Erwin Mortier: My Fellow Skin

I was on the point of letting myself fall face down on the coat so as to lose myself altogether in the blissful, caressing sensation when I heard footsteps. Their jaunty pace did not bode well.

I froze, pulled the flap of the coat over my head and wondered what would happen next. The footsteps halted.

The satin was absorbing my body heat fast, and the steam from my breath couldn’t escape. When I stuck my head out for a breath of air, I found myself looking straight into my cousin Roland’s mischievous face.

“Down in the hole. Down in the hole,” he intoned, tapping each of my shoulders several times with his forefinger. “Down in the hole.”

I was desperate to get away. The mere thought of the torture he had inflicted on me a few hours earlier was enough to make my eyes sting with tears.

He skipped across the room and stood in the doorway, all bright and shiny, as neat as he had been at breakfast, except for his trousers, which were streaked with chalk and bits of cobweb. He must have been snooping around the whole house, all the remotest outposts of my very own castle.

The chalk on his thighs could only have come from the walls in the cellar, the one place I had never dared to explore all by myself, where it always smelled of damp and mould and where the weak light bulb flickered as scarily as a candle that might blow out any moment. In winter the ground water oozed up between the tiles, leaving little bumps of salt behind when it dried, as white as the powdery snow that drifted into the attic through the chinks between the roof tiles. The attic and the cellar were the only parts of the house that were not sealed off from the outside world, a condition I found both appealing and daunting.

“Have a look. Come on,” Roland whispered. He was leaning with one shoulder against the door frame, picking at a bit of dead skin around the thumbnail of one hand until he drew blood.

For a second I thought I was supposed to admire him for bleeding, that he took pleasure in administering pain to himself as brutally as to me or his mother. But he raised his thumb to his mouth and licked the wound.

“Come on!” he urged, grabbing me roughly by the arm when I hesitated.

He set off at a brisk pace. I could barely keep up with him. My father’s shoes flew off my feet, tumbled over the floor and bounced against the skirting board. I felt like screaming, shouting that he shouldn’t go so fast, but I restrained myself. I didn’t want to wake Aunt Odette or alarm my father.

We stumbled down the stairs, through the passage, round the corner, past the grandfather clock, to the annexe. I had been there often enough, but now I was wandering in a foreign place. It didn’t feel right that I was being led, like a visitor, a stranger, but Roland wouldn’t let go of my hand.

He slowed down and stopped in front of a closed door. I knew it well, even though the glass panel was a shield of darkness rather than glowing with the familiar light of the window beyond.

Roland twisted the handle and swung the door wide open.

An unfamiliar chill struck my face. Air that felt unexpectedly fresh, without the merest hint of snuff or pipe tobacco, nor of booze or men fast asleep.

Roland pushed me into the room. It was pitch dark. I only knew where I was when the cold floor underfoot made way for the thick pile of a carpet. Behind me I could hear Roland fumbling along the walls. Something clicked under his fingers and the light went on.

Michel was lying on the bed, motionless in his best suit, eyebrows raised. Even though his eyes were shut I had the feeling he was surprised to see me there, or that he was pretending to be annoyed because I had the cheek to disturb him.

The line of his lips curved up at one corner of his mouth and down at the other, half-smile and half-scowl, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether to make me hoot with laughter or cry out in fear. His hands were yellow, his nails blue.

The pillow supporting his astonishingly bald head — I had rarely seen him without his cap — was decked with twigs of cherry laurel, and at his feet lay a bouquet of early dahlias.

For all I knew he was tricking me. At harvest time, in the barn, he pretended he was the corn monster, and in the orchard he would give the almond tree a sudden shake when I passed, unsuspecting, underneath.

“Michel,” I called out, half-grinning.

“Shshsh,” Roland whispered. He clapped a sweaty hand over my mouth.

I drew back indignantly.

“Michel!” I cried again.

Roland brushed past me and stopped a few paces short of the bed. He tucked his hands under his arms, as if he too expected Michel would leap up any minute and chase us down the passage to tap us on the backside with his walking stick.

He did not move.

Roland went up to the bed and slouched against the mattress. He extended his arm and covered Michel’s hand with his.

My heart lurched, but aside from an almost inaudible click of the rosary beads in the blue fingers, nothing happened.

Roland looked at me, hunching his shoulders.

“Down in the hole,” he said solemnly, “down in the hole.”

NIGHT ALWAYS FELL suddenly, and it was with the same suddenness that the shutters were flung open and the blinds raised in the front room, where the coffin resting on trestles shone darkly. I was swung from arm to arm, washed, brushed, given milk to drink, and when everyone was gathered in the hall my mother rounded on my father, exclaiming, “Pa, what have you done? I did say to put on his black shoes, not the pale ones.”

The house had filled up over the past few days. In the front room and in the kitchen I’d had to squeeze through hedges of shins and calves to get anywhere near my father or my mother. She was standing by the sink, sweating as she turned the handle of the meat grinder. Women I had never seen before were watching her every move. They addressed me as “Antoine”.

The night before I had listened as everyone trooped through the house, all the way to Michel’s room. I had stood up in my cot and leaned against the raised side, straining to hear.

I heard Roland tiptoe across the landing to the stairs. He sat down on the top step and I caught the sound of him scratching the paint off the skirting board.

They must have been praying, but I thought they were singing or reciting poems about rosebuds in the rain.

For the past few days I had taken to slipping away, when the others were still at table, to open the door of Michel’s room and check whether he was awake and moving yet. But he had ignored me each time.

I had shown him my new toy car, and the kite that hadn’t been torn to shreds in the branches of the beech tree, and my orange tin box; but even my silver spoon, which was shinier than anything I had ever seen, had not been enough to provoke a reaction. In the end I just stayed away and sulked. Quite soon I hardly knew he was there.

*

We advanced like shadows over the dyke road. Hunched shoulders. Furry collars. Black leather. Veils. I was the only one wearing pale shoes.

Around us everything glittered and made us blink. The bleached corn leaned sideways in swathes. The parched poplar foliage, already curling at the edges, rustled crisply overhead, and the grey ostrich plumes on the hearse bobbed up and down, as comically as the pompons on the ponies’ bridles when the circus came to town and the clown’s trousers fell down.

My father swung me over the potholes by one arm. Every few steps my mother raised her hand to massage her ear lobe between thumb and forefinger or to pat the lapels of her coat.

Now and then I caught a glimpse of Roland a few paces ahead of me, wedged between his parents. He was being propelled forward rather than walking in step, and several times I saw his feet kicking in mid-air above the cobbles.