Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

evening we’re experimenting with a robot bird,’ said Willem. He ate his macaroni in big bites. Everything about his father was big: his mouth, his ears, his nose, his hands. His movements. Women found him handsome in an exciting sort of way. They stole glances at him but didn’t dare strike up a conversation. Sometimes women from Uncle Fred’s book clubs came over, and they would suddenly get all theatrical if his father happened to walk into the room.

      Willem Bos looked at his son. ‘Maybe you’d like to come along? To see the robot bird, I mean.’

      ‘I think I have time,’ said Gieles.

      His father pushed the empty plate away and let his hands rest on the table.

      Gieles wanted to take hold of that powerful hand, but he was afraid it would seem childish. He looked at his own hands. They were baby hands compared to his dad’s. They hadn’t done anything yet. He’d never even laid a finger on a girl’s body, let alone in a girl’s body. In kindergarten he’d rooted around in a girl’s backside with his finger, but it might just as well have been her nose. There had been a practical reason for it. They had been playing that the felt-tip pen was a thermometer, and the top got stuck inside her. Gieles wanted to get the top out. The teacher got mad if they didn’t put the tops back on the felt-tips. She was afraid they would dry out. (She was also afraid of lice, sour milk, mud in the construction corner, scraped knees and lots of other things.)

      After supper Gieles went to his room. He had half an hour before he had to leave. He turned on the fan and the laptop and wiped his forehead. It was early May but it was stifling in his room. The airport had had the roof insulated with thick mattresses that were supposed to muffle the noise of the planes, but they turned his room into a pressure cooker. The worst thing was that the sound insulation made his hair stand on end. He was always walking around with a permanent static charge.

      Gieles wanted to do some more work on the letter to Christian Moullec, but he noticed there was an e-mail from his mother. It was the second message she’d sent since she left. Gravitation was also online. He quickly read the last sentences of his mother’s mail.

      ‘And I can’t take off the burka either, even though it’s forty degrees. I miss you and think about you, and I hope you spend just a teensy bit of time thinking about all those people living in such terrible poverty here. Love, Ellen.’

      Gieles didn’t want to think about all those people, so he closed the mail. Africans made him feel so incredibly depressed. He’d rather think about the virtual girl. Gravitation. He wondered why she called herself that. It was as if she wanted to imply that she was fat, but she didn’t look fat in the little photos. She had pitch black dreadlocks and a pale, oval face. It said in her profile that she had fourteen piercings. Gieles wondered where they were. He could only see one, in her eyebrow. He couldn’t get a clear picture of Gravitation because of the dreadlocks and the black make-up. Her green eyes were beautiful, he thought. They were the same colour as the scum on the fish bowl when it hadn’t been cleaned for weeks.

      He could start with her eyes, but that was corny. Keep it simple.

      Captain Sully: ‘Hi, what are you up to?’

      Gravitation: ‘Nothing. Playing with my rabbit and listening to music.’

      Captain Sully: ‘What you listening to?’

      Gravitation: ‘Fever Ray. You probably don’t know her. Fever Ray is this Swedish woman. She changes every day. Just like me. This morning I dyed my hair.’

      Captain Sully: ‘What colour?’

      Gravitation: ‘Violet.’

      Weirdo. Violet dreadlocks.

      Captain Sully: ‘Did you dye your rabbit, too?’

      Gravitation: ‘Fuck off.’

      Captain Sully: ‘I have rabbits, too. Hundreds.’

      Gravitation: ‘You live at a petting zoo?’

      Captain Sully: ‘Ha ha. No, I live on a dead-end street next to an airport runway. There are lots of rabbits near the runway. And hares.’

      Gravitation: ‘Cool.’

      Captain Sully: ‘There are lots of birds and foxes and stuff near the runway, too. My father calls it a wildlife area. I have two geese.’

      Gravitation: ‘Geese are great!’

      She’s pulling my chain. Nobody thinks geese are great.

      Gravitation: ‘What are their names?’

      The geese had no names, but that might sound like he didn’t care enough about them. He scanned his room in search of suitable names. On his bookshelf he spotted the rows of comic books that had belonged to his father.

      Captain Sully: ‘Asterix and Obelix. And your rabbit?’

      Gravitation: ‘Just plain rabbit.’

      Captain Sully: ‘How old is he?’

      Gravitation: ‘Five. And you?’

      Captain Sully: ‘About four.’

      Gravitation: ‘No. You!’

      She has to be older than fourteen.

      Captain Sully: ‘Sixteen. And you?’

      Gravitation: ‘Almost seventeen.’

      She’s almost three years older than me! That means I pretty much don’t even exist for her!

      Gravitation: ‘I’m moving out as soon as I can. I hate my parents.’

      Shit, I have to be at Dolly’s in ten minutes.

      Captain Sully: ‘I’ve got to go to work.’

      Gravitation: ‘Where?’

      Babysitting wasn’t cool, Gieles decided, so he thought of the part-time job Tony had in his father’s shop. His father was a butcher.

      Captain Sully: ‘In a butcher shop.’

      Gravitation: ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

      -

      3

      Dolly lived with her three little sons at the bend in the runway. The house was wedged in between two abandoned houses that looked just as dilapidated as hers. Empty houses were cancerous growths, Dolly said, that should be cut out immediately. But that didn’t happen. There she was, stuck in the most nauseating place in the universe. On rainy days, when the polder was dull and grey and the only thing that shone was the asphalt, she repeated her theory over and over again like a mantra.

      Gieles didn’t know whether she was right or wrong. But over a year ago her husband had died of a heart attack. One morning she found him dead in their bed. It was a mystery, said the doctor, but not according to Dolly. She was convinced that it had to do with the airport and the empty houses. The noise of the airplanes ate away at him the way fungus hollows out a tree. She could feel the cancer demons beaming their rays right through the walls. Since then, Dolly cursed the house, the neighbourhood and her life, but she never managed to get away. A FOR SALE sign had been hanging in the front yard since her husband’s death. Not a single person had come to look.

      Dolly opened the door. She already had her jacket on and her face was carefully made up. She smiled. ‘Hello,’ he said, and put his backpack with the laptop under the hat rack. Gieles was eager to get back online.

      Gieles thought Dolly was sexy, but sometimes she was scary, too. She could light into her children like a crazy lady. His father and mother never yelled or hit. Gieles had gotten a smack on the head, but just once. That was after the incident with the paint bomb and the Cityhopper. His father pulled him out from under the bed, where he had been hiding. He was covered with blue paint. That was the one time his father had hit him.

      Dolly could get a certain expression on her face that made you want to look the other way. She never did it with him, but she did with his mother sometimes. If his mother was at a birthday