“Can you be home at six on Tuesday?” Max said on Monday night.
“And Thursday.
For Sanne.”
Henk was in the chair with the Telegraaf folded to the football.
He didn’t lower it.
“Why?”
“I’m going to a sportschool.
Kickboxing.
Tempel, in Geitenkamp.
It’s six till half seven.”
The paper stayed up.
Behind it, Henk made a noise.
It wasn’t yes and it wasn’t no.
It was the noise a man makes when he’s heard you and would like it to count as an answer.
“She doesn’t need a babysitter, she needs someone in the house,” Max said.
“She’ll be watching TV.
You don’t have to do anything.”
The noise again, slightly shorter.
That’s a yes, Max thought.
“I’d log it as a seventy percent yes,” Otto said.
“Sixty-five.”
* * *
On Tuesday he left at twenty to six with twenty-five guilders folded in the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms and his heart going like he was about to sit an exam.
Henk was home.
He was in the kitchen eating bread over the sink.
Sanne was on the sofa watching Alles Kits.
Max said “Bye,” to both of them and got one “Bye” back, from Sanne.
Geitenkamp was up the hill, and the hill was real.
Max did the first half on the saddle and the second half standing up, the bike swaying side to side under eighty-five kilos, a number 3 bus going past him so close the wind of it nearly pushed him into the kerb.
At the top he had to stop and lean on the handlebars and breathe for a full minute.
A woman with a shopping trolley walked past him and gave him a look.
“That was the warm-up,” Otto said.
Shut up.
“Respectfully.
Pace yourself in there.
I don’t want to watch you die twice.”
Sportschool Tempel was on a corner, in a long low building that had been a bakery once.
You could still see BROOD & BANKET (bread & pastry) in ghost letters under the paint on the side wall.
The front window was painted white on the inside up to head height, and above the paint there were photos taped to the glass, sun-faded to blue: men in satin shorts, a trophy, a man with a moustache shaking hands with a Thai man in a gold shirt.
The door was propped open with a brick.
Inside it smelt of sweat, leather, Tiger Balm and old cigarette smoke.
There were three heavy bags hanging on chains from a steel beam, a ring in the corner with grey canvas and ropes wrapped in tape, a rack of skipping ropes, and a wall of mirrors with a crack running across one of them like a lightning bolt.
Max stopped in the doorway.
Fight Factory, he thought.
Rinus.
The smell.
It wasn’t Fight Factory.
Nothing in here had been built after 1975.
But the smell was the same, and the sound was the same, the slap of shins on bags and the hiss of breath through mouthguards, and for a moment he was twenty-eight and one ninety-four in his head, and it felt like coming home.
Then he caught himself in the cracked mirror.
A fat kid in a too-small tracksuit, red in the face, sweat soaking through under the arms from the hill.
“Ja?”
A man had come out of a side door.
He was short, maybe one seventy, and wiry the way old wood is wiry.
He had a flat nose that had been broken more than once, white stubble, forearms like knotted rope, and a roll-up stuck to his bottom lip that bobbed when he talked.
He was wearing a grey sweater with the sleeves pushed up and old blue tracksuit bottoms with a stripe down the side.
The man from the photo in the window.
Thirty years older.
“I’m here for the class,” Max said.
“The youth class.”
The man looked at him.
Up and down.
It didn’t take long.
“Hoe oud?”
“Fourteen.”
“Ever done it before?”
Twenty years.
“A bit.”
The man took the roll-up out of his mouth, looked at it, put it back in.
“Kijken is gratis,” he said.
“Meedoen is vijfentwintig gulden.”
Max got the notes out of his pocket.
The man waved them away.
“After.
If you’re still here after, you pay.
If you’re not, you’ve lost nothing.” He jerked his chin at a bench by the wall, where four or five kids and a couple of older boys were sitting lacing their shoes.
“Shoes off.
On the mat.
Harry.”
“Max.”
“I know.
Max.” Harry Tempel had already turned away. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
* * *
There were nine of them in the youth class, from about twelve to sixteen, and two older boys who were apparently there to help, or to show off, it wasn’t clear.
One of the older ones was tall and brown and lazy-looking, with a loose way of standing, as if his body were taking a break between things.
The others called him Rico.
The warm-up was skipping.
Three rounds of three minutes.
Harry stood in the middle with a kitchen timer in his hand and the roll-up in his mouth and said “Tijd,” and everyone started, and the room filled with the whirr and slap of rope on the wooden floor.
Max’s first minute was fine.
He’d skipped ten thousand rounds in his life.
His feet remembered it, light, on the balls of his feet, the rope coming round in a flat easy loop.
His body didn’t.
At ninety seconds his calves were burning.
At two minutes his breath was a saw going in and out.
His feet started to slap instead of tap, and the rope caught his heel, once, twice, and every time it caught he had to stop and start again with everyone watching.
At three minutes he was bent double with his hands on his knees.
“One minute rest,” Harry said.
The second round he made it to a minute and a half.
Then the rope caught and he didn’t get it started again.
He stood there with it in his hands, swaying, the room sliding a bit to the left.
“Your heart rate is very high,” Otto said, very far away.
“I’d like you to sit…”
Max didn’t sit.
He walked very fast to the corner where there was a grey plastic bin full of tape and plasters and empty Spa bottles, and bent over it, and threw up everything he’d eaten since lunch.
Behind him the skipping stopped.
Somebody laughed.
Then a couple of others.
A boy of about thirteen with a bowl haircut said, “Gadver,” and somebody else said, “Not in the bin, man, that’s the bin,” and that got a bigger laugh.
Max stayed bent over the bin for a while.
His eyes were streaming.
His throat burned.
He could hear Harry’s kitchen timer ticking in the silence.
He’d been here before.
Not here, but here.
Nine years old, first week at the club in Arnhem-Zuid that Oma had walked him to, and he’d thrown up then too.
He’d cried on the bus home and not gone back for a month.
Not this time.
He spat.
Wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
Turned round.
They were all looking at him.
Rico, by the ropes, wasn’t laughing.
He had his head on one side.
Harry hadn’t moved.
The roll-up was still on his lip.
“Tijd,” Harry said, and clicked the timer.
Max picked up the rope.
He didn’t do the third round well.
He did it badly.
He did about forty skips in total, stopping and starting, the rope catching on his heel every eight or nine times.
But he was skipping when Harry said “Tijd” again, and he was still standing.
* * *
After the skipping, they did shadowboxing in the mirror.
Harry walked behind them, saying nothing, occasionally pushing someone’s elbow in with two fingers or kicking a back foot into place with his own foot.
Max’s hands came up on their own.
Chin down.
Elbows in.
Weight a touch on the back foot.
Jab, and the shoulder came up to cover the chin.
Cross, and the hip turned through.
Hook, and the foot pivoted.
He did it slowly, because there was nothing in his tank, but he did it right, because there was nothing else his body knew how to do in front of a mirror.
Harry stopped behind him.
Max saw him in the mirror, looking.
Not at his face.
At his feet.
Then his hips.
Then his hands.
Harry didn’t say anything.
He moved on to the next kid and pushed her elbow in.
“He saw that,” Otto said, a little clearer now.
He saw nothing.
He’s a coach.
He looks at everyone.
“He looked at you for four seconds longer than everyone else.
I counted.”
They did pad work in pairs.
Max was paired with the bowl-haircut boy, who held the pads like he was holding a dirty nappy, and who hit Max’s pads very hard with a lot of shoulder and no hips, and said “Oh, sorry,” every time he missed and hit Max’s forearm instead.
Max held the pads properly and didn’t say anything.
In his own round he threw slowly.
Jab, cross, hook.
His arms were made of wet sand.
He could barely lift them by the end.
They finished with sit-ups, which Max could do eleven of, and then press-ups, which he could do four of, and then Harry said, “Klaar,” and that was it.
Half past seven.
Everyone was talking, pulling on shoes, drinking water from the tap in the corner with their mouths under it.
Max sat on the bench.
His legs were shaking so badly the bench rattled.
There was sick on his sleeve.
The bowl-haircut boy was telling the others about the bin.
“Right in it.
Splat.” They laughed again.
Max got up and went over to Harry, who was sitting at a little desk by the door with a cash box and a ledger, writing something in pencil.
He put the twenty-five guilders on the desk.
Harry looked at the money.
Then at him.
Then at the sick on his sleeve.
“You could have gone home,” Harry said.
“I know.”
Harry took the notes, smoothed them out, and put them in the cash box.
He wrote something in the ledger.
Max read it upside down.
Brouwer, M.
Sept.
f25.
Then he took a small card out of a drawer, wrote BROUWER on it and handed it over.
It was a membership card, yellowed, with SPORTSCHOOL TEMPEL stamped on it in red and a picture of a fist.
“Tuesday,” Harry said.
“Thursday.
Six o’clock.
Don’t eat after four.”
“Okay.”
“And you clean the bin.”
Max cleaned the bin.
He took it out to the back where there was a drain, and rinsed it with a hose, and dried it with a roll of paper towel while the others filed past him into the street.
Rico was the last one out.
He stopped at the door, bag over his shoulder.
“Hey.
Dikke (Fatso).”
Max looked up.
“Where did you learn to keep your elbow in like that?” Rico said.
Twenty years of doing it wrong first.
“Television.”
Rico looked at him for a second, then grinned, slow and lazy.
“Yeah.
Me too,” he said, and went.
* * *
He walked the bike home.
He didn’t trust his legs on the pedals.
It was dark by the time he got to the Velperweg, and the shops were closed, and the streetlights had come on orange.
“Money after the fee,” Otto said, “forty-two guilders and forty cents.
Household envelope separate.
I’d note that your father put two hundred guilders in it on Saturday, though he didn’t tell you, and I’d note that you may not use it for kickboxing.”
I wasn’t going to.
“I know.
I’m just saying it out loud.”
When he got home the light was on in the living room.
Henk was in the chair, watching the news.
Sanne was asleep on the sofa under the orange blanket.
Somebody had put the blanket on her.
Max stood in the doorway with his bag and his sick-smelling sleeve.
Henk glanced at him.
“How was it?”
It was the first time anyone in this house had asked him how something was.
“I threw up in the bin,” Max said.
Henk looked back at the TV.
For a moment there was nothing.
Then, very quietly, something happened at the corner of his father’s mouth that might have been the start of a smile.
“Your grandfather threw up at his first boxing club,” Henk said.
“Nineteen thirty-something.
Never went back.”
“I’m going back.”
“Mm,” said Henk.
He turned the volume up.
And then, after a while, without looking round: “The office phoned.
I go back out on Friday.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk