“Yes,” Max said into the phone.
“I went.”
The line hissed.
Somewhere between Presikhaaf and the middle of the North Sea, the words took about a second to arrive, and his father’s answer took another second to come back, so that every gap in the conversation was twice as long as it should have been.
“Your grandmother says the juf wouldn’t talk to you.”
“She needed a grown-up.
Oma came on the bus.”
The hiss.
The delay.
“In the dark,” Henk said.
“Yeah.”
A longer gap.
Max waited.
In the bathroom upstairs Sanne was singing a song from Sesamstraat (Sesame Street) to her rubber duck, very loudly, with most of the words wrong.
“Next time,” Henk said, and stopped.
Next time what?
“He doesn’t know,” Otto said quietly.
“He got that far and ran out of sentence.”
“There’s something else,” Henk said.
“Kees has broken his wrist.
On the platform.
He’s out.
They’ve asked me to do his three weeks on top of mine.” The hiss.
“I said yes.
It’s double pay.”
Max stood in the hall with the beige phone against his ear and looked at the calendar on the wall by the coat hooks.
Somebody, probably Oma, had drawn a circle round Friday the twelfth of October in red biro, and written PAP in it.
“So when are you home?”
“The second of November.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll send money to your grandmother.
For the house.
She’ll bring it.”
“Okay.”
“Is your sister there?”
Max put his hand over the mouthpiece and shouted up the stairs.
There was a crash, a splash and a wet thundering of feet, and Sanne came down in a towel with her hair dripping on the hall carpet and grabbed the phone in both hands.
“Pap?”
Max went into the kitchen to give her some room.
He could still hear her.
She told Henk about the Efteling on Wednesday, which she hadn’t been on yet, as if she had.
She told him about the game in the shed.
She told him the hunter ghost was called Bas.
Then she was quiet, listening, for a while, and then she said, “Okay,” in her signing-a-form voice, and “Bye,” and put the phone back on the hook very carefully.
She came into the kitchen in her towel.
“He’s not coming on the twelfth.”
“I know.”
“He’s coming on the second.” She looked at the calendar through the doorway.
“That’s three weeks more.”
“Three weeks.”
Sanne nodded slowly.
Then she went to the calendar, took the red biro off its string, crossed out the circle round the twelfth, and drew a new one, round the second of November, pressing so hard the pen went through the paper.
* * *
On Tuesday he paid Harry twenty-five guilders for October.
It was Oma’s robin note, and it went into the cash box, and Harry wrote Brouwer, M.
Okt.
f25 in the ledger without looking up.
“One guilder fifty,” said Otto, as Max pulled his shoes off.
“Total assets.
Plus one Blue Band tub, which I’m not valuing.”
On Wednesday he started the paper round.
The depot for the Arnhemse Koerier was a garage behind a row of shops off the Velperweg, with a roller door, a strip light, and a man in a body warmer called Wim who smelled of cigars and had a list on a clipboard.
He looked at Max’s bike and then at Max.
“Route fourteen,” he said.
“Three hundred and twelve houses.
Geitenkamp side, up the hill and back round.
That’s the one nobody wants, because of the hill.
You want it?”
“Yes.”
“Twenty-two fifty a week.
Paid Wednesdays, here, cash, when you bring back the empty bag.
If I get complaints you’re out. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
If it rains, you still go.
If they’re wet, I get complaints.” Wim handed him a canvas bag with KOERIER printed on it in red.
“Your stack’s there.”
The stack was there.
It was two stacks.
Max looked at them for a moment.
Each one was a pile of newspapers, folded once, held together with plastic straps, as high as his knee.
Inside every paper there were adverts.
Supermarket offers, a carpet shop in Velp, a garden centre, a folder for the Kijkshop with six pages of electric toothbrushes.
“Heavy week,” Wim said.
“Kijkshop.”
He loaded the bag.
It took both stacks and then didn’t close.
He put the strap over his shoulder and felt it sink into his collarbone, and then he put the bag on the front of the bike and tied it to the handlebars with the bungee cord from the shed, and the front wheel went down about two centimetres.
“Fourteen kilos,” said Otto.
“Give or take.”
Feels like forty.
“That’s because it’s on your shoulder, not in your hands.
Push.
Don’t ride.
Not with that on the front.”
He pushed.
* * *
Route fourteen was mostly hill.
Max hadn’t realised, in twenty-eight years of living in Arnhem, how much of Arnhem was up.
You didn’t notice in a car or a bus.
You noticed with three hundred and twelve newspapers.
Every house had a letterbox, and every letterbox was different.
Some were in the door at waist height, a long brass slot that bit your fingers with its spring.
Some were at the bottom of the door, so you had to bend all the way down.
Some were boxes on a post at the end of a garden path, with a lid that stuck.
Some had a sticker on them, NEE/NEE or NEE/JA.
Nee meant no adverts, which meant pulling the folders out of that paper, which meant stopping.
Some had a dog behind them that hit the inside of the door like a car crash as soon as the paper touched the brass.
By the fortieth house he was sweating through his shirt.
By the hundredth, his calves were burning the way they burned in the skipping at Tempel.
At the bend in the road where the hill really started, he had to stop and stand with both hands on the handlebars, breathing.
“Your heart rate,” said Otto, “is about where it sits during round two of the skipping.
And you’ve been doing this for forty minutes.
You do know what this is?”
A paper round.
“Cardio.
Long, slow, steady cardio, the most useful thing you could possibly be doing, with a weight on the front, on a hill, once a week, and somebody paying you twenty-two fifty for it.” A pause.
“If I’d designed your training, I’d have designed this.
I’m slightly annoyed that I didn’t.”
You can design the next bit.
“I will.
From Monday, the six o’clock runs follow route fourteen.
You’ll know every hill on it by the end of October.”
He finished at a quarter past six, in the dark, with the empty bag flapping.
On the way back, freewheeling down the hill with the cold wind on his wet shirt, he passed the school and saw the Efteling bus pulling in.
Tired parents were waiting with their hands in their pockets.
Sanne got off third.
She had candyfloss in her hair, a paper hat shaped like a jester’s, and a face that was grey with tiredness and blazing underneath.
“We went on the Python,” she said, as he lifted her onto the back of the bike.
“Twice.
Lotte cried.
I didn’t cry.
I screamed.
Screaming isn’t crying.”
“Screaming isn’t crying,” Max agreed.
“Juf Annemiek went on it and she screamed too.” Sanne put her arms round his middle.
“Max.”
“Mm.”
“You smell like newspaper.”
* * *
The six o’clock runs folded into the route.
Otto had been right about that.
On Monday he did the first half of route fourteen without the bag, in the dark, at a slow shuffle, past the houses whose letterboxes he now knew.
The brass ones that bit.
The NEE/NEE ones.
He walked the steep part.
On Tuesday he trained.
On Wednesday he did the full route with the bag.
On Thursday he trained.
On Friday he did the first half again and found he could jog the bottom bit of the hill, slowly, if he didn’t look up.
On the second Wednesday, the tenth, he took Sanne.
She’d asked.
She’d asked about four times, actually, on the Sunday, and then on the Monday, and then Max had worked out that what she meant was that she didn’t want to be at Lotte’s every Wednesday until six, and that Lotte’s mother had a new boyfriend who shouted, and that Sanne liked the dark streets and the brass letterboxes and the dogs.
So he hitched Pap’s bolderkar to the back of the bike with two bungee cords and a length of washing line.
He put the second stack of Koeriers in the bolderkar and Sanne in the bolderkar on top of the Koeriers, in her winter coat and her woolly hat with the bobble, holding a torch.
“You’re the navigator,” he said.
“What’s a navigator?”
“You read the house numbers.
And you shout when there’s a dog.”
Sanne took it very seriously.
She shone the torch on the doors, one after the other, and read the numbers out loud.
When there was a NEE/NEE sticker, she shouted “NEE NEE!” and pulled the adverts out of a paper herself, with her tongue between her teeth, and handed it up to him.
When there was a dog, she shouted “HOND!” a full second before it hit the door, which meant she’d memorised them on the first go.
On the steep part he couldn’t pull her.
Nobody could have pulled her.
So she got out and walked beside him, and he pushed the bike with one hand and pulled the bolderkar with the other, leaning forward into the hill like a man in a painting of a man pulling a cart.
The bolderkar’s wheels squeaked.
Sanne held the torch on the pavement in front of them and counted the lampposts out loud to make it go faster.
At the top, he stopped.
He was steaming.
Actual steam was coming off his shoulders into the cold air under the streetlight.
Sanne looked at him, amazed.
“You’re smoking.”
“I’m not smoking.”
“You’re smoking like a horse,” Sanne said, delighted, and got back into the bolderkar.
* * *
On Thursday, before training, he biked to Oma’s and stood on the bathroom scale in his socks.
The needle wobbled and settled.
Eighty-three.
“Two kilos,” said Otto.
“Six weeks.
Slightly faster than ideal, in fact.
Eat your bread.”
I’m eating my bread.
“Eat more of your bread on Wednesdays.
You’re burning about eleven hundred calories on that route, and I’d rather you ran on bread than on muscle.”
Oma had made soup.
She watched him eat two bowls of it at her kitchen table, with a dry slice of bread on the side, and nodded as if that was correct, and went back to the Arnhemse Courant.
He had forty-six guilders and fifty cents.
Two Wednesdays of Koerier money, plus the one fifty.
Otto had already said it six times.
“Two hundred and two fifty short,” it said, for the seventh.
“Assuming nothing breaks.
Assuming you don’t eat.”
I know.
“At twenty-two fifty a week, that’s nine more Wednesdays.”
I know.
“Christmas,” said Otto.
Oma turned a page.
Then she folded the paper in half, and then in half again, and pushed it across the table to him with one finger on a small square of print near the bottom of the classifieds page, between a second-hand pram and a man in Elst selling rabbits.
“You said you wanted one of these,” she said.
“The thing that takes the money.”
Max looked.
TE KOOP: muntproevers, gokkastonderdelen, flipperkast (defect).
Speelhal Lucky Star, Arnhem, vraag naar Ferry.
“Coin mechanisms,” Otto said slowly.
“Machine parts.
From Lucky Star.”
Max looked up at Oma.
She’d already gone back to the crossword, with her magnifying glass, as if nothing at all had happened.
“Seven down,” she said.
“Eight letters.
‘Een die altijd doorgaat’.
Somebody who never stops.”
Doorzetter, Max thought.
“Doorzetter,” said Oma, and wrote it in, in pen.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk