Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

When he got excited like that, Joe seemed more and more like some nutty sorcerer’s apprentice.

‘It’s weird to think that, at the same time atomic science was being developed, planes didn’t amount to much more than a little bamboo, ash wood and canvas.’

‘No, that’s normal,’ said Engel, lighting a gold-rimmed cigarette. ‘The mind always has a head start on the invention. An idea is weightless; it floats out in front of matter. We can think up all kinds of things, but try carrying them out. That’s the bitch.’

‘Engineers are patient, though,’ Joe said solemnly.

‘Did you guys know that P.J.’s mother is a nudist?’ Christof broke the train of thought.

‘P.J.?’ Joe asked.

‘Picolien Jane,’ Engel said. ‘New girl? Blond pin-curls? South Africa?’

Joe shrugged. Christof hopped up onto the engine block.

‘You mean you’ve never seen her? I don’t believe you!’

‘I probably have,’ Joe said, just to calm him down.

How did we find out that P.J.’s mother, Kathleen Eilander, was a nudist? Perhaps it was the postman who delivered Athena , the club magazine of the naturists’ association of the same name, to a ‘Mrs K. Eilander-Swarth’ every three months? Or was it a barge captain from Lomark who claimed to have seen her naked on one of the beaches between the breakwaters? Or then again maybe it was only a rumour, a bit of gossip congealing into such solid factuality that one day Kathleen Eilander felt the irresistible and hitherto unknown urge to go down to the river, take off all her clothes and go skinny-dipping. However it happened, we knew. Never in our lives had we seen a nudist. But the term smacked of very serious nudity indeed, and of things for which we had been waiting for a long time.

Engel looked at me. His eyes were the same colour as the ink in my favourite fountain pen. He knew how much I liked those afternoons when Joe climbed onto his soapbox and pronounced theories with their feet on the ground and their head in the clouds.

Bright and early each morning, Christof claimed, Mrs Eilander jogged down to the river to go bathing. He also said she walked around naked in the garden behind the White House. Her legs, Christof said, were long and kind of strange, but legs hardly played the leading role in my fantasies about the nudist. No, I saw other things. Things that took my breath away. She was a mother, and therefore an old lady, but after hearing the news about her nudism I noticed she was transformed into a sexual creature with a secret to which we just happened to be privy, and which filled our heads with burning questions and our guts with melted sugar.

Reluctantly, Joe descended to the subject of Mrs Eilander’s legs.

‘Can we get a look?’ he asked, but Christof shook his head.

‘Wall around the garden,’ he said, ‘and it’s still dark when she goes swimming.’

Joe toyed pensively with a screwdriver, twirling it in the fingers of his good hand like a majorette. Wednesday was dozing on my shoulder. The wrinkly membranes were pulled down over his beady eyes. He had become a beauty of a bird, a jaunty, proud creature trained to come back whenever I whistled. Joe had made a lucky pick, I don’t think a more handsome jackdaw could be found. The feathers at his neck and on the back of his head were silvery-gray as graphite; when he walked the bobbing of his head lent him a certain consequence. It’s not like with starlings, birds that seem to radiate a sort of lowliness. Starlings fly in spectacular eddies and shimmering spirals, that’s true enough, but in such huge numbers that you can’t help but be reminded of big cities where people hate and tread on each other, but strangely enough can’t get along without the others.

Wednesday possessed an inner nobility that placed him above inferior garbage eaters like starlings and gulls. He would be able to see Mrs Eilander walking naked in her garden, but jackdaws weren’t interested in things like that. I often tried to put myself in Wednesday’s place as he flew over Lomark, to imagine what the world looked like from a bird’s-eye view. It was my dream of omniscience — nothing would ever be hidden from me again, I would be able to write the History of Everything.

We all looked at Joe, waiting to hear his thoughts. Joe looked at Wednesday as the screwdriver propellered faster and faster through his fingers. It was amazing how fast he could do that. When the screwdriver fell at last and all four of us, wakened from the spell, looked at the concrete floor where it had landed with a clear tinkle, Joe raised his eyebrows.

‘It’s actually quite simple,’ he said. ‘If we want to see her naked, we’ll need our own plane.’

The airplane was the crowbar that man needed to force his way into the air, the final element; that’s what Joe had said that afternoon in the garage. But it wasn’t until he came up with the idea of building his own plane that I realized what he meant; the plane would be the crowbar with which we would part the heavens between Mrs Eilander’s legs. The plane would allow us a view of that terra incognita , and Joe was the engineer who would make it happen.

I watched the airplane grow, starting with the eighteen-inch moped wheels we found at the junkyard right up to and including the fine, varnished propeller Joe wangled from a nearby airfield.

They started work on the high-wing plane in a shed at the edge of the factory grounds, amid black mountains of broken asphalt scraped from old roads and dumped there for reuse. The big grinding machine had broken down years ago. Now it stood in slow collapse between chunks of unprocessed asphalt on one side and the pointy hills of a finer structure that it had spit out on the other.

In the mineral world of the asphalt plant, bulldozers trundled back and forth between piles of blue porphyry, red Scottish granite, bluish quartzite and sands of many varieties. The ground stone came in by ship from German mills along the Upper Rhine. A sharp eye might find among it pieces of mammoth bone and tusk, and the occasional fossilized shark’s tooth. Christof had a sharp eye. Pointing at the piles of sand and gravel, he would speak of himself as the curator of a ragtag collection of prehistory, what he called the ‘Maandag Museum’. And Christof was the boss’s son, so no one interfered; the three of them could do whatever they liked, as long as they didn’t get in the way.

There came a day when the plane was a full eight metres long: a fuselage of steel wires, tubes, cables and crossbars, schematic as an articulated insect’s rump. Structural elements, Joe told me, were always arranged in the form of a triangle.

‘Geometrically speaking, the triangle provides a solid construction,’ he said. ‘A square will shift, change its shape. But the triangle is the basis of every solid construction.’

The thing remained wingless until the end. I could never really believe that the plane was actually meant to take off, especially after I found out that the gas and choke handles were made from the gearshifts of a racing bike. Had foreman Graad Huisman of Bethlehem Asphalt known the real purpose of their activities in the shed, he would definitely have kept the boys from coming there. But they talked about their plans to no one else, and no one ever asked me a thing.

The hangar floor was littered with sketches, blueprints and manuals. Dunhill in the corner of his mouth and one eye squeezed shut against the smoke, Engel pored over sheets of paper covered in calculations. For shock absorbers they had pulled the suspension springs off an old Opel Kadett at the Hermans & Sons junkyard and welded them between the fuselage and the wheels. Then the plane was hoisted on a rope a metre and a half off the ground and Joe climbed into it. We held our breath. Joe yanked on the rope, the knot slipped and the plane crashed to the ground. Everything remained intact, except for Joe, who climbed out with a ‘goddamn sore back’. Thereby demonstrating that the plane would not fall apart during the landing.