Tim Verhoef had nineteen guilders and twenty-five cents, and all of it was in kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins).
He’d counted them on the floor of his bedroom on Saturday morning at seven, while his mother was asleep.
He’d turned the sock out on the carpet and stacked them in piles of four, because four kwartjes was a guilder.
Nineteen piles and one kwartje (quarter-guilder coin) on its own.
The sock was a grey football sock of his father’s.
His father had gone to live in Zwolle with a woman called Anita who had a white car, but the sock was still here, and so were the kwartjes in it.
He’d been saving them since April.
Some were from bottles.
You took the empty beer bottles from the bin room of the flats down to the Albert Heijn, and the machine gave you a ticket, and the ticket gave you money.
Some were from his oma, at the Sunday visit.
Some were from doing Mevrouw Pinas’s shopping on the fourth floor, because her legs were bad.
They had been for a BMX.
He had worked out that at the speed he was going, he’d have enough for the BMX when he was about fourteen.
He put all of them back in the sock.
He put the sock in the inside pocket of his parka.
Then he put the parka on, and zipped it up, and left a note on the kitchen table that said BUITEN.
TIM (Outside.
Tim), and went out.
It was ten past nine.
He sat on the low wall across the street from ‘t Hoekje and waited.
* * *
The snackbar had its metal shutter half down.
Inside it was dark.
Through the gap under the shutter he could see the bottom of the black box in the corner by the window, and the ghosts on its side.
The red one, the pink one, the blue one and the orange one.
You couldn’t see the colours on the screen, because the screen was black and white, but you could see them on the box, so you knew.
Tim had been to Lucky Star almost every Saturday since he was seven.
He took the bus into town with two guilders and stayed until it was gone.
RUIMTEAANVAL!
was the best thing in there.
He was the best at it.
Everyone said so.
He had the high score, for most of the summer, until the picture had started to slide and a big kid from Rheden had beaten him with it sliding and then the picture had been fixed and he’d beaten the big kid back.
He knew every machine in Lucky Star.
He knew they came from somewhere else, on a lorry.
Ferry had told him once.
From Rotterdam, from Taiwan, from America, nobody really knew.
They were like the weather.
They were just there.
This one wasn’t from anywhere.
Last night, a fat boy had carried it down the street.
Tim had seen it from the window of the flat, from the kitchen, while his mother was on the phone.
A big black box being carried along the pavement by two boys, with a girl walking in front of it with her arms out.
He’d watched them go into Joop’s.
He’d thought it was a fridge.
Then he’d gone down at six to get patat (chips), and it wasn’t a fridge.
* * *
Joop rolled the shutter up at five to eleven.
He saw Tim sitting on the wall.
“You,” he said.
“Me,” said Tim.
“You’re really here.”
“I said.”
Joop looked at him for a while.
Then he held the door open.
“Come on, then.
But you’re buying something before twelve.”
Tim went straight to the box.
Joop turned it on at the wall.
The screen came up grey, and then black, and then the little tune played, the one that went up and down, and the maze came up.
He took four kwartjes out of the sock.
Two in the slot.
Two on the edge of the box, for next time.
The joystick was hard plastic with a red ball on top.
It clicked when you moved it.
The machines at Lucky Star clicked too, but this one clicked differently, sharper, as if every click was a real thing happening.
He held it the way he held a pen.
He started.
The first maze he knew from last night.
Round, eat, corner, eat, don’t go down the middle too early.
The four ghosts came out of the box one at a time.
He knew them now too.
He’d worked them out last night, in the second game, and then he’d lain in bed until one in the morning working them out more.
The pink one came straight at you.
Always.
Wherever you were.
You just had to keep moving.
The red one didn’t come at you.
It came at where you were going.
If you were heading for a corner, it went to the corner first.
It was the cleverest, and the most annoying, and Tim hated it.
Last night he’d thought it would be the other way round, because red was the angry colour, and angry things charge.
But on the box, the red one had the sly eyes, looking sideways, and on the screen, the one with the sly eyes was the one that got there first.
The red one knows where you’re going.
He’d tell someone that.
He’d tell the whole of Lucky Star.
The blue one did something strange.
Sometimes it came at you, and sometimes it went round the side, and he couldn’t work out why yet.
The orange one was the scared one.
It came at you from far away, and then, when it got close, it turned round and ran off into the corner.
Tim liked the orange one.
He didn’t eat it unless he had to.
He cleared the first maze.
The ghosts did their chase across the screen.
He cleared it again, the same maze, faster.
On the third level he died twice, because the red one went to where he was going, every time, and he lost his temper.
On the fourth level the maze was different.
Tim stopped breathing.
It wasn’t the round one.
It was long.
It had a corridor down the middle that wound left and right, back and forth, like a snake, and the ghost house was at the bottom instead of in the middle.
Across the top of the screen, for two seconds, before it started, it said in blocky letters:
DE SLANG (The Snake)
“There’s another one,” Tim said out loud, to nobody.
“There’s four,” said a voice behind him.
* * *
It was the fat boy.
He was sitting at the table by the wall with a glass of water and a bag of something and a notebook with squared paper, and he had been there, Tim realised, for some time.
He had a big round face and short hair and he was older, maybe fourteen, and he was looking at the screen and not at Tim.
“Four what?”
“Four mazes,” said the fat boy.
“That’s the second one.
There’s two more after it.”
“What are they called?”
“You’ll see.”
Tim looked at him.
The fat boy looked back.
Then the ghosts on the screen started moving and Tim had to look back too.
He died on De Slang.
All three lives.
The corridor down the middle was a trap, because if you went in, the ghosts came in from both ends.
He’d learned it by the third life.
By then it was too late.
He put the next two kwartjes in.
“Are you the one who made it?” he said, without looking round, while the tune played.
“Yeah.”
“How?”
There was a pause.
Tim glanced back.
The fat boy was thinking about it, with his pencil stopped above the squared paper, as if it was a real question that needed a real answer.
Grown-ups never did that.
“I worked out how a television draws a picture,” the fat boy said.
“And then I made something that told it what to draw.”
Tim thought about it.
“That’s not how,” he said.
“That’s exactly how.”
“It’s not how.
It’s what.
How is what you did with your hands.”
The fat boy looked at him for a long time.
Then he started to laugh, quietly, with his shoulders.
“That’s a very good question,” he said.
“Come and look one day.
I’ll show you.”
* * *
He played all day.
He bought a bakje patat at twelve, because Joop was watching him.
At two he went home for a sandwich because his mother came down to the snackbar in her slippers and dressing gown and stood in the door with her arms folded until he did.
She looked at the box, and at the queue, which had started again by then, and shook her head, and went back up.
At three he was back.
By three there were kids he knew from school in the queue.
By four there were kids he knew from Lucky Star.
Somebody had told somebody.
One of them was the big kid from Rheden, who’d come on his moped. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
He stood in the queue and didn’t look at Tim and Tim didn’t look at him.
Tim got to the third maze at a quarter to five.
It was called HET KASTEEL.
The ghost house was a tower in the middle with a gate at the bottom, and the ghosts came out of the gate and went round the castle walls, and the walls were thick, so you couldn’t see the ghosts until they came round the corner.
The pink one came straight at him.
He went left.
The red one was already there, at the corner, because it knew where he was going.
He’d known it would be.
He’d known it, and he’d gone anyway, because there was a power pellet behind it.
He ate the power pellet.
The four ghosts turned hollow and ran.
He ate the red one first.
He heard somebody behind him in the queue say, “Oh!”
At the end of that game the high score table came up.
He hadn’t known it would.
NIEUWE HIGHSCORE!
(New high score!) it said, blinking, and under it, three blank spaces with a line under the first one, and the old score below it, the only one: MAX 4520.
His own score was above it.
12850.
He looked round.
The fat boy was still at the table, writing.
He’d stopped writing.
He was looking at the screen.
“Up and down,” the fat boy said.
“Then the button.”
Tim pushed the joystick up.
The first space changed.
A.
B.
C.
He went all the way through the alphabet slowly, because he didn’t want to get it wrong.
T.
He pressed the button.
I.
The button.
M.
1ST TIM 12850
2ND MAX 4520
Somebody in the queue clapped.
Then somebody else.
Then the big kid from Rheden, at the back, said, “Lucky,” and the second-year girl next to him told him to shut up.
Tim stood in front of the screen and looked at his name.
At the top.
In a machine that nobody else in the world had.
He’d never seen his name on anything except his school books and the label inside his parka.
It looked different here, three white letters on black glass, in a snackbar, at a quarter past five on a Saturday in October.
“It’ll stay there,” the fat boy said, behind him.
“Even when Joop switches it off tonight.
It remembers.”
Tim didn’t turn round.
He didn’t want anyone to see his face.
“Forever?”
“Until somebody beats you.”
* * *
He went home at seven, with four guilders left in the sock and a stomach full of patat.
He went up to the flat, and ate his tea, and watched Wie van de Drie with his mother on the sofa without seeing any of it, and went to bed early, which his mother noticed, and lay in the dark thinking about the red ghost.
At ten past ten, he got up again in his pyjamas and went to the kitchen window and looked down at the corner.
The lights were still on at ‘t Hoekje.
There was nobody in the queue.
Just one person at the box, a big wide shape in a blue jacket with its back to the window, standing very still, playing.
A bus driver.
The big one with the moustache.
Hennie.
Tim watched until the lights went off at half past ten.
Hennie came out, buttoned his jacket, and walked off towards the depot without looking back.
On Sunday ‘t Hoekje opened at twelve.
Tim was on the wall at half eleven, in his parka over his pyjama top, because he’d been too quick to change properly.
Joop rolled up the shutter and switched the box on at the wall without saying anything, and the tune played, and the maze came up.
Then the attract mode started, and the two Pac-Men went round on their own, and after the first round the high score table came up, the way it did between rounds, in big white letters on the black glass.
Tim read it standing in the doorway.
1ST HEN 14210
2ND TIM 12850
3RD MAX 4520
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk