An excerpt from Australian writer Pip Finkemeyer’s debut novel, ‘Sad Girl Novel’

“I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the simplicity of only caring about one thing. I let the rest of my life fall away in pieces, like a cliff face collapsing into the sea.”

I think it was the third time I got attacked by a stranger on a train that I thought: ‘Maybe it’s time to leave Berlin for a while.‘ There was a man throwing candy at people and then asking them for money. His strategy was to throw the candy fast, so it went in a straight line instead of a curved one.

Most people would lift and squeeze their hands in front of their face as a reflex. When they looked down to see what they had caught, the man would smile and ask them to pay for it, in the tone of any man behind a counter making a regular transaction. The reason this qualified as an attack in my book – or even as a personal attack – was that I didn’t have the reflexes everyone else did.

The confectionery hit me in the forehead and made the sound of a knuckle popping. I only left my kiez once a week and this was one of the reasons why. Awkward interactions with strangers on trains. The other reason I never left my neighbourhood was because I had nowhere to go. All I had was a project that required me to sit alone in my apartment day and night, drinking stovetop espresso from a black Bialetti.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the simplicity of only caring about one thing. I let the rest of my life fall away in pieces, like a cliff face collapsing into the sea. I felt like a monk making great sacrifices for divinity. My goal was to write a book in one year and try to not make it about me (but so far it kind of was). Writing about yourself doesn’t feel like the most divine thing ever.

There’s supposed to be something other involved, some faith in unseen forces. I read somewhere that writing is like a way of connecting with a higher power, what some people would describe as a dialogue with God. Therapists were good for that too. So I caught the train once a week to see Debbie. Her office was on the other side of the ring in Prenzlauer Berg a suburb with an inexplicable amount of earthy toy shops and pregnancy yoga.

 

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The ring was made by the Ringbahn, the train line that ran in a circle around all the inner city suburbs. Like clockwork, if you imagined clocks that also went backwards at the same time as going forwards, because it ran both clockwise and anticlockwise at all times. It was far, but I was lucky to find a therapist at all, so I went. The train ride was the perfect amount of time for me to run through a bullet-point list of neuroses in my head like a military drill. It was when I prepared all my best material.

Ask Debbie about Matthew. Ask Debbie about Matthew’s invitation. Ask Debbie if your novel is stupid. Ask Debbie if your life is stupid. Ask Debbie if it’s wrong to be jealous of your best friend’s newborn baby. Don’t ask Debbie but try to ascertain, does Debbie like you? I was in the middle of this mental drill when the man’s candy made contact with my head and made that disconcerting crack.

The mood in the carriage up until that point had been jovial; I think everyone other than me generally enjoyed the man. While waiting for my reflexes to kick in, which never actually happened, I gave the man such a dead-eyed stare that he made off in the opposite direction and didn’t ask me for anything. The passengers sitting to the left and right of me had these dainty 1950s-looking candies and were sucking on them happily as if to say, isn’t life sweet?

I looked down at my lap. It was an entire chocolate bar: a perfect square the size of my palm. So I hadn’t imagined it, that my pain was probably worse than everyone else’s. Debbie told me that ‘attack’ was too strong a word to describe what happened and that yes, I probably was only imagining that my pain was anything spectacular. Then she laughed, pointed at the egg-shaped lump forming on my forehead, and said: “Only in Berlin.”

Some part of me knew all along Debbie was a terrible therapist, but the more I needed her the less I could see that. I needed a stern mother figure to tell it to me straight. I needed to talk to someone apart from Belinay. Things had become complicated since Bel had had the baby; she was someone else’s mother figure now. She was someone else’s literal mother, actually. And I looked forward to seeing Debbie. I liked Debbie. I enjoyed our rapport.

She was so mean to me that I was sure she didn’t think I could be suicidal, and I took that as a compliment. I liked to think that I was strong enough to weather all the shitty things she would say to me, so I could glean something good from her, like panning for gold. She was also free, paid for by my compulsory insurance, so there was that. I nicknamed her Debbie because she reminded me of a German version of a modern-day Debbie Harry, and also because Deborah was her actual name.

I never asked her how she ended up with such an Anglo name. I never asked her anything about herself at all. Debbie was crass, unforgiving and dry. She used the C-word a lot, which reminded me of home and was strangely comforting. She regularly had laughing fits at my expense, and when she did her laugh was deep and raspy. She sounded like she might have fronted a pioneering new wave meets punk rock band throughout the late 1970s and 80s, with a rigorous touring schedule of chain-smoking and heart-destroying.

She had a stoicism about her. Her cheekbones were argumentative in themselves. One side of her mouth would curl whenever she was internally disagreeing with me. The only matronly thing about her was her extensive collection of asymmetrical cardigans. Once, when I tried to skip a session because I had nothing to say, Debbie told me she couldn’t afford not to get paid by my insurance company. So I went. I came up with some new material. Maybe I was lonely, but I kind of fucking loved Debbie.

“How’s the writing, Kim?” she asked.
“I’m more into reading at the moment. I’m doing some research on the horror genre. I’m thinking of starting again, making it more ‘horror‘, you know. I’ve been thinking a lot about romance and horror together, and how the two are always combined for me in real life. Lately, anyway. How I could take that, and turn it into a sort of, like, genre fiction turducken, with something else mixed in there too, like a psychological thriller.”
“What’s a turducken?”
“It’s like a bird within a bird within a bird. That you eat.”
“Sounds too complicated.”
“And maybe my main character will slowly lose their mind too. Novels usually need an abandoned woman going crazy in them. It’s gonna be, like, commercial, but literary.”

Then came the curling lip. I assumed Debbie didn’t like the word ‘commercial’ because she was a former punk. I looked over at her bookshelf. I knew she would have preferred to have a patient who wrote poetry, who was something like Patti Smith reincarnated, if you didn’t have to be dead to be reincarnated; I was never sure about that.

“Matthew sent me a package,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. It was an invitation of sorts, I suppose.”
“To New York?” she asked, excited on my behalf. She knew I wanted to go back to the place where we had met, to the time where we had met.
“No, Frankfurt.”
“Oh,” she said, deflated on my behalf. “That’s – how do you say it? – a bummer. Why on earth would he invite you there?”

The package was a manila envelope containing a lanyard, a book, and a letter. The envelope was eight and a half inches wide and eleven inches long, so I knew that it was one of his, from America. The lanyard was royal blue and granted me access to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The book was a new release that I could only describe as a collection of sexy little horror stories. A very popular one.

I had looked it up and the author was a young woman around my age, who would be appearing at the book fair to promote it. The letter was more of a note, printed on a small piece of cream card: Kim, sorry I’ve been so quiet. I’m in Germany next week. Any chance you could drop by? I can organise a hotel for you. Matthew xo

“And?”
“I’m a bit offended at the assumption that I could just drop by Frankfurt from Berlin.”
“But can’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but he doesn’t know that.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny he sent you a book much like the one you are thinking about writing? Sexy and scary?”
“Not really. I’m not surprised by the coincidence. He’s always had good instincts about my writing, about my taste.”
“What is he to you, Kim?”
I sighed.
“He’s an obsession,” I said quietly.
“And so you should go and find him. Get to the bottom of it.”

I put my fingers to the lump on my forehead and noticed they were shaking as I brought them down over my eyes. I feel crazy, I wanted to say. Something felt off. Unearned.

“I do want to go. I feel it’s time to leave Berlin for a while.” Then I remembered. “But my suitcase is still in the basement.”
She frowned. “And you haven’t been in the basement since The Incident?”
The Incident is what we called the first time I was attacked by a stranger on a train.
“No.”
“Do you think this new incident today is reminding you of the first time? And that’s why you’re – ”
“No.”
“Are you sure about that, Kim?”

The honest answer was yes, of course it was. My life was a series of circles. My thoughts, my train rides, my tendencies. Everything would come back to the beginning again. I opened my mouth to say something, but then Debbie looked over my shoulder and I knew our time was up.

This is an edited extract from Sad Girl Novel by Pip Finkemeyer, published by Ultimo Press and available now.