Hooligan Read online

  “What’s going on?!“ yells a loud voice.

  I push the guy away and look around for the source of the voice. There are two cars in the middle of the street between us and Lucky Luke. All the doors are wide open. Eight guys are coming our way. At first I can’t make out anything except their silhouettes. Till they come into the light cone from the streetlamp. I immediately recognize two of them as hooligans from Braunschweig. At least three have telescopic batons in their hands, snapping them out.

  “Shit,” I whisper and then say out loud to Kai and Jojo, “get outta here!”

  Kai and Jojo take a left at the T-intersection, I take a quick detour to the van. Keys already in hand. Somehow I manage to get it into the lock on my first try, and lock the doors. Then I pull it out and run off. The electric whoosh of a baton very close by. It grazes my jacket but doesn’t hit my back. I run. Look back. They’re right behind me. Gather momentum from my arms. I pump the air out in bursts and see the outlines of Jojo and Kai in front of me. Another glance back. Created some space. They yell at us, try to stay close. Kai’s the first who has the idea of running across the field and jumping over a barbed-wire fence. We follow him. Across an industrial ruin. Crumbling concrete under our feet. Don’t bite it now! We move away from the streetlights, running past loading ramps and under conveyer belts. My lungs are burning. I could puke. Keep on running. Until we can’t hear another sound. We collapse in exhaustion on the grounds of a trucking company and wheeze our guts out.

  Jojo, who’s splayed out on the cold concrete next to me, asks if we think it’d be safe now to go back to the car.

  “What do you think, Jojo? They’ll just leave the car alone? How stupid are you?! They’ll bash in a window, at least. If not with the telescopic batons, then they’ll get a couple of bats. They’re just waiting for us to come back.”

  “Kai’s right,” I say.

  “What’re we gonna do then?” Jojo asks and lifts his head.

  I breathe the cool night air through my nose, in and out. Ponder. My skull is throbbing, as if it was stuck in a vice. I can feel my lungs so distinctly under my ribs, it’s as if they’re foreign objects implanted by someone.

  “Ain’t no use,” I say in the end, “we have to call Ulf, have him come and pick us up.”

  Kai screams a long, extended “Fuuuuuuuuck!” into the night sky.

  We’d just gotten in deep shit in more than the metaphoric sense. I dial Ulf’s number.

  ———

  Back then, we spent a lot of time at the Seidels’ house. Had given up on forcing Jojo to do something with us. He actually only left the house to go to work or go shopping with his mother at the discount supermarket. So we were constantly hanging out at his place. But it wasn’t cool, and we were relieved every time Jojo closed the front door behind us in the evening. This day, we were sitting as so often in Joel’s old room, which meanwhile had halfway become Jojo’s room. I thought it was spooky and somehow sick that he slept in his little brother’s bed. Of course, I’d have never said that to his face, and if it did something for him or made him feel better, well then he should do it anyway. We watched as he constantly sorted through photos and organized the reports of Joel’s games in folders. He hadn’t been to the barber in ages, and with his mop of curls he was beginning to look like the German version of the great midfielder Carlos Valderrama.

  We went into Jojo’s room to smoke and leaned out the window. Jojo didn’t want us to smoke up his little brother’s room because it would yellow the football posters Joel had covered the slanted ceiling with. And Joel had never smoked. In contrast to us. Hadn’t even tried it. Never. We didn’t put any pressure on him. Knew why he did it. And he didn’t touch alcohol either. Except on birthdays or something. He couldn’t hold his liquor and was smashed after just one and a half beers.

  So we spent the day hanging out on the sofa bed that had once been Joel’s bed, leafing through old issues of Kicker magazine, and watching action movies, the American Ninja stuff, or old Jackie Chan Easterns, from back when they were still cool. Joel’s jerseys hung on the clothes hangers next to the door. Jojo wanted to have them framed at some point. His father was constantly walking past the open doorway. I still remember he seemed vaguely busy without giving the impression he was doing anything in particular. He had really come unglued in the months following Joel’s death. Even more than Jojo and his mother. Hardly said a word, and within months Dieter looked like he’d aged years. Face fallen in. And even though he’d stopped smoking after the funeral. If he ever uttered a sound, his voice was as rough as it always had been. Comes from all those years of inhaling cigarillos. Gives you a voice like the vocal cords have been put through a cheese grater. So he wandered the corridors in his long, gray work coat like the resident ghost and occasionally glanced in the room while floating past.

  Mrs. Seidel was down in the kitchen. That was her place. One of those real traditional housewives. Hair pulled up into a tennis-ball-sized knot at the back of her neck and always wearing an apron. She prepared coffee and cake. It was a firm tradition at the Seidel house. Nice in a way, I guess. I’d never really known it myself. I mean at my house. On the other hand, it also seemed really annoying you had to gather at the kitchen table at three thirty in the afternoon. Whether you wanted coffee and cake or not. The same thing applied for us visitors. The rule simply transferred to us. Besides myself, no one seemed to think it was strange, so I never said anything. Different house, different rules, I guess.

  I think I was out smoking with Kai. We were debating where we should go drinking that evening, and with our phlegm we were spitting yellow holes in the thick layer of snow covering the Seidels’ garden and everywhere. It was already cold by early autumn, and snow soon followed. We closed the window. When we opened the door to Jojo’s room, the warm, sugary smell of cake was floating up the narrow staircase. Despite it all. I was looking forward to having my own place. Even though I was still in school, if you could even call it that with my infrequent attendance, I had moved out once already two years earlier. Simply hadn’t been able to take it anymore, just the three of us with my father and Mie. Manuela had left to study in Göttingen long before. At any rate, even if my place in the Barne residential tower was no bigger than a shoe box, living alone was a thousand times better than some pragmatic living accommodation with my family. You can’t pick your family, unlike your friends. And when it’s fucked up, then you just move out. Regardless of how old you are.

  “Coffee is ready!” Mrs. Seidel called from below. Ulf and Jojo came out of Joel’s old room. Jojo’s mother was waiting down below on the landing and asked if we’d seen Dieter.

  “He was walking around earlier,” Jojo said. “Maybe he’s taking a nap. I’ll go look.”

  The rest of us followed his mother to the kitchen and took our seats at the table. There was steaming hot black coffee in our cups. A piece of poppy seed cake was waiting on each plate.

  “You boys go ahead and start,” Mrs. Seidel said. “Otherwise it’ll get cold.”

  We thanked her like nice, pleasant boys. Kai and Ulf relished these cake sessions considerably more than I did. Ulf most of all, that icebreaker. The way he shoveled it in obviously pleased Jojo’s mother and confirmed her in her housewifely pride.

  There was a bang from outside. Mrs. Seidel got up and closed the kitchen window.

  “Those neighbor boys with their fireworks again. But it’s still a ways until New Year’s Eve.”

  “Probably left over from last year,” Ulf said, and had poppy seed cake crumble out of his mouth.

  “They’re desecrating the beautiful, white snow with their explosions.”

  Kai gave me a light kick to the shins, leaned over to me, and whispered: “You remember? The dead rat?”

  He threw back his head and laughed diabolically.

  One fall, I’d just left grade school, and we were shooting off the leftover fireworks from the previous New Year’s. We had found a rat carcass in a construction pit cl
ose to the main train station in Hannover, and we shoved a thin, powerful firecracker from Poland into its asshole and lit the fuse. Had underestimated the explosion radius and hadn’t moved far enough away.

  “Pssst,” I said and whispered out of the corner of my mouth, “sure. That was a huge mess.”

  Mie had been scared to death when she found the innards still stuck to my clothes in the laundry basket. The memory made me grin.

  Jojo came into the kitchen.

  “He’s not in the bedroom, but I looked out the window and the footprints go across the lawn to the garden shed.”

  Mrs. Seidel wiped her hands on the kitchen towel and went to the window.

  “He can’t be tinkering again. Dieter knows when coffee’s served.”

  “Let him be,” Jojo said, pulling on his rubber boots and heading out into the garden.

  “Eat. Eat,” his mother encouraged us. Ulf didn’t have to be told twice and pushed another brick-sized piece of cake onto his plate.

  The coffee and cigarettes from before were already having a little brown fiesta in my abdomen, and I was preparing for a nice round of fecal bobsledding.

  Jojo came back into the kitchen through the living room, leaving tracks.

  “Joachim, take your boots off!”

  “You guys have to help. The door to the shed isn’t locked, but something’s pushed against it from the inside.

  The three of us fetched our shoes, putting them on in front of the patio door, and followed Jojo through the snow to the pitiful garden shed his father had repurposed as his personal carving shop.

  “Look.” Jojo pushed against the door, which gave way slightly, but couldn’t be opened completely. “Doesn’t open.”

  We helped him, pressing our hands and shoulders against the wooden door.

  “You smell that too?” Kai asked, face twisted.

  Something inside gave way, and something could be heard crashing down. A cupboard fell over and spilled tools onto the floor. Screwdrivers and bits rolled against the rifle lying there and the foot belonging to Jojo’s father.

  ———

  Ulf and I meet up in Ricklingen. Amid all the look-alike housing projects, nail salons, drug dealer hangouts, and shabby internet cafés, this is where our favorite betting parlor, Wanna Bet?, struggles to stay afloat.

  We used to hang out in betting offices nearly every day. After all, football’s being played almost constantly somewhere. And someone’s betting on it. That’s why I used to have the teams from the top leagues in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan memorized. On weekends, our first stop was at the bookies before we went over to Timpen to watch football and get shitfaced. Over the years, that changed when betting went online and things like SureBets emerged. But also because the betting offices are always changing hands, became increasingly impersonal and standardized. But the ownership usually just moved within a family, for example from father to son, then to the cousin, and back again. Wanna Bet? is a century-old oak in a forest full of Tipicos and Bet-and-Wins. Then, around five years ago, the owner, Kallhein, turned his back on football gambling exclusively and has been showing horse races from all over the world ever since. Mainly from Great Britain, of course. That was always his specialty. And the old fart still has fabulous connections to famous bookies from the island. Here everything works like way back when. There aren’t any electronics aside from the televisions, the kind with tubes, and the coffee machine. The whole nine yards along with the counter, behind which Kallhein is always seated, and the paper betting slips. There are brochures and magazines on the big horse races circulating around. And the clientele hasn’t changed over the years either. Except maybe more and more walkers have taken their place at the tables. At some point, Kallhein had to build a ramp over the front steps for that reason.

  Accompanying all this are the best fried pastries in all of Lower Saxony. Every couple of hours, his wife, who runs the bakery next door, brings over a tray of warm, fresh pastries. The old farts aren’t the only fans around here. Once in a while we come by and without any real expertise place bets on random horses, most of which fail fabulously and are the last to crawl over the finish line. Then Kallhein shakes his head and his chin flaps, and he grouses about how clueless kids are these days. Besides us, he probably doesn’t know anyone under forty. We only do it to make our contribution to Kallhein and keep his gambling den alive until he’s lying dead and cold behind his counter.

  Ulf is already seated at one of the round tables when I come in. Two tickets in hand.

  I was just in the neighborhood visiting Gaul and had him give me a new tat. He does it at his kitchen table in his place in the projects. Right next to the 96 in the circle over my heart, I had a full-size jungle knife inked over my sternum. I had recently seen something similar in a movie Kai lent me. All about the Vory gangsters, which is kind of like the Russian version of the mafia. They basically have the coolest tats. If I were to land in a Siberian prison for some reason, I’d regret it a little less because of the tattoos.

  “Heiko.” Ulf gets up when he sees me.

  The cling wrap under my clothes rustles. We shake hands.

  “You doin’ okay?” I ask him and sit down. “Why’d you want to chat with me?”

  He folds his tickets, then unfolds them, then smooths them flat with his fingers. Breathes out through pursed lips, his cheeks puffing slightly. Old boozers saunter past our table, greeting us with curt nods, as was the custom in the good old days. Ulf shifts the words around in his mouth.

  “Spit it out already,” I urge him.

  “It’s just …” He places his open hands, the sides parallel, on the tabletop between us, “after I picked you guys up in Braunschweig …”

  “Yeah, thanks again, man. Don’t know how we would’ve handled it without you. How we’d have gotten out in one piece.”

  The pressure spreading in my chest reminds me of my short encounter with my uncle in the gym, when he asked if I knew what happened to the van. I’d pretended I was clueless, no idea. I couldn’t think of anything better on the spot.

  “No problem,” Ulf says and clears his throat. “When I came home, Saskia was sitting in the kitchen. Had stayed up for me. Couldn’t sleep anymore after I’d driven off.”

  A misgiving arose in me, but I kept listening.

  “I’d told her from the beginning the way we roll. Had tried to explain it to her so she could understand a little, even though she wasn’t familiar at all. Or at least accept it. And she did. But now our little one is almost ready for preschool, and of course he picks up more and more and understands more.”

  “Ulf—”

  “Hear me out, Heiko. She said it’s enough. I’ve done it for years and she’s tried to ignore it, because of course she didn’t think it was all that great when I came home with injuries and everything. But at some point, it’s enough, she said. And before it gets even worse, she’d like for me to quit.”

  “She’d like that?” I press him. “And what would you like?”

  “That’s not what this is about right now.”

  Before I’d even realized it, I was standing and planting my fists on the table.

  “It’s not about that?! Fucking hell, Ulf! It’s about what you want! This is our life. Why doesn’t she get it? Maybe I should—”

  “Heiko,” he booms. Then his voice relaxes again slightly. “It’s simple. If I keep it up, she’ll leave me. With the little one. I’m out.”

  “I don’t fucking believe it!” I yell and get a tongue-lashing from Kallhein behind the counter.

  “I’ll still come around Timpen once in a while, and we can go to the stadium regularly. As a kind of compensation. I just won’t be along on the road trips. Come on, Heiko. We’ll still be friends. This doesn’t change anything.”

  But all I caught was a wild whooshing sound that went through my ear canals like steel wool, glowing white hot.

  I say, “Everything changes, Ulf. Constantly! What the hell?! And that thing about staying friend
s? I’m not too sure.”

  I kick my chair aside. It falls over and slides a bit. I step over it, fling open the door, and storm out.

  ———

  I close the door to the coop behind me with wobbly knees, listen to the cooing from countless bird throats one last time. The grass is wet from the day’s rain and licks up my pant legs like long, thin chameleon tongues. Using the water faucet on the side of the house, I wash out the feed troughs I’d swapped out and lean them against the wall, upside down. When I was in the coop, I hadn’t noticed the patio light was turned on. She comes out. Must have been watching from the kitchen. Mie is wearing a thick wool sweater she risks disappearing in. Even though it’s size S at most. Her long, black hair is tied in a knot at the back of her neck. In one hand she’s carrying a deep bowl with noodles that are steaming in the cold evening air. In the other, she carries a full glass of wheat beer. She sets both on the table. Then she pulls the garden chair back from the table. There’s already a cushion on it. She motions to me, offering the chair. I hesitate. Feel like a deer or rabbit someone’s trying to lure into a trap with food.

  “Have you already eaten?” she asks.

  I shake my head, but then I think, damn, just say yes, thank her, and go. Too late. So I go over, thank her, and take a seat at the table. She disappears into the kitchen. I hope she won’t go and get a dessert or something, and I start to roll the noodles on the fork. The diameter increases by threefold, and I stuff it into my mouth. Then I dump a sip of beer behind it. Because I’m scarfing, I only notice from the aftertaste how good the food is. It’s nothing but ordinary fried noodles with egg, so she must’ve done something with it. Maybe a special spice mix. It tastes like ten things all at once, but in a good way, and not as if they’d all overlap. Mie comes back from the kitchen. This time with a cereal bowl full of noodles and a glass of water. Sits down next to me and begins to eat as well. She sucks the noodles hanging off her fork. Not like I did, rolling it up like a spool of cable only to shove it down the hatch.