The Dinner (13 page)

And it was there and at that precise moment, as I heard the sound of my own voice – was jolted awake by the sound of my own voice, I should perhaps say – that I suddenly knew what I had to do.

I took Michel’s cell phone out of my pocket and slid it open.

I pressed Show.

I read both text messages: the first one contained a phone number, and the comment that no message had been left; the second said that the same number had left ‘one new message’.

I compared the times under the two texts. Between the first and the second there had been only two minutes. Both had arrived just a little more than fifteen minutes ago: while I was talking to my son on the phone, in this same park, just a little way from here.

I pressed Options twice, then hit Delete.

Then I called the number on the voicemail.

When Michel got his phone back later, there would be no missed calls listed on the display, I reasoned, and therefore no reason for him to consult his voicemail – at least not for the time being.

‘Yo!’ I heard then, after the voicemail lady had announced that there was one new message (and two old ones). ‘Yo! You gonna call me back, or what?!’

Yo! About six months ago, Beau had started adopting the Afro-American look, with a New York Yankees cap and matching lingo. He had been taken from Africa and brought here, and until a short while ago he had always spoken proper, standard Dutch. Not the Dutch spoken by ordinary people, but the Dutch of the circles surrounding my brother and his wife: supposedly quite neutral, but in fact with the accent recognizable among thousands as that of the elite; the Dutch you hear on the tennis court and in the canteen at the hockey club.

There must have been a day when Beau had looked in the mirror and decided that Africa was synonymous with pitiful and needy. But despite his prim diction, he would never be a Dutchman either. So it was perfectly understandable for him to go looking for his identity elsewhere, on the far side of the Atlantic, in the black neighbourhoods of New York and Los Angeles.

From the very beginning, though, there had been something about this act that annoyed me terribly. It was the same thing that had always annoyed me about my brother’s adopted son: something about his aura of sainthood, if you could call it that, the shrewdness with which he exploited his differentness from his adoptive parents, his adoptive brother, his adoptive sister and cousin.

As a little boy he had climbed onto ‘Mother’s’ lap much more often than Rick or Valerie did – usually in tears. Babette would caress his little black head and speak comforting words, but she was already looking around to find whom to blame for Beau’s sorrow.

The guilty party was usually not far away.

‘What happened to Beau?’ she would demand accusingly of her biological son.

‘Nothing, Mama,’ I heard Rick say once. ‘All I did was look at him.’

‘In fact,’ Claire had said when I aired my dislike of Beau, ‘you’re a racist.’

‘No I’m not!’ I said. ‘I would be a racist if I liked that little hypocrite simply for the colour of his skin or where he comes from. Positive discrimination. I would only be a racist if our adopted nephew’s hypocrisy made me draw conclusions about Africa in general, or Burkina Faso in particular.’

‘I was only kidding,’ said Claire.

A bicycle was coming across the bridge. A bicycle with a headlight. I could see the rider only in silhouette, but I could have picked my own boy out of a crowd of thousands, even in the dark. The way he sat hunched down over the handlebars like a racing cyclist, the supple nonchalance with which he let the bike sway left and right while the body itself barely moved: these were the ways and moves of … of a predator. The thought popped into my mind without my being able to stop it. ‘Of an athlete’ was what I had meant to say – to think. A sportsman.

Michel played soccer and tennis, and six months ago he had joined a gym. He didn’t smoke, was very moderate with alcohol, and he had on more than one occasion expressed his disdain for drugs, both soft and hard. ‘Those losers’ was what he called the potheads in his class, and we, Claire and I, were all too pleased to hear it. Pleased to have a son who was not a delinquent, who rarely skipped school and always did his homework. He was not an exceptionally good student, he never went out of his way to excel, in fact he barely did more than the bare minimum, but on the other hand there were never any complaints. His marks and exam scores were usually ‘average’, it was only for gym that he ever received an A+.

‘Old message,’ the voicemail lady said.

I realized only then that I was still holding his cell phone to my ear. Michel was already halfway across the bridge. I turned my back to him and began walking towards the restaurant; whatever happened, I had to break the connection as quickly as possible and stuff the phone back into my pocket.

‘Tonight’s okay,’ Rick’s voice said. ‘We’ll do it tonight. Call me. Ciao.’

After that the voicemail lady announced the time and date that the message had been left.

I heard Michel behind me, his bike tyres crunching on the gravel.

‘Old message,’ she said again.

Michel cycled past me. What did he see? A man rambling through the park all alone? Holding a cell phone to his ear? Or did he see his father? With or without the cell phone?

‘Hi, love,’ I heard Claire’s voice say now, at the same moment that my son went by. He cycled onto the lit gravel path and climbed off the bike. He looked around quickly, then walked his bike to the rack to the left of the entrance. ‘I’ll be home in an hour. Your father and I are going to the restaurant at seven, I’ll make sure we stay away till after midnight. So you two have to do it tonight. Your father doesn’t know about any of this, and I want to keep it that way. Bye, love. See you in a bit. Big smooch.’

Michel had locked his bike and was walking towards the door. The voicemail lady mentioned the date (today) and the time (two in the afternoon) that this last message had been left.

Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

‘Michel!’ I shouted. I slid the cell phone into my pocket. He stopped and looked around. I waved.

And I want to keep it that way.

My son came towards me along the gravel. We met precisely at the top of the path. It was awfully well lit. But maybe I was going to need this much light, I thought.

‘Hi,’ he said. He was wearing his black knitted cap with the Nike logo, the headphones were slung around his neck, the cable running down the collar of his jacket. A green, quilted Dolce & Gabbana jacket he had bought with his own clothes allowance only recently, after which there was no money left for socks and underpants.

‘Hi, guy,’ I said. ‘I figured I’d walk up a bit and meet you.’

My son looked at me. His honest eyes. Frank, that was how you would have to describe his gaze. Your father doesn’t know about any of this.

‘You were talking on the phone,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘Who were you talking to?’

He was trying to sound as casual as possible, but there was an urgent undertone to his voice. It was a tone I had never heard there before, and I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

‘I was trying to call you,’ I said. ‘I was wondering what was taking you so long.’

This is what happened. These are the facts.

One night, about two months ago, three boys were on their way home from a party. It was a party in the canteen of the high school two of the three boys attended. Those two were brothers. One of them was adopted.

The third boy went to a different school. He was their cousin.

Although the cousin never drank alcohol, that evening he had had a couple of beers. Just like the other two. Both cousins had danced with girls. Not their steady girlfriends, because they didn’t have them at that point – all different girls. The adopted brother did have a steady girlfriend. He spent most of the evening kissing her in a darkened corner.

The girlfriend had not gone along when the three boys left; they all had to be home by one. The girl was waiting for her father to come and pick her up.

It was, in fact, already one-thirty, but the boys knew that this fell within the limits their parents allowed. It had been agreed beforehand that the cousin would sleep over at the home of the two brothers – the cousin’s parents were spending a few days in Paris.

They had decided to drink one last beer at a café on their way back. But because they didn’t have enough money on them, they needed to stop first at a cash machine. A few streets further down – they were now about halfway between the school and home – they found an ATM. It was one of those with an outer door made of safety glass; the machine itself was inside, in a cubicle.

One of the two brothers, the biological brother as it were, goes in to withdraw cash. The adopted brother and the cousin wait outside. But then the biological brother comes back outside almost immediately.

So quick? the other two ask.

No, man, the brother says, man, I flipped my shit.

What is it? the others ask.

Inside there, the brother says. There’s someone lying there. Someone’s lying there asleep, in a sleeping bag. Jesus, man, I almost stepped on his head.

As to what precisely happened after that, and above all as to who was the first to come up with the disastrous plan, accounts differ. All three of them agreed that it stank inside the ATM cubicle. A horrible stench: a mixture of barf and sweat, and something else that one of the three described as being like the smell of a rotting corpse.

That stench is significant; a person who stinks cannot count on as much sympathy; a stench can be blinding; no matter how human those odours are, they can actually obscure the perception of the one who stinks as a real person of flesh and blood. That is no excuse for what happened, but it would also not be right simply to omit it.

Three boys are out to get some cash, not a lot, a few ten-euro notes for a final beer at the café. But there was no way they were going to hang around in that stench, you couldn’t be around it for more than ten seconds without gagging, it was like a torn-open garbage bag was lying there.

But what is lying there is a person: a person who breathes, yes, who even snores and snorts in his sleep.

Come on, we’ll find another ATM, the adopted brother says.

Forget it, say the other two. That’s crazy, if you can’t even get some cash because someone’s lying in front of the machine, stinking and sleeping off his rotgut.

Come on, the adopted brother says again, let’s go.

But the other two think that’s spineless, they’re going to withdraw their money here, they’re not going to go off and walk how many blocks to some other machine. Now the cousin goes inside, he starts yanking on the sleeping bag. Hey, hey, wake up! Get up!

I’m leaving, says the adopted son. I’m not into this.

Don’t be such a wimp, say the other two, we’ll be done in a minute, and then we’ll grab a beer.

But the adoptive brother says again that he’s not into it, that he’s tired anyway and doesn’t feel like a beer any more – and then he goes off on his bike.

The biological brother tries to stop him. Wait a minute, he shouts after him.

But the adopted brother only waves back, then disappears around the corner.

Let him go, the cousin says. He’s a bore. He’s squeaky clean. He’s a boring asshole.

The two of them go back inside. The brother tugs at the sleeping bag. Hey, wake up! Oh, blecch, man, that stinks, he says. The cousin kicks the foot end of the sleeping bag. It’s not really the smell of a corpse, more like garbage bags, that’s right, garbage bags full of leftover food, gnawed-off chicken bones, mouldy coffee filters. Wake up! A kind of stubbornness comes over both of them now, the cousin and the brother, they’re going to withdraw cash here, at this ATM, and nowhere else. Of course they’d had a little to drink at the school party. And it is in fact that same stubbornness, the stubbornness of the tipsy driver who says he’s perfectly capable of taking the wheel himself – and the stubbornness of the guest who hangs around too long at the end of your birthday party, who grabs one last beer (‘one for the road’), then tells you the same story for the seventh time that evening.

You gotta to get up, mister, this is a cash machine. They remain polite: despite the stench, so horrific it brings tears to their eyes, they still call him mister. The stranger, the invisible man in the sleeping bag, is undoubtedly older than they are. A mister, in other words, probably a tramp, but still a mister.

Now, for the first time, sounds start to come from inside the sleeping bag. They are the kinds of sounds you’d pretty much expect in the circumstances: moaning, groaning, unintelligible mumbling. It is coming to life. It still sounds like a child who doesn’t want to get up yet, who maybe doesn’t really want to go to school today, but then the sounds are followed by movements: someone or something stretches and seems about to poke a head or some other body part out of the sleeping bag.

They don’t have a clear plan, the brother and the cousin, they realize perhaps too late that they really don’t want to know precisely what’s hidden away inside the sleeping bag. So far it has been only an obstacle, something that was in the way, it gave off a monstrous stench, it didn’t belong there, it had to go away, but now they actually have to talk to that something (or someone) who’s been woken up against its will, woken from its dreams; who knows what the stinking homeless dream about, about a roof over their head probably, a warm meal, a wife and children, a house with a driveway, a sweet dog wagging its tail and running towards them across a lawn complete with sprinkler.