My Fellow Skin (4 page)

The pillow supporting his astonishingly bald head—I had rarely seen him without his cap—was decked with twigs of cherry laurel, and at his feet lay a bouquet of early dahlias.

For all I knew he was tricking me. At harvest time, in the barn, he pretended he was the corn monster, and in the orchard he would give the almond tree a sudden shake when I passed, unsuspecting, underneath.

“Michel,” I called out, half-grinning.

“Shshsh,” Roland whispered. He clapped a sweaty hand over my mouth.

I drew back indignantly.

“Michel!” I cried again.

Roland brushed past me and stopped a few paces short of the bed. He tucked his hands under his arms, as if he too expected Michel would leap up any minute and chase us down the passage to tap us on the backside with his walking stick.

He did not move.

Roland went up to the bed and slouched against the mattress. He extended his arm and covered Michel’s hand with his.

My heart lurched, but aside from an almost inaudible click of the rosary beads in the blue fingers, nothing happened.

Roland looked at me, hunching his shoulders.

“Down in the hole,” he said solemnly, “down in the hole.”

N
IGHT ALWAYS FELL
suddenly, and it was with the same suddenness that the shutters were flung open and the blinds raised in the front room, where the coffin resting on trestles shone darkly. I was swung from arm to arm, washed, brushed, given milk to drink, and when everyone was gathered in the hall my mother rounded on my father, exclaiming, “Pa, what have you done? I did say to put on his black shoes, not the pale ones.”

The house had filled up over the past few days. In the front room and in the kitchen I’d had to squeeze through hedges of shins and calves to get anywhere near my father or my mother. She was standing by the sink, sweating as she turned the handle of the meat grinder. Women I had never seen before were watching her every move. They addressed me as “Antoine”.

The night before I had listened as everyone trooped through the house, all the way to Michel’s room. I had stood up in my cot and leaned against the raised side, straining to hear.

I heard Roland tiptoe across the landing to the stairs. He sat down on the top step and I caught the sound of him scratching the paint off the skirting board.

They must have been praying, but I thought they were singing or reciting poems about rosebuds in the rain.

For the past few days I had taken to slipping away, when the others were still at table, to open the door of Michel’s room and check whether he was awake and moving yet. But he had ignored me each time.

I had shown him my new toy car, and the kite that hadn’t been torn to shreds in the branches of the beech tree, and my orange tin box; but even my silver spoon, which was shinier than anything I had ever seen, had not been enough to provoke a reaction. In the end I just stayed away and sulked. Quite soon I hardly knew he was there.

We advanced like shadows over the dyke road. Hunched shoulders. Furry collars. Black leather. Veils. I was the only one wearing pale shoes.

Around us everything glittered and made us blink. The bleached corn leaned sideways in swathes. The parched poplar foliage, already curling at the edges, rustled crisply overhead, and the grey ostrich plumes on the hearse bobbed up and down, as comically as the pompons on the ponies’ bridles when the circus came to town and the clown’s trousers fell down.

My father swung me over the potholes by one arm. Every few steps my mother raised her hand to massage her ear lobe between thumb and forefinger or to pat the lapels of her coat.

Now and then I caught a glimpse of Roland a few paces ahead of me, wedged between his parents. He was being propelled forward rather than walking in step, and several times I saw his feet kicking in mid-air above the cobbles.

As she passed, Aunt Odette gave my shoulder a squeeze with a black-gloved hand that reminded me of a bird’s scaly claw. She hissed that I was to behave myself, later on.

“Listen!” she said, pointing her finger to her ear. “The bells, already…”

I heard the slow tolling of the bell and the long silences between each stroke, and I was overcome with boredom. Everything clotted together in the heat.

The rooms where the grown-ups gathered to while away their boredom were places that spelled boredom for me. In the café on Sundays after Mass the rattling of dice, the grunts and cries from a dart thrower and the thumping of fistfuls of cards on table-tops mingled in a heaving swell of tedium on which I floated, feeling seasick. I would clutch the legs of a bar stool for support, or my father’s legs as he stood drinking and laughing.

There was the mild boredom of the women as they sat on the chairs they had taken outside, with their skirts hitched up over their knees. Bent on catching the last rays of sunlight, they craned their necks and spoke little, and for a moment that lasted for ever they manifested the same inanimate truculence as my rag dolls and my bears, on those intensely monotonous days when everything seemed to defy my imagination.

Boredom also nestled in the lofts over the stables, where years of undisturbed compaction had transformed it into bales of straw more akin to dust, and in the boxes containing rusty forks and spoons under my father’s work bench. A mere glimpse of them was enough to make me feel as lost and
abandoned as the tarnished cutlery itself, which left a sour aftertaste on your fingertips if you touched them.

Deadliest of all, though, was the boredom of church, where the vaulted ceilings held every second captive and the priest, like a puppet attached to invisible strings, knelt jerkily, broke bread and drank wine without offering me a taste.

A man with a gold tooth in the corner of his mouth and a peaked cap had awaited us in the portal. After the coffin had been lifted from the hearse, he separated the men from the women with a casual gesture.

My father sat me on the chair beside him and pressed a soft toy into my hands. Roland was sitting in the row behind us, rocking agitatedly from side to side. Now and then he glanced up at his father to see how he was coping with the enervation.

Cymbals clanged. My father turned our seats and knelt on the prayer stool. I sat down on mine with my back to the altar.

Roland reached for the tips of my shoes, and in doing so dropped a handful of coins, which skittered across the floor.

“Pick them up,” his father hissed.

Roland cowered. He was out of his element, a world with nooks and crannies for hiding in, a place where he could calculate distances and escape routes, like this morning, when he had plunged in among the coats hanging from the pegs as soon as his mother came near. She was sitting across the aisle, on the other side of the bier, and sank down on her knees so devoutly as to elicit a faint smile from Aunt Odette. When the priest sent the collection box round, she drew from her handbag a tight roll of bills which crackled softly but had more impact than the brassy jingle of the coins donated by the other Aunts.

Even in church, under the heaven-high arches, she was like an elephant absorbing all the space around her and elbowing everyone who came near into a corner. Roland must have plopped out of her body without leaving any trace at all, or only the most fleeting ripple. He must have escaped her like an unwelcome thought, an unforeseen, unpleasant surprise which had left her daydreams in tatters and had been twisting doorknobs and knocking over vases ever since.

On the flagstones at my feet I followed the wavy calcite patterns like the courses of rivers on a map, until they ended at the mortar-filled edge. All around me the stained glass windows of the south apse dissolved into patches of colour. Time waded through sand.

It puzzled me that grown-ups should want always to sit still, not to move at all or hardly, and ended up stowing themselves away in a box with a lid on top, to be dead and gone.

When the priest walked round the coffin sprinkling holy water we got wet, too, and I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head without thinking. My father slipped it down again with a smile.

“Just hang on a little bit longer,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

In the mound of fresh earth beside the yawning hole among the gravestones, I glimpsed fat, shiny earthworms poking out briefly before wriggling back in. Roland held tight to his father’s hand and peered cautiously over the side. Clods of earth thudded on to the wood.

Two nights earlier, my father had woken me up in the
middle of the night. He had taken me in his arms and carried me downstairs. To my mother’s protests he had replied, “It’s all right for him to see.”

We had stood around the foot of the coffin. Beside me the Aunts sent their rosaries flying through their fingers.

Roland’s father supported the old man’s head while the trunk and the legs were lifted up by two others. Wearing the same expression of mockery mixed with scorn, Michel had allowed them to lower him into the casket.

It was only when the Aunts kissed his forehead one by one that for a moment I had the impression his eyes had opened a crack. All of a sudden he had seemed angry, stricken by a stubborn fury, the way I sometimes felt when my mother hid my building blocks from me and I held my breath in outrage.

My father leaned across to lay his hand on Michel’s forehead, just before the lid was closed. He had put my hand on Michel’s forehead.

“Cold,” I had said.

My mother fled into the garden.

“Down in the hole,” Roland sang. His mother clapped her hand over his mouth and jerked him back, into the crowd.

A while later I saw him saunter out of the churchyard, past the wrought iron gate. His father swore under his breath but did not go after him.

Somewhere a dog barked, and almost at once Roland reappeared, ashen-faced and hurrying up the path. He’d got a fright, which pleased me.

His father turned round. “Come here,” he said, extending an arm.

Roland bent down.

The gravediggers thrust their spades into the earth.

“Why don’t you walk with us,” Aunt Alice said.

My father had his arm round my mother’s waist. People shuffled past, men doffed their hats, my father nodded.

No-one spoke. The heat was oppressive.

“One metre seventy,” Flora said. “I thought he was shorter.”

Aunt Odette unclasped her handbag and stuffed her handkerchief inside.

“They always look smaller when they’re dead.”

Out in the yard, under the beech tree, folding tables were set up, glasses were filled to the brim and trays piled high with sandwiches were handed round. As soon as we got back, Roland’s mother had gone upstairs to change her dark clothes for a salmon-pink frock. The Aunts were scandalised.

“Sometimes it’s more sudden than you think,” Roland’s father said. “Myself, I’d want to make sure I was in a decent state before I died. Someone’s always got to clean up the mess.”

“Diddle diddle doo,” sang Aunt Flora, her cheeks wobbling as she bounced me on her knee.

“Was I happy when you came along! Sooo happy! Corneel and I only produced girls, and Aunt Odette, poor thing, she never even got hitched. Far too picky, she was. No-one was good enough. Too fat, too thin, too rich, too poor.”

She raised her glass of port wine to my lips.

“There, have a sip,” she urged quietly when no-one was looking, and again, and again, until the world reeled and swayed as I slithered down her shins.

It was one of those summer days when flying ants swarmed up from their nests en masse to dance over the treetops, and swallows scissored through the swarms.

“Anton, d’you want a sandwich?” my mother cried, but I did not reply.

I wandered off towards the stone steps leading to the vegetable patch and the fence where the woodbine crept up to invade the boughs of the beech tree.

I wanted to play in the orchard or by the vegetable patch, or in the lee of the hedges, where at this time of year the windless afternoon air vibrated minutely as a peach dropped from a tree and bounced two or three times on the tufted grass. I wanted to see how the stoneweed growing in the cracks between the paving stones folded its halo of fleshy leaves against the sun, and to hear the leisurely flap-flap of hens unfurling their wings like fans.

I wanted to follow the sandy path to the end of the orchard and thread my arm carefully through the thorny sprays of bramble to pick the first blackberries, all the way at the back, where the unknown vastness began.

The plum tree had shed a few early, unripe fruit, which lay fermenting in the grass. Soon they would burst, and clouds of buzzing flies or wasps would settle on them to gobble them up. Afterwards, the leftover stones would bleach in the grass.

There was a weeping willow by the old ice-house next to the pond which had been dug long ago, before Belgium came into existence, but which had been filled in since. My father leaned against the trunk and said, “Look, that’s where we’d hide when the bombers came over, in that dark hole over there. We slept on straw, like rabbits. Remember, Roger?”

Uncle Roger nodded. “Our father used to say there’s no safer roof than the roots of a tree. They hold the stones in place. Still, he did cross himself when they bombed the bridge. The pieces flew right over the shed.”

“We were lucky,” my father said. “Damned lucky. You don’t realise when you’re young. I thought it was exciting. Better than fireworks.”

“And in the winter of forty-one,” Uncle Roger said, “we used to cross the frozen canal to get to school. Ma was furious. Yet the ice was at least half a metre thick.”

“She was always worrying. It’s not until you have kids of your own that you can see why.” My father took his hands out of his trouser pockets, took a deep breath, gave me a poke and cried, “Race you to the bottom!”

I charged down the slope, stumbling over the tussocky grass.

He gave me a head start. “Watch out. There’s an ugly monster chasing you,” he cried.

Over my shoulder I saw Uncle Roger crawling towards me on all fours, teeth bared and growling alarmingly.

“A great big dog,” my father chuckled. “He’s going to bite you in the bum.”

My foot shot into a hole and I fell flat on my face.

Two hands grabbed me under my arms and pulled me upright. Uncle Roger put his teeth against my neck, my tummy, and swung me round by my arms.

Air whooshing past my ears. Tingle in the stomach.

“Fatty, fatty, fatty, you’re a Swiss cheese patty.” He put me down.

I fell over backwards.

Treetops, roofs, clouds wheeled around me. I could hear the Aunts taking the dishes into the kitchen, chairs being folded with a clatter.

My father knelt on the grass beside me. It was summer. Branches drooping with foliage and a blue-and-white sky beyond.

I ran my hands over his bare forearms.

“Fatty, fatty, like a Swiss cheese patty.” He flung a handful of grass in my face.

I blew the blades away, groped for his neck, and the world broke into smithereens of sheer delight.