Erwin Mortier - Shutterspeed

She did go abroad once, to Lourdes, on a train crammed with crutches and cripples with miraculous expectations, and they had a short stop in Paris, just long enough to pose for a group portrait at the Trocadéro, under the watchful eye of a most combative-looking Hélène who, with Miss van Vooren’s help, unfurled the banner of the Catholic Girls’ Circle, thereby hiding most of the Eiffel Tower from view.

Two pages further on in the album she is at home, swamped in a sea of bouquets in the living room on her wedding day. She smiles nervously at Uncle, who makes an equally starched impression, as if his mother had given his suit a quick iron with him already in it.

At the registry office my father signs the marriage certificate as a witness, while Uncle and Aunt look on with a rather dazed expression, but out in the orchard, the formalities over and done with, he stands shoulder to shoulder with his slightly less robust look-alike, twin brothers, cigarettes between their lips, shirt collars undone, tipsy and dreamy, like me that Sunday, lulled by the port wine, setting the roasting pan upside down by the sink and hearing Aunt’s little cries tumbling from the eaves like fledgling sparrows.

After a while I heard Uncle’s racking cough. I was afraid he would suffocate, but the next moment he was stumping across the landing. He breezed into the kitchen, whistling.

‘Good lad,’ he said, grunting with the afterglow of a gratification located I knew not where within his body. ‘Done all the dishes for us, all on your own.’

He pulled his braces down and held his forearms under the tap.

‘Had a good rest?’ I asked. ‘Did the food settle down all right?’

‘Don’t you worry,’ he said, slapping water on his jowls. ‘Pass me the towel, will you.’

He mopped his face. ‘Just as well Our Lord created Sundays. When else can a body catch up on his homework?’

‘But you always tick me off when I leave my homework till Sunday,’ I said.

Squaring his shoulders, he gave me an amused look. ‘That’s because I’m the boss and you’re not. You can’t even piss in a straight line yet.’

He flicked the drops clinging to his fingers on to my face.

On the square in front of the station the fairground attractions were covered by tarpaulins in assorted colours, like the tents of Mongolian horsemen. Through the slits glimmered an occasional glass eye, a harness decorated with little mirrors, the tip of a black-painted hoof. The circus tent was pitched in a fallow field on the other side of the track, its roof supported by two masts from which banners hung limply in the afternoon stillness.

The streets were desolate, they smelt of asphalt and heat. I was still a little dizzy from the port, but had a sense of sobering up. The comforting haze that had been stretched taut like a membrane over the world began to tear, letting in trickles of the sadness that engulfed me at times for no reason, even though I was only twelve.

Each year I awaited the arrival of the travelling fair with mixed feelings. The other boys couldn’t wait to jump on their bikes after school and descend on the square by the station like a plague of locusts, or stop at the side of the road and marvel at the slow motion of a camel’s ruminations, whereas I preferred to walk past with studied nonchalance, permitting myself no more than the most fleeting of glances.

The caravans were inhabited by coffee-coloured folk whom the villagers regarded with suspicion for being like jackdaws, pinching everything in sight. Everyone said so, but Aunt had different ideas. They were good customers, she said, and coffee-coloured or not, she had never had any trouble with them at all.

They usually sent their daughters to the shop for their provisions, amber-eyed girls in saris and hair ribbons of a purple so bright it left me speechless.

Not that they said much either, for they would extract from the depths of their shopping bag a scrap of paper covered in hieroglyphs, which for some strange reason Aunt could only decipher by taking her reading glasses from her apron pocket and putting them on her forehead instead of her nose, holding the note at arm’s length, then bringing it up close to her eyes and holding it out again, as if the recondite script did not read from left to right but from far to near.

The purple girls eyed her dispassionately all the while. They slipped into every shop with the same quiet demeanour and laid their illegible shopping lists on the counter. They were the harbingers of topsy-turvy times for the village. To me the roundabouts, rides and stalls were magical machines, not entirely to be trusted in their garish glitter. The morning after the trailers all vanished in the night and the station square stood empty once more, a flotsam of late revellers staggered about the pavement, grabbing hold of drainpipes and doorknobs to steady themselves, as though fearful of losing touch with the ground underfoot.

‘Well, they certainly look like plucked chickens,’ sniffed Miss van Vooren, who refused to venture out of doors after Mass until the final strains of fairground music had died away. For days on end she remained ensconced in her house amid the lofty cedars, keeping the windows blinded against brass bands, dance parties and drunkards.

Once the fair was over the world sank back into the swoon of summer, where time did not count. Mr Snellaert stored away his solar system, collected the inkwells from the desks, pronounced his Last Judgment and shut the book of latitudes with a firm clap.

On very quiet nights, when I went to bed with the window open I could hear, high in the sky above, a faint rumbling sound, a ruffling like feathers being spanned, the tock of spatulas or hammers, the clatter of chains hauling heavy objects, as if up there, in God’s own belfry, the Great Miller had secretly opened the roof lights to the breeze blowing around the spire and was now funnelling it away into a range of small basins, catching the remainder in sacks to be stored in the recesses of a vast mill.

In my imagination He was a flour-dusted eccentric who took no more notice of the Gloria during Mass than if it were being sung on the radio, not bothering to raise His eyes from His workbench in the space behind the clock-face, which was where He busied Himself with pliers and tweezers to create new insects, where He lingered among catalogues full of Milky Ways trying to decide which, if any, merited inclusion in the firmament.

The clock had struck half-past three. I headed down the church lane towards the stream, following the footpath along the railway embankment where the hot air shimmered above the rails and conjured an expanse of water on the horizon.

Nothing stirred in the fields. It was only when I reached the tree-lined alleyway that a blackbird or two swooped down from the lindens to catch worms in the ruts cut by cart-wheels.

I began to feel drowsy. Thanks to all the food I’d eaten I gradually became susceptible to gravity again. The port was wearing off.

I stretched out my arms and turned around a few times to get things spinning again, while whorls of dust rose about my ankles. Then I leaned back against a poplar and slithered down. Looking up into the leafy crown, I noticed how the tracery of branches resembled dark veins in the sunlit canopy.

I was half sunken in a slumber perfectly attuned to the soporific afternoon when I thought I heard someone approaching. A moment or two later someone kicked my foot.

I opened my eyes and saw a pair of hands gripping the cane of a furled umbrella, and, further up, a chin, pinched lips, and then large sunglasses.

‘Joris,’ Miss van Vooren said crossly, ‘is this any way for a bearer of the heavens to behave?’

IT BECAME UNBEARABLY HOT IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED. Uncle Werner said you could fry eggs on the cobbles and that the brewer would be rubbing his hands with glee if the weather kept up for the rest of the week.