pottery.
‘Put your hands on the cracks and push.’
He thought of his mother. She had scars on her arms from a car accident in Zambia. Or was it Malawi? He didn’t remember. When Gieles asked what the long, thin stripes were on her arms, she answered, ‘Glue joints. I fell apart, and they glued me back together.’
After a couple of minutes Gieles said they could pull their hands away.
‘Nice,’ said Onno. ‘Now Mom won’t be mad.’
Skiq lined the tubes up in front of him and began to count. ‘There are eighteen,’ he said.
‘Why do you have so much glue here?’ asked Gieles.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. ‘I think because lots of things break.’
Gieles picked up his laptop. ‘Go watch TV.’
The brothers stretched out on the couch, zapping, while Gieles installed himself at the table. Fuck. No Gravitation. He read the mail from his mother.
‘Sunshine,’ she wrote. His mother had been calling him that for as long as he could remember. ‘I’m writing you in the classroom of a little school in Budunbuto. It’s a poor village without running water but with eight brand-new computers donated by a Dutch company. A heart-warming initiative. Unfortunately, seven of the computers broke down because of all the airborne sand. Tomorrow I’m giving the women of the village a cooking demonstration. They’re used to cooking on wood, but there’s not a tree to be found in the whole area. Compared with Budunbuto our polder is an overgrown jungle. Fortunately I can spend today resting from the journey. It took almost a week to get here. I’m used to inaccessible places and bandits, but my guide really beat them all. He chewed khat non-stop. Munched down entire bushes of the stuff like a goat, so that he totally lost touch with reality. He actually thought I was a female hyena and he was the male counterpart. I’ll spare you the details. I’m glad I’m here, although sometimes the dust drives me nuts. It gets on and into everything. There’s nothing I’d rather have than a cold shower, but the water is being rationed. And I can’t take off the burka either, even though it’s forty degrees.’
He had already read the bit about the burka.
‘There’s nothing good on TV,’ said Skiq, grabbing his black Michael Jackson hat.
‘Can I show you the moonwalk?’ The hat was hanging low over his eyes.
Gieles slammed the computer screen shut and walked over to the cabinet where the CD player was stored. All the CDs were scrambled up together, none of them in boxes.
‘Number four!’ shouted Skiq. ‘“Billie Jean”, it’s already in it.’
Skiq stood in the middle of the living room with his hat tilted at an angle over his face. He held the brim with one hand. The music started and Skiq began shaking his narrow hips. Then he made punching movements. His little brother imitated him from the couch. While snapping up the heel of one foot he pushed the other foot back.
‘You do it better than Michael Jackson,’ said Gieles.
Onno jumped down from the couch, right on top of his brother. They began fighting.
‘Time for bed,’ said Gieles, pulling the boys apart. They continued their quarrel in the bathroom, first fighting over toothbrushes, then over their medicine. All three children had asthma. Dolly blamed their illness on the airport, too.
‘If you guys put your inhalers in your mouth now, I’ll let you ride in Uncle Fred’s scooter the next time.’
They both inhaled their medicine and went out to the hallway.
‘You can’t come in my room,’ Skiq told Gieles.
He stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance.
‘Skiq still wets the bed. He has a piss alarm,’ teased Onno.
‘I DON’T WET THE BED, YOU STUPID PRICK!’ screamed Skiq, punching his brother in the stomach. Onno fell against the wall and began to cry.
The youngest boy woke up and started bawling, too.
‘We’re not gonna start beating each other up,’ said Gieles, pulling them apart once more. It took half an hour to calm the boys down. Gieles went into Skiq’s bedroom last. Skiq was lying with his back to the door. Next to his head was a little black box attached to a cord. The cord disappeared under the duvet.
‘Is that the alarm?’ asked Gieles.
The boy said nothing. His angular shoulders protruded from the duvet. Skiq was a boy of delicate build. When Gieles horsed around with him he could feel the bones right through his skin. He made Gieles think of a grasshopper. Dolly had named Skiq after an English hardcore band. Gieles was afraid that Skiq would never become hardcore.
‘I wet the bed sometimes, too,’ Gieles lied, but he immediately regretted saying it. Later Skiq would tell Dolly.
Totally unconvinced, the boy turned around. ‘Really?’
‘Joke. But Tony does,’ said Gieles. ‘And Tony is sixteen already and you just turned nine.’
Skiq looked relieved.
‘And Tony drives a motorbike.’
‘Don’t tell anybody. Promise?’
‘Promise.’
‘Gieles?’ the boy asked.
‘Yes?’
‘Are we ever gonna play table 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
