“My eyes won’t
collaborate with my face.”
“Shut one eye then.”
“I see many colours.”
“Like a kaleidoscope?”
“In my head I’m
building a house…”
“What kind of house?”
“One with windows…
and, a, ah, roof. And some walls.”
With the abandoned
airport and techno music as a backdrop, running on artificial energy, Daniel
turned to me and asked earnestly about my childhood:
“Were you happy as a
child?”
“I mean…”, I started.
“Because, when I was a
child, you know, there were things that were… ah, how do you say, strange?”
“Yep, ‘strange’ is a
word.”
“Because, like, back
in Dusseldorf…”
“Hasslehoff?”
“Your humour, even
when I am in this state like this is not so good.”
Checkmate.
“Back in Dusseldorf,
when I was very young, we had this dog, you know? And like…”
Dead sober, I recalled
all the times I was high in a club, discussing the darkest moments in my 25
years, completely dead pan, with sliding smiles encouraging me to divulge everything I'd ever buried.
Of course he had a dog. It would have died when he was 14.
They’d have given it a human name, which would have made it even more of a
tragedy, because it called for greater empathy. They
would have had a mock funeral, their father curling the Jack Russell into a
shoebox, before burying it in the corner of their property. Years later, he’d
re-visit to find there was a rose bush growing where Mickey had been buried.
And he would have stood there, in Hawthorn, by the picket fence, with an ice-cream
and his best friend and reminisced about the dog he’d had for as long as he
could remember. And even though he’d moved to Berlin from Australia for three
months, he’d still remember, years and years later, the dead dog he’d described
losing as a child to a sober dude on an abandoned airport runway, high on MDMA,
speaking in broken English, with his eyes not collaborating with his face.
