Max heard the alarm through the wall at ten past five.
It was Henk’s alarm, the old Helder clock radio with the red numbers, and it played two seconds of Radio 2 before a hand came down on it.
Then the bed creaked.
Then feet on the floor, the toilet, the tap, the stairs.
Max lay in the dark and listened to his father’s whole morning through the walls of a terraced house built in 1962.
Friday, he thought.
Den Helder.
Helicopter at ten.
“Your father is leaving,” Otto said, quiet, the way you talk in a house where people are asleep.
I know.
“Are you getting up?”
He was already up.
He pulled on yesterday’s tracksuit bottoms and went down in his socks.
Henk was in the kitchen in his work jacket, the orange one with reflective strips, standing at the counter eating a slice of bread with nothing on it.
His sea bag was by the front door.
The keys of the Opel were in his hand.
He looked at Max coming in, and then at the clock on the cooker.
“Go back to bed.”
“I’m up.”
Henk chewed.
He swallowed.
He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and put it on the counter.
“Household,” he said.
“Till the twelfth of October.
And the gas is on automatic.”
“Okay.”
“Oma’s got the number of the office.
If something happens.”
“Okay.”
They stood there.
The fridge hummed.
Outside a car went past slowly, its headlights moving across the ceiling and down the wall.
“Are you going to say bye to Sanne?” Max said.
Henk looked up at the ceiling, as if he could see through it.
“She’s sleeping.”
“She’d want you to.”
Henk didn’t move for a moment.
Then he put the bread down on the counter and went up the stairs, slowly, the way a much heavier man would.
Max heard him stop on the landing outside Sanne’s door.
He heard nothing else.
No door handle.
No voice.
After about half a minute, Henk came back down.
“Let her sleep,” he said, not looking at Max, and picked up the sea bag.
At the front door he stopped with his hand on the latch.
Max thought he was going to say something.
He could see it in his father’s back, a kind of gathering, like a man about to lift something heavy.
“Don’t burn the shed down,” Henk said.
“I won’t.”
The door opened and the cold came in, and the smell of wet street.
Then it closed.
Max stood in the hall and listened to the Opel start on the third try and pull away, and turn at the end of the street, and go.
“Ten days,” Otto said.
“Eleven, if you count the Tuesday.
Your father said, I estimate, a hundred and fifty words to you in that time.
Thirty-eight of them were about the television.”
You counted.
“I count everything.
It’s how I cope.”
Max went into the kitchen and finished his father’s bread, because otherwise it’d go in the bin.
* * *
Sanne came down at seven in her nightie and stood in the doorway of the living room, looking at the chair.
The orange blanket was folded on the arm.
The Telegraaf was gone.
The ashtray he’d been using as a coaster was clean.
“Is he gone?”
“He left early.
You were sleeping.”
“He didn’t say bye.”
“He went up to your room,” Max said.
“He looked in.
He didn’t want to wake you.”
Sanne looked at him for a long time, the way she did, with her chin down, until he wasn’t sure she believed any of it.
“Okay,” she said.
She ate her bread.
She didn’t argue about the crust side.
She didn’t say anything about the biscuit, or the cat on her lunchbox, or the fact that Max had put the cheese on in the wrong order.
On the back of the bike she held on to him so lightly that twice he thought she’d fallen off and twisted round to check.
At the school gate she slid down and went in without saying bye to him either.
“She’s taking it badly,” Otto said.
She’s nine.
She takes it the only way there is.
Max stood at the gate until she’d gone through the double doors.
Bas Koster was there by the bike rack with two other boys.
He looked at Sanne as she went past.
She didn’t look back.
* * *
At school, Femke de Wit turned round in maths and dropped a folded square of paper on his desk without a word.
He opened it.
It was a drawing of a television on legs, in very good pencil, with a speech bubble that said HORIZONTAL SYNC PULSE??
and an arrow pointing to a small man in a cardigan with steam coming out of his ears.
Underneath she’d written: My dad wants to know where you got that word.
He wrote back: A book.
Which book?
He didn’t answer that one either, and she gave him a look over her shoulder that was nine parts suspicious and one part curious, and turned back to the board.
At the second break he sat on the low wall by the bike shed with Jeroen, who ate two krentenbollen and talked about Vitesse and Ajax and a girl in 3B called Natasha who had looked at him on the stairs.
Max listened to about a third of it.
“What’s up with you?” Jeroen said at last.
“My dad went back out this morning.
To the platform.”
“Oh.” Jeroen thought about this.
His father was a bus driver who came home every night at half six and fell asleep in front of Studio Sport.
“Is that bad?”
“It’s normal.”
“Oh,” Jeroen said again, and held out the paper bag, and this time Max took a whole krentenbol, and ate it, and didn’t count it.
“You did count it,” Otto said.
“About two hundred calories.
I’m not judging.
It was a medicinal krentenbol.”
* * *
When he came home from collecting Sanne, he went out to the shed for the first time that day.
On the workbench, next to the Weller with its new tip, was a canvas roll tied with a cotton tape.
He untied it.
It unrolled across the bench.
Inside, each in its own pocket, were eight screwdrivers: four flat, four Phillips, from tiny to big, with yellow and black handles that still had the shine of the shop on them.
Proper German ones.
The kind Rinus at Fight Factory had kept in a locked drawer in his office, back in another life, and nobody else had been allowed to touch.
Max picked up the smallest.
It was perfectly balanced.
The tip was ground clean and square.
It fit the screws on the back of the Bakker TV like it had been made for them.
Next to his own screwdrivers, Max’s old ones, from a set that had come free with a box of washing powder, it looked like a scalpel next to a butter knife.
“Your father,” Otto said.
Yeah.
“Without a note.”
Yeah.
“I’m going to make a reasonable guess,” Otto said.
“He saw you working on Tuesday night with screwdrivers that came free with Omo.
He thought about it for three days.
Then he went into town, on his last day home, and bought these, and put them where you’d find them after he’d gone.
Because if he’d given them to you, you’d have said thank you, and he would have had to say something back.”
Max stood there holding the screwdriver.
That’s a lot of guessing.
“I’m a project manager.
Guessing is half the job.”
* * *
Sanne stayed quiet all evening.
She didn’t watch TV.
She sat at the kitchen table with her colouring pencils and drew something, and covered it with her arm when Max walked past.
She ate four pieces of macaroni and pushed the rest round her plate.
When he asked her if she wanted a bath, she said no.
When he asked her if she wanted to see Puntje, she said no.
At eight he sat down across from her.
“Sanne.”
“What.”
“Can I see?”
She kept her arm where it was for a while.
Then she moved it.
It was a drawing of their house.
The door and the window and the shed in the garden with a thin line coming out of its roof, which he realised was meant to be smoke, or a wire.
In the window was a fat boy with very straight lines coming out of his head, and a small girl with long hair and a big triangle that was obviously a sandwich.
In the corner of the page, on the far side, was a big blue patch.
In the middle of the blue patch was a tiny grey square on four sticks, and on top of it, a tiny man.
“That’s Pap,” Sanne said, and put her finger on him.
“On the sea.”
“It’s good,” Max said.
His voice came out a bit wrong.
“He doesn’t fit in the house,” Sanne said.
“So I put him there.”
Max looked at the drawing for a long time.
Sanne watched him look at it.
“Does he not like us?” she said.
“Careful,” Otto said, very quietly.
“Careful, careful.”
Max thought about the alarm at ten past five.
The half-minute outside her door.
The tip for the soldering iron that Henk had phoned Oma about.
The screwdrivers in their canvas roll.
“He likes us,” Max said.
“He’s just really bad at saying it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.
Maybe nobody ever said it to him.”
Sanne thought about this with her chin on her hands.
“That’s stupid,” she said.
“It is a bit stupid.”
“You say it.”
“Do I?”
“You say it with sandwiches,” Sanne said, and picked up a pencil, and went back to colouring the sea.
* * *
He put her to bed at half nine.
Then he went out to the shed, untied the canvas roll again, and put all eight screwdrivers back into their pockets one by one, in order, smallest to largest.
As he rolled it up, a slip of paper fell out of the last pocket onto the floor.
He picked it up.
It was a till receipt, thin and curling, with purple ink that was already fading at the edges.
RADIO RUITER.
STEENSTRAAT 41.
ARNHEM.
SCHROEVENDR.
SET 8-DLG.
f 38,50.
(Screwdriver set, 8 pieces.
f 38.50.)
06-09-1990.
Thirty-eight fifty, for a man who’d eaten dry bread that morning.
Max turned the receipt over, out of habit.
On the back, in his father’s block capitals, in biro, was a short list.
It looked like something written on a counter while someone else talked:
EPROM.
2764.
WISSER?
(EPROM.
2764.
Eraser?)
ZEGT: KOMT IE WEL VOOR.
(Says: it’ll turn up.)
“He went to Radio Ruiter,” Otto said.
“And he asked what you’d need next.”
* * *
Thanks for reading.
Every chapter goes free here in time.
~ F0rk