At ten past ten on Sunday night, with Sanne asleep and the Blue Band tub on his desk next to the lamp, Max opened the schrift (exercise book) to a clean double page and wrote KAST at the top.
Cabinet.
“Finally,” said Otto.
“I’ve been waiting for this all evening.
I’ve had a spreadsheet ready since Wednesday.”
You can’t have a spreadsheet.
You haven’t got a computer.
“I am a computer.
I’ve had it in my head.
Shall I read it out, or do you want to write it down while I talk, like a secretary in a film from 1962?”
Read it.
Max wrote while Otto talked.
The pencil scratched.
Outside, a moped went past on the Velperweg and faded, and the house ticked as it cooled down for the night.
What was on the breadboard was a game.
It was not a machine.
You couldn’t put a breadboard in a snackbar.
The first time someone knocked it, or a bus driver leaned on it, or a kid spilled Fanta on it, half the wires would come out, and Puntje would go back to being a dot, and the dot would go back to being nothing.
“So,” said Otto.
“Line one.
A proper board.
Veroboard, the big size, wire-wrap sockets, wire, solder.
Everything off the breadboard and onto something that doesn’t fall apart.
Forty-five guilders.”
Forty-five.
“Line two.
More sprites.
The chess pieces have to go.
Four ghosts that move smoothly means four more sprite circuits, comparators, counters, a priority chip so they don’t fight over the same dot.
Thirty.”
He wrote 30.
“Line three.
Sound.
The duck is charming.
The duck is also one channel.
A real sound chip, the AY-3-8910, three channels.
Then you can have a siren under the waka, and the ghosts can sound like ghosts.
Twenty-two.”
The duck stays, Max thought.
As an option.
“Line four.
A power supply.
The battery clip won’t run anything that has to be on from eleven in the morning till ten at night.
A transformer, a regulator, a heatsink.
Twenty-five.
I’d note that the heatsink is the part most people get wrong.”
I won’t get it wrong.
“Everyone says that about heatsinks,” Otto said.
“Line five.
Battery-backed RAM for the high scores.
So Joop can switch it off at night and it still remembers who’s best.
Twelve.”
12.
“Line six.
Controls.
The Blue Band tub is a family heirloom now and you can’t put it in a snackbar either.
A proper joystick, microswitches, a start button, a two-player start button.
Fifteen, if Ruiter has the switches.
Thirty, if he doesn’t.”
Say fifteen.
“I’ll say twenty.
Line seven.
A coin mechanism.
Kwartjes in, one credit out, a box to catch them with a lock on it.
New, it’s a lot.
Secondhand, from somebody who runs a speelhal and has a dead machine in the back, maybe thirty-five.”
Ferry, Max thought.
Lucky Star.
“Line eight.
The box itself.
Plywood from the Gamma, eighteen millimetres, screws, glue, hinges, a lock on the back.
Paint.
A sheet of perspex for the front of the screen.
Forty.”
40.
“Line nine.
A screen.”
Max stopped writing.
The Bakker TV was the screen.
The Bakker TV was the only screen.
It was black and white, it had a dent in the side where Ton Bakker had dropped it on the step, and it sat on the workbench in the shed, and it was Puntje’s home.
“You can use it,” Otto said, more gently.
“It works.
It’s free.
But it’s black and white, and the whole point of the ghosts is that they’re four different colours, and Joop’s customers have colour televisions at home.
So I’ll put it in at zero, with a note.”
What’s the note? Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“‘Sooner or later.'”
Max added it up.
Then he added it up again, because he didn’t believe it.
Otto didn’t say anything.
It waited.
Two hundred and forty-nine guilders.
“Against twenty-six fifty in the tin.
Which is about two hundred and twenty short.”
And Tempel on Tuesday.
“Tempel is twenty-five of the twenty-six fifty, which Oma gave you for that and only that.
So if you’re an honest man, two hundred and forty-seven fifty short.
If you’re not, two hundred and twenty-two fifty.”
Max looked at the number at the bottom of the page for a long time.
In 2026, two hundred and forty-seven guilders was about a hundred and twelve euros.
It was one shift and a bit at the DC in Duiven, scanning boxes.
It was a cheap pair of headphones.
In 1990, in this house, it was most of a month of the household envelope.
It was more money than had ever been in the butter cookie tin.
It was money Henk earned in about three days on the platform, and Max was not going to ask Henk for it.
“I didn’t think you would,” said Otto.
If I ask him, it’s his.
“Yes.”
It has to be mine.
“I know,” Otto said.
“So.
Revenue.”
* * *
There were two ways for a fourteen-year-old to make money in Arnhem in 1990, and Otto went through both of them like a man reading out the specials.
Babysitting, which was not going to happen, because Max already had a child.
And paper.
“The Arnhemse Koerier,” Otto said.
“Huis-aan-huis.
Free paper.
Comes out on Wednesday.
There’s a card in the window at the tobacconist by the shopping centre, I saw it on Thursday when you went in for Sanne’s stamps.
Bezorgers gezocht, vanaf 13 jaar (Delivery kids wanted, age 13 and up).
Usually it’s about three hundred houses for between twenty and twenty-five guilders a week, depending on the route and how heavy the adverts are.”
Twenty a week.
“Twelve weeks to the cabinet,” Otto said.
“Ten, if you don’t eat.
Eleven, if you eat a bit.”
Twelve weeks is Christmas.
“Not if the cabinet starts earning before it’s finished.
That’s the second half of the spreadsheet.
The kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins).”
Max sat up.
“Two kwartjes a game,” Otto said.
“Fifty cents.
Snackbar ‘t Hoekje’s open twelve hours a day.
The bus drivers from the depot come in at the end of each shift.
The school kids come in after school.
Say on a slow day the machine gets played ninety times.
That’s forty-five guilders.
Split fifty-fifty with Joop, twenty-two fifty a day for you.
A hundred and fifty a week.
Before repairs and the electricity.”
A hundred and fifty a week.
“On a slow day.
On a Saturday, double.
In the summer…” Otto paused.
“In the summer, I’d prefer not to say it out loud, in case I jinx it.”
You don’t believe in jinxing.
“I’m a spreadsheet.
I believe in everything that’s ever gone wrong with a spreadsheet.”
Max wrote f 150/wk on the opposite page, and drew a box round it, and sat looking at it.
“There’s one more line,” said Otto.
What?
“Joop.
A cabinet in a snackbar needs the snackbar to say yes.
Which means somebody needs to walk in there and ask Joop Hendriks for floor space next to his fruit machine and half his evening electricity, and agree a split, and sign something.”
I’ll ask him.
“You’re fourteen.”
So?
“I’d note,” Otto said, “that I have no data for how Joop feels about fourteen-year-olds.
But I have very good data for how most people do.”
* * *
On Monday morning Sanne was so tired she put her shoes on the wrong feet and didn’t notice until the end of the street.
Max stopped the bike and swapped them while she sat on the back carrier with her legs out, yawning.
She had the Blue Band tub in her schoolbag.
He’d told her she couldn’t take it to school, and she’d taken it anyway, because she said nobody would know what it was, which was true.
“Can I play tonight?”
“It’s a school night.”
“Last night was a school night.”
“Last night was special.”
“Tonight can be special,” Sanne said.
“Bye,” and slid off, and ran.
At the bike rack, Bas Koster said something to her.
She didn’t stop.
Max couldn’t hear it.
He saw Bas’s mouth fall open.
“What did she say?” Otto said.
No idea.
“Whatever it was, I want it in the log.”
In maths, Femke turned round with her arm over the back of the chair.
“Well?”
“They work,” Max said.
“They walk.
Two frames.
And the eyes.
I used your eyes.”
Femke looked at him for a second as if she was waiting for the bit where he was lying.
When it didn’t come, she turned back round to the front without a word.
But Max saw the back of her neck go pink, and in the margin of her exercise book, for the rest of the lesson, she drew small round things with eyes.
* * *
At four, after he’d dropped Sanne at Lotte’s for an hour, Max went to the tobacconist by the shopping centre, copied the phone number off the card in the window, and then walked to the end of his own street.
Snackbar ‘t Hoekje was on the corner, in the ground floor of a block of flats.
It had a red-and-white awning and a menu in the window in white plastic letters, some of which had fallen off, so that it offered PAT T and KR KET.
Inside there was a steel counter, a glass case of frikandellen (fried sausages) and kroketten (croquettes) and kaassoufflés (cheese fritters) under orange lights, a fryer that hissed, two tables with a bench each, a fruit machine flashing in the corner, and a smell of hot oil so thick that Max’s stomach growled before he’d even got the door shut.
Not today, he told it.
Joop Hendriks was behind the counter, a heavy man of about fifty with a white apron over a striped shirt and a pencil behind his ear and grey hair combed back with a lot of something.
He was talking to a bus driver in a blue uniform jacket.
He looked at Max when the bell went, then went on talking.
Max waited.
The bus driver got his patat (chips) with mayonnaise in a paper cone and left.
Joop wiped his hands on a cloth.
“Ja, jongen (lad)?”
Max had practised it on the way.
I’ve built a game.
A video game, like the ones at the speelhal, but better.
I’d like to put it in your snackbar.
The kids would come in and play it, and wait for their food, and you’d get half of every kwartje.
He said it.
He said it well, he thought, clearly, the way he’d practised.
Joop listened to all of it with his hands on the counter and his face showing absolutely nothing.
When Max had finished, Joop picked up the cloth and wiped a part of the counter that was already clean.
“How old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.” Joop nodded slowly.
“You live up the street, don’t you?
Number forty-something.
Brouwer.
Your father’s the one on the boats.”
“The platform.”
“The platform.” Joop folded the cloth.
“Kids who hang round don’t buy anything, jongen.
Kids who hang round take up the tables.
I’ve got a fruit machine in the corner that pays for the electricity.
I don’t need a game.”
“It’ll make money.”
“Everybody says that, about everything.” Joop put the cloth down.
“Listen.
I’m not going to do business with a boy.
Not because you’re a boy, but because when it breaks, and it’ll break, or a kid gets a shock off it, or the fire brigade comes round, I want to be talking to somebody who can sign their name on a piece of paper and mean it.”
“I can…”
“Go and get your mother,” said Joop, already turning back to the fryer.
Max stood there.
The fryer hissed.
The fruit machine played a small cheerful tune to nobody.
My mother’s gone, he thought, and didn’t say it.
“Don’t,” Otto said quietly.
“Not here.
Not to him.”
He went out.
The bell jangled behind him.
* * *
The phone rang at half past eight that evening, while Sanne was in the bath and Max was at the kitchen table writing f 249 on the back of the Koerier phone number for no reason except to look at it.
It was the beige phone on the wall in the hall.
It hardly ever rang, except for Oma.
Max picked it up.
“Brouwer.”
There was a long hiss on the line, a crackle, and a delay, like someone talking from the bottom of a well.
Then a voice.
“Max.”
He knew it straight away, though he’d never heard it like this, small and far off and fighting through a satellite.
“Pap?”
“Your grandmother rang the office,” Henk said, from the middle of the North Sea.
Another hiss.
Another delay.
“She says you went to a parents’ evening.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk