Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

bunch of boneheads. Leaving without resistance: that, according to him, made you a bonehead. But for Gieles the environmentalists were heroes, and since that summer he had felt a deep longing to be a hero himself. He had done the occasional heroic thing, but that didn’t make him a hero. Two years before he had rescued a German shepherd from the canal. The dog hadn’t been able to scramble up onto the bank himself. Gieles pulled him out by his collar and the dog ran away. No one had seen his act of heroism, so it didn’t count.

      The Frenchman Christian Moullec was a hero. In his flying two-seater motorbike he saved lesser white-fronted geese by showing them the way to their winter quarters.

      His mother was a hero. At the risk of her own life she travelled from one dried out place to another (for reasons that were incomprehensible to him) to teach poor Africans to cook on solar-powered stoves.

      Captain Sully was the biggest hero of them all. Without a doubt. I was sure I could do it. Americans adored him. They drank coffee from I ♥ SULLY mugs. They wore T-shirts with THANK YOU CAPTAIN SULLY, SULLY IS MY HOMEBOY, OLD PILOTS NEVER DIE on them. His name was on pillows, mouse pads, bumper stickers, calendars and dog shirts. Women wore panties bearing the words TRUE HERO FLT 1549. He was sexier than Johnny Depp, greater than Jesus. Jesus could walk on water, but Captain Chesley Sullenberger could land on water and bring a hundred fifty-five people to safety.

      Another hero of immense proportions: Jan-Ove Waldner. The best table tennis player ever. Also called the Mozart of table tennis. Gieles had no idea why, but it sounded good.

      His father was a kind of hero. He drove birds from the runways to keep the passengers safe. Gieles suspected him of driving the birds away to save them from the airplane engines. Obstinate birds were shot, but not by Willem Bos. He never shot. Except at pigeons. His father despised pigeons.

      Gieles went to the barn, shovel and bucket in hand. In just a few more months he’d be a hero himself. He would personally see to it that his mother never wanted to go back to Africa again. Everyone would be hugely impressed.

      In the barn he picked up the bamboo stick and the tin of speculaas. When he shook the tin the geese came running. He gave them a couple of cookies and put the tin in his backpack. Then he prodded their feathery backsides with the stick.

      Strutting with pride, their tufts held jauntily in the air, the geese crossed the road. When they got to the environmentalists’ woods they began to graze in the grass. Gieles looked up at the camera that was mounted to a lamppost.

      The airport tolerated the geese because his father had told them they were flightless farm chickens that had never flown a metre in their lives. His father had authority.

      If only they knew.

      Idiots.

      They passed a derelict house whose garden was overrun by wild blackberry bushes that were creeping up the outer walls. Gieles noticed that part of one bush was growing in through a broken window, as if the house were being devoured. Behind the uninhabited ruin was a grassy path leading to the shed. He pushed open the corrugated metal door. The shed was empty, except for a couple of aluminium boats and a disassembled tractor. The geese waddled in, their tails wagging. They were eager to get started.

      ‘Stay,’ he said to the geese, articulating distinctly. He held up his hands as if he were pronouncing a blessing.

      ‘Stay.’

      Slowly Gieles started walking backward, repeating the command. The geese stayed where they were but became restless. They wiggled up and down and began cheeping. At a distance of less than twenty metres Gieles again called out ‘stay!’, but this time they took a running start and flapped up to him awkwardly, flopping down at his feet and cackling with wild abandon.

      ‘Damn!’ said Gieles in frustration. ‘You guys are supposed to wait till I give the sign! With my stick!’ They pecked at his pants’ leg. Gieles pushed the geese away. ‘First listen. Then cookies.’

      He began walking backward once more. ‘Sit! Stay!’

      -

      2

      At the end of the afternoon they watched scenes of an earthquake on television. A woman stood wailing in front of a mountain of rubble that until very recently had been a house.

      ‘Good thing Ellen isn’t there,’ said Uncle Fred, opening the newspaper. They were sitting side by side on the threadbare couch with the English tea-rose pattern.

      Gieles tried to imagine what it was like for the earth to shake. A shaking roof was normal for him. When the heavy cargo jets took off at night, the roof pounded like an old washing machine.

      Gieles zapped from the earthquake to Animal Planet. A grooming bonobo and her baby were sitting under a tree. Gieles’s friend Tony had a lot in common with monkeys. He was muscular in a stocky sort of way and there was something threatening about his body language. He had a habit of scratching the zits on his chin and putting the pus in his mouth. It was revolting. Even so, Gieles still hung out with him. After the runway had been built almost everyone in the neighbourhood had moved away.

      One of the males grabbed the female from behind.

      ‘Bonobos spend almost the entire day delighting in each other’s company,’ said a voice.

      Uncle Fred glanced up from his newspaper. Gieles quickly zapped to another station. Recently it was impossible for Tony to carry on a conversation without talking about screwing, as if he had already done it a gazillion times and Gieles was doomed to be a virgin for the rest of his life. It’s true that he was too much of a chicken to talk to girls, which was why he spent so much of his time on the internet. He had met someone on a website. She called herself Gravitation. He had logged in as Captain Sully. The e-mail correspondence between them had been fairly vague.

      His father’s airport service car came into the yard. It was a bright yellow jeep with transmitters and sound equipment on the roof. The equipment was meant to keep birds off the runways. He had recordings of dying birds that sent ice cold shivers down your spine. The screeching of a terrified seagull was especially effective at keeping other seagulls away.

      His father got out of the jeep with his phone to his ear. He looked grave. Gieles zapped to soccer. A little while later his father came into the living room with a beer in his hand.

      ‘Hey, guys,’ he said, dropping onto a dark grey sofa that had once matched the rest of the interior. When Uncle Fred had moved his own furniture into the living room—the English tea rose couch, a mahogany sideboard and a glass tea table—unity of design went out the window.

      ‘How’d it go?’ Uncle Fred asked his twin brother.

      ‘A close shave,’ said Willem Bos, never a man of many words. Whenever he did speak, he got it over with as quickly as possible. Occupational disability, he called it. He had adjusted the rhythm of his sentences to the take-off and landing of the airplanes.

      ‘Thousands of migrating starlings flew over the runway and down into the fields. Close shave.’

      He said it at the end of every workday. Close shave. Uncle Fred and Gieles didn’t even hear it any more, nor did Willem Bos expect a response. Swallows, seagulls, geese, bats, owls, starlings, lapwings, oystercatchers, buzzards, swans: hundreds of thousands of birds made a stopover at the airport. The sky was a tangle of migratory routes, invisible to most people but not to his father. When Willem shut his eyes he could see all the bird highways take shape before him. His job was to keep the birds at a safe distance, an overwhelming task when you considered what was involved.

      Willem Bos took a sip of beer and settled down to watch the game.

      Uncle Fred hoisted himself up with his crutch. ‘Supper’s almost ready.’ He click-clacked into the kitchen.

      Gieles set the table and sat down to eat. They only sat in the same seats when his mother was away. He had a view of their narrow backyard, the canal and the runway. The black water glistened in the evening sun. The nose of a plane appeared in the kitchen window and came to a halt. The crew and passengers couldn’t see them. His mother had