Other People's Clothes - Softcover

Henkel, Calla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059331378X ISBN 13: 9780593313787

Verlag: Anchor Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Two American ex-pats obsessed with the Amanda Knox trial find themselves at the nexus of murder and celebrity in glittering late-aughts Berlin in this “hugely entertaining” (The New York Times) debut with a wicked sense of humor.

“Darkly funny, psychologically rich and utterly addictive... [a] harrowing tale of twisty female friendships, slippery identity and furtive secrets.” —Megan Abbott, best-selling author of The Turnout

Hoping to escape the pain of the recent murder of her best friend, art student Zoe Beech finds herself studying abroad in the bohemian capital of Europe—Berlin. Rudderless, Zoe relies on the arrangements of fellow exchange student Hailey Mader, who idolizes Warhol and Britney Spears and wants nothing more than to be an art star. 

When Hailey stumbles on a posting for a high-ceilinged, prewar sublet by well-known thriller writer Beatrice Becks, the girls snap it up. They soon spend their nights twisting through Berlin’s club scene and their days hungover. But are they being watched? Convinced that Beatrice intends to use their lives as inspiration for her next novel, Hailey vows to craft main-character-worthy personas. They begin hosting a decadent weekly nightclub in the apartment, finally gaining the notoriety they’ve been craving. Everyone wants an invitation to “Beatrice’s.” As the year unravels and events spiral out of control, they begin to wonder whose story they are living—and how it will end.

Other People’s Clothes brilliantly illuminates the sometimes dangerous intensity of female friendships, as well as offering an unforgettable window into millennial life and the lengths people will go to in order to eradicate emotional pain.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CALLA HENKEL is a writer, playwright, director, and artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her work with Max Pitegoff has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of Art, and she currently operates a bar, performance space and film studio called TV in Berlin. Other People’s Clothes is her debut novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

“Start from the beginning,” she insisted and if I were allowed to smoke, I would have lit a cigarette. I was never good at telling stories and this one always felt like it belonged to someone else; I had been young and stupid. I had been idealistic. I was twenty. Maybe I could start from the first slide of art history class—a black diorite pillar. Hammurabi’s code: two hundred and eighty-two laws and sliding punishments for eighteenth-century-bc justice, some seemingly logical, an eye for an eye, a surgeon’s hand for a botched surgery, a builder’s life for a collapsed building, some more bizarre—the guilt of the adulterer judged by whether or not they sank when thrown in water—all etched out onto a seven-foot column. But there was nothing for me on the cold black stone. No law had been engraved to deliver due process for what happened to me last year. I had no idea whose hand to chop off.

“Okay. Well, what about her first words? What did she say when you got here?”

I sat silent, arms tightly folded, unable to understand Frau Klein’s persistent interest in the beginning.

The Spa was only for women, all of whom were present for different disorders, and some diseases, most unknown to me. But everyone knew why I was there. I was famous, and the angular whispers of the nurses and patients followed me through the concrete building. However, I found comfort in their efforts to mask these remarks, knowing all too well that outside the Spa there was no reason to whisper. By the time Berlin’s summer was blazing, we—Hailey Mader and myself, Zoe Beech—were all anyone could talk about.

Sprawling and old, the Spa was situated in a converted primary school somewhere in northern Brandenburg. Its hallways still smelled chalky like the inside of a brick, and most of the bedrooms, once classrooms, were shared by two or three girls. But I was alone, living in what I assumed had once been a very generous broom closet, with my own square window, blue-painted chair with matching desk, and a porcelain sink adorned with a halo of dark-brownish mold. I liked to imagine that the ring of mold was a well-run city of tiny spores, filled with good, nonviolent mold citizens, maybe even with mold artists and mold curators doing coke at tiny mold clubs.

I spent most of my time in this sort of useless daydream, elbows pressed into the soft wood of the desk, staring out at the unbearably still farmland and then, lightning, an interruption to my doldrums: a body writhing in a lake of blood, flashes strobing, sound blaring, like a Rihanna music video, or a trailer for a horror film. And just as fast as it crested, I’d snap back to the barren field or mildewy sink or the constellation of moles on Frau Klein’s neck.

Frau Klein loved the word par-a-noi-a, letting each syllable slip like a ping-pong ball out of her wet mouth. She was in her early forties but dressed for her sixties, with roadkill-brown hair and potato-sack skirts. We had at this point spent many hours together and I was certain she was living vicariously through me, filling the void of her own existence with my answers and traumas, extracting information she would eventually sell to the tabloids, or her own tell-all.

“Zoe, how did sex make you feel?”

“Did you ever fantasize about Hailey?”

Her voice sounded scripted as if she were recording an audiocassette from a language class.

“What drugs did you do?”

“What pushed you to do them?”

I watched in disinterested horror, as the saliva began to surface at the edges of her thin lips, thirsty for my reply.

“I did what was around.”

She nodded. More questions. Whenever I mentioned the name Beatrice her eyes flickered and she would take her stubby blue pen and quietly draw a shape in her notebook. Frau Klein entertained my theories but she always returned to the same head tilt: “And what makes you so sure Beatrice was watching you?”

“She read my emails.”

“And how can you know that?”

“I told you already—”

“But is it possible you imagined it?”

“No.”

Frau Klein made another shape in her notebook then checked the clock. The stainless-steel lamp on her desk cast an orange circle on her overmoisturized cheek, her skin hanging loose like the Mask of Agamemnon or a glob of half-baked cookie dough.

“And whose story do you believe you are in right now?”

“Yours,” I said, motioning toward her notepad.

Frau Klein made a suggestive nod. “And let’s go back to the beginning again. What were her first words to you when you arrived?”

2

“Guten Tag, Dumpster!” Hailey called, waving a frantic freckled arm across the Hauptbahnhof with an ocher hiking-pack strapped to her athletic frame. She looked ready to move camp every night, which terrified me. While buying our train tickets she perkily explained that Hostel Star was in the East side of the city, a bed cost twenty-two euros a night and each room held eight people with four bunks. I didn’t really understand the intricacies of East or West, but I knew it meant something specific here. The grog of the Dramamine I’d taken somewhere over the Atlantic was wearing off and I felt helpless for relying on all of her arrangements, following, a mute dog, as she babbled, pointing things out on the train: the art museum on our left, Alexanderplatz, the TV Tower.

I rolled my hand-me-down suitcase on the cobblestone sidewalk while Hailey bounded ahead until she abruptly stopped under a neon star winking from a crumbling concrete facade. I followed her in and the smell of mildew and lemon floor cleaner wafted over us.

“I liked the name Hostel Star,” she said with a hint of embarrassment while looking around the fading lobby. Finally clutching our new keys, we entered our room on the third floor, where we found three guys our age, spread across the furniture, duffel bags and rolling papers littering the dark-blue linoleum. They greeted us with rotund Australian accents.

“We are only here until we find something more permanent,” Hailey whispered after the initial pleasantries, unbuckling her Gore-Tex straps and taking a sip from her Smart Water bottle. The three Australians went on to tell us their names, which all sounded like Aaron, Oron or Erin. We reluctantly introduced ourselves. I was relieved when she yawned. Human, after all. We lay down on our bunks and I fell into a syrupy sleep. When I woke from my jet-lagged nap the sky had already turned black, and the reflection of the neon star bounced into our room like a hiccuping sunset. The Aarons asked us if we wanted to go to the club with them. Hailey and I exchanged fuck no glances. They shrugged and began snorting speed off the lip of the top bunk. In one last attempt to persuade us to join them, the tall one bellowed, “Every night you miss in Berlin is a night you miss in Berlin.” We burst into laughter after the door thudded shut.

This became our mantra for when things were either absolutely miserable or absolutely amazing. Every night you miss in Berlin is a night you miss in Berlin. I watched from the top bunk as Hailey scrawled the lines in her orange diary. She was always scribbling, pausing from our conversations to pull out the soft-covered book, her red ponytail a bobbing paintbrush as she wrote.

“All of the great artists kept a diary,” she’d said to me on our second afternoon, croissant flakes fluttering from her cupid’s-bow lips, “I’m taking it really seriously while I’m here.” I nodded, not sure what I was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anchor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059331378X
• ISBN 13: 9780593313787
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar