The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘There are women going in there too,’ I said. ‘Do you think …?’

  GG shrugged and blew noisy air through her lips, steaming up the window behind the net curtains. ‘Who knows? But bang go the house prices.’

  We watched as a man in a beige raincoat walked up to the Harts’ door and knocked, before casting his gaze along the street. He was a tall man, broad, really large. He was fat.

  ‘Oh, good grief, look at the state of that one,’ I said.

  ‘Poor Frau Hart,’ said GG.

  ‘Do you think she’ll have to …?’

  ‘I really doubt you get to pick and choose in this game,’ GG said, as if she was an authority on the subject.

  Then – PANIC! The fat man had seen us! It was as if our whispers had travelled through the double-glazing and across the street. He glanced up, right at our window. We dropped to the floor, our backs against the wall beneath the sill, giggling at our own sudden fear. We huddled together in our pants and bras.

  ‘Clementine’s in there,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said GG.

  ‘Do you think she can, you know, hear what’s going on?’

  GG pulled a face. ‘Gross!’

  It was GG who had come up with the plan for us to be there.

  As we were both moving away after the summer, we wouldn’t get the opportunity to join the local Faith and Beauty group, like Angelika Baker and the rest. So GG asked the school if we could have a couple of afternoons a week off to set up our own ad hoc club.

  ‘Just to teach ourselves the essential skills before we go,’ GG told Fräulein Allis.

  Fräulein Allis had questions of course. ‘And what will these “essential skills” be exactly, girls?’

  She kept directing her questions to me, even though I wasn’t the one doing the talking. I was the one most likely to confess though, I suppose – to run from the room and tell her not to worry.

  ‘Oh, you know, the usual,’ GG cut in. There was barbed wire in her voice; I could hear it. ‘Just a bit of Familie, Kinder, Haus.’

  Family, children, house.

  Fräulein Allis paused, absorbing the words as if they’d been a curse. She wetted her painted lips. ‘Why do we always end up doing this, Gabi, huh? Doing battle like this.’

  I looked to GG to understand what was going on. Her jaw was tense, her eyes shining. Was this a hangover from all of their arguments about GG’s smoking?

  ‘You know we’re fighting for the same side, don’t you?’ Fräulein Allis continued.

  I shifted in the silence, willing GG to speak.

  ‘I don’t know what “side” you’re talking about,’ she said at last, her voice lacking its usual punch. ‘All we’re going to do is some embroidery. Knit socks for the boys in the barracks, write them love poems, that sort of thing.’

  She gave Fräulein Allis a tight, painful smile. Our teacher sighed. I looked into Fräulein Allis’s spidery-lined eyes and wondered why no one had reported her for setting a bad example by wearing mascara. But also I was thinking that she was, just as she’d said, on our side. She had meant that.

  Then GG added: ‘This is all Jessika’s father’s idea, so …’ And then the deal was done.

  I was furious, of course.

  ‘Why did you say that!’ I squeaked on the walk home. ‘What if she goes and discusses this with my dad?’

  ‘She wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘But what if she just mentions it, in passing, at a parents’ evening or something?’ A panic attack was centimetres away, I could feel it. ‘Then what do I say to my dad when he comes and asks me?’

  ‘You tell him that we’re setting up an ad hoc Faith and Beauty group,’ she said, throwing an arm across my shoulder. ‘Because that’s exactly what we’re doing.’

  I gathered together a stack of Mum’s embroidery patterns, some scraps of weaver’s cloth and a box of threads to take to school the following day. Then at GG’s oh-so-quiet house after lunch, when our mothers were off making chutney and singing ‘O, Women With German Hearts’ at the meeting hall, I spread the patterns across her dining-room table. GG grabbed the box of pins, opened it up and shook them free. She snapped the paper bands off a couple of bundles of fresh thread and unravelled them, willy-nilly.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Making it look convincing,’ she said.

  She opened up the cupboard beneath their People’s Radio and dug out some half-finished embroideries still in their frames – one of some flowers, another of a what was maybe, possibly, a cat.

  ‘They’re Lindy’s,’ she said. ‘She was into all that.’

  We stared down at the lopsided eyes of her older sister’s awful embroidery, tilting our heads to see if it looked better from another angle.

  ‘I never said she was any good at it.’ GG laughed. Then: ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked. I had started to thread a needle.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she said. She was already out of the door and into the hallway.

  ‘But I thought you said that we were actually going to do this, sewing and knitting and stuff.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jess,’ she said. ‘Don’t play innocent.’

  I am innocent, I thought as I followed her up the stairs. Though I understand now that word can also mean naive. And certainly I was that.

  We sat on the floor beneath the window and I told GG, ‘She’s gone a bit mad, you know, Clementine.’

  The papers she’d given me were burning a hole in my wallpaper from their skirting board hiding place.

  GG nodded. ‘Bet she’s gone properly cuckoo at home all day with nothing to do.’

  ‘I mean, she’s got into all these conspiracy theories,’ I said. I needed to talk to someone. I needed someone to make things straight.

  ‘What, the ones about the Americans?’ asked GG. ‘The ones about them having satellites that watch us?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  ‘Because if the Yanks were sitting up there with their binoculars, we would just wipe out New York in a second.’

  ‘I know!’ Repeating other people’s theories only made you sound like a believer yourself. ‘Not that theory!’

  ‘Which one, then?’ GG asked.

  Deep breath. ‘The one about the Jews.’

  Silence.

  Then GG started chuckling. She let her cheek fall onto my bare shoulder. She grabbed hold of my knee.

  ‘Oh, god! Angelika Baker believes that one too!’ GG managed through her laughter.

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Yeah, her mum is totally neurotic about it. She’s convinced Angelika that some of them are still hiding out, that they’ve all had their noses fixed and are passing themselves off as normal people.’ GG let the giggles take over for a moment. ‘She’s terrified that Angelika is going to pop her cherry with a piece of dirty Jewry and that’ll be it. Spoilt blood. Onto the scrap heap. Kaputt!’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, shaking my head again. ‘I meant the other theory.’

  ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘The one about them all being killed.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ GG stopped laughing. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  We were both quiet for a moment. We stared at the half-built train set laid out on the floor of GG’s brothers’ room.

  ‘Do you think it matters if they were?’ I said. ‘Killed, I mean.’

  I wanted to have this conversation. But at the same time I wanted to jump up from the floor and shake myself free of it. Why had I got myself into this madness? Believing every single silly thing that I heard.

  ‘Maybe if they really were so evil …’ GG shrugged.

  ‘They stole and lied, didn’t they?’

  ‘They killed and ate their own children,’ GG said.

  Quiet again.

  ‘But that’s not what happened, is it?’ I said. ‘What Clementine says? That they were all murdered.’

  ‘No,’ said GG. ‘They all went to America
. They all got sent there.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘How did they get there?’ I tried to make it sound like a reasonable question, not the one of a crazy person. ‘Because we didn’t have planes that could fly that far, back then, did we?’

  ‘They put them on boats.’ GG was using the voice she’d used with Fräulein Allis now. The one that said, There you go, that’s the answer you want, isn’t it?

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  GG was up on her knees. She poked her head over the windowsill again. I joined her. The fat man had gone – inside, we guessed. To get what he’d come for. The street was still. The flags on the poles at the front of both our and the Harts’ gardens were hanging as limp as teatowels. I thought that was it, that there would be nothing more to see and we were going to have to face the silence and my questions again. Then a bunched-up coat flew over the Harts’ high garden gate at the side of their house. Hands appeared at the top of the gate, arms next, a head, shoulders. A woman with dark curly hair who we’d seen go in through the front door earlier was swinging a leg over the fence. She was dressed really oddly, like a man, like someone from a play, maybe, in tight black trousers and a maroon polo neck. She jumped onto the path, fell onto her side and scrambled quickly to her feet. Then a bearded man in a scruffy T-shirt was pulling himself up over the gate, then another woman, and another man. They all waited until the last man was over, though he was urging them to go without him, and then they dashed away, off down the street.

  ‘Oh my god!’ we both gasped.

  ‘Do you think …?’ I asked, not really knowing what it was that I thought. An image shot through my mind – Clementine’s fingers curling into that defiant fist. All my crimes are political.

  ‘They’re trying to leave without paying Frau Hart for the sex,’ GG said, utterly convinced.

  ‘What?’ I said, realising I was about to do it again, like I had with my father – say my line, perform my part. ‘No way!’ I gasped.

  GG folded her arms and nodded. ‘Yep.’

  We waited for more action from the street, but none came. We got to our feet. The show really was over.

  ‘Have you noticed how things get busy there on the afternoons when all the women are at the Frauenschaft meetings?’ GG said, rearranging the curtains before we left the room.

  ‘How do you know it isn’t like that on the afternoons when our mothers are about?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t, I guess,’ she said. ‘It’s just the vibe I get.’

  She made for the doorway and I found myself grabbing her hand and pinching it too tight.

  ‘Please don’t report it,’ I said. We both looked back instinctively to the window, to what might be going on in that house across the street. ‘Any of it,’ I added.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ she said.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘Because people in glass houses …’ said GG. But she didn’t finish her sentence.

  JUNE 2013

  It began with things she would say in conversation. Awkward, stagey things. It was my mother’s turn to read a script – and hers sounded like it belonged to one of those awful dramas they put on the People’s Television in the afternoon. The ones where it doesn’t matter if they’re romances, horror or knockabout comedies, the ending is always the same – the hero is strong and does the right thing.

  ‘You know when you take Wolf for a walk …’ Mum said as we did the washing up one evening.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She had her rubber-gloved hands in the water. I was drying.

  ‘And you know you sometimes see mushrooms growing …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you understand that there are good mushrooms and there are bad mushrooms, don’t you?’

  ‘I never pick mushrooms,’ I told her, taking my finished stack of dinner plates to the dresser. I came back to dry the dessert bowls.

  ‘No, no, I know you would never do that, but if you did …’

  ‘But I don’t. ‘

  ‘No, and I’m not saying that you would.’

  ‘So what are you trying to say?’

  She stopped washing, rested her wrists on the edge of the sink and turned to look at me. We are alike, she and I – the same shape nose, the same colour eyes. I think she finds it easier to deal with Lilli, because Lilli is clearly a different person. But I am just a piece of Mum. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. I waited for her to get to the point of this bizarre lecture on woodland foraging.

  ‘Are you talking about when we do the collecting for the health service?’

  Mum looked down at her Marigold hands and shook her head.

  ‘Because I’m nearly always on chamomile. Sometimes birch leaves. We don’t do mushrooms. And if we do collect mushrooms for the Aid programme, then it’s the boys who get that job. They’ve had the better coaching, and no one wants to murder anyone’s granny by accidently picking a death cap.’

  She was still looking down.

  ‘I could tell Fisher to give the girls a class on identifying mushrooms too, if you’re really that worried.’

  ‘Ask,’ she muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wouldn’t tell Fisher to do the class, you would request it.’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t mean …’

  Then came a horrible wail from the back garden. Mum’s eyes sprang upwards, to the window.

  ‘Oh, no!’

  I started snorting with laughter.

  Lilli had been rolling around on the grass with Wolf. I could get quite jealous of her, all that time she had for mucking around. But then I would remember that she was going to turn eleven that month and the fun would end and the hard work would start, and then I’d feel bad for wanting to rob her of the time she had left.

  Lilli was up on her feet, weeping, her shoulders hunched around her ears, her stomach spasming like she was about to chuck up. She’d rolled in one of Wolf’s turds, hidden in the grass, and they were getting sloppy in his old age. It was all through her hair and across her cheek.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Mum sighed, pulling up her rubber gloves. She was off, out the back door, focused now on cleaning up a whole other kind of mess.

  Then came the book.

  I went up to my bedroom after the BDM meeting the following evening and there she was, on my bedside cabinet – the deadly fierce yet deadly soft, good deutsche girl on the cover of Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen, nose in the air, thinking she’s better than everyone else. The sight of her stopped me like a downward strike to the brachial plexus. I picked up the book. It was definitely our family copy – Oma Davina’s name and the date were there on the first page – but it should have been in my little sister’s room. She was dutifully working through the section entitled ‘Examples From The Animal World’ and still had a number of excruciating chapters to go. I felt a pang of pity for Lilli. I believe it is entirely possible for a person to die of cringing and I was very lucky not to meet my early death while finishing that book. It’s written as a conversation between a mother and her daughter, but no mother and daughter I have ever met. Every other word is ‘mein Schätzchen’ or ‘mein Herzchen’ – my sweetie-pie this, my little heart that. Our mother always called a spade by the right name, and we certainly never talked to each other about where babies came from. As for love – I’d rather have been struck by lightning than have her try to explain it to me.

  There was a bookmark in one of the later sections. Lilli was eager to get things over and done with, it seemed, and was motoring ahead. I opened it up – she’d reached the part where the daughter tells the mother some gossip about Anni, a girl who everyone is talking about because she’s only seventeen and has found herself – dun, dun, dun! – ‘with child’. The daughter is apparently ‘trembling like the aspen leaves’ about the whole thing. The mother’s response is not that her daughter should stop being a wet firework; instead she calmly explains how Anni’s chi
ld will have to be taken away and given to proper, deserving parents, which any daughter with half a brain would have worked out anyway. And then the mother offers up a moral to the whole sordid episode: ‘Two people must only indulge in each other if they are married.’

  Indulge in each other.

  I was back there, behind the curtains of the meeting hall, Fisher pushing the hard lump of his crotch into my belly. I was in GG’s bedroom, looking at the naked shape of her in the curtained afternoon light. I snapped the book shut.

  This was Lilli’s doing, I decided. She was so desperate to avoid any more squirming that she had casually ‘lost’ the book in my room. That was the only possible explanation.

  Then the phone trilled unexpectedly through the carpeted quiet of the house one afternoon after school. The phone NEVER rang at that time of day, when everyone knew there would only be me to answer it. My fingers trembled a little as I lifted the handset from its cradle. It could only be bad news.

  ‘Keller 74837?’ I said, trying to mimic my mother’s telephone voice.

  There was huge sigh on the other end of the line, then, ‘Jess?’ It was a lead-heavy question.

  ‘Yes …’ I said.

  ‘It’s Katrin.’

  A weird, confusing pause.

  Katrin?

  My big sister always called on a Sunday evening, with my father taking the handset first, then my mother, speaking until Katrin ran out of coins. I would then be regaled – in parent stereo – with her fantastic achievements until I was full-to-nauseous.

  ‘Yeah, I know it’s you, you … twonk,’ I grunted, wincing at the uselessness of my insult. I was off guard. I hadn’t recognised my big sister’s voice at all. I’d never spoken to her down a phone line before, had had no reason to. I was right. There must be something wrong. I was about to ask what that something was, but she spoke first.

  ‘So,’ she said, with another sigh. ‘What’s going on?’

  She didn’t sound in trouble. She sounded as grumpy as always.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I said defensively. I buried the why do you want to know? that was bubbling beneath the surface. Was Katrin trying to be friendly? I couldn’t be entirely sure. It was all very peculiar. ‘How’s athletics camp?’ I asked, because I felt I had to, though I made it clear in the tone of my voice that I cared not one bit about her answer.