Shutterspeed (2 page)

One winter’s day he sits on his heels on a frosted
football pitch, his arms around his mates’ shoulders. Judging by the twinkle in his eye it must have been her taking the picture. She seems to have had some trouble focusing the lens; perhaps the sight of him with tousled hair, unbuttoned shirt, and thighs glistening with post-match sweat made her head spin.

How he must have loved her wide skirts, her sleeveless blouses showing off her pretty arms. He lifts her over puddles, thresholds, ditches, just for the fun of encircling her small waist with his hands.

The long pigtail that tied her to her girlhood has suddenly gone. Her hair is short and bouncy, with curls flying in jubilation at their newfound freedom after so many years of constraint, or perhaps it was just that she thought the new hairstyle went well with the wedding band on her finger.

In a meadow on the outskirts of the village she sits on a rug under a greening willow, holding herself with the propriety she must have acquired through careful instruction. The slightly strained elegance of knees and ankles kept close together makes her look older than her years. Her hand reaches out to my father, from whose vantage I observe her now, showing him something, a blade of grass or a twig perhaps, and apparently speaking to him.

Here she repeats the same gesture. At a table set up in the garden she offers my father a spoonful of jam to taste, cupping his chin with her free hand. He cranes his
neck, mouth agape. She holds the spoon just beyond his reach.

There is no sign of me anywhere. But the fruit trees behind them look familiar. The white-washed trunks are a little thinner than I remember, but I can tell by their leafy crowns and the deep shadows on the grass that June is drawing to a close. They must have been picking cherries. In the scullery there would have been a pan on the boil, and steaming jars lined up on the draining board.

It is their last summer without me. She is as round as a cannonball. Her breasts loll like mounds of fat on her midriff. Her arms are strewn with freckles, as if inside the batik tent-dress she were succumbing to the never-ending thirst with which I am sapping her lifeblood.

I must have dug my heels into her stomach, butted my head against her bladder, sent her running to the kitchen pump day and night to gulp down water in an effort to dull the vicarious craving for sugar, pickled herring or raw milk, made her want to purge her flesh of me, who was plundering her like a larder.

With an expression of wonder, which with hindsight qualifies as maternal love, she gazes at the white bundle in her arms. My father sits on the side of the bed, leaning over to run a fingertip over my brow. He seems afraid to touch me – me, half of him, but more inextricably entwined with her than he has ever been.

In the chapel at the hospital he watches impassively as Uncle Werner lights the baptismal candle while their mother, wasted by the disease that will soon kill her, holds
me over the font. She looks uncertain, almost as if I could slip from her hands any moment. In the next picture my father, having taken me from her arms, pulls funny faces in the hope of quieting my howls.

I cannot possibly remember any of it, and yet I can see his face before me, vague and ethereal like the marbled rainbow stripes on the lenses of my binoculars.

On the evening after my First Communion, while the sky clouded over, I stood by the open window in my bedroom and unscrewed the caps on the lenses. Aunt was downstairs doing the dishes, Uncle Werner was feeding the hens in the back yard.

It took me a while to work out how to adjust the focus so that the church appeared in minute detail. I could distinguish the hairline cracks in the rendering on the spire, just as I could count the leaves of the linden tree in the road, pale green against the darkening sky.

I told myself there must be a world out there stocked with all the images that had never been captured, except by the sunshine perhaps, which always seemed to absorb a smattering of whatever it illuminated, reuniting it God knows where with all those two-dimensional figures patiently prised from frames, albums or the depths of the old suitcase in which I kept my most treasured possessions.

I waited until it was nearly dark before dragging the case out from under the bed, raising the lid and adding my mother’s letter to the others inside.

The coppery sheen of the sun sinking behind the trees that evening conjured a vast, shimmering lake or reservoir, an afterlife of once reflected surfaces, fragile and inaccessible.

I see the same light, but much longer ago. In a room somewhere I hear footsteps, a door swings open on squealing hinges and someone calls my name.

Try as I may, I cannot pull myself upright. I feel anger welling up inside me, the briny prickle of tears in my eyes.

I remember my shoes: blue with leather laces. I can still hear the sound they made on the tiles when I flew into a rage and kicked all my cars, building blocks and pencils across the room.

I see my father reaching out to me. There is something about his broad grin that makes my mother’s soft features seem surprisingly stern at times.

Hanging on to his fingers to pull myself up, I almost lose my balance, and a tingling sensation shoots down my shins.

In some pantry or kitchen at the back, a leaky tap drips on to the lid of a saucepan, and the echo rings with the emptiness of the whole house.

My father lifts me, makes the wind whistle in my blond hair and throws me up in the air, higher and higher. My chest tightens. I hear myself shriek more in terror than in mirth as my body leaves his hands and I grow conscious of being surrounded by air.

He probably cried something like ‘Up you go, Joris! Fly!’ But his lips offer no clues.

I do not know who took that picture, who it was that left me suspended for ever in mid-air above my father’s splayed fingers, like an alarmed putto in a painting.

OF THAT LAST SUMMER I HAVE ONLY A FEW DISTINCT
memories. In the unrelenting heat of those months the days seemed to run together into a single, long day, as though intent on confirming Aunt’s prediction that this would be the last of the good life for me. The world was immersed from May to late August in the shimmer of a dream, deep beneath the surface of sleep. I was eleven and had learned about Newton. I could write and spell, I could read the hands of the clock and work out what time it was outdoors, where the hours made a difference.

The day the photographer came to take the annual class photo our master, Mr Snellaert, turned up at school wearing his best suit and his homburg with a jaunty blue feather tucked in the headband.

He lined us up four rows deep in the playground, in the shadow cast by the arcade. July was already weighing down the trees. The end of term was drawing near, and I was feeling the hypnotic approach of the summer holidays.

‘I shall count up to five,’ said the master. ‘At three you keep still, and at five we’ll be done.’

He snapped his fingers and we held our breath. A dry click sounded and the next thing we knew it was all over.

I wore the beige nylon shirt Aunt Laura had quickly ferreted out from the top shelves in the shop, where skeins of knitting wool awaited the cold season like eternal snow. The fabric chafed my arms and chest and irritated the skin of my neck. The stubborn smell of plastic packaging and cardboard collar-strip lingered in the seams all day long.

I felt strangely crease-proof, starched, new, and when we filed back to the classroom Mr Snellaert growled: ‘Alderweireldt, boy, you gave your usual impression of an ironing board, that’s for sure.’

He always had me in his sights. There were times that I suddenly felt the weight of his eyes, his latent sarcasm impinging on me like a fly on my forearm when I was busy lining up my ruler exactly parallel to the side of my desk, or couldn’t decide where to lay my jotter – underneath or beside my reading book – or how to position my protractor or my pencils, but most of all when for the umpteenth time I frantically crossed out the opening line of my composition, shielding the page with my left arm for fear that the words I needed would evaporate before I had a chance to commit their sounds to paper.

Just as unexpectedly he would lay a heavy hand on my shoulder, as if he had crept up on me, soundlessly treading on the tiled floor in which his soles had worn out a shiny path.

‘Eyes like marbles and still you don’t know where to look,’ he said, pushing my head down over my desk.

His fingers seemed to be kneading the muscles around my bones, massaging my spine to make it longer, and shaking my head so that the thoughts, which were like as not lost in the branches of the apple tree by the big window, fell from my hair like unripe fruit.

‘Get on with it. Too finicky by half, you are …’

The boys squirmed in their seats, nudging and smirking, but it could also happen that their gales of laughter descended on me like a hailstorm, especially when the master went round collecting up the exercise books while I was still labouring to end what I had scarcely begun, my handwriting chasing over the lines in an ever wilder scrawl.

‘You’ll be late for the Last Judgment at this rate. And what’ll you do then, eh?’ he sneered. ‘Hang around in space? Or put your hand up and moan: Oh sir, wait sir, I’m not ready yet, sir!’

The ensuing jeers and sniggers moved me to retreat into more or less wounded silence, and to fix my gaze on the dark green dust coat which he donned morning and afternoon as if it were his robe of office.

Back in the days when my father and Uncle Werner were his pupils, his hair had been dark and wavy and his paunch nowhere near sagging.

The annual school photo was not taken in the playground then, but indoors, with all the boys at their desks and the master standing right at the back of the classroom, ramrod-stiff in the space between the stove and the
row my father was in. He sat near the window, shoulders hunched and arms folded, as if none of it had anything to do with him.

Perhaps it took longer then to adjust the camera, a redoubtable contraption that reminded me of a cannon, what with the blinding flash and the loud crack as it fired into the air to startle my father. He is not sitting bolt upright but inclining his frame slightly, away from the master and towards the window. On the ledge close to his elbow the potted geraniums crane towards the glass, making all their veins show up against the chill spring light.

Some of the maps hanging on the wall above the cupboards are familiar. Perhaps, in the bleakness of morning lessons, he stared as long and hard as I did at the continents, so that their shapes would perform a shadow dance across the retina when we shut our eyes tight. Perhaps he was just as relieved as I was to come down to earth when the master rummaged in those same cupboards to prepare the next initiation of his boys into the secrets of the Natural World.

On days of particularly gruelling sums, when our toil was deemed worthy of reward, the master went over to the cupboard at the back of the classroom and brought out the model of the solar system. He set it up on his desk and called us all to come forward, and once we were crowding round he would, as often as not, take a deep breath and blow the dust off Saturn’s rings into our faces before making the moon turn around the earth in front
of our astonished eyes, and the earth around the sun along with all the planets.

‘In the heavens above,’ he intoned, ‘everything runs like clockwork.’

If we were good we were allowed to take turns at the handle, making the time-warped copper filaments vibrate as they moved the heavenly bodies in circles around an old light bulb, accelerating the years to mere seconds.

It was not until I turned the handle the wrong way, less accidentally than I made out, thereby bringing the entire mechanism to a halt, that the master lost his patience. ‘Ah, you again. I might have known.’

He had all the answers, but that didn’t mean I always took him at his word. Later that day, when he filled a kettle with water before our eyes and put it on a burner until the spout emitted a ribbon of steam, thus proving to his boys that of all matter it was only the form that changed, I did not believe him.

Where did that leave the gestures I made when shifting in my seat, stretching out in my chair, crossing my ankles, or spreading my arms and splaying my fingers on my desk?

When the master let the steam condense against a sheet of glass and caught the drops of moisture in a cup, the sunlight seemed to loosen me up and rarefy my thoughts. If I had shut my eyes then, I would have seen myself sliding from my desk like a sheet of paper, zigzagging into blissful, stultifying sleep.

There were weeks when I suppressed my truculence to act the paragon of virtue, paying slavish attention to the
master, readily accepting the role of goody-goody. When commended I lowered my eyes modestly and relished the exquisite self-loathing brought on by the pride flushing my cheeks.

There were also times when I stopped washing my hair and didn’t change my underwear until it was unspeakably filthy, so that I could sniff my whole crusty body from under the clean shirt I wore on top.

I would vegetate for hours, lying back on my bed with my legs flung wide, or lolling against a wall, as lazy as the neighbour’s flea-ridden dog on the pavement outside. If Aunt called my name or Uncle knocked on my door, I curled my lip and saw myself baring my teeth in the shiny varnish of the headboard.

I longed to be as dishevelled as the drawers of my wardrobe, which I deliberately left half open with a pair of underpants or a sock draped over the side. I longed to be as spineless as my satchel when I let it drop from my hands after school and kicked it against the leg of my writing table.

I dawdled over the drawings in my jotter, tracing the outlines of kingdoms shaped like ink blots or paint splashes, using crayons to mark them with roads in different colours, the more hairpin bends the better, and with mountain ranges so high that I gasped for air above the snow-line.

I gave my countries names more exotic even than Ouagadougou or Agadir. I drew trading ships in the harbours and sent the cargoes over complicated railway
networks to the most remote regions. Each country was an island, like me, surrounded by an ocean with narrow fjords penetrating deep into my heartland.

I also drew forgotten kingdoms, undiscovered by any explorer and inhabited by people who had no idea where they were. Boundless, imaginary lands, where each moment of the day was private and secret, as were my own thoughts in after-school hours, when the master’s spell was broken and things became weightless.

When I got home that afternoon Aunt Laura told me to take off my clean shirt; I would only get it dirty, and anyway it was too hot.

She was shelling peas at the table under the cherry tree in the back garden. With the routine precision that characterised all her gestures, she dug her thumb into the tough pods and pushed the peas to the end until they dropped like stillborn babes into an enamel basin on her lap.

She was economical in every way. ‘We’re not rolling in it, but we get by,’ she would say with proud resignation.

The compactness of her frame gave her the appearance of being in control, but her composure could be demolished from one moment to the next by a nervous tic in her right eyelid, which sometimes caused her to start winking at me or at Uncle or at customers in the shop, which widowers and bachelors in particular found unsettling.

She went through all the motions of being my mother,
laying an arm around my shoulder from time to time or ruffling my hair, but she was too bony and too short to convince me.

‘I hope you smiled for once in your life,’ she said without looking up from her work. ‘In every picture up to now you look as miserable as a nun at a funeral.’

She thought it a waste of money. On the dresser in the back room I was already present in five school photos amid classmates and master, with a face like sour milk, as Uncle Werner used to say.

‘Now, your dad,’ Aunt Laura went on, ‘he was serious, just like you. That look of his, as if he had a stack of tax forms to fill in … As for you, you ought to spend more time with your friends, and if that doesn’t appeal, there’s plenty of work to be done around here, plenty of chores to occupy idle hands.’

I knew she liked it when I broke in with a loud, plaintive ‘Ma!’ in mock protest. Our tokens of affection were offered at exchange rates only she and I were privy to. Neither of us was good at compliments. We dressed them up in rags of ill-temper.

‘The padre caught you fooling around in the graveyard again,’ she said, sweeping the empty pods into a bucket. ‘What will people think, Joris? I wish you’d behave. You’ll knock a corner off your father’s gravestone if you’re not careful. And that would be expensive to repair, you know.’

My father lay by the western wall, a few paces from the shop, under a slab of unpolished Belgian bluestone which always left my hands white with dust when I ran them
over the rough-hewn edges. On hot afternoons I sometimes smeared a gob of spittle on the slab and watched the stain dwindle rapidly in the sunshine. Walking home from school I would show off to my friends by skipping down the gravelled paths between the graves, chanting the names on the headstones to the tune of nursery songs, and I would make a point of slipping my father’s name in among the rest without anyone noticing. I tucked him up and sang him lullabies, leaving him to turn over each time the church bell struck the hour while he carried on sleeping and dwindling.

Dying might be a bit like evaporating, dissipating into the afternoon, succumbing to the soporific scrabble of pigeons in the guttering on the roof, and heaven was the place where the souls of the dead condensed on God’s cold countenance and ran like tears down His cheeks into His cupped palm.

In the classroom Death carried a scythe over his shoulder and turned an hourglass. His face was obscured by a pitch-black cloak, with ‘Time flies, use it wisely!’ written across it in flaming letters, but each time the classroom door swung shut he fluttered so frivolously on the pin holding him to the noticeboard that I couldn’t take him too seriously.

He ought to have merely swayed in a noble sort of way, with the slow grace of seaweed rippling on the tide, ruling over a domain where nothing moved of its own accord, rather like the beetles I kept in jars at home, who bided their time in utter immobility. Eventually they grew so
fragile that their antennae fell off when I lifted their glass dungeon with both hands and shook it.

I tried holding my breath some days, and if I kept it up long enough I could feel something inside me drop through narrow funnels, but my midriff rebelled and drew gulps of fresh air into my lungs. When I tried closing my eyes against the light, I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into an aching tide of boredom that swelled each time the tower bell struck another quarter-hour.

I wanted to lose myself, lose a shoe, feel my socks sliding off my feet between the sheets, or my feet sliding out of my socks, and then fumble around to retrieve them, which would be in vain because they were just as lost as I was. But I was dangling like a fly in a daytime web and there was no escape.

‘If you like, you can pour those lovelies into the jars,’ said Aunt, reaching me the bowl with peas.

‘Mind you don’t spill any. Peas are in precious short supply, what with the drought these past weeks.’

I shook my head, stood up and made off towards the road, while she called after me not to be too long. I ran round the back, down the church lane between the claustrophobic beech hedges which only last month had been alive with buzzing beetles, past the tree-lined alleyway to the big house, and past the tankers pumping chilled milk into stainless-steel vats at the dairy.

I slowed my pace along the last row of cottages before
the bridge across the stream. I settled myself on the brick parapet. It was my favourite spot for doing nothing but taking in the sweet summer air, the whisper of the wind in the rushes along the bank, and the water sliding languidly beneath my feet towards the manor. Upon reaching the trees in the park, the stream branched out into countless little creeks which vanished among the trunks before coming together again in the pond by the terrace, where carp rose to the surface, snapping for air or midges in the drowsy warmth, and swans curved their necks into question marks.