The Big Lie (16 page)

‘
Hamlet
,’ I croaked.

‘Me,’ she replied. ‘Us. We don’t have to tell them everything.’

The night before Dad went away, we all sat together watching a programme about the Reich’s supercomputers. Mum and Dad were sitting on the sofa, Lilli and I were on the rug. A camera panned along banks of black towers humming quietly to one another. Then it went in close on a sleek, flat touch-screen. A man in a white coat was being interviewed about what we were seeing. The men always wore white coats on those programmes, whether they were experts on the space programme or an authority on how women could make their houses cleaner.

Trust me,
said the coat,
I’m a scientist
.

‘Our great nation has the fastest computers in the known world,’ said the man. (Clementine’s voice: ‘But they might have MUCH faster computers in Russia, or Japan, or America.’) ‘They enable us to do almost everything, from predicting the weather accurately …’ he gave a little grin at this, as if a bit of rain was the most ridiculously trivial thing for a supercomputer to be worrying about. ‘… to creating weapon simulations that ensure Germany is the safest and most formidable country on Earth.’

The camera moved across a panel of men from the security services. Each one was sitting, focused, hypnotised, by the flickering monitor of a small, flat computer that opened like a book. They were wearing headphones and listening in on ‘dangerous conversations’, though the white-coat man didn’t explain who these ‘dangerous conversations’ actually involved.

He didn’t need to, I suppose. Everyone knew that ‘dangerous conversations’ went on between evil terrorists with bombs in their briefcases. The camera went in close on one of the men’s screens to show a moving, jagged bar-code – a soundwave. This was a bad person’s voice in all its terrifying detail.

Lilli was suddenly up on her knees. ‘Look, Papi!’ she squealed. ‘You’ve got a computer like that one!’

‘No, I haven’t,’ said Dad.
Slam
. Like a door being shut in her face.

‘Oh,’ said Lilli.

I let my eyes slide from the screen to my sister. I watched her smile fade, her brow crease. She sat back on her heels.

The man in the white coat was saying how he was going to take the back off one of the computers now and show us its brain. I stayed watching Lilli though. I wanted to see what was going on in
her
brain. Which of her memories was winning the fight? Was it Dad all of those evenings, sitting in the dark of the dining room focused intently, hypnotised, by the flickering monitor of a small, flat computer that opened like a book? Was it the sensation of her little nail-bitten fingers, once or twice being allowed to touch its delicious keys? Or was it that moment – the one where Dad shot her down and told her she was wrong?

I guessed the last one. It packed quite a punch.

I looked back at the white-coat man. He’d pulled out the processor – a thing no bigger than a Curfew Mint – then from inside that he extracted something so tiny he had to hold it up to a microscope with a pair of tweezers. It looked like a robot spider.

‘This,’ said the man in the white coat, ‘is what’s doing all the work.’

He seemed terribly pleased with himself, and I think we were supposed to feel the same.

That day in the sun, Clementine had made me take home a stack of magazines.

‘I already have this one,’ I said, handing back the issue of
Das Deutsche Mädel
with the 20
th
April celebrations pictured on the front.

‘No, you don’t.’ She pushed it back towards my chest.

‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

‘No, you don’t.’

I opened my mouth to argue but, after our earlier admissions, I didn’t have the strength, or the authority. I took it.

When I got home, I left the stack of magazines on the chair in the hall while we ate dinner. Dad ran through his list of questions for me, ticking boxes and making notes.

‘Is that all?’ he kept prodding. ‘You’re sure? Nothing else?’

Mum watched, slowly coming to the boil because Dad had brought paperwork to the meal table AGAIN. I was the one who felt the full steam of her annoyance though, once we’d finished eating. It had to come out somehow.

‘Er, excuse me, young lady, do these magazines live in the hall?’

Off we went.

‘Do you think I was put on this earth to trail around after you, putting away your things? Do you think I enjoy it?’

It was best never to answer these questions, even with a shake of the head.

‘I suppose you think that I have nothing better to do than tidy up!’

The vein at her right temple began to swell. I thought she might have a nosebleed.

‘Get these to your room. NOW.’

I grabbed the magazines. It took all of my restraint to go up the stairs without stomping.

‘Do you think I was put on this earth to trail around after you, putting away your things?’
YES,
I wanted to scream in her face.
ACTUALLY! That’s all you do. Tidy away! Tidy away Dad’s things! Tidy away me!

I tossed the magazines onto my bed and, with my restraint all used up, I slammed the door behind me. I flopped onto the floor and tipped my head back against the bed, smacking it against the duvet a few times until my neck hurt. That was what made the Hitler’s birthday edition of
Das Deutsche Mädel
slip from the top of the pile, slide over my shoulder and spill onto the carpet. It fell open on a large picture of a girl. A terrifying girl. I jumped to my feet. I had read this magazine – at home and in the doctor’s waiting room. I knew it front-to-back. There was definitely no picture of any terrifying girl.

I crept forward, crouched over the magazine and flipped it back to its cover. Yes, this was
Das Deutsche Mädel.
Yes, this was the Hitler’s birthday edition
.
I turned back to the page with the girl. She was one of the most in-demand celebrities of our time, the piece said. She was a singer, though the interviewer didn’t ask her very much at all about music or songs. They wanted to know what she thought about money and what kind of boy she ‘fancied’ and which part of her body she liked best. I couldn’t imagine she liked anything about her disgusting self. She had nails like claws and metal through the tops of her ears. There were things drawn on her arms, and her lips were as red as blood. Her short hair was two different colours. Black underneath, blonde on top.

I turned the page, to a cluster of smaller pictures of the girl. In one she was wearing a bikini like Clementine’s. In another picture she was basically naked, covered only in a net-curtain dress that didn’t conceal the sides of her breasts. She was offensively thin.

I threw the magazine across the room – because it was dirty, because I could almost feel the cancer crawling across my hands. I sat staring at the thing. It was a dead rat, one of Wolf’s turds – something I didn’t want to have to deal with. On the cover, the Faith and Beauty girls were still there spelling out WIR GEHÖREN DIR, completely unaware that there was a grotesque, alien girl inside their pages telling me I should just ‘
Get out there, live without regret, do it!’

Whatever ‘it’ was.

I crawled on my hands and knees back to the magazine. Using the very tips of my fingers, I opened it up again. There was a page of letters from readers, decorated with images of two different starving women. Neither of them had many clothes on. One was pulling down the waistband of a pair of too-tight trousers, as if to show us how painful they were, though there were no marks on her skin to back her up – her belly was weirdly smooth. The other shocking woman had a garland of flowers in her hair and no top. The words
I
AM
FREE
were painted across her naked breasts.

I carried on reading, though I knew I shouldn’t. I had to figure it out. Clementine wanted me to have this. There must be something I was supposed to understand. I went through the readers’ letters on the page. What were ‘sex tapes’? What were ‘plus-sizes’? What did Clementine want me to grasp from all this?

I tried the next page – a man wearing just a pair of pants was kissing the shoulder of an arrogant girl in a fluffy black dress. Further on, another man in just his pants, this time for a medical article. Arrows pointed to the parts of his body that scientists say should be touched to increase blood flow to the penis. I thought of Fisher, that he seemed to know where to put his hands on me without the help of any magazine. Or maybe there was a corresponding edition with instructions for men? A gentle throb started up between my legs at the thought of it. I quickly turned the page. Here was an article about a terrible ‘crime’ illustrated with pictures of Untermenschen with brown skin and fat noses shouting and holding up signs.
I
AM
A
GIRL
NOT
A
BODY
TO
BE
USED
said one banner. Yet the terrible ‘crime’ had not been committed by these awful people, the crime had been done AGAINST one of them. A rape. What Commie bastards do to nice German girls.

I went over to the skirting board and pulled out Clementine’s notes. There was the word again.

It was the first time I had ever really thought about what the word actually meant. Before, it had just been a word. A vague idea.

We travelled into London for rehearsals every day during that final week. I was instructed to shift my skating practice forward to 4 a.m. so I could be at the station with the others to catch a train at 6.30 a.m. Ingrid was furious.

‘If I’m to teach all the little ones right up until midnight, then when do I actually sleep?’

Just like when Mum was fuming about something, I knew that it was best to keep quiet, be the punchbag.

‘All for a stupid boy,’ Ingrid muttered as she laced her boots, ‘who can’t even find a pair of trousers to fit.’

‘Is it, though?’ I asked her. There was something fake about her fury, like when a skater cheats by starting the rotation of a jump on the ice. That’s much easier than doing it for real in the air.

‘Is it what?’ Ingrid arranged her knitted warmers over the top of her laces and hooked them under the heel.

‘Is it just a boy, though? Is it just a concert?’ I looked over Ingrid’s shoulder to make sure we were alone, that the man who drives the ice resurfacer had left to take his morning tea. Ingrid followed my gaze and did the same check. I lowered my voice. ‘Or is this them doing their hardest to control something they just can’t control?’

Ingrid gave a painful sigh, closed her eyes. ‘Probably,’ she whispered. ‘But let me tell you …’ She was up then and stepping past me. ‘I am far too old to be getting my hopes up.’

I watched her take to the ice, launch into great swirls of backward crossovers that I could see were cooling her down just as much as they were warming her up.

While Ingrid wanted to know when she might sleep, I wanted to know when I was supposed to eat. For my breakfast, I was forced to stuff some of Mum’s Zimtschnecken
rolls into the pockets of my BDM jacket and eat them on the train.

I had thought that these trips might be an opportunity to travel into London with Dad. I wanted to get a glimpse of his morning routine, of another version of him. Not the man we got at home, the other man. Perhaps the real one. But Dad was drafted to work from London 24/7 that final week. He packed a suitcase on the Friday, the morning after we sat together watching the television programme about the supercomputers, kissed us all goodbye and said he’d be back after the concert.

‘Where will you be staying?’ I asked.

‘At the office.’

‘With Herr Hart?’

‘Yes,’ said Dad. An uncomfortable yes.

I pictured my father rolling out his sleeping bag next to Clementine’s dad, on the floor of Fräulein Gruber’s office, wishing each other night-night before turning out the lights. In the battle inside your brain, often the made-up image is more powerful than anything else.

We didn’t sing.

There was excitement in the train carriage but it was regimented, scary. We’d been told too many times that all the world’s eyes were on us, that the images from the concert were being broadcast across the globe, that this was the first time we were letting those other, lesser nations get a glimpse of our beautiful Reich. Telling us this was meant to be motivating, to fill us with even more passion, but it only left us frozen.

At our last meeting, Fisher had opened up the knowledge section by asking: ‘Soldiers, what should you say if an American journalist asks you about living in the German Reich?’

Ruby Heigl’s hand flew up in the air. Of course it did. I think her question-answering reflex had developed in the womb, way ahead of any reflex to suck, cough or gag. But of course the question was entirely rhetorical. Fisher had the EXACT things that we should say to an American journalist if we got asked about living in the German Reich. They were written on the sheet of paper in front of him.

‘Let’s practise shall we, battalion?’

We recited back what Fisher read out to us. ‘
As youngsters we have been taught the value of camaraderie – and not just textbook theories, but in the thousand-fold experiences of our everyday lives.
’

The words felt weirdly familiar, lines from a school play that you’d been in ages ago and thought you must have forgotten.

That finished, we were informed that if we did come across someone claiming to be an American journalist, then they were on our soil illegally, because American journalists couldn’t be trusted to have access to our great nation and not abuse it by planting a bomb or something. Either that or they were lying about being an American journalist, so were probably a spy.

So, then, (asked nobody) when would we ever get to say our lines?

Fisher attempted to lift the fog of confusion by making us practise our restrain and detain techniques. We each took our turn in the middle of the circle, pretending to be an illegal/fake American journalist. I was chosen to go first – and I was lost. What did an illegal/fake American journalist in need of restraining actually look like? I decided to stand in the middle of the circle, tip my head back and scream. It may have been wrong but just like Ingrid’s series of workmanlike backward-crossovers, it made me feel better.