Chapter Text
The village was swallowed up by darkness within five minutes. Out here it always surprised me at how quickly one could leave civilisation behind and be in the middle of nowhere. In Berlin, even on the outskirts, you would still be somewhere. But catch the train out to Schwerin and amongst the lakes, and it was another world.
Flake and I had seen plenty of countryside as we drove from one gig to another. The Mecklenburg scenery didn't bother me so much from the confines of Aljoscha's van. It was safe, behind glass, glimpsed through a heat-haze or from the side of the road; it was something I looked at to stave off boredom as we passed by on the way to yet another concert in yet another field.
I didn't mind the beach concerts at Hiddensee – that was different, not least because Aljoscha became nostalgic for his childhood – and besides, I had my own fond memories of Hiddensee: the lighthouse, the woods where we'd unroll our sleeping bags, the trawl for driftwood so we could build a fire, and the inevitable drunken jamming and impromptu concerts that followed.
I like the beach. And it's not that I dislike the countryside. It's just that I prefer the city. You always know where you are in the city. In the country, unless there's a really obvious landmark, then you have to rely on things like cows and woods to point you in the right direction. And cows have a tendency to move, and trees all look the same to me.
And of course in the dark, you can't see where you're going at all… Which was why I'd wanted to catch a taxi from the village, but Flake had complained that he didn't have enough money, and said we should walk instead, because it wasn't far. Flake has really great ideas sometimes. This was not one of them.
At some point over the last week, someone somewhere had invited us to a party. We had no idea where we were going, or even who'd invited us, but we had the address and some vague directions, and that was enough. We'd followed the road out of Hohen Viecheln, where the buildings were just shapes in the dark, the church tower the only recognisable thing in the village; and then we'd heard the distant thump of a bass-line.
Like rats following the Pied Piper, we hurried in the direction of the music. The road forked, and so after a moment's disagreement we took the right-hand track. The track disappeared after a hundred yards, and we found ourselves squelching through a field that got progressively muddier. The music did, however, get louder; and when we saw the lights of the party-house I felt vindicated enough to say, "See? I told you it was this way."
Flake ignored me. He was trying to maintain his footing in all the mud, and so was walking in a weird sort of crab-fashion, a shuffling glide in time to the steady pulse of the music. I recognised it as a Gary Numan song just from the beat, and hummed along until Flake deigned to talk to me.
"Not many neighbours to complain about the noise," he remarked. "Fucking hell! What was that?"
Something moved in the darkness at our feet. I aimed a kick at whatever-it-was, and missed. "Probably a rat."
"Rats?" Flake moved closer to me. "C'mon, Paul, let's go back into town. The bars won't all be closed yet. Let's do this another time."
Now I wanted to know what it was that had brushed up against Flake and that now decided to land on my foot. I fumbled for my lighter and clicked it into life, and then waved it in a vaguely threatening gesture towards the ground.
A misshapen lump of dirt stared up at me with beady eyes, and then hopped away.
"A frog! A bloody frog!" Flake said in disgust.
"Nah, that's not a frog. It's a toad."
"Some fucking amphibian, anyway – and what the hell is that? Jesus, this guy lives in a swamp. My feet are wet."
"Stop complaining. This was your idea, remember?"
"I don't remember."
"And this isn't a swamp. It's just a wet field."
Flake made a derisory noise. "It's a fucking swamp."
By then we were close enough to the house to see movement inside, and to distinguish the yell and whoop of voices over the blare of the music. Lights shone from every window and winked occasionally from the garden, like fireflies. As we got closer, I realised that the fireflies were a group of people seated on the fibreglass body of a Trabbi. They were passing around a joint in between smoking their own cigarettes, and they called out vague greetings as we came close.
Directly in front of the house was a gravel track that somehow we'd completely missed when we turned off the road. Flake muttered something about my navigational skills and then pushed past me to enter the house. I lingered on the porch for a moment and swapped cigarettes with a girl, had a quick toke, and then wandered inside in search of booze and entertainment.
Now, we could fit quite a few people into our apartment in Berlin. We were lucky: we even had a balcony, and this was a pretty good place to put the sofa if we wanted to cram even more people in for a party. But I'd never seen so many people stuffed into a house like this before. The place was packed. I could barely see the floor, and it seemed to be easiest to allow the movement of the crowd to rotate you from one room to the next. When I saw somebody I wanted to talk to, I just hooked onto their arm and dragged myself out of the current.
It was hard to get a drink, but Flake reappeared by my side and handed me a bottle of schnapps before he vanished back into the crowd. I drank a lot of it pretty quickly, and then started talking to a guy whom I knew slightly from the gig circuit. We were shuffled around up against a wall, and just as I was beginning to feel drunkenly nauseous from the heat and noise, I noticed through the window that the back of the house had a porch.
"It's too hot in here. Why don't we go outside?" I said, pointing with the half-empty schnapps bottle and sloshing some of the spirit onto somebody standing in front of me. "Shit, sorry! Look, there must be a door out the back. Let's go."
I think I was told that I wasn't allowed to go out the back, that the party was inside and besides, it was cold out there, but once I've got an idea in my head then I have to see it through, no matter how stupid it might be. And I didn't see anything stupid about going out the back door onto the porch, just to catch my breath and clear my head.
I took the schnapps with me and managed to slide through the press of bodies into the kitchen, and from there I made it to the door. I rattled the handle once or twice, and then tucked the bottle under my arm so I could fight with the rattan blind that had got tangled around my right hand. I cursed the blind, the door, and the guy who owned the house, all in no particular order; and then when I tried the handle again, the door opened and I staggered outside.
Immediately something thin and cold spiked me in the side. I yelled and dropped the bottle, dancing to one side to avoid the prickly embrace of whatever it was that had attacked me. It was darker out there than I'd expected, and so I automatically reached back to open the door so that at least I'd be able to see what was keeping me company. I missed the handle and flailed into another spiky thing, grabbing onto it and then letting go. It felt like a cane, slippery and damp, and it rustled and bumped and crashed into more canes, until the whole lot went tumbling down with a noise that obliterated the din from inside.
"Holy shit!" I yelped, hopping sideways. I lost my balance and sat down heavily, hearing something give beneath my weight with a loud snap. A second later, I hissed in pain as something very sharp and whippy sank into certain delicate parts of my anatomy.
"Okay," I said to the night when I'd stopped swearing, "what the fuck is this?"
"Willow," came the reply.
I was so startled by the response that I sat there amongst the fallen and broken withies and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. From my undignified position on the floor of the porch I could see a shape seated in a rocking chair a few feet away from me.
"Willow?" I repeated. "What kind of idiot keeps willow on their porch? It's dangerous. People could trip over it. I've lost my drink because of this bloody willow. Where did it go?"
The shape laughed at me. He had a deep, pleasant laugh that made me momentarily less annoyed at the loss of my schnapps. I stopped groping around in the fallen willow canes and levered myself to my feet. I had no clear idea of what I was doing, so I turned back to the shape.
"Why are you lurking outside in the dark?"
I could hear him smile. "I like the view."
I looked around, but only saw more shapes in the darkness. There was a faint breeze that rustled the trees somewhere nearby. I remembered that my jacket was inside, and I shivered.
"Are you cold?"
"Yeah. I should go back inside."
"Come back out again at dawn. It looks better, then."
I snorted. "Doesn't everything look better in the morning?"
He chuckled at that.
I sat down on the porch and felt my feet hang over the edge. I prodded with the toes of my boots and felt another edge just below. Steps. This seemed right and sensible. I was vaguely worried about finding more mud.
"Flake says that this place is a swamp," I told him. "I said it was just a muddy field. Thank God we set up already. Our field is dry. I wouldn't want to set up the stage in a wet field."
He was probably humouring me when he asked, "Who's Flake?"
I flapped a dismissive hand towards the house. "My flat-mate. Our keyboardist and percussion type thingy person. Well, by percussion I mean that he plays the triangle occasionally. That was Aljoscha's idea. He found a triangle somewhere and stuck it on Flake's keyboard stand. A fucking triangle! They're crap."
"You're in a band?"
I lolled back on the porch. "Yeah! Of course I am. You think I visit swamps for fun or something? We're doing a concert on – tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Soon, anyway. You should come. It would get you out of this swamp and into a dry field. It makes all the difference, you know."
"I don't live in a swamp."
"You sound sensible. I bet you don't. You probably live in Bad Kleinen -" I had problems saying that when I was drunk "- or something."
"No," he said patiently, "I live here."
I was almost horizontal by now. "Here? Like, in this house here?"
"Yes."
"Bloody hell," I said, blinking rapidly to try to clear my head. It didn't work. "You really do live in a swamp. Will I drown if I fall asleep?"
I heard the creak of the chair as he leaned forwards.
"I won't let you drown."
He took my hand – I remember thinking that he must have cat's eyes to see so well in the dark. He felt warm despite the fact that he'd been sitting there all night: warm and safe. Only a drunk would be so trusting. I fell asleep, holding onto his hand.
It was still dark when I woke up, but the darkness was now deep blue rather than black. The party was over and it was countryside-quiet. I could hear the ripple of water somewhere close by, and I could smell wet grass and mud and cigarette smoke. A fisherman's sweater had been draped over me. It was warm and heavy, but I was annoyed that it didn't cover my legs as well as my body. It was cold out on the porch. I complained about this.
"Some people are never satisfied," said the shape.
I rolled onto my side to face him. "You still here?"
"It is my house, after all."
"Yes." I nodded into the floor. "Why aren't you in bed?"
"Because there's a couple of people fucking on it. That sort of thing tends to keep one awake."
"God, I'm glad I don't live here." I sat up and realised that I was still drunk. "You – what's your name, by the way?"
"Till."
"Hello. I'm Paul."
We sat in silence for a while.
"Wow, that killed the conversation," I said brightly. "Do you want a cigarette? That's good for at least a couple of sentences." I pawed through my pockets and found the squashed packet and my lighter. I admit that it was more out of curiosity to see what he looked like than from any real need for nicotine.
"Thank you." He took a cigarette and bent down towards the flame. I held the lighter even after he'd lit up, taking in details until he withdrew from the glow and sat back in his rocking chair.
I closed the lighter with a snap. It seemed much darker all of a sudden.
"Well?" he asked. "Do I look the way you thought I did?"
"Yes. No. Both." There had been a falsity to the image I'd seen, a blur of light into shadow caused by the naked flame. His voice was soft and dark, so I'd imagined him to be much the same. I'd been surprised by the planes of light across his cheek; by the way he tilted his head so that his hair fell forwards to conceal the scars. His face was strong, his mouth passionate. I was amazed that such a good-looking man would rather sit on the porch than go to his own party and pull all the girls.
He'd looked at me directly for only an instant. I had the confused impression of dark eyes and heavy brows, and then he'd dropped his gaze. Was he shy? Nobody was shy with me. I was infallible when it came to getting shy people to talk. I could talk to anybody about anything. I could wheedle the life history out of a stranger faster and far less painfully than the Stasi could.
But now it seemed as if I'd met my match. Till was as uncommunicative as a piece of wood. I thought uncharitably that this was probably the reason why his porch was a haven for bits of willow.
"You're blond," he said suddenly. "I didn't expect that."
It was rather random as conversations go, but it was a start. "Yeah. I like it. I have to bleach it every few weeks though, or the roots start to show." I combed out the straggles of my hair with my fingers. In those days I wore it long at the back, long enough for a half-assed ponytail, and it was sort of chopped and fluffed at the front. This wasn't from any pretension to style on my part, but was due to the fact that Flake cut my hair.
I didn't want to get into any further discussion on hairstyles, so I asked, "Why do you have willow on your porch?"
"I'm a basket-weaver."
I laughed out loud, and then stopped when I realised he was serious. "Really?"
"Absolutely. You want a basket?"
"Hell, no." I was about to light my cigarette when I had second thoughts. "Isn't it dangerous to smoke by the – the sticks? The canes? What if they catch fire?"
The tip of his cigarette glowed brightly as he took a drag. "Then they'll burn. It's wood, you know. It burns quite nicely."
I huffed. "I'm not as dumb as I sound."
He made a warm, ticklish 'hmm' that I took as agreement. "Seriously," he said, "it doesn't matter too much. I can always get some more. I've got a stand of willow on the lakeside; and if I run out of certain colours then I can go someplace else and buy the rods."
"Colours," I repeated. "It's a tree. It's tree-coloured."
"Actually…" Till paused, tapped flutters of burning ash onto the porch, and then said, "You're not really interested, are you?"
"It's fascinating."
He obviously heard the dubiousness in my tone. "Hey, you asked. It's practical, it's beautiful, it pays a decent wage -"
I nodded. "And it's weird as fuck."
"I'm good at it." He lifted his hands. "It's - Well. I'm good at it."
We watched the blue lift and merge into the twilight grey of dawn. I wondered if he sat like this every morning, to watch the sun come up. It seemed like the kind of freedom that should be rationed.
I pulled the fisherman's sweater tight around my shoulders. Belatedly, I realised that it must belong to Till. Embarrassed, I took it off and folded it, and then placed it on the porch behind me. He hid behind his fringe and said nothing.
"You really like basket-weaving?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Till took his time in replying. "Because I don't have to make conversation while I do it."
"Oh." I wondered if that was a hint. "I bet you do, though."
"I'm sorry?"
"I bet you do," I said with a yawn. I lounged on the porch and wondered if I could use his sweater as a pillow. "Talk, I mean. I bet you sit there and talk to the willow, or the flowers, or the fish, or the birds in the trees."
Till made a soft snuffle that could have been interpreted as amusement. "Not really. Sometimes I talk to the radio, though."
"At least it answers back," I said. "Okay, it might not actually converse with you, but…"
"You're right. I talk to the willow, too; and that does answer back."
I sat up in alarm. "It does?"
"Of course. Stick around tomorrow and I'll show you."
Quite truthfully I said, "You are the strangest man I've ever met."
"I can't believe you're not bored here."
I shrugged and nodded back to the darkened windows of the house. "Party's over. Anyway, you're interesting." I hesitated for a moment, and then before I could think better of it, I said: "You know, I talk a lot. All the time. Even in my sleep, apparently. I don't know why. If I don't hear my voice, I get scared. It's a safety net. A comfort. I hate silence. It's… I hate it."
"It's not silent here," Till said; and for a moment we listened to the water and the breeze in the trees and the gathering chirp and twitter of the dawn chorus.
I shook my head. "There's no traffic. No loud music – well, not at the moment. No movement. And that's why you're so interesting. You're so still. How can you be so still, and so silent? It's like you're dead or something."
He was quiet for such a long time that I was afraid that I'd offended him; and then he said softly, "Maybe that's the secret. Maybe you have to be a little bit dead inside. That's why you'll never be silent, Paul. You have too much life."
I honestly didn't know how to respond to that, so I shuffled around on the floor of the porch and then said, "Thanks."
His head dipped down. "You smile a lot," he said.
I smiled, then. "And you laugh a lot."
There was surprise in his voice. "I don't."
"Yes, you do."
Till stared at me. He seemed genuinely perplexed. "That's strange."
"It's been a strange night." I yawned again. "Okay. I'm going to sleep. Just for half an hour. Wake me up, yes?"
He didn't.
When I woke for the second time that morning, he was asleep in the rocking chair; a tangle of dark hair and folded limbs and deep, deep breathing. I watched him for a while, and thought that, while he looked peaceful, he would probably have really bad cramp in one leg from sitting all twisted up like that. That useless observation made, I got up off the floor and went into the house to forage for food.
Stumbling around the wreck of the kitchen, I made enough noise to waken the dead. I heard gripes of complaint from elsewhere, but nobody challenged me even when I began singing. By the time I decided that Till would be awake, I'd managed to cook something. This was a novelty, and I wanted appreciation if not outright praise.
I nudged open the door onto the porch and went outside. "Look," I said brightly, holding out the frying pan. "I made breakfast."
Till brushed back his fringe and gave me a steady look. He seemed different in daylight - remote and uncertain – but then he recognised me and tried a polite smile. "What the hell is that? It smells disgusting."
"Erm. It's fried eggs. Or it was." I agitated the frying pan, but the eggs refused to move. "Only, you don't seem to have any butter. So I had to improvise."
His eyebrows lifted slightly. "What with – axel grease?"
I looked down at the pan again. The mess of eggs was surrounded by a thick black substance. It did rather resemble axel grease. "No," I said, wounded. "I used honey."
"Fried eggs and honey. Of course."
I couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. Just in case he was, I added, "The honey only went black because you didn't clean the pan properly. I don't know what you last cooked in this thing, but it must have been really… black."
He stretched. The rocking chair creaked as he moved. "I probably burnt something in it. Never mind. Apparently, it adds to the flavour."
I was about to agree with this statement when the door swung open and Flake peered out. He blinked at the daylight and the glitter of the sun reflecting on the water, and then he shielded his eyes with one hand and made a noise that sounded like "Unghrr."
"Morning!" I chirped, knowing from long experience that Flake was not fully human until past mid-afternoon, especially when he'd been raving drunk the night before.
"Fuck you," came the cheery reply. "What's that smell?"
"Breakfast." I waved the contents of the pan under his nose, hoping that he'd do something amusing, like throw up. I was disappointed.
"I'm not eating that. It looks like… I don't know what it looks like, but I'm not eating it."
"Good," I said, "because it's not for you. It's our breakfast. You can make your own."
Flake frowned at the pronoun and then took another tentative peek outside. He tilted his head around the doorframe enough to see Till seated on the rocking chair, and then he said, "Who the hell is that?"
"That's Till."
"Oh." Flake waved vaguely. "Hi, Till."
"This is his house."
Flake nodded. "Right. Why is there no food?"
"Because my guests have eaten it all, I imagine," Till said.
"Yeah. Probably. You need to get some more food, man. I'm starving." Flake pushed his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose and yawned, losing interest in the conversation. Halfway through the yawn I could see the implications of the last few moments begin to hit him.
"Shit!" Flake said, staring at Till. "This is your house?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Flake winced, screwing up his face in almost-pain. "Fuck. Your stereo, too? Your, uh, records?"
"Yes and yes again," Till said, patient as ever.
"I… might have broken one of them."
"The stereo or a record?"
"A record." Flake winced again. "Maybe two records."
"Flake!" I scolded, and nudged him in the belly with the frying pan.
He looked offended. "What? They were fucking awful. Folk songs. Folk songs! Some idiot was playing them at top volume and I really couldn't hear any more. Rock and roll is bad enough, but folk songs… They deserve to – uh… I mean, I'm really sorry. It was an accident. I didn't mean to – to tread on them."
Till shrugged. "I stole them from my father. Break as many as you like."
"Cool guy," Flake said to me as he retreated back into the kitchen. "Any eggs left?"
Till and I ate breakfast on the porch. I'd only been able to find one fork, so we shared it between us and took a mouthful at a time of the egg-and-honey mess, direct from the pan. The black stuff tasted a little bit like steak and onion. It was a very strange breakfast. He didn't say anything apart from to thank me the first time I gave him the fork.
Robbed of conversation, I looked at the scenery. It was very pretty, if one liked the countryside. The porch led onto a lawn edged with trees and dog roses; at the end of the lawn was a reed-bed, and beyond that, the lake. The water was a pale shifting colour of blue and silver under the morning light. I couldn't see the other side. It seemed boundless; even though I knew it was only the Schweriner See and that it definitely had another side because I'd been there with Aljoscha.
"Told you it looked better in the morning," Till said.
I nodded and took the fork back. "It's okay."
"Only 'okay'?" he asked, sounding amused.
I stabbed at a crusted piece of egg and shrugged. "I prefer the city."
"Have you always lived in Berlin?"
"No." I offered him the fork and he shook his head, so I set it down in the pan. "I lived in the countryside once. A long time ago."
Till took the frying pan from me. "What happened there to make you hate it so much?"
I was so startled by the question that I laughed, trying to deflect it. "What is this? You only talk during the day and you're all quiet and mysterious at night? Anyway, I don't hate the countryside. It just makes me nervous. That's all."
"He's frightened of cows," Flake said as he came out onto the porch to join us.
I scowled. "I am not."
"You are." Flake addressed Till and ignored my evil glares. "Once, we were in a field up by the coast, and Paul was chased by a cow. It didn't like the way he played guitar. It was mooing and everything. And Paul just ran away from it, yelling, until he fell over."
Till gave me a startled glance. "What happened?"
"Nothing," I said, snatching back the frying pan. "I'll put this inside."
Flake leaned against the door and smiled. "The cow licked you. There you were, flat in the grass, and the cow licked you. It must have thought you were its calf or something."
"Yeah, it was really funny." I poked Flake with the pan to move him out of the way. "Especially the part where I was covered in cow-shit. I remember you thought that was fucking hilarious."
I went inside and ran the taps at full blast so I didn't have to hear the remainder of the conversation. For some reason it annoyed me that Flake should mention that story. Yeah, it was true, and I didn't like cows in the first place, but still – I didn't want Till to think I was too much of an idiot. Not so soon, anyway. He was different from the usual crowd I hung out with. He was very different from Aljoscha.
I made a half-hearted attempt to clean the frying pan and then gave up. I dried my hands on my jeans and then went back onto the porch. Till and Flake had disappeared. I stared at the rocking chair for a moment. It looked peculiar without Till hunched up in it.
A path led from the porch around one side of the house, so I followed it out to the front. Flake was standing on the gravel track, admiring the Trabant. Till stood beside him. It was the first time I'd seen him standing up, and I realised then how big he was. Flake is tall, but so skinny that he looks like a stork. Till was almost as tall as Flake, but more than twice his width. Even dressed all in black, he was huge. I felt cheated. He'd seemed so small in the rocking chair.
Flake waved me over, and then said to our host, "Hey, Till, I heard last night that you could pick up your car on your own. Is that true?"
Till gave the Trabbi a push. "Sure. It's only fibreglass."
"Go on, then," I said, cross.
He gave me a curious look, but obliged me all the same. We edged around the car as he went to the front end and crouched down. An idiot would bend over and try to lift it from the bumper and would probably dislocate their arms in the process. Till was not an idiot. He scuffled down into the mud and put his entire body weight behind it, hooking his hands beneath the overhang of the bumper.
Up went the front of the car, fluid and easy, as if it weighed barely anything. It did, though: I watched Till snarl with concentration as he levered himself further beneath it, shoving it higher until the bumper was level with his chest and his shoulders were tight with strain.
"That's enough," I said, alarmed. "You'll give yourself indigestion."
Till gave a crack of laughter, and the car shook as if possessed. A minute or so later, he gently lowered the car back to the ground. He stood up straight and rolled his shoulders to ease the tension, and then wiped his hands and looked at us.
"Whoa," said Flake. "What the fuck, man. Do you get a discount at the garage for doing that?"
"Anybody can do that," I said. "Once, I saw a Trabbi blown down the street by the wind."
"You liar," Flake snorted.
"I did!" Actually, I wasn't sure that I had. Maybe I'd dreamt that. But it was too late to backtrack, and so I blustered on: "It's not so difficult."
Till nodded towards the Trabbi. "Be my guest."
I could see that Flake was biting his lip in an effort not to laugh, so I said, "Right. Watch this."
I have no idea what possessed me to do something so stupid. Maybe I wanted to impress him after Flake's story about me running away from the cow. Anyway, I knew that it would be impossible for me to be able to lift the car the way he'd done, so I decided that a cunning plan would be to get down on the grass and try to bench-press it. So I wriggled under the front of the car, and then lay there on the damp gravel and examined the underside of the Trabbi. I'd never had cause to lie beneath a car before, so it was pretty interesting.
"Come on," I heard Flake say. "We have to meet Aljoscha at one o'clock."
"What time is it now?" I asked, hoping that it was ten to one, so I could get out of this ridiculous situation with at least some dignity intact.
"Eleven minutes past twelve," Till said.
"Just admit you can't do it," said Flake helpfully. "You're a wimp."
"Oh, really? This is from somebody who can't undo a jam jar," I snapped.
Flake laughed. "I'm not the one under a car."
I swore and then shoved at the curve of fibreglass body above me. To my surprise, it gave quite easily. I began to hope that all was not lost, and so I pushed as hard as I could. The weight of the engine nearly crippled me. I yelled and let go, and then yelled some more when the car shuddered on top of me like some great mass of beige jelly.
"Wow, Paul, you managed to lift it about one inch off the ground, that's pretty fucking cool!" Flake mocked from the safety of several feet away.
I couldn't answer, being momentarily struck dumb with terror at the thought of being crushed to death by a Trabant. My parents would be so ashamed. I lay flat on my back and felt the damp ooze through my shirt. The mud smelled like axel grease. I felt sick.
Flake banged his fist on the side of the car. "Paul!"
I shook myself out of my stupor and wormed sideways, one hand flailing for freedom. I was hoping to grab Flake's ankle so I could knock him over for taking the piss. Instead I managed to grab Till, who took hold of my hand and pulled me out from underneath the car and quite effortlessly set me on my feet as if I were a particularly obnoxious child who'd been playing hide and seek. I half-expected him to scold me, too, but he didn't. What he actually said was, "The engine is heavy."
I detected sympathy in his tone, and smarted with it. "Gosh, do you think so? I'm just a guitarist. We don't need to know these things. Guitarists only need strong wrists."
For some reason, this made Flake laugh even harder.
Till gave me a patient look. "I'm a drummer."
"Are you? Well, there it is, then." I felt humiliated, but I'd only got myself to blame. "Drummers must be really fucking strong."
"I used to swim as well," he added, as if this was a good excuse.
"What, with your drum kit as a drag-weight?"
He raised his eyebrows and I realised that I'd overstepped the line. I brushed the back of my hand against my mouth as if I could gag myself from making any further moronic remarks, and ended with saying softly, "I'm a really bad loser."
Till smiled at me, gently. "It wasn't a competition."
"No. But… It doesn't matter." I busied myself with trying to wipe the worst of the mud from my clothes. It was in my hair and everything, and I wrinkled my nose in disgust.
"Do you want to wash? I have -" Till began.
"A lake. You have a lake and I can go jump in it," I finished for him. I scrubbed at my hair viciously. Flake was still laughing. Till looked wounded, as if I'd really hurt him. He folded his arms across his chest and dropped his gaze.
I felt irrationally angry. I liked him, and I'd made a fool of myself, and Flake was laughing at me, and I wanted a reason to come back here and see Till again, if only to leave him with a better impression than the one I'd already made.
"Paul. We should go. Aljoscha will wonder where the fuck we are," Flake said with a loud sigh. "It'll take us ages to get back… unless Till can drive us there?"
I rolled my eyes. Trust Flake to immediately grasp the possibilities of knowing someone with a car. Even I wouldn't be so blatant. Not about such a material thing, anyway.
Till didn't seem surprised by the request. "Sure," he said, low-voiced. "Get in. It's open."
Flake grinned: Mission accomplished. He slid into the back of the car, and so I sat in the passenger seat, still combing mud out of my hair with my fingers. Till lapsed into silence, pretending to concentrate on his driving. It wasn't as if it was a difficult route to follow – back into town and then out the other side - and the road wasn't exactly heaving with traffic. I watched his hands on the wheel and then forced myself to look away.
It was quarter past one by the time we reached the field. I could see Aljoscha prowling up and down, waiting for us. Flake leapt out of the car and, caught by his urgency, I started after him. Then I swore aloud and dashed back to the car. It was still idling by the side of the road, as if he'd been waiting for me to remember. I put my hands on the roof of the Trabbi and leaned down to him.
"Thank you. For the ride. And for the eggs."
Till nodded, very serious, still waiting.
"And…" I said, screwing up my face in a wince, "I'm sorry about before. I was stupid and rude. I'm not always like that."
"I was beginning to think that I prefer you when you're drunk and crazy than when you're sober and crazy," he said, and he looked up at me from beneath the drift of his hair. His eyes were grey, I noticed: expressive and beautiful when he was unguarded. I decided that he needed to be unguarded a little more often.
"Yes," I said, having completely lost the thread of conversation. "Oh, and I'm sorry on Flake's behalf for breaking your records. I'll make him buy you some new ones, if you like."
He shook his head and his fringe fell into his eyes. I resisted the urge to brush it back for him, and tapped my fingers on the roof of the car instead.
"It's okay. I have other records," he said, apparently oblivious to my agitation.
"Right." I let go of the car and stepped back. "Uh, the concert is this evening. So you can come. If you want to. If you haven't got any baskets to make."
That did it: He smiled.
"See you later, then," I said, triumphant. I gave him a wave, and then turned and ran after Flake into our nice, dry field where our van was parked beside the stage and where Aljoscha waited to bawl us out for being late.
He came to the concert; stood a little way off and listened with that amused, patient expression I was coming to recognise as typically Till. I flattered myself that he was there for me, and then I was offended that, by the time we'd finished the set, he'd gone.
On the way back to Berlin, Flake said to me, "He likes you."
"What? Who?" I asked, even though I knew the answer.
"That guy. Till. He likes you."
I affected nonchalance. "So? You like me. Or at least, I hope you do. Otherwise I'm moving out."
Flake wasn't fooled for a second. "Paul…"
"Okay." I shrugged and stared out of the window. "He's interesting."
"What will Aljoscha say?"
I scrubbed at the window, hard. "I don't give a fuck what he says."
"The town mouse and the country mouse."
I glared at him. "I'm not a fucking mouse."
Flake gave me a glittering look. "Yes, you are."