On the second Tuesday he made it through two full rounds of skipping before he had to stop.
On the second Thursday he made it through two and a half, and then he stood by the bin, bent over, breathing, while the room whirred and slapped around him.
He didn’t throw up.
He came very close.
Somebody said “Bin’s ready, Dikke,” and somebody laughed, and he straightened up and picked up the rope.
The third Tuesday it was raining so hard on the hill to Geitenkamp that the water ran down the inside of his collar and filled his shoes.
He got there at five to six looking like he’d been pulled out of the Rijn.
Harry, at the desk with his cash box, looked at the puddle forming round Max’s feet on the wooden floor, and said, “Mop’s in the back.”
Max mopped his own puddle.
Then he skipped.
* * *
There was a system to it.
It took him three sessions to understand it.
Harry didn’t teach the youth class.
Not in the way Rinus had taught, walking round, explaining, demonstrating, calling out combinations.
Harry stood in the middle with his roll-up and his kitchen timer and said very little at all, and the class did what the class had always done, in the same order, every time.
Skipping.
Shadowboxing.
Pads in pairs.
Bag work.
Sit-ups.
Press-ups.
Klaar.
If you did something wrong, Harry moved your elbow or your foot with two fingers.
If you did it wrong a second time, he moved it again, a bit harder.
If you did it wrong a third time, he said your name, just your name, and everybody went quiet.
It was the oldest kind of gym there was.
You learned by doing it until your body stopped arguing.
The problem was that Max’s body argued about everything.
Rico’s didn’t.
Rico came to the youth class on Tuesdays to hold pads for the younger kids, and afterwards he stayed and worked the heavy bag on his own while Harry locked the cash box.
Max watched him from the bench while he got his breath back.
Rico never seemed to hurry.
He’d stand in front of the bag looking half asleep, and then a left kick would land with a sound like a car door, and the chain would rattle up to the beam.
Then he’d look half asleep again.
He’s nineteen, Max thought.
He’s going to be very good.
“He already is very good,” Otto said.
“He just doesn’t look like he’s trying.
Which is either talent or a personality.”
His technique was there.
Every time he threw a jab in the mirror, his shoulder came up, his chin went down, his hand came back on the same line it had gone out on.
His feet stayed under him.
His weight moved from the ball of one foot to the ball of the other without his thinking about it.
But each round he could do it properly for about a minute, and then his tank ran out, and his arms dropped, and his feet went flat.
He could feel the moment it happened, like a cassette slowing down when the batteries go.
“Your problem isn’t skill,” Otto said, on the way home, the second Thursday.
“Your problem is that your engine is the engine of an eighty-five-kilo fourteen-year-old who sits down for a living.”
I know what my problem is.
“I’m just saying it out loud.”
You always just say it out loud.
“It’s the only way I can say anything,” Otto said, a little stiffly, and for the rest of the ride home it hummed something tuneless that might have been a sulk.
* * *
In the third week they did a partner drill: clinch work, the Thai kind, standing up, forearms on the collarbones, trying to pull the other kid’s head down.
Max was paired with a broad-shouldered fifteen-year-old called Mehmet, who was a good ten kilos lighter and half a head taller, and who’d been coming for two years.
Mehmet grabbed his neck and pulled.
Max’s body did what it had done ten thousand times on a mat at Fight Factory.
He dropped his level, stepped in under Mehmet’s arms, wrapped both of his own arms round the back of Mehmet’s thighs, drove with his legs and lifted.
Mehmet went up.
Then he went over.
Then he landed on his back on the wooden floor with a slap that made everyone in the room turn round.
Max was on top of him, in half guard, his head already in the right place, his hip already turning to pass, before he understood what he’d done.
Silence.
Harry had come over.
Max scrambled off, red.
Mehmet sat up, more surprised than hurt, rubbing the back of his head.
“Sorry,” Max said.
“Sorry.
Reflex.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment.
Then he took the roll-up out of his mouth.
“We don’t roll around on the floor here,” he said.
“No.
Sorry.”
“This is kickboxing.
Not judo.
Not worstelen.
You want to wrestle, go to the wrestling club in Elst on a Wednesday with the farmers’ sons.”
“Yeah.
Okay.”
Harry put the roll-up back.
He turned to Mehmet.
“And you,” he said.
“Hands.
Where were your hands?”
“On his neck.”
“And where were his?”
Mehmet looked at Max.
“On my legs.”
“So who was wrong?” Harry said, and walked away.
“Interesting,” said Otto.
“That’s not what he said.
But that’s what he meant.”
* * *
By the middle of the third week, there was a pool.
Max found out because Jeroen’s cousin Bart went to Tempel on Thursdays, and Bart told Jeroen, and Jeroen told Max in the bike shed, eating, with his mouth full.
“They’ve got a list,” Jeroen said.
“In the changing room.
On the back of the door.
Dates.
When you’re going to quit.
You put a guilder on a date, and whoever’s closest gets the pot.”
“How much is in it?”
“Eleven guilders,” Jeroen said.
“Bart says most people said the first week.
Then the second.
Somebody’s got the third.
That one’s now.
Somebody’s got October.
One guy’s got Christmas, but he’s mental.”
Max thought about this for the rest of the day, through German and history, and on the bike to collect Sanne, and in the queue at the C1000 with eleven guilders’ worth of shopping in the basket and Otto keeping count.
Eleven guilders.
Nearly three times what was in the butter cookie tin.
“You could win it yourself,” Otto said.
“Put a guilder on never.”
I have four guilders.
“Exactly.
A twenty-five percent stake.
High risk.
High return.
It’s what I’d advise if I were a different kind of advisor.”
What kind are you?
“The kind that tells you that a fourteen-year-old betting on himself is called gambling, and the Kansspelautoriteit (gambling authority) of a lot of countries would have something to say.”
What’s the Kansspelautoriteit?
“Something that won’t exist till 2012,” said Otto.
“Don’t bet.”
* * *
He went to Oma’s on the third Saturday, because she’d asked, and because there was a scale in her bathroom.
Max stood on it in his socks.
The needle wobbled, and settled.
Eighty-four.
“One kilo,” Otto said.
“In three weeks.”
One kilo.
“Don’t sound like that.
One kilo in three weeks is exactly right for someone who’s fourteen and still growing.
Any faster and we’re burning muscle, and you don’t have muscle to burn.
Any slower, and the cheese sandwiches have won.”
He stood on the scale a bit longer, as if it might change its mind.
Then Oma knocked on the bathroom door and said there was koffie, and a koek if he wanted, and he said no thank you to the koek, and Oma said “Since when?” in a voice that was half pleased and half suspicious.
He told her about Tempel.
She listened without saying anything, sitting at her kitchen table with her hands round her cup.
When he told her about the bin, she shook her head.
When he told her about the pool, she put her cup down.
“They’re betting on you?”
“On when I’ll quit.”
Oma looked at him over her glasses for a while.
She had a face that had seen the war, and Henk’s father, and Henk’s wife walk out with a suitcase, and a lot of things in between.
“Well,” she said.
“I’d hope you show them.”
* * *
The fourth Thursday was the worst so far.
He’d slept five hours, because the night before he’d been out in the shed until half one rewiring the programmer for the second time.
He’d gone to the gym on a lunch of half a krentenbol and an apple.
On the hill to Geitenkamp he had to get off the bike and push it.
In the skipping he made one round.
In the shadowboxing his hands kept dropping and Harry moved them up, once, twice.
Then Harry said “Brouwer,” just his name, and the whole room went quiet, and Max’s face burned so hot he thought his skin would come off.
He didn’t finish the pads.
In the middle of the second round his arms just stopped, and he stood there with his hands at his sides and his partner looking at him, and couldn’t lift them.
He tried.
They wouldn’t go.
He went and sat down on the bench by the wall.
He didn’t go to the changing room.
He didn’t get his bag.
He sat on the bench with his elbows on his knees and his head down and watched them work, the bowl-haircut boy, Mehmet, the two girls, Bart, everyone.
He watched the pads and the bags and the sit-ups.
He watched Harry walk round moving people’s elbows.
At half seven Harry said “Klaar.”
Max stood up.
He went to the bin and took the bag out, as he did every time now, without anyone asking, and took it out the back to the drain and washed it with the hose.
When he came back in, Rico was in the changing room doorway, his bag over his shoulder, looking at the back of the door.
Max could see the list from where he was standing.
A sheet of lined paper, taped up with brown tape.
Dates down the side, and names, and a guilder sign next to each.
Some of the earlier dates had been crossed out, one by one, with a biro.
Rico dug in his tracksuit pocket and came out with a guilder.
He looked at it for a second, then picked up the biro that hung on a string from a nail in the door, and wrote something at the bottom of the list.
He pressed the coin onto the tape next to it, so it stuck.
Then he walked past Max, out into the street, without a word.
Max went to the door and looked.
At the bottom of the list, under Christmas, in a loose looping hand, it said: NOOIT.
Rico.
f1.
(NEVER.
Rico.
One guilder.)
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk