Chapter Text
Late October, 1989
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«Scholle made it.»
Till looked up from the willows he was sorting by lengths and thickness into water basins. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore, it was cold already today. He had considered warming up the water first, but then dismissed it as too much work. He would let the branches sit over night anyway so they would turn soft, and as for his hands, they were half ruined already anyway.
«How do you know?» He asked suspiciously, not quite ready yet to feel happy for his friend. There was an endless string of rumors as it were.
Gert shrugged off his weathered jacked and fell into Till’s weathered leather couch.
«Alex was over there. He met with Pedder, and apparently he’s met him.»
Till was still sceptical.
«Alex?»
«Alex, the writer.» Gert wriggled around to fish a lighter out of his skin tight jeans and lit a cigarette. Normally, Till would have asked him not to. Not that he minded people smoking, that would be hypocritical, but he did work with wood after all. The floor of his workshop was covered with sawdust.
Today, he didn’t feel like reprimanding Gert like a damn teacher. In fact, he didn’t feel particularly like expanding energy to anything.
«Oh, he can go? I didn’t know that.»
In fairness, that was no wonder, honestly, because Till wasn’t really interested in anything that happened across the wall. Least of all to literary people. As far as he was concerned, people leaving or even just spending alot of time there, were simply ... lost. Not lost in a «I won’t see them ever again» sort of way, nor in a «they’re a nut case, lost their path» sort of way. No, they just kinda ... stopped existing. Lost any relevance to his reality. As if the west was some sort of quicksand, that just swallowed people and did not let them go again.
At least it used to be that way.
«He can. Some representative bullshit. Never liked the guy. Anyway. He met Pedder. Remember him?»
Till nodded and pretended to turn his attention back to his willows. He didn’t care about careerist writers, or defecting screamers. Pedder was one of those people that had yelled loudest for change, and did least to change anything and Till barely knew him. He’d left months ago. He wasn’t missed much.
«I do remember him. Unfortunately.»
«I agree,» Gert said and snipped cigarette ashes on the floor. Till winced, but didn’t say anything.
«But appearantly, Pedder met Scholle. On some gig, because where else. Philipp Boa. Heard of it?»
«No.» Till shook his head.
«Me neither. Some weird independent stuff, says Alex.»
«Alex doesn’t know shit,» Till alleged, mostly out of spite. There was a small spark of excitement at the thought of his friend watching west shows the way he had always wanted to. It died as quickly as it had come and left a bitter note of missing out behind.
«In any case, they talked some and Scholle told him to send the word. He got there a week ago or so.»
Till just nodded and bowed his head over the willows without really seeing them. He waited for the expected relief. It didn’t come.
«Anyway, I thought you’d want to know,» Gert said casually. If he’d paied any attention, Till would have caught the curious, slightly too considerate note in his friends voice. He didn’t though.
«Eh. Yeah. I did. Thanks.»
«So, can I borrow that buzzsaw we talked about?» Gert got up from the couch.
«By the slicer,» Till said absent mindedly.
Gert put his cigarette losely between his lips and straightened his always crooked glasses before he clapped Till’s back and left him behind, grunting under the weight of the saw.
«See you saturday?»
«... sure.» Till replied when Gert was already long since out the door.
Scholle made it.
Till wondered if he’d still use that name. He’d always hated it. Maybe he was just going by Sven again now.
For days, he’d agonized about him in private. There was no real reason why this one would be different. The never ending stream of people leaving had lost any sense of novelty weeks ago. After months, it had become too tedious to feel anything but faint annoyance at each new person who vanished over night, with nothing but a sketchy, cryptic note pinned to a windowframe. Scholle was just the latest one.
Should have been just the latest one.
And still. This time, Till had worried. Had stressed. Had tried to catch any glimpse of gossip or news he could find, passed up through the music scene’s grapevine. He’d rooted for him to make it.
Till thought it was because Scholle had such a penchant for getting into serious trouble. The kind of guy with the tough luck to actually get shot. Because he had left for better reasons than most. Because he left nothing behind that would really miss him, the eternal misfit that he was. Till had been so sure that once he had gotten the news, he could forget about it, could let the worry go, let the man with the pixie smile and the eyes shadowed by a constant frown slip into the quicksand too.
Instead he just felt sad for himself.
Till left the workshop without cleaning up. He poured himself a triple Korn in his unlit kitchen, homebrewed by the old cartwright he’d apprenticed with for a while. It could probably kill a horse, which seemed just about right for the moment.
He downed it fast enough to make his head feel light and to turn his vision blurry with wet spots of swirled color and then he went to bed.
On the upside down beercrate he used as a night stand was a misplaced tape. It’s label still claimed it as a children’s fairytale reading, but the liner was a hastily cut and folded piece of red paper filled with maticilous notes in oddly feminine handwriting.
According to the notes, Side A now contained the full length of Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond. The quality of the recording fluctuated between the different parts, because the author of the tape had pieced it together from different sources when he’d recorded it over the retelling of Grimm’s Red Riding Hood. He’d written down every single one of them.
Till turned the tape between his numb and icy fingers for a while before he stuck it into the casette player.
He pressed play and bawled his eyes out for the entire 26 minutes.
///
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
Blown on the steel breeze
Come on you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine
Pink Floyd, Shine on you crazy diamond