He set about drying himself, rubbing his neck vigorously, dragging the towel across his back from side to side. He took his underpants from the chair and put them on, flexing his knees slightly to adjust his balls. Next came socks, vest and jumper, and finally he zipped up his flies and buckled his belt.
Almost done now. Time for the finale. Sitting on a chair he thrust his feet into his shoes, pulled the laces tight and made a whooshing sound as he knotted them. His shoelaces meant nothing to him, whereas I still had trouble with mine. To me they were like umbilical cords still tying me to my mother.
He rose to his feet and stared down at his shoes for a moment. Then he opened the door to the corridor, shut it quietly behind him and went down the stairs. I was alone.
*
I stepped out of bed, enjoyed the warmth of the sun on my feet and the coarse wood of the floorboards under my soles. The elaborate morning ritual that my cousin had performed seemed unfinished, somehow, as though the energetic flapping of the towel and the speed with which he had got dressed was still generating whorls of turbulence in the air.
He was a teenager and I couldn’t make him out. His room exuded a sense of order that took my breath away. There wasn’t a single shoe or towel left lying around. The only thing that looked out of place lay on the bedside table, next to a little pile of books arranged according to size with the biggest one on the bottom. It was a blue-and-white handkerchief screwed up into a ball, which crackled intriguingly when I pulled it apart. The neatly made bed bore no traces of ever having been slept in, and as the window had been open the whole time, the unchaste aroma of his sleep was kept from me.
In his haste he had forgotten to pull the plug of the basin. I peered at grey soapy water with plumes of foam floating around and sticking to the sides.
I took off my pyjamas and, just as Roland had done a while ago, looked at myself in the mirror.
Slowly I began to disintegrate into the parts that came from my mother and those from my father. Her eyes, his nose. His ears, her hands. The dimple in my chin — for how many generations had it been travelling from face to face? I had seen it in photographs of my grandfather. I used to rub it with my thumb when I sat on Michel’s lap, and had watched my father manoeuvre his razor around it umpteen times.
Roland didn’t have one. He had the round chin of his mother, the only part of her, it seemed, that she had managed to smuggle into her son, aside from her sleekness, a fine layer of fat just under the skin. He was not as thin as I was. I could count my ribs and when I took a really deep breath you could almost see through my stomach to my backbone.
I felt too light, too loose-limbed for this room, where Roland had installed himself in such an orderly fashion. All his shoes in rows on the bottom of the wardrobe, his jackets in military ranks on the hangers, his shirts, with starched, manly collars, in piles on the shelves.
From the bottom of the stairs my mother called out that I’d catch it if I didn’t hurry up, but I already knew I was going to be late.
Church bells rang out on the horizon. I stooped over the basin and sank my hands in the water. The sourish smell of old soap filled my nostrils. The cold made my head spin. I buried my face in the towel in which a faint smell of Roland still lingered.
CHAPTER 3
ON A CORNER of the kitchen table stood a glass of milk and a plate with half a slice of bread on it, left there by my mother. She was already waiting outside, with the others. I knew to expect a cuff on the ear, which would amount to little more than a flutter of the hands, after which she would whip out her comb to restore the side parting to my hair.
The nearer we came to the square the more churchgoers joined our party, making the patter of heels and soles on the cobbles ever louder. Wrinkled faces above snow-white collars, ankles in shiny socks peeping out from trousers that had shrunk, and on the square at the foot of the church tower everything fused into a cloud of mothballs and Woods of Windsor.
In the portal my father held the swing door open for us. My mother extended fingers moist with holy water to hold my hand and Roland’s, and motioned for us to make the sign of the cross.
“We can go upstairs,” I told Roland, digging him in the ribs.
He glanced up at my father, who nodded. “Go along then. You’ll be less bored there.”
Next to the niche where a sleepy-eyed churchwarden sat was a low wooden door. I dragged it open and started up the spiral staircase with Roland in my wake. My heart swelled with delight at the coolness rising from the stone steps and swirling round us as we wound our way up and up until the glorious moment when I gave the door of the rood-loft a little push and we stepped into the pale golden light cascading in through the window, where the chill gave way to dusty warmth.
Mr Snellaert was waiting by the keyboard. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. The rows of chairs and benches in the space between two sets of organ pipes, a bit like a clearing in a leaden forest, were occupied by choristers flapping their song books and sheet music.
“I thought you’d overslept again,” the choir master said.
“I’ve brought someone along. My cousin Roland.”
“Roland… Roland,” the choir master echoed, wrinkling his brow. “You must be Roger’s boy.”
Roland nodded.
“If you can sing as well as your Pa when he was a boy, you’re more than welcome to join us.” The choir master pressed a missal into his hands.
I threaded my way among the chairs and benches to the last row, up against the wall. Roswita was already there, wearing a grass-green blouse that strained to hold her bosom.
She was leaning forward slightly on her seat with her elbows on her knees, perhaps because she wanted to conceal her budding curves, in the midst of which a thin silver necklace quivered.
She wore quite ordinary turquoise studs in her ears, which flashed brightly when she stretched her neck with all the nonchalance she could muster and shook her mane so that everyone might admire her jewellery.
I knew I confused her by pretending not to notice, but she set me on edge, alarmed me even, with all her sighs and little groans, the hair in constant need of adjustment, the reins that kept slipping, the pleats in her skirt, her collar, the thin silver necklace, the navy-blue knee socks she wore with the sandals in which tiny pebbles got stuck, driving her crazy, so that she sometimes couldn’t help shaking her feet to dislodge them. The sound of them hitting the wooden floor was magnified ten times under the vaulted ceiling.
“Move over a bit,” I said. “From now on there’s two of us.”
She threw me an inquisitive glance as she raised her bottom off the wooden bench and lowered it further along.
“This is my cousin Roland. He’s come to stay with us for a while.”
Her moist eyes lit up, just as I had foreseen. The fevers raging deep inside her flared, beading her downy upper lip with perspiration.
“Where’s he from?” she asked.
“You ask him,” I said meanly. “He can speak for himself, you know.”
“Where are you from?”
“From Ruizele,” Roland replied, averting his eyes.
“Quite a long way away.”
Roland shrugged. “Half an hour by car, that’s all.” He opened the hymn book and started thumbing the pages.
Roswita’s glance slid past me to him, and I felt chuffed.
“Wait till you see him racing on his bike,” I said, for good measure. “He goes so fast he can almost keep up with his father in his Ford Granada.”