Meine Private Bambule

I look down at the wriggling white lines on the cobblestone where the maggots are doing the Electric Boogaloo and the Lindy Hop and I’m almost sure I can see two of them squished together in an Argentine tango, all crisp angular lines and lusty stares. My God, get a room, you two, I say to the maggots that I know aren’t really maggots. Little Green Man in the traffic lights says Off yee go now, once he halts the cars for us on Kantstrasse, but I decide to stay where I am and keep watching the tiny disco.

Factually speaking, I know the maggots aren’t really there, that there isn’t a social gathering at my feet while I’m waiting to cross the road in Berlin that yells at me auf Deutsch. And if I am to put on my serious face and be all geological about it, I would deduce that the white specks are, in fact, a very normal and natural part of the composition of limestone, that the creamy lines are microscopic remains of once alive organisms from the bottom of the ocean. I know all these things. Yet there they are, I don’t know what to say. I see maggots and I’ll be watching them until the traffic lights change again.

My mind hasn’t been quite right since I found Frau Schmidt’s mind splashed across her once-white embossed wallpaper. The rest of Frau Schmidt was also in the room, collapsed in her favourite mustard and emerald poinsettia armchair that overlooked Proskauer Strasse. It was like someone had let the air out of her, all crumpled and loose. I found out later from die Polizei, that’s the German for ‘the guards’, that it was Suizid, which is German for ‘shot herself in the head.’

I hadn’t seen Frau Schmidt for a while before that, and I used to see her most days slowly climbing up the stairs to her first floor flat. My flat is all the way up in the attic but my legs are really strong now since moving in, so I don’t mind. I used to hold her shopping bags and walk with her so slowly I felt like I was going backwards. Would you not get one of those old-people walker thingies, I’d say to her, And you could push me around on the little seat. Then I’d act like I was being pushed around and she’d be doubled over laughing because she didn’t speak a word of English. Once we got her safely into her flat, she’d tell me to warten which I eventually figured out meant to wait and she’d bring me a slice of homemade Streuselkuchen which was the tastiest cake I’ve ever eaten in my life. Streusel is so much more delicious than the regular crumble I used to get in Ireland. Streusel are giant crunchy balls of caramelised butter, whereas crumble is a bit too crumbly for me.

Little Green Man pops up again, disturbing my choking on grey exhaust fumes from some old lad’s midlife crisis car. Maybe I can make it across this time. I consult with the maggots who are very professional when they need to be. We agree that, no, based on the totality of the circumstances, now is simply not the right time. Some teen charges past me across the road before the lights turn again, and her nearly knocking me from my concentration. How rude, I shout to the miniature rave over the jungle bass line.

I was and still am very sad about Frau Schmidt. I always like people who find me funny, and she thought I was absolutely hilarious. She was always so glamorous, Frau Schmidt. I could tell she slept in rollers, and she wore big fat diamonds on her fingers that sparkled in even the smallest glimpses of sunlight in the hallway. And even though I know we’re supposed to hiss and boo and throw paint on people who wear fur, she had a stunning floor length mink that she wrapped around herself over the winter months.

I miss chatting with her on the stairs. It’s so much bigger here than in Ballylacken and honestly, I hadn’t thought through the whole language barrier thing before I hopped on the plane. At least I have somewhere to live in Berlin, a home I can call my own. As tiny and rotten and pitch-black as it is, it’s free of people who hate me. I used to tell Frau Schmidt all about it on the stairs. If I didn’t clean up properly after dinner, my mother would whack me across the head. One time she made me stand in the garden in nothing but my undies. I don’t even remember why. And if my tone was ever cheeky, she’d take my bedsheets and I’d lie there all night shivering.

I’d love to be able to tell Frau Schmidt about how I’m a bit precarious since I found her all bloody and wrecked. The American man I work for in the café said I’m not allowed to use the word ‘mad’ anymore because it’s offensive to some people. I never say anything back because I can’t afford to lose my job, and also I want to have sex with him. Although I think to myself that I should be the decider of what a mad person might find offensive, thank you very much.

No matter what you call it, I know my mind is not quite right, despite all my hilarious jokes. For example, if I am to once again put on my serious face, I am able to acknowledge that I’ve been talking to myself since I got to the traffic lights, which is not the done thing for normal minded folk. And then, two weeks after Frau Schmidt shot her brains out, I saw her while I was walking along Frankfurter Allee. It’s usually a lovely stretch to walk. There’s gigantically wide footpaths and knobbly trees that arch over your head and all these tiled mother-of-pearl communist buildings that are perfectly symmetrical, which soothes my brain even though I know I’m not supposed to enjoy communist things. There’s also an uninterrupted view of the Fernsehturm, that great disco ball in the sky spinning over all the gorgeous party people who never invite me to go out dancing with them. The first of the cherry blossoms were starting to bloom which turned the bird shit into splattered candy floss, and a wide-eyed anime kitten graffitied onto the side of a building told me to spank her ass and feed her tacos. I politely declined. But as I was walking down the path that day, I saw her, Frau Schmidt, standing there in front of me. Oh, she looked wretched, all dark eyed and bloody headed. And older, but I suppose death can be very aging. Yes, I know she wasn’t really standing there. But I could still see her. She was wearing the mink and she gestured into her coat pockets but didn’t speak on account of being dead. I scrunched my face at her and shrugged dramatically, lifting my arms up like I was carrying a whole cake in the palm of each hand, so she understood that I was confused. She gestured again at her pockets and then turned them inside out. I yelled over to her, Do you need money? And then Frau Schmidt looked frustrated and she was gone. I think I finally realised what she was trying to tell me because when I reached into my own coat pocket I felt a slip of paper.

Someone had written me a note. It wasn’t another one of those fake-but-real-to-me things. The paper was there. The words were there. I felt a chill run through me, like when you walk into one of those massive cinema chains on the hottest day of summer. The note said:

Look closer. It was him.

I felt my stomach churn and bubble like it used to whenever the witch was on one of her rampages back in Ireland.

Once I started thinking about her death again, the whole gun thing never made any sense to me. Frau Schmidt was about a hundred and twelve years old. You don’t tend to see many of her age group packing. I’d tried to tell that to the Polizei when we found her, but they’d just looked at me like I was a nutter.

Suddenly, everything was obvious and I smacked myself on the forehead for being such a goddamn idiot. It wasn’t Suizid. Frau Schmidt was murdered. Now I just needed to find Him.

Frau Schmidt had a son. I met him once when he was leaving her flat. He wasn’t around a lot, said he lived in Basel with an English wife. He seemed grand enough, a bit boring maybe, in his fifties I figured, not loads of hair on the top of his head. I certainly couldn’t imagine him shooting his ma. But what if I was being too closed-minded, dismissing him based on his obvious shitness.

Then I remembered a few days before Frau Schmidt died, I had seen another man around the place, one I didn’t recognise. I had been trying to open the entrance door to the building. It gets stiff sometimes because someone had tried to kick it in, and the building is even older than Frau Schmidt. I ran towards it and charged it open like a human battering ram, and when I got through, I saw the strange man walk out to the Innenhof. I found that peculiar because there are only weeds and mice out there. He was properly tall - German tall, not Irish tall - and wore a long navy wool coat and a pair of dark aviator sunglasses. I found him to be shifty, but I also coveted his navy coat, which is actually why I remembered him. Had this man seen something? Did he have anything to do with Frau Schmidt’s death? I needed to find him. And ask him where he got his coat. And maybe ask him if he wanted to have sex with me.

Roaring, flashing ambulance hullabaloo. They must work on commission; it’s like they want me to have a heart attack. I feel a bit bad, being so horny about a potential murderer. Some of the maggots stand erect to take a closer look at me. Don’t you lot dare judge me, I say to them. Little Green Man summons me again but there’s no rush. People are so afraid to be bored these days. I jump out of my skin again, my bloody nerves, a tap on my shoulder. A woman about my ma’s age asks me if I’m okay. She switches to English once she sees my face go, Heh? and she says that she’s been sitting in the bakery over there and noticed I’d been standing at the traffic lights for a while. She asks me if I need help getting across the road. I feel a bit suspicious of her because she has the same short haircut that my mother and all mother’s have so I tell her I’m fine, thank you. After she leaves, her face still watching me, I check to make sure she hasn’t squished any of the maggots. We’re all safe, what a relief.

I hadn’t a clue where to find him though, my future husband. I made a few posters that said Have you seen this man? but all I had to describe him was his navy coat. I left my phone number on little strips of paper at the bottom of the A4 sheets and sellotaped the posters across the neighbourhood, although they disintegrated into white mush once it rained. No one called and I felt sad again about Frau Schmidt.

So, then I tried calling the management company of our building. I asked them if maybe there was some secret recording equipment lurking about in the ceilings or walls that might have captured the man, like in all those DDR films I’d seen. We’re in the east, I said, I know how things work here. The woman was furious and said something about German privacy laws and defamation and hung up on me.

It ended up being the telly that saved me, as always. I was lying on my mattress on the floor beside Gary. No, Piotr. Whoever it was, he was dozing beside me while I watched three silverfish scoot around and I gave them names that I can’t remember now. That night I was awake still. I don’t like to sleep much anymore. My dreams have gone a bit stabby. I was rubbing my feet together under the cotton sheets, which were the first things I bought when I got to Berlin, even before I’d found somewhere to live. But then as I was fidgeting my feet around, I got a cramp in my sole. I made sure to scream without a sound so as not to stir Gary Piotr and tried to manipulate my foot back to its normal position. I distracted myself by focusing on the tiny telly which was a present from my Australian neighbours when they moved out. With baby on the way, they needed a less treacherous building that didn’t always smell like stagnant water.

The scene silently played out in front of me. A trembling jewel-thief waved around a diamond necklace and a gun in the marbled lobby of a San Franciscan mansion. He had black bouffant hair and his denim shirt was tucked tightly into blue jeans and he was surely saying something like Don’t try to stop me! The camera zoomed in on the author’s face, all poised and knowing as she probably very firmly convinced him to put down the gun. You could tell, she was about to blow this whole thing wide open.

That was it. I needed a Murder She Wrote. I needed a woman, an Angela Lansbury, to get the job done.

Little Green Man waves at me again. For some reason, I always thought losing my mind would be more glamorous, that I’d be skinny and smoke and have perfectly smudged kohl eyeliner. Instead I’m just tired all the time and a bit musty, like a charity shop. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, now a cyclist breaks the red light and the air swirls around me, him whizzing past. I need a sit down, just a small break, and I make my way to a cross-legged position on the footpath. My mother would be horrified. I can hear her screeching, There might be dog dirt! I imagine I look like a peaceful Buddha, all calm and meditative and lotus posed. Now that I’m down here though, I can’t see the maggots anymore and I taste salty tears.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been at the traffic lights. Time gets a bit confusing when my heart starts to twitch.

I’m so tired. Not depressed. Only tired, but

don’t worry

I’m fine, grand, not a bother

don’t worry

Vomit hangs out on the ground beside me and my bum starts shaking from a giant orange truck rumbling forwards. Purely hypothetically speaking, if the driver of that truck happened to lose control and mount the path and run me down, I’m sure I wouldn’t hold it against him.

But anyway, her name is Silke and she’s the coolest person in the world. We first met in a dark Charlottenburg café where the staff is rude and the coffee is burnt and the decor hasn’t been touched since the fifties. I love it there. Silke is older than my mother but when I first met her, she wore a studded leather jacket and she has a pixie cut. It’s now pink but back then it was silver. She has tattoos that crawl out from under her sleeves, anchors and skulls and symbols I don’t understand. We both ordered Streuselkuchen that first day, which made me sad. Silke told me she used to work for the government and became a private detective after the Wall fell. Said when she went out on her own, she genuinely wanted to help people and stop entrapping them. One can only have so much honey without eventually becoming ill, she said. I still don’t know what she meant. Maybe she’s diabetic but I don’t like to pry. I told her everything, about Frau Schmidt, about the son and the man in the navy coat, about the gun, the note. Silke agreed to take on my case and we agreed to meet every week.

Very profound, is Silke. Like how I imagine people view me right now, a beacon of mindfulness here at the traffic lights. I always ask her about the note in our meetings, but she never properly answers me. The mind is a wonderful thing, she said the last time I asked her, It brings order to chaos and meaning to discomfort. Then another time she said, The mind forgets when it needs to, an internal shield that protects us without instruction or awareness or thanks.

Zounds, my mind’s more blown than Frau Schmidt’s, I’d said to her after that. She didn’t really laugh, but that’s alright. I still like her.

Sometimes we don’t even talk about Frau Schmidt but Silke assures me that it’s all part of the process. She also stopped charging me for the investigation a while ago. We are friends, yes? she’d said to me, Consider this a favour between friends.

Gone are my maggots, left me behind. Next time Little Green Man hollers, I will certainly make it across, don’t worry, I’m fine grand not a bother, don’t worry. When Silke first agreed to take my case, she thought everything seemed straight forward and promised to have it solved within a month. But that was seven months ago now. I suppose that means the death of Frau Schmidt is even more mysterious than I’d originally thought. But I have a feeling we’re about to blow this whole thing wide open.