Tonio Read Online Free Page B

session at my desk.
    Socks. Shoes. Oh God, let him pull through. Not for me. For Miriam. For Tonio himself. And yes, for me, too, even though I didn’t deserve it.
    A knock at the door. I was just tying the laces of my shabby house-shoes, which I normally wouldn’t dare wear in public. The policeman again. ‘Sir, are you about ready? Your wife wants you to hurry.’
    His young, academy-trained voice, with just that whiff of compassion.
    â€˜Coming.’ A touch of irritation. I was being forced to get dressed, unshowered, in the rattiest possible clothes, and this kid was hustling me along on top of it. Damn it all, what did they expect? That we’d be standing by the front door, spiffed up and passport in hand, impatiently anticipating this long-awaited bad news? What if we had been out on the town until three or four in the morning, as in past Whitsun weekends, and were still sleeping off our grogginess? Did that ever occur to them?
    As I charged toward the door, my eye fell upon a coloured-pencil drawing above the bed. Tonio’s double portrait, from 1994, of his parents. He was five, nearly six, and had drawn it in just a few minutes, lying on the floor of a French restaurant while his pasta went cold. Since the man in the drawing wore a hat, which I never did, I asked Tonio who those people were, just to be sure.
    â€˜You and Mama.’
    â€˜There’s a bunch of red hearts flying around our heads.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ he laughed, ‘you’re in love, aren’t you?’
    It had finally happened. I had imagined this a hundred times, ad nauseum. How the police would arrive at the door to bring us the worst news imaginable. Your son … And then we were people capable of regarding our overanxious sacrifice to Fear as a cleansing, forestalling ritual. As though imagining an accident down to the most minute detail would stave it off.
    Last summer, for instance, when we had given Tonio money for a trip to Ibiza, I immersed myself in repeated nocturnal fantasies, torturing myself with the most gruesome possible scenarios. The guardia civil had found the lifeless body of a young man in a rock crevice. No passport on him, but the night porter at a hotel in Ibiza City recognised him … could we come identify the body …
    Miriam and I picked him up at Schiphol Airport. I had expected to see a sun-tanned Tonio strut into the arrivals hall, but he was paler than when he’d left, thanks to holiday nightlife and daytime sleep. But it was him, and he was alive. You see? It worked: the perils of reality were no match for the even more perilous power of the imagination.
    6
    Downstairs in the front hall, I found Miriam, trembling and in tears, in the care of the policeman. The cats, recovered from their initial panic, sat side by side in the hallway, restlessly sweeping the floor with their puffed-up tails. They remained anxiously in the neighbourhood of the open door to the pantry, where their baskets and food were kept and through which, in case of emergency, they could escape through the cat flap into the backyard. Sometimes, if the doorbell rang particularly long and loud, Tygo, the more skittish of the two, would flee into the golden-rain tree — so high he couldn’t get himself back down and Miriam had to rescue him with the library ladder.
    Under normal circumstances, we would certainly have locked Tygo and Tasha in the kitchen. But now, just clicking the glass door had to suffice, so that they wouldn’t follow us.
    Although the front of the house was still in the shade, we were nevertheless ambushed by the low, brilliant sunlight that bathed the junction with the Banstraat, and the white police van parked on the corner, in a flood of light. A young female officer who had been waiting at the vehicle approached us with a concerned, almost distressed look on her face, and introduced herself.
    â€˜My colleague and I are going to take you to the AMC ,’ she