The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘I swear you’ve all gone giddy,’ she muttered, taking the blanket off my arms and folding it for the next person.

  ‘Yes, Fräulein Eberhardt,’ I said, forgetting to drop the ‘Fräulein’, or maybe not wanting to.

  I only left Clementine’s side to go to BDM meetings.

  The rest of the time, we hung out in her back garden reading magazines. When it got hot Clementine stripped off, down to this tiny bikini that she said had come from Cornwall, though I’m sure Frau Hart must have run it up on her sewing machine because you couldn’t get anything like that in a shop. I tried not to look too much at the lean neatness of her body, or let myself think about how she was enough. Absolutely enough.

  I wore the navy one-piece Mum had bought me three years ago from Spencer’s.

  ‘Think you need a bigger size, Jess-Jess,’ Clementine had commented. ‘Got a bit of side-boob going on there.’

  She prodded the roll of flesh escaping from the fabric underneath my armpit and said it again, delighted with this new expression of hers. ‘Side-boob!’

  I wore a light shirt over the top after that.

  Clementine waited until we were outside before she took off her top and shorts, until she was standing centimetres in front of the uniformed man stationed at the Harts’ back door (to match the uniformed man at the front door). This uniformed man (well, boy, really) did his best not to look or blink or react in any way, which only provoked Clementine to make a bigger deal out of taking off her clothes the next time. Arching her back. Cocking her hips.

  ‘Maybe dieser gute deutsche Mann will get me pregnant, what do you think, Jess?’ she’d say. ‘Was sagste, Fritz, sollen wir eins für den Führer machen?’

  Whaddya say, Fritz, shall we have one for the Führer?

  I don’t know why she said it. She knew I could have – should have – reported it back to Dad. In the circumstances I decided to presume that the boy would say something himself if he felt it necessary. Or maybe I decided that I wasn’t the right person to be telling tales on someone using a boy of rank to get what she wanted.

  ‘She’s only joking. You know that, don’t you?’ I told the soldier. ‘She’s just being silly.’

  One afternoon I suggested we lie in the tall grass at the bottom of the Harts’ messy garden. I wanted us to be out of earshot of the Fritz boy. Clementine hadn’t mentioned her dad once since he’d left. I needed to talk about it, this giant elephant that lumbered across the lawn with us. I waited until she was bored of the magazines and had flipped onto her back to offer her belly to the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry about your dad,’ I began. I let myself play with the dry ends of Clementine’s almost-white hair.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she replied.

  I let go of the tiny plait I’d been working on. ‘I never said that it was my fault.’

  ‘Then why are you saying sorry?’

  This was classic Clementine. I would try to be kind and she would immediately chuck it back in my face.

  ‘I’m sad for you, Clem, that’s all. That he’s left you. Well, your mum, I mean.’

  ‘He didn’t leave us.’

  ‘He’s gone, Clem.’

  ‘He didn’t want to go.’

  Admitting that your parents are wrong is hard – that was the refrain in my head.

  ‘Maybe,’ I began, very gently. ‘But I think you need to realise that your mum is really not well and that’s why …’

  As if on cue, Frau Hart stepped out of the back door in a halter-neck dress and sunglasses, carrying a metal-framed deckchair. I watched her prise open the chair and position it on the patio so that she was facing the sun but also so that she could read her book without the guard looking over her shoulder. The outside of the novel was covered in flowered wallpaper.

  ‘You know he’s being detained, don’t you?’ Clementine’s voice was low and dangerous. ‘Against his will.’

  I stopped watching Frau Hart and looked back at my friend. She was still on her back, one knee bent towards the sun.

  ‘No.’ I put a hand on the bare skin of her arm, feeling a buzz of strange electricity. ‘No one is holding him, Clem, he’s …’

  ‘He communicates.’ She pulled up her sunglasses, so I could see her eyes. So I could see that she was telling the truth. ‘He communicates with people in America.’ I pulled my hand away. ‘With people in Canada, in Australia, all over,’ she went on, flicking a wrist through the air to suggest all of the many countries, all of the many people.

  The blood rushed from my head towards my feet.

  ‘What, on the telephone?’

  Herr Hart is a telephone engineer in Dad’s office – another well-worn refrain.

  ‘No, Jess, online.’

  I edged back from her and dragged the rug taut beneath us. ‘What line?’

  She stared at me. She narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that a real question, Jess? An honest one.’

  ‘Yes … Well …’ I understood what online meant, that there was this technology. I’d seen it on the People’s Television. But it was only for our top people. Certainly not some lowly telephone engineer, or some girl …

  ‘Because I really need to know,’ Clementine said sharply.

  ‘Well, y-yes, then,’ I stammered. ‘I guess it is a real question because I don’t know how …’

  ‘Has he got you locked up too?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t understand.

  ‘I mean … Metaphorically.’ She flipped onto her side and propped herself onto one elbow.

  My mouth dangled open. The words … None came.

  ‘Let’s stop this,’ she went on, ‘because the damage is already done. Me, my mum and dad, we’re near the end now. Let’s just come out and say it.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ A horrible panic was tightening my throat. This was too much. I wanted to pull her close to me, never let her go. But instead I was edging away. She was holding my head over a box full of snakes and she was about to open it and push my nose inside. She closed the gap between us. She cast her eyes quickly to where the guard was sweating in his jacket, to where her mother had hitched up her skirt to show her thighs to the sun. Clementine’s breath was against my neck. ‘I know why you’re here and not off polishing up all those portraits of the Führer. I know that you report back. I know that you always have, right from the start.’

  This was awful.

  ‘It’s not like that, Clementine! I look out for you!’ I think I really did believe that.

  I went to sit up, but she pushed me back.

  ‘Okay, however he sells it. Whatever he calls it. I get it. I’m not cross with you. We all do what we can to survive. You do it with a good heart, I think.’

  ‘I’m innocent, Clementine,’ I said.

  Painful tears were pricking at my eyes. My breath was short.

  ‘Maybe …’ she said.

  ‘I am, Clem! I am! I love you. I really love you.’

  ‘Shhhh.’ She slipped the whole of her arm around my shoulders to stop me from leaping up. We both darted our eyes across to the guard this time. He wasn’t paying us any attention. He was watching passenger jets cross in the very blue sky. From where Frau Hart was sitting it would have looked like we were hugging, or wrestling. Just being playful.

  ‘It’s fine, Jess, it’s fine,’ Clementine whispered. ‘I love you too.’

  But not enough. I knew that I wasn’t enough.

  ‘We only let you see and hear what we want you to,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we would still be here if it wasn’t for you. If we weren’t friends. We learn things from you too, you know.’

  I couldn’t bear this, the truth of it. I tried to shake off her grip but she clamped it tighter.

  ‘But I need to understand,’ she went on. ‘For myself, I guess. I need you to be honest with me. We can’t be friends any more if you refuse. You know where your information goes, don’t you? You know what happens when it gets there?’

  ‘I don’t know anything!
’ I gasped. I sounded hysterical. I felt hysterical. I couldn’t let myself know it.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she soothed. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay to admit it.’

  ‘I don’t know anything!’ I said, quieter this time.

  ‘So you don’t know where my dad is?’

  I stared into her green eyes, her pupils jerking from left to right as she held my gaze. I nodded.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He’s staying at the office,’ I whispered.

  I hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know.

  ‘And what office is that?’ she pressed.

  ‘My dad’s office, your dad’s office.’

  ‘And what office is that?’

  There was just the sound of our breathing for a moment, hard and faltering. Sweat was building between the bare skin of her arm and my shoulders.

  ‘What office is that, Jess?’ She drilled the question down into my cheek. ‘What office is that?’

  ‘Erzähl mir, wo du vorher gewohnt hast,’ I gasped.

  Tell me about the place where you used to live, before.

  ‘Nein.’ She shook her head. ‘Ask me about the place I’m going to instead.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ask me!’

  ‘If there is something wrong, Clem, our parents will sort it out. It’s not up to us, we’re children, we don’t need to –’

  ‘We can’t wait for them, Jess. When you get old, you get scared. I’m not scared. Ask me!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Ask me!’

  ‘Wohin gehst du?’ Where are you going?

  ‘An einen Ort, von dem ich nicht zurück kommen kann,’ she replied.

  Somewhere I can’t come back from.

  ‘No, you’re not! Stop it!’ It was a last desperate order. I wrestled free of her grip. She let me sit up. I straightened the straps of my swimsuit. I was properly crying now.

  She gathered her legs into her chest, folded her arms across them and pushed her face down into her knees. I took a tissue from my bag and blew my nose. The guard looked our way briefly at the sound of it. I smiled. He looked away. Clementine’s mother, though, couldn’t be torn from the pages of her book.

  Clementine lifted her head. ‘All I’m saying is, I know my cause, Jess. I know who I stand for.’

  The sun was sparking through the leaves of the willow trees behind her head, creating starbursts, making her seem like a goddess, making her seem immortal. I looked at the smudged red triangle that she had drawn on her upper arm in felt tip pen.

  ‘But it’s going to get you killed, Clem.’ My voice was just a husk. I couldn’t look at her any more. ‘I don’t want you to get killed.’

  She crawled over to me and wrapped her arms around me. She squeezed me very tight.

  ‘It’s better to live a short honest life,’ she said into my ear, quietly, but very definitely, ‘than a long, long, long one in the dark.’

  Her mum was looking over at us now, her gaze level, sure and unblinking.

  ‘Help me,’ Clementine whispered. ‘Don’t be scared.’

  I squeezed her back as tightly as I could.

  ‘The time is out of joint,’ Clementine went on. ‘O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right …’

  ‘Hamlet,’ I croaked.

  ‘Me,’ she replied. ‘Us. We don’t have to tell them everything.’

  AUGUST 2013

  The night before Dad went away, we all sat together watching a programme about the Reich’s supercomputers. Mum and Dad were sitting on the sofa, Lilli and I were on the rug. A camera panned along banks of black towers humming quietly to one another. Then it went in close on a sleek, flat touch-screen. A man in a white coat was being interviewed about what we were seeing. The men always wore white coats on those programmes, whether they were experts on the space programme or an authority on how women could make their houses cleaner.

  Trust me, said the coat, I’m a scientist.

  ‘Our great nation has the fastest computers in the known world,’ said the man. (Clementine’s voice: ‘But they might have MUCH faster computers in Russia, or Japan, or America.’) ‘They enable us to do almost everything, from predicting the weather accurately …’ he gave a little grin at this, as if a bit of rain was the most ridiculously trivial thing for a supercomputer to be worrying about. ‘… to creating weapon simulations that ensure Germany is the safest and most formidable country on Earth.’

  The camera moved across a panel of men from the security services. Each one was sitting, focused, hypnotised, by the flickering monitor of a small, flat computer that opened like a book. They were wearing headphones and listening in on ‘dangerous conversations’, though the white-coat man didn’t explain who these ‘dangerous conversations’ actually involved.

  He didn’t need to, I suppose. Everyone knew that ‘dangerous conversations’ went on between evil terrorists with bombs in their briefcases. The camera went in close on one of the men’s screens to show a moving, jagged bar-code – a soundwave. This was a bad person’s voice in all its terrifying detail.

  Lilli was suddenly up on her knees. ‘Look, Papi!’ she squealed. ‘You’ve got a computer like that one!’

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ said Dad. Slam. Like a door being shut in her face.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lilli.

  I let my eyes slide from the screen to my sister. I watched her smile fade, her brow crease. She sat back on her heels.

  The man in the white coat was saying how he was going to take the back off one of the computers now and show us its brain. I stayed watching Lilli though. I wanted to see what was going on in her brain. Which of her memories was winning the fight? Was it Dad all of those evenings, sitting in the dark of the dining room focused intently, hypnotised, by the flickering monitor of a small, flat computer that opened like a book? Was it the sensation of her little nail-bitten fingers, once or twice being allowed to touch its delicious keys? Or was it that moment – the one where Dad shot her down and told her she was wrong?

  I guessed the last one. It packed quite a punch.

  I looked back at the white-coat man. He’d pulled out the processor – a thing no bigger than a Curfew Mint – then from inside that he extracted something so tiny he had to hold it up to a microscope with a pair of tweezers. It looked like a robot spider.

  ‘This,’ said the man in the white coat, ‘is what’s doing all the work.’

  He seemed terribly pleased with himself, and I think we were supposed to feel the same.

  That day in the sun, Clementine had made me take home a stack of magazines.

  ‘I already have this one,’ I said, handing back the issue of Das Deutsche Mädel with the 20th April celebrations pictured on the front.

  ‘No, you don’t.’ She pushed it back towards my chest.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  I opened my mouth to argue but, after our earlier admissions, I didn’t have the strength, or the authority. I took it.

  When I got home, I left the stack of magazines on the chair in the hall while we ate dinner. Dad ran through his list of questions for me, ticking boxes and making notes.

  ‘Is that all?’ he kept prodding. ‘You’re sure? Nothing else?’

  Mum watched, slowly coming to the boil because Dad had brought paperwork to the meal table AGAIN. I was the one who felt the full steam of her annoyance though, once we’d finished eating. It had to come out somehow.

  ‘Er, excuse me, young lady, do these magazines live in the hall?’

  Off we went.

  ‘Do you think I was put on this earth to trail around after you, putting away your things? Do you think I enjoy it?’

  It was best never to answer these questions, even with a shake of the head.

  ‘I suppose you think that I have nothing better to do than tidy up!’

  The vein at her right temple began to swell. I thought she might have a nosebleed.

  ‘Get these to your room. NO
W.’

  I grabbed the magazines. It took all of my restraint to go up the stairs without stomping.

  ‘Do you think I was put on this earth to trail around after you, putting away your things?’ YES, I wanted to scream in her face. ACTUALLY! That’s all you do. Tidy away! Tidy away Dad’s things! Tidy away me!

  I tossed the magazines onto my bed and, with my restraint all used up, I slammed the door behind me. I flopped onto the floor and tipped my head back against the bed, smacking it against the duvet a few times until my neck hurt. That was what made the Hitler’s birthday edition of Das Deutsche Mädel slip from the top of the pile, slide over my shoulder and spill onto the carpet. It fell open on a large picture of a girl. A terrifying girl. I jumped to my feet. I had read this magazine – at home and in the doctor’s waiting room. I knew it front-to-back. There was definitely no picture of any terrifying girl.

  I crept forward, crouched over the magazine and flipped it back to its cover. Yes, this was Das Deutsche Mädel. Yes, this was the Hitler’s birthday edition. I turned back to the page with the girl. She was one of the most in-demand celebrities of our time, the piece said. She was a singer, though the interviewer didn’t ask her very much at all about music or songs. They wanted to know what she thought about money and what kind of boy she ‘fancied’ and which part of her body she liked best. I couldn’t imagine she liked anything about her disgusting self. She had nails like claws and metal through the tops of her ears. There were things drawn on her arms, and her lips were as red as blood. Her short hair was two different colours. Black underneath, blonde on top.

  I turned the page, to a cluster of smaller pictures of the girl. In one she was wearing a bikini like Clementine’s. In another picture she was basically naked, covered only in a net-curtain dress that didn’t conceal the sides of her breasts. She was offensively thin.

  I threw the magazine across the room – because it was dirty, because I could almost feel the cancer crawling across my hands. I sat staring at the thing. It was a dead rat, one of Wolf’s turds – something I didn’t want to have to deal with. On the cover, the Faith and Beauty girls were still there spelling out WIR GEHÖREN DIR, completely unaware that there was a grotesque, alien girl inside their pages telling me I should just ‘Get out there, live without regret, do it!’