Higher Ground by Anke Stelling (ap literature book list .txt) 📕

exhausting, what with Frank putting together the kitchen every night, and she on her own with Willi and Leon, who still couldn’t fall asleep unless she lay down with them.

But finally, it was all done, and the big day had arrived.

The sun was shining.

The windows had been cleaned, the sister-in-law had taken care of that; she knew what was needed in all that chaos — sunlight streaming through polished panes, conjured not by magic this time, but by a Swabian-Berliner-by-choice with a kitchen cloth.

The boys were in the kids’ room. Frank was helping them make suits of armour from cardboard boxes and duct tape. They were still fighting, but now it was funny and creative. Frank got a beer as a reward. He couldn’t drink it, though, because Kieran jumped on his back: once the group leader, always the group leader. Frank had to go back into the fray or else there’d be tears: he did seem a bit reluctant though. Off you go, Frank! No flaking out now! On to the next round! Give a whoop and chase Kieran back into the hallway!

I’m not bitching, Bea. I’m part of this madness. I was glad of the distraction on a Saturday afternoon, and that Frank had taken the boys off my hands and was building suits of armour, and that you were allowed to go up to Carolina and Ulf’s and browse through catalogues, and I could let Lynn run around in the garden while I pepped myself up with a glass or two of bubbly, not to mention the totally yummy chocolate mousse.

The kitchen was really lovely. A fantastic flat. I share Vera’s dream. Along with countless others. Because it’s not a private dream. It’s been projected onto our brains. By whom? No idea. Astrid Lindgren? Habitat? OK magazine?

There was that photo of Kate Moss’s wedding with twenty flower girls between four and fourteen years old, who stood around at her wedding, their tanned limbs showing from under faded yellow dresses.

Somehow, everybody knows what marriage and family should look like to seem laid-back and confident, controlled and free — and Vera and Frank are pretty close. So is the border to envy. It’s only natural to assume that I’m looking for the flaw in their perfection, like the fox who says the grapes are too sour.

But there was a gap between Vera’s assertion that she was perfectly happy and the way her face seemed to be falling apart. Perhaps it was just the light of the fire, but her features didn’t add up to a whole, and if you’d asked me, she was going to burst into tears as soon as the last guest had left.

It’s a feeling I know only too well: when you’ve reached a certain stress level, you need an audience to keep up your façade. Maybe we were only invited for that purpose.

Afterwards at home, I didn’t feel very well. The champagne, the chocolate mousse, and the constant supervision — no, restraint — of the children didn’t go together, after all. In fact, it was precisely the opposite of what we’d wanted. We’d agreed not to become like our parents. We had even agreed on it with our parents!

We had wanted to save each other from wising up in the sense of becoming ruthless, grown-up in the sense of being stressed, married in the sense of being trapped, and parents in the sense of being overprotective.

And now?

Scepticism translates into ‘being a killjoy’ and criticism into ‘being a know-it-all’.

I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. It was their business. It was their house: K23.

Woe betide me if I let show that the name alone bugged me with its self-importance, which Ulf and Caroline may have needed for their portfolio, but which soon got out of hand and spread like wildfire, so that no one referred to ‘the house’ anymore, but only to ‘K23’, as if it was an institution, like ‘Kommune 1’.

Woe betide me if I criticised anything, especially as far as language and names went; first, they wouldn’t understand and would accuse me of imagining things, and second, they’d ask me not take that attitude, and third, tell me I was probably just jealous.

It wasn’t always like this.

I remember Ulf pointing out to Vera fifteen years ago that she started every other sentence with ‘Been there’, saying it offended him and he didn’t believe her, and that it was probably just a mannerism but irritating for the person she was talking to. And Vera had to admit he was right, which was awful for her, and she became very self-conscious about the way she spoke, went red the next twenty times it slipped out, but then it disappeared, and everybody was grateful to Ulf.

Like me and ‘Eh?’. I was weaned off that too, and Ellen was weaned off eating from other people’s plates, and Christian weaned off making generalisations that made him sound like his father; except that he didn’t target ‘shirkers’ and ‘scroungers’, but rather ‘short men’ and ‘only children’.

We did each other a service by pointing out our irritating habits. That’s what friends were for.

But not anymore. Now the rule is: no criticism.

Perhaps it’ll come back in fashion, but first, the kids have to grow up, and the cement has to really dry, and our friendship has to weather the toddler phase, and the planning application has to be pushed through. How are we supposed to pay attention to finer details with all this stress? We’ll have the time and leisure again one day, we tell ourselves. But that’s not true, Bea. That day never comes.

Or it comes, but then you still have all those strained, grown-up, salvaged, and cemented relationships, children, houses, and careers that feature unsightly bruises and cracks and strange deformations that have to be bent back into shape, and which aren’t any less stressful now than it was to build, design, and raise them.

Didn’t we have a different dream? House-squatting rather than home-owning? To live differently? To live