Tip Of The Tongue

by Patrick Ness

  ‘What?’ his mother said, distracted. He glanced over. She was looking at the picture of his father she’d hung by the door, touching her fingers to it, not saying anything. Despite their last name and despite the fact that both sets of Jonny’s grandparents were as German as could be, his father’d had no trouble finding a place in the US Army and was now over there in Europe, fighting people to whom they were probably distantly related. Funny what war did, huh?

  ‘The strange thing?’ Jonny said, gently.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, sitting down wearily at the kitchen table. ‘Yes. We had an inspection.’

  Jonny added a few ounces of peas to the boiling potatoes. Those and a little butter and salt would be their entire dinner. ‘Why is that weird?’

  ‘It was this man and woman. British, I think, which was strange enough, but she was wearing trousers, if you can believe it, and he wore all white clothes to inspect a factory!’ She sat back in her chair as if the disbelief had pushed her there. ‘He didn’t seem to ever get dirty, though.’

  Jonny kept cooking, trying to ignore the Truth Teller in his pocket, which in his mind blared there like a siren, shouting at the top of its lungs (did they have lungs?), and he’d been wondering since his mother entered why she hadn’t been able to hear it.

  But of course it made no actual sound. They didn’t unless they were being worn. They didn’t do anything unless they were being worn. You never needed to feed them, they never needed cleaning up after, they just watched you, sadly, until you put them on your chin and they told all the truths you weren’t brave enough to say yourself.

  Like, as a purely random example, telling your mother you’d spent two whole dollars on a Truth Teller when you could only afford meat once a fortnight.

  ‘Mom,’ he started.

  ‘You should have seen Mr Acklin, though,’ his mother chuckled to herself. ‘I think I can be happy with anything that makes that man squirm.’

  ‘Mom,’ Jonny said again.

  ‘Kept asking everyone about those God-awful Truth Tellers,’ his mother said.

  Jonny froze. His mother didn’t. ‘Oh, I hated those things,’ she frowned. ‘People being rude all the time and acting like it’s brave, acting like it’s your fault if you get upset that they’ve been horrible to you.’ She looked up at him. ‘I know you kids like them, but I’m so glad you never got one, Jon.’

  Jonny said nothing. She brushed a strand of hair out of her eye. ‘What was it you were going to say?’ she asked, innocent as anything.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jonny said. ‘Just … the washing water’s ready. If you want it.’

  ‘Thanks, Liebchen,’ she said. She stood and kissed him on the forehead. He let her. ‘You’re a good boy.’

  She took the pan of water out to the washroom and Jonny just stood there at the stove, letting the steam from his boiling dinner blow over him.

  ‘So did it work?’ Nettie asked him as they rode along. She’d caught up with him on his way to his evening shift. She was returning home from her day at the town’s sole gas station. She was supposed to just run the till in the small store there, but with her Uncle Paul-inspired flair for fixing things, and in the absence of all the professional mechanics who’d been snapped up by the war, she ended up spending most of her time changing fan belts and replacing spark plugs. She smelled more of chemicals than his mother did. ‘Did you get your truths told?’

  ‘I haven’t had time to properly try it yet,’ Jonny said.

  They rode along in silence for a moment, Jonny pedalling away, Nettie coasting skilfully and riding in easy curves as she always did.

  ‘Don’t be …’ Nettie started, but didn’t finish.

  ‘Don’t be what?’

  Nettie stopped her bike. Jonny stopped his, too. They were a block away from the Diner, a block away from where Nettie would turn to the poorer part of town she and her mom called home.

  ‘With Marisa,’ Nettie said, not quite meeting Jonny’s eye. ‘Don’t be surprised if it doesn’t … get you what you want from her.’

  Jonny felt every inch of his skin start to burn red. The sun was setting and he could only hope it was too dark for Nettie to see him blushing. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, his voice only squeaking a little bit.

  ‘Girls like that …’ Nettie started, but didn’t say what girls like that were like. All Jonny heard in her silence was ‘never look at boys like you’.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said again, more angrily this time and pedalled away from her, leaving Nettie to watch him go.

  ‘I have a very large nose,’ the Truth Teller said into the mirror. ‘And my forehead is greasy and will undoubtedly fill with acne as I grow older.’

  ‘Well, don’t tell people that,’ Jonny said, his tongue still tripping a little on the Truth Teller’s prongs.

  It stopped talking and looked at him sadly. Jonny wasn’t on a break, and he could only really hang around the bathroom for maybe another minute before Mr Finnegan would come knocking loudly, yelling that there were tables to clear.

  But Jonny had looked up from his crate of dirty dishes to see Annabelle Acklin and three of her friends come in to sit at a booth and drink milkshakes. Two of those friends were Virginia Watson and Edith Magee.

  The third was Marisa Channing.

  Jonny had bolted to the bathroom. In the small mirror, he’d tried to shape his unruly hair into something approaching normal, wiped stray mustard from his lips where he’d been stealing leftover French fries, and tried to calm his breathing to lower than hyperventilation.

  Then he’d taken the Truth Teller out of his pocket and popped it in his mouth.

  It wasn’t going particularly well.

  ‘I am afraid that the war will not end in time,’ it said, ‘and I will be shipped off to fight and I will die.’

  Jonny shifted from foot to foot. ‘Well, everyone’s afraid of that. Aren’t they?’

  ‘Mr Finnegan is about to knock,’ it said.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ Mr Finnegan said through the door, knocking on it with a hammer blow. ‘These tables won’t clear themselves.’

  Jonny took out the Truth Teller and shoved it back into his pocket. ‘I’ll be right out,’ he said.

  Jonny neared the booth where the girls were sitting. They were all drinking their milkshakes through straws over the tops of their Truth Tellers.

  ‘You really should hide your ears more with your hairstyle,’ Annabelle’s was saying to Edith Magee. ‘They stick out.’

  ‘I am afraid of you,’ Edith’s Truth Teller said. ‘I will do anything you say.’

  ‘Don’t I know it?’ Annabelle said with a smile. Then she saw Jonny. ‘What are you staring at?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he stammered, only realizing just then that he was staring. He held the crate of dirty dishes under one arm, but his free hand went into his pocket, reaching for his own Truth Teller.

  ‘You have a very large nose,’ Annabelle’s Truth Teller said before he could get to it.

  ‘And very oily skin,’ Virginia Watson’s said.

  ‘Are you not of the Jewish persuasion?’ Edith’s said.

  ‘And definitely German,’ Annabelle’s said. ‘With your cumbersome last name, you could be a traitor to this country.’

  ‘I’m not –’ Jonny started.

  ‘And how very short you are,’ Virginia’s said.

  ‘And ugly.’

  ‘And do you think those three hairs under your nose are a moustache?’

  ‘And no one knows who you are.’

  ‘And no one ever will.’

  Jonny turned and fled, the dishes in the crate jangling under his arm. He slammed them down on the counter in the kitchen.

  ‘Hey!’ Mr Finnegan shouted from the grill. ‘You break any of those, you’re replacing them out of your tips.’

  Jonny just breathed heavily for a moment. His only small consolation was that Marisa Channing’s Truth Teller hadn’t
said a word.

  But was that a good thing? Or was it the worst thing of all?

  ‘Two chocolate milkshakes,’ Jonny said, moments later, placing the drinks in the corner booth without making eye contact with the people sitting there.

  ‘He seems to be the only employee in this whole establishment,’ Nyssa said as she watched Jonny go, ‘aside from the proprietor.’

  ‘There is a war on,’ the Doctor said, sniffing his drink. ‘Just chocolate and milk and frozen cream.’ He took a sip. ‘Delicious.’

  ‘Doctor,’ Nyssa said, slightly impatiently. She was watching the booth of four girls two tables down. ‘You said they were in terrible danger.’

  The Doctor turned and followed her gaze. ‘And so they are. The Dipthodat are merciless. They hide in plain sight, lulling a planet into accepting them. And then …’

  He didn’t finish.

  ‘Oughtn’t we do something?’ Nyssa asked.

  ‘In time,’ the Doctor said. ‘We need to find out their source. Ah.’ The girls at the booth had risen as one. The Doctor didn’t stop drinking his milkshake as he watched them put on their summer coats and go laughing out of the front door. ‘Time to go,’ he said, taking a last slurp and moving to leave.

  He paused, then put down two dollars as a tip.

  ‘Didn’t it work?’ Nettie said, from underneath the car, a shiny new one, even though they were as rare as hen’s teeth in wartime.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jonny said, looking at the Truth Teller in his hand. ‘Sort of. I guess.’

  There was a pause in the clanking sounds Nettie was making. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

  Jonny didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.

  ‘Why do you like her, anyway?’ Nettie said. ‘Marisa Channing barely even knows you’re alive.’

  ‘She knows it a little more now.’

  Nettie scooted out from under the car. She had oil smudged on her cheek. ‘You got your own little Truth Session, didn’t you?’

  Again, Jonny answered by not answering. Nettie shook her head and rolled back underneath the car. He was visiting Nettie on his lunch-break the day after the unpleasantness at the Diner. He had to get back in a few minutes, but still he sat in the garage of the petrol station, the sun shining through the open door. The Truth Teller in his hand stared back up at him like it always did. Mournfully.

  ‘Where do these come from anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘Europe,’ Nettie said. ‘Or South America or something. Paul said he thought it was a chemical thing they were trying out for the war –’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ a voice boomed from the doorway, shadowing it suddenly. ‘What do we have here?’ It was Mr Acklin himself, suddenly looming. He stepped inside, his expensive coat billowing out behind him in the slight breeze.

  He wore a Truth Teller over his thin beard.

  ‘The town’s mixed-race girl working on your automobile,’ it said, sadly, ‘along with the town’s only Jew.’

  ‘The town’s only German Jew,’ Mr Acklin sneered, looking at Jonny. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Heftklammern?’

  And there it was. The two-ton weight of his last name. It had been the bane of his growing up. So undeniably German, especially with the rise of Mr Hitler, as if small, Jewish Jonny Heftklammern didn’t feel like enough of an outsider amongst the Protestant giants of Temperance, Maine.

  It wasn’t even a proper German name. His father’s father had immigrated just after World War I and, given that that was another war fought against Germany, had been advised to anglicize the family name upon arrival in the United States. This had originally been intended as simply changing Mueller to Miller, but starving and sleepless after a lengthy, awful sea journey, Grandpa Dietrich had quailed at the stern face of the immigration clerk. Unable to remember his long-practised speech about his name, he had glanced at the clerk’s desk and blurted out the first thing he saw.

  Heftklammern was the German word for ‘staples’.

  Mr Acklin shook his head, an unpleasant smile hovering above the Truth Teller. ‘How’s your mother, Miss Washington?’ he asked Nettie, who had scooted back out from underneath the car.

  ‘This is your car?’ was Nettie’s only answer.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Mr Acklin said. ‘Just bought it. And imagine my surprise to find the coloured daughter of a maid working on it.’

  Nettie got carefully to her feet and swallowed nervously, wrench still in her hand. Jonny felt a sudden flash in his stomach, surprised at how much he hated seeing Nettie look nervous.

  ‘It needs some work on the clutch –’ she started.

  ‘I wonder what the town would think if they knew who Mr Bacon had looking after its automobiles.’

  ‘They’ve been fine with it so far,’ Nettie said.

  Mr Acklin smiled. ‘Have they?’ he said. ‘Shall we find out for certain?’

  He took a sudden step towards her. She – angry, defiant, but still a foot shorter – stepped back. ‘Hey!’ Jonny said, leaping to his feet, and when he turned to look, saw Nettie stumble. She fell back against the pearly black paint of Mr Acklin’s car –

  The wrench in her hand scraping a curlicue dent all the way down the side as she fell.

  For a moment, there was nothing moving but the dust in the sunlight.

  Then Mr Acklin smiled. Again.

  ‘You’re going to pay for that,’ Mr Acklin said.

  His Truth Teller added, ‘I will make sure you never work here again.’

  ‘And that’s the truth,’ Mr Acklin finished. ‘You can’t argue with the truth, now, can you?’

  He left, again momentarily blocking the sun streaming through the open door, calling out Mr Bacon’s name.

  ‘He can’t do that,’ Jonny said. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘He can try,’ Nettie said, angrily. ‘And you know he’ll get his way.’ She picked up the wrench again and made to swing at the window of Mr Acklin’s car.

  ‘Don’t!’ Jonny said. Nettie stopped mid-swing. ‘He’ll only make you pay for the glass, too.’

  She dropped the wrench to her side, sighing. ‘What am I going to do now?’

  Jonny suddenly remembered the two dollars that someone had amazingly, bafflingly, left him as a tip the night before. He took it out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Take this.’

  Nettie frowned at him. ‘I don’t need your charity.’

  ‘Take it as a second payment,’ he said, holding up his Truth Teller.

  ‘That’s not the price we agreed –’

  ‘A loan, then.’ He still held out the money. ‘To pay for the dent.’

  Nettie grunted and then took it. ‘A loan.’ She looked out through the door. ‘But this isn’t over. Mr Bacon can’t just –’

  She stopped, because Mr Bacon – as if the sound of his own name had conjured him up – entered, Mr Acklin striding in behind him.

  ‘Nettie,’ Mr Bacon said, and the look on his face was all the news anyone needed.

  A bell rang at the door of Mrs Acklin’s shop. She stood up from behind the counter, the smile on her face freezing as she saw the very oddly dressed man and woman coming through. Then she got a shrewd look. Maybe other women would like to wear trousers. Maybe it was something she could sell to these –

  ‘Are you the proprietress?’ the man asked.

  Good Lord, was that celery he was wearing on his lapel?

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Acklin.

  ‘Then I wonder if you could tell me where you found these, exactly?’

  He held out his hand. In it were four Truth Tellers, including one she recognized as her daughter Annabelle’s. She looked back up at him, fearfully.

  Then she started to scream.

  Jonny kept waiting for her to cry. Crying he was used to. His mother cried a lot, especially when she got a letter from his father, though that was mostly from an all-consuming relief that his father could write letters and hadn’t been eaten by the war over in Europe.

  He’d also see
n a lot of crying around the town, as that same war claimed husbands and sons, brothers and boyfriends. He’d seen Nettie’s mom cry when her brother, Nettie’s Uncle Paul, had shipped out for a second tour at the beginning of the summer, and seen her cry again when she shared news of him with his own mom during their sewing sessions.

  He’d never seen Nettie cry, though. Not even when Paul left.

  And she wasn’t doing it now either.

  Well, not really.

  ‘I’m going to kill him,’ she said, for the hundredth time. ‘I’m going to take that wrench and I’m going to knock those racist brains out of the back of his head.’

  She took a sip from the soda bottle Jonny had sneaked out from the Diner to share after his evening shift was over. He needed to get home; he’d worked all day and was beyond tired, and it was dark, and tomorrow was another day where he’d do the same all over again. But instead, he was sitting on the bus-stop bench across the street from the biggest house in town. Owned, of course, by the Acklins. The one they’d built right in the middle of a war, which seemed almost criminal.

  ‘People would probably appreciate it,’ Jonny said. ‘But then you’d go to jail.’

  ‘At least I wouldn’t have to pay for food there,’ she said, bitterly.

  ‘He can’t do it,’ Jonny said. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I’ll tell Mr Bacon, and I’m sure in a couple of days –’

  ‘If you do, Acklin might decide he doesn’t like Jews much either,’ Nettie said, almost calmly. ‘Your mom needs that job.’

  ‘And you need yours,’ Jonny said. ‘We’ll figure something out. I promise.’

  ‘Oh, you promise, do you?’ she said, but the sarcasm was light and when he looked at her, her eyes were shining wet in the moonlight. When she saw him notice, she wiped them hurriedly with the back of her sleeve. ‘What am I going to tell my mom? What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’ll figure something out,’ Jonny said again. ‘I mean it.’

  Nettie looked at him. ‘I know you mean it,’ she said, quietly. ‘You always mean it.’

  And the way she said it made that sound like a very good thing. He looked at her now, turning her face away from him, taking another drink from the soda bottle. I only like you as a friend, his Truth Teller had said, and neither he nor Nettie had challenged that at all.