Gráinne O’Hare

It’s a strange day in Berlin!
There is no laughter here at all
– Sally Oldfield, Strange Day in Berlin
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At half past five in the morning, when the fish tank at the heart of the hotel explodes, Max and I are in our room arguing about Timothée Chalamet. Max is jealous that I find him attractive but he tries to dress it up as something more intellectual, sneering that he’s not a very technically accomplished actor and that his red carpet styling is gaudy. I thrust a photo of Timothée Chalamet at the Met Gala under Max’s nose. Why is he wearing Converse? he asks. He looks like he’s in a kids’ movie about a European prince who just wants to be a regular guy.

We bicker again while we’re being evacuated. It’s not a fish tank, Max says, and I ask well, what is it then. He says it’s an aquarium. Exactly, I say. A fish tank. A big fish tank. He is stubborn and I am worse and I am in my pyjamas in the middle of the street during deep Berlin winter, demanding he state the dimensions at which a fish tank is no longer a fish tank but is rather an aquarium.

We are in Berlin to celebrate Max’s birthday. Our hotel is – was – wrapped around a colossal saltwater column of tropical fish. You don’t have to like fish to be impressed! said one five-star review online. Last night we checked in and we sat in the bar drinking vodka martinis and watching angelfish scuttling past the glass. The fish are confettied across the wreckage of the tank now, debris strewn right out into the street. Someone nearby tells us the glass ruptured, that no-one knows how it happened yet, but that people are speculating it might have been thermal shock from the drop in temperature.

Let’s go to Berlin, you said, Max mutters to me, scowling as though I am personally responsible for the disruption, as though I have shoved the aquarium whole into a freezer with the intention of chilling it like vodka.

Don’t start with me, I say.

I booked the hotel partly out of guilt, because I went to New York for a week in the autumn and lied to him about it. I wanted to take a writing holiday to finish my book. I met a woman called Hendy at a party in London last year and she told me she had inherited a rent-controlled Barbizon apartment, and that if I ever wanted to come to write and house- sit while she was on holiday then I would be very welcome. She had drunk a lot of champagne cocktails at that point and I did not want to take her seriously, imagining her showing my earnest email around to glamorous friends at another, different champagne cocktail party with mirthful shrieks of she actually took me seriously! but I was too desperate to stay there to care much. Didion and Plath had both stayed at the Barbizon while they were guest editors at Mademoiselle, back when it was a women-only hotel frequented by writers and artists. I knew that the building had been turned into a block of luxury condos and bore no internal resemblance to the halls my favourite writers would have walked; and I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer. I still badly wanted to go. Hendy replied to my email a week after I sent it (Darling!! I’ll be in Goole for a fortnight in September – for God’s sake don’t ask why) and said she’d be happy to have me stay. I did not tell Max that I was going until the day before I went, lied and said it was still a women-only establishment so it wouldn’t have been practical for him to come too, and that I was going to be writing so it wouldn’t have been much fun for him anyway. He googled the place and he found out it was now an apartment block and hadn’t been single-sex since the eighties, and he sulked with me for weeks, which I suppose was fair.

I offered to let him read my finished draft when I got back, and he did, but he rarely gives satisfactory feedback. In the beginning I thought that marrying a literary agent would entitle me to some free editorial advice, but nowadays he reads my fiction and poems looking for himself like a frenzied Taylor Swift fan trying to piece together clues from lyrics. I show him a story and I ask what he thought and he sends me back a screenshotted passage demanding is this meant to be me??? Since reading a short story in which I fictionalised a scene from our own lives (our honeymoon two years ago, when I had a miscarriage during an Amsterdam boat tour), Max has become suspicious that I am cannibalising our every conversation for writing material.

He read one of my newer stories on the flight to Berlin yesterday. It is fiction about a screenwriter trying to adapt The Bell Jar for film in the late sixties, and I have provisionally called it Potboiler. I asked Max whether he thought it was good.

I don’t really care for Sylvia Plath, he said.

You don’t have to like fish to be impressed, I said. He didn’t understand; I left it at that.

Outside the hotel, an English woman is talking to us about the noise the tank made when it burst. I thought a bomb had gone off, she says. I was shocked clean out of my sleep, were you? Max and I pretend not to have been awake and arguing. We pretend – to this woman and, for now, each other – that we were not squabbling over Timothée Chalamet, that Max did not wake up from his doze to discover me watching Dune with my hand down my pants. We had sex when we got back to the hotel around two a.m.; I brought out some lingerie, because it is his birthday, and he brought out the preconception lube from the pharmacy, because I am ovulating. Afterwards, I lay on my back with my legs in the air, and Max fell asleep. I could not sleep and I had not come. Dune was playing on one of the film channels.

We stand across the street from the hotel now, shivering and waiting for instruction. I want to know if any fish have survived being flung from the belly of the aquarium, whether any might still be flapping about on the shattered glass, gills wheezing.

Max zips his body-bag raincoat up to his chin; he looks at the ravaged hotel, and then at me. He says, You’re going to fucking write about this, aren’t you? and I am, I am, I am.
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Gráinne O’Hare is a writer from Belfast based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She was awarded a Northern Debut Award by New Writing North in 2022 and received one year of mentoring from Naomi Booth. She is represented by Jenny Hewson at Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency; and her first novel, Thirst Trap, will be published by Picador in 2025.