some groove in a tree trunk where I could spin a silk cocoon around myself and go to sleep for as long as it took to transform into a different state. But at night, in the soothing darkness, the ache in my joints often kept me awake. In heavy weather the storms raging outside seemed to be coming directly from within me. There were nights when I woke up drenched, with the thing refusing point-blank to lie down. I would try to find some relief in the familiar sounds of Roland asleep, unless he was awake too, in which case I could tell by his hushed breathing that he was waiting for me to doze off.

Three days a week he came home with wet hair, making the air redolent with the fresh mud he scraped off his football boots as he sat on the doorstep. The towels he pulled out of his sports bag were so suffused with his odour, the excruciating tang of his sweat, that an invisible twin of his seemed to emerge when he draped them over the footboard of his bed.

The way he shovelled down his food, swigged his drink and broke wind without any shame at all was something I secretly envied, just as I envied the subtle witchcraft with which Roswita was able to shatter his confidence at a stroke.

Up in the rood-loft she had unceremoniously ousted me from my seat a few weeks after his arrival, and had inserted herself with matriarchal aplomb between him and me. The things she whispered to him in the intervals between songs clearly made him uneasy.

He stuck his hands between his knees and awkwardly rubbed his palms together. Roswita’s girlfriends were watching him narrowly, nudging each other. They appeared to be in the know regarding her sophisticated strategies and made mental notes of the times he blushed, as if they were goals she had scored.

They went to nearly every match. Roswita’s father offered everyone drinks in the canteen, in the hope of making mayor one day. Roswita herself was usually to be found with her entourage under the corrugated iron roof by the changing rooms. She cheered when goals were scored, booed when they were missed, and stayed until the umpire blew his whistle and the teams left the pitch.

“You’re a fine runner, Roland,” she would shout. “My father says so too.”

That was enough to make him blush to the roots of his hair and keep his head down as he made for the changing room.

Inside was full of hot steam. Now and then, when the door opened a crack, I glimpsed him standing under the shower with his eyes closed, surrounded by a blur of bodies braying to each other in a show of unconcern over their nakedness.

Sometimes he would bray like that at home, too, after he’d washed and begun to put his clothes on. He always fussed with his underpants, tucking his buttocks in carefully, and then stretching out the waistband with his thumbs to inspect his crotch.

I took malicious pleasure in observing him. Knowing that he was at his most vulnerable, I dipped my words thoughtfully in poison and took very careful aim before letting fly.

“Everything all right then, Roland? Hasn’t shrunk has it?”

“Don’t stare. Mind your own business, you little creep.”

“I thought you liked me looking at you.”

Usually he would shut up after that and continue to get dressed.

When I was around Willem I was just as likely to be tonguetied as Roland was when Roswita put her feelers out towards him. Willem was a lot less talkative than the others. He wasn’t as withdrawn as I was, but I never saw him being mobbed by friends the way Roland constantly was.

Usually I was the only company he had. We crossed and re-crossed the school yard side by side, and while we surveyed
the bleak surroundings, intent on deleting whatever we found offensive, we ourselves were constantly being watched by Mr Bouillie. In his routinely disdainful air there was a trace of suspicion. He couldn’t place us. We weren’t sissies, nor were we rebels. We got reasonably good marks, in class we made sure we were not overeager while being sufficiently attentive, but when we raised our hackles we did it together. As a twosome we were unassailable. If we got the chance we preferred hanging around in remote corners, around the bike shed or in the shaded colonnade, where scraps of paper blew around in little whirlwinds. This was frowned on by Mr Bouillie.

“Callewijn,” he had said one day, after midday break. “You seem to get on remarkably well with De Vries.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What about the other boys? The two of you seem to stick together all the time.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You need to integrate with the rest, you know. Do you good…”

I didn’t know what “integrate” meant.

“He’s being easy on us,” Willem told me. “Because of my Pa. The fund-raising.”

If I kept my eyes peeled, if I made a convincing show of obeying the rules and overcame my boredom, it had to be possible to fathom the hidden agenda of school. That way I could endure the humiliations with my head held high and come out at the end more or less unscathed.

The first swimming session proved to be good practice. On the day itself I was already nervous when I left home in the morning. In the cubicle Willem and I shared, I made myself as small as possible. We both tried to avoid bumping
into each other, and if we did we mumbled a quick “sorry”. I put off stripping to the buff as long as I could.

His body made me feel inadequate. Nature had cast him from a perfect mould, unlike me. I looked as if I was made up of odds and ends. One of my nipples was lower than the other, and also stuck out more. The hollow in my chest was too deep for my liking. I kept getting red bumps on my buttocks, which made them look like unripe berries with lots of hair in between.

The swimming trunks that my mother had undoubtedly ferreted out of some cut-price treasure trove, a shapeless garment with brown stripes and orange dots, did not make me feel any better. They contrasted shrilly with Willem’s tasteful navy-blue trunks, which he had put on whistling. Besides, he had shed his clothes without the least sign of embarrassment.

He had blond hair. All his hair was blond. Beneath his navel, the base of his belly was fringed with pleasing flaxen curls, and the secret part down in the furrow between his thighs had no doubt been pronounced very fine indeed by the school doctor.

He moved with a self-assurance that seemed to have more to do with the harmonious proportions of his body than with his state of mind, and it made me long for something I couldn’t quite grasp. The promise of boundless blessing, the sense of dissolving in time, of being able to open out like a shell and escape from my own skinny self.

His limbs, like Roland’s, seemed a perfect fit. His body expressed him quite satisfactorily, it rarely interrupted him. He didn’t have arms that felt like too-long sleeves that got in the way. He kept his arms crossed on his desk or let them hang down in a very relaxed sort of way when he leaned back in his chair, whereas I just wished that mine were at least five
centimetres shorter. Mine kept letting me down, they were the source of my clumsiness.

He tapped me on the nose.

“You’re miles away. Come on.”

Mr Bruane, the P.E. teacher, who’d had the septum removed from his nose because it had been an impediment to his boxing career, had already clapped his hands, at which the doors of the cubicles had all swung open.

I waited for the last pair of bare feet to patter past on the wet tiles before stepping out of my cubicle.

We had to line up on the edge of the pool. Mr Bruane ordered us to jump into the water one by one and to swim two lengths.

I managed to turn a deaf ear to the surreptitious sniggering and thought I would make it to the end without incurring too much abuse, until Mr Bruane told me to get up on the diving board and make a dive exactly as he had personally demonstrated moments before.

There I stood, in all my misery, having to endure the jeers of my classmates with their smart trunks and even tans from Marseilles or St Tropez. Nor did the amusement in the swimming instructor’s eyes escape me.

“Cal-le-wijn! Cal-le-wijn!” they shouted.

I steeled myself, took a deep breath and shut my eyes.

The arc I described in the air can’t have been very elegant. The water hit me like a fist in the stomach, and for an instant I heard a great roar.

Then it was quiet. Blue light, a froth of bubbles. Panic. My own flailing arms and legs.

When I came up for air the others had gone, all except Willem.

He stretched his arms along the little gutter just above the surface of the pool and eyed me uneasily while I hid my tears with both my hands.

“Come on out. Time to go.”

I shook my head vigorously. “Can’t…”

He waited.

“Callewijn! Can’t get enough of the water all of sudden, eh?” Mr Bruane called. There was a fresh roar from the cubicles.

“Come on.”

“Leave me alone.”

“You’ll get into trouble.”

I gave him a long hard look.

He didn’t get it at first. Then he rolled his eyes, let go of the edge and disappeared under water.

It was a while before he resurfaced, with my trunks. He handed them over to me with a straight face.

“Don’t ever let on,” he said later on in the changing cubicle. “They can scent it. They’re like wolves. They always pick on the runt of the litter.”

I dried my tears, nodded.

“They’re good at that.”

He swore to himself, slipped his jacket on and buttoned up his sports bag.

He was already near to the exit. I hesitated before calling him back.

He swung round.

“What?”

My cheeks burned.

“Could you help me do up my laces?”

T
HAT AUTUMN
, as I remember it, was bathed in the diffuse light of an overcast sky and the stillness of October, when the dyke was permanently shrouded in mist and it drizzled for days on end.

It was the autumn when I became suddenly and acutely aware that my father’s hair was turning grey, especially around his ears. It hit me one evening during supper. He had been working late, and while he ate he complained bitterly about the situation at the mill, where things were looking bad.

“It’s just getting crazier every year,” he confided in me.

With each mouthful his anger ebbed away. I could see him sinking back into his usual self-absorption. Now and then a muttered imprecation bubbled up from his chest, then it was all over. He laid the newspaper on the table next to his plate, and started to read.

He’s getting old, I thought, and I was shocked. His father, whom I had never met, had turned white by the age of thirty. There were photographs to prove it. But thirty was old. In those days people were either little, big, or old. My father had always been big. Being big meant casting a big shadow, like the spread of leafy branches. I had nestled in his arms as if they were the limbs of a tree.

Now I was getting big myself. Even my mother said so. And he said so too, on days when I skulked around the house, pestering Roland, flinging myself dramatically on my bed, slamming doors, leaving my shoes lying in the middle of the room instead of putting them on the rack, at which he would jump up from his chair and demand in a puzzled tone of voice, “Anton, boy, whatever’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” I would yell, bounding up the stairs. “Everything.”

When the storm had subsided he came up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. After a long silence he said,“You’re getting to be a big boy.”

He needed reading glasses to do his crossword. They magnified his eyes, and the helpless astonishment with which they seemed to view the world filled me with a deepening sense of weariness. My father, old. The thought repelled me. So did his shuffling footsteps on the bathroom tiles. And so did his hand on my shoulders when he came in while I was doing my homework and said, “Mourning song. Five letters. Latin.”

“
Nenia
, Pa.”

He kept forgetting. He couldn’t find the words he was looking for. When Roswita’s father turned up in the café on Sunday, he hunched his shoulders. When he spoke I could hear him rattling coins and keys in his trouser pockets to help him think.

I registered these things. I was growing up. He was growing down in my eyes. I was growing right up over the roof and the stables. My thoughts branched out. In the old days when things were always out of reach and I longed to be as tall as the cupboards, being grown-up had struck me as a tranquil
state in which to be. But it wasn’t easy getting there. It was Willem’s fault. I felt myself clambering up inside his tall body and looking out at the world through his eyes.

One Wednesday afternoon I fetched up at his house. Roland had gone to visit his father. It was pouring with rain. After fifty metres our coats were soaked through.

“You’d better shelter in our house until there’s a break,” he said and I followed him on my bike into the garage.

We left our shoes on the mat. He opened a door for me and led me across a grey-green carpet into a long corridor, which was entirely made of glass on one side. I followed him up the stairs to his bedroom. He grabbed some towels from a cupboard and threw one in my direction.

We rubbed ourselves dry, hung our trousers over the backs of chairs and sat down at his desk by the window, looking out on the dripping trees. We rolled a marble back and forth over his desktop for a while. He showed me his books. Quite a lot of them were about natural history, which I wasn’t too keen on. He played me his records. A din, to my ears.

He straightened his bedcover and lay down on top, folded his arms behind his head, got up again and handed me a pair of his trousers to put on. He folded the bottoms up over my ankles so I wouldn’t trip.

Then came that strange moment, when he’d gone to the lavatory and his mother came up the stairs with a laundry basket and paused on the landing, said hello, asked who I was and looked me up and down for a very long time.

I lowered my eyes, studied the bookcase and stared at my fingers.

When I raised my eyes again she was halfway down the corridor. As she turned into another room I heard her say,
“Katrien, if you aren’t practising, you’d better close the lid. Or the keys will just gather dust.” Someone started banging on a piano.

“Is your friend staying for supper?” she asked when we came downstairs.

“You staying for lunch?” Willem echoed, as if I hadn’t understood what she’d said.

“Dunno… I expect they’ll be wondering where I’ve got to, back home.”

“Well, we can give them a bell,” she said. “What’s your number?”

She addressed my mother with the words, “Good afternoon, this is Willem’s mother. We’ve saved someone from drowning here.”

I knew my mother wouldn’t have a clue what she meant. I could hear her halting voice from where I was standing, offering apologies, hoping that I was not causing any trouble.

“He’s drenched to the skin, you know. His clothes are drying upstairs.”

I had to be home by five o’clock.

Willem’s house breathed. It soaked up daylight through all its vast windows. It sprawled on to the lawn and looked at the trees. Inside, there were long sofas upholstered in leather and low wall cabinets with large paintings hanging above them, oblongs of evenly coloured mist. Out in the garden the roly-poly statue danced in the rain.

His father came down another staircase from his office. He shook hands with me. The table was laid for five.

“Enjoy your meal, children,” he said, spreading his linen napkin on his lap.

They spoke in a posh accent, with the kind of ease that would have had my father fumbling desperately in his pockets. I couldn’t bear the thought of them dropping me off at home, as Willem’s mother had suggested.

His sister ogled me over her plate.

“Katrien, don’t forget to eat,” her mother said, with a smile. “Just let our friend here get on with it, will you.”

They were kind to me, wanted me to feel at home. My unease was palpable, it was in my clothes, my checked shirt, my V-neck jumper, my knee socks. Nothing seemed to match, especially in comparison with the sleek, dark colours they all wore. They talked about travelling and the countryside of Spain. The names of towns flowed from their lips like magical formulas. When the subject of school came up, Willem’s father raised his index finger and gave an imitation of the principal, “Mr Bouillie is a good man, Willem. A good man.”

I joined in their laughter but didn’t dare say very much, for fear that my attempts at polite conversation would remind them of the dank smell of bricks, moss and the walls of our cellar.

At home we did not talk much during meals. There were a few times when Roland rambled on about what he and his mates had been up to in class, making him choke with laughter, but mostly we all kept quiet.

We were Callewijns. We huddled together, we kept to ourselves behind the walls of the old farmhouse which in turn huddled against the dyke. At the sound of a strange car rumbling over the cobbles or reversing by the gate, or when unexpected visitors came to the door, we would all jump up and look out the window.

“I’ll draw a picture of someone on the wall, shall I, then I’ll have someone who’ll listen to me,” my mother often complained when there was no response to her list of chores that needed doing. We went through life with our fists clenched, for fear of being whisked away or robbed.

“I see you’ve made your bed for once,” Willem’s mother remarked.

He bent his head, pressing his chin on to his breast. His face reddened, and I could tell he was angry, not ashamed. When he got really wound up he would jiggle his knees. He did it in class, too, for no apparent reason, when we were given mathematical problems to solve and had to concentrate in stuffy silence. I could sense his anger in the air, which seemed to thicken around him.

It happened when he noted that Mr Bruane had found another victim to humiliate and at the sight of Mr Bouillie patrolling the yard, but it was most likely to happen during Mr Vaneenooghe’s lessons, when he droned on and on about God, the Most High, in whose almighty machinery we were like grains of sand being ground to dust by sheer tedium.

They made fun of things at his house. My father wasn’t good at that. The only mockery we had was my mother’s. It propped her up, whereas my father was forever buckling. He would buckle under loads of grain or divine blessing, in the eyes of his foreman or those of Christ the King, who sat above the altar in church holding the globe of his creation amid the seraphim.

In the café he was eyed with the same sense of mild misgiving as I was beginning to feel more and more strongly when I looked at him, although I felt sadness as well. My father, a traitor to his farming stock. He didn’t own any cattle, he had taken a job, he was just an ant in an army of workers. He drew up his shoulders and carried on in the countenance of the Lord.

I sensed condescension in the principal’s attitude to me. Behind his dainty gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes told me that I was an ant like my father, not without talent, not a bad student, but still an ant with a father who had no money. Ant-hood was all I was good for. I would slave like an ant at maths and grammar, I would study the geographical distribution of industries in Belgium and also its natural resources, the products of which I would find myself carting about in later life, pouring into troughs, watching as they vanished into mills, just like my father.

I left the table before the pudding to go to the lavatory. Willem and his sister were having an argument and their father made a joke to stop them. I lowered the lid on the toilet and sat down with my elbows on my knees, trembling, and stayed there, staring at the door, until my breathing returned to normal.

At about three the weather cleared up. Willem’s mother went off to drive his sister to her music lesson. His father vanished upstairs to his office.

We slouched in front of the television, watching a film in which knights in armour jousted. When the children’s programme began I said I ought to be getting home. My
trousers were dry. I took off the pair Willem had lent me and put mine on again. He grabbed me by my hips, hoisted me up and spun round until we both collapsed on his bed.

Next thing I knew we were wrestling, although it wasn’t really wrestling. His fingers sought out places that I preferred to ignore, unless it was the dead of night and I was safely under the covers, for only then did I dare to read them like Braille.

I pushed him away, but not very forcefully. I could smell his hair as he lay back on top of my chest, and then, suddenly, I swore and threw him off me.

He did not get up from the bed, just said, “See you tomorrow,” in an offhand way.

As usual I stopped in the middle of the bridge over the railway. The sky was still leaden. The church spire pierced the overhanging clouds, gauging their thickness. The bridge shook when the express train to Bruges thundered past beneath me.

I had the feeling I was somehow born to observe other people wallowing in riches of which they were quite unaware, and which would remain hidden from me in dark closets, on shelves that were far too high. I would only catch crumbs, coffee beans, alms, collecting them in tins, counting the times something struck the bottom, before sealing them up.

It was drizzling again. Great scrims of rain slid across the horizon.

Back home it would smell of cold and damp. Of my father’s feet. Of the savoury steam curling up from the pans on the
range and condensing on the ceiling. I would kick off my shoes, hang my dripping coat on the peg and go straight up to my room without saying a word, so I could pull the drawstring of our safe, stifling nest around me nice and tight.

I swallowed my cares, took a running jump and gave a shout as I sailed down the slope towards home.