Shutterspeed (3 page)

In those days the world still fitted in my hand, but my hold on it was not as tight as I imagined. I saw my face reflected in the dark water, ringed by a school of sticklebacks which darted away into the weed when I swung my legs over the parapet.

I was reaching the age of standing very close to my wardrobe mirror, not to watch the glass mist up with my breath, but to butt my head against my reflection and shatter the image of myself sitting on the side of my bed, hunched over the suitcase full of postcards, letters and photos, rooting and rooting among all those dead papers with fingers itching to tear everything into tiny scraps. Not that I ever did.

The days were still circular in shape. As far as I was concerned the sun was tied to the spire with invisible string, turning around the earth, whatever Mr Snellaert or Galileo said.

I heard the church bells signalling the end of vespers.
Another moment or two and I would hear the women’s voices in the lane and the patter of their shoes on the cobbles.

The daylight was already tinged with blue in the linden trees by the graveyard when I made my way back home. From the open door of the café across the road the smell of stale beer and the jangle of the jukebox wafted towards me. The church was closed. The stained-glass windows, which glowed crimson during the service, had reverted to blackness.

I walked down the path among the graves as solemnly as I could, fighting down the urge to hop and skip, and only quickened my step when I knew I was screened from view first by the branches of the linden trees and then by the paling around the rectory garden.

I liked the orderliness of the grand register of deaths that formed the heart of my inner world. God himself had put His flock to sleep in neat rows, like a collection of stamps in an album, postmarked with the dates of their first and last breaths. He was up in the belfry, using a magnifying glass and tweezers to feather the gunmetal craws of pigeons, which He flung into the sky by the handful each time the bells pealed.

The master said that the names of everybody who had ever lived or would ever live were written in the palm of His hand – some more smudged than others, he had added, casting a meaningful look at me.

As I pushed the door open, the tinkle of the shop’s bell betrayed my presence. I glimpsed Uncle Werner at the far end of the passage, looking in my direction. He could not have seen me in the dark, but I could see him patting someone’s arm, some visitor sitting beside him at the kitchen table beneath the lamp with the frosted glass shade, which was already lit. As I approached I recognised the tobacco-thickened voice of the dearly beloved leader of our flock, the venerable Father Amelinckx.

‘I suppose they’ll put up a notice,’ I heard him say, ‘but I would rather tell people myself …’ He fell silent when I came in.

I expected a ticking off for leaving great big footprints all over the freshly raked earth between the graves, which the verger always made such a fuss about, but all he did was put out his hand and say my name.

Uncle Werner motioned me to shake the proffered hand.

‘Sit yourself down,’ cried Aunt, coming in from the back with a steaming pan in her hands.

I went up the stairs, across the landing, and into my bedroom. I shut the door behind me, stripped off my shirt, wadded it into a ball to mop the sweat from my chest and armpits, then dropped it on my writing table.

On evenings like this nothing was emptier than my room. The penetrating smell of the lino creaking under my feet and the dust in the flaking paint on the windowsill got into my nose, making me even more tense.

I felt like climbing the walls, somersaulting backwards,
screwing up sheets of paper, kicking everything in sight. I grabbed my school satchel and hurled it on my bed like a child having a tantrum, I gave the spiral-bound desk diary such a hard shove that the days rose up and swayed to and fro accusingly.

I slammed open the leather-bound missal Aunt gave me for my First Communion, which I always left on my table in exactly the same position just to get at her. The tissue-thin pages rippled and came to rest.

I pulled off my socks, relished the cool air around my feet and sat down.

‘Joris, your food’s getting cold,’ Aunt called from the bottom of the stairs.

I held up the missal and, just before clapping it shut to feel the rush of air hitting my cheeks, I glimpsed the words
Thou has sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken
.

THAT NIGHT THERE WAS A THUNDERSTORM
.

‘Doesn’t look too good out there,’ said Uncle. He had got up from his chair by the reading lamp and was pulling all the plugs from their sockets. Aunt continued playing Patience with stoic resignation.

‘Funny, that,’ she said in a peevish tone just as Uncle made to sit down again. ‘Whenever you decide to disconnect the electric all over the place, you leave the lamp by your chair on. As if we’re the only ones the lightning has it in for.’

He heaved an indifferent sigh, switched off his reading lamp and left the room to hunt for candles elsewhere in the house. Aunt could get rather tetchy in this kind of weather. Uncle had also turned off the radio, so that she was missing
Songs from the Homeland
, her favourite programme.

‘Why don’t you read me something, Joris,’ she said. ‘It would take my mind off the storm at least.’

A few days earlier, Mr Snellaert had given me a book to take home:
Mysteries of Nature Unravelled
. In contrast to my school reports, which he said bore a strong resemblance
to the Pyrenees with all those soaring peaks and deep valleys, my love of reading met with his approval.

‘What’s it about?’ she wanted to know.

‘All sorts of things,’ I said.

‘So long as it’s not about prehistoric monsters, it’ll do for me.’ She found it impossible to believe that such dreadful creatures had ever walked the earth. A spider in the bathroom was enough to scare the living daylights out of her.

‘Don’t worry,’ I replied, and cleared my throat.

‘It says here,’ I intoned, ‘that Palissy, an avowed Protestant, wrote a book called
A Wonderful Tale of Waters and Fountains
, in which he established, after long years of study, that each snowflake falling on the top of a mountain helps to feed the world’s great rivers, and even the oceans!’

‘Did he really need to do all that studying just for that?’ Uncle grinned, setting a candle on the table. ‘Just to find out that water always goes down, never up? If that’s all it takes, I could be a professor myself …’

‘Werner!’ hissed Aunt. ‘Just let the boy get on with it.’

The book contained wonderful pictures, including one in which the heavens resembled a bell jar made of crystal, or a soap bubble. Tucked away in a corner at the bottom was a little man who, having walked to the end of the earth, poked his head out through the side, apparently reaching for the stars with one hand.
The vast unknown and the foolhardiness of the human spirit
, read the inscription.

Other pages had brightly coloured illustrations with
captions like
The earth before the dawn of civilisation
, in which the continents didn’t look at all like the wall maps in our classroom. As though God Himself had hesitated even as He was creating. As if He had experimented with all sorts of shapes in His rough sketches, cleaving continents in two or more pieces and drawing inordinately squiggly coastlines, and it seemed to me that He must have been trying to escape a kind of boredom that was a thousand times worse than the boredom I suffered every morning around eleven o’clock, when noon seemed aeons away.

Some places on earth, like the Pacific Ocean, looked as if He had skimmed over them in a semi-sleep, dreaming of land masses which, upon waking, He had crumbled between His fingers into a dusting of atolls.

It gave me a giddy sense of power to be able to survey the whole world and speak the names of all the deserts and mountain ranges, as if I were personally responsible for their existence. I held my hand in the light of the candle to cast a shadow on Hawaii. In my mind’s eye I saw the streets of Honolulu thronged with people looking up in astonishment at the sudden eclipse of their sun. I took my magnifying glass from the table drawer and held it over the islands of Micronesia.

‘All those peculiar names,’ said Aunt, fretfully, ‘you’re not pulling my leg, are you? Houaheina, who’d ever think of it?’

She shook her head, but that was more on account of her card game not coming good yet again.

‘I’m glad I was born here and not anywhere else. Not
too cold, not too hot, most of the time anyway, none of your unpronounceable names and no horrible savage beasts either. We can count our lucky stars, we can.’

She contemplated the cards she had laid out on the table for another game, placed her hands on the nape of her neck and threw back her head. The sound of the vertebrae cracking always gave me the creeps.

‘Houaheina,’ she mused.

Outside, the thunderstorm seemed to be waning before it had got well and truly under way. Uncle had fallen asleep; he began to snore.

‘A fanfare for free,’ Aunt grumbled. ‘There he goes again.’

I kissed her good-night and went upstairs.

Lying naked on my bed with my feet up against the wall, I carried on reading by the light of the street lamp outside my window, which threw a luminous, silvery triangle on the sheet. I still preferred to read the way I had learned in my first year at school – not in silence but in whispers, which gave me the feeling I wasn’t actually mouthing the words but fingering them carefully, as though fishing them out from the pages between thumb and forefinger.

There were words that set my teeth on edge like grit in poorly rinsed spinach, others that I swallowed whole like aspirin for fear of them tasting vile. One of my favourite words was ‘iodine’, which I had come across in a book called
Principles of Chemistry
. The title sounded mysteriously pleasing to my ears, if only because I was unsure what ‘principles’ meant.

I thought they were probably something like the shelving units we had in the shop. Principles would have their own little compartments with labels indicating names or dates, and iodine would be kept in one of them. The book said that iodine was to be found in sea water and that it occurred ‘in high concentrations in the sea air’, besides being ‘of vital importance for proper functioning of the thyroid gland’.

I often took down the book from the ledge over my bed, just to check whether iodine was still in there, given that it was such a volatile substance, and when I read the bit about the thyroid I always felt a tickle in my throat. One day I asked Uncle Werner where that particular gland was situated. He responded by placing his thumb and forefinger on either side of my Adam’s apple and giving my throat a squeeze.

‘Around there somewhere,’ he said. ‘In animals it’s called sweetbread.’ It sounded like some type of cake, but I preferred the name ‘thyroid gland’. The word thyroid came from the Greek for shield, and the idea of having a shield-shaped gland in my body made me think of knights in shining armour.

At school one day, when Mr Snellaert asked whether anyone could remember what the Flemings’ battle-cry had been during the Bruges uprising, when our people had at last – at long last, so he reminded us – taken up arms against the foreign invader, I jumped up from my desk without thinking and shouted ‘For gland and glory!’ My voice was so loud that even I was startled.

There was a long pause while the master rolled his eyes. He waited for the gales of laughter to die down, then came up to me quite calmly and gave me a resounding clip around the ear.

‘What you need is a thorough drubbing,’ he said in conclusion, wiping his hands on his dust coat.

After that I sometimes had the feeling that I was winding him up for the sole purpose of getting a thorough drubbing, so that I could secretly enjoy the humiliation of having my bones shaken up like an earthquake.

Words drove me mad at times. They would make the most extraordinary connections in my mind. I soaked them up like sweet-tasting poison until I was so saturated that they almost oozed from my pores. Wherever I went I left them on everything, like fingerprints.

I became so addicted that some days I woke up in a panic, not knowing where I was, groping frantically for sentences in the air like an alcoholic fumbling for the bottle in his bedside table. What a relief, after the early morning madness, to recognise the crack in the ceiling, the dingy skirting board, the pinecones on the bedposts, the green bedspread, and the chinks in the window frames out of which, in early spring, ladybirds would come crawling by the dozen after their winter sleep.

The master always used a red biro to write his niggling comments on the compositions I handed in. He thought them too high-falutin, or else too laboured. Too pompous, he said once, and the word rolled around my thoughts all day like a powder keg with a fuse. ‘You spray a lone
sparrow in the gutter with bullets, hoping that one of them will hit the mark,’ he had said when he gave me back my composition looking like a blood-spattered bed sheet. ‘You shouldn’t exaggerate so.’

The others kept silent, hiding their glee. They had no idea what the teacher was on about, but I did. I was worried about making a fool of myself. There were things that sent an ecstatic shiver down my spine and made me go weak at the knees. The mere sight of the afternoon sunlight fracturing in the crown of the cherry tree outside my bedroom window was enough to set me off, or a sudden gust of wind whipping the poplars on the bank of the stream into a roar of rustling overhead, or sitting by myself in the kitchen at four-ish on a cloudless afternoon, watching a sunbeam slice through the curtains and hit the floor tiles, watching the dust dance in the light, dust particles that came from goodness knows where, from what had once been meteorites, if the master and his books were anything to go by, or from a rocky mountain ground down to humble grains of sand by the perpetual abrasion of water.

Such things made me want to shout at the top of my voice. Likewise the books in the cupboard at the back of the classroom that was unlocked only once a fortnight – I longed to shake them out like suitcases over my desk, so I might take the spilled words and hold them up to the light one by one, as if they were marbles and I had to decide which was the most beautiful, which the shiniest and which the most dulled by age.

Sometimes I found comfort in putting a perfectly round marble in my mouth, sucking its coldness and tumbling it around to make it click against my molars and then letting it roll further back, close enough to my gullet to make me gag, knowing that I should not be doing this, while on other days, when it drizzled and everything was dreary, I liked to run the tip of my tongue over an old marble that had struck the pavement countless times, just to feel some roughness, some jaggedness to relieve the monotony of perfection. And what a wonderful, mighty sensation it was to spit it out into the palm of my hand when no one was looking, wet with saliva like the chewed stone of a cherry or a peach, as if I had just gobbled up the world.

It was still hot, my eyes stung and I fought to keep them open. The light from the street lamp was too weak to see the pictures in the book properly. I could make out a ghostly figure holding a candle over what appeared to be an old man with white hair and hollow cheeks dozing in a chair.

Frederick the Great in Sanssouci on the night of his death. According to his personal physician the famous Kaiser suffered no bodily anguish upon yielding his noble soul to eternity.

Outside, a light rain had started to fall. I listened to the drops drumming dully on the leaves of the linden trees, and more loudly on the pavement.

I pushed the book away. My curiosity had evaporated into drowsiness.

I turned over on my back. The church bell sounded
half-past eleven. Downstairs, Uncle lowered the blinds. I had a sense of slowly coming apart at the seams.

Later, I was woken by a loud crash. The window screen had come loose. A blast of cold air hit my bed, raindrops spattered on my writing table.

Elsewhere in the house a door slammed, the wind howled around the windows and one thunderclap followed another in quick succession. I heard Uncle run across the landing.

Before I had well and truly come to my senses I found myself getting out of bed to shut the window. The treetops were being buffeted in all directions. I saw a sheet of heavy-duty plastic flapping among the gravestones, doing a cartwheel and coming to rest for a brief moment before sailing off again and catching in the branches of a tree, where it remained.

I put on my trousers and vest and went downstairs. Uncle and Aunt were both in their dressing gowns, sitting at the table while the lightning flashed through the slits in the blinds.

‘Why don’t you put the kettle on,’ said Aunt. ‘We won’t have any peace for the next hour or so anyway.’

I went through to the kitchen and lit the gas under the kettle. Outside, the sky was seething with rage, the thunder was crashing everywhere.

‘It’s right on top of us!’ I shouted.

They did not react. I took three cups from the cupboard and set out the teapot on the draining board.

I overheard Aunt saying that a vault might not be such a bad idea, though she didn’t know how much it would cost.

‘We must do
something
,’ agreed Uncle.

I entered the room, put the cups down on the table, took teaspoons from the drawer and began to distribute them.

‘Leave it,’ said Aunt. ‘I’ll do that. Don’t forget the sugar. And bring some cinnamon biscuits, will you.’

I went back to the kitchen. Out in the courtyard the rainwater gushed over the flagstones into the drain. Between two thunderclaps I heard the alarm bells go off at the level crossing.

‘She never cared,’ Aunt went on. ‘A flowerpot once a year, that’s all. She might show some interest. It’s the least she could do …’ I could hear the nervous shuffle of Uncle’s slippers on the tiled floor.

The water began to boil, making the kettle whistle. I heard the scrape of a chair. ‘Let’s not discuss it now, Laura,’ said Uncle. ‘The lad …’

I took the kettle from the hob and filled the teapot.

We drank our tea.

‘Hark at that, hark at that,’ Uncle repeated after each crash of thunder. He was standing by the window, craning his neck as if he could look right through the blinds at the sky. ‘Hark at that …’