Nobody answered his father’s question.
Not that Max could hear.
He lay in bed and listened to the house.
Oma’s voice, low, in the kitchen.
Sanne’s voice, high, fast, explaining something.
Then Henk’s, one word at a time, too quiet to make out.
Then the sound of the kitchen chair being pulled out, and of a man sitting down heavily in it, and of a plate being put in front of him.
Nobody came up the stairs.
“He knows you’re ill,” Otto said.
Its voice was nearly normal again.
“Oma will have told him at the door.
She’ll have told him everything.
She’s been saving it up for a week.”
Then why doesn’t he come up?
“I don’t know,” said Otto.
“I’ve never known.
I only know what you know.”
At half past nine there were footsteps on the landing.
They stopped outside his door.
Max lay very still with his eyes open in the dark.
The door opened about ten centimetres and a stripe of yellow light fell across the floor, across Sanne’s drawing on the wardrobe, across the end of the bed.
He couldn’t see his father’s face.
Just the shape in the gap, big, with the light behind it.
“You awake?”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“Your grandmother says thirty-nine four.”
“It’s gone down.
It broke this afternoon.”
“Mm.” The shape didn’t move.
“Go to sleep.”
The door closed.
The footsteps went across the landing.
Henk’s bedroom door opened and closed.
* * *
On Saturday morning Max tried to get up and Oma put him back.
“It’s Saturday,” he said.
“Joop said Saturday.
If it’s not working by today, it goes back in the shed.”
“Then it goes back in the shed.” Oma pulled the duvet up to his chin as if he were five.
“You’re not walking to the corner.
You’re not walking to the toilet without holding the wall.
I watched you this morning.”
“Oma…”
“Joop Hendriks,” said Oma, “is not going to throw a box of plywood out onto the pavement on a Saturday in front of the whole street, with my grandson in bed with the flu, after I bought a kroket (croquette) from him.
Lie down.”
He lay down.
She went downstairs.
He lay looking at the ceiling, at the crack in the plaster that ran from the light fitting to the corner, which he’d been looking at all week, and which he now knew better than the maze in PUNTJE (Little Dot).
“She’s probably right about Joop,” said Otto.
She’s right about everything.
Since 1956.
“She told you that?”
Joop told me.
* * *
At half past eleven the front door opened and closed.
Max got up, holding the wall, and went to the window.
His room was at the back, over the garden, so he crossed the landing to Henk’s room, which was at the front.
It smelled of sea bag and Old Spice.
He stood at the window with one hand on the sill, in his pyjamas, shaking a bit from the effort.
His father was walking down the street.
He had his work jacket on, the orange one with the reflective strips, and his hands in its pockets.
He walked slowly, the way he always walked, like a man who wasn’t in a hurry because nothing was waiting for him.
He went past the Bakkers’, where Ton was raking leaves and lifted his rake, and Henk nodded at him without stopping.
He went past the lamppost where Sanne had once hit her head on her bike.
At the corner he stopped outside ‘t Hoekje.
He stood there for a while.
From the window Max couldn’t see what he was looking at, but he knew.
The cabinet was in the window, in the corner where Joop had put the brown tape on the floor, and taped over its screen was a piece of frikandel (fried sausage) box that said KAPOT (broken).
Then Henk went in.
“Patat,” said Otto. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
“He’s getting patat (chips).”
He doesn’t eat patat.
He eats bread.
“He’s getting patat,” said Otto, “today.”
Max watched the door of ‘t Hoekje until his legs gave out.
Then he sat on his father’s bed and kept watching from there.
His father was in there for forty minutes.
When he came out he had a paper bag in one hand, with grease coming through the bottom, and his other hand was still in his pocket.
He walked back up the street the same way, past Ton Bakker, past the lamppost, and Max heard the front door open, and heard Henk’s voice in the hall say, “Patat,” to nobody in particular, and Sanne shriek.
He got back into his own bed before anybody came up.
Nobody came up.
After a while Sanne brought him a saucer with eleven chips on it and a blob of mayonnaise, very carefully, with both hands.
“Pap got patat,” she said.
“He’s never got patat.
He got it for everyone.
Oma said it was bad for my teeth and then she ate some.”
“Did he say anything?”
Sanne thought.
“He said Joop says hello.”
* * *
At three o’clock the Opel started in the street, on the third try, and drove away.
At half past four it came back.
Max heard the boot open and close.
He heard his father’s footsteps go round the side of the house, past the kitchen window, and down the garden path.
Then the shed door.
The creak it made on its bottom hinge.
The light switch.
Max got up and went to his own window.
The shed light was on.
Through the little window in the shed door, in the dusk, he could see his father’s shape at the workbench, with his back to the house.
The orange jacket was off.
It was hanging on the hook where Henk’s old overall used to hang.
Henk was in his shirt sleeves.
On the bench in front of him, under the lamp, was something Max recognised even from here, even through a dirty window, even with a fever that had only just gone.
A shelf of plywood with a transformer and a scorched square of biscuit-tin lid on it.
His power supply.
Out of the cabinet.
He took it out, Max thought.
Joop let him take it out.
“Joop gave him the key,” said Otto.
“Joop knows him.
Everybody on this street knows him.
He’s the man on the boats.”
Max watched.
His father stood at the bench for a long time without moving, with his hands flat on the wood either side of the power supply, looking at it.
Then he reached up to the pegboard, to the row of tools that had hung there untouched since 1987, and took one down.
Then another.
Max watched until Oma came up with a bowl of soup and made him get back into bed.
* * *
He woke up at ten past one and the shed light was still on.
He watched from the window for half an hour.
Henk was sitting on the upturned crate now, the one Max sat on, bent over the bench.
Every so often a thin line of smoke went up from his hands into the light, the way it did when you soldered.
Once he stood up and stretched, both hands on the small of his back, the way Max had seen fishermen do it on television.
Then he sat down again.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Otto said.
“Look at his hands.
Look how he holds the iron.
That’s not a man who learned it from a book.”
He’s an electrician.
On the platform.
Maintenance.
“You didn’t know that.”
I knew it.
I just never thought about it.
“Twenty-eight years,” said Otto, “and you never asked what he did all day.”
Max didn’t answer that. Find the original chapter at g.com.
He went back to bed and lay awake, and listened, and at some point he must have slept, because when he looked again, it was light.
* * *
At seven on Sunday morning he went down the stairs holding the rail, in his dressing gown, and out of the back door in his socks.
The grass was wet and white with the first frost.
His breath steamed.
The shed door was shut but not locked.
He opened it.
The lamp was off.
The crate was back where it lived, under the bench.
The Weller was in its stand, cold, its new tip wiped clean and tinned silver.
Everything was put away.
The pegboard was full again, every tool on its own hook, in order.
And on the bench, in the middle, on its own, was the power supply.
It wasn’t his power supply any more.
The shelf was the same, and the transformer was the same, but everything else was new.
The cracked regulator was gone.
The burst capacitor was gone.
The square of biscuit-tin lid was gone.
In their place was a heatsink as big as Max’s hand, black aluminium, with deep fins like the radiator of a lorry.
Bolted to it with proper screws and a smear of white paste were a new regulator and, next to it, a fat metal transistor that took the load off the regulator so it wouldn’t have to do all the work on its own.
There were two new capacitors, each twice the size of the old one.
There was a fuse, in a holder, where Max hadn’t put one.
Every wire was the right thickness.
Every joint was a small, bright, perfect silver cone.
There was a little hole drilled in the plywood shelf, low down, under the heatsink, and another above it, so that the hot air could get out of the cabinet and the cold air could get in.
Under the heatsink, folded once, was a piece of paper torn from the back of the Telegraaf.
Max unfolded it.
Three words, in his father’s block capitals, in biro, pressed hard.
KOELLICHAAM TE KLEIN.
And under that, one letter.
H.
Max stood in the cold shed in his dressing gown and his wet socks and read it four times.
“Heatsink too small,” said Otto, very quietly.
I know what it says.
“I know you know.
I just wanted to say it out loud.
So it’s said.”
* * *
Henk was asleep in the chair when Max came back in.
He was still in his shirt sleeves, with his arms folded across his chest and his chin down, and on the back of his left hand there was a small red burn from a soldering iron, shiny, the shape of a grain of rice.
Max stood in the living room doorway and looked at him for a long time.
Then he went and got the orange blanket off the sofa and put it over his father’s legs.
The same as the night with Puntje.
This time, Henk opened his eyes.
He looked at the blanket.
He looked at Max.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
The clock on the cooker ticked in the kitchen.
“Thank you,” Max said.
Henk shut his eyes again.
“Twelve-volt line was sagging too,” he said, into his chest.
“When it warmed up.
You’ll want to keep an eye on it.”
“Okay.”
“Joop says Tuesday,” said Henk.
“If it’s back in by Tuesday, he’ll forget about Saturday.”
“I’ll put it in today.”
“Not today.
You’ll fall over.” Henk shifted in the chair and pulled the blanket up a bit.
“I’ll carry it.
You tell me where it goes.”
Max stood there.
His throat was doing something complicated.
“What time’s that boxing of yours?” Henk said, with his eyes shut.
“On Tuesday.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk