Erwin Mortier - My Fellow Skin

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.