Selected writing

It’s a hot Sunday afternoon and Dynamo Dresden has won 3:1 against Eintracht. As my train pulls in, one stop before Hoyerswerda (Saxony), I see a throng of five men all in yellow football shirts with at least two crates of beer standing on the platform. The door opens and the sunburnt lads pile in, their yells and chants deafening. In the carriage, everyone tenses and waits, holding their breath to see what happens. Judging from the panicked expressions, we all expect trouble – a fight, drunken hostility, something of that kind. That’s what happens in these parts, right? But, just like that, as the group heads off down the aisles, they lower their voices to a whisper like obedient schoolboys. The hush after they leave behind is eerie as if a black hole has swallowed them up.

It was in a dingy flat in Barcelona that I first wrote an autobiographical story. I was heavily influenced by my love of Angela Carter’s work, and so it featured a magic carpet, although it was about the abortion I’d had in my early twenties. I remember the basics: a young woman in an open-backed hospital gown goes under the knife in the same hospital where, as a young tomboy, she’d been rushed to A & E several times. Counting down from 100 on the operating slab, she tells the anaesthetist she’ll kill him if she feels a thing. He laughs. In an anaesthetic dream, she clambers onto a magic carpet and flies away from the ugly town where she grew up and the shame of being caught out with an unwanted pregnancy. No prizes for guessing that the slit-backed gown was a metaphor for exposure. The magic carpet, on the other hand, wasn’t just about dissociation or running away. It had no fuselage, life jacket, or parachute; my imagination was the only thing I had to get me out of there.

The city’s streets are clear for us. Nevertheless, when we pull up at a traffic light opposite a police car, and the officer casually glances over at us, I feel nauseous. When we hit the motorway, I worry that we don’t have enough petrol, even though the needle is well over the ‘F,’ and I’m driving at the speed I think will save as much fuel as possible. My bladder already feels full. We’re criminals on the run now. …

I swung into the drive, turned off the engine and breathed deeply a few times. Were the curtains twitching or was I imagining it? Go in, do what you came to do, leave, I repeated to myself. Like with the car wash or with the shopping, I had divided it into the most basic steps: the first, leaving the house, was behind me, so I had just two more steps to go. Then go home and get back into bed, I could manage that. …