were the three shirts. Two grey, one checked. At the bottom lay school textbooks and exercise books, with much-thumbed labels. Marcel Ornelis. Class C. Saint Laurens. Inside were stock-raising techniques, domestic fowl and cattle breeds, irrigation methods, with pencilled scribbles in the margin, faint from being erased:
Fly Bluefoot fly!!
All hail to Flanders!
The shirts did not match the picture in my mind’s eye, which was of a slim figure, military, clean-cut. A dark shape scissored out of the night. The check shirt had a peasant collar. He must have worn it buttoned up to the top, the same way it now lay folded in the trunk. He may have rolled up the sleeves on hot days. Up to the elbows, or over them. Probably over.
Glory to our Flemish Heroes!
He would have pencilled his slogans in secret, hiding behind the boys in the row in front. Perhaps he had shielded what he was writing with his left hand. He would have rubbed them out himself, later on. Possibly at the behest of a teacher. Or he might have been afraid, or ashamed, as ifhe had scrawled an obscenity on the wall of one of the lavatories. The older boys sometimes did this, even in Miss Veegaete’s lavatory. She would sweep out of her palatial privy seething with indignation, an empress stepping onto her balcony to face the rebellious rabble below.
Every single item had been replaced in the trunk in the correct sequence, for hadn’t I had plenty of practice observing the strictest order each Friday anew, portrait after portrait? I had even dusted the lid with my handkerchief so as to remove any fingerprints. Perhaps I had been too fastidious. Perhaps I had made the trunk look suspiciously spic and span. Now, in the early hours of the night, it would be filling up with black water, up to the brim and over, like an overflowing bathtub.
*
The grandfather switched the light off over the sofa. The grandmother folded her glasses and put them in their case. I sloped back to my room and drew the cold sheets up to my chin.
The familiar sounds of their nightly ritual wafted towards me. A Steradent tablet fizzing in a glass on the bathroom shelf. The splash of water on their faces, hands, wrists, while they grinned toothlessly in the stillness. The creaking of their joints, or it could have been the lining of their slippers, as they shambled down the corridor. The grandfather checked all the rooms, opening doors, glancing inside, and shutting them again. By the time he reached my door I was lying on my side, breathing through parted lips with studied regularity.
I knew without opening my eyes that he was standing in the doorway with his hand on the doorknob and his mouth twisted into an involuntary rictus. His flabby lips made soft smacking sounds. Finally he shut the door. A moment later their bedsprings groaned weakly under their combined weight.
*
I had learned to keep my mouth shut about the footsteps in the dead of night. I had mentioned them only once.
“You’ve got too much imagination, you have,” she had said. “You’ve got so much imagination it doesn’t fit inside your head. It’ll be the pigeons you can hear. Or your grandfather, when he goes to the lavatory.”
His footfall was familiar to me. He favoured his left foot to spare his bad knee. Hard-soft, hard-soft came the creak of his slippers, or was it his joints, as he headed to the bathroom and back again.
Perhaps she was right. It would be the pigeons – they certainly behaved as if they carried on until late at night. All the other birds would be up and about by sunrise, while the pigeons spent half the morning perching side by side on the gutter, a row of befuddled feathery balls on little legs. All that was missing were ice packs on their heads. They were the culprits – but then again maybe they were not. The veils of the night were more than a match for commonsense explanations.
*
Moonlight seeped through the slit under the door toward the bedstead. From the sewing room it inched