Authors: Erwin Mortier
G
OING ON FOR TWELVE
, and unfulfilled. I outgrew all my shirts in the twinkling of an eye. The world that had surrounded me so fondly up till then was beginning to resemble ancient wallpaper that might come unstuck any minute. The wardrobe mirrors still reflected robust beds with crucifixes beneath the light switch. All those Saviours fashioned out of copper or porcelain, or plated with pewter, all of them nailed and writhing. In the room that once belonged to Alice the palm frond still smelt faintly of the scent she had taken to sprinkling on it once she discovered that holy water was nothing but tap water that had been blessed by a priest.
The world had grown brittle, as friable as an Egyptian mummy or a desiccated chrysalis deep in the bark of a tree. A clap of thunder would be enough to pulverise it. In summer the stands of poplar trees managed to screen the chimney stacks of the new industrial estate, but in winter the stark factory halls edged the sunlight with the chill blink of aluminium. And although my father had planted a new hedge to hide where part of the garden and the fields beyond had been bulldozed away, the high green wall did not stop the rumble of trucks on the new elevated bridge from carrying right over the stables and pouring into the yard.
On the horizon cars raced over roads that hadn’t been there before.
The sodium lighting along the brand-new motorway cast an orange glow in the night. A few years back, on a grey day in late autumn, the mayors of the neighbouring communities had held a joint ceremony to open the new approach road. Standing shoulder to shoulder they had snipped the tricolour ribbon, eliciting a little burst of applause from the crowd. There was a picture in the local newspaper: in among the ladies’ hats and freshly sculpted hairdos were my father and Uncle Roger, both wearing expressions of mild scorn. They stood on either side of Roland’s mother, whose lips shaped the O of bravo, looking up as the reporter clicked the shutter.
Stuyvenberghe, our home town, was now linked to modernity for good. We were to reap the bittersweet harvest in time, but for now the brass band stood poised in readiness in the background and the church square became a temporary fairground.
*
“The Callewijn family’s like an old shrub,” my father used to say. “Plenty of young shoots in the old days, all but withered now.” He’d have liked ten children. Ten bedrocks in which to lay his sorrow to rest, without ever abandoning his unrealised hopes for me and my unborn brothers and sisters. He had dreamed of taking up a technical profession, of being a civil engineer. It would have been him running the construction site that was rising all around us, putting up new illusions and demolishing old ones. By the age of ten he was already making technical drawings of imaginary machines. Gears and
cog wheels. Complicated engines. Infinitely complex pumping installations which transported his dreams and eventually, when he was seventeen, sent them up in smoke. His father fell ill. Six weeks after the tests one of his legs was amputated. Not long after that the other one followed. It was in his lungs, too. He died a year later. The fields were leased and most of the cattle sold off. Someone had to be the breadwinner, and as Uncle Roger had already been studying for rather a long time, my grandmother, with characteristic pre-war fatalism, must have decided that taking her youngest boy out of school would be less of a waste.
From then on my father came home every evening around six, covered in flour-dust from the silos at the milling plant. His job was to pour the grain into troughs and watch it rattling over the conveyor belt before it vanished into machines that had not been designed by him.
But I remained an only child, the youngest shoot on the crown of a tree that was steadily dying back. A puny eleven-year-old, my frame not strong enough to bear the full weight of the past and far from ready for the future that was gnawing at my bones. My joints swelled up, my legs grew long and spindly. During the night my muscles twanged like tight strings, sending stabs of pain through my sleep.
My voice had already broken, on a high A-note during the
bonae voluntatis
on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in the twilight of the rood-loft. Mr Snellaert, the choir master, who used to go all dewy-eyed at the high reach of my chorister voice, had firmly banished me to the back row with the altos, where I was put next to a girl named Roswita. She had a high forehead in a triangular face and a bosom that had surged into womanhood way ahead of the rest of her.
She still wasn’t used to wearing a bra, and the straps bothered her. Reins, she called them. They kept slipping down her shoulders, at which she would slide her hand into her blouse or jumper to adjust them with a sigh that suggested as much pride as annoyance.
At night, when she shed her flimsy dress in her bedroom, the red marks on her shoulders left by the straps would be like the welts on the Aunts’ thighs when they took off their boned corsets or garter belts—but she wasn’t anywhere near as fleshy as Flora, who, before she got cancer, would wake up in the morning to find that the sheets had carved veritable canyons into her buttocks, which took ages to disappear.
It was only a matter of time before girls burgeoned into women, layered with sleekness and soft bumps. What time did to me was wreak havoc with old established ties and rudely rearrange the loose ends inside my body. Those were the years when I would grind my teeth and go into a sulk for days without knowing why.
I needed everything else to change, too, irreparably so. The doors of my toy cars had to rattle on their hinges when I raced them over the uneven floor tiles. Sand from the sandpit would have to clog up the axles, they’d have to lose their wheels, which would go skittering across the floorboards and down the stairs, where they would be subsumed into an orgy of discards at the bottom. I had picked at the seams in the sides of my teddy bears until they gave way, had stuck my fingers inside to grope for hearts and livers. Even my building blocks, so irritatingly solid despite the growth rings of the tree on the outside, were put to the test by my attempting to sink my teeth into them.
“You don’t deserve such nice toys,” my mother groused when she saw the slaughter of arms and legs around my bed,
the splayed hands with dented fingertips, the dismembered bodies and severed heads, empty and gaping like the discarded mantle of a reptile or an insect.
She used to buy my clothes a size or two too big, so I could grow into them. My shirts flapped draughtily around my ribcage, and I had to secure my trousers with a belt to keep them in place.
“You wear stuff out faster than your Dad earns his wages. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know.”
She was always hearing about obscure warehouses with cut-price sales, where plenty of clothing and shoes could be picked up for half the normal price. She would order my father to get into the car and push me on to the back seat, after which she would rummage through the profusion of notes, shopping lists and receipts in her pockets for the scrap of paper with directions that a neighbour or distant cousin had spelled out for her.
“Best if we take the side roads,” she would instruct, as if the straight lines of the motorway were offensive to the meanderings of her mental landscape.
My father had given up protesting. He had even stopped letting out a sigh of resignation before turning the key in the ignition. Even if we were completely lost within the hour, bumping over twisting country roads, with my mother in the front beside him staring agitatedly at the creased scrap of paper in her fingers, and then out the window again in the hope of spotting a phone box with a plastic rubbish bin next to it, a front garden with azaleas, or the chip shop where we were supposed to make a left turn, or a right and then over the railway crossing—the effect on my father was always the same: his exasperation was transformed into a veneer of cool
detachment which seemed to cover the windows on the inside with a mist of ice crystals.
Now and then he glanced in the rear-view mirror. His eyes met mine in a look of complicity.
Our destination would invariably be some derelict factory hall in the ragged outskirts of the city. The walls showed signs of old advertisement hoardings having been removed and replaced by hastily painted placards shouting “Lido” or “Textima”, the names of shady businesses which sprouted like poppies on wasteland only to shrivel almost immediately. The bleak euphoria of slogans like
Rock-Bottom Prices, Everything Must Go,
or
Your Savings Paradise,
made my mother quicken her pace.
Inside, in the glow of neon strip lights, half of which were blinking nervously, was a scene of mass plunder. Women trailing husbands and children in exactly the same state of bored resignation as my father and myself plunged their arms into troughs full of clothing. Holding their bunches of socks or underwear jammed under their elbows, they were like bumble bees weighed down with pollen as they descended on one heap after another, savouring, clawing, groping.
She made me try everything on. If there weren’t fitting rooms I would have to take my clothes off in front of everybody, no matter how loudly I protested.
“Don’t be so silly,” my mother would cry. “Nobody’s looking. Anyway, there’s no hair between your legs yet.”
Actually, I had cut off the first four hairs out of sheer astonishment at what I saw in the mirror in my room, as though nature had decided to furnish my groin with whiskers, a goatee in the wrong place. For weeks the stubble had irritated my thighs. I had shaved them off with my father’s
razor, and had cauterised the cuts with eau de Cologne. After that I had given up.
If I held back long enough I knew my mother would eventually open her raincoat and hold out the sides like tent-flaps to shield me, which gave some measure of protection although it only deepened my mortification. I felt like an overgrown kangaroo joey, too small for the world, too big for the pouch. At these moments I would seek reassurance from my father, always in vain, for he would have turned away from the embarrassing spectacle, and not until it was all over would he console me with a pat on the back.
In the end the clothes found their way into my wardrobe, where the folded piles slowly absorbed the scent of my mother’s trademark lavender soap. It was an act of rebellion against her compulsive tidiness—which I certainly didn’t want to have passed down to me—that I clogged up my room with crumpled sheets of paper, piles of books, empty glasses, dirty clothes. I would exult in my quiet mutiny when she padded down the corridor early in the morning and I could almost hear her outrage clawing at my door as she went past.
It was only a matter of time before she could no longer resist taking action. It was usually on a Saturday, when I was having a lie-in, that she would charge into my room armed with pails, chamois leather and brushes. She would whip off my bedclothes, knowing full well how embarrassed I’d be, and regard me with barely concealed amusement as I turned over on my front as quickly as I could and groped under the bed for my underpants. Sometimes she would bend down herself to help me find them, only to retrieve the odd sock, dirty handkerchief or dusty vest, which she would hold up like a dead rat between thumb and index finger before dropping it
theatrically in the laundry basket. Usually she held her tongue during these blitz operations, convinced that the noise of all the sweeping and clattering and sloshing, which pursued me to the bottom of the stairs, was the best way of conveying her disappointment in me.
*
One Saturday towards the end of August she reached boiling point. During breakfast my father and I did not speak. I kept my eyes on my plate while he glanced sideways at the newspaper lying on the table among crumbs and spots of jam. She bustled about, adjusting table settings and moving and re-moving a stack of my comics from one side table to another.
“Paradise,” my father murmured to himself. He had folded the newspaper to the page with the crossword. “Four letters.”
“Eden,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, lowered the tip of his ballpoint on to the paper and nodded.
I knew he knew the word without me telling him. He also knew how risky it was, with my mother hovering so close, to give the impression of being in any way pleased.
She strode towards the mantelpiece. I saw my father cringe. Woe betide him if there were any unpaid bills among the envelopes stuffed behind the clock, which she shifted ever so slightly with futile but measured precision to achieve an exact parallel with the ledge.
We ducked like schoolboys as she swept past on her way out of the room. She reappeared wearing her grey nylon apron.
“The upstairs room needs a good clean,” she said curtly. “I’m not waiting till just before they arrive.”
She had tied on a headscarf and knotted it under her chin, and was wearing blue galoshes. She made for the stairs bearing her brooms and long-handled mops like hatchets in the crook of her arm.
“But first I’ll have a go at that pigsty of yours,” she said in passing, without looking at me.
I heard her climb the stairs. She swore when a scrubbing brush slipped out of a pail and skidded down several steps.
“Why can’t you clear up your own room for once?” my father asked, not expecting an answer. He got up. “We’d better start doing our bit.”
*
Up in the attic there was a stack of planks covered by an old blanket, which we were to assemble into a bed.
“It’s time the bed came down from up there,” my mother had said several times over the past few days, in the aggrieved tone that she used in all her utterances.
We carried the planks down from the attic and left them in the room next to mine, where she was rushing around in a frenzy of tidying. She had already put my boxes containing the discarded body parts of bears and dolls by the door, so she could burn them in the back garden. I had no difficulty picturing the horror on her face as she carried the jar containing dead beetles outside, and her disgust when she found the bean plant with its roots tangled in the holes of the sponge, from which they had extracted the last drop of moisture before drying up completely.