Lucky Star at a quarter to four on a Friday sounded the same as it had in August.
Bleeps, the clatter of a fruit machine paying out somewhere at the back, the electric pew pew pew of RUIMTEAANVAL!
But the light was different.
The October sun came in low through the dirty front window and lay in stripes across the carpet, and in the stripes you could see the smoke.
Ferry was behind the change counter, which was a booth with a little window in it like a cinema ticket office.
He was about forty, with a moustache, a Vitesse scarf round his neck even though it wasn’t cold inside, and a gold chain that sat on top of the scarf.
He was counting kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins) into paper rolls with a speed that was almost beautiful.
“Change?” he said, without looking up.
“I saw your advert.
In the Koerier.
The coin mechanisms.”
Ferry looked up.
He looked at Max, at the school bag, at the eighty-three kilos in the tracksuit top.
“What do you want with a muntproever?”
“I’ve built a game.
It needs one.”
Ferry’s hands stopped counting.
He looked at Max a bit longer.
“You’ve built a game,” he said.
“What, like a pinball?”
“Like that one.” Max nodded at the RUIMTEAANVAL!
cabinet by the door.
A small kid in a parka was playing it.
“But my own.”
Ferry snorted.
“Nobody builds games.
They come from the importer in Rotterdam in a lorry, on a pallet, and they cost me four thousand guilders, and the importer gets them from some factory in Taiwan that copies an American machine from 1979.
Nobody builds them.
Not in Arnhem.” He started counting again.
“Thirty-five for a mechanism.
Forty with a coin door.
They’re out of the TAFELTENNIS.
That thing’s dead.”
Thirty-five, Max thought.
I’ve got forty-six fifty.
“He’ll take thirty,” said Otto.
“But I’d like to point at something first.
Look at the small kid’s screen.”
Max looked.
The kid in the parka was playing RUIMTEAANVAL!, rows of little invaders marching down towards a cannon.
Every few seconds, the whole picture slid upwards by a finger’s width, juddered and dropped back, like a TV with the vertical hold slightly wrong.
The kid had stopped noticing.
He was just playing through it.
“How long has it been doing that?” Max said.
Ferry glanced over.
His face changed, very slightly, the way a man’s face changes when you mention the thing that keeps him up at night.
“Three weeks.
The importer’s man says he’ll come in November.
The man always says November.
And it’s my best machine.
Kids stop playing when it goes bad.” He put down a roll of kwartjes.
“Why?”
“Can I look at it?”
* * *
The back of the RUIMTEAANVAL!
cabinet came off with four screws.
Inside, it was simpler than Max had expected and messier than he’d hoped.
A wooden box, a power supply on a shelf at the bottom, a game board on the side wall covered in dust, and a monitor in the middle with its own chassis.
The monitor was an ordinary TV tube with the tuner taken out.
It was the same family of thing as the Bakker TV in his shed, only bigger, older, and covered in the brown sticky dust that comes from twelve years of cigarette smoke.
“Don’t touch the tube,” Otto said.
“Don’t touch anything near the tube.
You know why.”
I know why.
He turned the cabinet off at the wall.
Then he went round to the front, held his breath and watched the picture fade, and came back and looked at the monitor chassis with Ferry’s torch.
Vertical hold that drifted, slowly, and got worse when the machine was warm.
On a TV that old, there was one thing it nearly always was, and he’d read about it ten times in the forums of 2015, where men his father’s age restored arcade machines in their garages and posted photos of every part.
The capacitors near the vertical circuit.
Little cylinders, like batteries, which dried out with heat and age.
He found them.
One of them had a small brown stain at its base, like a tea ring, and its top had swollen into a little dome where it should have been flat.
“That one,” Max said.
“That?
It’s a little thing.”
“It’s dead.
It’s been dying for three weeks.
When it’s warm it’s worse.
That’s why it’s bad in the evening.”
Ferry looked at the small swollen cylinder for a long time.
“It is worse in the evening,” he said.
* * *
Radio Ruiter was open late on a Friday.
Max was back at Lucky Star by half past five with two new capacitors in a paper bag, one guilder twenty-five, and the Weller in his school bag.
Ruiter had thrown in a handful of microswitches from a drawer marked RESTANT, leftovers, free, because “they’re left over, that’s what the word means.”
Ferry plugged the Weller in behind the change counter for him, by the kettle.
It took twenty minutes.
He took the old capacitor out, cleaned the holes, checked the new one’s stripe three times, because it had a plus side and a minus side, and he was not going to cook anything else this year.
He soldered it in.
The joints came out bright and clean, small silver cones.
He put the chassis back and the back on, and stood aside.
Ferry turned the machine on at the wall.
The screen came up.
The little invaders marched.
The picture sat still.
They watched it for ten minutes, Ferry and Max and the small kid in the parka, who’d come back with a new kwartje (quarter-guilder coin).
The picture didn’t slide once.
“It’ll stay like that,” Max said.
“Probably for years.”
Ferry rubbed his moustache with the back of his hand.
He walked round the cabinet once, slowly, the way a man walks round a car he’s thinking of buying.
Then he went into the back, behind a curtain made of plastic strips, and came out with a coin door.
A steel plate with two slots, a coin return and a little cash box behind it with a lock.
Muntproever and all.
He put it on the counter.
Then he took a fifty-guilder note out of his till, a sunflower one, yellow, and put it on top of the coin door.
“The importer’s man charges me a hundred and fifty just to come,” Ferry said.
“Plus the part.
Plus he looks at me like I’m stupid.” He pushed the whole pile towards Max.
“That’s yours.
Don’t argue.
And if you’ve really built a game…”
He stopped.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” Ferry said.
“Bring it here first, if it’s any good.
Before you take it somewhere else.”
I’m taking it somewhere else, Max thought.
First.
“Don’t say that out loud,” Otto said.
“Just smile.”
Max smiled.
* * *
“Ninety-six guilders fifty,” said Otto, on the bike home with the coin door bungeed to the back carrier and the fifty in his inside pocket.
“Minus the capacitors.
Ninety-five twenty-five.
Plus a coin door worth forty, plus eleven microswitches worth, at Ruiter’s actual prices, about thirteen guilders, plus one speelhal owner who now thinks you can fix things.”
That’s the important one.
“It’s also the one with a dog,” said Otto.
* * *
On Saturday morning, at nine, Gamma cut him an eighteen-millimetre sheet of plywood into seven pieces.
He’d drawn it on squared paper the night before.
The sides, the back, the front panel with a slot for the joysticks, the top, a shelf for the board, a bevelled piece for the screen to sit behind.
The man at the saw read the drawing upside down, turned it the right way up, looked at Max and said, “Who drew this?”
“Me.”
“Hm,” said the man, and cut it all, exactly, without asking a single question.
The pieces went home in the bolderkar, which Jeroen pulled, and which Max pushed from behind on the hill, and which Sanne steered by sitting on top of the plywood and shouting directions.
Then a tin of black paint, and screws, and wood glue, and hinges, and a hasp for the back door with a padlock.
“Forty-one guilders eighty,” said Otto.
“Fifty-three forty-five left.
The AY chip, the sprite chips and the lithium cell for the high scores will come to about fifty-three.
I’m not making that up.
That’s what it comes to.”
That’s lucky.
“It’s not luck.
I left out some things you won’t like to hear about.” This story is hosted at g.com.
Like what?
“Food,” said Otto.
* * *
Femke arrived at eleven.
She came on her bike, with her judo bag on her back and a plastic Albert Heijn bag of paint tubes and brushes hanging off the handlebars, and stopped at the gate and looked at the house, at the shed, at Jeroen sitting on an upside-down bucket eating a Mars bar, and at Sanne, who had come out to inspect her.
“You’re Femke,” said Sanne.
“You’re Sanne.”
“You drew Bas.”
Femke looked at Max.
“Who’s Bas?”
“The hunter ghost,” Max said.
“Long story.”
Femke stepped into the shed.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the workbench, the breadboard and its tangle of wires, the programmer, the MSX on its crate with the cassette deck, the Bakker TV with the maze on it, the four ghosts in their box, the Blue Band tub.
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
“Your dad’s going to have a heart attack,” Max said.
“My dad,” said Femke slowly, “is going to want to borrow your books.”
She played it.
Three goes.
On the third she got further than Sanne had ever got, and Sanne said “That’s not fair, she’s older,” and Femke said “That’s exactly fair, that’s what older is,” and gave her the Blue Band tub back.
Then they built the box.
Max and Jeroen screwed and glued.
It went together the way he’d drawn it, mostly, apart from one side that had to come off again because Jeroen had put it on inside out.
When it was done, it stood in the middle of the shed, taller than Sanne, black, smelling of paint and sawdust, with an empty rectangle where the screen would go and an empty slot where the joysticks would go.
A wooden person with no face.
Femke put a newspaper on the floor next to it, and laid out her tubes.
She’d brought acrylics from the hobby shop on the Steenstraat.
Red, pink, cyan, orange, yellow, white.
“What do you want on it?”
“I don’t know.
You’re the artist.”
Femke looked at the black side panel for a while, the way she’d looked at his first ghost on squared paper.
Then she started painting.
She didn’t draw first.
She just went.
The four ghosts came out of her brush one after the other, big, the height of Max’s forearm, running across the side panel.
Red, pink, cyan, orange, each with the eyes from her sheet of squared paper.
The sly one in red.
The steady one in pink.
The one working something out in cyan.
The one glancing back over its shoulder in orange.
In front of them, fleeing, a yellow circle with its mouth open.
And in front of that, very small, about the size of a guilder, a single white dot, on its own.
“That’s Puntje,” Sanne said, very quietly, kneeling on the newspaper.
“Who’s Puntje?”
“The first one,” Sanne said.
“Before all of them.”
Femke looked at Max.
Max looked at the dot.
“He’s right,” said Otto.
“I mean she’s right.
He’s…
Puntje is right.
Leave the dot.”
Femke left the dot.
At half past twelve, while the paint dried, Femke wiped her brushes on a rag and sat back on her heels.
She had red paint on her chin.
“Where’s it going to go, then?”
“‘t Hoekje.
On the corner.”
“Joop Hendriks’s place?” Femke’s eyebrows went up, the scarred one first.
“Joop said yes?”
Max looked at the cabinet.
At the ghosts running across its side, still wet.
“Not yet,” he said.
“I’m asking him this afternoon.”
“He threw my cousin out last year for sitting at a table for an hour with one Coke,” said Femke.
“Good luck.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk