The Big Lie (3 page)

You might say that Clementine’s mum was good-looking.

You might. I wouldn’t.

She was very thin. So thin that you could see the sinewy workings of her arms and the clavicles round her neck. Which I believe you think is something to be celebrated. Well done, Jocelyn Hart, for not eating enough of our land’s plentiful produce to be the most robust version of yourself that you could be.

Frau Hart had a job. She used to work for the Evening News. Clementine told me that she was a journalist but when I mentioned this to Dad, he smirked and repeated my word ‘journalist’ back at me like it was the stupidest thing ever to have fallen out of his mouth. We were in the back garden, pinning up the honeysuckle after putting in the new fences.

‘She does a bit of typing,’ Dad said under his breath before firing up the drill to drive a screw into the panel, ‘and that is all.’

I was standing with my spine against the main branch of the honeysuckle bush, arms out, holding the bulk of it back against the fence. The sugary smell of it was around my neck. Typing was still an impressive job though, I thought – but I didn’t say this to Dad. I would have killed to have had access to one of those machines all day, feel the
click-clack
of it beneath my fingers. It was one of my favourite activities at the BDM – typing practice. Fräulein Eberhardt would unlock the cupboard, and we would queue up to lift out a typewriter each. I loved the weight of the things. I loved the oily shine of the keys and how they fitted the curve of your fingertips so precisely. We had electric ones, but the manuals were my favourite, because you have to strike them hard like a piano.

The honeysuckle was heavy against my back; years and years of gnarled branches, twisting together.

‘Just a little longer, my strong girl,’ Dad said. ‘Hold your ground.’

I widened my stance in the flower-bed, careful not to squash the last bright heads of Mum’s echinacea. Dad went back to his toolbox on the lawn and brought out a reel of wire. He wound one end tightly around the screw, before uncoiling it against me. I was a prisoner of war being tied up by a ruthless Commie! (We were studying the
Endsieg
at school – the final days, when we beat back all those people for good.)

‘Right, Jess, slip yourself out from under there.’

I let my arms drop and the weight of the bush fall against this new support. I lifted the wire away from my chin as I went underneath it, thinking all the time of Mum cutting Tilsit cheese on the wooden board with the levered slice.

Once I was free, Dad pulled the wire tight and fastened it to a second screw on the other side of the bush. I stood back to watch him work. Pale blue shirt, thick black hair, a neat brown belt at his solid waist. The honeysuckle was drooping. There was too much of it now that the fences were lower. It needed hacking back. Over Dad’s head, in the next-door garden, a last-minute wasp was bobbing around Frau Hart’s underwear on the washing line, drowsy and drunk. Her knickers were nowhere near as white as mine, Mum’s and Lilli’s.

‘Don’t Herr und Frau Hart mind that we can see into their garden now?’ I asked as Dad snipped the end of the wire and tucked away its sharp edge.

‘Why would they?’ he said, stepping back to assess the job. He patted me on the back. Now Katrin was out of the picture, away at athletics camp, I was on my way to taking her throne. Biggest, brightest, best.

‘I have no problem with them seeing into ours,’ said Dad and he picked up the shears and started lopping.

A week or so later, Herr Hart planted mature leylandii along the length of the new fence, ten of the things. Enormous they were, almost two metres in height when they went in. Then, only a few days later, I woke one morning to find that these trees had been neatly beheaded to match the exact height of Dad’s new fences. But that was Clementine’s flaky parents for you, I decided, doing one thing one minute, and the opposite the next.

By comparison, my parents were solid.

Mum was efficient in all she did. Everything put away in the right place, dinner on the table at the exact time, the front step always swept, our knickers white as snow. Dad’s efficiency was more of a mental exercise. We talked.

Of course Mum and I spoke, but about everyday things – who will pick Lilli up from school, what to pack in my trunk for when I go away to skate camp, period pains, how to manage them … Dad taught me how the world works, the difference between right and wrong. He was the neighbourhood’s barometer. Mine too.

Over breakfast he read things out from the People’s Mail. Warnings. That was how I found out about the Jay Acker music cassettes turning up in our schools.

‘It appears,’ my father told me, ‘that they have laced the cassettes with traces of radiation.’

I stopped chewing my jam and bread. ‘But how can that be if it’s our people smuggling them in?’

‘Finish your mouthful!’

The unchewed crust scraped down my throat in one breathtaking lump. ‘Sorry, Dad.’

‘Excellent reasoning, Jessika!’ He was smiling now. I gulped milk to shift the last of the bread. ‘But that is exactly what they want you to believe!’

‘So … it’s nothing to do with us?’ I said, slowly, trying to make the picture to fit together in my mind.

Dad shook his head. ‘Nope!’

I allowed myself a small moment of pride because I did always catch on very quickly to the things that Dad explained to me. Lilli was too young to understand so, without a son to talk to, Dad had to pass all his knowledge on to me.

‘Don’t get sucked in, Jess,’ he told me. ‘Not only will they corrupt your mind, they’ll give you a deadly cancer into the bargain.’

I was destined to be a great skater for my country, and then, after that, a great mother, so I often wondered if Dad felt his great knowledge was wasted on me.

‘They just want us to be diseased,’ Dad went on, ‘like they are.’

We had learnt all about that at school – the filth, the brutality, all those people living alongside each other, corrupting one another. I would try to imagine it sometimes, how it actually looked and felt. I would see teeth – sharp and hungry. And then nakedness. And then after that I’d see beetles and weevils, people in rags, things smeared in excrement. Medieval scenes.

Dad talked me through the amnesty that the newspaper had set up, the rewards on offer. Hand in a cassette and you could get sweets, chocolate and music from our own bands.

‘But how do you pick these cassettes up?’ I asked Dad. ‘Without getting the cancer on your fingers?’

‘You use a bag, of course,’ he said. ‘Just like you would when picking Wolf’s turds up off the lawn.’

And from then on I made sure I kept an empty Waitrose carrier in my school bag to handle any enemy music, should I find it.

And I did find it – in Clementine’s bedroom, one day after school. But she didn’t have a Jay Acker music cassette. Oh, no. Clementine Hart had a Jay Acker compact disc.

And, it turned out, a machine to play it on.

‘Do you h-have a licence for that?’ I stammered as she dragged the big black oblong out from under her bed, followed by its pair of speakers on their cable leashes. She shrugged as if my question was nothing. Then I saw the ‘property of the security police’ symbol etched into the player’s casing, and thought I might drop dead right there on the spot.

‘Oh, hell, Clem!’ I hissed.

I was hyperventilating. I was going to pass out.

‘Calm down, Jess, will you?’ she said. ‘It’s fine!’

‘It’s not fine,’ I told her. ‘It’s a million miles away from being
fine
.’

She put one of her hands on my back and started rubbing, which did help. She’d been avoiding contact with me since that day by the river. I’d felt the absence as strongly as I would have done a punch. No casual arm slung across my shoulder, no tipping of her head into the crook of my neck. I suppose she saw it as a kindness, an honesty, but it was painful. I was just grateful that she still wanted to be friends. There was no way I could imagine living without her. ‘You’re not going to get into any trouble,’ she said. And her words helped me feel even calmer. Because what Clementine said was always true. Well, it felt true. I didn’t have to think about what she said to understand it, is what I mean, not in the way I did when Dad was talking. There was no jigsaw to do, no challenge to face – the image was already there. ‘Believe me,’ she said. ‘You’re not in any trouble.’

I watched her plug in the machine and prod at its buttons, while I held my fingers against the pulse on my neck, willing it back to a normal speed. I managed to get a sentence together. ‘Do your parents know you have this?’

‘Of course they do, stupid,’ Clementine said. ‘Where do you think I got it?’

I shook my head. I didn’t know.

‘Dad got it for me, didn’t he? From work.’

Which made no sense. I take it back – this particular picture she’d given me did need fitting together. And there were jigsaw pieces missing. Herr Hart was merely the telephone engineer at Dad’s office and would have had absolutely no access to anything like that. I decided it was theft. Terrifying theft. Or more likely, because this was the Harts we were dealing with, terrifying flakiness.

Then Clementine produced the CD in its plastic sleeve.

‘Ta-da!’ she announced, shoving it right into my face. The name
Jay Acker
was written in marker-pen straight onto the rainbowed silver, and underneath, the song title,
Feeling Free
. I jerked backwards.

‘Oh, Jessie,’ she laughed. ‘You’re so funny.’

I knew what I had to do. I was back in control.

My hand twitched for the Waitrose carrier in the pocket of my school bag, but I was certain that Clementine wouldn’t just hand over the contaminated item. This was a hostage situation. I needed to
isolate, contain, evaluate, negotiate
.

I got up from the floor, shaking still, but doing my best not to show it. I closed Clementine’s bedroom door. I went back and sat beside her. I had my palms on show – nothing up my sleeve.

‘My dad says we must hand those in,’ I told her in the flattest tone I could manage. (
When in a hostage negotiation keep your voice normal and calm, whilst working towards building a rapport.
)

Clementine wrinkled her nose. ‘Why are you talking like that, Jessika?’

She slipped the CD out of its sleeve and placed it into the mouth of the player. It sucked it up, licked its lips. I could imagine the radiation travelling across Clementine’s hands now, up her arms, making for her brain.

‘My dad,’ I said, slower this time (
repeat your information until you receive verbal confirmation that your message has been understood
), ‘says we must hand those in.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Clementine whipped her head around at this. A string of her blonde hair caught me on the cheek. Stung me. We had seen technicolour images of radiation on the People’s Television, and now I was imagining a slick of it across my face, spreading, mutating. She was smiling and angry. ‘And who is your dad to be saying that?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Who is your dad to be saying that?’ she repeated. ‘I’m interested. Really. Who is he?’

Silence. Horrible silence.

‘What do you mean?’ My voice was papery, like someone had their hands on my throat.

‘I mean,’ Clementine went on, ‘what is it that your dad actually does?’

There was great emphasis on the ‘actually’. She stood up, put her hands on her hips. I think that she wanted a fight – hands and fists and everything – which was silly of Clementine because we’d been taught how to deliver a swift downward strike to the brachial plexus at the BDM session straight after her parents had stopped her from attending. I didn’t want to use my pressure point attack on Clementine. It really hurt. Erica Warner had been my partner for the exercise and she had located the agony of that nerve with her first blow.

I didn’t even want to stand up and face Clementine. But I did.

‘My dad is an auditor!’ I tried to sound defiant but it came out sounding stupid.

‘And what does that even mean?’ Her face was screwed up with fury, her lips quivering.

‘It means …’ I said, trying to make my voice rise above hers, ‘it means … budgets and … stuff.’

She laughed at my answer, hard, spraying my face with little bits of her spit.

This was not the usual Clementine, the way she was speaking to me. There is a hierarchy in every friendship and I was always the leader. I had been chosen to represent the Princely State of England as a skater. I did well at school. I had been given responsibilities at the BDM, responsibilities that would never have been offered to Clementine. Not everyone can be a leader. Some people need to follow. Not a criticism. Being a follower is an important job in itself. I didn’t think Clementine was completely lacking in qualities. Of course I didn’t. I adored her. She was an excellent pianist, something that often made me feel horribly envious. I would thrash away at those BDM typewriters pretending that I was clattering through a Beethoven piano sonata at the Royal Albert Hall but really, I didn’t know a B flat from my elbow. Clementine could have represented our country as a concert pianist, if she had wanted to. Except that was always the problem with Clementine, her fatal flaw. She had the ability, a wonderful talent, but she could never be bothered to apply it. Or she wasn’t willing to.

I used to believe that this behaviour was somehow criminal.

Instead, she sat writing songs in her bedroom.

‘My own little
Götterdämmerung,
’ she told me.

The Wagner opera.

I had nodded, smiled, pretended that I knew what that collection of music sounded like. The meaning of the title had no impact then. The twilight of the gods. A catastrophic end.

We were face to face. She was bristling with something – upset, resentment … radiation, maybe. I could only imagine that this was a side-effect of picking up that CD. But, still, I was furious about her questioning of my dad. No one questioned my father.

‘And what about your mum …?’ I tried to be smiling and angry, just like she’d been with me, though I’m sure I was nowhere near close to achieving it. ‘Your mum, the
typist
!’