Free My Fellow Skin by Erwin Mortier Page A

a sports programme on television. They clapped their hands on their knees in unison when a favourite player missed the goal by a hair’s breadth, and conferred earnestly on the chances of the losing team.
    I sat at the table finishing my father’s crossword puzzle.
    “You can wear your blue shirt tomorrow,” my mother said. “You want to look smart for your first day.”
    Earlier on she had shown me my new sandwich box, which you could squeeze the air out of so as to keep everything fresh. I had nodded admiringly.
    Football was followed by a bicycle race. Roland continued to watch with undiminished interest.
    My father stood up from his chair. “Join me in a pint, Roland?”
    He hesitated for a moment, and then said, “All right. Why not?”
    My mother rolled her eyes.
    “Ma, please,” my father said soothingly. “He’s old enough. Besides, drinking takes practice.”
    “I’ll have one too,” I ventured.
    He didn’t answer, just laughed condescendingly.
    When he returned with only two bottles from the cellar I folded the newspaper pointedly, kissed my mother goodnight and went upstairs.
    I wanted to pack, get ready, and thereby assuage my impatience with rituals, but everything was already in my satchel. I got undressed and lay down on my bed.
    The drone from the television downstairs was faintly audible in my room. I turned over on my side and watched the daylight fade.
    The drop in temperature made the floorboards shrink again. All the rooms in the house seemed to be filling up with their original occupants. Michel hunting for gin in the dresser. Flora zigzagging towards the bed on her crutches.
    “They’re in heaven, all of them,” my father had said many times.
    But what was heaven? Perhaps it was a world that lay above or beneath ours, as transparent as the tissue paper separating the pages of Aunt Odette’s photo album.
    “There aren’t any clocks in heaven,” Mr Snellaert had insisted when he was preparing us for our Confirmation. “Just trumpets sounding the Day of Judgement.”
    Perhaps they were still roaming through the rooms, blind to the new wallpaper, deaf to our conversations. Perhaps they still gathered round the table downstairs in the dead ofnight or in the middle of what was daytime to us, and did jigsaw puzzles, played cards or darned socks. Now and then, I imagined, Flora would get up, groaning, and drag herself to bed to give birth or to die all over again, after which she would get up again and carry on, according to some logic governed by other-worldly clocks.
    The night had grown as dark as their skirts, which my mother had long since thrown away or cut up for use as dust-cloths. I dozed off and didn’t know how much later it was when I woke up, from the cold maybe, or from something else. An intriguing sound, there it was again, the rhythmical creaking of bedsprings in Roland’s room. It stopped abruptly when I coughed.
    I got up and put on my pyjamas. Outside my window, in the dark-blue dusk, hung the full moon. The light shone silver-white on my table, on the lampshade and the handle of my new satchel.
    “Roland?” I asked. “Are you awake?”
    I heard a deep sigh.
    It sounded far too studied for someone who was asleep.

CHAPTER 4
    I DREAMED I WAS WEARING a dark suit, jacket and long trousers, shirt and tie, and that my body, although unmistakably mine, was eighteen years old, taut and strong. There were a whole lot of us, a long row filing through a colonnaded passage, or was it a cloistered garden? I was overtaken by someone wearing a brown monk’s habit, and in the heat of a June afternoon we lined up on some brick steps between two conifers clipped into conical shapes, just like in the photo propped up against the spines of the encyclopaedias in my father’s room downstairs.
    My father is holding the school flag at the top of a pyramid of boys with closely cropped heads, under his arm a roll of parchment tied with a narrow scarlet ribbon. Black hair parted down the