The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  This, of course, made Frau Gross’s jaw snap shut immediately. Lilli and I pricked up our ears. Dad has an illegal chainsaw?

  The Junior Squad Leader nodded, as if that was all the information he needed. Case closed.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that …’ Frau Gross returned, but my mother chopped her down.

  ‘Get back into the house, girls!’ She clapped her hands. ‘This isn’t a sideshow.’

  Clementine winked at me as we went inside and Frau Gross saw it. Of course she did.

  JULY 2013

  I came to this conclusion: admitting that your parents are wrong is too hard. These are the people who are programmed to love you unconditionally. Acknowledging that they haven’t stepped up to the job and cared for you in the right way is close to impossible. Partly because it would mean confessing that you are as faulty as they are, because they built you, after all.

  I came to this conclusion and I thought only of Clementine.

  Poor Clementine.

  I would help her through this realisation of mine.

  Herr Hart had gone. Moved out. Because of his wife and her crazy behaviour. This is what Dad told me.

  ‘It’s a very busy time at work right now. Herr Hart can’t have that kind of distraction.’

  He flicked his wilting newspaper so it stood to attention. THE WORLD STAGE IS SET, read the headline. There was a picture of a bronze lion wearing a jacket of red, white and black, photographed from low down so its old, shaggy face appeared to be surveying the scene (and finding it all very tiring). Jay Acker’s white-white smile glowed from an inset photo.

  It was only when Dad mentioned it that I realised I hadn’t seen Herr Hart for weeks. He hadn’t surfaced during the flagpole incident, he wasn’t at the Solstice celebrations. I hadn’t seen him come in from work during any of my secret visits to Clementine. He’d been gone for ages.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘We’ve found him somewhere to stay in London, at the office,’ he said.

  It didn’t sit quite right, that Dad should help him out like that. I knew the story ran that my father had tipped off Herr Hart about the house coming up on our street, but it was clear Dad didn’t care much for him now. When rumours flew around that Herr Hart had been seen in Waitrose doing the weekly supermarket shop (all the women of the town sliding their trollies past him, their mouths set in perfect ‘O’s), Dad was the first to mutter about how he was bringing shame on the principle of the family unit.

  But Frau Hart was an unfit mother, an unfit woman, and sterilised too. So of course an intelligent man from Berlin like her husband must leave and find someone else. It was his duty.

  ‘What, actually somewhere to stay in your office?’ I asked.

  Having never seen Dad’s office, I imagined it like the one where Fräulein Gruber – our school secretary – worked, with a flat, felt carpet and a blonde wooden counter, two slices of reinforced glass across the front that could be slid apart when you rang the little bell. I imagined Herr Hart in a sleeping bag under Fräulein Gruber’s desk.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Very much nearby.’

  I turned the last of my alphabet cereal around in my bowl. Sometimes a properly spelt word, something that made sense, would come together from all the swirling.

  ‘Why are you so busy?’ I asked. Emphasis on the ‘you’.

  Mum scraped her chair back and started noisily stacking our milky bowls and crumby plates.

  ‘Jess, will you walk Lilli into school for me this morning?’ she said, her voice at least two octaves higher than usual. She made to snatch the bowl from under my chin, but I held it tight.

  ‘I haven’t finished!’

  ‘And I don’t need walking to school any more!’ Lilli harrumphed. ‘I’m too old. It’s embarrassing!’

  ‘Is it because of the Jay Acker concert, Dad?’ I said. ‘Is that why you’re busy?’

  ‘Yes, Jessie,’ my father replied.

  ‘Because there’s lots of auditing to be done,’ I said. Not exactly a question. Not exactly an accusation.

  Mum’s thumb was over the lip of the bowl again.

  ‘No!’ I said. I wanted to have another swirl of my milk.

  ‘Yes!’ my mother barked back.

  We both pulled at the bowl, my fingers turning white. I could feel Lilli and Father watching, taking their sides. Then I let go.

  Milk sprayed over my mum’s hand and up her arm, making her gasp. But she didn’t tell me off. She’d won after all.

  ‘Come on, Lilli,’ I snapped, getting up from the table. ‘I don’t want you making me late.’

  We sat our last exams. IT IS ACCOMPLISHMENT ALONE THAT DISTINGUISHES ONE PERSON FROM ANOTHER was the quotation up on the wall at the BDM meeting hall. I thought it was there to inspire us to study hard, but I soon realised it wasn’t talking about academic accomplishment. All those years at school: I’d expected a wonderful finale. In the end, exam week was a week like any other. The exams felt like nothing, because they would change nothing. I would still go to skate camp, GG would go to the horses in Gloucestershire, Ruby would lead the local Jungmädel, no matter what our results. Erica Warner might have got herself something a bit cushier than painting black tips on bombshells if her results had revealed her to be some kind of genius, but you didn’t often see pigs flying high over Buckinghamshire.

  It was a weird revelation, one that I wished I’d had months earlier, so I hadn’t wasted so much time trying to work out the squares on all those hypotenuses. Our lives were already sorted. The only thing that would change them was marriage. Which was both inevitable and completely not dependent on achieving an A grade in history.

  I was beginning to understand the consequences of bringing Fisher into our home though. While helping Mum with the washing up one evening (her turn to dry) she declared, very casually, completely out of nowhere: ‘Well, I suppose you’ll have to decide soon whether skate camp is the right thing to do.’

  The heavy casserole pot slipped from my hands and plopped back into the water, slopping suds over the side of the sink and down the front of the cupboard.

  ‘What?’ I squeaked.

  ‘Oh, Jessika! Look at this!’ She went down on her knees, sacrificing one of the tea towels to mop up the spill.

  ‘I’m g-going to skate camp,’ I stammered. ‘Of course I’m going to skate camp. Why would I not be going to skate camp?’

  ‘Stop dancing about, Jessika,’ said my mother. ‘You’re making this worse.’

  I lifted each of my wet-socked feet in turn to allow my mother to swab up the last of the washing-up water from the floor. I could see a line in the hair on the top of her head, grey at the roots then suddenly brown.

  ‘I wonder if Felix knows that’s your decision,’ Mum asked, leaning across me to wring out the cloth in the sink. She had a small smile and a coyness to her voice that made me want to shudder.

  ‘But …’ I didn’t know what to say. I knew I would marry eventually, have kids eventually. My skating career would be short, I understood that. Once I was in my twenties and worn out, someone younger would replace me; then I’d have to find a husband, but, but …

  ‘But, Rupert,’ I blurted. ‘Katrin still went.’

  My big sister had been seeing this lad from the boy’s elite school just before she left for athletics camp. He was a soft-hearted thing who would try to hold her hand at public events while she batted him away and told him to grow a pair. Though if you ever spied them alone they were like two little dunnock birds, heads together, pecking through the undergrowth, feeding each other scraps.

  ‘Yes, but Rupert was …’ Mum looked out at Lilli and Wolf in the garden, my little sister stepping a little more cautiously through the grass after that incident with Wolf’s turd earlier in the year. ‘… Rupert was different,’ my mother decided. ‘I’m really not sure that you can expect someone of Felix’s lineage to wait.’

  Clementine, meanwhile, had no decisions to make. They were being ma
de for her. She sat her exams with a black triangle stitched onto the arm of her blouse. The only future plan she had was her date: 13th August – the Tuesday after the concert.

  ‘All that time to have it looming over you,’ I said, as we walked home together after the last of the racial hygiene papers.

  ‘All that time to stage a protest,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ I lowered my voice. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to get myself pregnant before they have a chance to whip out their knives.’ She made a hi-ya! sound and chopped her hands through the air like a ninja. ‘Know any big strong boys willing to get me up the duff?’ Fisher sidled into the edge of my mind and I gave him a great big shove out the other side. I shook my head. Clementine was smiling, laughing.

  This was definitely not worth reporting. It was only a joke.

  Because it would have been my duty to report it, if I had thought that she was serious. I was only allowed to be with my friend again because I had promised to keep an eye on her. Otherwise I would have been with the others, doing all the extra collecting and sorting and stitching and cleaning, ready for when the world’s eyes were on us. If I really cared for Clementine, I must tell my parents anything she said that worried me.

  ‘Absolutely anything,’ my father had said. ‘However small.’

  They knew what she was going to do.

  We’d completed our uniform inspection and finished a rehearsal of the march, practising with the new, heavier flags that had only arrived that day – huge billowing things, strung onto beautiful polished-wood poles decorated with brass Hakenkreuzen. They were totally stunning. They were pretty much impossible to lift. The boys had competed to see who could hold one up high on their shoulder for the longest time, making out to each other that it was absolutely no effort at all. But we could see their muscles juddering. Martin Geese bent his wrist back so badly it swelled up to match the size of his head. By the third run-through of the march the staring match between Martin and Fisher had reached maximum intensity. Fisher’s hypno-gaze was challenging Martin to go on, go on, put that flag down, have a good cry, then see what happens. Martin’s manic glare, all bloodshot with pain, was silently screaming NEVER! I caught Fisher darting a look in my direction to see if I was impressed and I made absolutely sure to appear as though I wasn’t.

  They were beautiful though, the flags. The reds so red, the whites so bright, none of our patching-up from sewing practice over the moth-holes in the black Hakenkreuzen. The way the silk fought with the breeze … I wished for Clementine to be there, to witness our parade, to experience that swell in the chest. Because it was truly impossible to resist. In those moments when we were all together, all singing, everything was okay. More than okay. It was how it had always been. How it always should be.

  If only Clementine had heard us:

  Forwards! Forwards!

  Our flag flutters before us

  It’s the flag that marks a new age,

  It’s the flag that leads us to eternity.

  The flag that means more than death!

  She would have remembered how good devotion can feel. And then maybe she wouldn’t have done what she did.

  After the march, we took off our drums, stored away the flags and organised ourselves wordlessly into three neat rows of seven, which always felt like chaos, because we still hadn’t got used to the idea of mixed-sex line-ups. So when Fisher asked his first question (which I absolutely knew the answer to) I was distracted. Ruby Heigl got her hand to the sky first.

  ‘So, soldiers,’ he said, ‘who can tell me what to do if a person should catch on fire?’

  He looked up from the official briefing documents. He dropped his arms so the papers covered his crotch. The positioning of the two lightning bolts was almost funny.

  ‘Yes, Ruby?’

  I let my too-slow arm slink back down by my side. I didn’t care so much for Fisher’s approval, but I still wanted the group to think I was better than Ruby. Also, I suspected that Ruby had got a whiff of what had been going on between Fisher and me. I didn’t want her thinking she could elbow her way in.

  ‘I would stop still so as not to fan the flames,’ Ruby began, her shoulders doing a proud little jiggle. ‘I wouldn’t run. Then I would cover my face, drop to the floor and roll around until the flames went out.’

  A moment of quiet, which we all used to imagine Ruby rolling around on the floor, losing her clothes to the fire. Ruby quickly realised where our minds had travelled and her neck broke out in horrible, embarrassed blotches.

  ‘Excellent, Ruby,’ said Fisher.

  Her shoulders stopped their wobbling. The grinning began – huge, full-beam, doing awkward battle with the rash of shame that was creeping northwards.

  But it wasn’t excellent. Ruby hadn’t given the right answer. I could see Fräulein Eberhardt on Fisher’s left, poking at her piled-up hair, twitching a glance down at her shoes. I could see twig-legged Dirk on Fisher’s right rocking uncomfortably up on his heels. This was no just-for-fun warm-up question. (When hiding out in the woods, how can you best conceal yourself from approaching enemies? If you’re trapped in a car that has crashed into deep water, how could you make your escape? When necessary for survival, how should you go about cutting off one of your own limbs?) No. This question was serious.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Fisher again. He coughed and took another quick look at his briefing documents. There was a clumsy silence filled with birdsong. Ruby’s grin had now begun to seriously droop. She could feel it too – the wrongness. Fisher took a big breath, a different tone: ‘But what if it was someone else who was on fire?’

  Ruby’s grin went missing in action.

  ‘Well?’ He kept his blue gaze fixed on her – which was certainly an easier option than addressing the mystified stink rising off the rest of us. Our task at the concert, we had been told, was to deliver a short, rousing marching display, stand in position for the duration of Jay Acker’s musical offerings, then help out with crowd management and first aid, if the Schutzpolizei and Schutzstaffel ever let us get a look in. Which they wouldn’t.

  Basically, we were to stand there and look pretty (the girls) or formidable (the boys). Nothing more. Yesterday’s meeting had focused on the far from monumental task of how to stop a nosebleed.

  Whatever Fisher was trying to do, it wasn’t going well. I knew he was terrified that I would report back.

  Ruby powered on through this general uneasiness, all respect to her (which it KILLS me to say). ‘Well, I would tell them to do exactly the same,’ she said, less of the shoulder action this time. ‘To stay still and to cover their face and to drop to the ground, then roll around.’

  More unconscious tics from Fräulein Eberhardt and Dirk.

  The inspirational quotation poster that week: LET THAT WHICH MUST DIE SINK AND ROT. WHAT HAS STRENGTH AND LIGHT WILL RISE AND BLAZE.

  Unfortunate.

  Fisher still had his blue gaze on Ruby.

  ‘And what if that person didn’t want to do as you said?’ he went on, which – sod it, we couldn’t control ourselves now – brought about unconscious tics from all of us.

  Ruby’s mouth fell open. She ummed and erred for a moment, then decided to ask: ‘But why wouldn’t they want to …?’

  She trailed off, realising a good few seconds after everyone else that she had wandered into a ‘Zone’ and should shut her trap.

  After Fisher had given us a talk about the combustibility of various fabrics (manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard. Your uniforms, for example, are a mixture of polyester and cotton … ) we took it in turns to go up to the front and pretend to be on fire. GG was my flaming person. Awkward. But also, if I’m honest, a bloody relief – to have a good reason to be close to her. She gave it her all – hysterical screaming, arms flailing, running in dizzy circles. Utterly fabulous. Fräulein Eberhardt stood there tutting. I slipped my arms into the sleeves sewn into
the fireproof blanket, waited until GG was in the optimum position and then, with a grunt of effort, I booted her so hard she fell flat onto her face in the grass. (I could still feel the concrete footprint in my own backside from where Angelika Baker had done the same manoeuvre on me, so I didn’t feel bad.) Then I spread my arms and I flung myself on top of her, like a giant fireproof bat.

  ‘Nice work, Jessica,’ said Fisher, with rather too much enthusiasm.

  I pulled myself halfway up, GG yelping then giggling as my elbow dug into her kidneys. Karl Pfizer on the front row was sniggering. I looked up at him just as he was flickering his tongue up and down at us. I froze – a cold grip of terror. Had Fisher seen? I could report on him, yes, but couldn’t he also report on me?

  I looked up at our leaders. They had all seen. But it was Dirk who leapt to defend my dignity. Or possibly Fisher’s, for Dirk certainly knew that he had been for dinner at our house. As if Fisher would have resisted a quiet little boast. Dirk stepped forward and struck Karl about the head several times – which was funny to everyone because Dirk is a good thirty centimetres shorter than Karl, making it quite a reach. Then Karl was immediately down on the ground doing push-ups with Dirk’s muddy boot on his neck.

  We were all mesmerised by the sight of it – the way Karl was sweating and letting out these small, low moans.

  ‘Get up, Jessica,’ snapped Fräulein Eberhardt.

  And all of a sudden I realised where I was, still on top of GG’s soft outline beneath the blanket. I scrambled to standing. GG did too, dusting herself down. Her white shirt was grass-stained, her navy skirt was up round her haunches.

  ‘Look at the state of you,’ said Fräulein Eberhardt. The need for us girls to be both queens of combat AND pretty/presentable/alluring at the same time was taking its biggest toll on our female leader. She was growing more and more grumpy as the concert approached. Or maybe it was the further we got into the Great Integration. Because it wasn’t really a Great Integration for her, but a Great Demotion. She used to be in charge but now with Dirk and Fisher around she was only ever third in command.