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.
‘Nothing. You know. Grab a bite by the chink.’
They rode slowly past the security camera. True to form, Tony gave it the finger. The whole area was full of security cameras. The airport was perpetually on guard. Gieles had charted the position of every single camera. He knew exactly where the gaps in the system were. That would be essential for Expert Rescue Operation 3032.
Once they crossed the intersection, Tony stepped on the gas. Gieles tried to relax. Tony started screaming a story. ‘I’m now in an alliance guild!’ Tony shouted. ‘For eighteen years old and older!’
He was probably talking about World of Warcraft. Tony gamed himself silly in a virtual world that consisted of elves, trolls and dragons.
‘I’m member 250!’ Every time he turned halfway around, the motorbike swerved. ‘I have priority with everything because I play more than twenty hours a week!’
They
