Erwin Mortier - My Fellow Skin

Even my elation at Uncle Roger’s gift of a wristwatch had been short-lived, for it was too blatant a reminder of the rules and duties that would govern me from now on. You had to see to it that it didn’t run ahead of the proper time or slow down and even stop altogether. The face had a little window showing the date, which changed all by itself at midnight exactly. I knew this because I’d stayed awake on purpose. The next morning my thumb was sore from the grooves on the winder.

Time was something I wanted to get away from. I had the feeling that my new school was nothing but a front for a factory or military laboratory, where time was a weird, newly discovered serum that was injected directly into our veins in order to test how much of it we could take without falling asleep or becoming unruly. Even the soup which we were served daily — and which, so I discovered later, got thinner and thinner from Monday to Friday until it was little more than water with flecks of green — had time floating in it.

I heard Willem snigger.

“Dreamer,” he said.

I wasn’t dreaming. There was too much too look at, too much to see. My eyes were funnels into which the world kept pouring images. The real homework I had to do each evening was to sort all these impressions, classify them, put them in little boxes, fit them together like a jigsaw puzzle so they wouldn’t hang around in the night and get tangled in my sheets.

Why was Roland the way he was? He was pedalling up the slope towards us, chattering to his mates. Why did everything about him seem to fit? He talked in the same way as he pedalled his bike: in a no-nonsense, blunt kind of way. His thoughts resembled massive cupboards in his head. They remained shut until the ground tilted suddenly and the contents tumbled out like saucepans clattering to the floor. Compared to him I was a servant girl: furtively opening drawers, taking dresses from wardrobes and holding them against my front in the mirror, making sure to put the clothes back without creasing them.

He and his mates ignored us as they rode past.

Willem swung his bike round. We freewheeled down the slope under the trees. The past couple of hours slithered away like water off a duck’s back.

That very morning I had cycled past his house without knowing that he lived there. It was on the corner between two avenues. The gaps in the rhododendrons showed glimpses of a big garden. I noted a slide, and a gaily coloured sculpture on the lawn: a roly-poly woman with flowers painted all over her. The house loomed in the shadows. It was rather peculiar, dark and greenish with streaks of damp on the concrete exterior. The curving walls with large windows seemed to have been designed to spare as many trees as possible.

“Thank goodness that’s it for today,” said Willem. He swerved into the front garden and made for a mass of honeysuckle and ivy with a carport underneath and a glass door.

“I’ll wait for you here,” he said. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

I sped away, pedalling hard to catch up with Roland.

THE DAYS SHORTENED APACE. The dusk, which was already gathering when Roland and I went home after school, deepened each day. At home, the flames in the stove leaped higher and higher behind the sooty window, while the kettle sang that it was winter. We all moved closer together as the weather got colder.

Those were the weeks when the sky switched direction. Orion rose to its zenith, there was turbulence in the air, and gusts of wind buffeted the walls and hooked their fingers behind the shutters, making the woodwork rattle on its hinges.

Autumn was never my favourite season. From the end of August on I felt as if the summer were unwinding, like knitting being unravelled to save the wool, which would be rolled up into balls and stored away out of reach. As it was, the autumn showers and early storms seemed to be in tune with my soul, similarly in a state of flux.

One evening my mother came into the bathroom just as I was towelling myself dry. “Pardon,” she said, and left quickly. Later on I heard her on the phone to one of her sisters, saying that I was getting to be a big lad and that I was an early starter, seeing as I was only just twelve.

“Oh well,” she said. “Our Alois was rather forward, too, and so were you: your periods started when you were eleven, didn’t they?”

“Early birds, eh,” I heard her say with a chuckle before replacing the receiver.

When I saw myself in the mirror I looked pretty much as usual from the waist up, except maybe for some blotches on my forehead. But if I lowered my gaze and contemplated the dark curly hair of my crotch, a dense thicket surrounding that thing between my legs, I felt as if a macabre joke were being played on me: I was turning into an animal.

I wondered whether I was the only one to be plagued thus, whether anybody else was obliged to shift around in their seat like me, when my veins started throbbing for no apparent reason, when the lining of my stomach tingled and the thing in my underpants insisted on swelling up. However tightly I clenched my thighs, I couldn’t stop it from poking out from under my waistband and stretching the elastic in a way that made me shudder.

When this happened in class I sat very still for a time, glancing round to see if anyone had noticed, especially Willem, who never seemed to be bothered by these things.

Mr Vaneenooghe had mentioned “certain changes”, and had announced a special slide-show entitled “Growth and Tenderness”, but it didn’t amount to anything more exciting than boys and girls holding hands as they strolled down meadows and country lanes.

The images were accompanied by a cassette tape with trumpets and a soppy voice-over. For the rest, God’s top priority appeared to be personal hygiene. Mr Vaneenooghe had pronounced the words as if he had a hair stuck between his teeth.

During the school medical examination the doctor had pulled down my underpants, told me to blow on my hand, and then kneaded me with cold fingers. He ticked a box on the form, muttering, “That looks fine.”

I had asked Willem if the doctor had said the same about him. But Willem had frowned, and I didn’t dare pursue it any further.

The whole afternoon had been awful. First a nurse made me open my mouth wide so she could tap an instrument against each of my teeth in turn. Then she made me bend over, whereupon she drew my buttocks apart with her thumb and index finger. Then she put earphones on my head and went half-crazy when I had trouble telling left from right.

She heaved a sigh and pushed me into a lavatory. There was a hatch in one of the walls with a glass measuring cup, which I took in my hands doubtfully. It was only after several minutes, when she knocked on the door asking, “Still not done?” that the penny dropped.

*

If only I could leave it all behind, find some groove in a tree trunk where I could spin a silk cocoon around myself and go to sleep for as long as it took to transform into a different state. But at night, in the soothing darkness, the ache in my joints often kept me awake. In heavy weather the storms raging outside seemed to be coming directly from within me. There were nights when I woke up drenched, with the thing refusing point-blank to lie down. I would try to find some relief in the familiar sounds of Roland asleep, unless he was awake too, in which case I could tell by his hushed breathing that he was waiting for me to doze off.

Three days a week he came home with wet hair, making the air redolent with the fresh mud he scraped off his football boots as he sat on the doorstep. The towels he pulled out of his sports bag were so suffused with his odour, the excruciating tang of his sweat, that an invisible twin of his seemed to emerge when he draped them over the footboard of his bed.