“What the fuck does
that mean?”
“Not sure.”
This is the
conversation I imagine the German couple are having next to me at McDonald’s at
3am.
After choking down the
Fillet-O-Fish I ordered via language blunder, I make my way back to our
apartment, skipping over dog shit like it were my first time dancing. The
towers are eerie. The surrounding trees ominous. There’s silence among the
communal bins.
At level two I pause
and listen for what Mr Kauf is playing on his stereo, or singing, or shouting. Instead,
there’s nothing and I get lost in whatever it is I’m meant to be thinking:
No matter where you go in the world,
hairdressers always have puns for their salon names: eClips, hair of the dog,
hairport etc. No matter what time it is, someone, somewhere in the world is
having: a shower, a beer, a shit, a colonoscopy, open-heart surgery, their last
meal. No matter what anyone says,
you can trust your mantra. And if you don’t have a mantra, you can trust that a
Holiday Inn will provide a continental breakfast at a reasonable price and a
cosy place to sleep, free of bedbugs. There may be the occasional streak of
human faeces on the mattress cover, though. Which reminds me, I need to book a
room for two for the start of June.
I escape my thinking,
climb the final set of stairs and turn the key. There’s a rumble from the
kitchen and I’ve momentarily forgotten someone sleeps there. My fly already
undone, penis poking through my pants as if seeing the world for the first
time, urine readied to splash into the bowl with great force. The same force
that someone, somewhere in the world, is using to: flick a bug from a leaf,
hoist an infant onto their shoulders, push a car into gear, or sign the
customer copy of their last meal before stepping into oncoming traffic and being
ploughed into by a scooter with enough force to send them plummeting back into
the memories of the third, second and first time they had ever tried fish.
