Erwin Mortier - Shutterspeed

According to Uncle Werner it was all quite straightforward. ‘They just put an orange to bed with some alcohol for the night,’ he grinned, ‘and in the morning the alcohol smells of oranges. That’s how I got hitched to your aunt.’ It was one of those remarks that sent the blood rushing to Aunt’s cheeks.

I picked a small, bulbous bottle from the front row, and carried it in both hands to the girl. Before holding it under her nose I twisted the stopper off. There was an exquisite little squeak in the neck of the bottle, from which a wonderful fragrance immediately floated up.

‘Oooh, l’essence d’amandes,’ she cooed. She threw back her head and shut her eyes, luxuriating in the smell of almonds.

Encouraged by my success I returned to the glass cabinet in search of other fragrances. I heard the girl doing pirouettes behind my back, and making little scraping noises with her shoes on the floor.

‘L’essence, l’essence,’ she chanted softly.

Vanilla was bound to be a smell she would approve of. Besides, it was easy to locate, because this substance was treacly and dark instead of clear like the others.

Hardly had I unscrewed the top and turned round when a slap to my cheek sent me reeling against the showcase, more from shock than pain. The bottles rocked on the shelves, a few fell over. Something trickled down my neck. There was vanilla on my fingers. My ears burned.

The girl skirted the counter and ran into the passage, upsetting a couple of soup cans in passing.

‘Il m’a frappé,’ I heard her wail. ‘He hit me, he hit me …’

‘Dammit, Joris! What are you up to?’ called Aunt. I heard them push back their chairs and come into the passage. I took out my handkerchief and tried frantically to mop up the spill, without success.

‘He tried to kiss me, the clot,’ cried the girl as she returned with the two women in tow, and before I knew it Aunt had given me a box on the ears.

‘Du calme!’ cried Hélène Vuylsteke. ‘Dratted child, it’s not the first time this has happened.’

She grabbed the girl by the hand and gave her arm a sharp tug. ‘I think you’ve been up to your old tricks again, haven’t you? Off you go and get your coat.’

The girl trotted to the back.

‘Still, no excuse for him to go rummaging in my things,’ Aunt hissed in my direction. ‘He knows perfectly well to keep his hands off the merchandise.’

She moved to the front door and held it open. The girl squeezed past her and Hélène Vuylsteke, and paused on the threshold to put on her hat.

Hélène shook Aunt Laura’s hand: ‘Lundi prochain?’

‘Right, next Monday,’ said Aunt. ‘See you then. Au revoir.’

‘Au revoir,’ said Hélène, with a slight curl of the lip, ‘and au revoir to the young gentleman, too.’

Aunt shut the door. ‘Some gentleman,’ was all she said as she made her way to the back of the house.

When I followed some time later, she was at the table. She had poured herself the remainder of the coffee and now sat with her hands clasping the cup as she stared out of the window, oblivious to the cement slabs of the boundary wall and the Virginia creeper to the side.

Upstairs, I scrubbed my hands to get rid of the vanilla smell. I could hear Aunt clearing the table, making much more noise than usual.

I hoped and prayed that Uncle would not come home just yet, and that he would not be too woozy from his drinks, but less than two minutes later I recognised his whistle and his swaggering tread on the garden path.

Next he would put his hands on her hips as she stood by the sink, and try to kiss her neck.

I dried my hands, went to my room and lay down on my bed while the echoes of their rambling exchange reverberated from the garden wall. I could only make out half of what they were saying, but I knew it was about the vault. My mother’s name was mentioned, and goodness knows what else Aunt had to carp about. When she was angry she would wrench open her store of aggravation and tip it out over my or my uncle’s head.

After a time the storm abated. Uncle tapped on the door of my room. He sat down on the edge of my bed and put his hand on my knee.

‘You mustn’t mind too much about your aunt,’ he said. ‘She’s going through the change.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.

During supper the only sounds were our spoons scraping the bottom of our plates. Aunt had prepared warm buttermilk with apple slices to which she had added far too little sugar, a sure sign that she was in one of her moods.

I knew that Uncle’s slurping irritated her. I could tell by the way one of her eyebrows was raised slightly higher than the other.

‘He’s dead, Joris,’ she said abruptly. ‘He’s dead. It’s terribly sad of course, but so it goes. People die every day.’

She lifted her spoon to her mouth and sipped. ‘It’s us keeping you. You shouldn’t forget that.’

‘I won’t, Aunt Laura,’ I replied meekly, but the whole time I was jamming my toecap against the table leg to feel how much it hurt.

I CHERISHED THE NIGHTS IN THOSE OVERLY LUMINOUS weeks of June. For me the darkness held so much more than merely the absence of illumination. In the early days of that summer, the very last, the unforgiving light could be unspeakably crass.

Thinking back to those June days, I see the cracks between the flagstones in the back yard and long columns of ants lugging grass seeds, dead flies, caterpillars and grains of sand on their shoulders, black ants like Negro slaves, red ones like Arabs dwarfed by minarets of country lilies or beanstalks, and the oriental business of caravanserais, there, against the south wall beneath the drainpipe, but far too hurried and too tiny to grasp in the delicious indolence of those endless afternoons.

Night-time was a repository of everything that had ever existed. Sundown set the solid objects of daytime throbbing and seething in slow motion. Molecule by molecule they shed their contours and unfurled. The night was a vast ocean filled with all the movements ever made by arms, mouths, heads and legs, a primeval soup of gestures gently lapping my body and making my head swim.

I had stopped believing in ghosts by then. Death was among us, a megalomaniac collector who kept his treasures in cigar boxes buried in the earth. There was no swapping, ever. As God’s faithful warehouse steward, he dispatched his six-legged minions to pillage all that lay motionless and haul it underground, where he would spread out his booty on the tabletop to study each item with a magnifying glass for the purpose of classification, in readiness for Judgment Day.

Whenever God was minded to create a new person He took a stroll through the caverns of death and cast an amused eye over the fruits of His steward’s acquisitive obsession. He slid the graves open as if they were drawers, holding His measuring tape to a leg here, noting the dimensions of a chest or shoulder-blade there. Cupboardfuls of lips were at His disposal, tiers of double chins. On the walls eyebrows and moustaches were displayed like butterflies mounted in frames; elsewhere nipples and warts were stored in sweet jars.

He was at liberty to pick and choose, was God. Nor was He a stingy type by any means, as Uncle Werner was wont to say, because the old goat had been far from sparing with the titty-meat when He fashioned Aunt’s elder sisters.

I was keen to believe him, but there was a niggling feeling of doubt at the back of my mind. Mr Snellaert, too, had once told us about people getting children from a shop, but also that they had to place an order for them with Our Lord first. And say a prayer or two, he had added, half under his breath. He wouldn’t tell us where the shop was, not just yet — we’d have to wait until we were a bit older and had a bit more money in our savings accounts.