Free Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann Page A

on a life of its own. By the time Ophelia says hello through the intercom I appear as if the pain were either non-existent or already processed. Four storeys and a woman who only values our spiritual kinship for her own sake. She’s standing in the doorway smoking, wearing a pink and blue striped satin nightshirt.
    ‘You smoke too much, Mifti!’
    ‘Why? Because I’m so out of breath?’
    ‘Yeah. And you know what? I think it’s so great, the whole idea of the two of us as a culture annihilation crew.’
    Ophelia’s converted warehouse and industrial space is 290 square metres in total. The floor is concrete, the walls are four-centimetre-thick plasterboard. Her art collection is dominated by genre and landscape painting, with almost no trace of religious motifs or the intensified post-1970s modernism-postmodernism discussion. She bundles me on to one of her seats, offers me a probiotic yoghurt and asks, ‘Why exactly are you here right now?’
    I shrug. Were I capable of crying in the presence of people made of flesh and blood and not only in my own company, a number of things would be easier, both for myself and for the people made of flesh and blood.
    ‘Mifti, you’re too good, too young, too promising, too talented. I’ll scare you right out of here if you put on some great big performance. I scare off everyone I love, and then I feel something too. I went to Salem boarding school. Salem’s totally pathetic, at the end of the day. I did everything right but nothing works. That’s where I perfected my asocial streak, camouflaged under the façade of my empathy. I’m the same age as everyone when they die. That’s why you’re the superior one.’
    I don’t say anything.
    ‘Is all this crap here something to do with your mother again? Don’t you want to tell me what your mother was like?’
    ‘On benefits, permanently wasted, Chanel suits despite it all.’
    ‘And what’s happened now?’
    ‘I went to that unexplored territories party with Pörksen and Tina yesterday.’
    ‘Why didn’t you text me? A good day to rattle, wrestle and fight or punch guts.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Yeah, Mifti, someone asked me there one time if he could ram this big fuck-off medieval fork into my sternum. And of course I put up inconspicuous resistance and pretended I had an urgent appointment at the bar – you always do that, don’t you, pretend you really really need to go to the bar – but the whole situation proved all over again that anything goes. Not only can you shove aubergines up arseholes, you can try to ram four metal spikes into the flesh under a complete stranger’s jaws.’
    ‘Anyway I went there.’
    ‘Yeah, that’s where we were just now.’
    ‘And it was completely OK, even though I was utterly fazed by all the shaven-headed fetish freaks. What I’m getting at, this afternoon I completely flipped out, even though I got up this morning and felt amazingly fine under the circumstances. I was putting up these shelves with Edmond, and everything was totally chilled and great and wicked, and I thought, hey, yeah, family and that. And then some bit of wood broke off, and it totally freaked me out. Some stupid bastard little piece of wood broke off the freaking shelves, and I just stood there and started screaming at Edmond, and I thought it was the end of the world. And then I even called my father and said, “Dad, oh shit, it’s all too late.”
    ‘And he’s like, “Can you please start the conversation properly?”
    ‘“Dad, can I talk to you a minute?”
    ‘And he’s just like, “How much money do you want?”
    ‘“I’m in real shit here, something’s just broken off.” And no one knew what was going on. Not even I knew. And I can’t remember the rest. And then at some point Annika threw me out. She didn’t use violence, she didn’t present a horrific challenge for the law enforcement authorities by beating me out of the front door, she just threw me out. That’s how fucked I was. And