The Big Lie (8 page)

Which I thought was a bit ungrateful in the circumstances.

If the girls at the other school did get a better deal than us in any way, it was only that their lives weren’t as full with charity work and so forth, which meant they had more time to spend on spelling, grammar and punctuation. That was it.

‘Gosh,’ I said to GG. About the two-tone hair. ‘Imagine one of us doing that.’

‘I’d quite like to be able to do that,’ GG said.

‘But I like your hair.’ My hand went to the curls of her ponytail and gave them a quick stroke. Then I remembered myself and snatched my hand away. GG saw the whole thing, seemed to understand it.

‘That’s not what I meant.’ She got up from her crate and came to sit with me on the grass. She offered me her cigarette.

I shook my head. ‘The tar in that cigarette is turning your eggs black,’ I told her.

‘Probably.’

She slotted her arm across my shoulders. I was so conscious of it, of my succumbing to it, that it may as well have been a python draped around my neck.

‘Oh, Jess, relax,’ GG whispered. ‘What are you so worried about?’

She pressed her forehead close to mine as if trying to connect to my thoughts.

‘I’m worried about being a bad person,’ I whispered into the warm space between us.

‘There’s no such thing,’ said GG, with complete conviction, whipping her head back to face the town again. ‘You’re only bad if they catch you.’

She grinned at me, and I laughed like she wanted, but I was thinking about Clementine. Was that the reason she was being punished, not because she was behaving any worse than anyone else, but because people found out? Because someone had told on her …

GG’s hand went to the nape of my neck and she started playing with the strands that had come loose from my plaits. I tipped my head towards her, grateful for the contact. I watched her lips go tight around the filter of her cigarette and her chest lift to inhale. I actually wished for one ill-informed moment that I could smoke. It looked like it might help somehow.

‘And, anyway, you and me,’ GG added, letting the smoke go. ‘Well, especially you … We’re untouchable.’

I suppose Frau Gross could have gone and told tales to Mum. She was always sitting in the armchair by her front window. Always on surveillance. But Frau Gross had no reason to think that my going to the Harts’ house was anything out of the ordinary. And perhaps GG’s words had filtered through somehow. Maybe I was beginning to think I was in some way untouchable. If the laws about smoking didn’t apply to GG, which laws could I defy?

I expected Clementine to be home alone, but as we headed up the stairs, I saw that Frau Hart was sitting in the kitchen. She didn’t turn around to say hello. She stayed very still behind her halo of hair, a mug of steaming tea in front of her. I was grateful that she hadn’t spoken. What are you supposed to say to a woman who only the day before was screaming and raving and flashing the place between her legs for all the world to see?
Nice weather for April, isn’t it?

‘Why isn’t your mother at work?’ I asked, once we’d reached the landing.

Clementine didn’t answer until we were in her room with the door shut.

‘She lost her job.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

Clementine sat down on the edge of her bed, sort of perched there, as if it wasn’t really her room, as if she was waiting to be taken away. I thought she would be excited to have me here – at last, someone to confide in about her suspension! But she just stared up at me, waiting to be disappointed.

We’d had a read-through of
Hamlet
that afternoon in drama. Act four, the bit where Ophelia goes mad, which is a metaphor for the Weimar Republic or something (or is that Gertrude? I can never get my head around it). Anyway, Claudius says,
When sorrows come they come not single spies but in battalions.
This came into my head then, and I quoted it at Clementine. She gave me this look of disgust and I felt instantly embarrassed for thinking it might be what she wanted to hear. Clementine was in the other drama group, doing
The Merchant of Venice
. That was much easier to get your head around – evil Jews, pounds of flesh.

‘So, why did your mum lose her job?’ I asked.

‘Why do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Was she not very good at typing?’

Clementine dropped her head into her hands.

‘At being a journalist,’ I corrected feebly.

Clementine’s hair was matted at the crown, like she’d spent too much time lying in bed. I waited for her to lift her head and tell me the actual reason her mum had been fired but the silence dragged. I’d always assumed Frau Hart’s job was hanging by a thread, a thread that would break any day. Saying what you really think all the time wasn’t really conducive to the job of journalist.

‘So!’ I announced. ‘I’ve brought this!’ I pulled the pad of expensive writing paper out of my bag with a flourish. ‘And this!’ The fountain pen this time. ‘We’re going to write a letter!’

Clementine kept her head buried. ‘Who to?’ she growled through the mask of her hands.

‘Um.’ I pulled the chair out from beneath Clementine’s desk. I hadn’t thought that bit through. ‘To your doctor, I guess.’

She lifted her face. She’d dug her fingers into the skin; there were white blotches in her cheeks and moon-shaped fingernail dents in her forehead.

‘Saying what?’ she asked.

‘That you shouldn’t have the operation.’ I sat down, started clearing a space among the junk – plates with crumbs, old magazines. ‘We’re going to tell them that they’ve made a mistake.’

Her head went back into her hands.

‘I don’t want children anyway,’ she said. I ignored this. She was being difficult on purpose. How could anyone not want children?

‘
Dear Sir
,’ I said, speaking as I wrote. When I’d imagined this moment, I’d thought that Clementine would sit and do the writing while I paced the room and did the dictating, like Dad did on those occasional evenings when Fräulein Krause came to the house taking shorthand on some urgent business. ‘
Change in directive. Any person seen in the vicinity of 35a George Park is to be assumed complicit and to be brought in immediately for …’
But I could be adaptable.

I went on. ‘
I’m writing to you concerning the sterilisation order for Clementine Amelia Hart dated …
What was the date on your letter, Clementine?’

I waited. Her head stayed in her hands.

‘Never mind. We can put it in later.
I believe there has been some mistake. Clementine Hart is of sane mind and good health with no genetic abnormalities
.’

‘George,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘George.’ Her head was up now. ‘My brother.’

‘What brother?’

‘The one who was killed.’

‘Oh … Yes … Put out of his misery,’ I said trying to soften the moment. ‘I didn’t realise you’d given him a name.’

‘Of course he had a fucking name, Jess!’ she spat. ‘He was a person! A real, flesh and blood person!’

Her telling me his name stopped me in my tracks. George. With this name came an imagined face. A real baby. I put down my pen.

‘Is that the reason they gave you on the letter?’ I asked, not looking her in the eye.

‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Oh.’

I didn’t know what to do. Or what I felt. Because, of course, if there were abnormalities, if there was a good chance her children wouldn’t … Then she had to … Anything that is weak and not strong must die out, because that’s for the best, that’s how nature is arranged. But this was Clementine and she was my friend and I didn’t want this for her. I didn’t want this to be the last of her.

‘Still, it doesn’t seem right,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. There was a fierceness in her voice, tears dripping down her cheeks. ‘No. It doesn’t.’

I had been desperate to talk about Clementine’s letter with Ingrid this morning at the rink. I thought she might be the right person to help me. But I knew asking her outright was altogether too bold. Instead I’d asked, ‘How come you don’t have any children?’

‘How do you know I don’t have any?’ she’d said back, trying to be playful.

She worked all day; I knew that she wasn’t a mother.

‘Because I wasn’t able to,’ she said, the playfulness gone.

‘Aren’t you married?’ I asked. I really did know nothing about her, I realised, this woman I had spent every morning with for the last ten years.

‘No, I’m not,’ she said.

Her voice had an edge to it now. So I shut up. My last question had been pretty silly, after all. If Ingrid couldn’t have babies, who would want her?

‘I think I should still write the letter,’ I told Clementine. ‘What do you think?’ One of my own tears splashed onto the page. ‘I think they’ll listen to me. Don’t you?’

‘And why’s that?’ she asked. She already knew the answer, but she wanted me to say it out loud, so we could both hold it up to the light. ‘Why would they listen to you?’

‘Because …’ I tried to wipe away the tear before it would spoil the paper, but this only smeared ink across the page. I was making a mess of things. Of everything. I tore the page from the pad and screwed it up, bashed it smaller and smaller in my hands.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. The house was quiet. Frau Hart didn’t have the radio on. The People’s News would be starting right now. She usually liked to listen to that, butt in every five minutes with her own particular thoughts. There was just the bump and whistle of the central heating system. I looked around Clementine’s room for something to talk about, but everything seemed tired and trivial and not really relevant to anything. Relics. Props on a set.

Then Clementine said, ‘It’s hard for you.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said it’s hard for you. Harder than it is for me, I think.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said, gathering my things together. I was ready to go now. I needed to be back in the house before Mum and Lilli got back. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, laughing her concern away. ‘It’s you I’m really worried about.’

‘But at least I know what I am,’ she said.

‘What?’

And there I was, furious with her again. I wanted to help but she just kept poking me with a stick.

‘I know what I am, thank you very much!’ I told her. ‘I know what I am!’

I hated her in that moment, as she nodded at me solemnly, as if my shouting at her was proof of something somehow. I could have actually clouted her one, if she hadn’t chosen that instant to get up from her bed, lurch across the room and hug me.

I didn’t want her to say anything else. I couldn’t bear it.

So I whispered in her ear: ‘Erzähl mir von dem Ort, an dem du vorher gewohnt hast.’

Tell me about the place where you used to live, before.

‘Nein,’ she replied. Then into my ear: ‘Erzähl mir von deinem Vater.’

Tell me about your father.

‘Er ist ein guter Mann,’ I told her.

He is a good man.

‘Aber?’

‘Aber …’ I said.

But …

We waited, knowing neither of us was going to speak. Why is there no English word for Zwischenraum? The space between things, all the things we say without saying them, the gaps in the jigsaw. Did the English never need the word before?

‘I have to go home now, Clem,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

And as I went she pulled some sheaves of lined paper from the mess on her desk, folded them up and pushed them into my bag.

‘Ich hab dich lieb,’ she said as she closed her bedroom door, leaving me to find my own way out. I stood on the landing for a moment.

I love you
, she had said. No, actually, a small, gentle step back from that.
I have love for you.

‘Ich liebe dich,’ I said to her closed door before moving away.

I love you,
pure and simple.

The poison was in my ear. It didn’t kill me – it did something far more awful than that. It divided me in two. It created another version of me.

GG was wrong. There was Good Jessika and Bad Jessika. Bad Jess was up on stage, doing and thinking all these terrible, crazy things. But that wasn’t me.
The devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape
. Meanwhile, Good Jess was forced to watch and judge and have her conscience caught. Sometimes Good Jess would hide behind a curtain and listen in to other people’s conversations, hoping (and dreading) to get a little bit closer to the truth. Or was it the other way around? Was Good Jess up on stage acting – pretending – and was Bad Jess sitting and doing nothing, still a slave to the devil?

I kept the pieces of lined paper that Clementine had slotted into my school bag under my mattress. Then I realised that this was the first place that anyone would look, so I found a gap big enough behind the loose skirting board by my desk and pushed them into there. It still wasn’t perfect but it would do.

On the papers were a series of notes, with handwriting just as messy as Clementine’s room.

That was written at the top. That bit was the neatest – clear and underlined twice. Then followed pages of half sentences and phrases and crossings-out, all vomited onto the page.

They were Clementine’s notes for the controlled conditions essay.

Is how those notes began. Then …