We flung our empty bottles and made for the shoot. She hoicked another of her awful thick green phlegmy spits and I tried not to notice. She was so lean, with a ferocious mouth, and XXX-rated eyelashes. I’d found her through a small ad – a share offered on a studio apartment. The sense memory of the morning’s events was still with me. First the mouth, and after a long time my hands had stopped trembling enough to be brought into play. She talked me through the operation. It was delicate stuff. My hands felt so heavy, but then she laid hers on mine to guide, and lifted the weight – everything was suddenly lighter.

iv

Wedding was a raw expanse of towerblocks, tattoo pits, kebab shops. Nogoodniks in mauve-coloured tracksuits decorated every corner. We had a properly respectful air as we passed through. This was how Berlin was supposed to be. We cut down a back way, for a while, to avoid the main drag, because the sight of the kebab gyros was sickening Silvija’s stomach, which was troublesome. The rearsides of the towerblocks loomed either side of a dirt pathway itchy with catkins beneath our sandals, and the word ‘proletariat’ rolled its glamorous syllables over my tongue. Silvija may have been lazy as a feline in her stride but she made as sly and sure-footed a progress. She wore black military fatigues cut off at the knee and a black vest a couple of sizes too small the better to ride sexily high on her waist. Just as we approached the tenement where the shoot would take place, Silvija received a call to say the Tasmanian had ‘technically died’ that morning but the show would go on.

There were always such complications. The Tasmanian’s assistant, a serene Vietnamese, was instead in charge when we reached the old apartment where the shoot would happen. Politely, we asked after the designer.

‘At six a.m.?’ the Vietnamese grinned. ‘Clinical death! Now? Much improve!’

The room was peopled with hipster flunkies, and the Turkish model was in place. She had a pair of recent stab wounds in her side and looked as if she had walked straight off a human rights-type poster about torture. Silvija began to set up – she would not go digital and used commie-era Leicas always. I attempted to calm the model who was mouthing vengeance of death against a two-timing girlfriend. The anal beads and the Rottweiler were introduced. Silvija declared that the dog lacked a sufficiently vicious mien and she smashed a camera lens off the wall. She attempted to goad the dog to promote a viciousness but there was no response, and the shoot, as so often, broke down into a period of tense analysis. Pils was sent for to help smooth the debate. It went not well, even so, with Silvija questioning the talents of the absent Tasmanian.