All the Lights (12 page)

‘No,’ I said, looking at the hands of my watch. Still time; Stephan would probably be going over to where the guy picked up his boys right now. His ‘lad’ in Berlin had told him everything. ‘What if he doesn’t come?’ I’d asked. ‘What if he takes someone else home?’

‘You know me,’ he’d said, ‘I’m irresistible.’

‘I’ve never seen you here before,’ said the woman. ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not from round here.’

She drank her cocktail, stroking the end of her straw across her lips. ‘Are you here on holiday or are you working?’ She didn’t stop chatting, and I picked up my glass and turned to face her. It was dark outside now, and it was pretty gloomy in the bar too, little candles burning on the tables even though most of them were empty. She wasn’t that good looking, jaded, the corners of her mouth drooped, bags under her eyes, but her blonde hair shone in the light of the red lamp above the bar and she was nicely dressed, and the way she was dressed I could tell her body was still in pretty good shape, although it could all be playing tricks on me, the light and the whisky and the night. ‘What about you,’ I said, ‘what do you get up to?’

She stroked her straw across her lips before she drank. ‘This and that,’ she said, pushing the glass aside and taking out the straw and holding it between two fingers and tapping it on the bar a couple of times. I nodded and looked past her at the big window, behind it the night. I nodded again and looked at her, and now she smiled and blushed and lowered her head a touch and looked at the bar.

Sometimes I think that was what it was, that smile, that blush, that lowered head, sometimes I think … A cheap tart, I’d thought in the bar when she sat down next to me, and she probably was one, maybe a professional, I’d thought, and maybe she was one, semi-professional, now and then, but that blush – no, it wasn’t the smile so much, it was the blush, the lowered head, because just before she’d been asking stupid questions and laughing loudly. Sometimes I think she just did that for me at that moment, just acting because she could tell I’d like it. Sometimes I think, and sometimes I know, that all she did was give a stupid grin, that moment next to me, her head leaning forward into the red light of the lamp above the bar.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you’re a nice boy.’

‘You’re a nice girl,’ I said. I looked at my watch and put it in my pocket.

I ran down the corridor. I wanted to get out of there. There was a man lying on the floor, one arm splayed strangely away from his body. ‘Stephan,’ I called out, but I knew he wasn’t there. I’d searched the flat but all I’d found was sex toys. And special furniture, benches, stools. I found stuff only doctors have. I stood in the hallway, but there was no man on the floor any more. The door was open. I ran down the stairs. There’d been a couple of bushels of Blondie’s hair on one of the pieces of furniture.

I ran down the street. I turned around and looked back at the house where Blondie had been just a couple of hours before. A taxi came, the sign on its roof glowing yellow. I waved and it stopped next to me. I opened the door and got in the back. ‘To the station,’ I said, and we were on our way.

The man has a dog’s head. An Alsatian, large ears protruding from his head, pointing towards the ceiling. The man with the dog’s head is directly in the light of the large chandelier. Johannes Vettermann is lying on the floor, crawling backwards away from the man with the dog’s head. But the man with the dog’s head doesn’t seem to be taking the slightest interest in him. He’s holding a small, dark puppy in both hands, human hands, pressing it between the lapels of his jacket.

Now he opens his muzzle, a long pink tongue getting longer and longer until it touches the puppy’s head. The dog-man is absolutely absorbed in licking the tiny head. Johannes Vettermann wonders whether he ought to pick up the ashtray from somewhere behind him on the bedside table, but the two of them look so placid there, the tiny dog looking him right in the eye. ‘Father,’ says the puppy all of a sudden, and Johannes Vettermann doesn’t know if he means him or the dog-man. But the dog-man says it too, ‘Father,’ slurring slightly as he goes on licking. ‘Father, father, father.’ They won’t stop, their muzzles hardly moving, as if they were ventriloquists.

And he’s no longer crawling backwards, he’s crawling towards the door again where there’s a telephone on a table. There was a telephone on the bedside table but he smashed it against the wall because it kept ringing. No one knows he’s here, but it kept ringing and ringing.

The table is a long way away, a large suite in the best hotel in town, five stars, twenty-seventh floor, and the way to the door is even longer now because he has to make a detour around the two dogs. ‘Father, father, father.’

‘Then you two can –’ he whispers, ‘then you two can help me out a bit, can’t you?’

‘Bad father, bad father!’ Another man leaps at him from one side, Johannes Vettermann screaming out loud. The man is naked, tattooed all over his body, an eagle, a clown, faces, symbols, but that’s not what scares Johannes Vettermann. It’s the man’s face, contorted into a terrifying grimace. He has no top lip, his bottom lip sags lopsidedly, dark red and swollen, while two jagged teeth point towards his nose like two thin, white fingers. And his eyes … The eyes stare at Johannes Vettermann with such rage that he tries to crawl under the king-size bed. He’s still screaming. He squeezes his eyes shut so tightly that coloured circles begin dancing in the darkness. He takes the colours, mixes them, strokes them into lines, contours, heads, moves the brush, moves his shoulders, steps forwards and then a few steps backwards, moves back and forth in front of the canvas on the easel, ducks down and creeps around it, moves his shoulders, then stops perfectly still and touches the canvas over and over with the brush, breathing calmly in and out again, stroking and dabbing, a man with a dog’s head holding a puppy to his chest with both hands, the pale pink of the tongue … He opens his eyes; the room is empty. And the stabbing is back in his chest straight away. No, not just in his chest; in his head, his stomach and in his legs and arms, but mainly in his chest. He’s lying on his back, unable to move, looking up at the large chandelier. He threw a bottle at it, finest champagne, still half full, but he missed. That must have been a couple of hours ago, when he wasn’t yet lying on the floor. He’d been lying in bed, a woman on either side of him. They’d been with him all day, massaging his arms and injecting him. They were naked and beautiful, and he’d stroked them cautiously a couple of times but there’d been no real point to it; he hadn’t felt anything. They’d tried to fumble around at him but he’d just said, ‘Don’t,’ and told them the rules. They started getting bored and he gave them a bit of coke, and later he asked them to get dressed again because he couldn’t bear the two beautiful women so naked next to him and around him. ‘One blonde, one brunette,’ he’d said on the telephone, and when the guy had started talking about services he’d said, ‘I don’t care.’

The longing was still there sometimes, a little, especially when he woke up some time during the day, evening setting in again already, and he was suddenly very lucid and very alone.

He watched them getting dressed; the blonde had long hair that had covered her large breasts in bed beforehand, and a couple of times he’d grabbed her hair, enclosing a few strands in his fist so that only the tips were visible, and he stroked them across his face and the lids of his closed eyes like a brush.

‘No,’ he said, ‘not everything, not everything please. Only your bras and underwear and your shoes.’ By ‘underwear’ he meant their extravagant string tangas, but that kind of thing was presumably in right now and lots of young women wore that kind of ‘underwear’, but what did he know? And when they were lying next to him again, what a bed, what a huge, huge bed, and massaging his arms and injecting him in his left and right arms at the same time – ‘My medication, they have to inject my medication, that’s the only service I’m interested in, no matter what it costs’ – he suddenly realised he’d painted all this before. Coloured pencil and pencil and watercolour on paper, forty-eight by sixty-nine centimetres, sold to a former film producer who’d bought the picture of the large shark tank before that and lived with a pile of money in a huge villa with lots of white walls. The big white bed. He was suddenly lying underneath a sheet; he’d pulled it up over his nose. ‘Nose, nose,’ he whispered into the sheet, breathing through the fabric. The brunette handed him the small silver tray he’d brought along specially, his lovely small silver tray, the blonde inserted the tube into his left nostril; the right one had been out of action for a good while now. He giggled into the sheet, and then he snorted and snorted until he no longer knew whether he’d painted all this before or would paint it in the future. And then he wasn’t there at all any more, only two eyes watching everything he’d created, and if he hadn’t created it yet … the blonde reared up, the silver tray so lopsided in her hand that the coke sprinkled like a fine white shower onto the sheet, underneath which Johannes Vettermann no longer existed. And the brunette lay next to her, wearing white fishnet stockings – ‘Ladies, white is not a colour!’ – lying strangely contorted on her side, and her arse looked monumental, two semi-circular and yet slightly angular rock formations, between them the equally white and so tiny piece of cloth of her panties (panties or tangas, at what width of fabric does the difference come in?), and the fishnet stockings weren’t fishnet stockings either, they were ribbons crossing around her legs, and one of the ribbons snaked over her thighs and her arse … and Johannes Vettermann knows he’ll have to force the matter soon, or no one will be interested in his monkey.

Oh yes, it’s a particularly fine example squatting over there in the foreground. A mixture of orang-utan and gorilla with a gigantic head, a monkey with its eyes closed tight, not looking very happy. Oh no, thinks Johannes Vettermann under the white sheet and in front of the white easel, don’t you three dare just disappear! He fences in the bed, fences in the two women and the monkey, but it’s not a fence, it’s ropes round a boxing ring – take a close look you idiots, can’t you see the little boxing girl in the corner of the ring? And Johannes Vettermann knows he’ll have to put some speed into it, he’ll have to force things, and he knows that and he’s lying under the sheet and sweating and sweating while the telephone rings.

He opens his eyes, sees the chandelier above him again, and the telephone rings. He smashes the telephone against the wall; the two women gather up the splinters of plastic from the bed; the ringing won’t stop. And now he knows he has to pick up the receiver. He rolls onto his front, it hurts a lot, and then he crawls slowly towards the door. He feels his heart stumbling and breaking off, feels himself getting weaker and weaker; he’s had so many heart attacks over the past few years. He crawls slowly, moving his arms, moving his legs, and the table with the telephone is still so far away. Why on earth did he take a large suite in the best hotel in town? A small, quiet double room would have done just as well. He hasn’t got much money left now, but because he had so much money a few years ago he doesn’t know what it’s like to be economical. And two beautiful young women belong in a beautiful suite and not in a mid-range hotel with only beer and Coca Cola and apple juice in the mini-bar.

Johannes Vettermann crawls towards the telephone, not ringing any more now, he crawls and leaves a trail on the carpet. His nose is bleeding. But that doesn’t bother him too much; his nose bleeds easily, his mucous membranes have been shot for years now, which bothers him a lot more and he finds slightly embarrassing even though the beautiful women are a thing of the past, but there’s still always
something
or
somebody
there … Johannes Vettermann feels ashamed of his wet trousers and his clammy, warm legs. He feels the damp carpet beneath him and tries to crawl ahead faster. But there’s something in his way, and he knows he won’t get past it before he’s eaten up what’s lying on the carpet there ahead of him. Apples, bananas and oranges. He bites so hard into the peel of the banana that it splits open at the other end. ‘Apples and pears, extra-large strawberries, oranges and satsumas and bananas, sweet peaches and melons, redcurrants and blackcurrants, kiwis and pineapples, cherries sweet and cherries sour, gooseberries! Vettermann’s Fruit supplies everything young and fresh and well-grown at low prices!’ He tries to punch his teeth into an apple but the banana has sapped all his strength, and he feels his heart stumbling, feels a pulsing in his head and a gigantic pressure behind his eyes, too much pressure on his blood vessels, and the blood-stained apple rolls across the carpet, and Johannes Vettermann crawls on slightly then lies still, ahead of him the fruit and next to him the shards of the glass bowl.

‘Peaches are my favourite, father,’ he says. His father puts the paper bag of fruit into his satchel, like every morning, and then puts two extra peaches on top. ‘Peaches keep your skin fresh,’ he says. And Johannes Vettermann, fifteen years of age, has very fresh and rosy skin that all the girls envy. ‘Peaches keep your skin fresh,’ he says and hands out peaches. In return, the girls let him draw them; he draws them while they eat his father’s peaches. He draws the peaches too and his father. He draws all the fruit his father brings home with him. Sometimes his father takes him along to the wholesale fruit market, a huge hall full of crates, outside a huge yard full of crates, trucks arriving and unloading and driving away again, cooling rooms full of crates, sales counters across the entire hall, so much fruit, they supply the whole town with fruit, and his father takes him around everywhere, and most of all Johannes Vettermann likes sitting in the little office behind the pane of glass, where he can see the entire hall. He draws. Flies. He knows all sorts of flies. Big ones and small ones, the kind that only live very short lives and die on the old fruit, then there are green ones with long wings that shimmer in the glint of the strip-lighting. Sometimes he draws the flies larger than the fruit. Sometimes the flies are so big that they could grab the workers and fly off with them. He puts big spikes on their heads with which they could pierce through the workers. And he pierces through them. And then he hears them screaming. The flies and the workers. ‘I’ll give you as many peaches as you like if you take your clothes off.’

‘You’re crazy, Johnny.’

‘No, you don’t have to take everything off. Lie down on the bed over there, you can keep your underwear on.’

‘No, Johnny.’ Almost all of them call him Johnny, and he likes that; he loves John Lennon, he calls him Johnny too.

‘I’ll give you as many peaches and bananas as you like for a month.’

‘But don’t look at me so funny, Johnny.’

And Johannes Vettermann draws. Sometimes he stands for hours by the brightly coloured fruit and waits until the colours seep down into his head. He has oil paints in his bedroom too, but usually he just draws, pencil or charcoal, and leaves the colours in his head for now.

‘What lovely skin you’ve got!’ Johannes Vettermann, sixteen years of age, is standing between the women in their brightly coloured dresses, patting his cheeks and stroking his hair. ‘Peaches,’ he says, but they’re not interested in his fruit. They live in strange flats, and he stands at the big white walls and paints. Now the colours come from his head, he metes them out, sometimes forcing them back in again, and when he’s not painting the walls he dances with the women and their men, who wear dresses just as brightly coloured and have hair just as long, dancing with them by the big walls – ‘Johnny, Johnny, superstar!’ – he coughs and smokes, takes what they give him, and he sees the colours and the flies and sees something else entirely, which scares him terribly, there’s always
something
and
somebody
there, and he’s scared even though he’s dancing and laughing.

Johannes Vettermann notices he can no longer scream as there’s no air left in his lungs, and he takes a hectic breath, inhales water and spits and coughs and tries not to drown. How could it have happened, how could the big glass front of the large aquarium just break? There are very high notes that can shatter glass; maybe the strange, thin woman standing there in front of the glass sang very high, but he didn’t hear anything. Weren’t there lots of tiny cracks in the glass beforehand? Did the sharks perhaps smash the glass themselves? What intelligent animals, attacking the places with the cracks over and over … Johannes Vettermann beats around himself with his arms, has to calm himself down, he knows that, has to try to float perfectly calmly on the water so he doesn’t attract the sharks. Which is worse, he thinks – drowning or being torn limb from limb by the sharks? ‘Goodbye, Johnny, goodbye, Johnny, it was nice while it lasted … but sadly, sadly …’

Johannes Vettermann sees the sharks. There are red streaks on the water and now he feels the blood still flowing out of his nose. He has to stop the blood flow so he doesn’t attract the sharks. He sees them, in a tight huddle a short distance away. They seem to be occupied with someone else. There’s a big head floating on the water, shimmering white and pale blue, and strangely the water is almost transparent so Johannes Vettermann can make out the green surface beneath him. It’s not a human head, he thinks. The empty eye sockets are huge, the mouth is an O, and the ears – he doesn’t know anyone with ears that big. The head is bodiless, and now it submerges again and he watches it go. He’s always imagined that people have to disappear into the sea, one day. I have to paint the sharks and the sea, he thinks, and then they’re up close to him, he can feel their cold skin, he splutters and beats both arms against the carpet.