You (14 page)

“What did you do that for?” asks Ruth, as if you’d just got out of the water.

“I don’t know, it just felt right.”

“And if we’d been standing in the station, would you have jumped onto the rails?”

“Come on. I wasn’t planning on killing myself.”

They all nod, they hoped you were going to say this.

“Let’s all keep our mouths shut,” says Stink, before Ruth can tear into you again. “If Nessi doesn’t want to talk about it, then how about we don’t talk about it?”

Everyone looks at you, it’s your turn, the ball’s in your court, you say, “Girls, I’m pregnant, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

They nod again, it’s accepted, and you’re so relieved that you want to talk about it right now, but at the same time you’re exhausted by the day and just want to sleep. Schnappi reads your thoughts and says that’s enough for today. She offers to drive you home.

Ruth hugs you and tells you to keep the jacket. Stink strokes your back and kisses you firmly on the mouth. It’s never been so hard to say goodbye to your friends. You get into your wet jeans. Schnappi takes you by the hand and you walk to her bike. When you’ve cycled two blocks she brakes, turns around to you, and swears she hasn’t told a soul.

“They guessed, Nessi, they really guessed.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“Thanks.”

Schnappi cycles on, you rest your head against her back and shut your eyes.

It’s just after midnight when you creep into the apartment. Your parents are asleep, any sound would give you away, so you take off your running shoes and walk down the corridor to the bathroom in your wet socks. You close the door gently behind you and lean against it. It takes some minutes before you dare to turn on the light. Your face is pale, your clothes still wet and heavy. You could never have pulled this one off in the winter.

I went into the Lietzensee
, you think and flip yourself the bird in the mirror.

In the shower the water’s so hot that you flinch for a moment, but you don’t change the temperature, you put up with the heat and wait until it’s passed through all the layers of cold to your innermost core and makes you glow.

You haven’t been as freezing as that for years.

By the time you leave the shower, the bathroom is a landscape swathed in fog.

You wipe the mirror clear and look at yourself.

Go closer.

You try to see a change.
Nothing
. You look down at yourself. Everything is as it should be. Breasts, belly, legs.
As always
. You make a fist and press it against your belly button. You’re furious. You’re so furious with yourself that you want to shove your fist through your stomach.

And then?

You don’t know what then.

But you have a clear vision of where it goes from here. You see your father shaking his head and calling you
my little one
. Your mother will burst into tears and get a bottle of white wine from the fridge. She won’t understand you. She’ll want to know how you imagine it will all be. On no account must you speak of abortion, bear that in mind. Abortion is taboo, because your mother had an abortion when she was nineteen and has never forgiven herself. The decision hurt both your parents. So no word about abortion, because then you might as well take a corkscrew and jab their eyes out. Your
mother with her tears and quivering shoulders, your father leaning forward, hands open, as if to catch you. After the first glass of wine your father will say things will sort themselves out and there’s enough room in the apartment, which is already far too small, but you won’t point that out either. Your mother will hug you and promise to take care of everything, because she is your mother, after all, you should never forget that. She’ll also say she’s glad that you waited until after school, as if you planned to get pregnant. Then she’ll look at your father and say emotionally:
I’m going to be a grandma!

Your parents won’t ask who the father is, because they’re scared of the answer.

That’s how it is, that’s how it always will be.

Fear
.

And throughout all this your left hand would be clenched into a fist.

Over the next few weeks you’ll start getting fat. Not that you’re skinny now, but your mother looked like a whale when she was pregnant, so you’ll be exactly the same, she’s shown you the future. The months will pass, and the apprenticeship that Aunt Helga promised you will go to another girl. You’ll hardly see your girlfriends, because their lives are their lives and your life is your life and you can’t go in two directions at once. Every now and again Stink will call and you will start crying and Stink will cry too and after two hours your ears will be so hot from gossiping that you’ll hang up reluctantly. You’ll read everything about babies, weigh up the pros and cons of a home birth, and opt for the hospital. You’ll slowly come to terms with the situation. Your seventeenth birthday will be sad. Stink will drop in with Schnappi and stay for fourteen minutes. Ruth will phone in her greetings. And Taja? You’ll never hear a word from Taja, because still no one has any idea where she is. There will be no presents for you, just presents for the baby. Little socks. Little jackets. Toys. People will look at you askance in the supermarket and keep their distance. Everyone will know what kind of girl you are. Mother. Mom. Whale. And sometimes they will ask who the father is. And sometimes you will look at them and smile, as if that was an answer. You know you’re too young to be a
mother. You’re too young to be anything at all. But life in reverse only works in the movies.

During the birth you will consist only of pain, and the pain will hollow you out and fill you with fire.
Nothing bad can happen to me after this
, you will think. And then the child. Red. Noisy. Yours. And everything will be fine.

And everything will be lovely
.

It’s the last thing you want. You want to live without responsibilities or obligations, and without parents. You want to be someone who leads a life that is a mystery. Not the life of a girl named after a pop star. Not the life of the many girls who run around like emotional building sites and get pregnant and accept it because they’re just too idiotic to go a different way.

Not one of many, no
.

But who knows whether you might not be better off like this after all. Take a look at Stink. Her mother ran off when Stink was still a baby, and after her father had decided that two children was too much work, he dumped Stink and her brother on Aunt Sissi and ran off to Argentina. Stink was nine at the time and until her twelfth birthday she thought her dad was coming back for Christmas. Stink’s brother saw through it all right away, of course. Whenever you ask Stink about it, she shakes her head and says she couldn’t care less. But you know that’s not true. It is like an invisible itch that no amount of scratching helps. A mixture of hatred and resignation. You on the other hand love your parents, but you don’t want them around, there’s no getting past that.

You give a start when the phone in your jacket pocket rings. You seriously went to sleep on the toilet, your hair is dry, and the toilet seat has left two impressions on the underside of your thighs. Your phone beeps twice, then it’s quiet. The text is so short that for a moment you think your phone has got bumped.

Then you see who sent the text, and the thinking stops, your problems are your problems, this is more important. You run out of the
bathroom into your room and get dressed. You put on a pair of worn-out running shoes, turn around and see your mother standing in the doorway.

“Vanessa, what’s going on?”

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.

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.

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.