I steeled myself, took a deep breath and shut my eyes.
The arc I described in the air can’t have been very elegant. The water hit me like a fist in the stomach, and for an instant I heard a great roar.
Then it was quiet. Blue light, a froth of bubbles. Panic. My own flailing arms and legs.
When I came up for air the others had gone, all except Willem.
He stretched his arms along the little gutter just above the surface of the pool and eyed me uneasily while I hid my tears with both my hands.
“Come on out. Time to go.”
I shook my head vigorously. “Can’t…”
He waited.
“Callewijn! Can’t get enough of the water all of sudden, eh?” Mr Bruane called. There was a fresh roar from the cubicles.
“Come on.”
“Leave me alone.”
“You’ll get into trouble.”
I gave him a long hard look.
He didn’t get it at first. Then he rolled his eyes, let go of the edge and disappeared under water.
It was a while before he resurfaced, with my trunks. He handed them over to me with a straight face.
“Don’t ever let on,” he said later on in the changing cubicle. “They can scent it. They’re like wolves. They always pick on the runt of the litter.”
I dried my tears, nodded.
“They’re good at that.”
He swore to himself, slipped his jacket on and buttoned up his sports bag.
He was already near to the exit. I hesitated before calling him back.
He swung round.
“What?”
My cheeks burned.
“Could you help me do up my laces?”
CHAPTER 7
THAT AUTUMN, as I remember it, was bathed in the diffuse light of an overcast sky and the stillness of October, when the dyke was permanently shrouded in mist and it drizzled for days on end.
It was the autumn when I became suddenly and acutely aware that my father’s hair was turning grey, especially around his ears. It hit me one evening during supper. He had been working late, and while he ate he complained bitterly about the situation at the mill, where things were looking bad.
“It’s just getting crazier every year,” he confided in me.
With each mouthful his anger ebbed away. I could see him sinking back into his usual self-absorption. Now and then a muttered imprecation bubbled up from his chest, then it was all over. He laid the newspaper on the table next to his plate, and started to read.
He’s getting old, I thought, and I was shocked. His father, whom I had never met, had turned white by the age of thirty. There were photographs to prove it. But thirty was old. In those days people were either little, big, or old. My father had always been big. Being big meant casting a big shadow, like the spread of leafy branches. I had nestled in his arms as if they were the limbs of a tree.
Now I was getting big myself. Even my mother said so. And he said so too, on days when I skulked around the house, pestering Roland, flinging myself dramatically on my bed, slamming doors, leaving my shoes lying in the middle of the room instead of putting them on the rack, at which he would jump up from his chair and demand in a puzzled tone of voice, “Anton, boy, whatever’s the matter?”
“I don’t know,” I would yell, bounding up the stairs. “Everything.”
When the storm had subsided he came up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. After a long silence he said,“You’re getting to be a big boy.”
He needed reading glasses to do his crossword. They magnified his eyes, and the helpless astonishment with which they seemed to view the world filled me with a deepening sense of weariness. My father, old. The thought repelled me. So did his shuffling footsteps on the bathroom tiles. And so did his hand on my shoulders when he came in while I was doing my homework and said, “Mourning song. Five letters. Latin.”
“Nenia, Pa.”
He kept forgetting. He couldn’t find the words he was looking for. When Roswita’s father turned up in the café on Sunday, he hunched his shoulders. When he spoke I could hear him rattling coins and keys in his trouser pockets to help him think.
I registered these things. I was growing up. He was growing down in my eyes. I was growing right up over the roof and the stables. My thoughts branched out. In the old days when things were always out of reach and I longed to be as tall as the cupboards, being grown-up had struck me as a tranquil state in which to be. But it wasn’t easy getting there. It was Willem’s fault. I felt myself clambering up inside his tall body and looking out at the world through his eyes.
One Wednesday afternoon I fetched up at his house. Roland had gone to visit his father. It was pouring with rain. After fifty metres our coats were soaked through.
“You’d better shelter in our house until there’s a break,” he said and I followed him on my bike into the garage.
We left our shoes on the mat. He opened a door for me and led me across a grey-green carpet into a long corridor, which was entirely made of glass on one side. I followed him up the stairs to his bedroom. He grabbed some towels from a cupboard and threw one in my direction.
We rubbed ourselves dry, hung our trousers over the backs of chairs and sat down at his desk by the window, looking out on the dripping trees. We rolled a marble back and forth over his desktop for a while. He showed me his books. Quite a lot of them were about natural history, which I wasn’t too keen on. He played me his records. A din, to my ears.
He straightened his bedcover and lay down on top, folded his arms behind his head, got up again and handed me a pair of his trousers to put on. He folded the bottoms up over my ankles so I wouldn’t trip.
Then came that strange moment, when he’d gone to the lavatory and his mother came up the stairs with a laundry basket and paused on the landing, said hello, asked who I was and looked me up and down for a very long time.
I lowered my eyes, studied the bookcase and stared at my fingers.
When I raised my eyes again she was halfway down the corridor. As she turned into another room I heard her say, “Katrien, if you aren’t practising, you’d better close the lid. Or the keys will just gather dust.” Someone started banging on a piano.
“Is your friend staying for supper?” she asked when we came downstairs.
“You staying for lunch?” Willem echoed, as if I hadn’t understood what she’d said.
“Dunno… I expect they’ll be wondering where I’ve got to, back home.”
“Well, we can give them a bell,” she said. “What’s your number?”
She addressed my mother with the words, “Good afternoon, this is Willem’s mother. We’ve saved someone from drowning here.”
I knew my mother wouldn’t have a clue what she meant. I could hear her halting voice from where I was standing, offering apologies, hoping that I was not causing any trouble.
“He’s drenched to the skin, you know. His clothes are drying upstairs.”
I had to be home by five o’clock.
*
Willem’s house breathed. It soaked up daylight through all its vast windows. It sprawled on to the lawn and looked at the trees. Inside, there were long sofas upholstered in leather and low wall cabinets with large paintings hanging above them, oblongs of evenly coloured mist. Out in the garden the roly-poly statue danced in the rain.
His father came down another staircase from his office. He shook hands with me. The table was laid for five.
“Enjoy your meal, children,” he said, spreading his linen napkin on his lap.
They spoke in a posh accent, with the kind of ease that would have had my father fumbling desperately in his pockets. I couldn’t bear the thought of them dropping me off at home, as Willem’s mother had suggested.