Granta 165, page 11
Amelie stopped off at the Hasenheide on her way to City Chicken. She was wearing a dark-coloured dress; it suited her, it looked timeless and laid-back. She wasn’t one to follow the latest fashions, and her trainers were the only things that usually looked brand new. Amelie had been out to Heiners Bar the night before, and then to the newly renovated Bäreneck. To Tanja’s ears, that just sounded like banging headaches and unnecessarily existential conversations. It wasn’t like Amelie to be out late drinking on a weeknight; Tanja asked what the occasion had been, and Amelie said: ‘Oh, you know, just Janis.’ Amelie had introduced Tanja to Janis, who had a striking tattoo on his forearm, in January at a party put on by Trade. Tanja found tattoos on women even more unbearable than they were on men, unless they covered the whole body. Tanja approved of someone deciding to become a fully tattooed person like Justin Bieber, but not someone just wanting a tattoo. On matters of style, Tanja would have liked to be more tolerant, but she couldn’t help how she felt.
Amelie told her that she’d slept with Janis twice in the week before Easter. She couldn’t completely deny she had a crush on him. But last night in Bäreneck, Janis had confessed that he’d fancied Tanja for a long time. Amelie quoted Janis, making her voice slightly lower: ‘I thought I would keep it to myself, but it’s on my mind all the time now . . . and if I didn’t say it, then eventually it might go nuclear.’ Amelie emphasised that he really had used the word nuclear, at 4.30 a.m. in Bäreneck. She had been shocked and angry and, for a minute, speechless. ‘Then I told him you can’t stand tattoos and you’re in a committed relationship. I think he quite quickly regretted having said anything. He apologised, but I was already out of there.’ As she spoke, her eyes filled with tears. Tanja was sitting beside her on the grass, the empty can of sugar-free Red Bull in her hand, trying to think of something to say that wasn’t either meaningless or hurtful. Tanja knew that Janis took a woman home practically every time he went clubbing, he was wiry and reasonably tall, he had a pleasant voice, straight teeth and, Tanja thought, he was writing a doctoral thesis on a feminist topic. She also wouldn’t be surprised if, beneath his understated clothes, he was a fully tattooed person. He was probably also a fan of NovoPanopticon. Tanja really wanted to change the subject, but then she said: ‘Give him a few days. I mean, it’s easy for you. He needs to behave. He’s the one with the problem. Try to relax.’ Amelie nodded, looking very sad. ‘I’m going to go and get some food,’ she said. ‘You do that,’ said Tanja. They stood up and hugged. Tanja wanted to ask if they were still going to the Cocktail d’Amore party at the weekend as planned, but it didn’t seem like the right moment. Amelie had already walked a few steps when she turned round. ‘I’ll be in touch about Cocktail d’Amore.’ And Tanja said: ‘Cool.’
Tanja and Jerome hadn’t agreed any policies on information. They told each other whatever they felt like saying, mostly in long instant messages and less frequently over email. The personal, loosely written email that you fired off without having read it back was perhaps Tanja’s favourite form of writing. But since 2015, when the last of her friends had finally switched to smartphones, email had been increasingly pushed out by less carefully formulated speech bubbles on various messaging services. That made Tanja value the fact that she had found a worthy email correspondent in Jerome all the more.
His longer missives, which he wrote about once a week, felt like an attempt to compensate for the diary that he’d never kept, and they were always entertaining. He often told her stories about friends she had never met – so in theory he could simply have made these characters up, but she trusted him, and she was sure he trusted her, too. In their emails they told each other the truth, though they didn’t tell each other everything. For the time being, Tanja would keep quiet about the reasons for Amelie’s man trouble.
At the weekend, Jerome sent her a selfie he’d taken while he was out for a run. It showed him in a white headband, with a backdrop of windmills and a cloudless sky. Below the image, he wrote: 300% joy. Tanja liked the message. The photo was vain and not vain at the same time, since Jerome’s sweating, slightly red face looked older than usual, but he’d also chosen a flattering angle – offset low down to the left, emphasising his strong jaw – and his expression was goofy in a good way. You could see that running gave Jerome pleasure, and even people much older than he was could look attractive when they were radiating joy.
Sitting at her desk, Tanja looked at Jerome for a second not as the man she slept with and talked with about almost everything, but as a man from Hesse in his mid-thirties, who took cheerful selfies while exercising. She then thought, for comparison, about the men she’d encountered during her trial membership of the Holmes Place gym on Hermannplatz. A lot of them had been attractive, with an aristocratic look about them, which had something to do with the high monthly fees charged by Holmes Place. Jerome would have stood out there in a positive way, as a man whose vanity was refreshingly different. He liked his own appearance, that was true, but he wasn’t trying to fulfil some fitness norm. Tanja had ultimately decided not to become a member of Holmes Place. Instead, in May 2017, she had rediscovered badminton, a game she’d played at school in Kiel, and in which she was able to exercise a degree of aggression without the sport becoming at all dangerous.
Hi Tanja, has Amelie spoken to you? Could you please tell her I’m sorry? And ask her to call me? She’s blocked my number. Janis.
Tanja wasn’t sure how he’d got her number. It very likely wasn’t from Amelie, but possibly from her ex-boyfriend Max; Max was always happy to pass on her details, to prove that Tanja’s privacy no longer meant anything to him. Tanja had never blocked a number in her life, nor had she deleted emails or texts that said hurtful things and she had never sought ways to get her own back either; she’d never felt the need to draw a pathetic line under anything. She was proud of that. Instead of responding to Janis straight away, she wrote a message to Amelie, which in retrospect was not a clever thing to do. Amelie claimed she hadn’t blocked Janis’s number at all. There followed a call from Amelie that Tanja termed hysterical, although she had firmly resolved to stop talking about ‘hysteria’ in relation to women, because it always felt a bit cheap. Her success as an author, however, made her think the words that came to her spontaneously were usually the right ones. Tanja believed her choice of words was sound in this case, too. Amelie was very hurt by the accusation of hysteria.
In the queue for the Cocktail d’Amore party, Tanja was wearing badminton shoes made by Artengo, Decathlon’s own brand. She was 100 per cent sure she was the only person in the queue – which on this early Sunday afternoon was made up of around 400 people – who was wearing badminton shoes. They were a luminous reddish-orange, and it looked like you would sweat more in them than in comparable trainers from more well-known brands, but in fact the opposite was true. Tanja was also wearing grey linen trousers and a grey men’s shirt, with a sports bra underneath in case she wanted to take off the shirt on the dance floor. The fully-bare-torso look that was popular at this kind of Berlin rave, even among women, was something she would have found out of character. But a sports bra and badminton shoes suited her down to the ground. The majority of people in the queue were men with dark, buzz-cut hair; not many were wearing make-up. Tanja had worked gel into her own hair until it lay flat against her head and had a slick sheen. She had been standing there for forty minutes when the doorman asked her if she’d been here before, by which he meant Cocktail d’Amore and not the Griessmühle club. Tanja replied: ‘Yes, three or four months ago’ – though she knew very well it had been three months – and looked the man in the eye with a neutral expression. He hesitated for a moment, then let her go through to be patted down and pay the €15 entry fee. She bought a Diet Coke at the first bar she came to, so that she could take the rest of the pill she had been keeping in a transparent baggie in her sports sock. The piece of pill, which had been nibbled on six weeks previously and kept in the fridge ever since, was burgundy, with the logo of the clothing firm North Face printed on it. According to the saferparty.ch website, the whole pill had contained a total of 155 mg of MDMA, so the remaining half should be precisely enough for Tanja’s afternoon high. There were good reasons for not taking Ecstasy very often. Tanja liked the effect more than that of any other drug, but since she turned twenty-seven, she had become more sensitive to the after-effects, and now chose to deal with these only four to six times a year. This frequency would probably have to be reduced even further in future. She had told Jerome – who was planning a similar experiment with Ketamine in Offenbach today – that they should take notes on their trips. Since they had been together, they had shared most of their drug experiences, at least on a message level. Tanja didn’t even go into the toilets to take it, and afterwards she texted: Taken at the bar at 14.14. Pleasantly numb. Long-range heating soon.
Outside, unlike the Cocktail d’Amore parties that took place in high summer, there was no music playing, but men in varying states of undress had gone out to sit in the sun and have sex with varying degrees of obviousness. Tanja’s theory was that the second half of the 2010s in Berlin could be remembered as the period when sex parties made the leap into the mainstream. The number of people who went to parties where blow jobs were given in plain sight wasn’t exactly small. There were thousands of them at these events every weekend. Tanja couldn’t claim to be a fan of this development, but in general she thought it was a good thing that there was an increasing number of places where people could act on their desire for public sex, though she did also assume that a high percentage of clubbers had absolutely no wish to strip naked in front of countless strangers.
On the way to the toilet, she bumped into her sister. Sarah’s pupils were dilated and her forehead was damp with sweat; she approached Tanja accompanied by two guys wearing black vests with silver chains around their necks, probably fellow students at the film school. A hug and a kiss on the cheek was nothing unusual between the sisters, Tanja knew that, but she also felt a special surge of affection from Sarah. Sarah hastily introduced the guys – Tim and Jakob – and from the way they greeted Tanja, with a strangely formal handshake, she surmised that these boys already knew she was Sarah’s successful elder sister. Tanja and Sarah agreed to meet up at the outdoor bar at 3 p.m. at the latest, to drink still mineral water together. In the toilet queue, Tanja wondered whether she was seriously worried that her depressive sister was taking drugs, and if so, then what kind of a double standard that was. The interaction between antidepressants and Molly was not ideal, as far as Tanja knew, but on the other hand she was no neurologist. When it came down to it, her unease was really just based on the term ‘reuptake inhibitor’, which she associated with antidepressants. Tanja looked at her phone. Jerome had sent only the sunglasses emoji, which she found a little disappointing. She considered using her time in the queue to find out more about drug interactions, but she was nearly at her data limit and there wasn’t much signal in Griessmühle. They certainly didn’t yet live in the age that many people claimed they were already living in. Tanja read some of the texts she’d received in the past few days. Most of them pleased her. Actually, all the people she communicated with had developed a confident tone in their messages. Even her mother was now able to text with some degree of detail, and increasingly managed to skip the formal address – Dear Daughter. Tanja was proud of her mum, who worked as a therapist in Kiel, just as her mum was proud of her. Tanja’s father, a Hanseatic internist, was also proud of her – according to her mother – but entirely incapable of showing it. Tanja was moved by the thought of her father. He couldn’t help it; he was just less articulate than the other Arnheims. That didn’t make him a lesser person, though. Tanja decided to give her dad a call in the next few days, and now she was really looking forward to the faltering start of that conversation. In NovoPanopticon, Tanja had her central character Liam say: ‘You can either become very like your parents, or get mentally ill. And only if your parents are mentally ill might you manage to do both.’ Although Tanja had already defended this statement in three separate interviews, the insight now felt fresh again. Maybe Sarah had always fought too hard against her role models, maybe that was where the whole problem lay. But was it a problem at all? It was quite warm in the corridor outside the toilets. By the time the door in front of Tanja opened and a mixed group of five emerged – two women, three men – she was feeling really good. She nodded broad-mindedly to all five of them and then turned back to look at the men and women who were lining up behind her. For a moment Tanja contemplated asking whether anyone wanted to go ahead of her – she wasn’t desperate – but then it occurred to her firstly that this question would be entirely bizarre when she’d just spent ten minutes waiting and secondly that she was already pretty high. Not having eaten much for breakfast was paying off; the half a North Face was taking effect quicker than she’d anticipated. Tanja entered the toilet cubicle as if being washed in by a wave of bubble bath, and closed the door. She carefully laid tissues all around the toilet seat and sat down. She took her time, she couldn’t help but smile, she closed her eyes as she urinated; it was lovely.
Text to Jerome: Just saw Sarah, she’s high. Pleasantly cotton-woolish walking around in the toilet fumes. Far too many men. Miss you. And just a few minutes later: Miss U Miss U Miss U .
Jerome wrote back that his plan to meet up with Bruno and Julian had not come off because Julian’s daughter was ill, so instead of walking along the riverside in Offenbach on Ketamine, he was sitting at home with the sun coming through the windows, programming. He still wanted to read the updates on her trip, though, even if they did make him a little envious. Tanja wrote that he should at least have a cider while he was working: in solidarity with your drugged-up girlfriend not far from the Sonnenallee S-Bahn station. Jerome responded: You only use the word solidarity when you’re on xtc. But when you are, you use it every time .
Tanja stood sweating on the dance floor; looking at her phone, she saw the word solidarity in front of her and knew that Jerome was right. She loved him, yes, she really loved him, and she wanted to text that to him now, but then she decided to save it. Their situations were too different. She was feeling the bass; he was looking out at the nature reserve. And for Jerome, Ecstasy was a nostalgic thing. He’d often told Tanja about his ‘E-phase’ between 2009 and 2012 – a period he’d left behind but would always remember, like the summer of 2001, when he’d just got his driving licence and drove to France for a camping trip on the Atlantic coast with his best friends.
In Griessmühle, things went the way they usually did when Tanja was staring at her phone on the dance floor: people told her with looks and gestures that she should be living in the moment, and put her phone away – but these people didn’t understand. They had no idea that for Tanja, this was the most beautiful moment: high, and looking at the gateway to the world in her hand, communicating with the people she liked best in the way she was best at. It was fantastic to own a phone, it was fantastic to have people you loved in your life. Tanja was wearing her shirt tied round her waist, and dancing in her sports bra. She put her arms in the air, closed her eyes. She kept a tight grip on her phone the whole time.
‘Sarah, I’m high! ’ This simple statement brought a beaming smile to her sister’s face. ‘How are you doing? Want to do a shot with me?’ Sarah didn’t reply, seemed a little hesitant, but Tanja had already ordered vodka shots for them both. She had been intending not to drink during the party, but the idea of the vodka’s slightly burning aftertaste filled her with such a pleasant anticipation that it would simply have been wrong to deny herself the experience. Sarah was only 169 cm, 4 cm shorter than Tanja, but that afternoon you could hardly tell: Sarah was wearing heels, and Tanja had her flat Artengo badminton shoes on. And so the sisters stood facing one another and clinked their vodka glasses, flooded with a warmth that reminded Tanja of the magical moment when she had tried Ecstasy for the first time. She was even tempted to believe that the trip she was currently on felt just as good as that first one, but that probably wasn’t true.
‘I’ve got a new therapist now,’ Sarah said. ‘He’s my own age, and half Indian. He’s quite nice.’
‘How often do you meet?’
‘Twice a week. It’s a lot cooler than group therapy.’
‘Definitely! ’ said Tanja loudly. At that moment, she was a 1,000 per cent convinced that group therapy was nonsense. Sarah already knew her elder sister’s opinion on this and said that, actually, this wasn’t the time to talk about the progress she was making in therapy, while Tanja thought that in the medium term, it would never again be so easy to discuss this kind of thing. Their last mutual high had been four years previously, just before NovoPanopticon had come out, and before Sarah had started her screenwriting degree at the Babelsberg film school. That evening, at Club Golem in Hamburg, off their heads on Molly, they’d talked about their parents and both agreed they should have divorced fifteen years ago, and probably hadn’t because of Tanja and Sarah – and then, before they went back to the dance floor, the sisters said they hoped their parents had at least been happy to some degree. This time, a comparable moment of truth and intimacy eluded them. Sarah had been at Griessmühle since five in the morning and was starting to get tired, while Tanja was just peaking and might even consider buying another pill from someone. Sarah left the club at half past four. After that, someone came up to Tanja every twenty minutes and asked how long she’d been there or whether she wanted to snort something, to which Tanja answered truthfully, and declined. Despite being in the best of moods, her responses were mostly monosyllabic, and then she went back to dancing with her eyes closed or writing messages to Jerome. When Janis suddenly appeared in front of her at around 10 p.m., wearing a white T-shirt with a Vetements logo on the chest (which Tanja disapproved of), she was less monosyllabic. She could remember having a really interesting conversation with Janis in OHM once about Good Time by the Safdie Brothers, a film that Tanja thought was the best of 2017. Janis had liked it as well, and recommended the directors’ previous film, though when Tanja watched it, she liked this one much less. At Cocktail d’Amore, Janis seemed shy and very concerned about Amelie. ‘It’s funny, of course, seeing you here. I really messed things up with Amelie . . .’ His hair was longer than it had been in January, and he’d combed it into a centre parting, which looked at once absurd and attractive. Tanja tried not to let on that she knew he had a crush on her. She was standing in front of Janis, high and wearing a sports bra and quite enjoying the whole situation. ‘Amelie is really into you,’ she said. ‘Just be careful with her – I don’t think all is lost yet.’ Janis looked more alert and more sober than most people in the club. ‘I hope you’re right,’ he said, looking Tanja in the eye. When she glanced at his shirt again, he said: ‘Don’t worry, it cost €10. It’s a silk-screen fake from Brandenburg.’ He didn’t smile as he said it. Tanja felt she’d been caught out. ‘What have you taken?’ Janis asked. ‘E,’ said Tanja. Janis smiled. ‘It suits you. You’re more open than usual. Almost warm.’ The comment clearly overstepped the mark. ‘So what have you taken?’ Tanja asked.
