Stephanie de Velasco: Tiger Milk

I wouldn’t have even noticed it if Mama hadn’t run into Frau Stanitzek on the street. I know it was Frau Stanitzek because she already owned the convenience store in the building where Jameelah lives now. I can still remember how they stood around talking and laughing forever, and then they talked some more and then came more laughter. I wasn’t paying attention to them, I was bored and I remember I was holding onto the baby carriage to brace myself because the pavement was so icy.

Jessi was lying in the carriage, she was still a baby then, an accident. Mama had cried when she found out she was pregnant again. She was sitting in her room, on the corner of the bed, the corner of the same bed she used to share with Papa. Rainer was sitting next to her and then he took her in his arms and suddenly they both began to cheer up. I remember that I watched all of this through a slit in the doorway and that I had to pee really bad. The pregnancy test was still sitting next to the bathroom sink, it was one of the cheap paper ones and the ends were curled up like a dried-out slice of cheese on a sandwich put out for display at the bakery.

And then I saw it. It was lying in the snow, it was green, and it was steaming. Someone must have just spat it out. It looked like a little balled-up lump of pizza dough, about the right size for my Barbie doll to make a pizza out of, except it was green and it had teeth marks in it. I was still holding onto the baby carriage, I had mittens on and they were connected by a cord that ran up each sleeve of my jacket and across my back. My Barbie was stuffed into one of the mittens. And as Mama and Frau Stanitzek chatted away, the upper body of my Barbie crept out of the mitten and bent down. With an outstretched arm she speared the gum and then stuck it into my mouth. It was still a tiny bit sweet, and it tasted like Waldmeister syrup with a hint of cigarettes. Later, when I was eleven and took a drag on a cigarette for the first time, I immediately thought of that piece of gum and then today, again, I had to think of that piece of gum, the way it was just lying there in the snow, and the taste of it, because today for the first time I put a condom on using just my mouth. An old hooker’s trick says Jameelah, guys love it. I’m only explaining all of this because I think I had a childhood memory for the first time today, and you can only remember something as a childhood memory once you’re no longer a child. Jameelah says she can’t remember anything from her childhood. Then maybe you’re still a child, I said to her. Then she thought of something, she remembered how she found two bunnies in a dumpster once, how they weren’t quite dead but almost, it was one summer in Iraq when I was still little, and my cousin killed them with a tennis racket but other than that I don’t have any memories, Jameelah says, which is probably for the best, I don’t want to grow up anyway, at least not really, not all the way, just enough so that I can get into all the clubs and so guys don’t think they’re going to get thrown in jail if they fuck me.

The two of us, me and Jameelah, we really are grown up now. Which is why we buy striped thigh-high stockings with our pocket money. When you start to buy your own clothes, you’re grown up. After school we lock ourselves in the girls’ bathroom and take off our trousers, underneath are the stockings. Our t-shirts hang down just enough to cover our asses, and the stockings come up to the top of our thighs, it drives guys crazy. I always get milk from the cafeteria during our lunch break, I have a calcium deficiency, you can tell by the white flecks on my fingernails. At the discount supermarket we’ve bought cheap Mariacron brandy, maracuja juice, and a wide-mouth plastic container of chocolate Müller milk. The cashiers don’t usually care that we’re not eighteen. We dump the chocolate milk down the toilet, chocolate milk is for children. We drink Tiger Milk and this is how you make it. Pour a little of the school cafeteria milk, a lot of maracuja juice, and a decent slug of brandy into the Müller jar. Jameelah stirs it with her fingers, she has really long fingers and wears lots of rings, all of them stolen. She doesn’t steal just rings, she swipes perfume, nail polish, basically anything that doesn’t have one of those things on it that sets off the alarm when you leave a shop.

We take turns drinking from the Müller jar while we ride the U-bahn toward Kurfürstenstrasse. As we cross the city on the elevated steel rails, the train rocks us back and forth and Jameelah starts making up stories again. Just imagine, she says, looking at me with her huge dark eyes, picture it in your mind. It sounds like once upon a time … but it’s not once upon a time, it’s more like this is how it could be. I close my eyes and everything starts to spin a little. I imagine the train is a flying carpet and now, any second, Jameelah will start to tell some story or other.

Just imagine that when you’re seventeen or whatever, when your breasts have stopped growing, just imagine, that for a few days each month they filled up with Tiger Milk. How crazy would that be? I mean, how crazy would guys go over that?

Shut up, Jameelah, you’re the one who’s crazy.

Jameelah giggles loudly.

No, seriously, think about it, the same way you get breasts and you start to get your period, what if you got Tiger Milk once a month?

TMS?

Tiger Milk Syndrome. Miger Silk Tyndrome.

Jameelah loves switching letters around. Word-crunching, she calls it. She makes lust out of list and sex out of Beck’s. Put a six-pack of sex on your shopping lust. We also talk in our own O-language. Forget saying someone took a hit off a pipe, they take a hot off a pope.

You know, I always used to think that being a teenager just meant you were old enough to drink tea, what about you?

Jameelah laughs and shakes her head and her long earrings jangle.

What’s the Arabic word for teenager?

No idea, says Jameelah, who cares? What do you think about the idea of getting Tiger Milk for a few days a month as a gift from nature, a gift from god, from some god of sex, as, you know, a celebration of ovulation.

You’re wasted. And I don’t know. Every month for your whole life? Wouldn’t that end up being a pain in the ass?

Jameelah squints her eyes and thinks it over for a second. Okay, she says, how about only until you have a kid? Only up to then, right, that’s the way nature planned it, because by then you’d have a husband anyway.

I nod and Jameelah looks at me conspiratorially.

In that case, she says, you can never have kids, because then it would stop.

Nobody in Germany has kids anymore anyway. I saw it in a magazine.

They do in Iraq.

But you’re not in Iraq.

Yeah, but I might be soon, in three months.

What? Why?

I don’t know, my mother got a letter from the immigration department.

She gets stuff from them all the time.

Yeah, but this was different.

What do you mean?

It was a different colour.

For some reason this makes me laugh.

What, like a pink slip, I say.

Jameelah glares at me.

It’s not funny. They might deport us or something.