The cabinet went through the shed door with two centimetres to spare on each side, and Max only knew that because he’d measured it on Wednesday at one in the morning and then lain awake worrying about it anyway.
He carried the heavy end.
Jeroen carried the light end and complained.
They went down the garden path, through the side gate, where the hinge caught Jeroen’s sleeve, and along the pavement towards the corner at a quarter past four on Friday afternoon, a big black box with ghosts painted on the side, carried by two boys in school clothes.
Sanne walked in front with her arms out, like a policeman, stopping traffic that wasn’t there.
A woman with a pram crossed the street to look at it.
“Is that a wardrobe?” she said.
“It’s a game,” said Sanne.
“What sort of game?”
“The best sort,” said Sanne, and kept walking.
Halfway along, Jeroen had to put his end down and shake his arms out.
Max held his end up, waiting.
It was about forty kilos with the TV in it.
His forearms burned and his breath came short, but his legs and back held it like it was nothing.
Strong, he thought.
No engine.
Still.
“Fewer comments,” said Otto.
“More carrying.”
* * *
Joop had cleared the corner by the window.
He’d moved one of the tables up against the wall, unscrewed a poster for Heineken that had hung there since about 1983, and put a strip of brown tape on the floor in a rectangle, exactly where the cabinet should go.
“There,” he said.
“And not a centimetre further.”
They put it there.
Max plugged it into the socket behind the fruit machine, and the fruit machine’s tune hiccupped, and then the Bakker TV lit up behind its plywood frame.
The little tune played.
The maze appeared, with the four ghosts in their box.
Then the attract mode started on its own.
Two Pac-Men, one solid and one hollow, moved round the maze by themselves, eating dots and dodging ghosts, as if two invisible people were playing.
At the top of the screen, blinking: 2 KWARTJES = 1 SPEL.
(2 quarters = 1 game) At the bottom, the high-score table, with one name in it.
MAX 4520.
Joop came round the counter, wiping his hands, and stood in front of it with his arms folded.
He watched the attract mode for a full minute.
The solid Pac-Man ate a power pellet, and the ghosts turned hollow and fled, and the solid one ate two of them, and the hollow one ate the other two.
“It’s black and white,” Joop said.
“For now.”
“Hm,” said Joop.
That was all.
He went back behind the counter.
But Max saw him glance at it again when he thought nobody was looking, as the hollow Pac-Man went round a corner.
Max put the first envelope on the counter.
STROOM VR 19/10.
f 0,40.
Joop looked at it, and at him, and put it in the till without a word.
* * *
Then nothing happened.
That was the thing nobody tells you about launching anything.
You build it for six weeks and you carry it down the street and plug it in, and then you sit at the table by the wall with a glass of tap water and watch it, and nobody comes.
At half four two bus drivers came in, in blue jackets.
One of them was a big man of about fifty with a grey moustache and a stomach that hung over his belt, who Joop called Hennie.
He leaned on the counter and ordered a broodje kroket (croquette) and talked to Joop about the depot.
He didn’t even look at the cabinet.
When his food came he turned round and stood eating with his back to it, which meant he was facing it, and he looked at it then, for about a second, while he chewed.
“Kinderspul,” he said, and turned back to the counter.
At five, two girls from Max’s school came in, second years.
They bought a bakje patat (chips) to share, and stood next to the cabinet waiting for it, and watched the attract mode.
One of them said, “What is it?” and the other one said, “No idea,” and their patat came, and they took it outside.
At half five a mother came in with two small boys.
The boys went straight to the cabinet and pressed the start button and nothing happened, because they hadn’t put any money in.
Their mother pulled them away by their hoods.
“Zero games,” said Otto.
“In an hour and a quarter.”
It’s early.
“It’s ten past seven,” said Otto, in a voice that didn’t think that counted as early.
Sanne, who had been sitting at the table next to him with her own glass of water and her legs swinging, got up.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.
I’m head tester.” She held out her hand.
“Two kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins).”
He gave her two kwartjes out of the jam jar of change he’d brought for exactly this, in case it needed starting.
Sanne went to the cabinet, stood on the little wooden step Max had built so she could reach, and put them in, one, two.
The coin mechanism clunked.
The cabinet played its tune, loud.
Hennie turned round at the counter.
Sanne played.
She’d played maybe two hundred games by now, in the shed, on the Blue Band tub.
On a real joystick with microswitches that clicked every time she moved it, she was faster.
She went round the first maze like a girl who’d been born in it, the AY chip going wakawakawaka over the hiss of the fryer, the siren going under it, the ghosts sliding after her.
When she got the first power pellet, she spun round and went after the hunter ghost and ate it, and the cabinet made the eating noise, and Sanne said, out loud, “Hah!
Bas!”
The two small boys broke free of their mother and came back.
* * *
He was ten.
He came in at ten past six, on his own, with a parka zipped up to his nose and his hands in his pockets, and Max knew him straight away.
The kid from Lucky Star in August.
The one who’d been standing on a crate at RUIMTEAANVAL!, playing through the sliding picture like it wasn’t there.
He walked past the cabinet on his way to the counter, and stopped dead.
The attract mode was playing again.
Sanne had lost her last life, and the small boys had run out of kwartjes, and their mother had taken them away for good this time.
The two Pac-Men went round on their own.
The kid stood in front of the screen.
He didn’t move.
He watched the ghosts come out of the box, and the hollow Pac-Man go round the corner, and the solid one eat a power pellet.
He watched the ghosts turn.
He watched the whole thing go round twice.
Then he took one hand out of his parka pocket.
It had kwartjes in it.
A lot of them.
His fist was full.
He put two in.
The tune played.
“Who’s that?” Otto said.
Lucky Star.
The kid on the crate.
“He’s very good,” said Otto, a minute later, and then, two minutes after that, more quietly, “He’s very, very good.”
He was.
He played like someone who’d been playing machines for half his life, which, at ten, he probably had.
He didn’t grip the joystick.
He held it with two fingers and a thumb, like a pen.
He didn’t move his head.
He hardly blinked.
He worked out, on the first maze, in about thirty seconds, that the ghosts didn’t all chase him the same way.
Max saw the moment it happened, a little frown, and then a little smile, as the hunter ghost came straight at him and the one with the sly eyes went round to cut him off.
He cleared the first maze.
The cabinet played a little jingle and the ghosts did a short chase across the screen, which Max had put in because the original had them, between levels.
The kid laughed out loud.
One short bark.
By the time he’d cleared the second maze, there were five people round him.
The two second-year girls had come back in, eating their patat out of the bakje.
A boy of about twelve with a skateboard under his arm.
Two bus drivers, younger ones, still in their blue jackets.
Hennie hadn’t moved from the counter.
But he’d turned round to watch.
By half past six, there was a queue.
* * *
Max had seen queues before.
He’d stood in queues for midnight launches in his old life, outside the MediaMarkt in Arnhem, at eleven at night, in the rain, for a game that had come out with forty gigabytes of bugs.
He’d stood in queues for fights in Rotterdam.
He’d never seen a queue for something he’d made.
It wasn’t a queue the way a shop has one.
It was kwartjes.
Somebody put two kwartjes on the edge of the cabinet, on the flat bit next to the joystick, and it meant I’m next.
Then somebody put two next to them.
By seven, there was a row of them along the edge of the cabinet, ten kwartjes, twelve, little silver pairs in a line, and every time someone’s game ended, the next pair went in the slot, and the next person stepped up. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Nobody had told them to do it.
Nobody had told them anything.
“They invented the queue,” Otto said, slowly.
“On their own.
In about forty minutes.”
Kids always do, Max thought.
Every arcade in history.
“Not in this one.
This one’s never had an arcade.”
Joop came out from behind the counter twice to look.
The first time, he stood at the back of the little crowd for about a minute, then went back.
The second time, at about half seven, he had his hands on his hips.
“Are you all buying something?” he said, to the queue.
Nobody had bought anything.
Fourteen faces looked at him.
“Kids who stand here,” Joop said, “buy something.
Or kids who stand here go and stand outside.
Your choice.”
There was a short silence.
“Bakje patat, Joop,” said the boy with the skateboard.
“Two frikandellen (fried sausages),” said one of the bus drivers.
“Patat met,” said one of the second-year girls.
“Kroket,” said somebody at the back.
Joop went back behind the counter.
The fryer went on hissing.
The orders kept coming, one at a time, as the queue moved up, until the counter had a little stack of paper bags on it waiting to be picked up, and Joop was frying faster than Max had ever seen him fry, with his face shining in the heat, saying nothing at all.
* * *
At ten o’clock Joop turned the sign on the door to GESLOTEN (closed) and the last of the kids went out into the dark, reluctantly, looking back over their shoulders.
The kid in the parka was the last to go.
He’d played eleven games.
He’d stood in the queue between each of them like everyone else, and he’d bought a bakje patat at eight, and eaten it standing in the queue, with one hand, with the other hand already holding his next two kwartjes.
He hadn’t said a word all night, to anyone.
Joop unlocked the cash box on the cabinet with the little key Max had given him.
They counted it together on the counter, kwartje (quarter-guilder coin) by kwartje, in piles of ten, the way Max had promised.
Seventy-seven games.
Thirty-eight guilders and fifty cents.
Twenty-five guilders of it came out of kids’ pockets, a fistful at a time.
The rest was bus drivers and second years and a mother who’d come back at nine without her boys and played one game, very badly, and laughed the whole way through.
Joop looked at the money for a long time.
“I sold forty-one bakjes patat,” he said.
“On a Friday.
I usually sell twenty-five.”
Sixteen more, Max thought.
“Don’t say it,” said Otto.
“Let him say it.”
Joop didn’t say it.
He swept the kwartjes into a cloth bag, gave it to Max, and put the night’s envelope, STROOM VR 19/10.
f 0,40, back across the counter.
“Free week,” Joop said.
“It’s yours.
Keep it for the electricity.
I’ll start taking my half on Friday.” He turned the lights off over the fryer.
“Go home.
You look like death.”
Max picked up the cloth bag.
It was heavy.
On the way to the door he saw something through the window and stopped.
There was a face pressed against the glass outside, in the dark.
Hands cupped round the eyes.
A parka zipped to the nose.
Joop came to the door with the keys, opened it a crack, and looked down at the kid.
“We’re closed, jongen (lad).”
“What time do you open tomorrow?”
“Eleven.”
The kid thought about it.
“I’ll be here at ten,” he said, and went off down the street towards the flats, his hands in his pockets, walking fast.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk