My Fellow Skin (12 page)

B
Y MID-DECEMBER
the frost had set in. It came with the irresistible clarity of an illusion, transforming tussocks of grass into spun sugar, etching trails of seaweed on the window pane, bearding the rafters in the attic with white stubble.

The days, frozen solid, were filleted by razor-sharp sunbeams and tinkled like little slivers of crystal.

It was summer the other way round. August in December, so bitingly cold at night that the sheets stung all my pores, obliging me to lie absolutely still, almost without breathing, until my body warmed them up. The slightest movement of an arm or a foot meant exchanging Africa for the North Pole.

We ran short of blankets. There were three or four on each bed, and still we shivered. It was so bad that Roland didn’t protest when I gathered up my covers and slipped into bed beside him without even asking permission.

He turned over on his side to make room for me. I snuggled up to him, absorbing his body-heat like a sponge, listening to him go back to sleep, staring at the window and the icy, liana-infested night beyond.

We rolled against each other in the dip of the mattress. He slipped an arm under his pillow, my head lolled against his shoulder and I reeled from the scent of him. He turned
over. We lay back to back. His spine rubbed against mine. We turned over again, twisted away from each other and tumbled back like dice, each time in a different combination. Front to back. Back to front. Front to front. We pulled the sheet up over our heads. It slipped down, and our necks were nipped by the cold. We burrowed under again, into the warmth.

I listened to him making nibbling sounds in his sleep, smacking his lips, mumbling incomprehensibly, and I could feel his fingers twitching fitfully. A tremor passed through his legs from time to time, and his head jerked on his pillow. What he was dreaming of, I imagined, would be a fair reflection of his day-to-day world, complete with straight chalked lines and goalposts and him kicking in, heading the ball, scoring goals.

Sleep came over me in waves, surging and ebbing by turns until I was swept away at last into dreamy warm currents beneath a cover of pack-ice. Cloud formations in the water. White tunnels filled with diffuse grey light. The green of algae. An almost palpable silence.

My dreams were seldom about familiar things now. Mostly they featured vast plains scattered with boulders, or streets in anonymous cities, square windowless towers with machines throbbing inside, steel gates sliding open for me to step into galleries with display cases filled with mineral specimens or stuffed birds.

There were dreams in which I sat at the garden table under the beech tree reading fat books which made my head swim with words, images, and ideas of an awe-inspiring, glorious logic. Connections, explanations so lucid, so precise, that I kept telling myself, even as I was reading: I must remember this! But before I could do so the sentences seemed to dissolve. My voice wavered. The words slipped away faster and faster
under my frantic gaze, blurring and sinking into the paper as I flipped through the pages.

I was startled awake by the heaving mattress. Roland was lying at the very edge of the bed, gasping for breath as if he had raced up ten flights of stairs.

I called his name. He responded with a sigh of exasperation.

He got out of bed, wrapped himself in a blanket and went downstairs.

I don’t know how long he was gone, whether it was fifteen minutes or an hour. When he returned he smelled of mown grass. His forehead and his chest were beaded with sweat. He nestled himself languidly against me and the next instant he was asleep.

Morning came with a snowball splattering against the window, and my father calling us from outside, “Wakey wakey, lie-a-beds. Time to get up.”

Huddled in our blankets, we crept downstairs like caterpillars. My father had disconnected all the taps upstairs, he had poked a torch under the floorboards to locate the mains, which branched out into pipes intersecting with others, vanishing into walls and reappearing in the most unlikely places.

Downstairs the kettle sang on the stove. A woman’s voice on the radio burbled on about the country coming to a standstill, the King being struck down by the flu, railway points freezing in the tracks, harbours turning into glass, weights and measures going haywire and the Stock Exchange being in crisis. There was to be no pigeon racing, all sporting events had been cancelled, and the Minister of Education
had ordered the schools to be closed throughout the country because heating was too expensive. The holidays were to be prolonged for another week.

My spirits soared. No school for a whole week.

“It’s bitterly cold out,” my father said, rubbing his hands as he came into the house. Yet outside it looked like summer, for the wind had blown drifts of white-hot dunes where the fields used to be.

“One really good snowfall a year is just fine by me,” my mother said.

A blanket of snow invariably put her in a good mood. The world would be granted absolution, it would be pure again for as long as the weather lasted. I tried not to think of the slush, later on, when the thaw came and spoiled everything, and our shoes would go mouldy.

We were eating in silence when the telephone rang.

My father went out to the passage, returned after a few minutes and said, “It’s for you.”

I put down my fork and got up.

It was Willem.

“Fancy going skating?” he said.

His father drove him to our house. I was relieved to hear the car pull away after stopping by the gate.

My mother had spluttered at first, but my father said the ice was at least twenty centimetres thick, “Good, clean ice,” he said. “The very best. And Roland should join the lads.”

The wind had blown the snow against the dyke in banks, leaving a winding path in between. All we had to do was go
down the dyke, cross the towpath and find a suitable place to step on the ice.

We put on thick Norwegian socks, thick sweaters, mittens and woolly hats with ear flaps. There were plenty of skates for us to choose from. At the back of a cupboard in one of the rooms there were several pairs jumbled together, some of which were wooden with blades you sharpened by hand. They had a nice curl at the ends, but the wood was badly mildewed.

As we were leaving the gate armed with a couple of potato sacks for us to sit on while we tied our skates, we caught sight of someone riding a bicycle towards us, wobbling because of the icy road, and waving one arm.

An Arab or a Laplander, or so it seemed. Turbaned, with a pom-pom bobbing up and down. It turned out to be Roswita.

“Well,” Roland muttered. “I asked her to come.”

She had left her retinue of girlfriends behind. She had been attending an expensive school in town for some time, where she had probably found herself a new bevy of admirers. Only rarely did she show up at choir practice these days, but she never missed a football match.

Townie words and expressions were creeping into her speech.

“What a drag,” she would say, when Mr Snellaert made us rehearse the same chorus for the sixth time.

She also said she did Latin, which she pronounced with a frivolous little aspiration of the t—not that she was keen on all those ancient Romans, mind. When someone told her a joke she no longer laughed, she didn’t even pretend to be amused, she just said, “Hey, you don’t say,”—whatever that was supposed to mean.

She took her skates out of the carrier on her bike. “It’s been ages,” she said. “I’ve probably lost the knack.”

“Don’t worry,” Roland replied. “I’ll help you.”

It was his misfortune that his voice still switched from deep to an embarrassing squeak at times, especially when, as now, he was putting on a display of superiority. He pretended not to hear it himself, but his cheeks betrayed him.

I could tell that Willem was just as amused as I was, but neither of us let on.

“Who’s he?” Roswita asked, when Willem and Roland went on ahead to look for a less snowbound spot.

“He’s in my class. His Pa’s an architect.”

She had already looked him up and down appraisingly, I couldn’t help noticing, and no doubt decided that he was too young, too timid or too distant for her wiles, but mention of the word “architect” had made her look again.

“Does he do all right at school?”

“Not bad.”

The others were already on the ice.

“Come on, you lot,” Roland called, “if I have to stand here much longer my cock’ll freeze off.”

It was one of those typical things he’d come up with when he was embarrassed or flustered and said stuff I thought was crude, or stupid, or both.

“Why don’t you give me a hand,” Roswita called back at him. “Instead of playing the fool.”

One of her skates got caught on a reed stalk and I saw the crotch of the knitted pants she wore over her tights. Roland made a great fuss of patting the snow off her pleated skirt.

We glided past the warehouses, under the bridge, where the landscape was still empty and open. I had the feeling
that I suddenly had an awful lot to say. Everyone else always seemed to be yakking non-stop, in the refectory, in class, in the yard, in the market square after school. About stickers and cars. About the girl with the blonde hair, or the other one, with plaits—pity about all those freckles.

All that left me cold. Him too. He had books about ducks. About the jungle in Brazil. Anacondas. Mount Everest. I could have told him all about
Iceland, Child of Fire,
but I still hadn’t read it. Or about the first time I was taken to the seaside where, so my mother told me for I was too young to remember, I was so horrified by the sand that I hadn’t stopped bawling all day. The second time I had been bitterly disappointed that I couldn’t see America across the water, whereas in my atlas all the continents seemed so reassuringly close together. I could have told him that I sometimes wondered whether the solar system might be an atom. It was possible, I thought. The question intrigued me, more anyway than the Newtonian mumbo-jumbo Father Buyl distributed from behind his battery of lenses and mirrors like dry biscuits for our consumption.

I had thought about it long and hard. The possibility that I myself might consist of an infinite number of solar systems—and within one a planet like ours, and on one of its continents someone like me, but with any luck happier than me, which I would certainly be if there weren’t any schools—had made me even more doubtful about what God was up to.

“It’s nice here,” said Willem.

I looked up. Nice wasn’t the word for the world that had enfolded me from the cradle on. Whenever I stepped out of the gate a feeling of forlornness would creep over me. It wasn’t just the warehouses draping their wobbly reflections in the
water, blotting out my memories like an irritating ink stain. It wasn’t that there was too much sky, either, not even on the far side of the canal where there were no trees to relieve the starkness. Since starting my new school I sometimes felt as if I were surveying my surroundings through the wrong end of a telescope, and on other days through a microscope. The narrowness, the forsakenness of it all did not escape me, and I felt suffocated and deserted by turns.

“It’s because of the snow,” I said.

He didn’t agree. It was because of the slope upon which Zomergem was situated, that was what made the view interesting. We were at the lowest point of the Flemish lowlands. He had a book about the region.

We heard a shriek behind us. Then the sound of someone crashing into the brittle reeds by the bank, and Roswita railing against Roland for not being careful.

“Let’s turn round and go back,” I said. “Then we can go a bit further in the other direction.” We were already quite far from home, and I had spotted a couple of other skaters in the distance. I had no desire to join them.

He glided to an unsteady halt. I was the better skater. He had trouble keeping his balance, seemed unused to his own height.

For a while the only sound was the crunch and swish of our skates and Roland circling round Roswita, pushing her from behind, letting her go, skating off and returning at full speed to push her again.

She screamed.

He put his hands on her hips and braked.

They huddled together, talking in low voices and throwing quick glances in our direction.

Then he grabbed her hand and pulled her away with him. “We’re going to Bruges!” he shouted over his shoulder.

She begged him to slow down.

He wouldn’t listen.

“They’re heading for a fall,” Willem said.

They fell. It was Roswita who lost her balance first, stumbled, flailed her arms and clutched at his sweater as she fell, so that his foot shot away and he crashed on to the ice on his side.

The ice groaned. I could feel a tremor under my feet. Jagged cracks shot across the frozen canal. We held our breath.

Roland scrambled to his feet and stood there, rubbing his shoulder, dismayed. Roswita was stuck in a bank of snow. She wouldn’t let him help her.

“I can get up by myself. I want to go back.”

“I’m sorry sweetie,” I heard him say. “I’ll take you home, all right?”

Towards the end of the afternoon the clouds gathered again. The sun was a watery orange blob sinking fast. The wind rose.

My mother offered us hot chocolate and raisin bread. The light was already fading and Roland still hadn’t returned. She was getting worried.

“He’s old enough to look after himself,” my father said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“Have you had enough? Would you like anything else?” he asked Willem.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Will they be coming to fetch you?”

“Yes, at about seven.”

My mother glanced furtively at her watch. “Now, where can he have got to?”

He did not arrive until eight.

“I hung around for a bit,” he muttered. “And we had to shelter.”

He was deathly pale, and his legs were shaking.

“See a ghost on the way, by any chance?” my father asked. “You’re as white as a sheet…”