Objekt Vierzehn<\/p>\n
It\u2019s like an illness in the family. Or, rather, the announcement. Neighbours glance at\u00a0you in embarrassed sympathy. You shrug, smile, say, \u2018It won\u2019t be long now.\u2019\u00a0You\u2019ve been preparing for it, ever since the first letter came. Energetische\u00a0Sanierung. Modernisierung. Novellierung. W\u00e4rmed\u00e4mmung. Reminds me of\u00a0\u2018G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung\u2019. Or \u2018our house is literally verd\u00e4mmt\u2019. The letter for everyone in\u00a0the house.<\/p>\n
Funny how we call it \u2018house\u2019, this collection of apartments \u2013 eleven kids, last\u00a0count, including: six-month-old twins (when their Mum\u2019s on her own with the\u00a0shopping, she has to bring everything upstairs in stages, like the fox-chicken-bag of\u00a0seed over the river problem, so you sometimes encounter a placid neonate eyeing\u00a0you from a pram carriage on the stairwell; two lawyers; a judge who\u2019s at least ten\u00a0years younger than me (I took a wrong turn somewhere); a graphic designer creating\u00a03D landscapes of the new luxury \u2018development\u2019 over the road, rendering the precise\u00a0shadows it will cast over the urban farm (and allowing you to zoom in and stand on\u00a0your actual virtual balcony in order to pinpoint the precise quadrant of the sky where\u00a0the new cubes will block your view of the setting sun), skin cancer in remission and\u00a0water dripping through his ceiling from whatever rooftop activities the workers are\u00a0busy with; various American coders (a \u2018cloud\u2019 of coders?), clearly in on the groundfloor\u00a0of some plinky-plonky little Play-Doh\u00ae start-up; the schoolgirl learning piano\u00a0who, every evening at six, spends half an hour with a single index finger transforming\u00a0the first four bars of Handel\u2019s Messiah into a 15bpm dirge; that couple who really rock\u00a0out with the window open at night so you\u2019re trying to get to sleep to a symphony of\u00a0pubis-to-buttock dermal slapping (turning the whole house into reluctant aural\u00a0equivalents of voyeurs \u2013 \u2018auditeurs\u2019 perhaps?) which sounds like it ought to be erotic\u00a0until you realise, when you meet the guy checking their postbox in the morning, that\u00a0seeing him naked must be like facing the last chicken hanging in Aldi\u00ae\u2019s, and that him\u00a0bearing down on you in the privacy of your boudoir must be like having a wardrobe\u00a0fall on top of you with the key sticking out; the Polish newlyweds, recently moved in\u00a0on the daylight-bereft ground floor, who were told by the landlord just after they signed the contract that there might be a couple of months\u2019 work done on the house\u00a0(exactly 20% true); a sweet little lesbo couple who never leave the house together\u00a0but just scowl at you singly on the stairs, though everyone living here knows they\u2019re a\u00a0sweet little lesbo couple, and a guy in the back house, some mechanic to do with\u00a0high-end cars (lovely bloke \u2013 looks like he\u2019s dropped out of every institution society\u00a0put in front of him, running from money like all of us here, baccy-brown roll-up\u00a0fingers, face like fire-damaged Lego\u00ae \u2013 I said to him once as he was coming back, I\u00a0said, \u2018You\u2019ve had a good night\u2019 and he said, \u2018Yeah, long week \u2013 well earned \u2013 it was\u00a0like I hardly needed to lift the bottle. The beer just leapt down my throat.\u2019) Whatever\u00a0garage he\u2019s at, every Sunday he literally pulls a fast one, and turns up in a\u00a0Lamborghini\u2122 or Ferrari\u2122 or something, just parks it outside for the kids, so all the\u00a0parents at the corner caf\u00e9 can have a break. It\u2019s not like he pulls up with a clich\u00e9d\u00a0throaty roar, cos there\u2019s double parking and the place is rammed anyway with prams\u00a0on the pavement and half \u2018n\u2019 half ice cream and \u2018I want that one\u2019 and tantrums and\u00a0eight-year-olds hustling their old dinosaurs on a blanket where the walking trade is\u00a0densest, but the Italian engine purrs low, and my man\u2019s in the driving seat, sat on the\u00a0hide of an unborn lamb vacuum-suctioned out of a freshly zapped ewe by Italian\u00a0artisans, top down, shiny dials, elbow out, radio on, parents at the caf\u00e9 saying to their\u00a0kids, \u2018Course you can have a look,\u2019 and wondering if he\u2019s a kiddie-fiddler like that\u00a0bubble-guy in the park a few years back (what was his name, Paedophilio the\u00a0Clown?) and my backyard mechanic neighbour, reclining in a soft-leather half-driving\u00a0seat\/half-beach-recliner designed for account managers to spread their capacious\u00a0arses on and fantasise about Romanian hitch-hikers \u2013 who\u2019s just been told his\u00a0apartment is to have a new balcony affording a luxury sunless prospect of bikes and\u00a0bins that ups his rent by a quarter \u2013 just sits there absorbing the kids\u2019 awe, on the\u00a0executive sports-car vellum, rolling up a single-skinner and living the grease-monkey\u00a0dream.<\/p>\n
So, everyone in the house got this letter from a legal firm \u2013 to paraphrase: So the scaffolding is in place, the balcony plants are up to their dessicated\u00a0stamens in dust, all the original doors and windows will be replaced by their generic\u00a0Scandinavian-effect equivalents, meaning everything within two metres of the frames\u00a0needs to be either removed and piled up in the middle of the rooms under plastic\u00a0sheeting or, in the case of the kids\u2019 bunkbed (a wooden monster whose construction\u00a0consumed most of last December and which is now known as \u2018The Bed That Ate\u00a0Advent\u2019), dismantled and stacked in the corridor, the planks labelled \u2018Left upright 1\u2019\u00a0and \u20184th crossbeam, underside, right front\u2019, and the sound of industrial drilling\u00a0reverberates so intensely and at such low frequency throughout the building that, if\u00a0you\u2019re sitting on a wooden kitchen chair, it\u2019s like someone\u2019s feathering the underside\u00a0of your balls with an egg whisk, which is not as pleasant as it sounds.<\/p>\n The workers have Gaffa\u00ae-ed in on the ground floor that building-site carpet\u00a0analogue that prisoners make, the ambient colour of an old lump of plasticene where\u00a0the original tones have leached into a greasy grey. The carpet is also flecked with\u00a0tufty bits of stringy red and blue, presumably from the miscellaneous offcuts woven\u00a0by nonces and wife-beaters in their cells, so the whole ensemble resembles what\u00a0you\u2019d get if you force-fed a dog a fistful of Buntestreuse and then kicked it in the stomach till it sicked up the whole lot. Just looking at it makes my teeth itch.<\/p>\n The carpet serves as an olfactory aperitif to the looming styropur main course\u00a0\u2013 this plastinated insulating material that will eventually clad the outside walls in its stifling embrace. The tiles, stonework and inter-war wainscoting of the hallway used\u00a0to provide a blessed coolness to the space so that the kids and I had a ritual, when\u00a0we came in after a day out in the global-warming world (30+\u00b0\u00a0in mid-September?\u00a0You\u2019ll be telling me you don\u2019t believe in evolution next. There are people sunbathing\u00a0in the park and conkers are dropping on their heads, I have to put on my burkini just\u00a0to go to the corner bakery and I\u2019d be typing this naked were it not for the distraction\u00a0of my gorgeous body). The kids and I would come in and lean our foreheads on the\u00a0cool tiles and go aaahhh like Ben Hur reaching the oasis. But the entrance now has a\u00a0claggy sort of staleness about it, the carpet smelling like a flood-damaged charity\u00a0bookshop crossed with the back room of a butcher\u2019s where the blood has seeped\u00a0into the sawdust. There\u2019s a certain retch-friendly, umami undertone where weeks of \u00a0meat-fat cooking smells have started to infiltrate the carpet fibres. The air seems \u00a0smaller somehow, as if the nitrogen and oxygen are being elbowed aside by free\u00a0radicals dislodged with each step you take on the weave, exotic molecular\u00a0compounds slaloming down your glottis to latch their styptic little receptor chemicals onto the alveoli branching deep within your lungs.<\/p>\n Some of this stuff that will cover the house has been linked with birth defects\u00a0but, happily, the power of lobbyists has ensured that the ban on its use has been put\u00a0back a year, which is one reason you see so many of these scaffolds being put up\u00a0now \u2013 metastasizing like cancer through the body of the city. The location and indeed\u00a0aetiology of these points of infection depends on various exogenous factors: whether\u00a0a building has recently been sold to some tentacular tax-haven company with a\u00a0bland, Esperanto-ish, big-Pharma name (Vivico\u00ae, Immo\u00ae, Vonovia\u00ae, Bonobo) that\u00a0sounds like a brand of suppositories, keen to monetise the property as quickly as\u00a0possible; the existence of legislative frameworks that are careful to distinguish work\u00a0that goes on inside a property from changes to its outer structure, where tenants\u00a0have far less chance of legal redress; the primitive legal system in Germany that, unlike in most other European countries, doesn\u2019t allow for court cases brought by\u00a0groups \u2013 class-action suits \u2013 rather than by individuals (hence the divide-and-rule\u00a0method applied so successfully in our house, whereby everyone has been making\u00a0their own little deals with the owners to keep their particular rent increase as low as possible, which accounts for the shit-eating grin you\u2019ve suddenly started getting from\u00a0that lawyer guy who lives downstairs); a Gestasi culture of corporate snooping that\u00a0leads to nominally \u2018social\u2019 housing providers compiling dossiers on uppity tenants\u00a0whom they don\u2019t want as candidates for the boards of tenant-landlord associations; the inefficacy of transnational political and legislative bodies when it comes to\u00a0challenging the asset-stripping approach of non-national companies that has seen\u00a0old-fashioned third-way concepts like \u2018paying tax\u2019 go the way of phlogiston,\u00a0phrenology and MySpace\u00ae; a lazy-thinking and egoistic political class, especially in\u00a0Berlin, that conflates putting up buildings with development, and this whole\u00a0hegemonic superstructure of patronage, patronising, lies, marketisation, ecohypocrisy\u00a0and small-minded, present-dwelling cultural cowardice is supported by a\u00a0bestiary (look at them circling you like it\u2019s Fletcher\u2019s Hecate scene in Macbeth and\u00a0you\u2019re in the cauldron) of lawyers, lobbyists, investment bankers and hedge-fund\u00a0managers, architects, accountants, apologists, marketers, conference organisers,\u00a0brochure-, infofilm- and website-designers, chemical companies, copywriters,\u00a0bottom-feeding employers and guppy-faced provincial politicians hoisting up their\u00a0waistbands like they\u2019ve just voided an annoying obstruction (only now you\u2019re in the\u00a0toilet bowl, looking up as they flush you away), radiating their conceit from placards\u00a0tied to lampposts with those police-issue plastic handcuffs you always see around\u00a0lefties\u2019 wrists on May Day, the trailing strap sticking out horizontally, ready to scythe\u00a0through a passing iris, the superiority in their thin-lipped visages all but inviting\u00a0anointment with a balloonful of piss, a swirl of freaks and pencil-skirted demons on\u00a0swivel chairs, a Bosch triptych of expensively tailored leeches on top of their game,\u00a0getting out of cars and brushing down their jackets, studying spreadsheets at an\u00a0elliptical conference table of sustainable pine-substitute, untouched Perrier\u00ae bottles\u00a0lined up like specimen jars in front of them, and smiling as they stick a spade into the ground, the ground which now seems to be morphing into the top of your head, the\u00a0whole Hogarthian gallimaufry cavorting round your brain, bestriders of the Earth\u00a0surrounded by a Goyan chorus of imps with outstretched mikes and a deadline to\u00a0make, masters of a prostitute universe, fundamentally and irrevocably altering the\u00a0face of an entire capital city for generations to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Objekt Vierzehn It\u2019s like an illness in the family. Or, rather, the announcement. Neighbours glance at\u00a0you in embarrassed sympathy. You shrug, smile, say, \u2018It won\u2019t be long now.\u2019\u00a0You\u2019ve been preparing for it, ever since the first letter came. Energetische\u00a0Sanierung. Modernisierung. Novellierung. W\u00e4rmed\u00e4mmung. Reminds me of\u00a0\u2018G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung\u2019. Or \u2018our house is literally verd\u00e4mmt\u2019. The letter for everyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5186,"template":"","categories":[29,10],"class_list":["post-3180","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-2","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n\u2018Sehr geehrte Okkupant\/Okkupantin, Objekt Vierzehn, Rollerkoffer Stra\u00dfe, We\u2019re\u00a0gonna fuck you up and charge you for the pleasure. Details to follow. You have<\/em> to\u00a0agree to this in writing by the end of the month, otherwise we will sow your ancestral\u00a0lands with salt and have you up before a landlord-friendly judge who will authorise us\u00a0to open your pitiful bank account like a shucked oyster so that you, your dreams,\u00a0your descendants and your descendants\u2019 dreams shall be as our playthings unto the\u00a0nth generation. Mit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen, Wilhemina Kotzenfutter.\u2019<\/p>\n