Axolotl Roadkill (2 page)

Frau Messerschmidt is retired and works cash-in-hand for twelve hours a day because her husband’s a pathologically argumentative bastard who never leaves the house. The question arises as to whether I can deal with staff who talk about their family background and my truancy tendencies after only sixty minutes of self-sacrificing labour. I want staff who don’t speak German and don’t shoot melancholy glances in my direction showing me how terrible it all is, especially the thing with the ethnic-patterned dress that hasn’t been ironed in two years, and that life just doesn’t get any better later on. Ironing is a whole nother story. Daylight is a whole ’nother story.

Funnily enough, I know exactly what I want: not to grow up. In a couple of years I won’t have the energy to think deep thoughts about what colour my first ever sofa cover ought to be. I’ll look back sadly at a development process scarred by excessively counterproductive crashes ’n’ burns and be mortally ashamed of what I’m currently hammering into the computer, in finest throwing-a-sprat-to-catch-a-mackerel style – I think that’s what they call it. Because by then I’ll presumably have finally made sense of Foucault, because I’ll have different yardsticks and I’ll have killed my family and I’ll know suddenly that all this – this pile of trash collaged out of unstructured daily routines and truancy and sweat-soaked sheets – was the best time of my life.

Edmond comes home. He’s brought cigarettes and three slabs of hash in an Aldi bag. He doesn’t just look like Marlon Brando, he’s compiled an important element of his life straight out of his biography – the minimalist interior decoration for our flat. Two rooms laid out with a total of thirteen mattresses, with free access for any and every unknown junkie off the street. Edmond thinks it’s good to sleep in a different part of the flat every night, and in summer he always leaves the front door open so that the whole fresh air thing works better. So you could hardly call it breaking and entering; all a burglar would have to do is walk in through the open front door and put the nearest MacBook Pro or whatever under their jacket and stroll out again. One time Edmond unknowingly opened the entry door downstairs to burglars and all our neighbours got robbed. A speaker system, a cleverly placed overhead projector, ashtrays and throws printed with comic characters. A white poster on one unrendered wall, with minuscule letters saying,
Nowhere better than this place
.

Crap music is crap music; I just don’t find it funny. ‘Good Day’ by The Kinks is pretty much OK, it starts with an alarm clock, then comes Patsy Cline, overrated, ‘Sunday Morning’ by Margo Guryan, the Violent Femmes singing ‘Love is gone’, and I can’t help telling myself there must be a grain of truth in there somewhere, thinking of shredded body parts in the snow. They’re primarily songs written in the pre-ecstasy era.

This is Edmond’s iTunes library. I tell him I’m feeling magnificent. He tells me the song ‘Hey Hey, My My’ represents the missing link between alt-rock and punk, and that generally accepted standards define anyone as an absolute provincial hick if they use the words ‘techno’ and ‘culture’ to describe a youth movement that regards itself as alternative, rather than chav discos for the upper income bracket. Seeing ecstasy, techno and yourself as a combination to break down all boundaries is so nineties, he tells me, just like coke is so eighties and curly hair’s the new straight hair.

‘But that combination, as you call it, is all I’ve got left,’ I say.

We lay the hash slabs out on the carpet in the hall and dilute it by spreading crumbled-up
Lebkuchen
evenly across the top and then ironing it in.

‘Oh God, look, I’ve got this incredibly huge bump in my eye socket, I bet it’s going to be a massive spot!’ I say.

Edmond is brushing his teeth. As he answers, ‘Maybe it’ll be a boil,’ a froth of toothpaste drips down the front of the monkey’s head on his Christopher Kane T-shirt.

‘You bastard!’

‘Karl Marx had boils on his arse for years and then he got them lanced good and proper.’

‘Are there any women who’ve made action movies? Apart from Karl Marx, I mean?’

‘Angelina Jolie.
Lara Croft
.’

‘Directors, you mong.’

‘Oh right, no idea.’

‘There aren’t any, are there?’

‘No, you’re right, there aren’t any. Maybe that’s a job for you.’

‘I’ll just go out and revolutionize the female action movie genre.’

‘The action melodrama, it’ll be.’

‘The female action melodrama.’

‘The feminist action melodrama.’

‘No, the anti-feminist action melodrama! Someone told me today I was scared of getting close to people. What’s your take?’

‘My take is, where Mifti comes from they eat our worst nightmares for breakfast. Wherever Mifti goes she leaves a trail of burnt-out hearts behind her. She’s here today and gone tomorrow. But for most people she’s the incarnation of the Sputnik crisis turned woman. I’ll just treat you like shit.’

The day refuses to take a decisive turn. Let’s talk about three-year-old Aeneas. Several hours ago he was hanging upside down from a climbing frame, shouting at one of his parents, ‘No, I don’t wanna go to yoga!’

My sister invited his mother to dinner at our place in her cream-coloured nylon coat, and to add insult to injury she brought him along too. Right now he’s playing with a cannon made of Lego, which can catapult small tin soldiers right across the living room, and the whole world expects me to make him a knight’s outfit out of some weird insulation sheeting stuff. I’m the perfect image of chaos and disarray and paedophobia, and his mother interrupts me to say, ‘Sorry, is the noise bothering you?’

‘No – he’s just a kid,’ I answer.

We eat fish fingers. Aeneas is sitting on a shelf in his knight’s outfit, waiting for something or other.

‘What are you doing up there?’ I ask.

No answer.

‘Aeneas, where are you?’

‘On a train.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘To Barcelona. To fight.’

‘Oh Annika, you’re the only person I know who can wear everything!’

‘Thanks, that’s really—’

‘Seriously, you can wear absolutely anything.’

‘Oh no, I’m just really careful about what I buy. That’s probably why it looks like I can wear anything.’

‘Yeah, you can wear just anything.’

‘Annika is what you’d call a cross between Germany’s sex-shop pioneer and former stunt pilot Beate Uhse, Germaine Greer and Mother Teresa. She’s worked her way up to a position where people now look up to her, she looks a million dollars and she adores Argentinian beef. The thing is, searching for some ancient traumatic odysseys through the Berlin underground scene clad in neon T-shirts is pretty much out, in her book. Aeneas’s father has come round as well. He’s sitting slap bang across from me, out of his depth without the slightest idea of how to maintain a semblance of family life for the sake of this socially disturbed child. It’s a family life that was shipwrecked on the rocks of his lack of intelligence and his ex-wife’s effusive emancipation ambitions. She’s just talking about how her new lover bought a set of glass carafes for four hundred euros on eBay.

They used to take baths at our place in the dim and distant past, when they had the builders in. We could always hear them through the crack of the door, arguing in a pseudo overwrought way about feminism and the feminist alliance with patriarchal society and female sexuality restructured by men through the whole pornography thing until it’s not sexuality at all. And how the womb is only a product of discourse and all that. And it was great because neither of them could get out of the bath to get a bit of distance on the subject – they didn’t want to walk around naked in our flat.

Terrible lives are the best stroke of luck.

When he notices me noticing him he gives a sudden croak: ‘Hey, Mifti, were you also at Luther’s store on Schönhauser today? They had some dumb sit-down rave.’

‘Oh, yeah. No, what makes you think that? Edmond was there on his own. I don’t even know what you mean by a sit-down rave.’

‘What?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Must be the time zones. You look like you’ve got mini jet lag, and all the writing on the cigarettes is in English.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The cigarettes, where did you get them?’

‘Edmond just brought them home.’

‘Oh right, cool. I didn’t smoke when I was your age. I was still learning to tie knots in balloons.’

‘When I was your age . . . ha ha ha.’

‘Ha ha ha ha ha!’

It makes me want to puke, all that adult blustering and filibustering, all that talk about how little Aeneas pointed at someone at the next table in a restaurant and now his dumb mother had to go and say that stupid German saying beloved of all grown-ups, ‘Aeneas, we don’t point naked fingers at people with clothes on!’ And Aeneas went and poked his finger in a potato and carried on pointing it and the potato at the woman regardless. Zero punchline, but still, ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’

Annika’s mobile rings. Frau Pegler has informed my father that I haven’t been to school for the past six weeks. I don’t give a fuck, really I don’t.

‘You’re not the victim, you’re the sole perpetrator.’

‘Excuse me, but your thing’s burning!’

‘School qualifications? What do I need them for? I’ve got a bike and I can keep myself entertained just as well with French films where all the protagonists stuff some kind of crap into themselves out of handmade clay pots while cheating on their wives.’

20:13. Text message from Father in Tel Aviv: ‘What R U going to do now?’

20:29. Promising text message to Father in Tel Aviv: ‘Return to petty criminality no longer an option.’

20:33. ‘Y don’t you call?’

20:34. Text to Ophelia in her androgynous phase: ‘Know what, I want to shower you with love right now. Everything. Anytime.’

I grew up wild and I want to stay wild. It’s 3 a.m. and my partied-out body is sitting in a taxi, submerged to death in its role as a victim. The driver’s telling me about his son, who’s left his wife after ten years, and about his own wife, who’s cheating on him, and about God, with whom he claims to have a pretty good connection. That’s why he’s willing to forgive homos, because it’s like not their fault they’re that way. I’m running a fever, coordination problems, a BAC of 0.1 per cent and I’ve gone and agreed to go to a place of absolute opportunistic inhibition all over again. It’s all about my respect-worthiness, about steel and concrete, about a huge glazed façade that can be closed up using mobile shutters, about my fear of death, it’s about the explosion of perception and perhaps also a little bit about an organized form of aural events.

My wildness is a characteristic idiosyncrasy. I can either do what I want and satisfy my characteristics or just not.

Doing what I want is dangerous because it really makes me vulnerable. Not doing it is not an option.

That’s why I lie to you. I say, it’s primarily a matter of principle right now.

* * *

I’m sixteen years old and presently capable of nothing but wanting to establish myself – despite colossal exhaustion – in contexts that have nothing to do with the society in which I go to school and suffer from depression. I’m in Berlin.

It’s all about my delusions.

I can’t believe I’m exposing myself to all this crap all over again, on cognac-coloured four-inch heels. An industrial wasteland, of course; from far off you can see a former power plant in which the plan is to forget myself in half an hour at the most. I negotiate a path fenced in with neon tubes, generally regarded as the most awesome path in the world, which has never interested me, for some unfathomable reason. I find my dissociative identity disorder more interesting than anything this city constantly spews in my face. Facing a ten-foot security chief called Syd, I pretend to be on the guest list of a barman who spends his daylight hours attempting to represent the confusing prospects of our urban world by means of contemporary charcoal sketches. I circumnavigate a mile-long queue of overstyled 23-year-olds from stable family backgrounds, in whose eyes I’m not a human being but merely underdressed and fickle. Oral incontinence. They’re chucking shit in my face. I’m a motherfucking immoral cunt and I need to get a handle on my life.

The big question of the night: ‘Hey, what’s goin’ down here?’

The big answer of the night: ‘Hey, nuttin’s goin’ down.’

The big outcome of the night: ‘Wicked, no queue, taxi’s waiting back there, World Health Organization definitions everywhere you look, Jesus.’

From where I stand in front of the DJ console, on the left behind a big glass wall is a long bar, and there’s various seating options; on the right behind the dance floor is one of the unmissable darkrooms. As far as the eye can see, these pseudo-ravished individuals in their mid-twenties are trying to dance their souls out of their bodies. I’m sitting on leather upholstery, unimpressed by some absurd music style, being asked the most important question of the night after only ten minutes of unspectacular exuberance crap. Sixty-foot ceilings, two thousand five hundred people and HIV-positive Ophelia, who I’ve arranged to meet at the entrance. She looks gorgeous and anorexic in equal parts, wearing a half-open bomber jacket with nothing underneath, teamed with black leggings and satin Lanvin sandals with mirrored heels, and I talk undiluted crap the minute I see her.

‘Everything’s fine as long as some simple silhouette is transformed into an absolute must-have this season, huh, honey? Classic elegance.’

‘I’d step into any breach for you anytime, Mifti.’

‘And the ruffled fall of a silk curtain conceals most of your body.’

‘I really want to have a good time.’

‘But it’s just too hot in here.’

So then at some point she asks with a gesture towards the ladies, ‘See that guy over there?’

It’s the guy whose presence has prevented me from running past him nonchalantly to the cigarette machine. Just for a change, he doesn’t awaken any sexual yearning – only a bit of an emotional affection attack because he’s so cute, because he’s toned and he looks so totally washed, in contrast to all the chubbed-out chauvinist hippies around here. I’m only talking uninspired crap anyway.