TE23 Double Feature

Simone Buchholz

River Clyde

I think about my dead friend, Faller, about everything his death bombed out of me, such as the things that had felt like certainties, maybe he was my balancing pole for this eternal highwire act, and I think about the thing his death laid bare, the thing that was kind of bombed upwards, which until then I’d buried very deep: the question of whether there’s actually any reason for me to be here. If there’s anything holding me. Up here on the wire.

word. It didn’t bother me, I had Klatsche to do the talking. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have anyone now, apart from my god of concrete in there somewhere, but he doesn’t say much, of course, and so I just have to understand the people who happen to talk to me. But maybe that’s bullshit and it’s just age. An increase in something, a kind of arcane superpower that people only develop with time: understanding. I smile at him, he grins back again, I raise my left hand in greeting and go. The sun disappears behind the clouds again, the all encompassing grey is back, it wraps me up, it carries me, and as soon as I’m back at the station and under that bridge, I stop again and look, as if I’ve parked myself inside a clock. Hours later, I’m still standing there 257 ‘All right,’ I say, and now he says something else but this time I don’t catch it.

‘D’ye miss him?’

‘Yes. A lot.’

‘Happens to the best of us,’ says the guy, and now I’m really surprised that I can follow his heavy accent. I mean, I’ve never been here before, apart from eternities ago with Klatsche for a few days in Edinburgh and at Loch Ness, and back then, when the Scots opened their mouths, I could never understand a single 256