At ten past seven Max cut two cheese sandwiches into triangles and put them in Sanne’s lunchbox, the yellow one with a cartoon cat on the lid whose face had been mostly scratched off.
He added an apple.
He thought about it and added a biscuit.
“You never give me a biscuit,” Sanne said from the doorway, in her school clothes, with her shoes in her hand.
“Puntje money.”
“Puntje doesn’t have money.”
“Not yet.”
Henk was still asleep in the chair.
Max had looked in on the way past.
The orange blanket had slipped to the floor in the night and his father had his arms folded across his chest like a man waiting for a bus.
Max put the blanket back on him.
Sanne watched from the hall and didn’t say anything, and neither did he.
He biked her to school with her on the back carrier, her arms round his middle, her schoolbag hanging off one handlebar and his off the other.
It was two kilometres.
At the hill on the Velperweg his thighs burned and his breath went ragged, and Sanne said, “You’re puffing,” and Max said, “I’m not puffing,” puffing.
At the gate of the basisschool a woman in a long cardigan was greeting kids by name.
Juf Annemiek.
Max knew her face from a hundred mornings and couldn’t remember a single conversation with her.
Sanne slid off the carrier.
“Bye.”
“Have you got your gym bag?”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Right.” Gym is Thursday.
“Bye.”
She ran in without looking back.
A boy with a buzz cut was standing by the bike rack, and he said something to her as she went past, and Sanne didn’t answer.
Max watched the boy.
The boy watched Sanne.
“You’ve noted that boy,” Otto said.
I’ve noted that boy.
* * *
His own school was a flat brown building from the seventies off the Velperweg, with a bike shed the size of an aircraft hangar and a smell inside of floor polish and wet coats.
Max had spent four and a half years in this building the first time round, and the second-floor corridor still had the same dent in the radiator by room 214, where somebody’s head had gone in 1987.
In his old life, he’d hated nearly every minute of it.
He’d sat at the back.
He’d forgotten books.
He’d been tired every morning from doing Sanne’s lunch and the washing and the money, and none of the teachers had known any of that, because he’d never told them.
This time he went in thinking, Just get through it.
Keep the marks up.
Nobody notices you if your marks are fine.
First period was Dutch.
A teacher with reading glasses on a chain read a poem by Vasalis out loud and asked them what the poet meant by the word silence.
Nobody knew.
Max knew what the poet meant and kept his mouth shut.
In second period, maths, he sat by the window again, and the bearded maths teacher drew a coordinate system on the blackboard with a squeak that went through everybody’s teeth.
They were doing linear functions.
Max did the whole page of exercises in eleven minutes, then turned to the back of his schrift (exercise book), the squared-paper one, and started drawing.
He’d had Puntje.
Now he needed lines.
A dot was two comparators.
A horizontal line was a comparator on the line counter only, ignoring the dot counter, so the beam stayed on for the whole width of that line.
A vertical line was the opposite: a comparator on the dot counter only, so every line got one tick at the same point, and the dots stacked up into a stripe.
A box was four of those, ANDed together, with a bit of logic to only switch on inside the edges.
He drew it in pencil, carefully, each chip a rectangle, each wire a line on the squares, each gate labelled.
Ruitjespapier was perfect for it.
The squares lined everything up.
You could count pins.
“Is that a bomb?”
Max looked up.
The girl in front of him had turned all the way round in her chair, her arm hooked over the back of it.
She had straight brown hair cut to the jaw, a scar through one eyebrow, and a blue sports bag at her feet with JUDO VERENIGING SHIRO on the side in white letters.
Her own schrift was open on her desk.
In the margins of the maths exercises, small and very neat, she’d drawn a horse, a hand holding a pencil, and the maths teacher’s beard on the body of a goat.
Femke de Wit.
He knew her name from the class list.
The first time round, he didn’t think they’d exchanged ten words in four years.
She’d moved to a different school after third year.
He remembered that vaguely.
Somebody had said her dad’s shop had gone bust.
“It’s not a bomb,” Max said.
“It looks like a bomb.
In films, a bomb has a lot of wires like that and somebody has to cut the red one.”
“There’s no red one.
It’s pencil.”
“That’s what a bomb-maker would say.” She leaned over his desk without asking and turned the schrift towards her.
“What is it?”
“A television.”
“That’s not a television.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“It’s the inside of one.”
Jeroen, two rows back, snorted.
“He said that last week too.”
“The inside of a television doesn’t look like that,” Femke said.
“My dad fixes televisions.
The inside looks like a cake somebody’s dropped.”
“Not the whole inside.
The part that makes the picture.”
“So what’s this one?” She tapped a rectangle.
“A counter.
It counts.
When it gets to a number, it tells this one.” He tapped the next.
“And that one decides whether the screen’s on or off at that moment.”
“Why would it decide that?”
“Because then you get a box.”
Femke looked at the drawing.
She looked at him.
He was aware of being looked at in the way that a fourteen-year-old girl looks at a fat boy who’s started explaining things in maths class, which was a look that had a lot of possible endings.
“Femke,” said the maths teacher.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“No, meneer.”
“Then perhaps you’ll turn around and do exercise twelve.”
She turned round.
Max turned his schrift back.
After about a minute, a folded square of paper came over her shoulder and landed on his desk.
He unfolded it.
Under a very small, very good drawing of a television with legs running away from a boy with a pencil, she’d written:
What box???
He wrote back: A box on the screen.
That I tell it to draw.
The paper went back.
It came back.
Like a rectangle?
On the actual TV?
Yes.
Without a camera.
Yes.
Liar.
He didn’t answer that one.
The paper sat on the corner of his desk for the rest of the lesson.
When the bell went, Femke stood up and slung the judo bag over her shoulder and looked at it, and at him.
“You’re Max Brouwer.”
“Yeah.”
“You were really quiet last year.”
“I’m still quiet.”
“You’re not, though.
You’re explaining bombs in maths.” She hitched the bag higher.
“You can’t make a TV draw a box without a TV studio.
My dad says the picture comes from the transmitter.
All the TV does is show it.”
“Your dad’s wrong.”
Femke’s eyebrows went up.
The one with the scar went up further than the other one.
“I’m going to tell him you said that,” she said.
“Tell him.”
“He fixes about forty a week.
He’s been doing it since before we were born.”
“Then he’ll know what a horizontal sync pulse is,” Max said, “and he’ll know that if you make one yourself, the TV can’t tell the difference.”
She looked at him for a second longer.
Then she went out without saying anything.
Jeroen came up beside him, eating a krentenbol out of a paper bag.
“Femke de Wit just talked to you,” Jeroen said.
“She thinks I make bombs.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Shame,” Jeroen said, and offered him the bag.
Max took a piece of krentenbol, and then thought about the eighty-five kilos and the run that morning, and gave most of it back.
“You were nicer before,” Jeroen said, wounded.
* * *
The rest of the day was history, German and a gym lesson in the sports hall with the climbing ropes.
The gym teacher had them run laps for warm-up.
Max came last by most of a lap.
On the far side of the hall a boy called Ricky made a noise like a pig snuffling, quietly enough that the teacher didn’t hear and loudly enough that everyone else did.
Max kept running.
His face was hot and his lungs were full of broken glass, and it was the same noise Ricky had made the first time round, in this same hall, and Max found he cared about it about ten percent as much as he had then.
Twenty-eight-year-old brain, he thought, coming round the corner past the ropes, heaving.
Fourteen-year-old lungs.
“Your heart rate is around a hundred and ninety,” Otto said.
“I’m guessing.
It feels like a hundred and ninety.
My thinking’s gone a bit grainy.”
Sorry.
“Don’t apologise.
Breathe.”
In the changing room afterwards Max sat on the bench in his vest, red and sweating and waiting for his legs to stop shaking.
Across the room, Ricky was telling a story about his brother’s moped.
Max looked at his hands.
Then at his belly.
Then at the floor.
Tuesday, he thought.
Sportschool Tempel.
Geitenkamp.
Six o’clock.
“You’ll need twenty-five guilders,” Otto said.
I know.
“You have sixty-seven guilders and forty cents in total, and an EPROM programmer to buy parts for.”
I know.
“I’m just saying it out loud so it’s said.”
* * *
He picked Sanne up at half three.
The buzz-cut boy was at the bike rack again.
When Sanne came out he moved so that he was standing right in her way, and she had to go round him, and he moved again.
Max was across the playground before he’d thought about it.
The boy saw him coming and stepped aside, all innocence, and went back to the rack.
“Who’s that?” Max said, as Sanne climbed on the carrier.
“Nobody.”
“Sanne.”
“Bas,” she said, into his back.
“Bas Koster.
He’s just stupid.
Can we go.”
They went.
At home Henk had gone out.
His coat was gone from the hook and his car keys from the bowl, and on the kitchen table was a note in block capitals on the back of an envelope: BOODSCHAPPEN.
H.
(Shopping.
H.) Sanne read it twice and went to watch TV.
Max opened the fridge.
Henk had bought milk, a block of cheese, a pack of beef sausages and a crate of beer.
No vegetables.
No bread.
Groceries, he thought.
Technically.
He went to the C1000 with Sanne on the back again and bought bread, carrots, apples, macaroni and a cucumber with the household money from the drawer under the phone, and Otto kept a running tally in a dry voice like a cashier who’d seen everything.
When they got back, there was a new piece of paper on the fridge under the clog magnet, next to the rig rota.
Max hadn’t put it there.
In Henk’s capitals, on the back of a receipt:
DE WIT BEELD & GELUID.
PRESIKHAAF.
VRAGEN NAAR AD.
(De Wit Sound & Vision.
Presikhaaf.
Ask for Ad.)
Underneath, a phone number.
On the front of the receipt, when Max turned it over, was a till stamp from that afternoon.
Henk had bought something for fl 2,95.
Max stood in front of the fridge with the shopping bag in his hand for a long time.
“Your father,” Otto said slowly, “has been to a TV repair shop.
And bought something for two ninety-five.”
Which TV repair shop?
“The one Femke de Wit’s father owns.
Apparently.”
Why?
“I can’t see anything you can’t see,” Otto said.
“But I’m fairly sure it isn’t about our television.
Ours works fine.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk