The Big Lie
Authors: Julie Mayhew
Contents
LSO
B
Y
J
ULIE
M
AYHEW
Red Ink
To Alicia
‘
It was no excuse to be young.
’
— Traudl Junge
I am a good girl. It is my most defining feature. And that’s the truth.
If you’d asked anyone on Lincoln Drive or at the elite school, they’d have told you.
Jessika Keller?
Oh, she is a superior girl, upstanding, immaculate.
Then they would have told you how good I was at ice skating, but that’s a whole different kind of ‘good’. To land an axel jump you have to transform yourself, become all steely eyed and mad-headed and fuck-you and …
Now you’re questioning the whole good girl thing, aren’t you?
Because I used a swear word. Because that’s what you people do, I’m told. You question EVERYTHING. Just because you can. Because it’s right there in the laws of your land. But is there nothing you’d greet with a simple,
Yeah, okay, fine?
What if the love of your friends depended upon it? The love of your family?
Would you tell a lie? People who are good don’t lie, but a good person might, quite reasonably, leave out something that they didn’t realise was really very crucial to everyone else. That isn’t a lie. But it can be as bad as telling a lie, I have come to understand.
Anyway, forget the swearing – it means nothing. I said that I was good. I never said that I was soft and sweet; there’s a very big distinction.
Let’s rephrase. I always did the right thing, didn’t consider the alternatives. Before Clementine, I didn’t realise there were any other alternatives. I swear on Wolf’s life – not something I do lightly, because Wolf is one ancient and arthritic dog and he doesn’t need any of my empty promises helping him along. At least, he was about to die the last time I saw him. Maybe he’s gone and done it while I’ve been away.
I know how this should continue. You have questions, and I must answer them. So I suppose I should let you know: when it comes to answering questions, I’m also very good at that.
Straight after it happened, I was taken into a small meeting room along one of the marble-floored corridors at the grand hotel on Trafalgar Square – the hotel we’d been using as a base. The room was carpeted, air-conditioned, air-freshened; out in the reception lobby it was hot, the atmosphere crackling with static. The boys were starting to smell ripe and muddy. The girls stank too – sour, like fish. We were inside a terrifying balloon – that’s what it felt like – a balloon positioned beneath someone’s foot.
The meeting room wasn’t big enough for all three of us – me, Fisher and the man I was surprised to see waiting in there already. A tall man – broad, really, really large and …
Okay, he was fat.
There. I’ve thought it and now I’ve said it. He was fat – an enormous, pregnant Hausfrau of a man. Herr Five-sausages- and-all-the-chips!
That’s how you do it, isn’t it? You let the thought fly into your mind and then fly right out again, via your mouth. Crazy. Before, I would never even have noticed that he was fat. Or if I had, just for one minute, I would have immediately decided that I was wrong.
The fat man was wearing a beige raincoat, even though it was August. There was a huge brown sweat patch beneath his arm when he saluted, the edges of it salty and white. I wasn’t introduced to him by name. He was something to do with the HJ, I told myself; someone we hadn’t come across yet since the Great Integration. We knew all the boys in the Kameradschaft, the local colony of HJ boys that had joined our Mädelschaft, our fellowship of girls in the Bund Deutscher Mädel. We knew them from the next door elite school and from around the neighbourhood. And we knew one of the HJ leaders, a short, moustached man called Dirk who was forever picking his shorts out of his small, flat bottom.
And we knew Fisher.
Fisher smiled, put his hand gently in the middle of my back and guided me towards the table. This was reassuring, but startling, because they weren’t allowed to touch us. It wasn’t proper. Spoilt the milk. Our BDM leader, Fräulein Eberhardt, her hair always piled up like a squashed plum pudding, never touched us. Even if we were sobbing. Not that I would ever have let Fräulein Eberhardt see me sobbing. Maybe if one of us had blood gushing from a severed artery she would have made some sort of physical contact. (
Apply direct pressure to the wound with fingers or a cloth until a sterile dressing becomes available.
) Though I would have done my very best to hide that kind of weakness from Fräulein Eberhardt too.
I sat down. The fat man stared, giving me no clues about the way he felt. Maybe he was lost in thought, dreaming of big, greasy broilers, oozing with gravy, swimming in Fritten …
Fisher sat down opposite. He looked me in the eye.
That was the thing about Fisher – his eyes. I know this isn’t something you normally ever notice about a person. If I asked you the colour of your best friend’s eyes, you’d really have to think about it. (Clementine’s? Green. I think.) But with Fisher you couldn’t not notice. He put his eyes on you and –
kaboom!
– there they were, bright blue, like coloured glass, spokes of navy fireworking through them.
Angelika Baker always believed that I had a crush on Fisher, right from the start. She based this assumption solely on the fact that I had got used to the relaxation of our leaders’ titles while the others had not. They insisted on calling Fisher ‘
Herr Fisher
’ when he had expressly told them that the Great Integration called for less formality. I challenged Angelika on this piece of shoddy evidence when the rumours began and she said it wasn’t WHAT I called him but HOW I said it. She claimed that when I spoke to him my voice went ‘all frothy’.
I wouldn’t even know how to be frothy. Angelika understood nothing.
‘Fräulein Keller, we commend your quick actions at the concert today.’
‘Thank you, Fisher,’ I replied, gulping back my relief. There was no wobble in my voice though, no teardrop on my cheek. I was very proud of myself. Proud of us both, in fact, for putting on this polished performance. I snatched a glance at the fat man to see if he too was thankful for what I’d done. His face gave me nothing.
‘And what do you think happened?’ This was Fisher’s next question.
I began to shake.
‘In your own time, Fräulein Keller.’
I cleared my throat, straightened my back, looked into Fisher’s freaky hypno-eyes. The fat man shifted against the wall to make clear my answer was going to be very,
very
important. He nudged the portrait of Herr Dean into a wonky angle.
‘What happened was,’ I began, ‘that the mixture of polyester and cotton in our uniforms proved to be a volatile combination in the circumstances.’
Silence.
Both men wanted more.
‘And that’s because,’ I went on, knowing I must try my hardest to whack this ball out of the field, ‘manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard.’
My last sentence was word-for-word what Fisher had taught us from the official papers. It was a reply worthy of a round of applause. I watched Fisher and the man exchange a brief look, a tiny gesture that contained within it all the things in the world I did not know.
What I wouldn’t have given to be back in the hotel reception, with my smelly friends, being drilled on how to manage crowds and break up fights and apply pressure to an open wound until a suitable dressing becomes available. What I wouldn’t have given to have taken hold of the hand GG had offered me earlier as comfort. It could have been my last chance.
Fisher put his elbows onto the table and leant in.
‘No, Fräulein Keller,’ he said calmly. ‘I mean what do you think about what happened?’
The emphasis was on the words ‘you’ and ‘think’. Which was unheard of. Terrifying.
‘I’m not in any trouble, am I?’ I blurted. The word had been flying around above us.
Trouble.
But it was so stupid of me to bring that bird down, lay it onto the table. I wanted to shrink to the size of my little sister Lilli so I could climb inside the gigantic green vase sitting in the corner. I am the sort of person who does not get into trouble. Just like I am the sort of person who does not lie. Though in recounting this to you, I realise I have already told you a lie. Or at least I have left out something that you might think is really quite crucial: I didn’t need to be introduced to the fat man because I knew who he was already.
‘No. Fräulein Keller,’ Fisher went on, ‘you’re not in any trouble. Whatever you say to us is in complete confidence.’
And it was only then that I noticed he wasn’t calling me Jessika. Or Jess. Or Jessie.
Not, mein kleiner sü
β
er Singvogel. My sweet little Jay-Jay.
I looked at the fat man again. I wanted a clue, just the smallest indication of what I was supposed to say. Because I would say it, I realised, if it would make everything okay.
‘Could you repeat the question, please?’
‘I want to know what your thoughts are on the incident,’ Fisher said. ‘Tell me what you think Fräulein Hart was trying to do.’
‘My thoughts?’ Emphasis on both words. Such a bizarre combination.
‘Yes, Fräulein Keller, why did Fräulein Hart do what she did?’
Of course I knew what I was NOT supposed to say – that Fräulein Hart felt this country had been stolen, invaded, way back even before she was born, and that all she was trying to do, in her own extreme, and perhaps misguided, style, was to win it back.
I knew I mustn’t say that.
So where did it all begin? That’s your first, obvious question.
2002. When I was seven. The year I was given Clementine. My new best friend.
This was also the year I was given a little sister, though she arrived with much less fanfare. All of sudden there was Lilli, crying and stinking and hanging off Mum’s apron strap like an overgrown tick. I was far too busy trying to understand exactly where babies came from to even begin to appreciate Lilli’s fine qualities.
My big sister, Katrin, meanwhile, was eleven and destined NEVER to recognise my fine qualities. She was too busy trying to prove she was better than me. Bigger, brighter, better. She did this to avoid facing up to the real objects of her fury – our parents. How DARE they bring another child into the world after creating the wondrous and flawless creation that is Katrin Eva Keller! I was nothing but evidence of our parents’ betrayal and I had to be destroyed.
Katrin’s means of doing this …? Athletics.
By the age of seven, I had been made to stand in the rain and watch her be better than me FAR too many times to count. Perhaps she was also trying to kill me slowly with boredom. Off she would go, body scissoring, muscles rippling, her mouth snarling, a perfectly enjoyable hundred-metre sprint turned into a jerky, vomity display of frustration by having all those hurdles in the way. The mental fuel powering Katrin over the finishing line – I am absolutely sure of this – was the same words over and over again:
Jess must die! Jess must die!
I didn’t care. Better that she tried to outdo me by murdering those hurdles than take me down to the bottom of the garden and shove me into the fast-flowing river beyond the tree swing. But without Katrin as a friend, I admit, I was lost for company. It’s hard to be a leader when there is no one there to lead, to be a hero with no one there to do the worshipping. I was desperate to start school and enlist some troops.
So on that day when I helped Dad fix his motorbike in the garage (holding the spanners, passing him rags, depositing drips of oil where directed – all done under a cloud of gloom, his and mine, because I wasn’t really enjoying myself and because he was only enduring my clumsy efforts in the name of my mechanical education) my face lit up like the New Year sky when he said, ‘Good news, Jessie, we have fresh neighbours moving in soon.’
I had been sad when the Andersons and their five sons had gone. Not because I played with the boys – they were all older than me – but when they left, the house next door went from being warm and flowering, to wide-eyed and silent overnight. It was spooky.
Then Dad said, ‘This new family, they have a little girl exactly the same age as you.’
More firework celebrations across my face.
‘And she is called Clementine.’
I tried out the shape of this strange name.
Cle-men-tine.
‘Like the fruit?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Dad. ‘Like the fruit.’
I immediately dropped my spanners and headed for next door’s front lawn to wait for her. I waited until sunset.
Nothing.
Mum wandered over, carrying a sore-faced Lilli.
‘What are you doing, Jessa, sweetheart?’ she asked.
Lilli glared at me because she, in return, had not yet come to appreciate my fine qualities as a big sister.
‘I’m waiting for my new friend,’ I told her.
I had made a daisy chain that could loop around my neck four times over, a matching bracelet, a headdress, an anklet for each leg … I was running out of ideas. I looked up at Mum. I was a flower queen with no parade to attend.
‘Oh, lovie.’ Mum was laugh-talking. ‘They’re not coming until Friday.’
I hated this laugh-talking. I wasn’t being cute for her benefit.
‘Dad said they’d be here
soon
,’ I corrected.
‘Friday
is
soon,’ she said, smirking, and turned back to the house. Lilli twisted her neck to keep her eyes locked on me. Her head was a blonde fuzz back then. And it stayed blonde. Both me and Katrin went dark like Mum and Dad as soon as we turned three.
I tried to fathom how ‘five days away’ could equal ‘soon’ in anyone’s imagination. I didn’t understand then how things appear smaller as you become bigger – objects, rooms, time. Not fears though. Oddly, they only seem to grow.
I stuck my tongue out at Lilli and, for the first time, I made her smile.
When the Hart family finally arrived, stepping from the back of a large black car, blinking like tortoises waking from hibernation, I was at once on the pavement grabbing Clementine’s hand. I expected to welcome a small, round, orange child, perhaps even one of those deranged redheads you only ever hear about in fairytales, but instead she was a white-haired will-o’-the-wisp in a pale lace dress. She was a ghost girl. I pulled her away from her parents, off into our back garden to throw balls for Wolf.
To begin with she was scared; Wolf’s nose and eyes drew level with hers. But when he started galumphing up and down the garden, dribbling and smiling, falling for our feigned throws, Clementine began to see that he was harmless. Soon she was giggling and throwing her arms around his neck. And mine. And it was then that I knew we were always, always going to be friends.
‘Are you named after a fruit?’ I asked her.
‘No, silly,’ she said. ‘I’m named after a pretty lady.’
And I thought she meant the one in the song.
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine …
As for Herr und Frau Hart, they were different people at the start. They were polite, smiling, eager to please. They’d invite me to stay for dinner after school. They’d ask me about my skating and congratulate me on my promotions within the ranks of the BDM. I think they liked having another person at the table, to make the numbers up. Just one child – it was very sad. Frau Hart had a little boy after Clementine, Dad said, but it wasn’t born right and had to be taken away. Frau Hart wasn’t allowed to have any more children. I suppose that was why she went and got herself a job, and why no one gave her too much of a hard time about it. Mum always said that when I left for skate camp she would have another baby, ‘to fill the nest’. To make sure she didn’t have to pay off the last quarter of her marriage loan, more like. Or to hold back the moment when Dad moved on to start a new family.
I cannot picture Mum with a big fat belly.
My parents made the Harts feel welcome. They invited them to our regular neighbourhood gatherings where we cooked food on the grill in the garden and set up a makeshift bar in the conservatory with a keg of beer, boxes of wine and jugs of juice. The Harts were grateful. My father worked with Clementine’s father. Dad had tipped off Herr Hart – the office’s lowly telephone engineer – about the house coming onto the market. We lived in Buckinghamshire, on Lincoln Drive – in a desirable estate of gated county roads. Houses changed hands even before the sign had gone up on the porch. The Administration occasionally moved underperforming families into vacant homes on the estate, so they could see how life should be lived. Good behaviour breeds good behaviour. These sub-families became like us – and very quickly too – so no one really ever knew who they were. The Harts were lucky to have slipped their way in, and to have snagged the house right next to us. We were Lincoln Drive’s – or rather, the whole of the County Roads Estate’s – most influential family.
The Harts were quiet to begin with, knew their place. At our gatherings, they positioned themselves at a table on the edge of the patio, looking down into their glasses. They always dressed well, they drank moderately. Soon they made friends. In fact, now I think about it, they went through a transformation of sorts. Miraculous. Quick. Because one moment they were the people on the edge, and the next they were the people in the middle. Yet I can’t quite remember how that happened. I suppose it was because they were unusual – different enough to be exciting, but enough like us to be accepted. They seemed younger than all the other parents, thinner and more urgent. Their lack of flesh was down to some kind of inner fire burning it all up. Herr Hart was born in Germany and had lived in Berlin for much of his life. He had the accent so that made him particularly glamorous.
But still, I can’t work it out, how we let them become so popular.