He practised it again on the walk to the corner, and this time Otto helped.
“Lead with what he gets,” Otto said.
“Not with what you’ve built.
He doesn’t care what you’ve built.
Nobody who owns a snackbar has ever cared what anybody’s built.
He cares about his tables, his electricity, his fryer and his Saturday.”
Fifty-fifty.
“After the free week.
That comes first.
The first week, he risks nothing.
You pay the electricity.
I’ve worked it out: about forty cents a day, which you’ll give him in cash, in an envelope, every evening, so he can see it.
If anything breaks, you fix it.
If he doesn’t like it after the week, you take it away and he never has to see you again.”
And if he still says no?
“Then he still says no,” said Otto.
“And you go to Ferry.
But I don’t think you want to go to Ferry first.”
No.
“Why not?”
Max thought about it, walking past the Bakkers’ house, where Ton was washing his car in the drive in a string vest.
Because Lucky Star is somewhere you go, he thought.
‘t Hoekje is somewhere you are.
Otto was quiet for a moment.
“Put that on a T-shirt,” it said.
* * *
At two o’clock on a Saturday, ‘t Hoekje was busy.
Two bus drivers at the counter.
A man with a little girl on his shoulders, ordering six frikandellen (fried sausages) speciaal.
Three boys from the second year at the table by the window, sharing one bakje patat (chips) between them with three forks.
The fruit machine in the corner played its tune at nobody.
Max waited until the man with the little girl had gone.
Then he went up to the counter.
Joop saw him and stopped wiping.
“You again.”
“Me again.”
“Did you bring your mother?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
Max said it the way he and Otto had practised it.
The free week.
The electricity, in an envelope, every night.
Fifty-fifty after that, counted together, on the counter, at closing, so Joop could see every kwartje (quarter-guilder coin).
Any trouble, Max took it away the same day.
Joop listened to the whole thing.
His face didn’t move.
When Max had finished, he took the pencil from behind his ear, looked at it, and put it back.
“Kids who hang around don’t buy anything,” Joop said.
“I said that last time, jongen (lad).
I’ve been doing this nineteen years.
You put a machine in, the kids come in, the kids stand around the machine, the kids don’t buy anything because the kids have spent all their money on the machine.
My bus drivers can’t get to the counter.
My customers can’t sit down.
And then the kids start fighting about whose turn it is, and somebody’s mother phones me.
No.”
“They’ll wait for their food.
While it cooks.
They’ll be in here longer, and…”
“No,” said Joop.
“One week.
You lose nothing.”
“I lose the corner by the window.
I lose my peace and quiet.” Joop picked up the cloth.
“I’ve got a fruit machine.
It doesn’t talk back.
It doesn’t need fixing.
It pays.
No.”
The bell over the door jangled behind Max.
“One kroket (croquette), Joop,” said Oma.
“On a piece of bread.
With mustard.”
* * *
Max turned round.
Oma was standing in the doorway in her good grey coat, the Saturday shopping bag on her arm with a cauliflower sticking out of the top.
Sanne was behind her, holding her other hand and looking very innocent indeed.
Joop’s face did something Max had never seen it do.
It went young.
For a second, behind the grey hair combed back with Brylcreem and the apron and the fifty years, there was a boy who’d been caught with his hand in somebody’s biscuit tin.
“Mevrouw Brouwer,” Joop said.
“Joop.” Oma came up to the counter and put her shopping bag on it, next to Max’s elbow, without looking at Max at all.
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s…
good.
Her hip’s bad.
She’s in the Lingehof now.”
I go on Thursdays.
She beats me at klaverjassen (a Dutch card game).” Oma took her purse out.
“One kroket.
On bread.”
Joop put a kroket in the fryer.
The oil hissed.
He stood with his back to them and watched it, as if it needed watching.
“I used to give you a dubbeltje (ten-cent coin),” Oma said to his back, conversationally, “to go and play somewhere else.
In Klarendal.
When you were about this high and you used to stand under my kitchen window kicking a ball against the wall.
Do you remember?”
“I remember, mevrouw.”
“Every day for a year.
A dubbeltje.
I worked it out once.
Thirty-six guilders, about, in the end.
That was a lot of money.
That was a pair of shoes.” Oma put a guilder on the counter.
“And you never stopped kicking the ball.
You just did it under Mevrouw Smit’s window instead, and took a dubbeltje off her too.”
Joop turned round.
He was very slightly red.
“Mevrouw…”
“You had a business head on you at seven,” said Oma.
“I always said so to your mother.” She looked past him, at the corner by the window, where the three boys were scraping the last of the patat out of the bakje with their forks.
“That machine of my grandson’s.
The children will come in for it, Joop.
And while they stand and wait for their turn, they’ll smell your fryer.
You know what children are like when they smell a fryer.
Now.
Is my kroket ready?”
Joop took the kroket out of the fryer, put it on a slice of white bread, squeezed a stripe of mustard over it and handed it to her on a paper napkin.
Oma bit into it, standing at the counter.
She chewed.
She swallowed.
“Good,” she said.
“Your mother’s recipe.”
Joop looked at her.
Then at Max.
Then at Sanne, who was looking at the frikandellen in the glass case with a face of pure longing.
He picked up the cloth.
He put it down again.
“One week,” Joop said.
“From Friday.
Not a Saturday, Saturday I’m too busy.
Friday.
Electricity in an envelope.
Every night.”
“Every night,” said Max.
“And if one kid gets a shock off it, or one mother phones me, it’s out on the pavement the same day, I don’t care what it costs you.”
“Yes.”
“And I want it in writing.
With a grown-up’s name.” Joop looked at Oma.
“Since the grown-up’s here.”
Oma finished her kroket.
She wiped her fingers on the napkin, took a pen out of her handbag, turned the napkin over and wrote on it in her careful old-fashioned handwriting, the way she’d been taught at school before the war, with every letter joined.
Proef 1 week vanaf vrijdag 19 okt.
Daarna de helft.
Stroom wordt betaald.
Bij ongeluk weg.
(Trial 1 week from Friday 19 Oct.
After that, half.
Electricity is paid for.
Any accident, it goes.)
She signed it.
G.
Brouwer.
“There,” she said, and pushed it across the counter.
Joop read it, folded it once and put it in the till under the tray.
“Gerda Brouwer,” said Otto, very softly.
“No forging required.
She’s got the same surname as your father.”
She’s had it longer.
On the way out, Sanne pulled on Oma’s coat.
“Oma.
Can I have a frikandel (fried sausage)?”
“No,” said Oma.
And then, at the door, without turning round: “Joop.
One frikandel for the little one.
On my account.”
* * *
“I didn’t ask her,” Max said on the walk home.
Oma was a little way ahead with the shopping bag, and Sanne was skipping along beside her.
“I know,” said Otto.
“Somebody else did.”
Sanne skipped.
She didn’t look back.
Navigator, Max thought.
* * *
Six days.
He’d known it would be tight, and it was tight.
Every evening after school, after Sanne’s tea and her bath and the dishes, he went out to the shed and worked till midnight, and on Tuesday and Thursday he trained first and worked after, which meant he worked tired, which meant he worked slowly.
He’d learned that lesson in September, and his finger had the pink scar to show for it.
Every time he reached across the bench, he moved the iron first.
The breadboard came apart wire by wire, and went back together on the veroboard.
It was Ruiter’s offcuts, three pieces bolted together, with sockets for every chip.
Wire-wrap where he could and solder where he couldn’t.
It took three nights.
The new sprite circuits went in, five more, for the four ghosts and a second player.
The chess pieces were gone.
The ghosts slid now, smooth, a dot at a time, behind the yellow circle, which on the Bakker TV was a white circle.
The second player’s Pac-Man was the same shape but hollow, an outline, because the TV had no red.
Two Pac-Men in the same maze, at the same time, chasing the same dots.
When they bumped into each other they bounced, and when one of them ate a power pellet, the ghosts ran from both.
On Tuesday he put in the AY chip.
Three channels.
The duck became a proper waka, sharp and bright, with a low siren underneath it that rose as the ghosts got faster, and a little tune at the start that he wrote from memory, note for note, in the schrift (exercise book).
He’d hummed it in the shower for twenty years.
On Wednesday, after the paper round, with twenty-two fifty from Wim in his pocket, he put in the lithium cell.
It was a coin-shaped battery, wired through a diode to the high score RAM, so that when the power went off, the RAM kept just enough electricity to remember.
He wrote the routine that asked for initials.
Three letters.
Up and down on the joystick to choose, the button to confirm.
He tested it with MAX.
He switched it off at the wall.
He counted to sixty.
He switched it on.
1ST MAX 4520.
“It remembers,” said Otto.
On Thursday night, he did the mazes.
Four of them.
The classic one, which he’d been looking at for a month.
Then three more, which he designed on squared paper at the kitchen table with Sanne’s help, and which she named.
De Slang (The Snake), which had a long winding corridor down the middle.
Het Kasteel (The Castle), which had a ghost house in the shape of a tower.
And Puntje (Little Dot), which was the hardest, and which only came up from level nine.
And no kill screen.
In the original, the game broke at level two hundred and fifty-six, because a counter overflowed and half the screen turned into garbage.
Max put in a check.
At two hundred and fifty-six, it went back to one, and said WEER VAN VOREN!
(Back to the start!) across the middle in big letters.
“No one will ever see that,” Otto said.
Someone will.
The last thing was the power supply.
He did it at a quarter to two on Friday morning, with Otto going grainy and slow.
A transformer, the twenty-four-volt one from the tumble dryer, a bridge rectifier, a fat capacitor and a regulator.
The regulator would get hot, because the twenty-four volts had to come down to five, and the extra went off as heat.
It needed a heatsink.
He bolted it to a square cut from the lid of the biscuit tin.
“That’s…
small,” said Otto, from what sounded like the bottom of a well.
“For twelve hours…
a day…”
It’ll do for now.
“Famous last words of every shed in the Netherlands,” said Otto.
“I’m writing that down, so it’s said.”
Max switched it on.
The Bakker TV, sitting in its new black plywood box with Femke’s ghosts running down its side, lit up.
The tune played.
The maze appeared.
1ST MAX 4520.
He sat down on the floor of the shed with his back against the wall and looked at it until his eyes closed.
* * *
On Friday morning, on the way to school with Sanne on the back, he biked past the corner.
The window of ‘t Hoekje had changed.
The white plastic letters had been moved.
At the top, where the menu used to start, it now said, in letters of every size, a bit crooked:
VANAF VRIJDAG: PAC MAN (From Friday: Pac Man)
Underneath, the menu had lost most of its letters.
It said P T T and K K T, and something that might once have been FRIKANDEL and was now F I A E.
“He took the letters off the menu,” Sanne said, delighted, over his shoulder.
“He took the letters off the menu,” Max said.
“Means he’s serious,” said Otto.
“Nobody sacrifices their kroket for something they don’t believe in.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk