The Big Lie (10 page)

One of the stern-faced trainers – usually Bettina – stood at the side, shouting instructions. The training made Lilli’s muscles visible in her thighs and shoulders. It was hard to take your eyes off her. She was such a different creature from me. Blonder, leaner. The skating never really changed my body like the gymnastics did hers. I stayed soft.

Beneath one of the sets of practice bars was a large pit of broken foam shapes. The girls were expected to fall. It was encouraged. They didn’t want anyone developing a fear of the drop that would make them cautious. After a few swings, a few kips and beats, Lilli would throw herself into this foam pit, get swallowed up by it. Then she would swim her way back to the side. She would do this quite urgently, panicky almost.

On the way home after one practice session, Lilli told me: ‘If you slip down to the bottom of the foam pit you end up in China.’

I laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ She was furious with me. ‘Why are you laughing?’

‘Because it isn’t true,’ I told her.

‘Yes, it is,’ she spat. ‘Bettina said.’

‘Well, Bettina is pulling your leg!’

‘No, she isn’t!’ Lilli was almost breathing fire. ‘It’s true, Jess, I’m telling you!’

And nothing I could say would convince her otherwise. Bettina was a big, solid woman, a woman in charge, whose every word meant the world to Lilli. Bettina would never ever do anything as terrible as tell a lie.

Did I feel the same way about Ingrid?

Not exactly. I knew she didn’t lie to me, but I understood that she left things out. It was like when I marked a routine on the ice for the first time, just to get a feel for the pace and my position on the rink; I left gaps. In here will go the single lutz; in there, a double axel. Ingrid left spaces in her life. She never mentioned where she lived, who with, what she did when she wasn’t coaching. I never bumped into Ingrid in the outside world, caught her doing anything as normal as walking down the street. She was a half made-up person who existed at the rink, a ghost haunting the scene of her death.

But if I’m honest, I didn’t really want to see her anywhere else. If I witnessed that, I knew it would be sad. It was exactly like she had said herself: on the ice we are free. She was free. No rules, only wonderful secrets to help you fly. (
For an axel jump, get a good grip on the edge, don’t pre-rotate, then leap out, leap forward.
) The real world, when I left the door ajar, was a dangerous intruder.

I decided to ask Ingrid about Paragraph 175.

I watched her flow through a sequence of single and double axels, biding my time. Ingrid had never landed a triple in competition. Girls didn’t really do it when she skated, but it would be expected of me. I had managed it a few times in a pole harness, a giant fishing rod contraption that Ingrid held to keep me straight in the jump and stop me having a bone-crunching fall. Soon, like a baby bird jumping from the nest, I’d have to do it all by myself.

I loved watching Ingrid skate. I’d often pretend that I didn’t understand what I had to do so that she would huff and sigh and take off in one of those whip-smart demonstrations. All her jumps rotated to the right, whereas mine, like most other skaters’, went to the left, so her demonstrations were only useful to a point. We stepped onto opposite feet in everything we did, Ingrid and me. But that wasn’t what I was looking for when I watched her skate. I watched to understand her. I could see into all the gaps.

‘Your turn,’ she said, returning to the centre of the rink with pink in her cheeks and more air in her lungs. ‘I need to see that beautiful curve in your body on the landing,’ she said, taking hold of my arm and stretching it to show exactly what she wanted.

Then I asked what I wanted. ‘What’s Paragraph 175?’

Ingrid let go of me, as if I was a red-hot pan handle. The colour washed from her face.

I had known this was a question I could not ask my father. It was a question to ask someone as they stood very close to you, in the middle of an expanse of ice.

‘Well, off you go, then,’ she said. She wasn’t ignoring my question, just buying herself time to shape her words, to make them land as perfectly as I was about to.

I did as I was told, skated off, built up speed, switched to the backward edge, waited and kicked forward, whipping myself through the air. One and a half turns. I landed that single like a curved arrow shot from a bow. I went back to Ingrid for my answer.

‘It’s a rule,’ she said. ‘It’s a law.’ I felt the heavy placing of each word, like stones onto the ice. Stones that left dents. ‘It is a law that says men must not love one another.’

‘As friends?’ A genuine question. I was ready for the next jump.

‘Go again,’ she said. ‘A double now.’

Off I went, placed my feet as carefully as Ingrid had placed those words, but lighter, filling my leap with all the necessary desire. Two and a half turns – a double – again with that curve just as she’d wished. I spiralled back, knowing I’d earned my answer.

‘No, as lovers,’ she said, her voice low. ‘As sexual partners.’

‘But men can’t … How would they be able to …?’ I stopped.

A violin melody was whining from the tannoy. It sounded sarcastic somehow.

I saw the sadness in Ingrid’s expression. But was it for the men? The law? For the things I didn’t know? She kept her eyes on me, so much better at reading my mind than my father.

‘Ah, the feeling of a triple axel!’ she announced suddenly, her voice loud again, deliberate, as if we had an audience. ‘The feeling when it’s yours. I can’t imagine … Well, I can. I mean, I came close but … I wish I had … I wish I’d grabbed that joy with the both of my hands, do you know what I mean? Joy in whatever form it comes to you. Whatever the consequences …’

Her voice trailed off.

The violin climbed higher in place of her words – a strange, plastic imitation of a violin, making Ingrid sound genuine, crystal-sharp.

Consequences
.

‘Do you mean falling?’ I asked.

‘What’s falling?’ Ingrid replied with a silly shrug and a smile – a smile that I knew slotted into one of the gaps in her past.

We stood between the gap in the curtains in the room shared by GG’s three little brothers, hidden behind the nets, and we watched the strange people come and go from the Hart residence.

GG had decided what Frau Hart must be doing and why she was doing it – there was no way she would find another proper job after being sacked, and she had to earn money somehow. Our street wasn’t a cheap place to live – the salary of a telephone engineer wouldn’t be enough.

‘There are women going in there too,’ I said. ‘Do you think …?’

GG shrugged and blew noisy air through her lips, steaming up the window behind the net curtains. ‘Who knows? But bang go the house prices.’

We watched as a man in a beige raincoat walked up to the Harts’ door and knocked, before casting his gaze along the street. He was a tall man, broad, really large. He was fat.

‘Oh, good grief, look at the state of that one,’ I said.

‘Poor Frau Hart,’ said GG.

‘Do you think she’ll have to …?’

‘I really doubt you get to pick and choose in this game,’ GG said, as if she was an authority on the subject.

Then – PANIC! The fat man had seen us! It was as if our whispers had travelled through the double-glazing and across the street. He glanced up, right at our window. We dropped to the floor, our backs against the wall beneath the sill, giggling at our own sudden fear. We huddled together in our pants and bras.

‘Clementine’s in there,’ I said.

‘Tell me about it,’ said GG.

‘Do you think she can, you know, hear what’s going on?’

GG pulled a face. ‘Gross!’

It was GG who had come up with the plan for us to be there.

As we were both moving away after the summer, we wouldn’t get the opportunity to join the local Faith and Beauty group, like Angelika Baker and the rest. So GG asked the school if we could have a couple of afternoons a week off to set up our own ad hoc club.

‘Just to teach ourselves the essential skills before we go,’ GG told Fräulein Allis.

Fräulein Allis had questions of course. ‘And what will these “essential skills” be exactly, girls?’

She kept directing her questions to me, even though I wasn’t the one doing the talking. I was the one most likely to confess though, I suppose – to run from the room and tell her not to worry.

‘Oh, you know, the usual,’ GG cut in. There was barbed wire in her voice; I could hear it. ‘Just a bit of Familie, Kinder, Haus.’

Family, children, house.

Fräulein Allis paused, absorbing the words as if they’d been a curse. She wetted her painted lips. ‘Why do we always end up doing this, Gabi, huh? Doing battle like this.’

I looked to GG to understand what was going on. Her jaw was tense, her eyes shining. Was this a hangover from all of their arguments about GG’s smoking?

‘You know we’re fighting for the same side, don’t you?’ Fräulein Allis continued.

I shifted in the silence, willing GG to speak.

‘I don’t know what “side” you’re talking about,’ she said at last, her voice lacking its usual punch. ‘All we’re going to do is some embroidery. Knit socks for the boys in the barracks, write them love poems, that sort of thing.’

She gave Fräulein Allis a tight, painful smile. Our teacher sighed. I looked into Fräulein Allis’s spidery-lined eyes and wondered why no one had reported her for setting a bad example by wearing mascara. But also I was thinking that she was, just as she’d said, on our side. She had meant that.

Then GG added: ‘This is all Jessika’s father’s idea, so …’ And then the deal was done.

I was furious, of course.

‘Why did you say
that
!’ I squeaked on the walk home. ‘What if she goes and discusses this with my dad?’

‘She wouldn’t dare.’

‘But what if she just mentions it, in passing, at a parents’ evening or something?’ A panic attack was centimetres away, I could feel it. ‘Then what do I say to my dad when he comes and asks me?’

‘You tell him that we’re setting up an ad hoc Faith and Beauty group,’ she said, throwing an arm across my shoulder. ‘Because that’s exactly what we’re doing.’

I gathered together a stack of Mum’s embroidery patterns, some scraps of weaver’s cloth and a box of threads to take to school the following day. Then at GG’s oh-so-quiet house after lunch, when our mothers were off making chutney and singing ‘O, Women With German Hearts’
at the meeting hall
,
I spread the patterns across her dining-room table. GG grabbed the box of pins, opened it up and shook them free. She snapped the paper bands off a couple of bundles of fresh thread and unravelled them, willy-nilly.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Making it look convincing,’ she said.

She opened up the cupboard beneath their People’s Radio and dug out some half-finished embroideries still in their frames – one of some flowers, another of a what was maybe, possibly, a cat.

‘They’re Lindy’s,’ she said. ‘She was into all that.’

We stared down at the lopsided eyes of her older sister’s awful embroidery, tilting our heads to see if it looked better from another angle.

‘I never said she was any good at it.’ GG laughed. Then: ‘Come on, let’s go.’

‘Where?’ I asked. I had started to thread a needle.

‘Upstairs,’ she said. She was already out of the door and into the hallway.

‘But I thought you said that we were actually going to do this, sewing and knitting and stuff.’

‘Oh, come on, Jess,’ she said. ‘Don’t play innocent.’

I am innocent
, I thought as I followed her up the stairs. Though I understand now that word can also mean naive. And certainly I was that.

We sat on the floor beneath the window and I told GG, ‘She’s gone a bit mad, you know, Clementine.’

The papers she’d given me were burning a hole in my wallpaper from their skirting board hiding place.

GG nodded. ‘Bet she’s gone properly cuckoo at home all day with nothing to do.’

‘I mean, she’s got into all these conspiracy theories,’ I said. I needed to talk to someone. I needed someone to make things straight.

‘What, the ones about the Americans?’ asked GG. ‘The ones about them having satellites that watch us?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Because if the Yanks were sitting up there with their binoculars, we would just wipe out New York in a second.’

‘I
know
!’ Repeating other people’s theories only made you sound like a believer yourself. ‘Not that theory!’

‘Which one, then?’ GG asked.

Deep breath. ‘The one about the Jews.’

Silence.

Then GG started chuckling. She let her cheek fall onto my bare shoulder. She grabbed hold of my knee.

‘Oh, god! Angelika Baker believes that one too!’ GG managed through her laughter.

‘Does she?’

‘Yeah, her mum is totally neurotic about it. She’s convinced Angelika that some of them are still hiding out, that they’ve all had their noses fixed and are passing themselves off as normal people.’ GG let the giggles take over for a moment. ‘She’s terrified that Angelika is going to pop her cherry with a piece of dirty Jewry and that’ll be it. Spoilt blood. Onto the scrap heap. Kaputt!’

‘No, no,’ I said, shaking my head again. ‘I meant the other theory.’

‘What’s that, then?’

‘The one about them all being killed.’

‘Oh, right.’ GG stopped laughing. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

We were both quiet for a moment. We stared at the half-built train set laid out on the floor of GG’s brothers’ room.

‘Do you think it matters if they were?’ I said. ‘Killed, I mean.’

I wanted to have this conversation. But at the same time I wanted to jump up from the floor and shake myself free of it. Why had I got myself into this madness? Believing every single silly thing that I heard.

‘Maybe if they really were so evil …’ GG shrugged.

‘They stole and lied, didn’t they?’

‘They killed and ate their own children,’ GG said.

Quiet again.

‘But that’s not what happened, is it?’ I said. ‘What Clementine says? That they were all murdered.’

‘No,’ said GG. ‘They all went to America. They all got sent there.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘How did they get there?’ I tried to make it sound like a reasonable question, not the one of a crazy person. ‘Because we didn’t have planes that could fly that far, back then, did we?’

‘They put them on boats.’ GG was using the voice she’d used with Fräulein Allis now. The one that said,
There you go, that’s the answer you want, isn’t it?

‘Right,’ I said.

GG was up on her knees. She poked her head over the windowsill again. I joined her. The fat man had gone – inside, we guessed. To get what he’d come for. The street was still. The flags on the poles at the front of both our and the Harts’ gardens were hanging as limp as teatowels. I thought that was it, that there would be nothing more to see and we were going to have to face the silence and my questions again. Then a bunched-up coat flew over the Harts’ high garden gate at the side of their house. Hands appeared at the top of the gate, arms next, a head, shoulders. A woman with dark curly hair who we’d seen go in through the front door earlier was swinging a leg over the fence. She was dressed really oddly, like a man, like someone from a play, maybe, in tight black trousers and a maroon polo neck. She jumped onto the path, fell onto her side and scrambled quickly to her feet. Then a bearded man in a scruffy T-shirt was pulling himself up over the gate, then another woman, and another man. They all waited until the last man was over, though he was urging them to go without him, and then they dashed away, off down the street.

‘Oh my god!’ we both gasped.

‘Do you think …?’ I asked, not really knowing what it was that I thought. An image shot through my mind – Clementine’s fingers curling into that defiant fist.
All my crimes are political.

‘They’re trying to leave without paying Frau Hart for the sex,’ GG said, utterly convinced.

‘What?’ I said, realising I was about to do it again, like I had with my father – say my line, perform my part. ‘No way!’ I gasped.

GG folded her arms and nodded. ‘Yep.’

We waited for more action from the street, but none came. We got to our feet. The show really was over.

‘Have you noticed how things get busy there on the afternoons when all the women are at the Frauenschaft meetings?’ GG said, rearranging the curtains before we left the room.

‘How do you know it isn’t like that on the afternoons when our mothers are about?’ I asked.

‘I don’t, I guess,’ she said. ‘It’s just the vibe I get.’

She made for the doorway and I found myself grabbing her hand and pinching it too tight.

‘Please don’t report it,’ I said. We both looked back instinctively to the window, to what might be going on in that house across the street. ‘Any of it,’ I added.

‘I wasn’t going to,’ she said.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘Because people in glass houses …’ said GG. But she didn’t finish her sentence.