My Fellow Skin by Erwin Mortier Page A

keen to have me around.
    “You’re supposed to stay on that side,” he drawled, pointing to a white line crossing the school yard from end to end, dividing it exactly in two.
    On the far side gangly youths bounced basketballs on the pavement. The near side, reserved for juniors, was occupied by lads lugging outsized satchels, circling each other warily, breaking ranks again and picking at their pimples.
    I saw Roland go up to a group of boys who greeted him warmly. Punches were exchanged, playful blows were dodged. Someone held him fast, made him bend over and swiped off his cap.
    I retraced my steps. The chap with the doughy face waswalking back and forth along the white line like a border guard, and kept glancing in my direction.
    Of all the things I had seen in my father’s photographs, only the monastery with its frail cupolas and pretty bay windows was still standing. Wedged in among a couple of the shoeboxes, the old building seemed to tremble while it was being slowly squashed.
    There were tufts of grass growing on the brick steps where my father had once raised the school flag, and the conifers must have been chopped down ages ago. In the middle of a small, fussy flower bed stood a weather-beaten Christ spreading his arms, one of which had been amputated at the elbow, either due to a mishap or to mischief.
    There was no horizon anywhere. No way out. Not even when I looked up. The sky was a rectangular hole with a lid of clouds.
    This was St Joseph’s Institute for Hopeless Education, where it snowed chalk-dust, the sterile pollen of learning, day in day out. Where all the classrooms were equipped with centrally driven clocks swotting the minutes away like so many flies. Where tired kaffir lilies in pots on the window sills struggled to produce the bloom that might well be their last.
    I picked my way cautiously across the school yard, avoiding throngs of arguing boys, and positioned myself against the wall at the far end. A stale, sour-sweet smell from the stairs leading up to the classrooms wafted towards me. It was as though everything had been treated with a secret substance, not for the purpose of banishing the fluffy detritus from hundreds of jumpers, the smell of farts, belches, badly brushed teeth, the stench of countless armpits, but on the contrary to preserve them and mix them all up in a potent, all-envelopingatmosphere: that of school. More vividly than any punishment it was the institutional fug that brought home to me that school had reduced me to a cipher, one of the herd. Part sheep ready for slaughter, part insect; a creature with spindly, puny bones, rising saps and a nervous system like an over-twigged fruit tree in dire need of pruning.
    *
    A bell shrilled out. The older boys straggled into the building for class. The chap with the dough-face called out, “New boys assemble in front of the monastery.”
    Someone had thought to place a microphone on the terrace. Two of the bay windows were wide open and had loudspeakers on the sills.
    I hung around at the back of the group. A boy with long fair hair said, “Hello. I’m Willem,” and extended his hand.
    “I’m Anton,” I said, somewhat taken aback by his friendliness.
    “Do you live in Ruizele?”
    I shook my head. “No, in Stuyvenberghe. It’s not far from here.”
    “I live in the woods near here,” he said. “My father’s an architect,” he added, as if the two were connected.
    He spoke in a soft, well-mannered kind of way, which I found just as pleasing as his hair. But the others thought he sounded funny: they glanced at him and sniggered.
    He was not one of us. The speech patterns underlying his language were different. He did not have the musty, cavernous tone that distinguished the regional accent, instead he spoke in a leisurely, mellifluous sing-song.
    “So what does your Pa do?” he asked.
    “We used to farm,” I said.
    He did not pursue the subject.
    The door of the monastery opened and a short, doll-like figure