“I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
He hopped from one foot to the other. “Where’s the toilet down here?”
“Sorry,” I said, “Down the passage, turn right, it’s the second door.”
He padded out of the room.
Another six days or so and I’d sink back into boredom again. The idea paralysed me. Sometimes it started on the Saturday morning, when the prospect of having to get on my bike to undergo dreary lessons, teachers, discipline, being spied on and humiliated all over again would put me in a bad mood all weekend. School and I were not meant for each other. I simply did not exist. Just some little runt in cheap clothes, bought so I could grow into them, and I was tolerated because I behaved myself, because I let them ram all their lessons down my throat so I could cough them up again when required, but in reality they trusted me as little as I trusted them, and there were no generous donations from my father to make up for it.
I noted his crossword lying on the table, my mother’s copy of the Women’s Union magazine with free knitting patterns, the unopened envelopes behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and became acutely aware of the house that was home: dilapidated, old, emptier than ever.
The wind seemed to be digging out the foundations and lifting up the walls. The notion came as a relief. If only I myself could blow away in the wind like a lost letter fluttering across the fields, and once the thaw set in I’d let all my garbled sentences and nonsensical words leak away into the melted snow. I was reminded of the time in class when we were given yet another form to fill in and I simply put a tick in the box next to the word “born”, whereupon Mr Vaneenooghe gave me extra homework for punishment, although it made perfectly good sense to me.
I heard a door opening behind me and falling to.
“In one of your moods again, are you,” Willem said.
He lolled against the back of my chair.
“I know. I’m a pain sometimes.”
“Who isn’t?”
I said nothing.
“C’mon. Let’s go to bed.”
I stayed where I was.
He slipped his hands under my collar and leaned forward.
PART III
CHAPTER 1
PARIS. Soissons. Senlis. Summer 197*, the last school trip before our final exams and going off to university. Pointed arches, triforia, triptychs. Willem leaping in front of my camera lens going boo, time after time. Me pretending to be annoyed by his tomfoolery and striding ahead to stay close to our guide. I was going to study history, and didn’t want to miss anything. He found it all very boring and would duck into niches to pose among statues of prophets or ape the attitudes of martyrs and holy virgins. Not once did I press the shutter.
Nearly nineteen. When I try to recall the way I was then, with my long hair and the long white shirts I wore loose and flowing so they felt almost like a dress; when I look at old Polaroids of parties or outings and see that thin, lanky body harbouring passions that shattered like mirrors, shoulders invariably hunched, defensive, with Willem leaning against me, flaunting his beloved jangly armbands and necklaces, pulling faces and grinning and pointing his finger at the camera — what do I see? How can that be me?
He might have been my son, were he not one of the annual growth rings that have become ingrained in me along with what counts as “the past”, in a blur solidifying by the day. I catch myself contemplating his likeness with the melancholy satisfaction of a father observing his child, still young enough to enjoy simple, frivolous pleasures. Or should I not think of frivolity but of the unmitigated, boundless joys we thought would never end, even as time was grinding us down?
You can already tell where the first lines will be etched around the eyes. Lurking at the back of the smile, wide and angular, which seems almost to tear the face in two, there is already a hint of the grief that will come back like a boomerang to collar him as he hears himself roaring with laughter and thinks: here I am, I’m having a good time, life is being kind to me.
That apparently inescapable footnote of sorrow, chasing each moment of pleasure more doggedly year by year, sometimes hard on the heels, sometimes at a discreet distance — where does it come from? A tap on the shoulder from the dead, maybe, which I never felt when I was young and feckless. There, far away on the horizon, waving their black handkerchiefs, the dead stand out ever more sharply against the sky.
Perhaps it has something to do with the feeling that everyone in the pictures is dead. Not just the sense of unreality and emptiness that fills me as I go through old photographs and come upon myself at some party or other, engaged in animated conversation with someone whose existence has shrunk to a cardboard shape. It’s also seeing myself holding a glass in mid-air, halfway between the table and my mouth. Or sitting on a bench in a park somewhere, looking up in the tender light of spring at whoever was with me at the time.
It needn’t have been Willem who took that photograph. But the image has the elegant composition that seemed to come naturally to him, and there’s the bird’s eye perspective — a device he fancied. My face, all smiles, looks like the centre of a flower supported by the narrow stalk of my torso.
It can’t possibly have been taken by Roland. Photography didn’t interest him much, and the few times he did pick up a camera he managed to decapitate entire wedding parties at a stroke. He managed to slice me down the middle once, when I posed for him leaning against a tree.
He left school two years before we did. His results weren’t brilliant, but they weren’t bad either. He opted for a career in business, and from then on drifted from one branch of casual trade to the next: Oriental rugs, baby clothes, whirlpool baths, army surplus. The police were after him at one point and he kept having problems with customs inspectors, but he always managed to keep his head above water.
There must be pictures in the family albums of him wearing that slightly shady grin of his. Macho, square-jawed, hair cropped short. There’s a snapshot of the day his mother came home: Roland resting both hands on the back of her chair, in her eyes the glazed look of the heavily sedated. Surrounded by family members wreathed in dutiful smiles, his mother gazes down at the enormous slice of cake on her plate as though dreading the prospect of having to eat it. Roland stands behind her, stooping slightly to form a sort of little roof to protect her, but at the same time his eyes are raised and seem to say, “Yes, this is my mother. This is the sad creature who bore me. Poor, dear, half-witted Mama. Just as well I’m not a softie, and there’s still the inheritance to look forward to.”
The tip of his tie — as a self-proclaimed whizz-kid he went around formally dressed in a suit and tie — rests on her shoulder, giving the picture an entirely fortuitous note of intimacy.
There were a few occasions, later on, when his visits to my parents coincided with mine, and each time, as I watched him lift his little daughters from the back seat of his car and open the boot to take out push chairs, bags with nappies and baby bottles, I felt a slight pang of disappointment. In the end he got himself a perfectly insulated house in one of the new settlements that were springing up around the old villages all over the country, the kind of place where the wind plays listlessly in acacia trees and scatters lawns with the resigned sort of happiness that cowers behind tall reed fences, for fear of getting hurt.
I don’t enjoy coming face to face with myself in pictures of me with shoulders hunched, conversing with one of the many girlfriends he had over the years. A Lydia maybe, or a Natalie. Fair-haired or dark. Shy or rattling on and on like an alarm clock you couldn’t switch off. Sometimes he’d bring a girl home with him to spend the night at our house. A better place for a shag, I imagine, than that gloomy villa his parents lived in. Although it was grand enough to impress his sweethearts, there was always the risk that his mother would spend half the night shambling up and down the corridor like a drugged bear or put the roast in the oven at half-past two in the morning.