Hooligan Page 17

I say I don’t understand a word of what he’s rambling on about. He makes a sweeping gesture with his free hand.

  “They’re fucking each other up the ass!” he screams. “Couldn’t take that shit. Who here has a problem? Huh?” He looks in my direction, but isn’t really looking at me. It seems like he’s arguing with some imaginary person. “They have the problem! Fucking fags! Can’t kick me out. I’ll leave on my own free will, if I want to. Don’t need it!”

  I crouch down in front of him. His gaze follows me, staggering. I reach for the can in his hand and say it’s enough. He reacts immediately. When his beer’s in danger. He pulls his hand back. Shakes his head. Like a sulky kid when you want to take away the scissors because he can’t handle it yet.

  “No. Nooooo!” he screams, drawing it out.

  I grab his forearms.

  “Pull yourself together now, man!”

  He pushes away from me. Scoots backward across the sheets and bumps up against the wall with his back and head.

  “Everyone thinks they need to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do. Not a kid, damn it!”

  I get up again, righting the nightstand, and say, “Then stop acting like one.” He looks away, taking another sip. “Seriously. Have you completely drunk your brain to smithereens or what?”

  “Just stop it,” he says, without looking at me, rubbing his hand over his mouth and chin. “Now you’re starting in on it too. Why don’t you all just leave me alone?”

  “At the Bremen match, you didn’t act like the biggest asshole around,” I say, “but as soon as you’re back here, there’s only trouble.”

  “Huh?” he says and looks at me, flaring his right nostril and making his nose hairs stick out.

  “Don’t remember anymore, do you?” I smile ironically and can only shake my head. I drop down onto the chair. “You’re such a loser, Hans.” Somewhere inside a switch has been flipped. The give-a-fuck switch. No way back. “Manuela’s sitting downstairs in the kitchen bawling. And why? Because she can’t handle it anymore, with a father like this! Who never gets his shit together! Who was never there. Who was always hanging out at the local bar with all the other losers instead and getting blind drunk!” I had to pause for a second because I was irritated by the beating of my own heart and the way my fingernails were digging into the covers of the armchair. “No wonder mom fucked off!”

  Hans is instantly on his feet. Is swaying, but on his feet. He didn’t even expect it himself.

  He straightens up in front of me so his knees are almost bumping into mine. That intimidation shit might have worked when I was still a twerp, but that’s been over with at least since I turned fifteen.

  “She just ran off and left me all alone!” he yells and sprays a shower of spittle at me, which I take without moving an inch.

  “You. She left you alone?” I hiss through gritted teeth.

  “What was I supposed to do?” He holds his right arm as if it didn’t belong to his body. “You think I wanted it that way? That I fell off the roof on purpose?! Unemployed. What’s a man then? All you can do is start to drink. She left me behind, the old bitch!”

  I take a step forward and before I can control anything or pull myself together, I’ve smacked him one. He staggers back and crumbles. Something red streams through his fingers, covering his nose, falling drip by drip onto the sheets. I look down at him. He’s shaking. My father’s crying.

  I go down the stairs and stomp past the kitchen. Someone yells something. I don’t listen. Slam the front door behind me, shakily remove the keys from my pocket, start the car, scream curses against the windshield because I can’t take it anymore, and just get the hell out of there. Just leave.

  ———

  I come into the gym and the first thing I do is go to the lavatory to hold my face under the cold water faucet and lap it up like a dog. I still haven’t showered. I stink of old sweat, and the alc seeps out of my pores. After I’d locked myself in my room with two cases of beer and didn’t respond to Arnim’s calls from downstairs, I staggered to my car. The firm conviction that it was impossible to arrive in Hannover without an accident. And yet, here I am now. Because if my uncle says jump, then I jump. Fuck it! I sit on the toilet and take a couple deep breaths.

  “Pull yourself together,” I tell myself several times, and then I propel myself up from the toilet seat. I knock on Axel’s door.

  “Come in!”

  I take a seat on the chair without being bidden because I can hardly stand for more than a couple seconds. The lamps on the ceiling seem like floodlights directed at me. I try to blink away the splotches of light in my vision. Somewhere behind them Axel is staring at me and spinning a pen between his fingers.

  “Looks like someone vomited you out, Heiko,” he says with an indifferent voice.

  I take a pass and say he’d wanted to talk to me. He leans over and folds his hands on the desktop.

  “We have problems.”

  Instead of posing a question, I simply wait for him to continue speaking.

  “Your collective tomfoolery in Braunschweig makes us look really shitty. You know that?”

  “Just my own stupidity,” I try to correct him.

  Axel’s head swerves to the side, as if he has a spastic twitch. “Stop blowing smoke, Heiko. I know that Kai and Joachim were along. And that Ulf got you out of there.”

  Fuck, that idiot! But maybe it’s my fault. Like everything is my fault. Should have told Ulf he should keep his trap shut about Kai and Jojo’s participation in the Braunschweig action.

  “We can’t count on Ulf anymore”—he sniffs impatiently and continues to stare at me—“and it can’t be put any other way than that’s also your fault.”

  “Was his decision,” I say. But there’s something to that. We should’ve. Could’ve. If I hadn’t fucked it up so bad, then Ulf wouldn’t have had to get us and Saskia wouldn’t have been forced to choose.

  “By the way, the thing with the VW van has been fixed,” he says and shuffles some kind of papers on the desk. It sounds like he’s talking about something dry like balance sheets or something. “Gave the guy from Hildesheim some compensation for the … unpleasantness that Tomek showed him based on the incorrect assumptions. And because the whole thing is mostly your fault, you can forget about a couple months’ pay.”

  “But I never claimed he had anything to do with it,” I burst out.

  “Be quiet!” he barks at me, and I sink a bit deeper in my chair. “Next item. The day after tomorrow we’re going to Frankfurt. Eight against eight. Because of the stack of shit that’s piled up under your name, I wanted you to come along and just take pictures at most. But because we happen to have the absence of Ulf and Kai to compensate for”— my eyes go wide and my mouth opens, but I can’t produce a sound—“yep, I also heard about the thing with Kai. Because of the casualties, I have no other option than to bring you along. On probation, so to speak.”

  “When did you intend to tell me? Since when has the match been planned?” I ask.

  “I’m telling you now,” emphasizing the word “now.” “That’s got to be good enough for you. I really had to bend over backwards to even round up eight men. Do you actually know how stupid I’d look if I had to call off the Frankfurt match again?”

  I want to rub my face because it’s itching unpleasantly, but I keep my hands still. Someone knocks on the door. The hint of a smile flits over Axel’s otherwise chiseled stone mouth.

  “We’re done here. You’ll be waiting here at ten in the morning the day after tomorrow. Come in.”

  I get up. A woman with blond hair and brunette roots enters the office. She has a bulky leather bag and underneath her matching leather jacket she’s wearing a halter top. Accompanied by skin-tight pants.

  “Lock up behind yourself,” Axel says.

  I’m briefly irritated. Turn around. Then I see he’d been speaking to the broad. She stood still, wrinkling her nose at the sight of me. Or perhaps my smell. She waits for me to leave the
room. Then the professional closes the door behind me and turns the key. I go into the locker-room, change clothes, and pull my MP3 player from my locker. I pound the punching bags for an hour without taking a break for a drink. Then I go under the showers, lock the door with my key from the inside, let myself soak, and hope that past days and weeks wash off me and everything is like it used to be when I come back out. Bullshit.

  Two days later I’m back in the space behind the gym, waiting like the others for Axel to give the sign to go. The usual suspects, like Tomek, Töller, and Hinkel, are there. And—I can hardly believe my eyes—two of the Nazis we kicked out of Timpen. I stay away from the group and smoke, but the skins keep their distance too. Just glance at me occasionally. Don’t want blow it with my uncle by starting something with me again. Too bad. I gave up trying to reach Jojo. He texted: “Sorry. Can’t pick up now. On way to practice. Best, jojo.”

  Instead of writing back something like why the fuck I’m left hanging, I write Kai a message: “How are you feeling today? When I get back from FFM I’ll tell u how it was. PS not even Jojo’s along. really promising …”

  Uncle Axel comes out wearing jogging pants and a sweater. He locks the gym door and say, “Let’s go, men!”

  He’d gotten some new vehicles, and we spread out into two groups of four. I get shotgun next to Hinkel. Tomek and Töller are on the seat in back. No trace of anticipation inside me. I can only hope the adrenaline starts pumping soon because otherwise I’ll jump out of the car while it’s going full speed.

  The three are talking some pointless shit. I don’t participate in the conversation. Just look out the window and pick at the rubber seal around the glass. The autobahn’s endless dark green noise barriers obscure the view of the landscape. If someone asks me something, I answer in monosyllables. Say yes. Say no. Say don’t know.

  “Can you give me something from the toiletries bag?” Hinkel asks me at some point.

  I take his bag out of the glove compartment and open the zipper.

  “Waddaya want?” I ask and poke around in it. The bag has an old man smell and is full of strips of tablet blister packs.

  “One of the big yellow ones and a little white one.” I press the pills out of the packaging and into Hinkel’s palm, which he’s holding out in my direction. He tosses them back, grabs for the water bottle in the middle console and washes them down. I pack the toiletry bag back away.

  “What’re they for?” I ask, more out of boredom than true interest.

  “For my old pumper. So that I don’t collapse behind the wheel,” Hinkel says and starts to laugh, which ends with him hacking into his fist and having to take a sip of water. His face is red as a beet. Probably almost choked, the way he looks. He pounds his chest. His eyes are bugging out. Shiny and watery. He stops coughing, wheezes, and says, “Man, man, man.”

  I play with the lever that adjusts the side mirror. I use it to watch Töller and Tomek, one after the other. Töller’s sunken cheeks that don’t quite fit with his fairly muscular body. Broad, dark rings under his eyes. Tomek’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down with every breath. As if he needs to swallow air instead of breathing it. His mouth stays open, and I can hear his panting all the way from where I’m sitting. His ears are scrunched down to little cauliflower buds. I think how the long scar on the edge of his right cheek sticks out in particular, and it looks like someone’s taken a buzz saw to his face. I immediately feel really sick and weak and imagine how somehow we’re all just old stock bulls in an animal transport, on their way to some kind of animal sanctuary before we cross the Jordan in a couple weeks or days.

  ———

  We meet outside Darmstadt on a race track for remote-control cars. I’m totally zoned out. Clueless, I climb out of the car like anyone else. Shove the mouth guard into my mouth and check out the opponents. It’s like back in the day. Axel meets with the leader to the Frankfurt group. They briefly discuss the procedures, and the rest of us get ready. At least I can forget everything else for the few minutes that the match lasts. It rains without interruption, and the miniature track is fucking slick and makes us slide into each other like huge Godzilla monsters. We go down in flames. I’m able to take down a guy from Frankfurt but slip and catch a knee to the head. In the end, Axel and Tomek are the only ones on our side left standing, even though our opponents are able to keep at least five people on their feet. I inspect myself in a side mirror. There’s already a large bump from the knee forming on my head. On the skin above my cheekbone, but the rain immediately washed away all the blood from my face. My forearms and the heels of my hands are scraped, and my pants are ripped at the knees. The bare lower layer of skin shimmers red through the holes. I need better protection in rainy weather. Despite everything. Despite the defeat. Despite the ride back before us and the bad-tempered thoughts of what you could have done better. And despite my burning knee. Despite everything, I feel significantly better than after my half-hour shower at the gym.

  ———

  It’d been that way all day. Actually the whole week. The closer Manuela’s moving day came. And now the time had simply come. She was supposed to start studying to become a teacher at the university in Göttingen. I’d even come along once when she was looking for an apartment. Just to get out of the house.

  Hans yelled at Manuela that she could just commute. That she didn’t have to move away. She could always take the train to the university. About a month ago she’d worked out the math for him, that it was complete bullshit, and how she’d have to get up before six every morning to get to class on time. But he hadn’t been listening at all again, said it was pure chicanery, whatever he meant by that, and slammed her bedroom door behind him, mumbling to himself as he went past me. Barged into me. Pulled on his jacket. Opened the front door so he could finally go to the Olle Deele dive bar, but then immediately closed it again. Took off his jacket and tossed it in the darkest corner of the hallway and marched back into Manuela’s room.

  “Dad, I’ll come every weekend to visit, if I can!”

  “Sure, to visit your friends. Might as well stay over at their place, too! Don’t need to show up around here anymore.”

  She started crying again. I was sitting in my doorway, Indian style, ball between my legs, and listening to the two of them. I’d probably be way too late to kick around. The others had probably been waiting for me for ages in Luthe, but I couldn’t just up and leave now. I flicked boogers and must have retied my cleats ten times. Each time a little tighter. Then I loosened the laces and tied them again, this time a little less tight. Earlier, I’d thought it was halfway funny the way Hans got upset and screamed. He did it all the time. But normally things settled down once he’d finally gone off to his local dive bar again.

  “I have my own life, Dad! I want to make something of myself,” I heard Manuela’s squeaky voice protesting from her room. Then a wardrobe door was slammed shut.

  “Sure, great, the lady wants to have a career! And what about me? You’ll leave me behind!”

  I rolled my eyes and shook my head. Hans came back out, yelling loudly into the hallway, “Fucking hell!” and stopped in front of me. Little bubbles of spittle had caught on his porn stache.

  “And you? What are you doing sitting here and staring around?”

  Before I could think of a good answer, he turns on his heel and whips open Manuela’s door, disappearing behind it.

  “Dad, would you leave me alone for once? I’ll be back in a couple days already.”

  “The hell you will, young lady. You don’t need to think that you’re welcome back here!”

  In the corner of my eye, I saw something move and when I looked over, I was barely able to recognize Mie scampering into the kitchen and quietly pulling the door closed.

  “Stupid slit-eye slut,” I mumbled and in that very moment I meant it that way, because I couldn’t stand the intruder. And I only said the thing with the slit-eyed slut to make the insult more powerful. I would never have said it to her fa
ce, or whoever. At least I hope.

  “Could you knock it off once and for all!” Manuela screeched.

  “Then take your shit out of your bag and stay here!”

  Then my sister’d had enough. “Why? So that I can keep playing the role of the cheap cleaning lady?! You have Mie for that now!”

  The unmistakable sound of a loud slap echoed across the tall walls of the hallway. Accompanied by a muffled scream. I was immediately on my feet, ran over, and pushed the door open. I only needed a fraction of a second to register that Manuela, holding her hands in front of her face, was lying with her upper body sprawled over her bed. I ran inside and pushed both hands against Hans’s back. His head whipped back. He wasn’t ready for it and completely lost his balance. He fell over, stumbling over Manuela’s desk, and slammed into the table, which broke in the middle. Our father groaned and grabbed his head.

  He looked at me and whispered, “You little piece of shit.”

  I stood up, taking a wide stance, clenching my fists, and waiting. I’d already caught up to him physically. What little he had on me had already dissipated after he’d gone on disability and even more with the hardcore boozing, and I’d quickly made progress because I had my uncle as the best example of what you can get done with a little power.

  “Come on,” I said to Manuela. “Let’s wait for your taxi outside. I’ll get your suitcase.”

  I took her hand and pulled her up. She wiped the tears from her cheekbones and fled past me, out of the room. I kept an eye on Hans and grabbed the suitcase. He just looked at me sulkily but didn’t get up. If he’d wanted to, he surely could’ve still beat me up. But he didn’t make the effort. At all. Except when it came to blowing his disability check at the bar. Walking backwards, I pulled the suitcase out of the room. Hans wiped the spots of enraged spittle from his mustache with the collar of his work sweater that bore the logo of his former employer. I turned around once I was sure he wouldn’t jump up and grab my throat from behind. I still remember that I slammed a fist against the kitchen door in passing. Probably scared Mie half to death. Was in the heat of the moment, I guess. Manuela sat on the stoop before the front door and was blowing her nose. I dropped the suitcase and sat next to her and stared at the cobblestones.