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 once had to wait in a plane that was idling in front of their house. All she could see when she looked in the windows was the reflection of the plane itself.
‘Thursday 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.
