Free Axolotl Roadkill by Helene Hegemann Page B

now I’m here.’
    ‘How did you get here?’
    ‘Some railway policeman put me in a taxi. I stumbled into his arms completely fucked-up.’
    ‘And how did you pay for the taxi? Is there some hysterical professional chauffeur leaping around my backyard who I have to pay off?’
    ‘No. I had some money in my shoe, no idea why, but I still had money in my shoe.’
    Ophelia gives a nod of respect and gets up. She drinks a large glass of tap water before she ventures any reaction: ‘Why are you here?’
    ‘Because yours was the only address I could think of.’
    Ophelia gives another nod of respect and sits down again.
    ‘I kind of can’t find any way to react. I hope you don’t expect any reaction. I can tell you, go to school, don’t take heroin, integrate into your family structure as well as possible and be a surgeon when you grow up. Just get down to it.’
    ‘D’you know how often I hear that, Ophelia? That I should just get down to it?’
    ‘I don’t even want to tell you all that stuff. I’ve always thought I’m the one who’s the child. You don’t have to defend your mother even though she’s dead and she was a great woman, you don’t have to feel responsible for your father or his well-being or the fact that he can exist without having to think about whether you exist, and if he does then of course he thinks you only exist in a state of total lack of needs. I know that feeling. Sitting staring at some box of pills just because some bastard couldn’t keep his prick to himself, because Mummy . . . well, what? Shouldn’t have had children? Should have stayed her mother’s little baby rather than becoming the mother of her own little baby? Should they not have left you and me with our mothers? They were with us, Holy Saint Mifti, we weren’t with them. It tastes like shit, like metal, it tastes bitter, and it definitely doesn’t taste of comfort, but maybe it tastes of meaning in a general mouldering way.’
    Ophelia makes a kitsch waving-it-off gesture, signalling that she’s emotionally unstable and too drunk to maintain the conversation. She takes a pea-sized plastic sphere out of the breast pocket of her nightshirt and chucks it over at me. I chuck it back again.
    ‘By the way, I met your old crazy dealer the other day,’ I say.
    Instead of answering me, she peels off the plastic film. In the end there’s a pinch of brownish powder on the mahogany table, looking like instant tea and smelling like a mixture of cigarette butts, trash and vinegar. She rolls a tube out of a piece of silver foil, tipping half the powder on to another piece. When she holds a lighter under the foil, the heroin melts, producing a miniature trail of smoke. Ophelia inhales this vapour with the aid of the aforementioned aluminium tube, until all that remains is something very dirty, small and evil, and she asks me, ‘So what do my pupils look like now?’
    ‘Jesus, shit, I’m underage.’
    ‘No, Mifti. You’re not sixteen, you’re an indirect extension of my life now.’
    Her head drifts slowly towards the tabletop. I stroke her back and wait until she regains control over her body, put out of service by a sudden alteration in perception. It takes an eternity.
    ‘Or more like a direct extension. Mifti?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I’ll get you an invitation and you can come to Samantha and Albrecht’s party in Charlottenburg next Friday. It’s their wedding reception, completely fucked up, what d’you expect in Charlottenburg? Emre’s DJing. He eats black pudding sandwiches. I hate eating meat, but sometimes, every so often, I get these wild cravings for dirty great black pudding sandwiches.’
    ‘Can you get hold of some coke?’
    ‘I don’t spend money any more on drugs that don’t make music sound good.’
    ‘But I really need to do coke again, Ophelia. When you’re bored, and I am right now, or at least I would be if we weren’t sitting here together, but anyway – when you’re bored you always think of