Gliding Flight. Anne-Gine Goemans

tennis again?’

      ‘Sure.’

      He walked past Dolly’s bedroom. The door was open. It was a mess, clothes lying and hanging everywhere. The ironing board was about to collapse under a mountain of laundry. Gieles went in. He looked on the window sill behind the closed room-darkening curtains, but there was no wooden comb to be seen among all the pots of desiccated cactuses. He sat down on the unmade double bed. The room was suddenly ablaze with lights from a descending plane. Gieles squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like stadium lights were penetrating the curtains and shining right on him. The plane landed and taxied past the house. For a moment it was dark, but just a few minutes later the room was bathed in light again. Gieles stretched out on the bed. On the nightstand was a framed photo. He saw Dolly in a white wedding dress. Her dead husband had his arms wrapped around her waist. Gieles thought they looked happy. The light flared up again, blinking, and then ebbed away.

      Gieles’s parents were not married. His mother thought marriage was nonsense. Whenever she got all agitated about the state of the world, his father would joke, ‘Will you marry me?’ That made her laugh. But for the past year his father had stopped making those jokes.

      Gieles turned over on his stomach and smelled the same sweet fragrance he had smelled in the car. Yawning, he threw his arms around the pillow. His hands encountered a strip of pills and a small piece of velvet. In the airplane light he saw that it was some kind of Zorro mask.

      He thought about Gravitation and her green eyes. She liked Swedish music and animals. The next time he’d tell her everything about the behaviour of his geese.

      He thought about table tennis. He’d spent trillions of hours playing table tennis with Tony, but ever since Tony had started getting zits and acting irritating they didn’t play any more. He daydreamed about Dolly. Did she sleep naked? That was a thought that made the lower part of his body come to life.

      A high, shrill noise brought him back to reality. It sounded like a fire alarm. Stumbling over the clothes, he ran out into the hall. He expected to see metre-high flames shooting up the stairwell, but he saw and smelled nothing. The sound came from Skiq’s room, from the little black box. The boy didn’t even wake up.

      -

      4

      I am like you training my geese for a project. I cannot run into the details. It is secret and surprise for my mother. Like your rescue flying, my project is also an action of rescue. As I already wrote, my geese do not excel in listening. They behave sometimes completely stupid. When I give them an ordering, I want them to stay in the same place, even when I am no longer visual. But when I am not visual for the geese, they start looking for me. They panic and search for me and they are consummately happy to see me. I must punish, but I have trouble. They are not making a serious mistake. They are following the nature. I try to be goose. I cry, Christian Moullec. How to stay in 1 place?

      I look in book for dog. The dog is also like geese the best friend of the person. I try with a low voice. Sit and stay. But they do not listen. I do not scream. In the book dog it says: screaming orderings is useless. The book is right. My neighbour woman Dolly screams orderings at her children on whom I babysit. The children also scream, but they do not understand each other.

      Book for dog says for training use an open stream of water. But for leaking they have fear. As I already wrote to you, my geese see me as a cousin or brother. They do not see me as head of the platoon.

      Tony’s mother stood at the window with one hand on her hip. The telephone was clamped between her shoulder and her ear. From the back, Liedje looked like a high school girl. Her jeans were stretched tightly across her bottom. Her hair was long and golden blond. Gieles sat on the couch gazing at Liedje.

      ‘My God, honey,’ she said, ‘you never told me. I had no idea.’ Then she turned around. With her tan face full of wrinkles and her creased lips, she was Tony’s mother again. She was wearing a low-cut gold-coloured sweater. Her tanned cleavage was so full of crevices that it looked as if a tic-tac-toe board had been gouged into it. Tony called his mother ‘lame-o,’ ‘ass wipe’ or ‘weasel,’ depending on his mood. He had an inexhaustible collection of metaphors on hand to describe her.

      Liedje lit a cigarette and went back to the window. She nodded her head vigorously and kept repeating ‘uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh’ and ‘oh my God’ as she plucked at the mint green lace curtains. Liedje was a mint green fiend. Everything in the house was mint green: the couch, the toilet seat, the kitchen cabinets, the door mat, the dog basket.

      Tony put two glasses of cola on the coffee table and flopped onto the couch. On TV there was a black girl dancing with four black men. They hardly had anything on. Gieles looked over at Tony, who was slumped down with half his back on the seat of the couch. He was muscular, but he wasn’t much to look at. His eyes were small and too close together and his nose was the colour of a veal cutlet (and just as shapeless). Maybe it came from eating all that stuff from his father’s butcher shop.

      Working with a thumb and forefinger, Tony squeezed a pimple on his chin. He wiped the pus off on his pants, next to a dark grease stain.

      Liedje rubbed a sleeve of her gold sweater over the display cabinet. Liedje was very neat; she followed Tony and his little sister around all day with a damp cloth and the dustbuster. Inside the display cabinet were miniature motorcycles. The whole family collected them. Liedje’s were mint green.

      Liedje was silent for a while, said ‘oh my God’ and ‘uh-huh’ for the umpteenth time and hung up.

      ‘That Polman woman got cancer, too,’ she said absently.

      ‘Which Polman woman?’ said Tony, followed by a burp.

      ‘Renee,’ said Liedje.

      ‘Renee from the gay café.’

      ‘Cut the crap,’ she said with irritation. ‘The woman’s name is Renee Polman.’

      ‘Sick Renee with her vayjayjay.’

      ‘God, you’re disgusting. I don’t know where you get it from.’

      ‘Big hairy deal.’

      ‘The woman is only sixty-five! That’s a very big deal! And lay a towel down before you sit on the chairs with your filthy pants. How many times do I have to tell you?’

      His mother made noises that sounded like she was chasing away a cat.

      Big hairy deal. Tony said that all day long. Big hairy deal, and he said it with a look on his face as if he were telling the whole world to go fuck themselves.

      ‘Thanks for the cola,’ said Gieles, and rushed out behind Tony.

      There were white angel figurines in the front yard whose wings had been spray-painted mint green. Airplane spotters who were driving by often stopped in front of the house to take a look. It wasn’t a big house but it certainly was striking with all that green. Tony lived with his parents and little sister on the same road as Dolly. It used to be a lively neighbourhood before the runway came. Each spring the residents organised a street party, and in the winter they put braziers and pans of pea soup out on the sidewalk. Now only four of the houses were occupied. Even the squatter who knew how to make paint bombs had moved away. It was spooky, he thought. The airport had built the runway right through the heart of the community. Residents who lived in the danger zone were bought out, and those who refused to leave were dispossessed.

      Tony and Gieles walked to the backyard shed. Two motorcycles and a motorbike were lined up side by side. Liedje’s Kawasaki looked as good as new. Not a spot of dirt on it anywhere.

      Tony put on his father’s helmet and tossed his own helmet to Gieles. Gieles smelled it first. The inside smelled like scalp. The idea that Tony, with his wet chin, had had this helmet on his head, was truly disgusting.

      ‘Hurry up,’ said Tony impatiently. He had already ridden his souped-up motorbike out of the shed. Pebbles flew in every direction.

      ‘What exactly are we gonna do?’ asked Gieles. He shut his eyes and put on the helmet.