Erwin Mortier: My Fellow Skin

As she passed, Aunt Odette gave my shoulder a squeeze with a black-gloved hand that reminded me of a bird’s scaly claw. She hissed that I was to behave myself, later on.

“Listen!” she said, pointing her finger to her ear. “The bells, already…”

I heard the slow tolling of the bell and the long silences between each stroke, and I was overcome with boredom. Everything clotted together in the heat.

*

The rooms where the grown-ups gathered to while away their boredom were places that spelled boredom for me. In the café on Sundays after Mass the rattling of dice, the grunts and cries from a dart thrower and the thumping of fistfuls of cards on table-tops mingled in a heaving swell of tedium on which I floated, feeling seasick. I would clutch the legs of a bar stool for support, or my father’s legs as he stood drinking and laughing.

There was the mild boredom of the women as they sat on the chairs they had taken outside, with their skirts hitched up over their knees. Bent on catching the last rays of sunlight, they craned their necks and spoke little, and for a moment that lasted for ever they manifested the same inanimate truculence as my rag dolls and my bears, on those intensely monotonous days when everything seemed to defy my imagination.

Boredom also nestled in the lofts over the stables, where years of undisturbed compaction had transformed it into bales of straw more akin to dust, and in the boxes containing rusty forks and spoons under my father’s work bench. A mere glimpse of them was enough to make me feel as lost and abandoned as the tarnished cutlery itself, which left a sour aftertaste on your fingertips if you touched them.

Deadliest of all, though, was the boredom of church, where the vaulted ceilings held every second captive and the priest, like a puppet attached to invisible strings, knelt jerkily, broke bread and drank wine without offering me a taste.

A man with a gold tooth in the corner of his mouth and a peaked cap had awaited us in the portal. After the coffin had been lifted from the hearse, he separated the men from the women with a casual gesture.

My father sat me on the chair beside him and pressed a soft toy into my hands. Roland was sitting in the row behind us, rocking agitatedly from side to side. Now and then he glanced up at his father to see how he was coping with the enervation.

Cymbals clanged. My father turned our seats and knelt on the prayer stool. I sat down on mine with my back to the altar.

Roland reached for the tips of my shoes, and in doing so dropped a handful of coins, which skittered across the floor.

“Pick them up,” his father hissed.

Roland cowered. He was out of his element, a world with nooks and crannies for hiding in, a place where he could calculate distances and escape routes, like this morning, when he had plunged in among the coats hanging from the pegs as soon as his mother came near. She was sitting across the aisle, on the other side of the bier, and sank down on her knees so devoutly as to elicit a faint smile from Aunt Odette. When the priest sent the collection box round, she drew from her handbag a tight roll of bills which crackled softly but had more impact than the brassy jingle of the coins donated by the other Aunts.

Even in church, under the heaven-high arches, she was like an elephant absorbing all the space around her and elbowing everyone who came near into a corner. Roland must have plopped out of her body without leaving any trace at all, or only the most fleeting ripple. He must have escaped her like an unwelcome thought, an unforeseen, unpleasant surprise which had left her daydreams in tatters and had been twisting doorknobs and knocking over vases ever since.

On the flagstones at my feet I followed the wavy calcite patterns like the courses of rivers on a map, until they ended at the mortar-filled edge. All around me the stained glass windows of the south apse dissolved into patches of colour. Time waded through sand.

It puzzled me that grown-ups should want always to sit still, not to move at all or hardly, and ended up stowing themselves away in a box with a lid on top, to be dead and gone.

When the priest walked round the coffin sprinkling holy water we got wet, too, and I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head without thinking. My father slipped it down again with a smile.

“Just hang on a little bit longer,” he said. “It’ll all be over soon.”

*

In the mound of fresh earth beside the yawning hole among the gravestones, I glimpsed fat, shiny earthworms poking out briefly before wriggling back in. Roland held tight to his father’s hand and peered cautiously over the side. Clods of earth thudded on to the wood.

Two nights earlier, my father had woken me up in the middle of the night. He had taken me in his arms and carried me downstairs. To my mother’s protests he had replied, “It’s all right for him to see.”

We had stood around the foot of the coffin. Beside me the Aunts sent their rosaries flying through their fingers.

Roland’s father supported the old man’s head while the trunk and the legs were lifted up by two others. Wearing the same expression of mockery mixed with scorn, Michel had allowed them to lower him into the casket.

It was only when the Aunts kissed his forehead one by one that for a moment I had the impression his eyes had opened a crack. All of a sudden he had seemed angry, stricken by a stubborn fury, the way I sometimes felt when my mother hid my building blocks from me and I held my breath in outrage.

My father leaned across to lay his hand on Michel’s forehead, just before the lid was closed. He had put my hand on Michel’s forehead.

“Cold,” I had said.

My mother fled into the garden.

*

“Down in the hole,” Roland sang. His mother clapped her hand over his mouth and jerked him back, into the crowd.

A while later I saw him saunter out of the churchyard, past the wrought iron gate. His father swore under his breath but did not go after him.

Somewhere a dog barked, and almost at once Roland reappeared, ashen-faced and hurrying up the path. He’d got a fright, which pleased me.

His father turned round. “Come here,” he said, extending an arm.

Roland bent down.

The gravediggers thrust their spades into the earth.

“Why don’t you walk with us,” Aunt Alice said.

My father had his arm round my mother’s waist. People shuffled past, men doffed their hats, my father nodded.

No-one spoke. The heat was oppressive.

“One metre seventy,” Flora said. “I thought he was shorter.”

Aunt Odette unclasped her handbag and stuffed her handkerchief inside.

“They always look smaller when they’re dead.”

*

Out in the yard, under the beech tree, folding tables were set up, glasses were filled to the brim and trays piled high with sandwiches were handed round. As soon as we got back, Roland’s mother had gone upstairs to change her dark clothes for a salmon-pink frock. The Aunts were scandalised.

“Sometimes it’s more sudden than you think,” Roland’s father said. “Myself, I’d want to make sure I was in a decent state before I died. Someone’s always got to clean up the mess.”

“Diddle diddle doo,” sang Aunt Flora, her cheeks wobbling as she bounced me on her knee.

“Was I happy when you came along! Sooo happy! Corneel and I only produced girls, and Aunt Odette, poor thing, she never even got hitched. Far too picky, she was. No-one was good enough. Too fat, too thin, too rich, too poor.”

She raised her glass of port wine to my lips.

“There, have a sip,” she urged quietly when no-one was looking, and again, and again, until the world reeled and swayed as I slithered down her shins.

*

It was one of those summer days when flying ants swarmed up from their nests en masse to dance over the treetops, and swallows scissored through the swarms.