Propped against the books on the shelves were snapshots of the summer camp where he’d flirted with a boy called Koen and where, on that last night by the farewell bonfire, he’d come on so strongly to some girl that she sent him perfumed letters every fortnight for months afterwards. The picture of our whole group at the foot of a dune shows me sulking. He roars with laughter, throws his arm around my shoulders and shakes me free of my rigidity.
I drew up his chair and sat down, seized with longing to take off my clothes and crawl into his bed, pull the blankets up tight, snuggle down into the sheets wrinkled by him, bury my face in his pillow and inhale the last vestiges of his smell, and then to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
I took the snapshot from the shelf and slipped it into my back pocket.
“Found anything?” Katrien asked when I came downstairs.
“I’d better be going,” I said.
She went ahead of me to open the front door, rose up on her toes and kissed me on the cheek.
*
When I turned into the yard I saw Roland’s car parked under the beech tree. I went inside, took my shoes off in the passage and paused by the dining room door. I could hear my cousin boasting about some deal he’d struck and my father’s amused laughter.
“How did it go?” my mother asked when I came in. The three of them were having supper.
“How did it go… well, they’re sad, understandably.”
She poured me a cup of coffee. “I hope you passed on our condolences.”
“They weren’t there. Just the daughter.”
She pushed the bread basket in my direction. “Go on, take.”
“I’m not very hungry.”
“He was always a bit of a weirdo,” Roland said. “Attention-seeker, he was. All of them, really. I mean, that house of theirs, who’d want to live in a place like that?”
“You think everything’s weird,” I said.
“Now you two…” my father said soothingly.
“It’s time you decided which clothes you want to take,” my mother said. “You can leave the rest. I’ll pack them for you.”
“I’ll do it later.”
I went upstairs.
Roland made himself useful shifting furniture. There were still a couple of wardrobes and cabinets upstairs waiting to be moved to the back of the house.
“Watch out for that skirting board,” I heard my mother cry. “We don’t want to damage the wall. Anton, why don’t you give us a hand.”
I didn’t respond.
“It’s all right,” my father said, “leave him be.”
I set about taking down my posters. They were faded and reminded me too much of school. Patches of wallpaper came away with them, laying bare the pattern of my boyhood bedroom, the pale-blue clouds, lemon-yellow canaries, those grinning aeroplanes with propellers on their noses.
After stuffing the posters in the wastepaper basket, I turned to the wardrobe, but couldn’t bring myself to sort through my shirts and sweaters because of all those invisible stains they bore which would be impossible to remove, so I shut the door again.
The others were sitting outside on the bench by the wall. Bottles were uncapped.
“Do you want a drink?” my mother called.
“No, Ma. Just leave me alone.”
The starlings returned, flocking thickly around the tree and settling on the branches with a loud rustling like heavy rainfall.
“I can’t get enough of watching those birds,” I heard my father say.
I stood up, undressed, searched out my own warmth in the sheets, turned on my side and listened to the birds until I fell asleep.
CHAPTER 3
I WAS A LITTLE BOY again sitting in my high chair at the head of the table, out in the garden under the beech tree. It was a rainy day, the sky was overcast. Afternoon or early evening, could be either. But the overweening greyness, which might turn into drizzle any minute, did not match the happy atmosphere reigning all around me.
I saw myself banging my empty milk beaker on the tray of my high chair, to the rhythm of Alice and Aunt Odette clapping their hands. I remember my surprise at the sensation of the old comfort and warmth coming over me again, like a warm coat, a thick blanket, and the pleasure of seeing the Aunts’ white hair coiffed with tortoiseshell combs over their ears and the intriguing little brooches of salamanders set with rubies climbing up the glossy black fabric of their blouses.
My father was conversing amicably with Michel, who’d hung his walking stick over the back of his chair. At my feet I could feel the dog wagging its tail under the table. It was only after I had glanced round all the faces there, gladly recognising each one above the table laden with dirty dishes and glasses with greasy fingerprints, that I noticed Willem sitting at the far end. He was wearing a dark suit and clinked his glass loudly against Flora’s. They were laughing.
Then his eye caught mine. He nodded, nodded again and raised his glass to me. I could tell he was saying something, even as he laughed. His lips moved as if to ask, “Get it?”
He shook his head when Flora made to refill his glass.
“Willem!” I cried, but Aunt Odette hushed me with her hand on my arm.
“Just carry on,” she murmured. “Go on, eat.”
I drew back my arm, stood up in my chair, called his name a second time. Again I saw his lips move, and I shouted for him to speak up. He glared back at me.
“Hurry up,” said Aunt Odette. “The food’s getting cold.”
She began to feed me soup by the spoonful, which seemed to take for ever, no matter how quickly I swallowed.
All around me people were rising from the table and putting away their folding chairs.
Raindrops fell on my bare arms. Someone grabbed me. I struggled to resist and felt as though I were falling.
*
I woke up on the edge of my bed. Outside, the horizon flashed with lightning. I got up, shut the window and went downstairs.
My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, in the light of a flickering lamp.
“Can’t you sleep either?” she asked. “I’m getting to be just like my mother. She had trouble sleeping as she got older.”
I passed behind her towards the cupboard, in search of a mug.
“Like some warm milk?”
“Yes, not too much, though.”
There were some chocolate biscuits left in the tin, which I set down on the table.
“It’s that friend of yours, isn’t it?”
I nodded, chewed the inside of my cheek, dunked one of the biscuits into my milk.
“Ma?”
“Yes, lad?” She sniffed. In the lamplight her crows’ feet seemed more deeply etched than ever.
“It’s nothing really.”
She sipped her milk. “Your Pa’s snoring again. As soon as his head touches the pillow he’s off.”
I stared at her nose, which had a little dent halfway down it, just like mine, and at her lips, which she would press together and relax by turns when she was mulling things over, as if her thoughts were tweaking her facial muscles. My mother. The joints in her fingers were giving her trouble. Surgery hadn’t helped. The growths kept coming back. I gazed at her blue-grey eyes, the remains of mascara on her lashes and thought: You don’t know me. You’re my mother, but you don’t know me. You pressed me out of your body. I was a lump inside you, hanging on to your arteries, ruining your figure for the rest of your life, and you don’t know me. You cleaned up my shit, powdered my bum. Ironed my shirts. Read the stains in my sheets like letters. Swaddled me, brushed my hair, cuddled me, mopped me up. And you don’t know me.
“I’ll be glad when we’re out of this place for good,” she said.