[Read] Hot Desk Extracts: Megan Cheong - Exchange

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship, Megan Cheong completed the first draft of her autofictional novella, Exchange. Told in a series of vignettes written years later, Exchange considers the difficulty of writing when you are only just trying to figure out how to be in the world. Below are the opening chapters of the novella.

1

By third year, I was slowing down. I dropped down to three subjects a semester so I could work more shifts at the cinema, but also because a full-time load was already too much for me. I’d enrolled in three engineering subjects as I planned to study only German, and maybe some literature, while on exchange. 

I remember how hard I had to pull the heavy doors to break the seal on an air-conditioned cinema better than I do the content of my engineering degree. I can recall the names and faces of many of my lecturers—the waist-length, greying ponytail of my second-year maths lecturer, the taut skin of the course convenor’s shiny face—but the engineering itself is lost.

I must have spent hours practising calculations in preparation for the exams that came at the end of every semester, and yet even when I concentrate, what comes back to me from the year before I went to Berlin are the minutes I spent standing outside the university, squinting down the steel tracks in search of the next tram.

2

For the first four weeks, I stayed in a five-storey apartment building wrapped around a cobblestone hinterhof. Later in the year, I learned that many of the city’s apartment blocks had a similar space at their centre—a courtyard I remember as just large enough to accommodate four or five people standing at close quarters.

The walls of the apartment were a brownish shade of green muted by layers of time, the exact colour I had expected them to be, and I trembled with the thrill of met-expectations as I crouched, the first night, in the bathtub, pouring water over myself with a mug because the tap over the bath no longer produced running water.

The velour sofa pushed up against the wall of the apartment’s narrow kitchen was almost the same colour. Crowded into one corner of the sofa, I found that I had to overcome a mental barrier in order to extend my arm out from the rest of my body and take the joint from Christian, not because I didn’t want to share it with him, but because it seemed such a risk to go beyond myself.

‘So what are you looking for?’

His English was tidy in a way that made it impossible for me to speak a word of German in his presence, despite his early encouragement. He and my other flatmate, Anna, were learning Chinese, and though both of them had been disappointed to discover that despite my surname, I spoke not one word of Mandarin, they left me in no doubt that I was welcome in the apartment while the third flatmate was away.

‘What am I looking for?’ I avoided his gaze, focussing instead on trying to hold the smoke in my mouth for as long as possible before carefully blowing it back into the room.

‘Yes. In order to experience Berlin, you must know what you are looking for.’

The answer was immediately ready and waiting, but once again, it took effort to expel it.

‘I want to write.’

‘What do you write?’

‘I don’t write—I have written, but not a lot. Some stories. I want to write stories.’

Christian nodded. He had introduced himself as an artist, a painter, and was dressed entirely in black. We both were.

‘Well, you must find some people. I know some people who do readings, you know, with a microphone. You could read your stories.’

Not knowing how else to respond, I forced out a shrill laugh, the awful sound of which lingered in the air long after the smoke had dissipated.