The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  Oh god oh god oh god …

  I ran through the house, unlocked the back door, burst out into the garden.

  There wasn’t any time. There wasn’t nearly enough time.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lilli squealed after me.

  ‘Nowhere!’ I shouted back. ‘Don’t follow me! If you do I will kill you!’

  I tripped over myself to get to the trees, to the swing, to the stream, my heavy bag slamming against my kidneys. Wolf came with me, full of some kind of second wind, all deer leaps and skipping. To him this was some kind of game. It wasn’t. That girl on the lamppost had been for me, sacrificed just for me.

  I stopped at the swing, the earth kicking and wheeling beneath me, my head spinning like I’d fallen from a badly executed spin. I would have toppled down the bank if it wasn’t for Wolf yipping at my feet, keeping me there, present, ready to act. I dropped my bag to the ground, fell to my knees and I started to dig, using fingers, pulling at the soft dirt. Wolf joined in, his front paws pedalling at the hole. We kept going. Panting, both of us. When the space was big enough, I opened up my satchel, pulled out the stack of posters and dropped them in, Clementine’s face looking back at me, that sneer. Wolf’s eyes peered up at me, all wet and eager.

  Oh god oh god oh god … It wasn’t going to work! It was never going to work! Wolf would dig them back up the first chance he got. I needed something else. I needed fire. I ran back to the house, Wolf still with me, springing at my heels. I slammed into the kitchen. Lilli was at the table drinking a juice she’d poured for herself. There was a pool of it on the table all around her cup.

  ‘Urgh!’ she cried, gulping down her mouthful. ‘You’re all messy!’

  I yanked open the useful drawer and grabbed the box of matches. Wolf was turning crazy, muddy-footed circles in the kitchen, woofing out a now what now what now what.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lilli whined as I flew outside again. ‘Why can’t I come?’

  We bolted the length of the garden, Wolf and me, and when we got to our hole in the ground, there it was – our next game. Oh god oh god oh god … Wolf spotted it quicker than me. He was off. Playing catch. The breeze had lifted the top sheets of posters and was casting a trail of them down the bank and into the water. Off they went, some of them becoming little rafts, heading downstream.

  Into the water we went. In to save my skin. Not bothering to take my shoes off first. I didn’t care. I wanted to live, I realised. I wanted to protest, I wanted to have my say, but also I really, truly wanted to live.

  Mum’s first words when she got back from her Frauenschaft meeting: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Jess, look at my floor!’ I was standing by the washing machine, stripping away my soaking, filthy clothes. Wolf was at my feet, dripping, wearing a teatowel. Lilli loitered behind my mother in the doorway.

  ‘And she’s been playing with matches,’ she piped up.

  ‘Have I fuck!’ I spat back.

  My mother gasped. I put my hand over my mouth.

  I never said words like that in front of her. Ever.

  ‘I mean, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ I gabbled. I’d known that there was no chance I’d get cleaned up before she returned. I had prepared my lie. ‘It’s just that Wolf fell in the stream and I had to go in and get him and I was really scared because I thought that he was drowning and …’ I was crying. This was perfect. I couldn’t have rehearsed it any better. Wolf looked up at my mother with a pitiful face, slipping expertly into his role.

  ‘Just get upstairs,’ my mother muttered. She was shedding her coat and cardigan, ready to tackle the mess. I slunk past her wearing just my underwear.

  ‘Not you!’ my mother bellowed, snagging Wolf by the collar before he could follow me onto the hallway carpet.

  I showered quickly, still doing everything to the beat of my racing heart. I raided my skate camp trunk for clothes. I’d been carefully not wearing anything I might want to take with me, but I had nothing left. They’d have washing machines where I was going, I told myself, I needn’t worry.

  I didn’t bother to dry my hair. I got back to work. I shoved a chair up against the door, to stop Lilli wandering in, and lifted down my stack of magazines from the shelf above the desk. I pulled out the birthday celebration edition of Das Deutsche Mädel. I hadn’t hidden it exactly, because what better hiding place than in a stack of other completely harmless magazines. I flicked it open. I’d pulled out the wrong one – the genuine one. I tossed that aside and went through the spines looking for Clementine’s version.

  Not there.

  I spread them out across the floor, looking for the cover – the Faith and Beauty girls spelling our WIR GEHÖREN DIR.

  Not there.

  I went back to the edition I’d thrown aside, flicked through it again, expecting it to suddenly transform into the illegal version. No.

  Not there.

  Where was it? WHERE WAS IT?

  Then I thought – Lilli. It had to be. She had been in here, nicking my things. I was all set to storm across the hall and create a tornado in her room when another thought arrived …

  No, I told myself. No, no, no, no, no.

  I crawled over the carpet to the loose piece of skirting board, slipped my finger down the gap.

  Not there.

  Clementine’s notes. Gone.

  Oh, god! I climbed to my feet, backed up against the door, clattered against the chair, forgetting it was there.

  ‘You okay?’ This was Mum’s voice.

  ‘FINE!’

  Could I tell for sure? Would there be a clue? They must have left a trace, surely. I searched for it, no desire on this earth to find it. But there it was, on my windowsill. My skating trophies. They were neatly arranged, evenly spaced, that was okay, but I always organised them according to which win I was most pleased with, left to right, ascending order. Two trophies had switched places.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Everyone in this house knew my trophy system. We had discussed the merits of each victory at length. Only a stranger would have made that silly error. Not my parents. It couldn’t have been my parents. The men must have come while we were all out. Acting without my father’s permission. Or the women. Maybe they send women to do the searching. Who knew? No one. That was the point.

  I couldn’t leave my room. I couldn’t look my mum or dad in the eye. With one glance they would just know. I was no longer the Reich’s favourite daughter. I’d dropped the role. I hadn’t kept up my side of the bargain. I was not good.

  I sat on the floor by the door. Didn’t shift. I pictured the magazine and the essay notes sitting on a desk somewhere. A wet poster hanging up drip drying – because we hadn’t got all of them, Wolf and me. I waded as far as I dared without getting pulled under by the current. I ripped the soles of my shoes on the rocky bed in the process. Wolf swam merrily, the ripples breaking over his face, freed by the buoyancy of the water from his irritating limp. The wet posters I collected, I rubbed into pieces at the stream edge until they were nothing but pulp that washed away. The dry ones I burned. I tried to picture the path of the stream – where those runaway posters might wash up. I imagined a group of faceless people standing around that evidence on their desk, speaking in murmurs, deciding my fate. Would it be a public one, where they sold tickets for the viewing gallery with Kaffee und Kuchen, where Ruby Heigl could strike up a verse of ‘Eine Flamme Ward Gegeben’ just so she could, eternally, in my last moments, make it all about her? Or would I get a lamppost, a one-word sign? Or maybe something private?

  I stayed curled up and waited for the doorbell, for the men to come. Or the women. To take me away. And my family for harbouring me.

  And during all of this, despite my regret, still my admiration for Clementine swelled, that she had faced all this and more, every day, without cowering in the corner of her bedroom. I was no revolutionary. What was I thinking? I was a failure, a coward. I was a traitor.

  Sundays were our day of rest. We washed our underwear
and swept the dorm. We walked up and down outside, trying to catch a ray of sun.

  In the late afternoon, we did a show for one another, performing poems and stories we knew by heart. Clara would read aloud her letters home to her husband before she sent them – brilliant, sparkling things. She captured our days in a way none of us could ever have managed. The sight of two silvery aeroplanes in the sky sent her musing on how far we’d come as a human race but how far we still had to go.

  Nina had a lovely singing voice, all sad and lilty like a bird falling from the sky. She performed old English folk songs about bonny lads and cuckoos, songs that began with someone going a-walking or a-courting. Bells told rude jokes and did impressions, her favourite being a loving rendition of Marlene Dietrich all full of phlegm, warbling out ‘Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht’. You can’t live without love. Bells also impersonated the guards, including Boogie. They would often sit in and watch, the guards, laughing the loudest, yet still it felt dangerous. Could there be a Sunday coming when Boogie wouldn’t find it funny any more?

  ‘What can you do?’ Clara asked one weekend while our show was underway. I always sang along and cheered and cried, but the things that I had memorised as a child had no place in Red Block. I thought once about doing that speech from Hamlet, the one where he exclaims to Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, What a piece of work is a man! But I was scared that Boogie would report back when she heard me declare, Man delights not me.

  ‘I can ice skate,’ I told her.

  Clara clapped her hands in delight and was straight up on her feet, up on the bench. ‘Listen, ladies, listen!’

  Bells’ sing-along (a dirty version of ‘Es Klopft Mein Herz Bum-Bum’ that involved bending over and slapping her backside) came to a stumbling end.

  ‘Listen!’ Clara was flapping her bony arms like a hopeful flightless bird. ‘Jessika can ice skate!’

  The room fell into a chorus of oos and ahhs.

  ‘You kept that one quiet,’ honked Bells. They had known so much about me when I first arrived, I assumed they knew this too. After being good, wasn’t it my most defining feature?

  The women pushed and shoved, manoeuvring me into the middle of the room, onto the circle stage we’d created on the dormitory floor.

  I started to laugh. ‘But I can’t do it for you now. Not without boots, not without ice.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Clara called. ‘Just pretend, slide about in your socks or something.’

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going to do that. That would be silly.

  ‘What music do you need, Jess?’ Nina asked, hopping from one foot to the other at the prospect of seeing something new. There was a reassurance in watching the ladies repeat the same acts over and over but, yes, we also got bored. ‘Shall we hum, Jess?’ asked Nina. ‘What do we know?’ She began conferring breathlessly with the women beside her on the benches. The idea of music seemed to slice through my reluctance.

  ‘Do you know Bruckner’s Fantasie?’

  ‘Ummm.’ Nina looked around her. ‘Well …’

  ‘Yes. We. Do.’ This was Boogie. She placed her hands on her extensive thighs and hoisted herself to standing. With a smug and satisfied grin, she pulled the belt of her skirt up and over her belly, and swaggered off towards the door of the dorm, the chain of her keys clanking against her hip. ‘While I’m gone,’ she called after herself, ‘open up all the windows.’

  We looked to Clara to see if we should do as we were told. It was only a degree or two above zero outside. Clara shrugged, and began flinging open the casements.

  ‘It’ll be freezing,’ someone cried.

  ‘It’ll be like a fuckin’ ice rink,’ Bells cackled.

  As we sat waiting, shivering, for Boogie to return, it started, through the tannoy speakers outside. She’d made us open up the windows so we could hear. Bruckner’s Fantasie. Those low notes at the start. Boogie was back in our doorway, looking terribly pleased with herself. All faces turned to me in the middle of the rink. The high, hopeful notes arrived … and I opened like a flower.

  I slid and I jumped and I spun. It was stupid and ridiculous, but sort of wonderful all at the same time. The women oooed and ahhed as I moved in sweeping movements across the floor. They shuffled the benches back and back, widening the rink as I went.

  When it was time for the camel spin, I felt the same nerves that I did on the ice. Never a hard move by any measure but the one that always let me down. I got some purchase on the floorboards and flicked my body round for a spin or two, then held myself in position, imagining the rest of the revolutions. I showed them my heart. Then I set off again, skipping backwards in preparatory circles. It was time at last to make Ingrid proud. To show an audience all that she had taught me. I turned forwards, struck the floor with the edge of my foot and I leapt. I’m sure it was only a turn and a half in reality but, oh goodness, it felt as good as a triple. The women were on their feet, throwing gloves and socks, pretending they were flowers.

  I stood there in the centre of the rink with my eyes closed, listening to the applauding and cheering and whistling, my muscles burning, not feeling like my own any more. My ankles and knees would never be strong enough to do it again on actual ice. The realisation cut through me like a blade. I hoped I would eventually find some meaning in it all, like Clara had with her silver aeroplanes, because right then I felt so irredeemably sad. I had promised Ingrid that I would always skate. That I would always be free. But that was my last dance.

  All those futures that would never be.

  I took my bow.

  They didn’t come. The men, the women, whoever took my magazine, Clem’s notes.

  Mum called up brightly at 6 p.m. that it was time for tea and I crept downstairs, slowly, cautiously, expecting fire and brimstone. Instead I found that my wet and muddy clothes had been washed and hung up, and the only person acting weird was me.

  I stayed on my guard, of course I did.

  ‘Relax, Jessie,’ my father repeated on a loop, thinking I was coiled tight about going away. ‘You’ll do us proud, I know it.’

  On the Wednesday, the day before I left, my favourite meal was on the table. Roast chicken. There was a cake too, with the words VIEL GLÜCK! in piped cream and a little plastic figure skating across the icing. I looked into my parents’ eyes, just to check, just to make sure that this wasn’t to be a last supper of a different kind, but they were genuine and smiling and kind. Dad spoke soppily of all the things I’d done as a kid, seeming to forget Fisher’s stiff presence across the table. He talked about the first time I’d put on skates and glided across that rink as if I’d been born with blades for feet. Mum told Dad to stop because he was making her cry, then urged him to tell another story, and another, and another. Lilli was on classic form, arguing pedantically about every vegetable that passed her lips, claiming all the while that she wasn’t hungry, then demanding extra portions of pudding. It was how I’d always imagined it would be when I left. I would miss them so much, all their faults. At that table, I regretted everything I’d ever done to cross my parents, to disappoint them, all the things they knew and all the things they didn’t.

  The next morning, Lilli sat on top of my trunk so Mum could close the clasps, while I was forced to have a conversation down the phone to Katrin at athletics camp. (‘Good luck, yeah,’ she said, unbothered. ‘Thanks,’ I replied, with utter nonchalance. We honoured the truth of our relationship). Dad carried my hulking trunk down the stairs and to the end of the driveway. We waited for the coach to come. I was dressed in my BDM best, the knot in my necktie tight and straight, my Party pin shiny and centred on my pocket. I didn’t care one bit that I’d have to make small talk with Dani Hannah all the way there. I was just so thrilled that the day had come. I was blessed, I decided on that warm September day, to have been given a talent so clear and obvious that I could carve a whole life from it. Disappear into it. Forget everything else. I was blessed to have been given a second chance to have that life, after what I did.
I would have to steer a whole new path, and once I was away from home I would be able to decide how to do that.

  Here it was, a beginning …

  The large black car pulled up, and the driver got out to put my trunk in the boot. I was too busy with goodbyes to ask where the coach was, where Dani was. Fisher gave me a stiff peck on the cheek before stepping aside for me to have my last moments with my family. Mum hung a purse of money around my neck and sobbed as she held me tight. Dad kissed my head. Lilli threw her arms up and around my waist and Wolf stood on his hind legs, trying to be part of the hug.

  As I was driven away, my father stood very upright and solid-chested on the pavement. He didn’t wave. He had his arm around Mum who had tears spilling down her cheeks and a paper tissue balled up in her hand. Lilli had already made her way onto the front garden of the empty house next door and was picking the last of the summer daisies, Wolf sniffing at her fingers, hoping for food.

  ‘Ich liebe euch,’ I said to my family as the car took me away from Lincoln Drive, though they wouldn’t have heard me or even seen my lips move through that blacked-out glass.

  And I meant it, when I said it. I really did.

  Ask me now if I love them. Go on, ask me.

  Because despite everything, I’d have to say that I do.

  drei

  AUGUST 2014

  One day, a cat started coming into our kitchen.

  It was white with a fat, black tail and splodges of tortoiseshell across its back. For a stray, it was remarkably sturdy, but there are plenty of mice to be had on the farms around here. I could tell it was old, from its fur, from its soft belly hanging low. It had a rolling gait, one paw put right in front of the other as if walking on an invisible tightrope – one that it might fall off any minute.