A New Tense

A New Tense

1  Impressum

2  Dedication

3  A Call

4  The Flight

5  The Jones'

6  A Letter

7  Safe Subjects

8  Otherwise They Win

9  A Party

10  Bird Watching

11  Eddie Gardens

12  Self-Destruction

13  Ashes and Arguments

14  Old Dogs

15  Afternoon Tea

16  Codes of Conduct

17  Parking

18  Sun Catcher

19  A New Tense

20  Acknowledgements

21  About the Author

Impressum

Copyright: © Joanne Day, 2017

Verlag: epubli GmbH, Berlin

www.epubli.de

Cover design by Joanne Day and Robert Hanna

Dedication

For Nina

A Call

I was another Australian in Berlin and it was my first winter. Snow was covering cars. The warmest winter in years, people said, but it was cold enough for me.

I lived with three other people. I’d met one of them, Julia, drinking outside a bar in Friedrichshain. I’d wandered in from the street, drawn by the music, but I hadn’t liked any of the bands so I ended up sitting down next to her and starting a conversation. We sat out the front for hours, smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking cheaper beer. By the morning we’d decided to start a band and she’d offered me a tiny room in her apartment. It’d been so easy that I didn’t understand until later how lucky I’d been, all the struggles that other people had in trying to find apartments. I hadn’t even heard of the bar, I’d just been wandering around, locked out of the apartment I was crashing at, a friend of a friend from Melbourne who had started to hit on me with less and less subtlety. I told Julia about this and she offered me a place on her floor, and then, when we got more comfortable with each other, in her bed, until her other housemate moved back to Sweden and I could take over the room.

We were all hanging out in Steffi’s room now. She had the biggest one that we used as a lounge, there was a television hooked up to a laptop that we watched movies on. Julia, Steffi and me were wrapped up in the bed and Max was lying on the floor. We’d been out the night before, separately, and we were necking beers, all in various states of ruin, except for Max, who was mostly sober and drinking a Radler because he was on call. I saw his eyes darting suspiciously to the window whenever he heard an ambulance outside (Krankenwagen, one of my favourite words), and he’d pat his pocket for his phone, all these actions subconscious, I thought. Steffi was coming down from pills, and Julia and I were hungover and speedy from a show we’d played the night before in Mitte. I was nursing a bruised and swollen elbow. Some English guy had pushed past me up the stairs at Heinrich-Heine Straße and I’d started to fall. I tried to grab onto him when I did, but the stairs were so sleety and slippery that I took him down with me, and even though he landed on me and I hurt my elbow he called me a stupid bitch before he’d even gotten up. Julia had stood above him and yelled at him in German until he’d slunk away with his mates to a safe distance. He’d called us stupid cunts, and I could hear in his voice that he thought he’d put us in our place, like we’d never heard the word before.

Still, Julia’d thrown her bottle of beer at him, And that’s what love is, she said as we ran up the street away from his pack of howling friends, that beer was mostly full.

It was Saturday night and Steffi was getting up, trying on different clothes, a birthday party she had to go to, she said, and she didn’t even like the person that much.

“So why are you going?”

She shrugged. “Free booze.”

That peaked my interest, but we had enough booze here, and besides, this was basically perfection, friends and blankets and beers, Withnail and I playing on the television, flicking bottle tops across the room at Steffi’s bin, Julia rolling a joint that she’d pass around. Maybe some more people would drop over on their way out, but even if they didn’t, it was great to just stay in with Max and Julia, neither of us working tomorrow, talk of going to Tiergarten in the snow. I wanted to bring my camera and take some pictures for the winter zine I was making.

Steffi decided on an outfit, took a drag from the joint Julia was passing around and left. We all yelled goodbyes until the door closed, bon voyage, schönen Abend, have a good one! I was so warm and content that when my phone rang and I saw it was Jones calling from Melbourne I answered it straight away, even though, aside from the occasional email to let each other know we were alive, we hadn’t talked in months. “Jones, you shithead, how are you?” There was a crackling, and then a different voice spoke. “It’s Calliope, Lauren.” “Ah, right. Sorry, I thought it was Jones.” “I gathered, dear,” she said. “Look, I’ve got some bad news for you.” Her voice, distorted through the countries, was heavy with something and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. “What? Are Jones and Gary okay?” Max and Julia turned to look at me. On the television screen, Withnail and I were discussing who was going to kill the chicken. “Yes, they’re fine.” “Are you sure?” “Of course.” “Well, Jesus, Calliope, don’t lead with that.” There was a pause. “It’s your mother, Lauren. We just got a call from her partner. She died last night.” “Oh,” I said, and the way that I said it was Oh, is that all? “Um, how?” “A car accident.” “Right,” I said, and couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She sounded it. “It’s okay,” I said, to Calliope, but also to Max and Julia, who were looking at me in concern. I started to extricate myself from the mess around me, sending one of the bottles of beer to the floor. It spilled a frothy puddle on the stained floorboards but Julia waved me away. I went to my room and sat on the mattress on its pallets next to the radiator. Clothes on the floor, beer bottles lined up against the wall, rolled up scrap of cardboard on the desk. The room was about nine square metres, not bad because I didn’t have much furniture, except I dumped my clothes on the floor and it was hard to get anywhere. There were dregs of wine in a glass on the desk. It was filled with cigarette butts. “Is Jones there?” I asked. “Of course.” There was an exchange on the other end. I felt like it went on for too long, and even though it should be impossible for me to hear anything I thought that I knew what was going on — Calliope begging for him to take the phone, Jones shaking his head until the last moment. “Calliope,” I said quickly, “it’s alright, I don’t need to talk—” “Hey,” said his voice on the other end. “Hey,” I said. “How are you?” “I’m okay. How’re you?” Like a stranger on the street he added courteously, “I’m sorry.” “Yeah.” “Hang on.” There was a pause, the tinny sound of a door opening and closing. “Mum started making up your room,” he said. They still called it my room even though it had only been my room for a few years, and that was a decade ago. “She’s gonna try to convince you to come back, at least for a bit. For the funeral, I guess.” “What do I do?” “Well, that’s up to you, mate.” “Yeah, I know that, but I can’t think. What do you think?” “I can’t make the decision for you,” he said. “Yes,” I said. “I know that, I’m asking because I want your opinion.” Dread came over me, and with it all the memories of how it’d been before I left, his coldness. I forced myself to remember that he was actually my closest friend and not some condescending stranger. Before he could say anything else, I said, “Can you put your mum back on?” “Yeah.” Calliope, on the end of the line. “Are you there?” “Yeah.” “Look, I think you should come back. For the funeral.” There was a light knock on my open door, and it swung in a bit farther. Julia was there. She mouthed, Are you okay? I nodded back at her. She stepped over the mess, handed me a cigarette and a fresh beer and left the room. “Lauren?” “I’m still here,” I said, lighting the cigarette and blowing out smoke. “Look, I don’t know if I want to come.” “Of course,” she said, but the beat was a little too long. “Will you think about it?” “Would I even be invited? To the funeral?” “It doesn’t matter if you’re invited or not,” she said. “If you want to go, you’ll go.” “When is it?” “I don’t have an exact date yet, but within the week, I expect.” “Okay,” I said, but I still couldn’t think, and the static of the bad connection was the soundtrack to the snow falling steadily outside. I shook my head. “Well. I can’t afford a flight.” “I’ll pay,” she said quickly. “I think it’d be good for you and Kostas to see each other.” Kostas was Jones’ first name. He’d hated the name growing up, and would always introduce himself by his last time. By the time it didn’t bother him anymore he’d already been cemented in friend’s minds as Jones, and so it was only his family members who called him Kostas anymore. It occurred to me that it’d be early morning, their time. “Why is he there so early? Is he staying with you?” “Yes.” “Why? Is he okay?” “He’s okay. He’s...you know.” “Yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t. My cigarette had somehow smoked itself, or at least it was finished. I butted it out in the over owing glass. “Look, I kind of...I can’t really think, right now. I don’t know if I’ll come.” “Well, how about this: I’ll look at some flights and email you the details. You can let me know if you’re coming tomorrow, or the next day, if you need to.” “Okay. at sounds good.” I couldn’t think of what to say and didn’t want to make small talk, and I didn’t want to talk about my feelings, either. “Um, I think I’m gonna go now, is that alright?” “Of course. I’m very sorry.” “It’s okay, really.” “Anytime you want to talk, just call us. I’ll call you tomorrow to see how you are.” “Yeah, I will. And thanks.” We hung up. I sat on the edge of my bed, looking at my big feet encased in their dusty and smelly woollen socks. My torn stockings ending mid-calf, hairy legs peeking out underneath, bruises scattered amongst the tattoos. A car crash. That was it, then, an end to the vague idea of some reconnection between us. I tried to remember her face, but all I could get was her hair pulled back severely, blue eyes, high collars. The rest was a blur. Which wasn’t surprising, considering we hadn’t talked in nine years, and of course I knew how long it’d been since we’d talked. Although I guessed when I thought of years now it would be how many years since she’d died, instead of how many since she kind of kicked me out, or how many years since the last phone call we’d made. We must have been comfortable around each other at some point — stories read in bed, trips to the pool, movies under a blanket on the couch, kid stuff — except that I couldn’t remember any of that. When I thought of her I thought of the arguments, I thought of her sternly telling me that no, there was no other food on offer, of waiting until she’d gone to bed before I snuck into the kitchen and stuffed myself on Weet-Bix piled with sugar substitutes. When I was young she didn’t let me dress in anything other than little girl dresses, and I never felt anything other than uncomfortable in them, like I was constantly in costume. I thought of her version of a sex-ed lesson, which was to line up a bunch of vegetables on the counter and ask me to draw them. And I could draw, the teachers at school said I could draw, so I was excited for mum to see — doing it meticulously, getting all the detail, and then going back to replace the object with a new one. At the end, she didn’t look at my drawings, but said So, why did you only draw the new objects? Why didn’t you use something you’d already drawn? Because I’d already drawn it. I wanted something new. Exactly. You wanted something new, something you hadn’t touched before. That’s what boys think of girls. I know what she was getting at, except she got in too early, I’d only been nine or ten. I recoiled from men touching me for me years, in any context. Girls were safe though; she hadn’t said anything about girls.

I’d told Julia about my mum. She was one of my favourite people here, cool on the outside but so warm once you got to know her, always up for a beer or a line or an adventure or a day spent in bed watching movies. I had a bit of a crush on her when I first moved in, and I think she felt the same, but at least we were smart enough not to start anything while we were living together, and besides, when I got there I was still in ruins about Pete and I was fucking anyone I could to make myself feel temporarily better. I liked her too much from the first night to want to use her in that way.

I sat on the bed in Steff’s room and Max opened new beers and I told him a little about it, not much, just enough to take the shocked look from his face. Skinny Max from some little town in the south, wearing scrub-pants from his work and an old hoodie, cigarette hanging from his mouth, tattoos of tentacles curling over one hand. Max with scars over his left eye, faded but still noticeable, spider webs from his eye to his lip from when a car had hit him when he was sixteen. Another scar he had running down one hip pointed to where the metal started, I saw it in the summer when we all walked around the at in our underwear. It hurt him sometimes, he said, in the cold. I’d said, Still? and he’d said, without self-pity — while I looked at the scars on his lips — I nearly died. I got him to translate. Ich bin fast gestorben . “But are you upset?” he asked now. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know. I’m going to go to bed, I think.” “Me too,” said Julia. “Do you want to sleep with me?” “Yeah,” I said. I saw Max nodding. They were used to it by now, Max and Steffi, used to coming into one of our rooms and seeing us together. We spent a lot of time lying in bed with beers, talking until one of us would go to sleep and the other would remove the beer that we were holding, even though both of us had the ability of being able to not spill a drop from the bottle while we slept, which probably said more about passing out drunk than any kind of talent.

I woke the next morning to Julia snoring next to me, at on her back. She was wearing a baggy shirt with the sleeves cut off and at some point it’d twisted so that both of her breasts were revealed, which was no big deal, I’d seen them so many times before, but still before I got up I pulled the blanket over her.

Somehow I wasn’t hungover, or at least not yet, but my mouth was furry and I needed water, a lot of it: a bucket; an IV. I tiptoed out of her bedroom and went into the kitchen where I turned on the tap and, when I couldn’t find a clean glass, stuck my face under the flow. I stood near the window and watched the snow come down.

I opened the fridge door, ostensibly to look for soy milk for coffee, and saw instead that there were a few Sterneys left in there. I deliberated for all of a second, and then — “Fuck it” — took one and popped the top with a lighter from the kitchen table. I went back into Julia’s room to get my tobacco, and she stirred when I got my feet tangled in a bra and skidded against the bottles of beers lined against the bed. Groaning, she sat up, her bleached blonde hair standing up around her head, electrified, one eye closed, hand up against the wintry light coming in through her windows.

“Morgen,” she said sleepily, her eyes half-closed. “Everything okay? You need me to get up?”

“Nah, go back to sleep, it’s early.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I just opened a beer.”

“Fuck. That’s intense.” She lay back down in bed, eyes closed, and said, “I’ll be up in no time, wake me for the next one.”

“Yup, will do.”

I got my tobacco from her equally dirty desk, picked up a notepad and pen from my room and went to the kitchen. Boiled the kettle and put coffee in the French press, mostly for the order of it, the early morning smell. I took a sip from my beer and thought about writing a list of stuff I needed to think about if I was leaving, but there wasn’t much, actually. Our band, well, we had a couple of shows coming up but nothing too serious, and we’d gotten a bit lazy anyway, none of us willing to make the long trek from the S-Bahn to our rehearsal space in the cold. There was work, but that would be easy, too. I had a job in a bar in Neukölln, but my workmates were desperate for shifts, and besides, as excuses went I reckoned that dead mother was a pretty good one, I didn’t need to say estranged dead mother.

I didn’t want to say yes just now, though. Instead I rolled another cigarette, put my feet up, and found myself drifting there anyway, back to Melbourne, back to the house that Pete and Jones and I shared.

I’m walking home. I’ve had a shit day: first reason is because I found out that my tattoo artist, Jake, can’t finish the piece on my back because of the second reason, which is that he and my girlfriend, Sophie, want to be exclusive. The fucking was fine; I knew about that. He’d been awkward about it, but I thought it was just because he was weird about me being fine, when actually he was weird because they were at the hand-holding, wouldn’t-this-be-great-if-we-could-close-everyone-else-out stage, everyone being me, the person she’d been with for two years. My longest relationship. I was going to Europe for a couple of months, and she’d been acting weird, and I’d thought — god, how stupid — that it was because she’d miss me.

I’m walking home from seeing her. She didn’t give me any good explanations, and she was cold and horrible, like I should’ve known that I was just a stand in for The Real Thing.

I get home and see Pete on the porch. I give him the quick run-down. His eyes get huge and he stares at his beer and yells, “Je-sus, this is the last one! Wait a minute,” and he thrusts the beer at me and runs up the street. I wait for him on the porch, drinking his beer, and a few minutes later he’s running back from the shops, huffing and puffing, his scant muscles bulging from the strain of carrying a carton. He’s doing such a stupid shuffling run that I can’t help him because I’m laughing too much.

We sit and drink. At some point I go into my room and collect the clothes Sophie left and dump them in the street. People walk past them until one woman stops to look.

“Really,” she says, picking up a pair of nearly new Dr Denim’s, “you’re giving these away?”

“Yeah,” says Pete, “but give ‘em a wash first, they’re probably filthy.”

The woman holds the jeans away from her for a moment and then shrugs, taking them with her.

We stay in this position for a while, only moving to get more beers from the stinking fridge inside or to roll cigarettes. The sun goes down slowly, we’re still in the same positions, and after a while I can talk about the other stuff with Pete, how excited I am for Europe, about how now I could stay for longer, about how he should stop spending his money on bullshit to come meet me somewhere.

“Alright, mate, I know you’re upset, but beers, speed and records aren’t bullshit.”

I lift my eyebrows at him.

“But point taken, I’ll save up, you find me a place to stay and I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

“Fuck off , I’m not living with you again, you’re forever pissing on the toilet floor.”

“Now that’s just your hurt emotions getting the better of you, isn’t it? That’s surely not directed at me, your dearest friend. Hey?” He starts to nudge me. “Hey, who’s gonna meet up with you?”

We look up as Jones walks up the street, inspecting the clothes before stepping up to us.

“Bloody hell, Laurie, they’re not yours, are they? I didn’t think you had any dresses.”

“They’re not mine, but I have a couple.”

“Really?” He takes my beer, drinks most of it and lets out a low gargling burp before he hands it back to me with only the dregs left. I sigh.

“Have I ever seen you in a dress?”

“Yeah, man, probably. Why?”

He sits down on the other couch, pulls a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. “I just reckon you’d look weird in a dress. Like a dog on its hind legs.”

“Jesus, Jones, fuck off.”

“Yeah, come on, Jones, mate,” says Pete, “not today, she’s had a fucker of a time. Go get a beer and be nice, alright?”

My phone rang again sometime later when I was sitting in Julia’s room with her, drinking more beers and listening to music. It was an Australian landline number.

“Hey, Calliope?”

“No, it’s Jones.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” he said quickly, “I was a dick before. It threw me, I didn’t know what to say.”

“Mm,” I said back, which I hoped conveyed, yeah, you were a dick, but that’s not been a huge change, has it?

“I know, I know. So. Are you coming back? Can you spare the time?”

“Well, yeah, I can spare a week or two, maybe more, it’s just...I don’t know, man. Am I gonna get a black suit, go to her funeral? That seems fucking weird.”

“Yeah. I get that. But I was talking to mum, and she talked to some guy Mark — your mum’s partner, I guess, or ex-partner, whatever the fuck you call it — and she said there was some stuff with the will that you need to sign for. Might be easier if you came here.”

I got the subtext, but I wanted him to say it. “They could just send that over to me though, couldn’t they? I don’t need to go all the way back for that.”

There was a pause. “I want to see you,” he said. “We haven’t... well, you know how it’s been. It’s hard, mate, on the phone, or email, or fucking Skype. I do want to see you. Even if it’s just for a week.”

It was partly the breakfast beers, partly the fact that I hadn’t heard him say anything that could be construed as slightly emotional in a long time, but I was close to crying. I held my hand over the receiver and coughed to get rid of any hoarseness in my voice.

“Yeah, I’d like that too.”

“Good. Okay. So, I’m looking at the flights now. There’s one for tomorrow afternoon, can you do that?”

“My time or yours?”

“Yours, obviously,” he said.

“Okay, well, yeah, but won’t that be crazy expensive? I don’t know how soon I can pay that back.”

“Don’t worry about that, we can sort it out later. It seems like you’ll be getting money soon enough anyway.”

“Oh. Yeah, right. Well, yeah, book it then, I guess.”

“You guess or you’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Is there a return flight?”

“Not for this,” he said, “you can do that when you’re here, should be easier. Email your details, yeah? Passport number and address and birthday and all that shit.”

“You don’t know my birthday?”

“Oh, the outrage! Like you know mine.”

“Twenty-fifth of May,” I said immediately.

There was a pause on the other end. “September eighteenth?”

“Twenty-eighth.”

“Close enough,” he said. “Send me everything and I’ll get on it.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Anyway, I have to go. You’re alright, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, man. It’s fucking weird, but yeah, I’m alright.”

“Okay. You can call me, you know, if it’s not.”

I wondered if Calliope had just walked into the room, because that didn’t sound like it was for my benefit. Of course, it could’ve been drunk paranoia on my end. He’d always been like this to an extent, it seemed like it was hard for him to open up, he did it well enough with me but still sometimes I had to almost interrogate him before he’d tell me what was on his mind.

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll send you the stuff now. And I’ll see you — when?”

“Wednesday. We’ll get you from the airport.”

“Yeah, right. Cheers. Bis bald.”

He scoffed on the other end, and said, “Don’t be pretentious, Lauren, you know I don’t speak German.”

“Dickhead.”

“Yup,” he said, and hung up.