Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  Helene Hegemann was born in 1992 and lives in Berlin. Axolotl Roadkill is her first novel.

  AXO

  LOTL

  ROADKILL

  A Novel

  Helene Hegemann

  Translated by Katy Derbyshire

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Corsair, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Helene Hegemann, 2012

  The right of Helene Hegemann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-84901-054-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-184901-888-3 (ebook)

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Lilly Sternberg

  ‘We love to entertain you’

  (Pro7)

  OK, so it’s night, and once again that grapple with death, the snatches of fearful sleep, my bedroom shaking with daemonic orchestras and all the burglars’ voices from the backyard continually screaming my name. Not the noise of city roads and not the moans of great ugly giants in agony, unbandaged. Only the dark’s spinets, the howling in my head, the arrhythmic drumming – oh shit. In the old days it all got spewed up in finest adolescent style and now it’s seriously intense literature.

  I wake at 16:30, disorientated and wrapped in a duvet cover, primarily bored by myself. I cower. Laurel wreaths woven out of blood kind of flow out of my right ear. Something flashes before my eyes and I recognize it as high-society grotesquery: two cigarettes, two lines of Ritalin snorted through a till receipt instead of a banknote for reasons of hygiene, pulverized Parmesan and a nervous breakdown assuming worrying proportions, presumably the K-hole. For months now I’ve been having the wildest cancer diagnosis dreams – something deeper than nightmares, where I wake up screaming because there are so many thoughts that you can’t distinguish your own from other people’s. What with all my gastric excesses coupled with panic attacks, I feel like launching myself from my third-floor window. But instead I switch on trashy TV and watch a great nature documentary. It’s like some amazing televisual event. All of a sudden there’s this alert jackal, and then there’s a counter-shot of a herd of meerkats, and then they get all ripped to shreds by the jackal in close-up and the viewer overflows with love and thinks: yup, those freaking meerkats really do look so incredibly dumb, they just, like, don’t deserve anything better than getting eaten.

  I can either wank off to high-quality hardcore porn or stare at my fingernails and then in the mirror. My dermal appendages have grown into intercrusted eczema and my eyelashes are breaking off.

  At that moment, silence falls again.

  A trace of social acceptability, no hardtechno track drilling through it any more, just a sobering early fucking summer wind. I didn’t go to school. Five minutes before breaktime I was struggling out from beneath the covers in mortal fear, my heart racing and pain crashing against my skull with every step, even though at that point in time I ought to have been thinking:

  All right, today I’ll make contact with a tomato for a change. I have to remove it from the sandwich my responsible parental unit has placed it in for my school lunch.

  An hour after hometime I’m standing in front of the mirror, my legs spreadeagled, in the vacant flow of memories of last night’s sweat-soaked gimpish grin and the power of those repetitive dance beats that take on a life of their own.

  I want to build a children’s home in Afghanistan and own loads of clothes. I don’t just need food and a roof over my head; I need three villas with titanium white fixtures and fittings, up to eleven prostitutes every day and a Soviet-style Chanel suit swathing me in plush golden twenties chic. Then there’d be no such words as self-awareness and borderline any more. And no one who pretends to know you better than you do yourself – all that would count then is money. Now we’re getting there. I suddenly notice everyone gaping at me. I go out on the balcony with my fifth cigarette. I’ll just drink and drink until the money’s all GONE. Right now my existence consists entirely of dizzy spells and the fact that it’s been half ripped to shreds by a hyper-real installation of Vaselined tits blurred by Rohypnol.

  I say, ‘As soon as we begin doing something for others, we release ourselves from the prison inside of us. Alice hates herself, but that’s what’s so awesome: I can see she’s losing it and increasingly destroying herself. I’m so scared I can’t think any more. I’ll do anything to still have the privilege of knowing you. It’s no big deal if you don’t want to fuck me any more. You’ve disappeared out of my life now. It’s not as if I can abuse myself here the whole time with self-reflection and self-torment; I don’t know, there must be something else, like an irrational moment, one of those moments when you give me that fixed look with your colourless eyes. I can always see you’re just working out how many people are standing between us right now. Do you remember? How we always had to work out how many metres apart we were? And how I told you at some point, when we were alone at last, what perfection that was for me? Those moments when we looked at the sea – they were so perfect that I didn’t have to savour them. I can tell I’m going crazy. I can’t distinguish any more between dreaming and what you call reality. Because everything feels the same. The wind, your skin, everything three-dimensional.’

  Under the shower, drops patter down in slow motion, aspiring to spherical form through the influence of surface tension.

  Against the general assumption, a droplet of water is at no time drop-shaped, that two-dimensional shite: round at one end and pointed at the other. I tug a turquoise sheet out of the dirty washing to dry myself; it’s spent the past two months in a large basket in the company of two puke-encrusted items of clothing. Is it a stranger’s puke – someone who caught me by surprise in a highly frequented unisex toilet? Is it my puke? Does that bring me closer to myself in some way? It really looks like I’m starting to forget the most essential details.

  I’m standing in the hallway, terminally depressed, on a carpet laid for some inexplicable reason in the dim and distant past, and it’s kind of greyish green, it’s dirty, it’s covered with burn marks. Oh God, it’s all so awful.

  1. I’ve lost my patchworked personal history which is marked out by anal sex, tears and necrophilia.

  2. I’ve got an open sore in my throat.

  3. My family is a bunch of pathological self-promoters stuck in some early childhood omnipotence phase. In the most extreme case, they might write a pop-culture essay on the issue of why the avantgarde belly dances DESPITE IT ALL, but that’s

  You’ve made my shitlist

  (L7)

  I’m like, ‘Excuse me? Could you maybe help me with the beef here, I don’t know what kind of beef to buy.’

  I’m standing in front of a large freezer at Lidl.

  Cue heterosexual female communication designer in blue and grey striped cardigan.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m supposed to buy beef for dinner, but they’ve got stewing beef and stir-fry beef, and I don’t know what kind I need to get.’

  ‘Well, sorry, but I don’t actually know whether your mother needs stewing beef or stir-fry beef.’
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  ‘My mother’s dead. She’s been dead for ages.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He’s one of those assertive left-wing wankers with an above-average income permanently doing stuff with art, living between the galleries and boutiques on August-strasse. Every day up to eleven prostitutes, hair wax and highlighter pens to colour in melancholy expressionist artworks he puts together out of black-and-white record covers. And then at night he and his gallery owner nail them to the wall on LSD. His life’s all about depressing music. The Melvins, Julie Driscoll, Neil Young – as if no one else made music apart from Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Every week he orders records for three hundred dollars. I hardly know him.’

  ‘So where do you live?’

  ‘With my brother and sister.’

  ‘And what do your brother and sister do for a living?’

  ‘My sister’s called Annika and she’s a scheming marketing bitch. My brother Edmond designs motifs for a selection of textile items sold by a social commerce firm based in Leipzig. He uploads his designs on to an online platform and waits until someone has the ridiculous idea of walking around in a cream hoodie with “Our national colours are crap” printed on it in black, red and yellow. And he even designs T-shirts with the slogan “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m drunk – alcoholics go to meetings!” He’s twenty-three, a mixture of Marlon Brando and, er, who else? I don’t know. He owns one of only five hundred existing pairs of Pro Bowl 2007 Air Force 1 Nikes. Unemployed, demonstratively arrogant, Ray Davis fan.’

  If found, please return to the club.

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘Like any underage drug addict with an ability for reflection, my tendency to escape from reality expresses itself in a pronounced reading addiction. I devour everything from enlightened literature about Pakistani psychoanalysts to theses on the links between Moby Dick and Nazism. I shrug off daylight with a dismissive gesture.’

  ‘Well, it was lovely talking to you!’

  ‘Yeah, great, see you around!’

  * * *

  I remember the time when I did things in good weather other than pulling the blinds down. Dejected, I give myself a shot of legendary non-fiction on the praxis of DJ CULTURE:

  Over the past twenty seconds the situation on the dancefloor has altered drastically. Cheers, screams, new levels of extremity everywhere out there.

  ‘Hi, Edmond. When are you coming home?’

  ‘Don’t know. I’m hanging with Luther at the store on Alte Schönhauser. Penny should be here any minute, that girl with the PCP.’

  ‘And when are you coming back?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Thingy and Kleini just came in, you know, the guy with the girlfriend who always wants her own way— Is it mixed by you? It’s mixed like shit! Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man!’

  ‘Did you make that up?’

  ‘Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man? I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination, Mifti. Films, music, books, paintings, cold-cuts poetry, photos, conversations, dreams . . .’

  ‘Street signs, clouds . . .’

  ‘Light and shadows, that’s right, because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from – it’s where I take them to.’

  ‘So you didn’t make it up?’

  ‘No. It’s from some blogger.’

  ‘But when are you coming home?’

  ‘Hey, I don’t know exactly, maybe soon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon. Maybe in a minute.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Yeah, in a minute, right now.’

  ‘OK, bye.’

  I open our front door to the new housekeeper, the shock at all this excessive neglect spreading across her foolish face. She looks at me as if she was scared of coming across putrefying animal corpses inside the flat.

  ‘Why do you want a housekeeper, Annika?’

  ‘Because it’s totally awesome to get your bedlinen ironed and all that.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s really bad having all those people in your possession?’

  ‘You know, Mifti, you used to be just a poor little neglected kid and now you’re such a poor little neglected rich kid you’ve forgotten that housekeepers are human beings.’

  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?’