My Fellow Skin Read Online Free Page B

be housed on the summits of the storage cupboards? Some of them went all the way up to the ceiling. Even when my father carried me aloft, their contents remained unseen. There were bound to be far more exciting panoramas to observe than the same old rows of plates and glassware that came within my field of vision.
    I was on the landing, and it was oddly quiet in the house. Out in the yard voices tailed away. Outside the window at the end of the corridor, the crown of the nut tree burst into flames in the dying sun. In the kitchen someone filled a bucket of water and shut the back door.
    From my parents’ room came the sound of my father talking in a low voice to my mother. He had left his shoes by the door. I picked them up, carried them to the middle of the corridor, sank down on the wooden floor and kicked off my slippers.
    I placed the shoes side by side. A smidgen of my father’s warmth still lingered inside, a hint of his sweat, when I stepped shakily into his shoes. An odd sort of tremor ran up my calves, as though the strength of his legs were seeping up from the soles into my own muscles. I had a sense of stepping lightly, of being four times as tall, although in reality I advanced with difficulty, dragging my feet. It was time for everything to wake up again.
    The objects in the house showed themselves to their best advantage only to people who were bigger than me. Anyoneas small as me, puny even in my father’s shoes, had to make do with a view seen from a low, distorting angle. The ghastly loops of dusty cobwebs between cupboard and wall or under the sink, in which dead flies with devoutly folded legs quivered in the draught. Or the toad that showed up on the back doorstep every night, crawling into the strip of bright light under the door and clearing its throat repeatedly, as if it had a weighty message to deliver. There were the spiders, whose rightful home was out in the pine trees by the chicken run. In the annexe at the back of the house, among rusty milk churns and watering cans, they had spun webs like pointed caps blown off magicians’ heads, from which they emerged in a flash whenever a prey announced itself.
    I liked the place best of all in the hours before supper, when everything went quiet and the house draped its walls comfortably about my shoulders. Whenever I ventured into one of the rooms, or when I was in my father’s shoes zigzagging down the corridor, past all the doors behind which I caught the muffled sounds of the small habits in which everyone indulged, it was as though the space that enfolded the house seemed to divide like a cell and keep on doubling, again and again, until there was no end to it and time vanished into an infinity of folds.
    The spare rooms at the back of the house, which were normally empty and bare except for the elaborate crocheted counterpanes on the beds that reminded me of the Aunts when they dressed up for special occasions, were now full of suitcases. The wardrobe doors were open, and inside I saw coats and suits which carried the scent of other houses in their seams. There were shoes scattered around the legs of the bedside tables, on top of which lay white handkerchiefsor piles of folded newspapers crowned by spectacles in awesome frames.
    The brass locks of the suitcases shone seductively. How I wished I could reach them on those high forbidding beds, if only to hear the cold mechanical click as they sprung open.
    *
    In the last room, at the very end of the passage, I came upon a huge black coat lying on a sofa. It hung over the bolstered arm, with part of the front turned back, as though a sturdy lady’s calf might emerge from it any moment. The collar of dark fur glistened so invitingly that it was impossible to resist. I sank down on my haunches and leaned forward in my father’s shoes at a perilous angle to bury my cheeks, nose and forehead in the soft tickle of myriad hairs. The satin lining smelt sweet in a dry sort of way, and felt like cool water