My Fellow Skin (6 page)

It was my job to hold the planks level while he slid the ends into the notches in the headboard and screwed them in place.

My mother scrubbed the rusty stain in the washbasin and the spots on the mirror above until she was too exhausted to continue. She gave the writing desk, newly varnished by my father, an extra polish with her chamois and lined the shelves of the wall cabinet with dark brown paper.

It had been a few days since she had rubbed linseed oil into the floorboards. Now the heady, petrol-like smell deepened my unease at the prospect of my cousin Roland’s arrival within the next few hours.

Had no-one ever noticed there was something peculiar about Roland’s mother? With each family celebration, with each funeral her glossy furs seemed more extravagant and her cheeks more thickly streaked with powder. With each successive gathering she had grown less steady on her feet. It was as if she might collapse any moment under the weight of her gold jewellery, of which she wore increasing quantities until her neck and wrists were buried in precious stones. The more lavish her attire, the louder the note of despair in her ostentation.

I had visited their house just once. It was an immaculate villa with a scattering of ornamental rocks in the garden and a small fountain in front, where the gleam of gravel on the garden path and the Chinese vases on the window sill added to the impression of genteel grandeur. At my house they didn’t mind if I came to the table with dirty hands. They didn’t mind if I sailed toy boats on the slushy moat around the muck heap. I wore the smell of stables like the scent of the great outdoors, and if I tore my shirt on the holly hedge
in search of blackbirds’ nests I seldom got a clip around the ear, all I got was an angry look and it was over.

That afternoon found us gathered around the table like sculptures moulded to our seats, staring fixedly at the lace tablecloth and the platters with tarts that looked as if they had been modelled in clay.

Roland’s mother sank her knife into the iced cake with a flourish, and when her thumb inadvertently scooped an arabesque of whipped cream she had cringed as if it were a mortal sin. She had gone to the kitchen, where she could be heard shuffling her feet and blowing her nose repeatedly. An embarrassed silence had ensued, in which the clock ticking in the hall sounded faintly sarcastic.

Roland hadn’t thought of offering to show me around. He was stuck on his chair as if he were carved in stone, with his hands tucked under his thighs. When his father finally told us to be off, half the doors in the house turned out to be locked.

Through the keyholes lurked sofas with extravagantly carved legs. They were rarely sat on, and the cushions hadn’t been touched since the last time someone had arranged them prettily against the back. There were books permanently cloistered behind glass, their spines pristine, untouched.

My cousin didn’t have boxes with shells hidden away in his room. There wasn’t a single shelf on which he kept rocks picked from the bed of a stream for the sake of their veins of gold that no-one had thought to mine.

We went into the garden. He showed me the rope ends dangling from the limb of an ailanthus tree, where his swing had been until the day he landed in the middle of mother’s dahlia bed, plank and all.

We mooched among the flowerbeds edged with box and
kicked a football around half-heartedly, anxious that a poorly aimed shot might knock a Greek god off his pedestal. From the other side of the fence came the sound of girls playing in the neighbours’ swimming pool. Beach balls soared like colourful enticements over the conifer hedge. Elsewhere, boys would be storming sand castles, laying ambushes and fighting lightning battles.

I hadn’t seen much of Roland since that day, and even less of his mother. Later, when he started secondary school, there was talk of him throwing crockery around, breaking windows and stealing from shops. She had packed him off to boarding school, but he’d made such a nuisance of himself there that he’d been expelled before the year was out. Then one day, in the summer before my twelfth birthday, his father came to visit us on his own. I saw him at the kitchen table with my father, drinking gin. He sat with one of his arms hanging lamely over the back of the wooden chair, fidgeting with the frayed edge of the rush seat. His expression was as dark as a leaden sky before a hailstorm.

After he had left my father took me to the orchard.

“Roland’s coming to stay with us for a while,” he said. “It’s for the best.”

I already had a new bicycle, which I kept in the old stable. A proper bike with a big lamp powered by a dynamo which purred when I pedalled hard over the dyke in anticipation of Roland’s arrival. Flying ducks skimmed my head as they swooped down to land on the water. I craned my neck to make the wind, which hugged me closer than my clothes, sing loudly in my hair.

H
IS FATHER BROUGHT HIM
by car. They stood facing each other forlornly in the yard. They unloaded his bike from the luggage rack, took two suitcases out of the boot, a couple of coats and a bag containing winter clothes.

“I won’t come in,” Uncle Roger said. “I don’t like leaving Mother on her own.”

Roland responded to his father’s handshake with a perfunctory kiss. He followed the car as it backed out through the gate, then walked up to the dyke.

From my room I watched him amble along the towpath, kicking stones into the water. He pulled up his socks and sat down among the leafy irises on the bank. Now and then he greeted the skipper at the wheel of a passing barge with a listless wave of the hand.

He hadn’t addressed a single word to me since his arrival. Before sitting down to supper that evening he made for the kitchen, unbuttoned his cuffs and held his hands under the pump. Then he took his seat at table and proceeded to cut his slice of bread into cubes, presumably because that was what they did at home.

“You’ll soon settle in,” my father said. “Things aren’t really very different here. We’re Callewijns, all of us.”

He nodded briefly. He replied to all my father’s questions politely, but didn’t volunteer any information. Most of the time he kept his eyes on his plate.

My mother observed him with an air of concern. “Have some more milk,” she said. “And do have that last meatball. It’s a shame to waste it.”

I was sent to bed an hour earlier than usual. Beneath my window I could hear my father talking to Roland. I watched them strolling amicably in the garden. My father laid his hand on Roland’s shoulder a few times, and I saw him holding out his handkerchief. Roland accepted the offer and turned his back on the house, as if he knew I was spying on him.

I put on my pyjamas and lay on top of the covers, looking round my bedroom to gauge the effect of my mother’s great purge and wondering whether it would arouse scorn from Roland. He was bigger than me, he wore long shorts and long socks, so that the only bits of bare leg you saw were his knees.

I considered putting up some posters of cars, maybe some of wild animals in Africa, too, so as to draw attention away from the wallpaper patterned with anthropomorphic aeroplanes wearing wide grins. I had positioned my case with its new pens for my first term at secondary school on my writing table, next to an exercise book with much-thumbed pages curling at the edges, which, I hoped, would signal seriousness and diligence. An encyclopaedia—one from the thirty-volume set my father kept in his room—lay diagonally on the table, open and with the marker ribbon trailing casually over some photos of submarines during the War.

“I’ll unpack your clothes later,” I heard my mother call from the kitchen, but when he came upstairs a few minutes later I could tell he was carrying his suitcases up by himself.

Oddly, he did not shut the door that connected our rooms, but left it ajar. I was pretending to be asleep so I couldn’t very well get up to shut it for him.

He switched on the bedside lamp. I could hear him unzipping both suitcases, one on the table, the other on the bed. In the deepening dusk I found the sounds he was making comforting, and turned over on my side. In spite of the vague misgivings his arrival had stirred in me, I was glad I was no longer alone.

He gathered up all his socks and dumped them in the bottom drawer in one move, but for the rest of his clothing he made a separate journey each time, taking the items out of the suitcases and transferring them to the wardrobe shelves one by one. He took wire hangers from the rod and arranged his trousers on them, patting down the sharply creased legs quietly but very firmly. He must have taken his shoes off downstairs and come up in his socks, probably so as not to wake me, but the loose floorboard creaked just the same when he stepped on it.

Why he shut the doors of the wardrobe each time he had put something inside, only to have to open them again for the next item, baffled me. There was something cold and mechanical about his actions. I was reminded of the bully he used to be, how he’d go off during family get-togethers and skulk in the garden, where he’d pull the wings off butterflies and watch them drop helplessly on the path before he ground them underfoot.

Unlike me, who would occasionally amputate the antennae of a beetle or hold a moth captive between thumb and index finger for the sake of the horror I felt at its struggle to get away, the torture he inflicted seemed utterly lacking in the mercy of the true executioner. Even the constant misdeeds against his parents seemed to have more to do with unchannelled rebellious rage than with the kind of deviousness I myself was perfecting in my efforts to terrorise my mother. I had turned twelve, and needed to prove myself. A few words were enough to reduce her to tears. I played her rage as if it were a harp, and thrilled to my own beastliness.

Now she came up to Roland’s room bringing soap and toilet water to put on the ledge over the washbasin. He muttered “thank you”, and in the ensuing silence I knew she was sitting on his bed, next to the case, resting her hands on her knees.

I could barely make out what she was whispering, but I knew she would be saying things like, “Your mother’ll be better soon. School starts the day after tomorrow. That’ll take your mind off things.”

I could tell by the sound of his impatient shuffling on the floorboards that he wanted her to go away. She had put him off his ritual, his strict cycles of unpacking and placing on shelves, of opening and shutting the doors of the wardrobe. He padded to and fro like a panther in a cage.

My mother slapped her thighs and said, “I’m not done yet.”

The dry smack of her lips told me that he must have ducked away, so that her kiss landed on his forehead.

I don’t know how long it took him to put everything away in the wardrobe. I must have dozed off. I was startled awake by
the noise of something falling to the floor, a pair of shoes or an armful of books. He swore under his breath. A little later he opened the window and switched off the bedside lamp.

When I woke up I saw him in his pyjamas leaning against the washbasin. He was drumming his fingers on the rim while the basin filled up. He wrenched the second tap on, and jumped back when it sputtered loudly, coughing up air and gushes of rusty water.

After undressing the night before he must have put away his clothes with near-mathematical precision. The trousers were hanging neatly over the back of a chair, jumper and vest lay carefully folded on the seat, and on top of that rested a pair of socks and clean underpants.

His pyjamas received the same meticulous treatment after he took them off. He stood gazing in the mirror over the washbasin at the reflection of his chest, on which, now that he was shirtless, I spotted the first signs of hair growth.

He was a true-blue Callewijn. Tall and sinewy, dark hair, brown-black eyes. His complexion was pale, like my father’s and my uncles’, and seemed even to suggest a touch of anaemia, although physical exertion or strong emotions made the blood rush to his face in no time. His shoulders were covered in blemishes. The still-boyish skin was pitted with rosy craters from pimples and boils, which must have itched terribly.

As he waited for the basin to fill up, I saw his fingers crawl over his backbone. I could hear the dry scrape of his nails over his shoulder blades and his thighs, where the first tendrils of pitch-black hair clung to his buttocks.

He leaned forward, scooped water over his face with his hands and snorted in a shivery but satisfied sort of way. Taking the sponge in one hand, he soaped his armpits, the back of his neck, his chest and stomach, and with a barely perceptible shudder wiped his crotch and his buttocks. The scent of soap wafted into my room, where it collided with the air coming in through the window, bringing the smell of fresh earth and cut grass, as yet untainted by heat or dust.

He washed his feet by placing first the left foot and then the right on the edge of the basin and soaping his toes one by one. Now and then the leg he was standing on wobbled and while he regained his balance his sex dangled clumsily in the shadows beneath his buttocks.

He set about drying himself, rubbing his neck vigorously, dragging the towel across his back from side to side. He took his underpants from the chair and put them on, flexing his knees slightly to adjust his balls. Next came socks, vest and jumper, and finally he zipped up his flies and buckled his belt.

Almost done now. Time for the finale. Sitting on a chair he thrust his feet into his shoes, pulled the laces tight and made a whooshing sound as he knotted them. His shoelaces meant nothing to him, whereas I still had trouble with mine. To me they were like umbilical cords still tying me to my mother.

He rose to his feet and stared down at his shoes for a moment. Then he opened the door to the corridor, shut it quietly behind him and went down the stairs. I was alone.

I stepped out of bed, enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my feet and the coarse wood of the floorboards under my soles.
The elaborate morning ritual that my cousin had performed seemed unfinished, somehow, as though the energetic flapping of the towel and the speed with which he had got dressed was still generating whorls of turbulence in the air.

He was a teenager and I couldn’t make him out. His room exuded a sense of order that took my breath away. There wasn’t a single shoe or towel left lying around. The only thing that looked out of place lay on the bedside table, next to a little pile of books arranged according to size with the biggest one on the bottom. It was a blue-and-white handkerchief screwed up into a ball, which crackled intriguingly when I pulled it apart. The neatly made bed bore no traces of ever having been slept in, and as the window had been open the whole time, the unchaste aroma of his sleep was kept from me.

In his haste he had forgotten to pull the plug of the basin. I peered at grey soapy water with plumes of foam floating around and sticking to the sides.

I took off my pyjamas and, just as Roland had done a while ago, looked at myself in the mirror.

Slowly I began to disintegrate into the parts that came from my mother and those from my father. Her eyes, his nose. His ears, her hands. The dimple in my chin—for how many generations had it been travelling from face to face? I had seen it in photographs of my grandfather. I used to rub it with my thumb when I sat on Michel’s lap, and had watched my father manoeuvre his razor around it umpteen times.

Roland didn’t have one. He had the round chin of his mother, the only part of her, it seemed, that she had managed to smuggle into her son, aside from her sleekness, a fine layer of fat just under the skin. He was not as thin as I was. I could count my ribs and when I took a really deep
breath you could almost see through my stomach to my backbone.

I felt too light, too loose-limbed for this room, where Roland had installed himself in such an orderly fashion. All his shoes in rows on the bottom of the wardrobe, his jackets in military ranks on the hangers, his shirts, with starched, manly collars, in piles on the shelves.

From the bottom of the stairs my mother called out that I’d catch it if I didn’t hurry up, but I already knew I was going to be late.

Church bells rang out on the horizon. I stooped over the basin and sank my hands in the water. The sourish smell of old soap filled my nostrils. The cold made my head spin. I buried my face in the towel in which a faint smell of Roland still lingered.