Silvija snapped her fingers like this a lot. She allowed weight to nothing. All of life, she implied, was without meaning or lasting import, and in this way, I believe, she was teaching me how I should operate (and how I should think) if I truly intended to be an artist. We left the muddy remains of our coffees, stubbed our Marlboro Lights, and set out for a towerblock in the district of Wedding, there to photograph for the deranged Tasmanian model-burner a double-jointed Turkish neurotic capering with a string of anal beads.

And a Rottweiler.

iii

The Berlin designers had until this time mostly lived and worked in Prenzlauer Berg. By 2005, however, the bohemian bourgeoisie from five continents were arriving for the quarter’s cut-price lofts and superb childcare facilities, and gentrification was fast spreading through the old tenements and squares.

‘Motherfucking breeders,’ Silvija called the new arrivals.

The fashion crowd generally was in arch dismay at the intrusion, and had started to venture north from P’berg into the riskier neighbourhoods of Wedding. This was where most of the serious shoots happened that summer. We stopped at a corner shop on the way for some bottles of pils. I uncapped mine with the opener chained to the counter, Silvija hers with her teeth. We drank pils more or less constantly and ate very rarely. We crossed Bremenstrasse, dodging the ironically bearded cyclists on their high-nellies, and breathed in the petrol views. I lugged all the gear; Silvija strode. Inclined as always to be artistically late, we lay for a while on the scraggy hilltop in Mauerpark. We slipped in an earpiece each from my headphones and listened religiously to the Nina Simone version of ‘Lilac Wine’. We looked out across the city.

‘I give it six months,’ Silvija said, and spat dramatically.

I was only a few months off the plane from Cork but Silvija had ten years of Berlin under her belt, and she allowed me to share the old-hand snootiness that those years granted; I had learned to affect the same languid woe as all the other old hands. A constant of hip cities is that much of the conversation centres around the fact the city is not as hip as once it was. In Mauerpark that morning, Silvija talked seriously for the first time of leaving Berlin behind, and I felt a terrible spike of nausea.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Not for a while yet.’