The drawer did not contain any vestiges of boyish ruin. No wheels fallen off toy cars, no popguns or plastic geese from a set of farm animals long since dispersed; none of the stuff I kept in the drawer of my own bedside table. I clutched them in my fists like amulets when there was a thunderstorm and I felt I was too old to be scared.
What I found in Roland’s drawer was handkerchiefs. All except one, which was stuffed into a corner, lay neatly folded in four little piles. In the compartment underneath there was only an old wristwatch, probably his father’s, and a photo of himself smartly dressed for his Holy Communion. That was all I had with which to get a taste of what it was like to be Roland.
I slunk back to my room with an empty feeling, and was relieved when he reappeared a few minutes later to tell me they were having coffee downstairs.
*
That evening he sat beside my father watching a sports programme on television. They clapped their hands on their knees in unison when a favourite player missed the goal by a hair’s breadth, and conferred earnestly on the chances of the losing team.
I sat at the table finishing my father’s crossword puzzle.
“You can wear your blue shirt tomorrow,” my mother said. “You want to look smart for your first day.”
Earlier on she had shown me my new sandwich box, which you could squeeze the air out of so as to keep everything fresh. I had nodded admiringly.
Football was followed by a bicycle race. Roland continued to watch with undiminished interest.
My father stood up from his chair. “Join me in a pint, Roland?”
He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “All right. Why not?”
My mother rolled her eyes.
“Ma, please,” my father said soothingly. “He’s old enough. Besides, drinking takes practice.”
“I’ll have one too,” I ventured.
He didn’t answer, just laughed condescendingly.
When he returned with only two bottles from the cellar I folded the newspaper pointedly, kissed my mother goodnight and went upstairs.
I wanted to pack, get ready, and thereby assuage my impatience with rituals, but everything was already in my satchel. I got undressed and lay down on my bed.
The drone from the television downstairs was faintly audible in my room. I turned over on my side and watched the daylight fade.
The drop in temperature made the floorboards shrink again. All the rooms in the house seemed to be filling up with their original occupants. Michel hunting for gin in the dresser. Flora zigzagging towards the bed on her crutches.
“They’re in heaven, all of them,” my father had said many times.
But what was heaven? Perhaps it was a world that lay above or beneath ours, as transparent as the tissue paper separating the pages of Aunt Odette’s photo album.
“There aren’t any clocks in heaven,” Mr Snellaert had insisted when he was preparing us for our Confirmation. “Just trumpets sounding the Day of Judgement.”
Perhaps they were still roaming through the rooms, blind to the new wallpaper, deaf to our conversations. Perhaps they still gathered round the table downstairs in the dead of night or in the middle of what was daytime to us, and did jigsaw puzzles, played cards or darned socks. Now and then, I imagined, Flora would get up, groaning, and drag herself to bed to give birth or to die all over again, after which she would get up again and carry on, according to some logic governed by other-worldly clocks.
The night had grown as dark as their skirts, which my mother had long since thrown away or cut up for use as dust-cloths. I dozed off and didn’t know how much later it was when I woke up, from the cold maybe, or from something else. An intriguing sound, there it was again, the rhythmical creaking of bedsprings in Roland’s room. It stopped abruptly when I coughed.
I got up and put on my pyjamas. Outside my window, in the dark-blue dusk, hung the full moon. The light shone silver-white on my table, on the lampshade and the handle of my new satchel.
“Roland?” I asked. “Are you awake?”
I heard a deep sigh.
It sounded far too studied for someone who was asleep.
CHAPTER 4
I DREAMED I WAS WEARING a dark suit, jacket and long trousers, shirt and tie, and that my body, although unmistakably mine, was eighteen years old, taut and strong. There were a whole lot of us, a long row filing through a colonnaded passage, or was it a cloistered garden? I was overtaken by someone wearing a brown monk’s habit, and in the heat of a June afternoon we lined up on some brick steps between two conifers clipped into conical shapes, just like in the photo propped up against the spines of the encyclopaedias in my father’s room downstairs.
My father is holding the school flag at the top of a pyramid of boys with closely cropped heads, under his arm a roll of parchment tied with a narrow scarlet ribbon. Black hair parted down the middle. Two locks falling over his forehead, almost hiding his eyes. He looks grave, concerned almost, as if he already knew that his schooldays were over.
My breast filled with boundless joy, as though something wonderful was afoot, and there we stood, waiting in the shimmering light, perhaps for a photographer to click the shutter.
There was a moment’s hush, filled with the twitter of sparrows. The air was electric. Then someone next to me cringed away, and someone else shrieked and covered his face with his hands. From behind me came the sound of breaking glass. I could hear stones clattering down the tiled roof. In front of me someone collapsed on the ground, as though hit by a bullet. Still more broken glass. The wail of a siren. Someone shouted “Watch out!” I ducked instinctively, but a flying object hit me above my right eye.
It was a while before I realised that I was staring up at the cracks in the ceiling of my room, that I must have been woken by the noise Roland made as he groped sleepily for the alarm clock to silence it.
I stepped out of bed, grabbed a towel and went over to the washbasin.
Roland had opened one baleful eye. For a moment it seemed he was not going to get up, that he would turn over and snuggle down, but then he kicked off the covers and leaped out of bed.
“Move over,” he said gruffly. His hair was tousled, as if he’d been swimming across a sea of sheets or burrowing through banks of bed linen until the alarm clock brought release.
We took turns splashing water over our faces, stooping like birds quenching their thirst, craning our necks forward and drawing ourselves up again.
Every time he bent over I stared down at his neck. I noticed several moles, some of them with wiry hairs growing out of them, which were quite unlike the normal hairs that lay flat on his skin. When he clapped his hands to his face and snorted contentedly his shoulder blades stuck out, hard and angular as if he were sprouting wings that cast a shadow over the archipelago of his backbone.
“Get a move on,” he grumbled, “it’s a quarter past seven already.” But it was earlier than ever before. It was the earliest I had ever had to get up.
My eyelids were still heavy with sleep when we went downstairs, where my mother had already put two airtight sandwich boxes side by side on the table.
“Scrambled eggs and bacon,” she announced cheerily as she came in from the kitchen with the coffee pot. She proceeded to fill our cups, with remarkably good humour. She was actually humming as she ruffled my hair and leaned across to offer Roland a kiss, which he accepted after a moment’s hesitation.
Pink and fluffy in her dressing gown and quilted slippers, my mother sipped her coffee and eyed me with such tenderness that I started chewing more and more slowly, out of sheer apprehension. She wasn’t to think I would burst into tears when it was time for us to leave for school.