‘I’m sorry.’ (‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll put your dinner in the microwave.’)
A couple of hundred metres further on they passed Dolly’s house. Gieles remembered the smell of her messy bed and thought of Super Waling’s story. It got him agitated. Her tongue in his ears and nostrils.
Imagine Gravitation or Dolly pushing her tongue into his ears. How would that feel?
He had sent her a photo of himself posing in front of his father’s service car. In another one he was standing with his geese. He had plastered his hair down with gel. The sunglasses did the rest.
Gravitation had reciprocated with a photo of herself pressing her rabbit against her pale white upper body. He regarded this provocative pose as a sign of approval. Something like: You look pretty good.
His father was leaning against the car window in his leather jacket, peering into the sky. Then he looked down at the road. He did that all the time, even when he wasn’t on patrol. His eyes went up and down, from the sky to the road, from the road to the sky. He possessed the rare talent of being able to see things from a bird’s perspective. Why does a bird do what it does? That one question formed the basis of his thinking and defined his behaviour. According to his mother, his father had been a bird in a previous life.
They passed the fence that was under camera surveillance and for which Willem Bos had a special pass. In the distance they saw a couple of seagulls flying against a pale sky hung with grey clouds that looked like ice floes.
Willem Bos held the walkie-talkie to his mouth. ‘Gulls in midfield. I repeat: gulls in midfield.’
‘Runway free,’ came the reply after a pause. ‘Situation under control.’
The car’s dashboard was a bag of tricks. Press the button and a panic-stricken starling shrieked across the farmland. That farmland, according to Willem Bos, was a very big problem, apart from the infinite number of invisible intersections in the sky. When the runway was built, the experts had condescendingly shrugged their shoulders over the fact that agrarian areas tend to attract birds.
Standing in the midfield between the two runways were his father’s fellow bird controllers and the robot man. Unlike his father, the bird controllers were dressed in green. They looked like forest rangers. The robot man was wearing a faded turtleneck and jeans and was standing a couple of metres away from the group.
Willem Bos parked next to the other yellow cars and walked up to his colleagues, sauntering like a cowboy. They greeted him and gave Gieles a few brotherly slaps on the back.
Then Willem Bos walked up to the robot man and introduced himself, and Gieles shook the man’s hand in turn. He forgot his name immediately. Lisping and inhaling deeply through his nostrils, the robot man launched into a description of the invention he had worked on for three hundred and fifty hours.
‘Just show us the bird,’ Willem Bos interrupted. He had crossed his arms. The robot man was disconcerted by the interruption but quickly recovered and went to work. He opened a chest in the trunk of the airport service car and took out his invention. They all shrank back. The robot was a gigantic bird of prey with cold eyes and a hooked beak. Its dark brown wings spanned at least a metre and a half.
The robot man held the monster over his head, making his own body look even punier. One of the bird controllers whistled through his teeth. ‘Whoa,’ he said, deeply impressed. ‘You can hardly tell it from the real thing. A perfect white-tailed eagle.’
‘A golden eagle,’ corrected the robot man. ‘Notith the tail.’ He turned the bird halfway around, still holding it over his head. ‘It hath a black terminal band,’ he lisped.
‘We don’t get any golden eagles around here,’ said Willem Bos. ‘Plenty of buzzards, goshawks, kestrels and falcons. But no golden eagles.’
The robot man began sweating under the weight of his invention.
‘I saw a white-tailed eagle once,’ said one of his father’s colleagues, rubbing his moustache. ‘Above the dunes. But that was a long time ago. We’re talking about the end of the seventies. And from that distance it could have been a great spotted eagle. You can never be sure.’
The other bird controllers nodded in agreement. ‘I once mistook an escaped turkey vulture for a buzzard. But you don’t expect to see big ones like that out here. Buzzards can be very aggressive.’
The bird controller now turned to Gieles. His colleagues knew the anecdote by heart. ‘I know this farmer. He was out haying once on his land and suddenly this buzzard attacked him. The buzzard planted its claws into his hair and scalped him right then and there. Pieces of scalp this big.’ He created an implausibly large shape with his hands. ‘Really. Pieces that big.’
‘Okay,’ said Willem Bos, looking up into the dark sky. ‘Get going with that thing.’
‘It’th called Golden Eagle,’ the robot man said, slowly dropping to his knees. Gieles wanted to help, but the robot man absolutely refused.
‘Thith ith no toy,’ he said. Very carefully he placed the golden eagle on the ground and pulled the wings out further. Gieles saw that the feathers had been painted with the utmost precision. There must have been a thousand of them. The robot man stroked the wings, then took the remote control out of the trunk.
‘Golden Eagle ith ready,’ said the robot man, lifting the bird up over his head again with one hand.
‘Make sure you stay away from the runways,’ warned Willem Bos as the robot man ran onto the field. Gieles watched a plane taxi by. Maybe he was seeing things, but he could have sworn that the passengers were craning to look out of the little windows. Willem Bos and the other bird controllers chuckled at the scene before them. There stood his father—big, secure and completely relaxed. Gieles wanted so much to be able to stand like that someday.
‘You know who he reminds me of?’ said the man with the moustache. Now the robot man was running back in their direction. ‘That environmental bunch that came here and cut holes in the fences. They were just as lanky and nervous.’
‘Maybe he’s an activist, too,’ Willem Bos suggested.
‘Or a terrorist,’ said his colleague. ‘With a bird as a thuithide bomber.’ He burst out laughing.
They made a few more jokes about the lisping robot man, and just when they thought his technology had let him down, the invention took to the skies.
The majestic wings whooshed like windmill blades. The yellow-tinted body gained altitude with ease. Once it was high enough, the bird began gliding through the atmosphere. Anyone who didn’t know better would have sworn that the golden eagle was scanning the earth for cadavers.
The robot man had his bird fly toward a pole mounted with runway lights. A kestrel had settled on one of the lamps. A kestrel was one bird you didn’t want in an airplane engine. Recently a Boeing 747 had crashed in Belgium because of a kestrel. No fatalities, but the plane had snapped like a dry twig. The kestrel looked up at the unfamiliar assailant, gauged its chances and fled.
The golden eagle drove off a couple of seagulls, six partridges, a group of magpies and dozens of starlings. The bird controllers began to reassess their opinion of the robot man.
‘Can I give it a try?’ asked Willem Bos after an hour. A few drops of rain had fallen and no one felt like getting drenched.
