The Big Lie (11 page)

It began with things she would say in conversation. Awkward, stagey things. It was my mother’s turn to read a script – and hers sounded like it belonged to one of those awful dramas they put on the People’s Television in the afternoon. The ones where it doesn’t matter if they’re romances, horror or knockabout comedies, the ending is always the same – the hero is strong and does the right thing.

‘You know when you take Wolf for a walk …’ Mum said as we did the washing up one evening.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She had her rubber-gloved hands in the water. I was drying.

‘And you know you sometimes see mushrooms growing …’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you understand that there are good mushrooms and there are bad mushrooms, don’t you?’

‘I never pick mushrooms,’ I told her, taking my finished stack of dinner plates to the dresser. I came back to dry the dessert bowls.

‘No, no, I know you would never do that, but if you did …’

‘But I don’t. ‘

‘No, and I’m not saying that you would.’

‘So what are you trying to say?’

She stopped washing, rested her wrists on the edge of the sink and turned to look at me. We are alike, she and I – the same shape nose, the same colour eyes. I think she finds it easier to deal with Lilli, because Lilli is clearly a different person. But I am just a piece of Mum. She closed her eyes and bit her bottom lip. I waited for her to get to the point of this bizarre lecture on woodland foraging.

‘Are you talking about when we do the collecting for the health service?’

Mum looked down at her Marigold hands and shook her head.

‘Because I’m nearly always on chamomile. Sometimes birch leaves. We don’t do mushrooms. And if we do collect mushrooms for the Aid programme, then it’s the boys who get that job. They’ve had the better coaching, and no one wants to murder anyone’s granny by accidently picking a death cap.’

She was still looking down.

‘I could tell Fisher to give the girls a class on identifying mushrooms too, if you’re really that worried.’

‘Ask,’ she muttered.

‘What?’

‘You wouldn’t tell Fisher to do the class, you would request it.’

‘Yes, I didn’t mean …’

Then came a horrible wail from the back garden. Mum’s eyes sprang upwards, to the window.

‘Oh,
no
!’

I started snorting with laughter.

Lilli had been rolling around on the grass with Wolf. I could get quite jealous of her, all that time she had for mucking around. But then I would remember that she was going to turn eleven that month and the fun would end and the hard work would start, and then I’d feel bad for wanting to rob her of the time she had left.

Lilli was up on her feet, weeping, her shoulders hunched around her ears, her stomach spasming like she was about to chuck up. She’d rolled in one of Wolf’s turds, hidden in the grass, and they were getting sloppy in his old age. It was all through her hair and across her cheek.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Mum sighed, pulling up her rubber gloves. She was off, out the back door, focused now on cleaning up a whole other kind of mess.

Then came the book.

I went up to my bedroom after the BDM meeting the following evening and there she was, on my bedside cabinet – the deadly fierce yet deadly soft, good deutsche girl on the cover of
Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen,
nose in the air, thinking she’s better than everyone else. The sight of her stopped me like a downward strike to the brachial plexus. I picked up the book. It was definitely our family copy – Oma Davina’s name and the date were there on the first page – but it should have been in my little sister’s room. She was dutifully working through the section entitled ‘Examples From The Animal World’ and still had a number of excruciating chapters to go. I felt a pang of pity for Lilli. I believe it is entirely possible for a person to die of cringing and I was very lucky not to meet my early death while finishing that book. It’s written as a conversation between a mother and her daughter, but no mother and daughter I have ever met. Every other word is ‘mein Schätzchen’ or ‘mein Herzchen’ –
my sweetie-pie
this,
my little heart
that. Our mother always called a spade by the right name, and we certainly never talked to each other about where babies came from. As for love – I’d rather have been struck by lightning than have her try to explain it to me.

There was a bookmark in one of the later sections. Lilli was eager to get things over and done with, it seemed, and was motoring ahead. I opened it up – she’d reached the part where the daughter tells the mother some gossip about Anni, a girl who everyone is talking about because she’s only seventeen and has found herself – dun, dun,
dun
! – ‘with child’. The daughter is apparently ‘trembling like the aspen leaves’ about the whole thing. The mother’s response is not that her daughter should stop being a wet firework; instead she calmly explains how Anni’s child will have to be taken away and given to proper, deserving parents, which any daughter with half a brain would have worked out anyway. And then the mother offers up a moral to the whole sordid episode: ‘Two people must only indulge in each other if they are married.’

Indulge in each other.

I was back there, behind the curtains of the meeting hall, Fisher pushing the hard lump of his crotch into my belly. I was in GG’s bedroom, looking at the naked shape of her in the curtained afternoon light. I snapped the book shut.

This was Lilli’s doing, I decided. She was so desperate to avoid any more squirming that she had casually ‘lost’ the book in my room. That was the only possible explanation.

Then the phone trilled unexpectedly through the carpeted quiet of the house one afternoon after school. The phone NEVER rang at that time of day, when everyone knew there would only be me to answer it. My fingers trembled a little as I lifted the handset from its cradle. It could only be bad news.

‘Keller 74837?’ I said, trying to mimic my mother’s telephone voice.

There was huge sigh on the other end of the line, then, ‘Jess?’ It was a lead-heavy question.

‘Yes …’ I said.

‘It’s Katrin.’

A weird, confusing pause.

Katrin?

My big sister always called on a Sunday evening, with my father taking the handset first, then my mother, speaking until Katrin ran out of coins. I would then be regaled – in parent stereo – with her fantastic achievements until I was full-to-nauseous.

‘Yeah, I know it’s you, you … twonk,’ I grunted, wincing at the uselessness of my insult. I was off guard. I hadn’t recognised my big sister’s voice at all. I’d never spoken to her down a phone line before, had had no reason to. I was right. There must be something wrong. I was about to ask what that something was, but she spoke first.

‘So,’ she said, with another sigh. ‘What’s going on?’

She didn’t sound in trouble. She sounded as grumpy as always.

‘Nothing much,’ I said defensively. I buried the
why do you want to know?
that was bubbling beneath the surface. Was Katrin trying to be friendly? I couldn’t be entirely sure. It was all very peculiar. ‘How’s athletics camp?’ I asked, because I felt I had to, though I made it clear in the tone of my voice that I cared not one bit about her answer.

Katrin didn’t reply. There was a crackle and a clunk as my sister put a hand over the receiver. I got the muffled swirl of noise you hear when you put a seashell to your ear. She was saying something I couldn’t make out to a person there with her. The seashell came away.

‘Look, Jess, what do you want?’ she demanded. ‘I need to go.’

‘But you … But you called me,’ I fumbled.

‘Only because Mum told me to.’

‘Oh.’ Was Mum trying to get us to become friends? Wasn’t it all a bit late? ‘Right,’ I said.

‘So, what do you need to talk about?’ Katrin pressed, getting cross now.

‘Nothing,’ I bit back.

‘Well, fine!’ she snapped.

‘Fine!’ I echoed.

‘But I really do have to go.’

‘Well, go then!’ I yelled. ‘And you can …’

But I was shouting at the pay phone’s pips.

It was all leading up to this.

The following afternoon I walked in from school to find Mum sitting waiting for me in the hallway. She was wearing her good dress, her good shoes and her good wool coat. Outside, the needle was knocking twenty-four degrees.

‘Did someone die?’ I asked.

‘We’re going to the doctors,’ she replied. Her face was pale, her voice flat. She looked thin, all of a sudden.

‘Why?’ I dropped my bag. ‘Are you ill?’

I was going to take her hand, kneel beside her, do something, but she didn’t want that. She got up, swerved her hips around me and stalked off into the kitchen. Her gloves fell off her lap but she didn’t notice. They were her best ones, too – silvery grey with an embroidery cuff. The ones she wore to look respectable, rather than to keep warm.

‘Go to your room and re-plait your hair. We need to leave in five minutes,’ she instructed.

This was awful.

I picked up the gloves, placed them back on the chair and went upstairs to do as she said.

She was silent in the car, kept her eyes on the road. She wouldn’t answer my questions. My first was, ‘Is it serious?’ Followed by, ‘Does Dad know?’ And then, ‘Maybe we should have him come with us too, don’t you think?’ After a few moments searching for the right amount of courage, I eventually asked THE question: ‘Is it cancer?’

The only question she would answer was, ‘Where’s Lilli?’

‘She’s playing at Suki Franz’s house. No need to worry about her.’

I couldn’t get anything from Mum in the waiting room. Respectable people do not discuss their ailments within the earshot of others. It was talk enough that we were there in the first place. Though logic runs that the other people in the waiting room were there for some weakness too, so if they wanted to go and blabber about it they’d only be shaming themselves. And anyway, we used a different doctor to most of my friends. A better one.

Mum thrust a copy of
Das Deutsche Mädel
into my hands, one I already had at home. The front cover showed the Faith and Beauty girls from the birthday celebrations in April, an aerial shot of the culmination of their dance – WIR GEHÖREN DIR – which now only made me think of SS stiffies.

I was obedient. I flipped open the magazine and tried to read. There was an article about Jay Acker’s upcoming visit that I hadn’t bothered to finish in my copy at home.

It would not be a surprise if the boy requests asylum from his own brutal nation after seeing the freedoms of the Greater German Reich
, read one enboldened paragraph. Some of the Faith and Beauty girls had been photographed for the piece too, with their opinions printed underneath.

I think that this is his true home really
, said Anneka.

This will be like a homecoming for him
, said Frida.

Blah blah blah blah blah something-something repetition-of-the-word-home
, said robot-eyed Jenny.

I slapped the magazine shut. I was starting to think like Clementine. In the article, Jay Acker had explained, in
German
how thrilled he was to be visiting our nation. The writer had been very keen to emphasise that there was no interpreter, no translator, yet there was also no explanation of how he came to speak our language so fluently. The inspirational quotation on the wall of the BDM meeting hall that week had been:
EVERYTHING
IS
GERMAN
THAT
BELONGS
TO
GERMAN
HISTORY
,
IN
WHOM
GERMAN
BLOOD
FLOWS
,
WHO
SPEAKS
THE
GERMAN
LANGUAGE
.
Coincidence?
Asked the voice in my head. Not Clementine’s voice any more, my voice.

Mother had not picked up a copy of
Frauen Warte
for herself
.
She stared straight ahead. I had pretty much decided she was definitely, certainly going to die. The doctor would break the terrible news to me. He’d explain how I was the woman of the house now and must give up my place at skate camp to become my little sister’s new mother. I would have to take on this information without crying, because both my mother and the doctor would be expecting great strength. I would need to be like the good deutsche girl on the cover of
Mädel von Heute, Mütter von Morgen
. Chin up, eyes to the sky.

‘Fräulein Keller!’

The sound of my name sent an electric shock through my entire body. We stood, my mother and I, and it was only when the door of Dr Hardy’s office was shut behind us that I realised I still had the surgery’s copy of
Das Deutsche Mädel
in my hands – rolled up tightly, as if ready to use as a weapon.

The last time I had been in Dr Hardy’s room was for a damaged tendon in my arm, an injury I’d picked up skating, which Ingrid had initially suspected was a break. That was a couple of years ago. Dr Hardy had got a lot more beardy since then. I wondered how he thought I had changed. Did I seem mature enough to become the new Commander in Chief of my mother’s kitchen?

He gestured for us both to sit. We did. He cleared his throat.

‘And what can I help you with today?’ he asked.

He was staring right at me, wearing just half of his smile.

I opened my mouth, closed it. It felt like Katrin’s phone call all over again. I slowly shook my head and looked to my mother.

She cleared her throat. ‘I believe, doctor – and I’m sure that my husband and I can rely on your complete confidence in this matter …’

She paused so Dr Hardy could give her a nod – his signature on this particular deal. Her voice was strange, like polished metal. ‘You see, my daughter requires medication of some sort. A cure for … Well, she has some misplaced attentions, and I have been reliably informed that a course of hormone injections is all that is required to correct this … this …’ Her eyes went wide as she fished around for the right word, any word except THE word. And I realised I had got my mother all wrong. She did not call a spade by the right name after all.