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

says Bea in my tone of voice. Jack farts in reply; Kieran laughs.

‘PE kits!’

Jack and Kieran charge out of the door. I hear them in the stairwell jumping down the last steps on each floor. Bea follows them and pulls the door shut.

Now it’s just Lynn, sitting in her highchair in pyjamas.

Her legs have outgrown the highchair and her Hello Kitty onesie. Nobody is a baby here anymore—

Suddenly my yearning for them to be old enough to get ready on their own in the mornings flips over into wanting them to stay small forever.

What am I going to do when there’s no one to wake up, wash, tell off, and send out of the door?

Sven comes out of the shower.

‘Hurry up,’ he says to Lynn; but Lynn is incapable of hurrying. She can already do many things that her brothers and sister could only manage when they were at least two years older than she is, but always at her own pace, never on command, and definitely not according to her dad’s timetable, which is that he needs to leave now.

She goes into her room and gets dressed.

At least, I hope she does.

Sven eats the boys’ half-finished toast and drinks up their tea.

Lynn returns to the kitchen, indeed fully dressed, with her hairbrush in her hand and her hair falling in her face.

‘Why do only men go bald?’ she asks Sven, who ties her hair into a ponytail, puts on her hat, and holds out her jacket for her to put on while giving a quick summary of sex hormones and their effects.

‘So why aren’t you?’ Lynn asks, and Sven says ‘Ciao’ to me and ‘It has to do with genes too,’ to Lynn, and this will probably keep them going until they get to childcare, and I sit here all alone, awake at last but with a lump in my throat; I want to cry for them, put my arms around them all and hug them tightly to my chest, talk to them. Now that they are finally out of the door, I want them close to me and to never let them go, I want to save them—

Woe betide anybody who tries to hurt them out there in the big wide world, doubts their perfection for a second, tries to rival, criticise, or quarrel with them — all the things I do as soon as I’m with them.

Woe betide them!

It’s quiet in the kitchen: I turn on some music.

Paul Simon is singing that he has to leave. Creep down the alleyway, fly down the highway, before they come to catch him.

Bob Dylan sings that Miss Carefree doesn’t know how it feels to live on the edge and out on the street.

Jim Croce sings that he’s a fool, but that’s exactly why he won’t give up his dream; he is and always will be moving down the highway, and his dream will carry him.

The Boss sings that everybody’s got a hungry heart.

Mine’s thudding and trying to leap out of my chest, but more than that, it doesn’t want to be alone. It wants company on a tour bus.

‘This is where we part ways.’

When I told Sven, he shrugged.

‘They’ve “made it”. Isn’t that how they talk? This isn’t just where we part ways, it’s also the end of theirs.’

‘And my hungry heart? What’s it going to do without a highway?’

‘Sit with a drink in the service area?’

Idea for song lyrics: My hungry heart hitchhikes / my ass is on Sitzstreik / my feet train the moonwalk / my mouth bubbles small talk / my brain is still asleep / my guitar gently weeps.

I don’t even have a driver’s licence. Have never owned a car, have always been a passenger. Highway songs aren’t for me. If anybody, I’m the tramp, jumping on the freight train.

Making music would be so much better. Writing is too close to speaking, and its art gets lost in literacy.

Without music, the lyrics about having a hungry heart seem so trite that I can’t sing them out loud.

The last time my father came to visit, Bea, you said: ‘I feel so sorry for Grandpa Raimund.’ I played it down. ‘Why’s that? Grandpa’s doing just fine,’ instead of telling the truth: ‘Yes, you’re right, Grandpa Raimund’s got a hungry heart.’

Everybody does. And the closer you are to somebody, the more their heart touches yours, and then your heart longs to still the hunger of their heart, and because that’s not possible, your heart hurts, and you need something to numb the pain.

When you were two, Bea, and Jack was a day old, Sven picked you up from the nursery, and you went to the chemist to get lavender blossom for my sitz bath. Don’t worry, dear child, no more torn-perineum stories. At the chemist, you got a packet of gelatine-free gummy bears. Which was an exception, because it was usually a waste of time to make a fuss at the checkout, especially with Sven. But that day, it worked — and why? You remembered when you came home and saw me lying in bed with your baby brother Jack.

You stood there in your much-too-warm quilted jacket and your tiny winter boots and didn’t look at us — not at me, not at Jack, just at the gummy bears in your hand. You looked at them, and I looked at you, and saw you were connecting the dots between that packet and how our family had changed. I saw you weighing up the sweets against your bitterness, trying to hold the gummy bears and be pleased. You didn’t look up when I said: ‘Hi Bea, nice to see you!’ but carried on looking at the gummy bears. ‘Did you get a packet of gummy bears?’ — What a stupid question. You turned on your heel and marched off.

Off down the highway.

Oh, how my heart trembled when I saw your hungry one setting off.

And you feel sorry for Grandpa Raimund, Bea; you see him sitting at our kitchen table drinking