by Julie Mayhew
Bells narrowed her eyes, the grooves in her forehead rivalling those of a toast rack. ‘Can’t be.’ Her voice was like gravel. ‘We would have had word of this.’ She folded her arms.
The pair stared, Clara’s face wavering between amazement and suspicion; Bells’ face unimpressed.
Clara coughed, she sharpened her vowels. ‘Right. Tell us what happened on 13th August.’ She laid it down as a challenge.
I didn’t know what to say. If I had been in one of those white-washed rooms with a tape recorder whirring, I’d have understood which version of events to give. If I had been stood in front of a smiling peppermint lady … But what did these women want?
The cats were shoulder to shoulder now, bringing with them the sour smell of unwashed hair.
‘There was a concert,’ I began, ‘in Trafalgar Square and …’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Bells cried out – her words came as if raked through a cheese grater. ‘She would know all of this, even if it wasn’t her.’
‘Who was your neighbour on Lincoln Drive then?’ Clara chimed in.
My mouth opened and shut uselessly like a fish on dry land.
She knew where I lived.
How could she know where I lived?
‘See!’ cried Bells. ‘She don’t know nothing. She’s nothing but a liar.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not a liar!’ Not in that moment. ‘The Hart family!’ I blurted. ‘The Hart family were my neighbours!’
Clara gasped. Bell’s narrowed her eyes. The cats shuffled closer.
‘First names,’ prompted Clara.
‘Jocelyn …’ I began.
A little cry of oh gosh …
‘… Um … Simon …’
… a few laughs of joy …
‘… And Clementine Amelia Hart.’
Delighted squeals from them all.
‘Still …’ muttered Bells. ‘But she’s still …’
‘No, she’s not,’ said Clara. ‘Not, if she’s in here.’
But Bells wasn’t giving up. ‘It looks nothing like her! The Nazi’s daughter had meat on her bones!’
Clara took hold of my chin, lifted my face to the light. ‘I can see it, can’t you? Her father. Look at the nose, the eyes.’
I twisted free of her grip. I was nothing like him.
‘Tell us what happened on 13th August,’ Clara asked again.
‘There was a concert,’ I said. ‘In Trafalgar Square and …’
‘Shhh!’ Clara spat to the whispering cats behind her.
‘And …’ I said.
‘Go on …’ she said.
A terrorist made an attempt on our young people’s lives.
‘I can’t,’ I said. I looked over my shoulder. Had the freckly warden really left? Did I imagine that? Had she heard everything? Would she be reporting back? ‘I just want to …’
They moved as one, wordlessly, and created a cocoon around me.
‘They can’t hear you,’ Clara whispered. Her breath was sweet but stale, her lips a firm and definite line. ‘You can tell us the truth.’
I could feel the warmth of them. They bent their heads in. They all wanted it. They wanted me to say it, even though they had heard it already. To them, this was good news, proof that the fight goes on.
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER!!!
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER!!!
WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER!!!
‘Clementine Amelia Hart tried to start a revolution,’ I said.
All around me, teeth, smiles.
‘And what did you do?’ Clara asked, a tear trickling down her sharp, grey cheek.
‘I put out the fire.’
The women held their breath.
‘But only because,’ I said, ‘I wanted to save my friend.’
The cocoon fell in on me, so many arms wrapped tightly around my vanishing body, even the reluctant arms of Bells.
We stayed curled up into each other.
I wished that I’d had a moment like that with Clementine, a quiet and gentle moment which I knew for sure was the last. I wanted to go back, say a proper goodbye.
‘It’s terrible what happened,’ GG said, her mouth close to my ear. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. Whatever made her …’
‘I understand, I think.’ I traced a finger across GG’s chest, joining one scattered freckle to the next.
Ever since I’d learnt to talk, I’d learnt to be careful about what I said and who I said it to. Even a good friend could betray you. So this was self-destruction.
‘There were too many reasons …’ I told her. I pictured my typed list:
THEY TOOK AWAY HER PLACE AT MUSIC COLLEGE. THEY TOOK AWAY HER MOTHER’S JOB, THEY TOOK AWAY HER FATHER. THEY WERE GOING TO CUT HER OPEN AND STOP HER HAVING CHILDREN.
The list snapped me back to reality. GG must never hear Clementine’s reasons coming from my mouth. She must not see the paper. Had she seen it already? I leapt up.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘I have to …’ I found my bra and fastened it in place, gathered together my hair that smelt of rubber from the PE mats beneath us, pulling it into a neat-enough bun. ‘I just have to …’ That pang of disgust at myself again, for my desires. I was wicked. I let it pull me off track, away from the most important thing I would ever do. There was something wrong with me. All the risks I would take and the risks I was willing to ignore. I slipped on my pants, bundled the rest of my clothes together and walked out from behind the curtains.
‘What happened to her parents?’ GG called after me.
I dropped my clothes by the typewriter and ripped the typed sheet from the roller, slipping it carefully into my bag.
‘I don’t know,’ I called back.
‘Are they dead?’ She was out from behind the curtains, still naked, holding her jodhpurs, shirt and underwear against her chest. The blonde triangle of hair between her legs made me think of fish-scales, of mermaids.
‘I think so.’ My voice came out as a whisper. ‘They don’t do all of them in the square, or on the lamppost.’ There had been a man on the high street earlier when I passed through, quite young, the flies just getting word that he was there. I STOLE FROM PARTY PREMISES AND SOLD THE SPOILS FOR MY OWN PROFIT, his sign read. ‘They do some of them quietly,’ I told GG. I had listened through the door one evening when Dad had Fräulein Krause over for urgent business. I’d heard him dictate the word ‘guillotine’.
‘I’m not quite sure why they waited so long,’ I went on. ‘They could have avoided so much trouble for themselves if they’d just taken the Hart family away when they first discovered that … If they’d just done it, I mean, just got on with it, then …’
What was I saying?
WHAT WAS I SAYING?
‘No,’ I spluttered. ‘I didn’t mean … I didn’t mean …’
Defending the Harts would get me killed. Condemning them meant I was an animal.
GG’s mouth was open.
‘I have to go.’ I couldn’t look at her any more. I couldn’t have her look at me any more.
I lifted up the typewriter, the sharp metal edges pushing into my arms and bare belly, and started towards the cupboard.
A loud crash stopped me in my path – the sound of a bunch of keys falling to the floor. The bolt was turning in the meeting hall door. The door was opening. Fisher’s keys sang as they slid across the floorboards in the door’s path. I backed away from whoever might be coming in. GG, not caring that she was naked, stepped forward to get a better view.
Fräulein Eberhardt. Her piled-up hair, like a squashed plump pudding, came around the door.
‘G-girls?’ she stammered, her mouth then forming a perfect ‘O’.
And in my panic, I dropped my favourite typewriter, shattering it to pieces at my feet.
The sirens meant something to me now. They meant get up, get washed, get fed, even before the day had begun. The second siren meant go and stand in the ‘playground’, be inspected, be counted.
/> Roll call could go on for hours. If anyone got dizzy and keeled over, Clara picked them up and smacked their cheeks, but only after being given the nod by our Frau Aufseherin – our boulder-like prison officer that Clara alone, not Bells, got away with calling by the unexplained nickname ‘Boogie’. It was usually Nellie that crumpled to her knees. She was the oldest woman in Red Block – eighty-seven, toothless and bent as a spoon. She refused all offers to be propped up once she was conscious again. One of these mornings, I knew we’d be carrying her lifeless body to roll call and have them strike her off the list.
In my first line-up I spotted the woman with the chins who had made me sign away my things. I thought she had been staff but, no, she was a prisoner like me. Although not exactly like me. She was standing in the green triangle section – the criminals. (‘The hard bastards,’ according to Bells. ‘They make the best kapos. They get a kick from ruling over their own.’) The woman with the chins was wearing a lovely striped scarf. My lovely striped scarf. It took all I had not to yell across and unmask her as a thief, but Bells had warned me never to mess with a Green, not if I was at all attached to my pretty face.
Line-up done, we walked the two miles of country lanes to the factory, men honking and jeering as they passed in their trucks, driving fast through the puddles and soaking us to our underwear. We sewed all day until our fingers bled, and our eyes refused to focus, breaking only for a lunch of watery soup and a hunk of bread.
I sat next to Clara. I was her trophy – a sign that the cause was living strong.
‘The Reich’s favourite daughter!’ she’d exclaim – quietly, of course – between slurps of the diarrhoea soup, shaking her head, smiling her smile. ‘The Reich’s favourite daughter! And here she is!’
‘How do you know I was called that?’
There was no television in the place, no radio, no magazines.
‘Oh, we get all the information we need,’ she said with a wink.
The Reds’ letters were usually edited, literally, with sections snipped out. The ladies would hold them up in the dorm, cry ‘for fuck’s sake!’ then stick their tongues through the holes. They got parcels too – photos and chocolates, gloves and socks, nice-smelling toiletries, a jar of jam. The Reds were the best fed and the best dressed in the playground. The criminal Greens, and the girls from the whore block had nothing on us, even if one of them had pinched my lovely scarf. The only other women who measured up were the small proud group on the far side of the tarmac. Good skin. Nice coats. None of them had lost their hair. Sonderhäftlinge, was what Bells called them. Special prisoners.
‘Special how?’ I’d asked. But she’d shrugged, embarrassed, and told me she didn’t know.
‘You’ll start getting parcels soon, don’t you worry,’ Bells said one lunchtime at the factory. She’d finished organising the Table Girls who distributed the bread. She cocked a leg over the bench opposite and sat down. ‘They’ve probably been holding back all the stuff you were sent in solitary,’ Bells went on, talking with her mouth full. ‘It’ll be like Christmas Eve when …’ She trailed off – because Clara was widening her eyes and shaking her head. They exchanged a look of understanding. Bells dropped her gaze into her empty bowl.
Silence. Zwischenraum.
‘Where’s my stuff?’ I asked, politely first.
Thieves, they were all thieves!
‘Well,’ said Clara, speaking like an adult would to a difficult child, ‘firstly, we don’t like to think of it like that, as “my stuff”. We share. You got a scraping of marmalade from Gitta’s jar. All of us took a chocolate brazil from that tray of Emma’s. The shampoo is always pooled and …’
‘Where are my letters?’ I cut in. I felt hot – nothing to do with the soup, because that had arrived at the table barely lukewarm.
‘Calm down,’ hissed Clara. ‘Don’t attract attention.’
‘I want my letters,’ I hissed back.
Clara and Bells exchanged guilty glances.
‘What have you done with them?’
I wanted a picture of my family to pin on the wall like the others. I wanted to know what Ruby and Angelika and stupid Frau Gross were doing. I wanted Mum to send a tin of her lemon biscuits – experience the comforting taste again. Did Clara and Bells think I wouldn’t have shared? Was Daniel Keller’s daughter not to be trusted? At home, or here, would I never be trusted?
‘There aren’t any,’ said Clara.
‘What?’ I said.
‘No one has sent you anything.’
‘Oh, come on!’ I didn’t want to cry. The cotton dust made our cheeks sore and our throats dry. Salty tears would only make it worse.
‘I checked.’ Her voice was soft. She took my hand under the table and squeezed. ‘The first night you were here. I do it for all the girls. I go to Boogie and I chase up their things … But there was nothing, Jess. I’m sorry.’
‘The trunk of stuff I came with …’
‘Gone.’
‘But …’
‘You lose your things. That’s how it goes.’ She took a breath of decision. ‘Unless you’re classified as a Sonderhäftling; then you live like a queen.’
‘Special how?’
Bells was squirming now, hearing this question for the second time.
‘Well, you might be considered a special inmate,’ explained Clara, ‘if, for example, you have a high-ranking relative.’
‘But I have a …’
Clara was shaking her head. I was so upset I started speaking German. ‘Aber ich habe einen …’
‘No, you don’t …’ She gripped my hand a little tighter. ‘Not any more.’
‘We’ve been with the horses,’ GG told Fräulein Eberhardt, her eyes stretched wide with panic. ‘We were muddy and smelly and thought we’d come here to change our clothes.’ Her voice was trying to keep pace with her pulse, tripping over itself in the rush.
Fräulein Eberhardt looked us up and down – GG’s ruffled hair and naked body, me with my messy bun, wearing only my underwear.
‘And the typewriter?’ All eyes went to the pieces of it on the floor.
‘We were messing about,’ I said. We had to confess to something or Fräulein Eberhardt would have sniffed out the truth. ‘We’re really sorry,’ I told her.
‘Yes,’ said GG. ‘It’s just that I’m going away this week and it’s making us all feel a bit …’
‘Giddy?’ offered Fräulein Eberhardt. A word that was preferable to so many others.
In the days that followed, I waited for the explosion. I waited for Mother to lecture me while we did the washing-up. I braced myself for another trip to Dr Hardy. I expected Father to throw something hard against something breakable. It would get back to them eventually, somehow. Fisher could mention the keys to Dad (I had shoved his set back through the boarding hall letterbox folded up in a piece of paper with his name on. I had no nerve left to hand them back in person) or Frau Gross would be at our door, brimming over with a wicked little story that she’d heard. I’d told Fräulein Eberhardt that the bunch of keys had come from Frau Gross, you see, not wanting to lead her back to Fisher. But that was a foolish thing to do, opening up that well-greased channel for rumours to slip back to our house.
Or Fräulein Eberhardt could have simply come and told my parents herself, knocked on our door and asked for money to replace the broken typewriter. But would she? Would she actually dare?
I slid my typed poster between the pages of a copy of Das Deutche Mädel on my bookcase and I waited to see if I still had the guts for the next important step.
It may have been our last goodbye but that wasn’t the last time I saw GG. The morning she was to leave for the West Country she turned up at the ice rink to watch me skate. She must have sneaked in by the fire exit and found her place high up in the stands. Ingrid spotted her straight away, always very aware of who might be watching or listening in. But when she made to yell up at GG, ask her what she was doing there, I grabbed her sleeve and shook my head. I mo
uthed the words, It’s okay, and reluctantly, Ingrid agreed to carry on.
We were to attempt the triple axel that morning – without the pole harness.
We – even though it would be me all alone when it came to leaping from the ice.
Of course, it had all been for Ingrid. It was important to her that I executed the jump successfully, just once, before I left for skate camp. That way, she could tell everyone she had taught me all I knew. Who she would tell, I really didn’t know, maybe just herself, but even so, I wanted that for her. It would be my parting gift.
Ingrid set the music running, Bruckner’s Fantasie, and I skated figures of eight waiting for the section that demanded the jump. The piano became louder, more earnest, and I picked up the routine, Ingrid shouting last-minute nervous instructions through the mist of the ice. ‘Remember, you need to stay lower than you think, get a good grip on take-off.’ And I felt strangely cool and detached from it all as I skated backwards, made that twist forwards, struck, and – one, two, three – landed. As if it was nothing.
Ingrid exploded with excitement. I glanced up at GG, thinking she would be the same but there was no reaction from the stands. Perhaps she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, or perhaps to the inexpert eye, it was just a jump like any other.
‘You did it!’ Ingrid shrieked, skating over, joyfully clattering into me. ‘You did it! You did it!’ She grabbed my hand, waving it around as if I was the victor of a fight. ‘You are going to do such great things!’ She was crying tears of real happiness. ‘This is just the start for you, Fräulein Keller!’
I felt so warm in her excited presence, triumphant as she hugged me.
But it was time to leave Ingrid. I loved her for her rebel’s heart but I didn’t want to begin to hate her for being scared to act upon it. I told her that I really couldn’t have done it without her, any of it, and I promised, solemnly, to do everything I could in the future to make her proud. Because that was the truth and because I had learnt that it was important to say things to people while they were still there in front of you, not regret the unsaid later when they were gone.