Oma said no.
Otto said no.
Max’s legs, on the stairs on Tuesday morning, said no very clearly.
“You’ve been out of bed for two days,” Otto said.
“Your resting heart rate is still twelve beats higher than it was before the flu.
If you skip, you’ll be sick in the bin again, and this time you’ll have earned it.”
I’m not skipping.
I’m going to watch.
“You’ve never gone anywhere to watch in your life.”
I’ll watch.
And do shadowboxing.
Slowly.
“I’m putting that in the log,” said Otto, “word for word, so I can read it back to you on the way home.”
The cabinet had gone back into ‘t Hoekje on Monday afternoon.
Henk had carried it down the street on his own, on one shoulder, like a man carrying a door, while Max walked beside him with the power supply in a Hema bag and Sanne walked in front with her arms out.
Joop had looked at Henk, and at the cabinet, and said, “Henk,” and Henk had said, “Joop,” and that had been the whole conversation.
Tim’s two kwartjes (quarter-guilder coins) were still on the corner by the joystick.
He’d played the first game.
At twenty to six on Tuesday the Opel was in the street with its engine running.
Henk didn’t say anything when Max got in.
He didn’t say anything on the way, either.
He drove the way he walked, slowly, with both hands on the wheel, and took the hill to Geitenkamp in second gear without effort, the hill that had made Max stand on his pedals and gasp and once get off and push.
At the top, Max looked out of the window at the bus stop where he’d leaned on his handlebars in September and breathed while a woman with a shopping trolley stared at him.
Seven minutes, he thought.
By car.
It takes me twenty.
“Twenty-two,” said Otto.
“And you’re welcome.”
Henk stopped outside the old bakery with BROOD & BANKET (bread & pastry) still showing through the paint.
He looked at it.
At the white-painted window.
At the faded photos taped above it.
“That’s Harry Tempel’s,” he said.
“You know him?”
“Everybody knew him.
He was in the paper.
Seventy-something.” Henk turned the engine off.
“I’ll wait.”
“It’s an hour and a half.”
“I’ve got the paper,” said Henk, and took the Telegraaf off the back seat and opened it.
* * *
Max had been away for a week and a half, and the room had forgotten him.
The bowl-haircut boy looked surprised to see him.
Mehmet nodded.
Bart, Jeroen’s cousin, said, “Dikke (Fatso)!
Thought you’d quit,” and then, more slowly, “Shit.
Who had this week on the list?”
On the changing room door, the list was still there, longer, with more crossings-out.
At the bottom, under NOOIT.
Rico.
f1., there were two new lines.
NOOIT.
Mehmet.
f1.
And under that, in pencil, in very small letters, as if whoever had written it didn’t want to be seen: NOOIT.
f1.
(Never.
f1.) No name.
The coin was taped on next to it.
“Somebody anonymous,” said Otto.
“Interesting.”
It’s Bart.
“How do you know?”
Because he just said ‘shit’.
Harry was at his desk with the cash box.
He looked up at Max, and down at the ledger, where November was a new page, and back up.
Max put twenty-five guilders on the desk.
Not Oma’s.
His own, kwartjes from Joop’s till, which Oma had changed into notes at the Postbank on Saturday while he was still in bed.
“You’ve been ill,” Harry said.
“Flu.”
“You look like shit.”
“Yes.”
Harry wrote Brouwer, M.
Nov.
f25 in the ledger.
“Sit out the skipping,” he said.
“Shadowboxing, at the back.
If you throw up, you clean it.
I’m not doing it twice.”
* * *
He sat out the skipping on the bench, and it was the worst thing he’d done since he got here.
Worse than the bin.
He sat with his hands between his knees and listened to the rope whirr and slap, and watched Mehmet skip, and the two girls, and Bart, who was much better than he’d been in September, and the bowl-haircut boy, who was exactly the same.
He watched Rico, at the back, hitting the heavy bag on his own while he waited for the older class, with his half-asleep face and his car-door kicks.
“You’re sulking,” said Otto.
I’m watching.
“You’re watching very sulkily.”
Then shadowboxing.
He went to the back of the room, by the cracked mirror, where Harry had said.
He stood in front of it and looked at himself.
Paler than last time.
A bit less of him, he thought, in the face, though that would be the flu.
Eighty-one and a half on Oma’s scale on Monday, which Otto had said was mostly water and would be back by Friday and not to get excited about.
He brought his hands up.
He didn’t do it slowly, in the end.
He did it the way you do it when you have nothing in the tank and you know you can’t waste a single movement, because there aren’t any spare.
Jab.
Not a punch, a touch.
Out on the line and back on the line.
The shoulder up.
The chin down.
Step off to the left after it, a small step, a half-turn on the ball of the front foot, so whoever you’d jabbed was now punching air where you’d been.
Jab, cross.
The hip through.
The back heel turning out.
Then the pivot, again, out to the side, and a hook from the new angle.
Low kick.
Dutch style, shin into the thigh, the hip turned all the way over, the arm on the same side swinging down and back for balance and power.
Then the kicking leg landing not where it started but forward, in a new stance, southpaw, so the next jab came from the other side.
He was doing what he’d done ten thousand times at Fight Factory, with Rinus shouting from the corner.
The thing nobody here did, because nobody here had seen it yet.
A fighter who didn’t stand in front of you and trade.
A fighter who was never where you’d aimed, who turned you, who fought from angles you didn’t know existed.
The reason he could do it on an empty tank was that it didn’t need power.
It needed timing.
You didn’t make it work by being strong.
You made it work by being in the right place half a second before the other person knew there was a place.
He did it for three minutes.
His arms were burning by the end.
His breath was ragged.
But he hadn’t dropped his hands once.
He looked up.
In the mirror, behind his shoulder, the room had gone quiet.
Not all of it.
The pad work in the middle was still going, the slap of gloves, the bowl-haircut boy grunting.
But two or three people on the edge were looking at him.
Rico had stopped hitting the bag.
And Harry was standing behind him with a pair of pads on his hands.
* * *
Max had never seen Harry hold pads.
Nobody had, apparently.
In nine weeks Harry had walked round with his roll-up and his kitchen timer and moved people’s elbows with two fingers.
He had never picked up a pad.
The older boys held pads.
Harry watched.
The pads were old, brown leather gone almost black, cracked across the palms, with a hand-stitched patch on one where the stuffing had come through.
They had been somebody’s in about 1975.
Harry held them up.
Not high.
At chin height, close together.
“Jab,” he said.
Max jabbed.
The pad clapped.
The sound was different from the sound of the bowl-haircut boy’s pads.
Sharper.
Harry caught it a fraction early, moving the pad into the punch, so that it met it instead of just being hit.
“Again.”
Jab.
Clap.
“Jab, cross.”
Clap, clap.
“Step off.”
Max stepped off, left, the small pivot, and Harry turned with him without moving his feet, just his hips, so the pads were still in front of Max.
“Hook.”
Clap.
Harry dropped the right pad low, to thigh height, on the outside. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
It was the oldest sign in Dutch kickboxing.
Kick here.
Max kicked.
Shin on leather, the hip over, the arm swinging down.
It didn’t have much in it, after the flu, after the shadowboxing.
But it landed where it was meant to, flat and true, with the sound a kick should make, a deep thick thock.
Harry brought both pads back up.
He didn’t say anything.
He moved them a fraction to the left, and then a fraction lower, and Max followed them with his eyes and his feet, and they did it again.
Jab, cross, step off, hook, low kick.
Again.
Then Harry changed it.
He came forward a step, suddenly, with the right pad swinging in at head height, the way a real opponent would throw a hook, and Max didn’t think.
He ducked under it, rolling with it, the way he’d done ten thousand times, and came up on the outside, behind Harry’s right shoulder, where there was nobody at all to hit him.
From there, with Harry turning, he jabbed the left pad as it came round.
Clap.
Harry stopped.
He stood still with the pads on his hands and the roll-up on his lip and looked at Max.
The room was quieter now.
Rico was leaning on the heavy bag with both arms.
“Who taught you that?” Harry said.
The roll and come up on the outside.
Rinus, a hundred times, at Fight Factory in Arnhem-Noord in 2019, shouting Don’t stand there, you’re too big to stand there, get out of the way and come back where he can’t see you.
And before Rinus, a thousand hours of fight footage on a laptop in a room in Malburgen at two in the morning, rewound and watched again and rewound.
“Videos,” Max said.
Harry looked at him for a long time.
“Videos,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
Harry made a sound in his throat.
A grunt, short, from somewhere low down.
It might have been disbelief.
It might have been something else.
“Again,” he said, and brought the pads up.
* * *
They went for two more rounds.
Harry fed him the same combination, and then a different one, and then the first one again with the hook at the end, and every time, at a different moment, he stepped in and swung the pad, and Max rolled under it and came up on the outside.
By the end of the third round Max could barely lift his arms, and Harry stopped, and took the pads off, and dropped them on the bench.
“Klaar,” he said to Max, and walked back to the middle of the room to move somebody’s elbow.
Max sat down on the bench.
His legs were shaking.
He hadn’t thrown up.
He looked down at the old brown pads next to him on the bench, at the cracked palms and the hand-stitched patch.
“Respect,” said Otto, very quietly.
“Stage two.
I’ve been keeping a list.”
I don’t care about the list.
“You do a bit.”
A bit, Max admitted.
* * *
At half past seven, when the others were filing out, Max went past Harry’s desk with his bag.
Harry was writing in the ledger and didn’t look up.
“Thursday,” Harry said.
“Six o’clock.”
“Half five.” Harry turned a page.
“Before the others.”
Max stopped.
“I can’t pay any more.
I’m paying the twenty-five.”
Harry looked up at him for the first time.
His eyes were pale blue, very sharp, sunk deep under white eyebrows, in a face that had been hit a great many times by a great many people.
“Did I say pay?” he said.
Then he went back to his ledger, and Max went out into the street, where the Opel was waiting under the streetlight with the engine running and his father inside it, reading the Telegraaf by the light of the little lamp in the roof.
Max got in.
Henk folded the paper.
“Well?”
“Harry held the pads.”
Henk started the engine.
He pulled away from the kerb.
He drove all the way down the hill in second gear without saying anything, and at the bottom, at the lights, waiting for green, he said:
“He never held pads.
Not in the paper.
Not for anyone.”
“I know.”
The light went green.
Henk drove on.
“Thursday, then,” he said.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk