On the morning of Bo’s eighth birthday, I got out of bed at five. I turned on the light in the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, took a shower. Hair still wet, I fried eggs and bacon, filled a big thermos flask with coffee and a smaller one with tea. I stared at my reflection in the window while the butter spattered in the pan. ‘You’re turning into an old prune face,’ I said to myself. Then I went in and woke Bo.
‘Bo! Bo! Happy birthday!’
We ate our breakfast of crunchy oatmeal and fruit without a word, and while Bo was getting dressed I made bacon and egg sandwiches, with mayonnaise instead of butter, and with plenty of salt, exactly the way he likes it.
Bo didn’t really wake up until we were in the car.
‘Where’s my present? Don’t I get a present?’
‘We’re going fishing. Isn’t that a present?’
In my five years with Monika, I never went fishing. It was the only real sacrifice I had to make for her. She would never have forgiven me otherwise. ‘Driving a hook through the mouth of a living animal, just for the fun of it,’ Monika said when she discovered my rods in a corner of my room. ‘I think that’s about as low as a human being can get.’
‘Is it cause enough to reconsider?’ I asked. She’d just confessed to Robbert that there was another man in her life. (Her words, not mine – when it came to love, Monika adored high-flown texts. Monika never said ‘fucking’: she said ‘making love’ or ‘sleeping with someone’. While in my view, what she did, what we did, was what you really call fucking.)
‘It should give me cause to reconsider,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid that this time the spirit is once again weaker than the flesh.’
‘Would it help if I promised never to fish again as long as you’re in my life?’
‘That would be a great help,’ Monika said. That’s how it happened. I only went fishing again when Bo turned five, and then only because he wanted to so badly. My own feeling about it was that it wouldn’t be fair to Monika to start torturing innocent fish again, simply because she’d had the misfortune to die young. That death had caused enough suffering, without adding to it the suffering of fish. (Fishing is, of course, a form of cruelty to animals – but it’s such a beautiful form, almost as beautiful as bullfighting, for which I have a secret soft spot.)
When I’d told him that going fishing was a present, too, Bo had looked at me doubtingly. But I simply kept my eyes on the road, which was misty and still largely shrouded in darkness, and said nothing. By the time we got to the boat-hire place, the eastern sky was dark violet. Hesitantly, the land took on its first colour.
‘Your rod!’ I shouted when I opened the trunk. ‘We forgot your fishing rod!’
Bo didn’t say a thing.
‘I guess we’ll just have to take turns with mine.’
Bo stared at the ground.
‘Come on.’
He dragged his feet, but not for long.
‘Hey,’ I said after the man from the hirer’s had taken us to our boat. ‘What’s that?’ Lying on the bottom of the boat there was a long dark-green object with a yellow ribbon around it.
‘My present!’ Bo shouted in amazement.
And so we rowed out onto the lake. The shores were deserted and we fished in silence, and only a moorhen saw us and was startled and withdrew into the reeds. Bo’s little hand clenched his new fishing rod. His knuckles were white. Occasionally our floats dipped out of sight. Occasionally the water churned and splashed.
At nine o’clock I rowed the boat over to the shore, where a coffee house had just opened its doors for business. There I phoned Bo’s school.
‘My son is sick.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope.’
‘No, nothing serious.’
‘That’s a relief. Be sure to wish him a happy birthday, would you?’
By the end of the day we had caught eleven roach, four white bream, six bream and a mirror carp. Bo caught the mirror carp. It was his first, and a miracle his line held. When the fish was lying on the bottom of the boat, gasping for air with its big rubbery mouth, I leaned over and sniffed.
‘What do you smell?’ Bo asked.
‘Try it.’
He leaned over the fish and sniffed.
‘I smell fish.’
‘And the wondrous odour of the underwater world,’ I said.
He sniffed again, then nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The wondrous odour of the underwater world.’
Next week Bo is going to turn fourteen. For the first time, I have no idea what to give him.