Three days a week he came home with wet hair, making the air redolent with the fresh mud he scraped off his football boots as he sat on the doorstep. The towels he pulled out of his sports bag were so suffused with his odour, the excruciating tang of his sweat, that an invisible twin of his seemed to emerge when he draped them over the footboard of his bed.
The way he shovelled down his food, swigged his drink and broke wind without any shame at all was something I secretly envied, just as I envied the subtle witchcraft with which Roswita was able to shatter his confidence at a stroke.
Up in the rood-loft she had unceremoniously ousted me from my seat a few weeks after his arrival, and had inserted herself with matriarchal aplomb between him and me. The things she whispered to him in the intervals between songs clearly made him uneasy.
He stuck his hands between his knees and awkwardly rubbed his palms together. Roswita’s girlfriends were watching him narrowly, nudging each other. They appeared to be in the know regarding her sophisticated strategies and made mental notes of the times he blushed, as if they were goals she had scored.
*
They went to nearly every match. Roswita’s father offered everyone drinks in the canteen, in the hope of making mayor one day. Roswita herself was usually to be found with her entourage under the corrugated iron roof by the changing rooms. She cheered when goals were scored, booed when they were missed, and stayed until the umpire blew his whistle and the teams left the pitch.
“You’re a fine runner, Roland,” she would shout. “My father says so too.”
That was enough to make him blush to the roots of his hair and keep his head down as he made for the changing room.
Inside was full of hot steam. Now and then, when the door opened a crack, I glimpsed him standing under the shower with his eyes closed, surrounded by a blur of bodies braying to each other in a show of unconcern over their nakedness.
Sometimes he would bray like that at home, too, after he’d washed and begun to put his clothes on. He always fussed with his underpants, tucking his buttocks in carefully, and then stretching out the waistband with his thumbs to inspect his crotch.
I took malicious pleasure in observing him. Knowing that he was at his most vulnerable, I dipped my words thoughtfully in poison and took very careful aim before letting fly.
“Everything all right then, Roland? Hasn’t shrunk has it?”
“Don’t stare. Mind your own business, you little creep.”
“I thought you liked me looking at you.”
Usually he would shut up after that and continue to get dressed.
*
When I was around Willem I was just as likely to be tonguetied as Roland was when Roswita put her feelers out towards him. Willem was a lot less talkative than the others. He wasn’t as withdrawn as I was, but I never saw him being mobbed by friends the way Roland constantly was.
Usually I was the only company he had. We crossed and re-crossed the school yard side by side, and while we surveyed the bleak surroundings, intent on deleting whatever we found offensive, we ourselves were constantly being watched by Mr Bouillie. In his routinely disdainful air there was a trace of suspicion. He couldn’t place us. We weren’t sissies, nor were we rebels. We got reasonably good marks, in class we made sure we were not overeager while being sufficiently attentive, but when we raised our hackles we did it together. As a twosome we were unassailable. If we got the chance we preferred hanging around in remote corners, around the bike shed or in the shaded colonnade, where scraps of paper blew around in little whirlwinds. This was frowned on by Mr Bouillie.
“Callewijn,” he had said one day, after midday break. “You seem to get on remarkably well with De Vries.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the other boys? The two of you seem to stick together all the time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You need to integrate with the rest, you know. Do you good…”
I didn’t know what “integrate” meant.
“He’s being easy on us,” Willem told me. “Because of my Pa. The fund-raising.”
If I kept my eyes peeled, if I made a convincing show of obeying the rules and overcame my boredom, it had to be possible to fathom the hidden agenda of school. That way I could endure the humiliations with my head held high and come out at the end more or less unscathed.
The first swimming session proved to be good practice. On the day itself I was already nervous when I left home in the morning. In the cubicle Willem and I shared, I made myself as small as possible. We both tried to avoid bumping into each other, and if we did we mumbled a quick “sorry”. I put off stripping to the buff as long as I could.
His body made me feel inadequate. Nature had cast him from a perfect mould, unlike me. I looked as if I was made up of odds and ends. One of my nipples was lower than the other, and also stuck out more. The hollow in my chest was too deep for my liking. I kept getting red bumps on my buttocks, which made them look like unripe berries with lots of hair in between.
The swimming trunks that my mother had undoubtedly ferreted out of some cut-price treasure trove, a shapeless garment with brown stripes and orange dots, did not make me feel any better. They contrasted shrilly with Willem’s tasteful navy-blue trunks, which he had put on whistling. Besides, he had shed his clothes without the least sign of embarrassment.
He had blond hair. All his hair was blond. Beneath his navel, the base of his belly was fringed with pleasing flaxen curls, and the secret part down in the furrow between his thighs had no doubt been pronounced very fine indeed by the school doctor.
He moved with a self-assurance that seemed to have more to do with the harmonious proportions of his body than with his state of mind, and it made me long for something I couldn’t quite grasp. The promise of boundless blessing, the sense of dissolving in time, of being able to open out like a shell and escape from my own skinny self.
His limbs, like Roland’s, seemed a perfect fit. His body expressed him quite satisfactorily, it rarely interrupted him. He didn’t have arms that felt like too-long sleeves that got in the way. He kept his arms crossed on his desk or let them hang down in a very relaxed sort of way when he leaned back in his chair, whereas I just wished that mine were at least five centimetres shorter. Mine kept letting me down, they were the source of my clumsiness.
He tapped me on the nose.
“You’re miles away. Come on.”
Mr Bruane, the P.E. teacher, who’d had the septum removed from his nose because it had been an impediment to his boxing career, had already clapped his hands, at which the doors of the cubicles had all swung open.
I waited for the last pair of bare feet to patter past on the wet tiles before stepping out of my cubicle.
We had to line up on the edge of the pool. Mr Bruane ordered us to jump into the water one by one and to swim two lengths.
I managed to turn a deaf ear to the surreptitious sniggering and thought I would make it to the end without incurring too much abuse, until Mr Bruane told me to get up on the diving board and make a dive exactly as he had personally demonstrated moments before.
There I stood, in all my misery, having to endure the jeers of my classmates with their smart trunks and even tans from Marseilles or St Tropez. Nor did the amusement in the swimming instructor’s eyes escape me.
“Cal-le-wijn! Cal-le-wijn!” they shouted.