The Big Lie (6 page)

My visits to GG’s house stopped.

I had proved that I was normal, and special. Staying away from GG, I understood in some fuzzy, indistinct way, would help me maintain this. I mustn’t let people get close to me. Only bad came of it.

I decided I should spend more time with my father. I was missing his good influence and excellent warnings. We had grown apart since the Jay Acker announcement and it was my fault. I intended to fix things.

One day after school I set out my papers and books on the dining room table, like the best bait in the most irresistible trap. There was a copy of
Deutschland: Damals und Heute,
which translates as
Germany: Then and Now,
and Dad’s
Pictorial History of the Kampf um Lebensraum 1938
–
1940,
which is a little more difficult to put into English.
The Battle for Habitat,
shall we say.
The Battle for Space.
Dad immediately got a sniff of something as soon as he came through the front door from work.

‘What have you got going on in there, Jessika?’ he asked as he hung up his beige raincoat.

‘Oh, just this controlled conditions essay to prepare for tomorrow,’ I sighed.

He came into the doorway. I read aloud the question as if it was the toughest challenge a girl would ever have to face.

‘Detail how the Nationalso‌zialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei achieved a successful resolution to the English government’s intrusion on Kampf um Lebensraum with Operation Seelöwe.’

As if he could have resisted. Off he went to the highest shelf of the bookcase, pulling out his treasured souvenir editions of the People’s Mail, all yellowing and thin, and the photo albums containing the pictures of Uropa Joachim – Great-Grandpa Joachim. We had a large, staged portrait of him wearing his green belted uniform with the eagle on his chest, and more casual shots too – Joachim lying back on a picnic blanket with a group of other sturdy-looking lads in Bavaria in the 1930s, Joachim standing in the doorway of a small terraced house in shirt and braces, his arm around a grinning young woman. This was his new girlfriend, Sally, the British woman who would become my great-grandmother.

My father and I began by discussing the lead-up to the liberation of the British Isles – the outrageous and insulting treaty that had to be avenged, the nine European States already capacitated. Then onto England’s systematic, yet indiscriminate, bombing of Germany. Dad opened up his photo history of Berlin. We were quiet as we took in the faces of the families picking through the rubble of their homes looking for their missing babies. We looked at the bodies laid out in the exhibition hall.

‘This was the turning point,’ Dad said. ‘We had a sacred wrath. We still do.’

I wrote that down.

Onto the air campaign where we redoubled our efforts. England relied on a flimsy system called radar – until our intelligence services liquidated those communication stations.

‘England was drowning in its own decadence,’ Dad told me, with a disgust so strong it was if he’d actually been there, felt it. Smelt it, even. ‘They knew they were defeated.’

He always used the term ‘they’ for the English, never ‘we’, unlike Herr Robertson in history class, who often aligned himself as English when describing the events of 1940.

‘Why are you doing that, sir?’ Ruby Heigl demanded.

‘Because my grandparents were English,’ he replied.

Of course, someone reported him, and he disappeared (back to teacher school for a reminder of our sacred wrath, I imagine) and he was replaced by Herr Manning. Everyone had presumed it was me who had dobbed him in, but it wasn’t. The way he talked only made me think of my great-grandmother Sally. Was she, an innocent young woman, responsible for the actions of her country?

We moved onto Winston Churchill – a man who had always seemed so unreal to me. He was someone I knew from the comedies on the People’s Television – some actor with cotton wool in his cheeks, a cigar in his mouth, woofing like a bulldog. How did someone as ridiculous as that commit so many horrors? How did he ever even get into power?

‘Not “ridiculous”, Jessika.
Dangerous
.’ Dad would always get terribly stern about this. ‘He was a charming monster. He took England’s schoolboys, sent them off on his renegade schemes and brought about their terrible early deaths. All the while, what was he doing?’

‘Drinking champagne, Dad.’

‘Bingo.’

The English troops began to collaborate, self-sabotaging, ignoring orders, desperate to save themselves. They ran from Dunkirk in any small boat they could find. Ground staff put anti-aircraft guns on the wobbliest of buildings. They removed barbed wire from the aircraft stations and deliberately went unarmed so German planes could land and refuel.

Then came the flood of all those unwanted people, those Untermenschen, into England, in their thousands. The natives were desperate for order. And it arrived, on 15
th
September 1940. An end to chaos. Members of the Wehrmacht and Schutzstaffel landed in Kent and Sussex and began the liberation, bringing about order and a system for getting rid of the uninvited. The men cheered, the women covered the faces of the German soldiers with thankful kisses, the children waved flags. Operation Seelöwe set the people free.

Dad loved all those documentaries about the evil of Churchill on the People’s Television. This was just what he needed. The colour was back in his cheeks, the fight in his belly. I knew it would revive him.

My next task was to revive Clementine.

‘She needs your help right now,’ Dad reminded me. This was true. I had turned in on myself. Self-absorption was a weakness and a total waste of my intellect. A disgusting decadence. I decided I must learn from what my forefathers had achieved over seventy years ago. I must look outward, perform a rescue. I would recharge Clementine’s heart. I rang her doorbell before school.

And there were screams coming from inside the house. Frau Hart’s screams.

I thought about turning and leaving, walking to school alone, but I made myself stay
. She needs your help right now.
Didn’t this only prove that I had returned to Clementine’s doorstep at exactly the right moment?

I put my finger on the bell again and held it there, so that a good, long buzz sounded through the house.
Pull yourself together, Frau Hart! Your daughter needs you! Answer the blasted door!

I heard Herr Hart’s voice coming from inside, rising above his wife’s wails and pushing them down. Clementine opened the door. Her eyes were puffy and red, the irises dishwater grey, not their usual piercing green. Those eyes stopped me from speaking. We stared at one another. It was this awful moment of reckoning, I realise now, though at the time I couldn’t have said what it was we were calculating or making even.

‘All ready for the essay today?’ I asked brightly, ignoring the strange whimpering sounds coming from further in the house. They were the sort of noises Wolf made when he wanted you to open a door.

‘Yes,’ Clementine said with no intonation at all.

Then Frau Hart was there, sprinting down the hallway, her hair even wilder than usual, dressed only in a nightshirt, which was soaked through with sweat, maybe snot and tears. The material had gone see-through and you could see the dark outline of her nipples. She grabbed Clementine’s arm and tried to pull her back into the house.

‘You can’t go!’ she sobbed. ‘You don’t have to go!’

Then Herr Hart was there, clamping his arms around his wife, trying to pull her away from his daughter, away from me. Because Frau Hart was staring at me, as if she wanted to literally rip my face off. I couldn’t help but think of those mad women we’d seen on the school visit to the asylum.

My job at this point should have been to shout out tips to Clementine’s father on how best to restrain her (
find a contact point and grasp, move to the side, keeping your head to their chest, then form a choking grip around the neck, jerk backwards
) but in the heat of the moment, my knowledge just wasn’t there. I said nothing. I watched him clumsily drag Frau Hart back into the house, kicking and yelling, not caring that she was showing the world how she wasn’t wearing underwear. It was brutal, what he did, but necessary. And, strangely, it also seemed very loving. It was nowhere near as terrifying as watching a dining room chair fly through the air and rebound off a cabinet with a jaw-aching crack.

Clementine had remained still during the whole performance. Head forwards. She hadn’t seen her mother flail a leg in the air and expose the dark place between her legs.

‘Shall we go?’ Clementine said briskly, pushing past me.

Frau Gross watched us from her living room window as we walked out into the cool spring air, up out of the cul-de-sac of Lincoln Drive, and down the cut that took us to the stream and the ditches. We said nothing. There was just the rustle of our backpacks, the riffing of the birds, a light breeze through the leaves. I could hear Clementine thinking; it was as loud as the whirring of a clock.

‘What’s up with your mum, then?’ I asked, lightly, as if Frau Hart had just been a little moody.

‘PMS,’ Clementine replied, not missing a beat.

She picked up her pace and I picked up mine, and then, noticing that I’d done this, Clementine slowed down to a crawl. So did I. Then she jolted into a march again. And I copied her.

Clementine started laughing. ‘God, Jess, you’re just such a sheep!’ And she carried on laughing. Harder now. I watched her until it became infectious and I had to join in. There we were, Jessika and Clementine, giggling away, back to how we used to be. But then Clementine’s laugh turned, and she was crying. Really crying. Big, heaving sobs. I’d never seen her properly cry before. It wasn’t something that Clementine did.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

Clementine kept walking, a plodding pace now. ‘Ask your fucking dad,’ she muttered. ‘Doesn’t he know the answer to everything?’

I managed not to be spiteful back. Envy could be a horrible, corrosive thing. Dad had taught me that. I had good, solid parents, the type of people who guided and protected me; Clementine did not. She was angry. Angry and jealous.

‘I’m here for you, Clem,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’

I put a hand on her shoulder, which she jerked away, as if it had stung her, or would infect her with something.

‘It’s all different now we’re not kids, isn’t it?’ Her voice trembled.

‘We are still children,’ I said, in an attempt to reassure her. In an attempt to reassure myself.

We carried on along the path through the wood, the sound of our footsteps changing under the canopy of trees. Then she told me.

‘I’ve got my date,’ she said. She pressed her teeth together. The pain of something stretched her mouth really wide. The tears were streaming down her face.

I could hear Angelika Baker’s righteous braying somewhere behind us. We both turned to see her there, a short distance away, arm in arm with Erica Warner. Michael Baxter and Karl Pfizer were kicking along in their wake.

We snapped our heads back around and Clementine wiped her face dry of tears. They would catch up with us in a moment.

‘Your date for what?’ I asked.

She took a few deep breaths, sighed them away, trying to get rid of the hiccups that had come with the crying.

‘For what, Clem?’

She didn’t want to say. Or she was cross that I hadn’t worked it out.

‘Tell me.’

Her features were swollen and quivering. She took her finger and she sliced it, hard, across her belly, the very lowest part, and then she sliced that finger back again in the opposite direction. A terrible X.

I watched Clem write her essay in history. She didn’t cry then, but she was twitchy and strange, as if there was a bomb in her pocket, seconds away from detonation. We had been told in English lessons never to say someone is ‘writing furiously’ because that is a cliché, but that was what Clementine did in that hour. I thought she might tear holes in the paper. Clementine didn’t usually take exam-condition lessons seriously. She’d look around the room, pull faces at the rest of us who actually cared about our education. But that day she wrote from the moment Herr Manning said, ‘Turn over your papers,’ and she kept on writing. Furiously. She was finished well before everyone else. She scraped her chair back, threw down her pen, walked out.

I did a terrible job. I couldn’t get all the information to hold together like it had around the table with Dad the night before. I’d get an A-minus at best.

As soon as we had finished our essays, we were to quietly leave the classroom, get changed and head off on a cross-country run. The route would take us out of the school grounds, around the playing fields and on through the park. We were meant to come back along the high street, past the lamppost where they hang the traitors, past the other school – which they made us do as an incentive to the children there, I think, so they knew what to aspire to – and then back to our own grounds. But I took a wrong turn.

I’d stayed to the end of the lesson, right up to the moment Herr Manning said, ‘Put down your pens.’ Almost everyone else had gone. Manda Darby was still there of course, because she was thick. We reckoned she only got her place at the elite school because her father was someone terrifying within the secret police. How on earth had he passed the medical? And how had she? You didn’t need a measuring calliper to know that giant Balto-Slav forehead of hers should have been put in the other school. Or on a fast train to Highpoint.

I was towards the back of the field of runners when I eventually set off. Most of the time there was no one to follow. I was distracted and dithered at the forks in the path. I hadn’t paid proper attention to the route when it had been explained. So when I suddenly saw GG ahead of me, her long, horse-rider thighs powering away in those white shorts, I was really very grateful. I did all I could to catch up. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why she was so far back in the group. She had finished her essay not long after Clementine and was usually pretty speedy at cross country, always beating the pants off Ruby Heigl. All I was thinking was how I would like to talk to GG about what had gone on that morning at Clementine’s house. GG would know how to blow a raspberry at it all, make my worries seem like nothing. But I was far too embarrassed to speak to her. It would mean explaining why I had stopped going to her house. I purposely hung back a little.