He meant to fix it on Saturday.
That was the plan, and it was a good plan, and Otto agreed with it.
On Saturday morning Ruiter would be open, and Ruiter had heatsinks, proper ones, black aluminium with fins like a radiator.
Max would buy the biggest one he could carry and a new regulator, just in case, and he’d be at ‘t Hoekje at eleven when Joop rolled up the shutter.
Twenty minutes with the back off, and the power supply would run cool for the next ten years.
He’d go home now, on Friday night, and make Sanne’s tea, and then he’d come back at nine to check on it.
“I’d stay,” said Otto.
It’s been fine for a week.
“It’s been getting hotter for a week.
And it’s Friday.
And the autumn holiday starts tomorrow, so every child in Presikhaaf is staying up late tonight with money in their pocket.”
Two hours.
I’ll be back at nine.
“Two hours,” said Otto, in the voice it used when it was writing something down.
* * *
He was back at a quarter to nine.
He’d biked fast.
He knew before he got to the door.
There was a sound coming out of ‘t Hoekje that he’d never heard in there before, and it took him a second to work out what it was.
It was a crowd groaning.
He pushed the door open.
The queue was the longest it had ever been.
Twenty kids, maybe more, standing in a loose crowd round the corner by the window.
The edge of the cabinet was covered in kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins), two by two, in a row that went all the way along and round the corner and onto the top.
Hennie was there in his uniform.
Tim was there in his parka, with a girl Max didn’t know.
The boy with the skateboard.
Both the second-year girls.
The fryer was going and the room smelled of oil, and under the oil there was another smell, sharp and sweet and burnt, like a hairdryer left on in a cupboard.
The screen was black.
Not off.
Black, with a thin bright horizontal line across the middle of it, where the picture had collapsed.
As he watched, the line flickered, and spread, and for half a second the maze jumped back up, squashed and shaking and far too small, like a reflection in a spoon.
The AY chip let out half a note of the siren, warped and slow.
Then the line went out.
The groan again.
Louder.
“It’s been doing that for ten minutes,” Joop said from behind the counter.
His face was very still.
“Coming and going.
Then it went bang.”
Bang.
“Not a big bang.
A little bang.
Like a firework in a tin.”
* * *
Max went round the back.
He unlocked the padlock.
The heat came out when he opened the door, as if he’d opened an oven.
He didn’t touch anything.
He turned it off at the wall first.
Then he waited, counting slowly to sixty, while twenty kids watched the back of his head and the fryer hissed and nobody said anything.
Then he looked.
The regulator was dark brown.
The plastic case on the front of it had cracked down the middle.
The square of biscuit-tin lid it was bolted to had gone a dull straw colour where it had been silver, the colour metal goes when it’s been cooked.
The fat capacitor next to it had blown its top.
It was split open in a little cross, the way they were designed to fail, and there was a sticky brown smear on the shelf around it.
The transformer, the one out of somebody’s tumble dryer, was so hot that even holding his hand five centimetres from it hurt.
He looked at it for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” said Otto.
You told me.
“I don’t want to have told you.
It doesn’t feel the way I thought it would.”
Max put his head in his hands for a second, kneeling on Joop’s floor, with the back of the cabinet open in front of him like a hurt animal.
“Can you fix it?” said a voice beside him.
It was Tim.
He’d come round the side, and he was crouched next to Max with his hands on his knees, looking into the cabinet.
He’d never been round the back before.
His eyes went over every part of it.
The game board on the shelf, the veroboard, the wire-wrap, the two sockets with Max’s EPROMs in them with the labels he’d written on them in biro, PAC 1 and PAC 2.
“Not tonight,” Max said.
“Why not?”
And I haven’t got another one.
And the shop’s shut.”
Tim looked at the burnt regulator.
“That one?”
“That one.”
“It’s black.”
“It’s dead.”
Tim nodded slowly.
He looked at the regulator a bit longer, then at Max.
“Tomorrow?”
Not tomorrow, Max thought.
Ruiter, eleven o’clock.
Then…
* * *
He tried anyway.
He told Joop he’d be back in twenty minutes, and biked into town as fast as he’d ever biked, down the Velperweg in the dark, through the Velperpoort, with his chest on fire and the cold wind in his face, and down the Steenstraat.
He got there at four minutes past nine.
The shutter was down.
Through the gap under it, a light was on in the back.
He knocked on the shutter.
He knocked again.
The light went off.
Nobody came.
He stood in the street with his hands on his knees and breathed until he could see straight.
“He’s seventy,” Otto said gently.
“He goes home at nine.”
I know.
“Go back.
Tell them.
Then go to bed.”
He biked back.
Slower.
When he got to ‘t Hoekje, most of the queue had gone.
A few kids were standing outside under the awning, looking at their kwartjes.
Joop was going along the edge of the cabinet with a saucer, scooping the pairs of coins off one by one and handing them back to whoever said they were theirs.
He did it without arguing with anybody.
When two boys both said a pair was theirs, Joop gave them a pair each out of his own till, and said, “Out,” and they went.
Max helped him.
It took a long time.
The last kwartjes on the cabinet were in the corner, by the joystick.
Two of them, on their own.
Nobody came for them.
“Whose are those?” Joop said.
Max looked round.
Tim was standing by the door with his parka zipped to his nose.
“His,” Max said.
Tim shook his head.
“Leave them,” he said.
“For when it’s fixed.” And went home.
Joop looked at the two kwartjes for a while.
Then he left them there.
He found a piece of cardboard from a box of frikandellen (fried sausages), wrote on it with a black marker, and taped it over the screen.
KAPOT.
“I’ll give you till Saturday,” he said.
“Next Saturday.
If it’s not working by then, it goes back to your shed and we forget the whole thing.
I’m not having a broken box in my window.
People think the whole shop’s broken.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it, jongen (lad).”
“I know.”
Joop turned off the lights over the fryer.
Then he stopped.
“Seventy-one bakjes,” he said, quietly.
“Tonight.
Till it went.”
* * *
He woke up at four in the morning with his teeth chattering so hard he could hear them.
He was freezing.
He was boiling.
He lay in bed under the duvet in his clothes, which he’d fallen asleep in, and shook.
His head felt like somebody was inflating it with a bicycle pump.
His throat was full of gravel.
When he tried to sit up, the room tipped over to one side and slid, slowly, like the picture on Ferry’s RUIMTEAANVAL!. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“Max,” said Otto, from very far away.
It sounded like it was speaking through a wall.
Through two walls.
“You’re…
very…
hot…”
He went back to sleep, or something like sleep, and dreamed of the John Frostbrug, and lightning, and a thin bright line across a black screen.
* * *
When he woke again it was light, and Oma was sitting on the end of his bed with a thermometer.
“Thirty-nine four,” she said, reading it.
“Flu.
Half the flats have got it.” She put her hand flat on his forehead.
It was cool and dry and smelled of Nivea.
“You’re not going anywhere.
Not to school, not to that sweaty place, not to the shed.
You’re staying in bed.”
“Ruiter,” Max said.
It came out as a croak.
“Eleven o’clock.
The cabinet…”
“Your sister told me about the cabinet.”
“Joop said Saturday…”
“Joop can wait,” said Oma, in the voice for the man at the Postbank.
“Joop’s been waiting since 1956.
I’m staying here until your father gets home.
Sanne’s sleeping with me in your father’s bed.
Now drink this.”
It was Roosvicee, hot, with honey in it.
He drank it.
He went back to sleep.
* * *
The week went past in pieces.
Oma, in the kitchen, with the radio on.
Sanne, standing in his doorway, very quiet, holding a drawing of the cabinet with KAPOT (broken) on it and a sad face on the screen, which she stuck to his wardrobe door with Pritt.
The doctor, on Monday, a young man with cold hands who said “flu” and “rest” and “lots of drinking” and went away.
Jeroen, on Wednesday afternoon, standing in the doorway in his coat with the canvas Koerier bag over his shoulder.
“Wim says I can do your route this week,” Jeroen said.
“And next week if you’re still dying.
He says you have to pay me.”
“Pay you what?”
“Half,” said Jeroen.
“And a go on Pac-Man.
When it’s not kapot.”
Max laughed and it turned into coughing and Jeroen looked alarmed and went to do the round.
Otto hardly spoke all week.
When it did, its voice was thin and slow, as if it were coming out of a cassette that had been left in the sun.
It said, once, on Tuesday night, “Your temperature is…
still…
high,” and, once, on Thursday, “It’s going down,” and once, very late on Thursday, when Max was lying awake in the dark looking at Sanne’s drawing on the wardrobe door, “I’m still here,” as if it had been worried that he’d think it wasn’t.
Each day, at about four, Sanne came up after school and stood in the doorway.
“Is it still kapot?”
“It’s still kapot.”
“Tim asked,” she said, on Thursday.
“At the gate.
He comes past.
He said, is it still kapot.
I said yes.”
* * *
On Friday the second of November, at a quarter past seven in the evening, Max woke up because the front door had opened.
He lay still in bed.
His fever had broken that afternoon.
He was weak and sticky and his whole body ached as if he’d been in a fight, but his head was his own again, and he could hear properly.
The front door closed.
Something heavy hit the hall floor.
A sea bag.
He heard Oma come out of the kitchen.
He heard her say something, low, and a man’s voice answer, lower.
He heard Sanne thunder down the stairs, and stop at the bottom, and the man’s voice say her name.
Then, after a while, he heard his father’s voice in the hall, quite clearly, in the tone of a man who has walked past something on the way home and hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
“What’s that box in Joop’s window?
With kapot (broken) on it?”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk