Tiger Milk Read online

  I shake my head at Jameelah.

  I’ll bet you, says Jameelah, I’ll bet you he comes over here.

  She waves at him and I see his eyebrows arch. He hesitates for a second and then crosses the street with an awkward grin on his face.

  Him, I ask.

  Jameelah nods without taking her eyes off the guy.

  Watch this, she whispers.

  As the guy gets closer I start to feel a little strange. But that’s normal, you always feel a little strange at first, it happens every time, it’s just part of the whole thing. Jameelah takes my hand and we saunter toward him.

  Hey, says Jameelah.

  The guy looks us up and down and grins.

  What are you staring at, says Jameelah.

  I’m not staring, he says.

  He’s pretty old, he must be thirty. He looked younger from far away because of his clothes. He’s barely got any hair left, with just a bit of fluff above each ear.

  Our last two classes of the day were cancelled, says Jameelah.

  Aha, he says, so what are you up to then?

  I’m Stella Stardust, says Jameelah, and this is my friend Sophia Saturna. I’ll bet you have one of those apartments with wooden floors and stucco moulding and all that stuff, right? And tons of old vinyl? You definitely look like the type of person who collects records.

  No vinyl but a lot of CDs, the guy answers, shoving his hand into his jeans pocket, do you know what CDs are?

  Nah, we’re walking talking MP3 players you know, at night we plug giant thumb drives into our ports, kind of like in the Matrix, you know? We keep them on our nightstands right next to our kiddie cassettes and the music is downloaded automatically onto our internal hard drives along with everything else, like our homework assignments, telephone numbers, French vocabulary lists, everything.

  The guy looks at Jameelah and laughs out loud.

  What’s so funny about that, says Jameelah, barely able to keep from laughing herself.

  Shaking his head, he stares at her like he’s watching the climactic scene of the most interesting movie ever. For a second I think he might actually believe Jameelah’s bullshit. Belief is wanting things to be true that you know are impossible. And this guy is one of those people, the type of guy who wants to believe everything because he spends all day taking care of boring shit, emailing and crunching numbers and sucking up to clients, yeah, he probably has to meet with clients constantly and once in a while when he’s running back and forth to the copier he stops and asks himself why he bothers with it all. He’d much rather lose himself in our lies.

  What do I have to do to see these ports, he says folding his arms across his chest.

  It’ll cost a hundred euros, I say.

  Jameelah winks at me and her eyes guide my gaze to her left hand. She forms a circle with her pointer finger and thumb.

  I actually never do this kind of thing, he says as we climb into the backseat of his car which is parked at a nearby garage.

  We never do this kind of thing either, Jameelah says giggling. She picks up a pile of glossy magazines on the seat and tosses them into my lap.

  Are you rich, I ask.

  He laughs.

  No, not really, he says adjusting his rearview window so he can see us.

  There’s no such thing as not really. Are you rich or not?

  I don’t talk about money, he says trying to sound all slick and cool.

  Jameelah looks at me and rolls her eyes.

  What an idiot, she whispers.

  The apartment is incredible, exactly the way we imagined it would be, gigantic, full of beautiful furniture, kind of like what you see at Ikea except more expensive, and there’s not a speck of dust anywhere. He must have a cleaning lady I think to myself.

  Do you guys want ice cream, he asks.

  I don’t like ice cream, I say, though it’s a lie.

  Right, we don’t like ice cream, says Jameelah opening her rucksack, where’s the kitchen anyway, she asks, and do you have any milk?

  There’s a tall CD rack next to the bed. The guy really does still buy CDs. From the far corner of the place I hear the sound of utensils clanging. Jameelah and the guy are in the kitchen. Then Jameelah slides across the wooden floor in her stockings and stops in front of me.

  Hey, she whispers, Sophia Saturna.

  She smiles, nods at the silk scarves hanging from the rungs of the cast iron bed frame, and looks at me inquisitively. I nod and push play on the CD player and the music is decent so I turn up the volume. Jameelah slides back toward the kitchen, balancing herself like a newborn foal taking its first steps across the pasture. I have to laugh because I know that couldn’t be farther from the truth. All of a sudden the apartment goes dark. A disco ball hanging from the ceiling starts to spin and tiny flecks of light dance on the walls. The guy must have taken off his t-shirt in the kitchen because his upper body is naked when he reappears. The tiny points of light spin across his skin and it reminds me of Friday nights at the ice skating rink. There’s no hair on his chest, I bet he shaves it. He holds out a glass for me and smiles. He looks like a nice guy somehow, but that just makes me feel kind of sorry for him.

  Jameelah takes off her top, hops onto the bed, and starts jumping up and down on the mattress. I toss my t-shirt on top of Jameelah’s things and join her. Our heads bob up and down as we jump. The guy stands in front of us and takes cautious sips from his glass of Tiger Milk.

  Come on up, Jameelah shouts, the air’s much nicer up here.

  He gingerly tests the mattress with his big feet and I notice that his second toe is longer than his big toe. He says something but the music is so loud that I can’t understand it. I grab his hand so he doesn’t fall over and as I do I ask myself whether the length of your second toe plays a role in keeping your balance. Mama had said something once about people with long second toes, I can’t remember what it was, but it was something bad, something like people with long second toes die young, that wasn’t it but it was something like that. Mama often says things that sound wrong. Mama says that back when Papa left he took her engagement ring, the one with the green gemstone in the middle, it was real, she says, it belonged to his mother, she says that every time she starts going on about the ring, it was real, she says, and Papa took it to give to his new girlfriend, and then she starts to cry and says that you just don’t do that, and the way she says it makes it sound as if the fact that the ring is gone, that Papa took it with him, is much worse than anything else about Papa leaving.

  We jump around on the bed to the deafening music. The guy pulls me close.

  You have such beautiful hair, so blonde, he shouts in my ear so loud that it hurts.

  He tries to grab my hair as it flies around and I kiss him and he grabs my ass. Jameelah drops to her knees and pulls the guy down with her and opens his belt and pulls down his jeans and he’s wearing boxers and they get pulled part way down with the jeans but it looks kind of nice, even the bulge where his hard-on is sticking out. Jameelah takes a big swig of Tiger Milk and dribbled it all over the guy’s chest. She leans over him and starts to slurp up the milk from his body and he wraps his long legs around her and I take two of the silk scarves and tie his hands to the bed frame. We take turns kissing him and take off the rest of our things until we’re naked except for our stockings. Jameelah ties his feet to the other end of the bed, her stockings are rolled most of the way down, I don’t know why and I want to pull them up for her but she does the opposite and takes them all the way off. She’s hidden the condom somewhere inside, and when she finds it she rips open the package. The condom’s bright red and I wonder what flavour it is, must taste like something red, I think, maybe strawberry or cherry, but then Jameelah puts it in her mouth tip first and things get serious. We take the big white sheet that’s crumpled at the bottom of the bed and lay it around the guy so that only his cock, which is all red, is showing, like during surgery, when everything is covered with that green fabric except the spot where they are g
oing to operate. The guy lays there completely still, as if we’ve given him anaesthesia.

  Jameelah says you can learn something from these guys, just like when you study medicine. First you cut up a frog, then corpses, and only at the end do you get to work on real, living people. That’s how you learn something. We need to practise, for later on, for real life, at some point we’ll need to know how it all works. We need to know everything so nobody can ever mess with us.

  It’s still the middle of the day, meaning it’s a little too early to go to the planet, but going home now would be weird so we head toward Wilmersdorfer Strasse U-bahn station and wander through the pedestrian zone, into the mall, and then downstairs to the supermarket. We grab all kinds of stuff, Yum Yum noodles, marble cake, Pixy Stix, tubes of sweet Milchmädchen condensed milk, and butter rum flavour Riesen, which Nico likes so much. We pay with Jameelah’s fifty euro bill and then walk over to the planet.

  The planet is a big ugly concrete ball right next to the mall at Wilmersdorfer station. There are a bunch of smaller planets or moons around the big one, all of them made out of concrete too. In summer, when it’s hot, foamy yellow water sometimes shoots out of the small planets, but most of the time the whole thing is dry. I have no idea who decided to put it here. I guess it’s supposed to be art but it just looks like shit. I think they wanted mothers to sit around the planet with their kids and eat ice cream and splash around in the fountain or whatever. But you never see mothers and children at the planet, only alcoholics and crazy people and us.

  Nico says the city didn’t build it for mothers at all, he says it’s for us so that we have a place to meet after school and on weekends. There’s a phone booth next the planet. It’s an old yellow dinosaur and I’ve never seen anyone go in to use it except for Nico when he’s smoking up. But it’s actually in the perfect spot. It’s covered from top to bottom with writing. We leave each other messages on it about when we’re going to meet or where a party or concert is. It may be old fashioned but it’s cheaper than calling or texting and everyone who comes to the planet checks the phone booth for messages anyway and luckily for us the city cleans it as soon as every inch is covered with ink.

  Kathi and Laura are sitting at the planet. Kathi is fussing around with Laura’s bangs with a razor blade, just like earlier today at school during the twenty minute morning break, when we were down in the basement in the bike storage area, where we always smoke, she was working on Laura’s hair too. She wants her bangs to be straight, perfectly straight, but to run at an angle from left to right and it’s not so easy to cut them at an angle and make the line perfectly straight.

  So what’s going on today besides hair cutting, asks Jameelah.

  S-bahn party I think, says Kathi, Nico was just here and said something about it.

  Where is he anyway, I ask.

  Under the railway bridge. You guys have anything to drink?

  Jameelah pulls out the bottle of Tiger Milk and the bag of butter rum Riesen from her rucksack. Viovic are next to the phone booth. Viovic are always in the same outfit, all in black, with the same hair, dyed black and cropped at the chin, and when it rains they have the same black umbrellas, which is why we just call them Viovic, like it’s just a single entity, even though that’s not true, there are two of them, they’re twins. The only time you can tell them apart is when they are on stage, because Viktoria plays bass and Violetta plays guitar. Their band is called Viovic and they’re crap, everyone says so, not just me. I don’t understand why they are so bad since they have a rehearsal space in their parents’ basement, with egg boxes on the wall and everything, and they practise almost every day because there’s also a music room at the private school they go to, but maybe they don’t practise as much as they say they do.

  Nini, Viktoria calls, do you have a sharpie?

  I shake my head.

  I do, says Kathi and tosses it over to Viktoria.

  Violetta scrawls something on the phone booth.

  You guys coming to the S-bahn party?

  Viktoria and Violetta shake their heads.

  We’re going to Rotor, they say.

  I wonder to myself whether they practise saying everything simultaneously like that, it’s almost creepy.

  Here comes Nadja, says Laura with her mouth full. She points toward the S-bahn tracks.

  She looks awful, whispers Kathi.

  She was already looking bad at school earlier, says Jameelah.

  Hey, have you guys seen Tobi, asks Nadja as she walks up.

  Is everything okay with you, asks Kathi.

  Got my period, where’s Tobi?

  He’s with the others under the railway bridge.

  I look in the butter rum bag. Only one left.

  This one’s for Nico.

  We run past the entrance of the U-bahn station and cross Stuttgarter Platz toward the raised S-bahn tracks. Apollo and Aslagon are squatting next to the underpass. It looks like Apollo is drawing something on the ground with his wooden sword. His Viking helmet is tossed to the side, lying in the dirt. Apollo believes he’s a Viking and Aslagon thinks all humans are divided between bird people and lizard people. I’m a bird person and so is Jameelah, he says, but he himself is a lizard person, just like the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Apollo and Aslagon only hang out with us at the planet during the summer because they spend winters in the Auguste Viktoria mental hospital.

  What’s that supposed to be, asks Jameelah.

  It’s Naglfar, says Apollo, the ship that has to be built out of human fingernails before the end of the world can finally come.

  And that’s why you two can’t pass, says Aslagon, peering at us with his kohl-smeared eyes.

  Why not?

  Anyone who wishes to pass beneath the railway bridge must have their nails cut by Apollo, he says, so we can build the ship and bring on the apocalypse.

  Why would you even want to bring on the apocalypse, asks Jameelah.

  Yeah, says Nadja, maybe we don’t want the world to end.

  God’s earth is rotten, says Apollo as he gestures at us with a rusty set of nail clippers.

  Nadja rolls her eyes.

  Fuck it, she says, taking the clippers and snipping one nail from each of us.

  The walls of the underpass are covered with spray paint from floor to ceiling. The crappy graffiti is Tobi’s. Tobi tags his stuff animaux, which means animals in French. But for a graffiti tag animaux is too long, Nico explained it to me. It’s the last two letters that make it too long, you need to spray quickly and then get the hell out of there. Maybe that’s why Tobi gets caught all the time and maybe that’s why you see the tag anima all over the city.

  The good stuff is Nico’s. Sad is his tag, written in English. Sometimes he writes Sadist. He writes it in soft funny-looking letters, like clouds. It’s comforting when I’m riding the bus around town and see a Sad Nico has tagged on some random wall. It’s like the sensation I get when I have a pebble in my shoe, in that moment when I see one of Nico’s Sad tags I’m not alone.

  At the far end of the railway underpass, Tobi and Nico are standing around smoking. Nico’s leaning against the wall. He’s big. Everything about him is big actually, his hands, his blue eyes, his mouth, and his feet, which are always in the same pair of trainers which he throws into the washing machine just as often as he washes his clothing and hangs to dry along with the clothes. Even his shaved head is big and really the only small thing about him is the kiddie lunchbox he always carries around. It’s plastic, with bright stripes and on the side of it a clock that doesn’t work because it’s out of batteries. I used to have one just like it from when Nico and I were kids. We were at the carnival one day and the lunchboxes were on display on the top shelf of a raffle ticket booth. Nico and I wanted them so bad, one for each of us, but both of our mothers just wanted to keep moving. We began to cry and Nico’s father started buying raffle tickets, more tickets than anybody else. Nico’s mother cursed at him and the man at the booth laughed as he handed
Nico’s father one ticket after the next, pulling them out of the clear wrappers like meal worms and shoving them at Nico’s father until he had enough points for two of the lunchboxes.

  So that’s how we’re going to spend our money, Nico’s mother had said to his father pointing to the slips of coloured paper littering the ground, but she was just in a bad mood because Nico’s father was drunk and so were my Mama and Papa but she couldn’t drink because she was pregnant with Pepi then.

  I don’t think it’s right either, my Mama had said to my Papa, say something, she said, but Papa just rolled his eyes.

  Nico has carried that thing around with him ever since. He used to carry his matchbox cars back and forth to the playground in it but these days he keeps his pot in it and uses the smooth plastic face of the clock to blend the pot with tobacco. He even takes the lunchbox to Schulze-Sievert, where he’s doing his apprenticeship. Everybody jokes about Nico and his lunchbox, but he doesn’t care, he laughs right along with them. His lunchbox is his lunchbox. Mine got destroyed the same summer I got it. Dragan threw it against the wall of a car park after I told him the clock on it was shockproof.

  Hey, says Nico, so did you let Aslagon cut your nails?

  I nod.

  Poor guy, says Jameelah as she reaches for the joint.

  What do you mean?

  I mean seriously, she says, God’s earth is rotten has got to be the saddest sentence I’ve heard in ages.

  Nico spits on the ground.

  Yeah, maybe it is sad, he says, looking up at the sky. Sad but true.

  All of a sudden there’s a commotion at the planet. A bunch of skaters are riding around the fountain, shouting and clapping as they fall down and hop back up and their boards smack loudly against the concrete. It looks like the diagram Herr Wittner shows us in physics class, with the planet as the nucleus of an atom and the skaters whizzing around the nucleus like electrons, everything is made out of atoms, says Herr Wittner, the whole universe.