Now it’s obvious that a woman and a boy are lying there.
With the pen I draw an oven and burners on the wall at the heads of the bodies. With a bit of perspective, as if the stove’s receding into the wall.
At the top of the oven door I cut into the wallpaper with the pen. I use my fingernails to claw along the oven door and then pull at the wallpaper, ripping it down from the top to the floor. Now it looks like a real, open oven door.
I step back and take a good look at what my relatives are about to discover.
My good-bye letter. The reason I’m leaving. Silence.
There they are. My mother and my brother. Just the way I found them. They all hoped I’d forget. You can’t forget something like that. And through their silence it loomed ever larger for me. Never faded.
I ring the buzzer one last time and wait for my Robin.
The entire time I’m waiting I stare at mom and Tony. I can smell gas.
Robin comes in.
“Get me out of here.”
We leave.
I close the door behind me. I press a big puff of air out of my lungs, exhaling loudly.
We walk slowly down the hall.
We don’t hold hands.
Suddenly he stops and puts the bag down. He’s changed his mind.
No. He steps behind me and ties the gown closed over my bum. He wants to cover me up in public. Good sign. He picks up the bag again and we walk on.
“If I’m living with you, I guess you’ll want to sleep with me?”
“Yeah, but I won’t do you up the ass for now.”
He laughs. I laugh.
“I’ll only sleep with you if you can suck a pony’s insides out through its asshole.”
“Is that even possible—or do you not want to sleep with me?”
“I just always wanted to say that to a guy. Now I have. And I do want to. But not today. I’m too tired.”
We walk to the glass door.
I smack the button, the door swings open, I throw back my head and scream.
About the Author:
Charlotte Roche was born in England in 1978 and raised in Germany, where she still resides with her husband and daughter. A longtime presenter on Viva, the German equivalent of MTV, she is a well-known and award-winning television personality. Wetlands is her first novel.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
About the Translator:
Tim Mohr is a staff editor at Playboy magazine. His writing has also appeared in other publications, including The New York Times. Prior to joining Playboy, he spent six years as a club DJ in Berlin. His translation of Guantanamo, by Dorothea Dieckmann, won the Three Percent prize for best translation of 2007.
The translator wishes to thank Andrej Huesener for his advice and his careful read of the draft manuscript.
Copyright
Wetlands
© 2008 by DuMont Bucherverlag, Cologne (Germany)
Translation copyright © 2009 by Tim Mohr.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-554-68592-9
Originally published in Germany under the title Feuchtgebiete.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
First Canadian edition
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available
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