Shutterspeed (6 page)

She came out from behind the counter and surveyed the goods in one of the windows. Aunt thought she had a high forehead, and that it was typical. I thought it was because her hair was pulled flat over her scalp and tied at the back. Hélène Vuylsteke struck me as the sort of governess who would use a hairbrush to punish misbehaviour, but Aunt said people of high birth always had high foreheads. She didn’t know why, it was just one of those things.

‘Too much inbreeding, if you ask me,’ Uncle Werner used to say. ‘Happens with rabbits, too. Not the foreheads, of course – the ears.’

The girl sat on the bottom step of the ladder and reached for the book Mr Snellaert had lent me. She began to turn the pages without much enthusiasm. Now and then I heard her emit a little sigh of boredom, which sounded to me like a personal summons to relieve the monotony of the moment.

In the commotion following their arrival in the shop Aunt had forgotten to lock the glass showcase in which she kept the most expensive items. One of the little doors was ajar. I snatched a few glistening fruits from a jar of sugared cherries and held them out to the girl, in the space between her nose and the book.

She shook her head and pushed my hand away, but I found it hard to believe she was in the least interested in the page she was looking at, which had no pictures on it.

I had another try with a few bright green pellets from a tall canister. Uncle always sang their praises as a sure remedy for a sore throat or dry cough, and when I put three of them in my mouth at the same time to show him how much I believed him I was blown straight to Alaska on a polar wind of peppermint and eucalyptus. This offer, too, was waved away without so much as a glance at me.

As a last resort I turned to the bottles on the top shelf, where Aunt kept her most treasured wares, her essential oils or whatever they were, which she decanted into glass phials with an eye-dropper and sold to customers wishing to give their preserves an extra zest, or to heighten the taste of cakes baked for special occasions and family visits.

‘
Alcohol of orange citrus
’ read one of the labels in Aunt’s spidery hand, and I always wondered how that colourless liquid could possibly smell so strongly of oranges.

According to Uncle Werner it was all quite straightforward. ‘They just put an orange to bed with some alcohol for the night,’ he grinned, ‘and in the morning the alcohol smells of oranges. That’s how I got hitched to your aunt.’ It was one of those remarks that sent the blood rushing to Aunt’s cheeks.

I picked a small, bulbous bottle from the front row, and carried it in both hands to the girl. Before holding it under
her nose I twisted the stopper off. There was an exquisite little squeak in the neck of the bottle, from which a wonderful fragrance immediately floated up.

‘Oooh, l’essence d’amandes,’ she cooed. She threw back her head and shut her eyes, luxuriating in the smell of almonds.

Encouraged by my success I returned to the glass cabinet in search of other fragrances. I heard the girl doing pirouettes behind my back, and making little scraping noises with her shoes on the floor.

‘L’essence, l’essence,’ she chanted softly.

Vanilla was bound to be a smell she would approve of. Besides, it was easy to locate, because this substance was treacly and dark instead of clear like the others.

Hardly had I unscrewed the top and turned round when a slap to my cheek sent me reeling against the showcase, more from shock than pain. The bottles rocked on the shelves, a few fell over. Something trickled down my neck. There was vanilla on my fingers. My ears burned.

The girl skirted the counter and ran into the passage, upsetting a couple of soup cans in passing.

‘Il m’a frappé,’ I heard her wail. ‘He hit me, he hit me …’

‘Dammit, Joris! What are you up to?’ called Aunt. I heard them push back their chairs and come into the passage. I took out my handkerchief and tried frantically to mop up the spill, without success.

‘He tried to kiss me, the clot,’ cried the girl as she
returned with the two women in tow, and before I knew it Aunt had given me a box on the ears.

‘Du calme!’ cried Hélène Vuylsteke. ‘Dratted child, it’s not the first time this has happened.’

She grabbed the girl by the hand and gave her arm a sharp tug. ‘I think you’ve been up to your old tricks again, haven’t you? Off you go and get your coat.’

The girl trotted to the back.

‘Still, no excuse for him to go rummaging in my things,’ Aunt hissed in my direction. ‘He knows perfectly well to keep his hands off the merchandise.’

She moved to the front door and held it open. The girl squeezed past her and Hélène Vuylsteke, and paused on the threshold to put on her hat.

Hélène shook Aunt Laura’s hand: ‘Lundi prochain?’

‘Right, next Monday,’ said Aunt. ‘See you then. Au revoir.’

‘Au revoir,’ said Hélène, with a slight curl of the lip, ‘and au revoir to the young gentleman, too.’

Aunt shut the door. ‘Some gentleman,’ was all she said as she made her way to the back of the house.

When I followed some time later, she was at the table. She had poured herself the remainder of the coffee and now sat with her hands clasping the cup as she stared out of the window, oblivious to the cement slabs of the boundary wall and the Virginia creeper to the side.

Upstairs, I scrubbed my hands to get rid of the vanilla smell. I could hear Aunt clearing the table, making much more noise than usual.

I hoped and prayed that Uncle would not come home just yet, and that he would not be too woozy from his drinks, but less than two minutes later I recognised his whistle and his swaggering tread on the garden path.

Next he would put his hands on her hips as she stood by the sink, and try to kiss her neck.

I dried my hands, went to my room and lay down on my bed while the echoes of their rambling exchange reverberated from the garden wall. I could only make out half of what they were saying, but I knew it was about the vault. My mother’s name was mentioned, and goodness knows what else Aunt had to carp about. When she was angry she would wrench open her store of aggravation and tip it out over my or my uncle’s head.

After a time the storm abated. Uncle tapped on the door of my room. He sat down on the edge of my bed and put his hand on my knee.

‘You mustn’t mind too much about your aunt,’ he said. ‘She’s going through the change.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.

During supper the only sounds were our spoons scraping the bottom of our plates. Aunt had prepared warm buttermilk with apple slices to which she had added far too little sugar, a sure sign that she was in one of her moods.

I knew that Uncle’s slurping irritated her. I could tell by the way one of her eyebrows was raised slightly higher than the other.

‘He’s dead, Joris,’ she said abruptly. ‘He’s dead. It’s terribly sad of course, but so it goes. People die every day.’

She lifted her spoon to her mouth and sipped. ‘It’s us keeping you. You shouldn’t forget that.’

‘I won’t, Aunt Laura,’ I replied meekly, but the whole time I was jamming my toecap against the table leg to feel how much it hurt.

I CHERISHED THE NIGHTS IN THOSE OVERLY LUMINOUS
weeks of June. For me the darkness held so much more than merely the absence of illumination. In the early days of that summer, the very last, the unforgiving light could be unspeakably crass.

Thinking back to those June days, I see the cracks between the flagstones in the back yard and long columns of ants lugging grass seeds, dead flies, caterpillars and grains of sand on their shoulders, black ants like Negro slaves, red ones like Arabs dwarfed by minarets of country lilies or beanstalks, and the oriental business of caravanserais, there, against the south wall beneath the drainpipe, but far too hurried and too tiny to grasp in the delicious indolence of those endless afternoons.

Night-time was a repository of everything that had ever existed. Sundown set the solid objects of daytime throbbing and seething in slow motion. Molecule by molecule they shed their contours and unfurled. The night was a vast ocean filled with all the movements ever made by arms, mouths, heads and legs, a primeval soup of gestures gently lapping my body and making my head swim.

I had stopped believing in ghosts by then. Death was among us, a megalomaniac collector who kept his treasures in cigar boxes buried in the earth. There was no swapping, ever. As God’s faithful warehouse steward, he dispatched his six-legged minions to pillage all that lay motionless and haul it underground, where he would spread out his booty on the tabletop to study each item with a magnifying glass for the purpose of classification, in readiness for Judgment Day.

Whenever God was minded to create a new person He took a stroll through the caverns of death and cast an amused eye over the fruits of His steward’s acquisitive obsession. He slid the graves open as if they were drawers, holding His measuring tape to a leg here, noting the dimensions of a chest or shoulder-blade there. Cupboardfuls of lips were at His disposal, tiers of double chins. On the walls eyebrows and moustaches were displayed like butterflies mounted in frames; elsewhere nipples and warts were stored in sweet jars.

He was at liberty to pick and choose, was God. Nor was He a stingy type by any means, as Uncle Werner was wont to say, because the old goat had been far from sparing with the titty-meat when He fashioned Aunt’s elder sisters.

I was keen to believe him, but there was a niggling feeling of doubt at the back of my mind. Mr Snellaert, too, had once told us about people getting children from a shop, but also that they had to place an order for them with Our Lord first. And say a prayer or two, he had
added, half under his breath. He wouldn’t tell us where the shop was, not just yet – we’d have to wait until we were a bit older and had a bit more money in our savings accounts.

‘We never bought any babbies,’ said Uncle when I pressed him to tell me more. ‘Your aunt and me, we got one free, gratis, for nothing. That was you.’

He removed the stopper from the decanter of port wine, because it was Sunday, and poured himself a generous drink. Then he took a smaller glass and poured a dram for me – after all, I had taken my First Communion and was no longer in short trousers, so to speak.

Aunt came in from the kitchen. ‘Oh, Werner,’ she wailed, ‘do you really think that’s the first thing you should teach him?’ Shaking her head, she took the soup plates from the dresser and set them on the table.

Uncle Werner gave me a knowing wink, and when Aunt returned to the kitchen he topped up my glass. ‘A feller has to learn to drink, so he can have a few on Sunday …’

Having a few drinks meant that the world spun around and you felt like a lord. The port had a cloying sweetness that stuck to the roof of my mouth and left a warm trail through my gullet down to my stomach.

‘Mind you, we did do the odd bit of shopping in our time,’ Uncle grinned. ‘Still do, now and then. But we never have enough money. The babbies lie there in the shop in their wicker baskets, wearing pink and blue caps. But you’re not allowed to choose. It’s take it or leave it.’

‘He’s having you on,’ Aunt called from the sink. She tipped the potatoes into the colander, the steam from the kitchen curling along the rafters into the room. ‘If it was that simple …’

I knew he was having me on. In the book Mr Snellaert had lent me there were pictures that appeared to be at odds with his talk of shops where you could buy children, including one of a woman with long wavy hair sitting on the base of a column with her lower body splayed open as if her skin had a zipper in it. Wearing a curiously serene expression, she invited the viewer to admire her innards.

According to the book’s author, primitive man already showed a certain awareness of the genital mechanisms. Note, he instructed, the disproportionate size of the ovaries relative to the uterus.

Despite being pretty much in the dark about ovaries, I knew Aunt would recoil in horror if I read her the bits about genital mechanisms. A few days earlier, when she was sitting by the window darning socks, I had stared at her so sceptically, with follicles on my mind, that she had asked if there was something the matter with her nose.

‘Another drop, lad?’ Uncle Werner whispered. ‘One for the road?’

I didn’t dare say yes out loud, for fear of alarming Aunt. He poured a splash of the ruby liquid into my glass and gave himself a generous refill. The port was evidently agreeing with him.

‘Did they get me from that shop too?’ I asked. Through the wooziness in my head I tried to look at him sharply, to show that I knew he was having a laugh.

‘Course they did.’ He nodded towards the kitchen, and winked at me again. He was generous with his winks after downing a few glasses. ‘The first time your mother let me hold you in my arms, the price-tag was still dangling from your elbow …’

He paused. I suspected another joke was in the air.

‘You were a free gift, dammit!’

I tried to roar with laughter along with him, although I didn’t think much of his wit.

‘Werner, please,’ hissed Aunt. ‘You’re doing the boy’s head in with your nonsense.’

She set the soup tureen on the corner of the table, put the ladle in and stirred. Uncle Werner patted his paunch contentedly.

‘God created the day, and mother created the soup.’ He held out his hands to receive his plate.

‘Buying children in a shop …’ snorted Aunt. When she had served us both she sat down and crossed herself.

‘You know that children grow inside their mothers. You saw those pictures of your own ma when she was expecting you?’

‘But Laura,’ Uncle Werner laughed. ‘We were just kidding. The boy’s no fool …’

I saw her casting baleful looks at the glass of port beside my plate.

‘That shop …’ she said, lifting her spoon to her lips and
blowing on it before taking a sip, ‘… they never let me in … not that I didn’t stand on the doorstep waiting and waiting … Always closed.’

An awkward silence fell.

Looking up from my plate I noticed that Aunt was scowling at Uncle Werner from under her furrowed brow, and that her eyes were rimmed with pink.

Uncle sank his spoon in his soup and chewed his lower lip.

‘Go on, Joris, eat,’ said Aunt coolly.

After lunch I caught the sound of her muffled squeals and strangely sinuous giggles drifting down the stairs. She and Uncle Werner had gone up for a rest, to settle their stomachs, as Uncle put it.

I wondered why Aunt gave all those little yelps and why there was such a lot of creaking, as if they were chasing each other across the floorboards in the attic. Perhaps Uncle was gripping her firmly by the waist and lifting her up to give her a good shake, although it was also possible that he was lying on top of her, as I had spied him do through a chink in their bedroom door one day, and that he was rubbing his stomach over hers, presumably to help settle the food. Uncle often said his wife needed a good cuddle from time to time, or she’d go sour.

They had left me alone with the dishes, as usual on such occasions. I rinsed the plates under the tap and put them to drain in the rack over the sink.

Now and then I paused in my labours to take another sip of port. I had been careful not to drain my glass during supper and had smuggled it into the kitchen. I wanted to drink it slowly so as to make the lightness in my head last as long as possible.

I scoured the sink and caught myself grinning stupidly at the metallic sound of the steel pad against the sides, which reminded me of the mewing of a cat.

The day was decked in gold leaf. Aunt’s twitters were like a flurry of petticoats up and down the house, invoking the guileless girl she must once have been, as she was in all those snapshots of her childhood: the youngest in a row of nine flaxen-haired children arrayed around their adored, basalt-hewn mother, posing in the yard behind the farmstead where she grew up.

Later, too, sitting on a rug under a silver willow in the field by the canal with half a dozen girlfriends, teenagers like herself, she is admittedly the only one brazen enough to look up from her knitting, but her gaze reflects little more than the tender greening of springtime.

At her back Hélène Vuylsteke and Miss van Vooren recline rather fetchingly against the tree. Miss van Vooren clasps her hands behind her neck, the jacket of her two-piece suit unfastened to admit the sunshine, but her blouse is primly buttoned all the way up to her chin.

Our excursion took us Over the Hills and Far Away
was the somewhat hyperbolic caption penned by Aunt with white ink in the album, which abounded in pictures of prayer meetings as well as pious evening singsongs
around Miss van Vooren’s harmonium. She herself called the instrument ‘my house organ’, which seemed an absurd name for the ramshackle, wheezy apparatus that sent those offensive, nasal tones floating over the cobbles on Saturdays.

The harmonium would always be open when I came to deliver Miss van Vooren’s groceries, the musical score of some hymn on the stand, presumably to impress her extraordinary piety on anyone who happened to call, but several of the ivories had been chipped or lost over the years, so the keyboard resembled an old man’s
gap-toothed
grin.

Aunt Laura had fond memories of the scenes in her album. Each outing must have been like going halfway across the world, for she had rarely travelled further than Bruges or Ghent. She had been to the seaside once or twice, to Ostend, which she remembered well because she and Uncle Werner had spent their honeymoon there, in a small hotel where they served inexpensive meals, as she told me excitedly on the day she bought two return tickets to the seaside as a treat for my First Communion. As it turned out we lost our way as soon as we got there – the small hotel had long since been demolished.

She did go abroad once, to Lourdes, on a train crammed with crutches and cripples with miraculous expectations, and they had a short stop in Paris, just long enough to pose for a group portrait at the Trocadéro, under the watchful eye of a most combative-looking Hélène who, with Miss van Vooren’s help, unfurled the banner of the
Catholic Girls’ Circle, thereby hiding most of the Eiffel Tower from view.

Two pages further on in the album she is at home, swamped in a sea of bouquets in the living room on her wedding day. She smiles nervously at Uncle, who makes an equally starched impression, as if his mother had given his suit a quick iron with him already in it.

At the registry office my father signs the marriage certificate as a witness, while Uncle and Aunt look on with a rather dazed expression, but out in the orchard, the formalities over and done with, he stands shoulder to shoulder with his slightly less robust look-alike, twin brothers, cigarettes between their lips, shirt collars undone, tipsy and dreamy, like me that Sunday, lulled by the port wine, setting the roasting pan upside down by the sink and hearing Aunt’s little cries tumbling from the eaves like fledgling sparrows.

After a while I heard Uncle’s racking cough. I was afraid he would suffocate, but the next moment he was stumping across the landing. He breezed into the kitchen, whistling.

‘Good lad,’ he said, grunting with the afterglow of a gratification located I knew not where within his body. ‘Done all the dishes for us, all on your own.’

He pulled his braces down and held his forearms under the tap.

‘Had a good rest?’ I asked. ‘Did the food settle down all right?’

‘Don’t you worry,’ he said, slapping water on his jowls. ‘Pass me the towel, will you.’

He mopped his face. ‘Just as well Our Lord created Sundays. When else can a body catch up on his homework?’

‘But you always tick me off when I leave my homework till Sunday,’ I said.

Squaring his shoulders, he gave me an amused look. ‘That’s because I’m the boss and you’re not. You can’t even piss in a straight line yet.’

He flicked the drops clinging to his fingers on to my face.

On the square in front of the station the fairground attractions were covered by tarpaulins in assorted colours, like the tents of Mongolian horsemen. Through the slits glimmered an occasional glass eye, a harness decorated with little mirrors, the tip of a black-painted hoof. The circus tent was pitched in a fallow field on the other side of the track, its roof supported by two masts from which banners hung limply in the afternoon stillness.

The streets were desolate, they smelt of asphalt and heat. I was still a little dizzy from the port, but had a sense of sobering up. The comforting haze that had been stretched taut like a membrane over the world began to tear, letting in trickles of the sadness that engulfed me at times for no reason, even though I was only twelve.

Each year I awaited the arrival of the travelling fair with mixed feelings. The other boys couldn’t wait to jump on their bikes after school and descend on the square by the station like a plague of locusts, or stop at the side of the
road and marvel at the slow motion of a camel’s ruminations, whereas I preferred to walk past with studied nonchalance, permitting myself no more than the most fleeting of glances.

The caravans were inhabited by coffee-coloured folk whom the villagers regarded with suspicion for being like jackdaws, pinching everything in sight. Everyone said so, but Aunt had different ideas. They were good customers, she said, and coffee-coloured or not, she had never had any trouble with them at all.