You

You push past her and run out of the apartment like someone who’s left herself outside and hopes to find herself again as quickly as possible, before it’s too late.

SCHNAPPI (#ulink_a232ce4a-b3d3-5897-9e6a-836ed6b0c0cd)

She yells at you. She yells at you through the closed door as if you were a stranger, as if your life were worthless and she had the right to spit on it. In the background you hear your father mumbling. She ignores him and goes on yelling at you. One of the neighbors calls up the stairwell, telling her to shut up. You call down telling him to shut up himself.

A door slams.

It continues.

She calls you a whore. She calls you a bastard. You wait till she is out of breath, then press the doorbell, you press so hard that your thumb turns white, when the ringing suddenly stops. You laugh out loud. She’s seriously switched off the bell. You laugh until the tears come and the tears have nothing more to do with laughter. Your finger slips off the doorbell, you sit down on the doormat, your back against the door.

And I’m only three hours late, what’s three hours?

Some nights you slip into the apartment unnoticed, a few times your father sits waiting in the kitchen, he shakes his head and says he was worried. But he isn’t really bothered, he trusts you and calls you his little sunshine.

If it wasn’t for her …

Your mother must have left the key in the lock. You wouldn’t have credited her with so much imagination. She told you the houses in her village didn’t have any doors, because people trusted each other, and if someone stole something, the whole family was chased from the place. So that’s how things are back home. It’s a mystery to you how someone who grew up without doors could come up with the idea of leaving the key in the lock.

You’re so tired.

Now you’ll wait till she’s asleep, then your father will let you in. Wait for half an hour, an hour at most. The day rushes through your head like the subway train that you’ve been waiting for. You see Nessi in the water, you see yourselves in the cinema and you can taste the stale popcorn. You like looking back on the day. It’s a bit like coming home late in the evening, turning on the television, and there’s a program on that shows only you, going through life, all your mistakes, all your heroic deeds. You want to tell your father about the movie. He likes Denzel Washington. But how surprised will your father be when he opens the door in twenty minutes and sees that you’ve disappeared? And how surprised will you be in retrospect that your life has taken a new turn in a few seconds, and dragged you thousands of miles away from Berlin?

Anything is possible. And it all begins with two short beeps.

You’re sitting in the dark corridor, because you don’t feel like pressing the light switch over and over again. You sit there in the darkness, and there are two beeps. You take your phone out of your jacket and read the text on the blue display and react the way you all react to this message tonight.

You run.

RUTH (#ulink_b27fd639-fc5f-554c-9d2b-6277fd098128)

You get the message at the same time. You’re lying next to Eric again and your ears are tingling. You were spared the sex this time. You’re both too drunk. Your parents think you’re sleeping over at Stink’s. It’s one lie more or less. You have very different problems, because you couldn’t leave it alone. Four cocktails in the little bar on Savignyplatz, where you only get served because one of the waitresses is Eric’s sister. Schnappi and Stink stopped after the second cocktail, only you couldn’t stop yourself. Now you’re lying beside Eric. In your defense, it would have to be said that there was no real chance of going home in this state. Your mother would have bitten your head off and your father would have pogoed on your corpse.

The mattress is on the floor and smells slightly of mold, and there’s also the acrid smell of a sweaty boy who sprays himself with too much perfume—things you won’t miss. You won’t miss the hand on your shoulder either.

“Go away!”

Eric persists. He shakes you as if you were a fruit machine that had swallowed his last euro. You groan, you could puke, you could just lean out of bed and puke. But you don’t. You’ve still got a bit of self-respect. So you open your eyes, and as if by magic your ears open too.

“… light is driving me mad. Really mad. How do you turn this little fucker off? Tell me how to turn this fucker off.”

“What?”

Eric holds up a green star in front of your eyes, going light and then dark again. You feel spittle dribbling from the corner of your mouth and wipe it away.

“Please,” says Eric.

You recognize your phone. You love that glow, it pulses like a light under water, you set it that way on purpose.

“Take it away,” you say.

“Turn it off, Ruth.”

“Put it under the pillow and let me sleep!”

Eric pulls the covers away.

“The fucker is vibrating and lighting up. Turn it off!”

You would like to strangle him. Too dumb to turn off a phone, you think, and grab it from him. You look at the message that’s just come in and see double and then triple and then double again. You rub your eyes and look again. Your thumb taps in your PIN and the phone stops lighting up. Eric sighs with relief, but his happiness lasts only a few seconds.

“Shit, what are you doing now?”

You pick up your clothes from the floor and are about to clear out when you realize that you’re far too drunk to negotiate a zebra crossing. You look back at the bed. Eric has his arm over his eyes. No, you can’t rely on him.

Maybe it was just an illusion, you think, maybe I’ll turn my phone back on and there’ll be nothing there.

You go into the bathroom, drape yourself over the toilet bowl, and stick your finger down your throat. After that you feel better. You slap water in your face and rummage in your purse. Five euros. That’s never going to be enough. You go back into your room. Eric is asleep, his arm still over his eyes. You take his wallet out of his trousers. Nothing, just a few coins. You drop the wallet, take a deep breath, and look at your phone again.

cm

You knew it wasn’t an illusion. Phones don’t lie. You pull on your boots, and then you run.

STINK (#ulink_3918bdc0-9e5c-599b-80eb-728af8417dcb)

Of course there’s an idiot in every story. Someone who does everything wrong, backs the wrong horse and gets caught in the rain. Someone like you, disappearing on a stolen Vespa and grinning to themselves as if they’d won the jackpot. You’re the idiot, you’re the marked card. At the same time you’re the only one lying contentedly in her bed tonight. Your head is heavy from those two cocktails, the barkeeper probably slipped something into your glass. You hate it when guys flirt and then get nasty when you slap them down. If you said yes to every barman, you’d have died of alcohol poisoning years ago.

Eventually sleep overwhelms you and you dream of Neil going down on one knee in front of you in the disco and saying he isn’t bothered by your flowery underwear. You also dream of Nessi, bobbing away like a water lily and disappearing into the distance, even though you call her name. It’s a good thing you have a brother, otherwise you’d probably have slept through the rest of this story.

“Get up!”

The light goes on and off, on and off.

“Are you deaf or something? Get up!”

You wish you were deaf or something. You roll over. Your brother won’t let go.

“One of your stupid girlfriends has been ringing up a storm, how can’t you hear it?”

That’s enough. You kick the covers away, bickering like a washerwoman. You swing your legs out of bed and a whole universe of stars explodes in front of your eyes. You feel dizzy and you bend down and look at your toes until the explosions subside. You didn’t hear any ringing. Good thing your aunt’s on night shift tonight.

“God, Paul, I didn’t hear it ring,” you murmur.

“Yeah, right.”

Your brother slams the door behind him, you sink back.

Maybe it’s all just a dream? Maybe I can just go back to sleep—