Erwin Mortier - My Fellow Skin

He didn’t agree. It was because of the slope upon which Zomergem was situated, that was what made the view interesting. We were at the lowest point of the Flemish lowlands. He had a book about the region.

We heard a shriek behind us. Then the sound of someone crashing into the brittle reeds by the bank, and Roswita railing against Roland for not being careful.

“Let’s turn round and go back,” I said. “Then we can go a bit further in the other direction.” We were already quite far from home, and I had spotted a couple of other skaters in the distance. I had no desire to join them.

He glided to an unsteady halt. I was the better skater. He had trouble keeping his balance, seemed unused to his own height.

For a while the only sound was the crunch and swish of our skates and Roland circling round Roswita, pushing her from behind, letting her go, skating off and returning at full speed to push her again.

She screamed.

He put his hands on her hips and braked.

They huddled together, talking in low voices and throwing quick glances in our direction.

Then he grabbed her hand and pulled her away with him. “We’re going to Bruges!” he shouted over his shoulder.

She begged him to slow down.

He wouldn’t listen.

“They’re heading for a fall,” Willem said.

They fell. It was Roswita who lost her balance first, stumbled, flailed her arms and clutched at his sweater as she fell, so that his foot shot away and he crashed on to the ice on his side.

The ice groaned. I could feel a tremor under my feet. Jagged cracks shot across the frozen canal. We held our breath.

Roland scrambled to his feet and stood there, rubbing his shoulder, dismayed. Roswita was stuck in a bank of snow. She wouldn’t let him help her.

“I can get up by myself. I want to go back.”

“I’m sorry sweetie,” I heard him say. “I’ll take you home, all right?”

*

Towards the end of the afternoon the clouds gathered again. The sun was a watery orange blob sinking fast. The wind rose.

My mother offered us hot chocolate and raisin bread. The light was already fading and Roland still hadn’t returned. She was getting worried.

“He’s old enough to look after himself,” my father said. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“Have you had enough? Would you like anything else?” he asked Willem.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Will they be coming to fetch you?”

“Yes, at about seven.”

My mother glanced furtively at her watch. “Now, where can he have got to?”

He did not arrive until eight.

“I hung around for a bit,” he muttered. “And we had to shelter.”

He was deathly pale, and his legs were shaking.

“See a ghost on the way, by any chance?” my father asked. “You’re as white as a sheet…”

Roland sat down at the table.

“No,” he said, “worse than that.”

My father gave a short laugh.

Not long afterwards, maybe a quarter of an hour, the phone rang. My father answered it.

“Ours has conked out too,” I heard him say. “The anti-freeze isn’t strong enough to deal with this kind of weather… No, never mind… We’ll think of something… No problem. I’ll get him…”

“It’s your Pa,” he told Willem. “His car’s broken down. Mother, we have a guest for the night.”

“Well, I hope I’ve got enough bedding,” she replied.

*

After supper Roland went straight upstairs. My father remained seated at the table for quite a while, chatting to us. He didn’t usually talk much, but when he did he would talk in bursts. He wanted to seize the fullness of past summers before it slipped like sand through his fingers. I could sense the images flitting across his retina, of trees in the orchard cut down years ago, and of the garden in its prime. The garden, which was so vast that you could get lost in it. That was when he was a boy, when in the summer holidays his mother would pack a surprise picnic for the children to take on their exploring expeditions round the world that existed within the confines of the farm.

My mother joined us. “I’ve had to use a tablecloth as a bottom sheet,” she said. “Not ideal, I know, but it’s got a pretty floral pattern.”

“Can’t tell the difference in the dark anyway,” Willem said.

I hoped she wouldn’t start telling him about me. She would do that occasionally — go off at a tangent about how she’d tried breastfeeding me but had to give up after two weeks because I gave her a rash, which meant I was getting more blood inside me than milk. I was afraid this was going to be one of those occasions. She’d had a drink of gin and the stove was purring.

“His favourite place was his potty,” she told Willem.

Here we go, I thought.

“He could spend hours on it, quite happily. If he was any trouble, all I had to do was sit him on his potty. And he’s still the same, really…” she giggled.

“Ma!”

“It’s true isn’t it? Reading the paper on the lav. Just like your Pa, you are…”

“I do that too, sometimes,” Willem said pleasantly.

He could tell I was ashamed of her. “I’d better be getting to bed,” he said.

“Anton will show you the way.”

*

My mother had prepared one of the old spare rooms. It must have been years since it had last been used. It smelt a bit stuffy, and it was freezing cold in there. She had laid an old sleeping bag on the bed as extra blanket.

Willem put his hands in his pockets. I noticed him shivering.

“It’s all a bit makeshift here,” I said apologetically.

“It’s fine.”

“If you’re cold you must say so. I can get you an extra pullover.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Night,” I said.

“Night.”

*

I came upon Roland in the bathroom, inspecting the inside of his lower lip in the mirror.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “I just bit my tongue, that’s all.”

I started brushing my teeth.

He held his head under the tap and dried himself with a towel.

“Right, see you in the morning.”

“See you.”

Everyone had gone upstairs. All the lights were out. The stove was still warm, and I sat down in the dark.

I didn’t feel sleepy, I never did when it snowed. This was a throwback to when I was little, when I waited for weeks for the snow to arrive, and when it came at last I’d slip out of bed at night and cross to the window to check whether I could still see the flakes falling in the cones of light cast by the street lamps on the dyke road.

The wind buffeted the walls. The limbs of the beech tree tapped against the shutters. I remembered the cosiness that went with stormy weather in the old days, when I’d struggle to stay awake as long as I could so I’d feel safe all through the night.

Someone came down the stairs. I could hear bare feet thumping on the treads.

“Anton?”

“Over here,” I said.

“I couldn’t find you anywhere.”

He hopped from one foot to the other. “Where’s the toilet down here?”

“Sorry,” I said, “Down the passage, turn right, it’s the second door.”

He padded out of the room.

Another six days or so and I’d sink back into boredom again. The idea paralysed me. Sometimes it started on the Saturday morning, when the prospect of having to get on my bike to undergo dreary lessons, teachers, discipline, being spied on and humiliated all over again would put me in a bad mood all weekend. School and I were not meant for each other. I simply did not exist. Just some little runt in cheap clothes, bought so I could grow into them, and I was tolerated because I behaved myself, because I let them ram all their lessons down my throat so I could cough them up again when required, but in reality they trusted me as little as I trusted them, and there were no generous donations from my father to make up for it.