Free My Fellow Skin by Erwin Mortier

make it bulge and glanced at the clock over the bar. Half-past one atthe latest, my mother had said. It was already a quarter past. We’d be having warmed-up steak again, with reproaches for gravy.
    *
    It was all set. Toasts had been drunk, his membership of the football club was sealed. Roland would join the team. Practice on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Matches every few weeks on a Saturday.
    “And you’ll have your choir practice on Thursdays. You’ll be busy all week,” my father concluded with a satisfied air. My mother was in the kitchen, venting her spleen on the dirty dishes.
    “It’d be a good thing for you to take up some sport, too,” she called out to me, still angry about her cauliflower boiling to a pulp and her potatoes getting stuck to the bottom of the pan.
    She placed the dishes upside down on the draining rack, rubbed some vaseline on her hands and untied her apron, thereby signalling that it was time for the sultry boredom of Sunday afternoon to take over.
    Upstairs in my bedroom, with Roland in the next room lying on his bed with a book, I picked up my new satchel and opened it. It was dark brown with long straps to hang over my shoulders so I could carry it on my back. I inspected the stiff leather at close quarters, unzipped the compartments, checked whether my pencil case fitted inside properly and decided on the best places for my sharpener, ruler, rubber, sheets of blotting paper. Once everything was packed away I discovered that the bag was much too light, totally at odds with the weight of the responsibility that I was about to shoulder inthe world at large. I added two extra volumes of my father’s encyclopaedia and buckled the strap of my satchel, only to discover that it was now so heavy I couldn’t lift it off the floor.
    “For goodness sake,” Roland grumbled, “can’t you sit still? You’re driving me up the wall with all your fidgeting.”
    They were the first words he’d spoken to me. Even though I felt a twinge of shame, I lapped them up like honey.
    “I’ve put too much stuff in it,” I said.
    “In what?”
    “My satchel.”
    He shut his book with a clap. “You don’t need to take anything special tomorrow. Just a pen and a pencil. They’ll give you all you need at school. They’ve got their own exercise books, with the name of the school on the front.”
    Trying to make as little noise as possible, I opened the satchel again and carefully took out one of the volumes, but just as I went to put it on the table it slipped from my fingers and crashed to the floor.
    I heard Roland get up and leave the room, slamming the door shut.
    It didn’t seem a good idea to go after him, however curious I was about what he might be up to.
    On his bedside table, next to the imposing alarm clock, lay a book about the Word of God, a gift from an aunt on his mother’s side named Vera. It was hard to imagine him wanting to read it, but it lay on top of another book, which was about salmon fishing in Scotland and had lots of photos, and which looked a little more worn than the other one.
    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 Ikept 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