Tiger Milk Read Online Free Page A

are covered with spray paint from floor to ceiling. The crappy graffiti is Tobi’s. Tobi tags his stuff animaux , which means animals in French. But for a graffiti tag animaux is too long, Nico explained it to me. It’s the last two letters that make it too long, you need to spray quickly and then get the hell out of there. Maybe that’s why Tobi gets caught all the time and maybe that’s why you see the tag anima all over the city.
    The good stuff is Nico’s. Sad is his tag, written in English. Sometimes he writes Sadist . He writes it in soft funny-looking letters, like clouds. It’s comforting when I’m riding the bus around town and see a Sad Nico has tagged on some random wall. It’s like the sensation I get when I have a pebble in my shoe, in that moment when I see one of Nico’s Sad tags I’m not alone.
    At the far end of the railway underpass, Tobi and Nico are standing around smoking. Nico’s leaning against the wall. He’s big. Everything about him is big actually, his hands, his blue eyes, his mouth, and his feet, which are always in the same pair of trainers which he throws into the washing machine just as often as he washes his clothing and hangs to dry along with the clothes. Even his shaved head is big and really the only small thing about him is the kiddie lunchbox he always carries around. It’s plastic, with bright stripes and on the side of it a clock that doesn’t work because it’s out of batteries. I used to have one just like it from when Nico and I were kids. We were at the carnival one day and the lunchboxes were on display on the top shelf of a raffle ticket booth. Nico and I wanted them so bad, one for each of us, but both of our mothers just wanted to keep moving. We began to cry and Nico’s father started buying raffle tickets, more tickets than anybody else. Nico’s mother cursed at him and the man at the booth laughed as he handed Nico’s father one ticket after the next, pulling them out of the clear wrappers like meal worms and shoving them at Nico’s father until he had enough points for two of the lunchboxes.
    So that’s how we’re going to spend our money, Nico’s mother had said to his father pointing to the slips of coloured paper littering the ground, but she was just in a bad mood because Nico’s father was drunk and so were my Mama and Papa but she couldn’t drink because she was pregnant with Pepi then.
    I don’t think it’s right either, my Mama had said to my Papa, say something, she said, but Papa just rolled his eyes.
    Nico has carried that thing around with him ever since. He used to carry his matchbox cars back and forth to the playground in it but these days he keeps his pot in it and uses the smooth plastic face of the clock to blend the pot with tobacco. He even takes the lunchbox to Schulze-Sievert, where he’s doing his apprenticeship. Everybody jokes about Nico and his lunchbox, but he doesn’t care, he laughs right along with them. His lunchbox is his lunchbox. Mine got destroyed the same summer I got it. Dragan threw it against the wall of a car park after I told him the clock on it was shockproof.
    Hey, says Nico, so did you let Aslagon cut your nails?
    I nod.
    Poor guy, says Jameelah as she reaches for the joint.
    What do you mean?
    I mean seriously, she says, God’s earth is rotten has got to be the saddest sentence I’ve heard in ages.
    Nico spits on the ground.
    Yeah, maybe it is sad, he says, looking up at the sky. Sad but true.
    All of a sudden there’s a commotion at the planet. A bunch of skaters are riding around the fountain, shouting and clapping as they fall down and hop back up and their boards smack loudly against the concrete. It looks like the diagram Herr Wittner shows us in physics class, with the planet as the nucleus of an atom and the skaters whizzing around the nucleus like electrons, everything is made out of atoms, says Herr Wittner, the whole universe.
    It starts to drizzle. We sit down next to the fountain. Just