Erwin Mortier - My Fellow Skin

I walked past the university buildings just to get a sniff of the place. There were students sitting on benches by the professors’ offices, riffling through their textbooks. The plane trees at the entrance were shedding their first leaves.

I returned to my lodgings and had nearly reached the top of the stairs when a door opened in the hall downstairs and I heard the landlady’s shuffling step.

“Your parents phoned,” she called up to me. “You’re to ring them right back.”

I left my purchases on the stairs and came down, intending to go out and call from a phone box, but Miss Lachaert was holding the door of her parlour open for me and gesturing towards her telephone, which sat on an absurd pedestal beside the fireplace.

I lifted the receiver and dialled my parents’ number. My father answered the phone.

“Bad news,” he said.

His words didn’t sink in. Miss Lachaert was hovering nearby, whisking her feather duster over picture frames and figurines to disguise her eavesdropping.

“I must go and see them,” I told my father.

My mother called from the background, “He mustn’t call on those people without changing into clean clothes. Pa, tell him he mustn’t.”

“I’ll come and see you afterwards.” I put the phone down before he could reply.

*

The bandstand on Ruizele’s main square was occupied by a brass band playing Glenn Miller, and an evening market was in full swing. A policeman was diverting the traffic. The high street was thronged with people and hooting cars. I rolled down the window, leaned back and waited. I felt the old resignation mixed with impatience, which I had grown so familiar with thanks to all that sitting around, waiting for Willem in the station restaurant or the café opposite the bus stop, where I’d listen to the buzz of voices and let my thoughts drift along with the waiters calling their orders to the kitchen, taking care not to keep glancing at the clock slowly ticking the seconds away and making me feel more lost than ever.

Families in their Sunday best squeezed past the bumpers of waiting cars. Boys on bicycles rode on the pavement, ringing their bells shrilly and braking suddenly when the traffic policeman signalled for them to dismount.

I clenched my fists round the driving wheel, steeled myself. All I could think of was that I had to see Willem, his father, his mother, all of them, and suddenly I was flooded with panic.

The policeman blew his whistle and spread his arms. The cars in front of me started to move.

I drove around the main square and away, up the hill, into the wood. I parked the car on the side of the road, walked up the drive to the front door framed in withering honeysuckle, and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

I waited for a moment, rang the bell again and was already heading back to the car when someone called my name.

It was Katrien.

I turned round leadenly, at a loss for words to say to her, but she had vanished into the house, leaving the door open.

*

She was sitting in one of the leather armchairs by the big window, hugging her raised knees. The side table was littered with dirty cups around a tray of biscuits that had not been touched.

“They’re not here,” she said. “They left a while ago, with my aunt. I wanted to be alone.”

“If you’d rather I came back another time,” I mumbled.

Shaking her head, she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s all right.”

She rose, thrust her hands into the pockets of her trousers and crossed to the window overlooking the lawn, the old climbing frame, the roly-poly woman doing her mindless dance.

“When did it happen?” I asked.

“Yesterday, around five. The police came round at half-past six.”

She turned away from the window, started collecting the cups on a tray. “They’re taking him to the mortuary tonight. I don’t know how long they’ll be.”

She picked up the tray and went through to the kitchen. I heard her turn on a tap and rinse the cups.

I didn’t dare stand up. Thoughts raced through my head, jostling and shouting to make themselves heard and bring me to my senses. He must have had a fall, nothing serious, or flown into a rage and slammed the door to the bathroom so hard that the key snapped off and now he’s locked inside. He’s run away from home. He’s climbed to the top of a very tall tree and can’t get down, so they need firemen with ladders to rescue him, but he clings to the branches, shouting, “Just leave me alone, the lot of you.”

I fought back my tears and made for the kitchen, took a tea towel from the hook by the sink and started drying the cups.

“No need for that,” Katrien said absently.

She was wearing her mother’s bright-pink rubber gloves.

I watched her wash the saucers by turning them over and over in the dish water.

“Anton…”

“Yes?”

Her hands sank into the foam, groping for cutlery on the bottom.

“I’ve always known, you know.”

I felt my stomach tighten, heard myself ask, stupidly, “What do you mean?”

“I’m not daft.”

I took a cup from the draining board. “And them? What about them?” I asked, meaning her parents.

She paused, stared blankly at the pot of basil flowering on the window ledge above the tap.

“My mother, maybe. She always used to say, ‘I can’t make him out.’”

“Well, he did keep things to himself,” I said.

A crooked smile crossed her lips. “She was referring to you.”

Not knowing how to react to this, I held the cup up against the light as if it were a glass and asked, “When will it be?”

“Saturday most likely. They’ve got a lot of organising to do for the cremation.”

She peeled off the pink gloves and took the cup from my hands.

“That’ll do fine,” she said, putting it away in the cupboard over the sink.

I leaned back against the kitchen table and covered my eyes with my hands.

She said my name. Her voice caught in her throat.

I heard her leave the kitchen.

When I had calmed down I found her back in the living room on the couch by the window.

“Sorry,” I said.

She shook her head. Lit a cigarette. “Why don’t you go upstairs.”

I looked at her questioningly.

“Take something for yourself. Anything, doesn’t matter what.” She nodded towards the staircase.

*

The bedclothes were still rumpled, the pillow still faintly dented by his head. There was a kitschy Virgin Mary, a souvenir from Lourdes, with several of his bangles gleaming at the base. His wristwatch lay there ticking softly; he must have forgotten to wear it, as he so often did.

The carpet was strewn with two pairs of discarded socks, a couple of pairs of underpants and a vest, marking a trail from the bed to the laundry basket behind the door. On the desk by the window lay an open anatomy textbook. I clapped it shut.

Propped against the books on the shelves were snapshots of the summer camp where he’d flirted with a boy called Koen and where, on that last night by the farewell bonfire, he’d come on so strongly to some girl that she sent him perfumed letters every fortnight for months afterwards. The picture of our whole group at the foot of a dune shows me sulking. He roars with laughter, throws his arm around my shoulders and shakes me free of my rigidity.

I drew up his chair and sat down, seized with longing to take off my clothes and crawl into his bed, pull the blankets up tight, snuggle down into the sheets wrinkled by him, bury my face in his pillow and inhale the last vestiges of his smell, and then to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I took the snapshot from the shelf and slipped it into my back pocket.

“Found anything?” Katrien asked when I came downstairs.