My Fellow Skin (11 page)

M
Y BIRTHDAY CAME
and went without a fuss. Coffee for three, cake, no candles. We celebrated in silence: my father, my mother and me. They had bought me a book:
Iceland, Child of Fire.
They must have found it difficult to make a choice from the shelves in the shop at Ruizele, or perhaps elsewhere. Books with only words from beginning to end made them wary—you never knew what might be in there—but they knew I wasn’t keen on picture books. Pictures belonged in comics, and I had stacks of those.

I dare say they’d had some assistance from the bookseller, who would have seized this opportunity to flog some leftover stock while making a show of being polite and helpful. The book he recommended had a few photographs in it, so at least they had some idea of the contents, and I could imagine his satisfaction as he showed them out and watched them head across the square to their car, relieved and happy with their purchase.

It was wrapped in brown paper. To brighten up the parcel my mother had written “
Happy Birthday
” on it in her
old-fashioned
florid script, followed by “
many happy returns of the day. Ma & Pa
.”

Many happy returns. I had taken the book upstairs to my room to look at. The taste of the kisses I had given to express
my gratitude was still on my lips, and my chest felt tight with the gloom that filled me as I climbed the stairs.

The book did not grab me. Not many things grabbed me nowadays. I had left it open on the table where I did my homework, so it looked as if I couldn’t get enough of it, they’d ask how I liked it and I’d nod and say “it’s great”, but what I really wanted to do was stick it on the shelf along with the other books, which seemed to be closing ranks on me, keeping their stories from me and making my head swim with letters and punctuation marks instead.

Fourteen. I wrote the number down on a piece of paper and held it up to the light. I gazed at my reflection in the window pane, which was milky-white with mist. I didn’t look fourteen. I ought to be wearing jeans and my hair in a fringe, I ought to go off on sailing trips with my friends the way the boys did in my adventure stories. They rode horses, too. During seaside holidays they thwarted the evil intentions of gangsters, survived shipwrecks and washed up on desert islands. There were ruined castles and bottomless pits. They hunted and found worm-eaten treasure chests filled with gold bars, rescued the daughters of business tycoons from remote fishing huts, and usually had a dog called Soda or maybe Tarzan, which could be relied on to give the game away by barking at the wrong moment. I couldn’t have cared less about that stuff.

So they got to me in the end—the priest, Mr Bouillie and all the other staffroom creeps. A whole school year had passed, a summer had lit up and been snuffed out again, and I hadn’t even noticed. At this rate it wouldn’t be long before
I fell asleep altogether. Then, when I woke up again I’d be just like Roland. I’d lure new boys behind the cherry laurel and send them packing a few minutes later with tears in their eyes, having done goodness knows what to them, I’d punch people left and right and my halting voice would become a growl, I’d be good at football and get flustered when Roswita cheered me for being a fine runner.

His bed had not been slept in for several nights. He was staying with his parents for the half-term holiday. His mother was on leave from the institution everyone was so secretive about. There was the same sense of mystery surrounding the postcard she had sent from there, elegantly phrased in French but containing several spelling mistakes.

My father had said, “He’s a poor sod, Roger is,” and sighed heavily. My mother.

They called from the bottom of the stairs that they were going to visit the graves. It was November, and the mist would be catching on the chrysanthemums in the cemetery and making them soggy.

I stayed at home, lounging on my bed, flicking through exercise books and drawing monsters in the margins. Willem was away on a trip to the mountains with his parents, which he’d been greatly looking forward to. He couldn’t wait to get away.

For all our efforts to look as if we were chewing the cud like the rest of them, our contrariness did not fail to attract attention, and there were moments when he too lost his cool, especially on the day we were summoned to the principal’s
office during break. Hardly an embodiment of divine authority in his bespoke suit, yet he exuded the stony severity of the Ten Commandments. A barely perceptible wrinkle played on his brow that afternoon as he sat himself down between the two of us on the leatherette couch. He fiddled with his tie pin, clasped his hands and looked grave.

“Gentlemen,” he began.

“Yes, Father?”

I sensed the superior, measured scorn that was spreading through Willem, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling he was on his guard. The way he leaned back in the fake smell of the couch was a touch too devil-may-care, as was the relaxed expression on his face while he listened to the priest’s obscure discourse on the subject of community spirit.

School did not minister to individual needs, those of individual boys in this case, it was best compared to a busy beehive. We were not to view our teachers—benign, devoted souls to a man—as our masters, but as older brothers who wanted only what was best for us. Mr Bouillie felt the same. The priest rambled on about the pillar of our establishment shedding bitter tears on our account, so much did it pain him that certain boys never showed up for extracurricular games or sport on Wednesday afternoon, that they never volunteered for dish-washing service, nor did their bit to keep the library open on Tuesdays, let alone on Fridays from four to six p.m.

“You want to be more outgoing, the pair of you. Do you understand what I’m saying? At your age… sticking together all the time… And there is so much more beauty and wisdom waiting to be discovered out in the world. Look, we’re human,
all of us… so am I,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “You are young. Young and inexperienced, and the pure bond of friendship is a thing of great value, but still…”

It was as though he had hinges in his body that needed oiling. Doors were scraping over floors and getting jammed halfway, and he couldn’t bring himself to force them open with a thrust of his shoulder.

“We all have strong feelings at times. And when one is young one is extra susceptible. Let’s see, a fitting metaphor would be…”

He selected a Havana from the cigar box on his coffee table, lit it and balanced it on his lower lip, thought hard, blew out little puffs of smoke, and embarked on an ethereal parable about the light of love and flowers in bud needing time to unfold their petals, and what a shame it would be to disturb this tender process in any way. Of course, we were young and feckless, he had been young himself, and no less mischievous than us… It would be a pity if our high spirits caused us to nip each other in the bud.

I hadn’t a clue what he was getting at, but I heard a little snort escape from Willem’s nostrils. His cheekbones flushed briefly, from shame or anger I could not tell. He was certainly not jiggling his knees.

“So much for that, then,” the priest said at last.

He gave us each a manly slap on the thigh and rose to his feet. “I know you’re good boys at heart…”

He accompanied us into the corridor, visibly relieved at having acquitted himself of what must have been a delicate task.

Just before starting across the school yard, Willem turned round—he seemed to have been waiting for this moment—and
told the priest that his father had said he’d be getting in touch soon, something about the spring fund-raising dinner for the purchase of two new vaulting horses for the gym.

“Yes indeed, we must see to that,” replied the priest. “The poster has to go to the printer’s. I’ll ring him myself.” His tone was level, but for some reason Willem’s remark had touched a raw nerve.

We returned to the classroom. The bell for the end of break had already sounded, the yard was deserted.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

He just grinned and jostled me up the stairs. Everyone stared when we arrived in class.

After the summer holidays we were no longer in the same class. Without his presence the lessons became compact eternities. Boredom coiled itself around my neck like a thick scarf being pulled tight, throttling me slowly. I yearned for the four o’clock bell, yearned to go and wait for him on the edge of the wood, but in the meantime I had to struggle to stay awake in ever deeper dungeons of apathy, stealing looks out the window at the cavalries of clouds breaking ranks and straggling across the horizon, their lances broken and their banners torn to shreds; or glancing round the classroom at the others, all of them busy taking notes and shooting their hands up imploringly as soon as the teacher asked a question, at which my facial muscles would go rigid with contempt.

I’d have spat out the whole world and all the doomed creatures with it, including myself, if I’d been able, like getting rid of a gob of phlegm. I longed to be little again, when I
was no more than a membrane upon which the days tapped their tattoo of impressions for me to take or leave. The days of screaming for my milk, and yawning. Going to sleep and waking up. Feeling the blaze of summer in my legs, lifting a tile in the cellar and discovering a salamander underneath, licking its chops like a dragon, then quickly dropping the tile back in place and running away crying, “Papa, Papa!” After dusk, when a hush descended on the outdoor world, there’d be the Aunts indoors, spreading their bats’ wings and detaching themselves from the corners where they spent their days upside down and fast asleep, and I’d salute the sweetness of the night as it deepened into black, as black as the pages in the photograph albums which preserved my image under a sheet of tissue paper.

I thought of my father and my mother. His creations: man and woman. He read the paper, she did the dishes. She complained, he soothed. The sexes are complementary, but different, Mr Vaneenooghe had explained in class, and he had written the word on the blackboard: com-ple-men-tary. The story of the Creation revealed a profound truth, he had declared in conclusion, but I remained unconvinced.

His rusty-brown sweater and speckled jacket seemed to belie his words, for they hinted that his own better half vacuumed him twice a week along with the carpets, or laid him out on the wet grass to air. His tone turned melancholy when he alluded to the blessings of the family or to his own fatherhood and offspring. He had a boy and girl, whose names were Bjorn and Tineke. His own Christian name was Didier, which was bad enough.

With a view to adding what he liked to think of as a “personal note” to his lesson, he had come to class equipped
with a wedding photograph of his own. His bride wore a beribboned cartwheel hat which hid most of her face. They posed side by side in front of a Japanese cherry tree, his arm round her waist, and he reminded me of a diminutive male spider mounting its gigantic mate. It was a colour photograph, but the colours were blighted with a purply sheen. No doubt it was kept on a window sill, where it would be taken up and contemplated routinely, until it was time to mow the lawn or wash the car.

“
The wedding will take place on October 4th,
” it said on the card stuck in my parents’ leather-bound wedding album with silk tassels. Wedlock. A parcel of land enclosed by white picket fencing. No grass, just earth neatly divided into beds with leeks or haricot beans. Husband and wife having breakfast in the gazebo with its slender pillars and climbing roses. There’s toast and jam, a brand-new tea cosy, Boch porcelain and Aunt Françoise’s not very nice but very expensive tablecloth. When the sun has set and the screens are placed before the windows to keep the mosquitoes out, they’ll enact the candlelight shadow-play which Mr Vaneenooghe said was at the heart of the bond between man and his helpmate, they’ll find fulfilment in one another as creatures of flesh and blood, as the divine confirmation of love in life and death, which, he assured us—and I tried hard not to think of his whiskers—was as delicious as strawberries with whipped cream in a blizzard of caster sugar.

His lecture left us somewhat nonplussed. The rest of the lesson was devoted to studying Genesis Chapter Two, Verses eighteen to twenty-five. Mr Vaneenooghe sat down at his desk, reached a hand into his trousers and scratched his crotch at length.

At home it was raining bills that couldn’t be paid. They spent long hours every evening fretting over household expenses, adding and subtracting, deciding against repair of the gutters in favour of someone they knew who knew about fridges and didn’t charge too much, who poked around with screwdrivers and pliers and in the end got the thing going again, although it made such a racket you could hear it streets away.

I gritted my teeth. What did God care about love? He parted seas and burned cities to the ground, set armies upon each other like termites, laid wagers and cast lots for his own son’s robe. He held our souls up to the light as if they were holiday slides, thrilling to the multitudinous patterns of our sins. On Ash Wednesday he made the sign of the cross on my forehead with grimy thumbs, whispering that I was a little heap of ashes mixed with water, and at the end of the lesson, when the others trooped out into the yard and I was kept in to clean the blackboard, my nostrils would sting with a smell like bad breath. I gazed out over the deserted desks, the satchels resting against the legs, the rulers, pens and pencils in the trays. I heard the clamour in the yard and was glad I had to stay in, even if it meant not seeing Willem. I soaked sponges, wiped them across expanses of blackboard, rose up on my toes, opened windows and knocked the chalk-dust out of dusters.

When the wind blew in from the west, which it nearly always did, half the dust blew back into my face, powdering me as white as the walls with their pockmarks indicating where pictures had hung until they fell down or were removed or shot down with rubber bands.

I screwed up my eyes. It got under my fingernails, in the
corners of my mouth, made me blink. It clogged up my nose, gave me an itchy feeling in my neck and made my hands dry. When I licked my fingers they no longer tasted of me. I am nothing, nobody, I thought. I belong nowhere, and everywhere. At last I was at one with the Holy Father.