When a palliatively ill novelist wants to put his childhood past to rest by revealing his role in a fatal swim afternoon during summer holiday, he realizes victim and perpetrator can switch sides.

SYNOPSIS:

Content

Journalist Bob interviews the (cancer suffering) writer Mike Stiegford about his oeuvre. Stiegford (who is approaching his 39th birthday) has erratic novels to his name that illuminate the dark side of life, with much psychological depth and less attention to violence, sex and lifestyle. Mental detriment plays a strong and explicit role in his work. The most remarkable novel is 'The swimming afternoon', a description of one day during summer holiday in the life of a teenage boy.

In addition to being a journalist, Bob is also a biographer, and he is preparing a biography about Mike Stiegford. After studying his life (among other things on the basis of interviews) and oeuvre, Bob suspects that 'The swimming afternoon' is a more realistic representation of reality than Stiegford has always admitted in interviews. The writer once admitted in an interview with a national newspaper that the novel is 'loosely based' on a 'very unpleasant experience' in his youth. A salient detail is that the writer has been portrayed in the media as a possible perpetrator of what seemed to be a fatal accident. Bob tries to pick loose what really happened that day. The rest of the story is switching between the interview and flashbacks. The conversation that follows and Stiegford's narrative stir the two men: murder, guilt and the development from a teenager to a human being are discussed.

The afternoon at the lake starts with a group of friends: the boys are looking for beer, weed and girls. They all have their own (yet short) history with their parents and family, but there at the lake they'll have to save themselves. The further the afternoon enrolls, the group gets more disrupted by the traumatic experiences. During the interview the story comes to life before our eyes, as a dramatic coming of age story. When we switch back now and then to the interview with the writer and the journalist, we see that this also puts the relationship between the two men on edge, with both slowly losing their roles. Their businesslike attitude is changing, (against their will), into a personal dependency relationship. Stiegford tensely unravels his story as he approaches the moment of his own death.