My Fellow Skin (8 page)

I wanted to pack, get ready, and thereby assuage my impatience with rituals, but everything was already in my satchel. I got undressed and lay down on my bed.

The drone from the television downstairs was faintly audible in my room. I turned over on my side and watched the daylight fade.

The drop in temperature made the floorboards shrink again. All the rooms in the house seemed to be filling up with their original occupants. Michel hunting for gin in the dresser. Flora zigzagging towards the bed on her crutches.

“They’re in heaven, all of them,” my father had said many times.

But what was heaven? Perhaps it was a world that lay above or beneath ours, as transparent as the tissue paper separating the pages of Aunt Odette’s photo album.

“There aren’t any clocks in heaven,” Mr Snellaert had insisted when he was preparing us for our Confirmation. “Just trumpets sounding the Day of Judgement.”

Perhaps they were still roaming through the rooms, blind to the new wallpaper, deaf to our conversations. Perhaps they still gathered round the table downstairs in the dead of
night or in the middle of what was daytime to us, and did jigsaw puzzles, played cards or darned socks. Now and then, I imagined, Flora would get up, groaning, and drag herself to bed to give birth or to die all over again, after which she would get up again and carry on, according to some logic governed by other-worldly clocks.

The night had grown as dark as their skirts, which my mother had long since thrown away or cut up for use as dust-cloths. I dozed off and didn’t know how much later it was when I woke up, from the cold maybe, or from something else. An intriguing sound, there it was again, the rhythmical creaking of bedsprings in Roland’s room. It stopped abruptly when I coughed.

I got up and put on my pyjamas. Outside my window, in the dark-blue dusk, hung the full moon. The light shone silver-white on my table, on the lampshade and the handle of my new satchel.

“Roland?” I asked. “Are you awake?”

I heard a deep sigh.

It sounded far too studied for someone who was asleep.

I
DREAMED I WAS WEARING
a dark suit, jacket and long trousers, shirt and tie, and that my body, although unmistakably mine, was eighteen years old, taut and strong. There were a whole lot of us, a long row filing through a colonnaded passage, or was it a cloistered garden? I was overtaken by someone wearing a brown monk’s habit, and in the heat of a June afternoon we lined up on some brick steps between two conifers clipped into conical shapes, just like in the photo propped up against the spines of the encyclopaedias in my father’s room downstairs.

My father is holding the school flag at the top of a pyramid of boys with closely cropped heads, under his arm a roll of parchment tied with a narrow scarlet ribbon. Black hair parted down the middle. Two locks falling over his forehead, almost hiding his eyes. He looks grave, concerned almost, as if he already knew that his schooldays were over.

My breast filled with boundless joy, as though something wonderful was afoot, and there we stood, waiting in the shimmering light, perhaps for a photographer to click the shutter.

There was a moment’s hush, filled with the twitter of sparrows. The air was electric. Then someone next to me cringed away, and someone else shrieked and covered his face with his hands. From behind me came the sound of breaking glass.
I could hear stones clattering down the tiled roof. In front of me someone collapsed on the ground, as though hit by a bullet. Still more broken glass. The wail of a siren. Someone shouted “Watch out!” I ducked instinctively, but a flying object hit me above my right eye.

It was a while before I realised that I was staring up at the cracks in the ceiling of my room, that I must have been woken by the noise Roland made as he groped sleepily for the alarm clock to silence it.

I stepped out of bed, grabbed a towel and went over to the washbasin.

Roland had opened one baleful eye. For a moment it seemed he was not going to get up, that he would turn over and snuggle down, but then he kicked off the covers and leaped out of bed.

“Move over,” he said gruffly. His hair was tousled, as if he’d been swimming across a sea of sheets or burrowing through banks of bed linen until the alarm clock brought release.

We took turns splashing water over our faces, stooping like birds quenching their thirst, craning our necks forward and drawing ourselves up again.

Every time he bent over I stared down at his neck. I noticed several moles, some of them with wiry hairs growing out of them, which were quite unlike the normal hairs that lay flat on his skin. When he clapped his hands to his face and snorted contentedly his shoulder blades stuck out, hard and angular as if he were sprouting wings that cast a shadow over the archipelago of his backbone.

“Get a move on,” he grumbled, “it’s a quarter past seven already.” But it was earlier than ever before. It was the earliest I had ever had to get up.

My eyelids were still heavy with sleep when we went downstairs, where my mother had already put two airtight sandwich boxes side by side on the table.

“Scrambled eggs and bacon,” she announced cheerily as she came in from the kitchen with the coffee pot. She proceeded to fill our cups, with remarkably good humour. She was actually humming as she ruffled my hair and leaned across to offer Roland a kiss, which he accepted after a moment’s hesitation.

Pink and fluffy in her dressing gown and quilted slippers, my mother sipped her coffee and eyed me with such tenderness that I started chewing more and more slowly, out of sheer apprehension. She wasn’t to think I would burst into tears when it was time for us to leave for school.

Meanwhile Roland devoured six slices of bread in quick succession, gulped down his coffee and took a swig of milk. Then he got up, belched, and solemnly said, “Pardon.”

“Enjoyed your breakfast?” my mother said, smiling.

He took his plate to the kitchen, despite her protests. “No need to bother, Roland. That’s a mother’s work.”

Turning to me, she laid her hand on my cheek. “Fancy having to let you go already…”

I pulled away. “My shoes,” I said.

I had put on my ankle boots, which came close to being as clumpy as the black leather clogs that Roland wore. Shoes with thick soles, which made me at least two centimetres taller, but they had complicated laces. They reached out in meandering labyrinthine coils and laid themselves in nasty knots when I tried to deal with them unaided.

“You should really start tying your own laces, you know,” my mother said, with a rueful sigh. She kneeled down at my feet.

“You will take care, won’t you?” she said with a catch in her throat. “Just you stick close to Roland, mind.”

I was glad I couldn’t see her fighting back her tears.

Roland took the lead as we rode over the dyke, both with our satchels on our backs. It was a pale morning, neither sunny nor cloudy. Swathes of mist drifted over the water and further on, where the canal curved and widened out, the houses and trees were veiled in grey. We cycled alongside the warehouses with fork-lift trucks riding in and out, past the flour mill where strange funnels suspended from cranes sucked up the cargo of ships moored alongside in a cloud of fine yellow dust. On some days I would catch sight of my father at work there. He’d look up if I rang my bell, but today he was nowhere to be seen.

All the way up to the railway crossing the world was familiar to me. I had explored the sandy lanes, knew where everyone lived and which guard dogs I had to beware of, and could locate the bomb craters that had turned into ponds alive with the whirr of dragonflies making rainbows with their wings. The stretch of open countryside came to an end in a thickly canopied wood.

There, under the trees, it smelled of damp earth, of fermentation and mould. The first toadstools were shooting up in the verges. Peering through the gaps in the rhododendron bushes, I could make out the castle at the end of the drive. That was as far as I had ever ventured on my bicycle, before racing back the way I came for fear of getting lost in the web of lanes.

The park was deserted. Peacocks strutted about on the lawn, dragging their tails behind them. Magpies chattered in the depths of the wood. Pigeons circled around the roofs of the farmhouses at the far end.

“Can you keep up?” Roland panted.

“No problem,” I cried, although my calves were aching and the saddle was beginning to hurt my thighs.

The trees thinned out. Through the brushwood a pool sparkled, with little islands rising like ruined fortresses above the mist and fringes of reed. We came upon an open space. There were fields, some of which had been parcelled into plots where villas were under construction. Still further on the road made a sharp turn, and we were riding under the trees again, but uphill now. Roland stood up on the pedals. I broke out in a sweat.

At the top we found ourselves in a busy settlement of houses, with bicycles pouring on to the road from all sides.

“Hey Roland, have you moved house or something?” someone called in passing.

“Hi,” Roland called back, without bothering to look who it was.

I kept my eyes fixed ahead, anxious not to get tangled with the other bikes on the road. By the time we reached the high street the stream of cyclists had swollen to a swarm, a plague of locusts surging past the houses, crossing the market square with the bandstand and sliding into a narrow side street.

A few hundred metres on, surrounded by wasteland where stretches of newly constructed roads stopped abruptly as though the houses they led to had yet to rise from the ground, stood our school.

I had imagined crenellations, ramparts and walls overgrown with ivy or woodbine; that I would be entering a world of study and respectful silence, with deeply shaded galleries and turrets like minarets, and a drawbridge; but what I saw was more like a stack of shoeboxes, austere and white, with cold steel window frames. One of the boxes had a low gateway, into which plunged the horde of bicycles.

I had trouble keeping up with Roland. In the end I lost sight of him and simply followed the others into a gloomy space with concrete pillars and bicycle racks.

Boys got down from their saddles, exchanging noisy greetings. I threaded my way through them cautiously, until my ear was pulled hard. A man with a face like a lump of dough barked at me that cycling was not allowed past the gateway. “Got that?”

I parked my bike in one of the racks, feeling weak at the knees. I spotted Roland in the mêlée spilling out over the bleak, paved courtyard, but when I went up to him he didn’t seem keen to have me around.

“You’re supposed to stay on that side,” he drawled, pointing to a white line crossing the school yard from end to end, dividing it exactly in two.

On the far side gangly youths bounced basketballs on the pavement. The near side, reserved for juniors, was occupied by lads lugging outsized satchels, circling each other warily, breaking ranks again and picking at their pimples.

I saw Roland go up to a group of boys who greeted him warmly. Punches were exchanged, playful blows were dodged. Someone held him fast, made him bend over and swiped off his cap.

I retraced my steps. The chap with the doughy face was
walking back and forth along the white line like a border guard, and kept glancing in my direction.

Of all the things I had seen in my father’s photographs, only the monastery with its frail cupolas and pretty bay windows was still standing. Wedged in among a couple of the shoeboxes, the old building seemed to tremble while it was being slowly squashed.

There were tufts of grass growing on the brick steps where my father had once raised the school flag, and the conifers must have been chopped down ages ago. In the middle of a small, fussy flower bed stood a weather-beaten Christ spreading his arms, one of which had been amputated at the elbow, either due to a mishap or to mischief.

There was no horizon anywhere. No way out. Not even when I looked up. The sky was a rectangular hole with a lid of clouds.

This was St Joseph’s Institute for Hopeless Education, where it snowed chalk-dust, the sterile pollen of learning, day in day out. Where all the classrooms were equipped with centrally driven clocks swotting the minutes away like so many flies. Where tired kaffir lilies in pots on the window sills struggled to produce the bloom that might well be their last.

I picked my way cautiously across the school yard, avoiding throngs of arguing boys, and positioned myself against the wall at the far end. A stale, sour-sweet smell from the stairs leading up to the classrooms wafted towards me. It was as though everything had been treated with a secret substance, not for the purpose of banishing the fluffy detritus from hundreds of jumpers, the smell of farts, belches, badly brushed teeth, the stench of countless armpits, but on the contrary to preserve them and mix them all up in a potent, all-enveloping
atmosphere: that of school. More vividly than any punishment it was the institutional fug that brought home to me that school had reduced me to a cipher, one of the herd. Part sheep ready for slaughter, part insect; a creature with spindly, puny bones, rising saps and a nervous system like an over-twigged fruit tree in dire need of pruning.

A bell shrilled out. The older boys straggled into the building for class. The chap with the dough-face called out, “New boys assemble in front of the monastery.”

Someone had thought to place a microphone on the terrace. Two of the bay windows were wide open and had loudspeakers on the sills.

I hung around at the back of the group. A boy with long fair hair said, “Hello. I’m Willem,” and extended his hand.

“I’m Anton,” I said, somewhat taken aback by his friendliness.

“Do you live in Ruizele?”

I shook my head. “No, in Stuyvenberghe. It’s not far from here.”

“I live in the woods near here,” he said. “My father’s an architect,” he added, as if the two were connected.

He spoke in a soft, well-mannered kind of way, which I found just as pleasing as his hair. But the others thought he sounded funny: they glanced at him and sniggered.

He was not one of us. The speech patterns underlying his language were different. He did not have the musty, cavernous tone that distinguished the regional accent, instead he spoke in a leisurely, mellifluous sing-song.

“So what does your Pa do?” he asked.

“We used to farm,” I said.

He did not pursue the subject.

The door of the monastery opened and a short, doll-like figure emerged. He stepped daintily to the microphone, adjusted his brown Homburg hat, slipped his hand into the pocket of his fluttering nylon raincoat and drew out a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. He put them on with a flourish of the fingers.

“That’s Father Deceuster,” Willem said. “He’s the principal. A do-gooder.”

The priest unfolded a sheet of paper with delicate movements. A pause ensued, during which he eyed us sharply. When he finally pronounced the words “Good morning young men”, we all started at the volume of his voice.

His booming salutation was instantly met with a tinny screech from the loudspeakers blaring out over the brick paving.

The priest took his spectacles off and hissed, “François, François!”

The man with the dough-face tiptoed to the front, made a reassuring gesture and ran inside. The screeching stopped.

Recovering himself, the priest readjusted his glasses and said, “You have just made the acquaintance of Mr Bouillie! Devoted study supervisor and a pillar of this institution. A round of applause for Mr Bouillie!”

A couple of boys started clapping dutifully. Willem kept his hands in his pockets.

The priest considered this to be a blessed day, for it was the first day not only of term but also of the school year, which meant that we were embarking on a great adventure.

“He says the same thing every year,” Willem murmured. “He’ll be telling us about the new sports hall next.”

“This school is ready and waiting for you,” the priest said, beaming. “With all the proper modern facilities, and we are proud—as I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr Bouillie—to announce that the new sports hall can finally, yes finally, be put to use. From now on we play basketball indoors and we swim in our own private pool!”