The “I Do” Joker: Or Why You Should Never Marry a Washing Machine
Part 6: Industrial Vintage, or: The Rat Is the Best Man
The morning of the venue inspection felt like a walk to the gallows, except that the gallows was Lukas’s rusty Opel Corsa. Grandma Hildegard sat bolt upright in the back seat, her expression making it very clear that she usually put people behind bars for less than a staged wedding. “Industrial area?” she asked, raising an eyebrow as we drove past a factory whose windows looked like they had witnessed the Thirty Years’ War. “Mia, I thought you had taste. This looks more like a disposal site for toxic waste.”
“It’s industrial vintage, Grandma!” Mia cried desperately, gripping the upholstery so tightly that I feared for the already fragile seat. “Totally on trend in Berlin and London. It’s all about celebrating decay and the raw charm of the working class.” “I’ll be celebrating my departure in a moment if this turns out to be a rubbish dump,” Hildegard muttered, pulling out a white cloth handkerchief as if to filter the air.
Lukas parked with screeching tyres in front of the old warehouse. The “starlight opening” in the roof – meaning the enormous hole through which you could see the grey clouds – looked less like an architectural feature in direct daylight and more like a fatal building regulation violation. We got out. The smell of old machine oil, pigeon droppings, and shattered dreams hit us immediately.
“Welcome to paradise for the nonconformists!” Lukas proclaimed, yanking open the creaking doors, which sounded like a dying dinosaur. Hildegard stepped inside. The echo of her heels on the concrete floor sounded like gunshots in an execution chamber. She stopped in front of a stack of old tyres, on which Lukas had placed a sign reading “Lounge Area: Relax & Enjoy”. “Tyres, Lukas?” she asked icily, pointing her walking stick at a particularly greasy Pirelli. “Recycled seating in urban style!” he corrected instantly, without batting an eyelid. “We want guests to feel grounded. Back to the roots, Grandma Schmidt. No stiff chairs, just real history you can touch.”
Then the inevitable happened. A rat, the size of a small terrier and with a look shaped by years of industrial waste consumption, darted out from behind a Euro pallet and stared Hildegard straight in the eyes. I held my breath. That was it. The wedding was off, we were going to prison, and the €2,000 back payment would haunt us as utility-debt serfs for the rest of our lives.
Hildegard didn’t move. She stared at the rat. The rat stared back. It was a clash of titans. “A pet?” Hildegard asked dryly, without taking her eyes off the rodent. “That’s… that’s Karl-Friedrich!” I improvised in panic as my pulse broke the sound barrier. “The hall’s mascot. Part of the artistic concept. He symbolises the… the unstoppable resilience of love in a harsh, mechanised world.” Mia looked at me as if she wanted to beat me to death with a paragraph from the criminal code.
Hildegard snorted and put her handkerchief away. “So love needs rats and holes in the roof. Wonderful. In that case, I hope Karl-Friedrich at least wears a tie when he brings the rings.” She moved on to the “altar”, a wobbly metal table where Dr von Vogelstein would be conducting the ceremony the next day. “And where exactly is the cake supposed to go? I trust not next to the oil drums.”
“Right here at the front, directly under the light!” Lukas enthused, flailing his arms like a madman. “We’ll hang up five hundred strings of fairy lights. It’ll sparkle like a diamond in the gutter. We’ll call it ‘Elysium in Scrap’.” Hildegard ran her gloved finger over the table, inspecting the black dust. “You have exactly twenty-four hours to turn this place from a crime-scene backdrop into something you can subject a wedding party to. If I see a single unwashed sock or another rodent metaphor tomorrow, the budget is cut.”
“Budget?” I asked hopefully. “I’ll pay for the catering,” she said curtly. “But only if Mia assures me right now that she really wants to marry this… Finn. He talks more nonsense than a drunk sailor on shore leave.”
Mia looked at me. In her eyes I saw pure, naked survival instinct. She took my hand – hers was ice-cold and trembling slightly – and smiled at her grandmother so convincingly that I almost believed it myself. “He’s my drunk sailor, Grandma. I can’t imagine anyone else who believes so passionately in Karl-Friedrich.” Hildegard nodded slowly, as if delivering a verdict. “Very well. Lukas, get brooms. Lots of brooms. If we’re going to lie, we might as well do it in a clean ruin.”