The Big Lie (18 page)

‘I WANT TO BE FREE,’ she screamed over the song. ‘BUT WE ARE NOT FREE.’

Jay Acker turned to look at her across the stage. He seemed puzzled for a moment, then beamed. He was pleased at the intrusion and because he was pleased, the crowd, lost in themselves, were pleased too. They cheered her on. But I couldn’t. Because now I understood what she was going to do. Had I always known, on some subconscious level? I could smell her – the stench of petrol.

We stayed on our Xs. We did as we were told. I alone was pinned there by the awful realisation of what I had done by keeping quiet, by the awful realisation that no matter what I did, I couldn’t truly save her.

‘WE ARE THE DEVIL. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF DEVILS,’ she screamed.

‘Yes,’ the crowd screamed back, not really understanding.

‘GERMANY AWAKE! DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!’ she cried to the heavens, a fist to the sky. The lights danced around her like colourful moths. She was irresistible.

‘DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!’ the crowd echoed. It was a phrase we knew and understood from one of our own songs. Historic. And here she was, changing that history.

She hollered her last words, borrowing them from Jay Acker’s song – ‘I AM LUMINOUS!’ she cried. ‘I WILL SHINE ON!’ – and then she flicked the wheel on the lighter in her hand. ‘Goodbye,’ she gasped. To me, for me. She did just as she promised. She said goodbye. Then the microphone dropped to the ground with a horrible clunk.

The fire ate her up. The flag, her skirt, her hair. The ticker tape dancing in the air became a swarm of fiery butterflies.

Clementine curled into the flames but she refused to fall.

Everyone just watched.

Like this wasn’t a person at all.

Like she was just the burning logs of a Sonnenwendfeuer on summer solstice eve.

Do you ever feel like you are not your body? That you are trapped inside of it? A soul, if you like. Though I’m not sure I believe in magic like that. You want to climb out of your skin, get a proper view of yourself. A proper view of reality. Or unreality. Because in that moment you can see that everything is just a construction. It’s all fake. But even though you want to leave your body behind, your greatest wish is to be reconnected with it. You want to be part of the world again. But you can’t do either of those things – leave or go back – because either way you’re trapped. Do you ever feel like that?

I left my X.

I didn’t make the decision to do it. I didn’t break the rule on purpose. My body moved without any conscious thought. A well-trained reflex.

I ran to the HJ boy holding Jay Acker’s jacket, snatched it from him, slid my arms inside, back to front, the hood over my face. All this happened in slow motion, though it could only have been seconds.
Manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard.
I ran towards the person on fire, kicked them hard on the backside, made the hungry fire spill onto the stage, then I threw myself on top.

LET THAT WHICH MUST DIE SINK AND ROT. WHAT HAS STRENGTH AND LIGHT WILL RISE AND BLAZE.

I lay there with the taste of petrol in my mouth, the fug of smoke in my lungs, triumph in my heart, until the fire went out.

I left my X.

I didn’t make the decision to do it. I didn’t break any rule on purpose. My body moved without any conscious thought. An instinct that can’t be taught. Love.

I ran to the HJ boy holding Jay Acker’s jacket, snatched it from him, slid my arms inside, back to front, the hood over my face. All this happened in slow motion, though it could only have been seconds.
Manmade fibres burn faster than natural fibres, but a combination of the two can be the greater hazard.
I ran to my friend on fire, my best friend, the only person I have every truly loved and kicked her hard on the backside, made her and the hungry fire spill onto the stage, then I threw myself on top.

THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT

O CURSÈD SPITE, THAT EVER I WAS BORN TO SET IT RIGHT.

I lay there. We were one, the taste of petrol in our mouths, the fug of smoke choking our lungs, something unquenchable in our hearts, until the fire went out.

I left my X.

They pulled me off her.

I don’t know who they were, I only felt them. I was blind. Someone slung me over their shoulder – a man definitely, a soldier maybe. I was carried at some speed back to the hotel, my body bouncing with each step.

‘Out of the way! Out of the fucking way!’

Once in the lobby, they prised open my eyelids and poured in drops that stung like hell.

‘It’s just the blast of the heat,’ said a voice. ‘Just the effects of the smoke.’

The world came back, smeary and unreal. Fuzzy, green explosions in the blackness first, which turned out to be the small, circular spotlights set into the lobby floor. Then I could make out pillars, chairs, feet, people, my Mädelschaft, our Kameradschaft. They had all retreated from the square to regroup.

‘Ugh!’ Ruby Heigl was all of a sudden in my face. ‘You know you have absolutely no eyelashes left.’ She spoke as if my swollen eyes were the worst thing she’d seen that day.

‘Do they hurt?’ she asked, a little quieter now, almost kindly I thought.

I couldn’t speak. I knew I would cry. I looked down at the dark putrid stains on my skirt and socks. I stank like burnt bacon. I nodded.

‘Well, you’re all right then,’ she snapped. ‘Because if it was a third-degree burn, you wouldn’t feel a thing.’

The Wehrmacht boys drew down the roller blinds in the reception lobby. Walls of glass became walls of fabric. This muffled the chaos outside but also made it louder somehow, because now our minds put images to the sounds instead. The blinds had been rushed – they hung at different lengths, just a centimetre here or there – so the pretty, bossy girl with the looping plaits came out from behind that huge sweep of a reception desk and made it her job to correct them. The day had been mangled beneath the wheels of a steamroller and there she was tying a ribbon around it all, thinking that would make everything fine.

Clementine’s voice was in my head: ‘It’s all window dressing, Jess, nothing but window dressing
.’

My sight had returned too late.

I didn’t see what they did with her. And I’m not talking about her body, an empty shell without a soul, but all of her. Because she was still alive. I heard her screaming – I’m sure I did – as I was carried away.

I was frantic to ask. Someone would know. GG would have seen. She was right next to me on the stage. But when she came over to my corner of the lobby, her face white with shock, I pushed her offered hand away.
Did you know?
Her eyes were asking.
Did you know this was going to happen?

I shook my head.

Then I was told to stand.

This would be my goodbye, I had started to believe.

I was taken away. To that small meeting room along the marble-floored corridor. With Fisher. With the fat man – the man I knew, yet didn’t.

I thought about asking them, before Fisher started his cross-examination.
Is Clementine going to be okay?
Because if my fate was already sealed, asking this could bring me no more harm. But I didn’t ask. Mainly because it was a really stupid question. Alive or dead, Clementine Hart was never going to be okay again.

The fat man quickly got impatient with Fisher’s questioning. His grilling of me had started well – persuasive, authoritative, no hint of any particular softness – but it went nowhere fast. The fat man huffed and puffed and readjusted his position against the wall. He must have known what Fisher was to me, to the Kellers. It was as if he expected him to fail,
wanted
him to, even. The fat man made the portrait of Herr Dean behind him scrape against the plasterboard. Fisher began to repeat himself and fumble. This was his chance to impress. This was the moment he’d been waiting for all his life – a great big crisis he could stand on top of, hands on hips, and demonstrate his brilliance. He was sliding down the side of it.

I tried to help him. And myself. ‘Shall I run through things exactly as they happened, Fisher, or …?’

The fat man planted his grip on Fisher’s shoulders. No words were needed. Fisher got up and the fat man dumped himself down opposite me in his place, the leather of the seat doing a fart as he did so. It made me want to laugh – even after everything – because what a relief it would have been to let go with a fit of hysterics. I wanted to gather together the Mädelschaft
and take them down to the basement toilets again and pull faces in the huge, gilt mirror, wearing silly hats made from the flannel hand towels. As if nothing had happened.

The fat man coughed phlegm from his big, barrelled lungs. Fisher took up a position by the door, his head hanging, like a puppy that had messed on the carpet.

‘Do you know who I am, Fräulein Keller?’ The fat man leant forwards on his elbows, so far forward that the heat of his breath was burning my sore eyelids.

Yes
, I wanted to say,
you are Frau Hart’s very best customer
, because GG’s story was much preferable to facing up to the real reason the fat man kept visiting Frau Hart and Clementine, why he was in our kitchen the evening after Frau Hart chopped down the flagpoles, why the Harts had been moved into the house next to ours in the first place. Believing that he was a sweaty, sex-hungry brothel-goer, that Frau Hart was an asocial prostitute, was so much nicer than reality.

‘Yes,’ I said to the fat man. ‘You are Herr Hoffmann. You work for my father.’

‘So let’s get everything straight before he gets here, shall we?’ He opened his eyes wide.
Okay, little girl?
I was beginning to understand what this was. I nodded slowly. Just outside the door a man started shouting, no, shrieking, in German.

‘Alle in die zugeteilten Räume! Sofort!’

Go to your designated room! Now!

There was the satisfying
ch-chunk
of a gun being readied.

‘Woah, man, cool it, cool it,’ came a high-pitched American voice – a man’s voice. I don’t think he’d understood.
The Americans are lazy people
– I had been told at school –
they are falsely convinced of their own superiority so they do not attempt to learn the languages of other, greater nations.
But this man understood the gun. There were boots in the hall, then quiet. Herr Hoffman waited for this short audio play to be over before he began again. I wondered if he needed to hear it, to know what was going on, or if he needed me to hear it so I knew what was going on.

‘Fräulein Keller, were you complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

‘Sorry?’ My head was still outside the door, still staring down a rifle.

‘Sorry for what?’ Herr Hoffman snapped back. ‘Sorry that you don’t understand? Sorry that you were complicit …?’

I was back in the room.

‘I’m very sorry that I didn’t hear you, Herr Hoffman.’ I used my BDM line-up voice, my soldier voice.

Fisher lifted his head. He was no longer the lowest person in the room.

‘We’ll try that again, shall we, Fräulein Keller? Are you ready?’

I swallowed, nodded.

‘Were you complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

What a word. Why that word? Because with a word he’d changed it. It wasn’t terrorism, I was sure of it. That was done by men with bombs in their briefcases, who made friends with wily American journalists. Clementine was a girl (
is
a girl) who was desperate (
is
desperate). Herr Hoffman didn’t know what he was talking about. They had driven her to it. They had made her. Left her with absolutely no choice whatsoever. What did they expect? If anyone in this room was complicit in any act of terrorism, it was him.

I shook my head.

‘Aloud, please, Fräulein. Were you, Jessika Davina Keller, complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon?’

‘No.’ It wasn’t a lie. I had only wanted her to escape.

‘Say it.’

I had only wanted her there, selfishly, to say goodbye.

‘I was not …’

‘No!’ He slammed a hand on the table. I flinched. Fisher flinched. This was how it was done. Fisher had much to learn.

‘I, Jessika Davina Keller …’ said Herr Hoffman, feeding me my line.

‘I, Jessika Davina Keller …’ I parroted.

‘Was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

‘Was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

‘Again!’

‘I, Jessika Davina Keller, was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

‘Again!’

‘I, Jessika Davina Keller, was not complicit in Clementine Hart’s act of terrorism this afternoon.’

‘And do you condone acts of terrorism against the Greater German Reich, Fräulein Keller?

‘No.
’

‘Sag es!’

‘Ich, Jessika Davina Keller, dulde keine Terrorakte gegen das Großdeutsche Reich!’

‘And is she your friend?’

He was switching languages quickly, on purpose, to make me lose the thread. ‘Am I friends with …?’

‘WITH CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART!’ he shouted – shrieked – using the same voice as the man with the gun outside the door. ‘WITH THE TERRORIST CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART! IS SHE A FRIEND OF YOURS, JESSICA DAVINA KELLER?’ His spit landed on the surface of the lovely, glossy table. My ears rang. My body began to shake again, my teeth began to chatter. Fisher and Herr Hoffman were sweating.

‘Was she a friend of yours?’ he said quietly now, remembering all of a sudden who I was. He didn’t really want to make me cry.

I had no choice. I shook my head.

He was almost whispering now. ‘Was Clementine Hart a friend of yours?’

‘No,’ I whispered back.

‘Was she ever a friend of yours?’

‘No.’

‘What was she?’

What IS she? What IS she? What IS she?
I desperately corrected him in my head to keep her alive.

‘Ein Staatsfeind,’ I said.
An enemy of the state.

Maybe I was outside of my body then, looking back at myself, when those words came out. Maybe my body was speaking, not my soul.

‘And what happens to enemies of the state, Fräulein Keller?’

His eyes were unblinking. The whites had edges of yellow.

‘Death,’ I said, my stomach clenching at the word. I would not let myself cry. I pitched my gaze upwards, my chin too. The profile of a perfect deutschen Mädel.

Silence.

Then: ‘Ja, gut,’ said Herr Hoffman, chirpy almost. Job done. Fisher’s head bobbed into a fully upright position. Herr Hoffman pushed himself to standing with a grunt. ‘Well, I’m glad we have agreement on this, Fräulein Keller. You are free to go.’

Fisher saluted. For a moment I thought Herr Hoffman would shake his hand. But no. He reached past him and straightened the portrait of Herr Dean on the wall. He tutted at Fisher as he did this, as if he held him responsible for its wonky angle, as if he held him responsible for everything unsatisfactory in the room.

‘Watch her until Herr Keller gets here, will you?’ said Herr Hoffman, and he slipped out of the door with a wink.

Silence.

No, not silence.

Zwischenraum. The space between.

‘Jessika …’ Fisher said.

I didn’t reply. There was nothing I could say.

‘Jessika …’

‘What?’ The word came out like a dart.

‘Are you okay?’ he asked gently.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

He made to move away from the wall.

‘I’m fine,’ I repeated a little louder, keeping him where he was. ‘My father will be here any minute.’