Tying Down The Lion (5 page)

“Put the light on, Jacqueline,” Victor says when I come back into our room. My flung-back sheets look uninviting, and I wish someone could tuck me in.

I pass Victor a hanky from under my pillow and tell him, “It’ll be all right now.” I find him a weary old peppermint-cream and a flat toffee left over from a Jamboree Bag. I even sling my arm round him.

We listen to the china cups clinking. The tea steam seems to curl under our door. While we fall asleep, the house settles down from the upheaval, although I think Dad wanders on the landing for a minute after his tea, because I hear the floorboards squeak, as well as a gentle murmuring.

The next few hours of sleep are a blessed relief. My arm is still across Victor’s bed in the morning, his small hand rounded underneath mine like a contented tortoise.

Nothing is said the next day. Toast is burnt, the wash-basin is stained with toothpaste-spit and milk boils over. Situation normal.

Like the moon rolling through its cycle and round to the beginning again, the recurring terrors are an oddly acceptable feature in our lives, the same as dentist appointments or the dreaded window-shopping. Awful, but always there, like being too tall or having enormous ear lobes. You have to grin and bear it, and even though the grinning part is excruciating, we are still the same people in the same home.

The Bad-Moon girls are different, an evil invasion. Dad’s silence makes the house swell. Too much air. Too little sound. His shadow becomes a long ink-stain on the floor.

The Bad-Moon girls slither in unannounced and uninvited. They coil themselves around the furniture and sometimes stay for days, like the worst kind of visiting cousins, the sort who eat the one shiny apple you’ve been keeping an eye on in the bowl, or the sort like Auntie Freda who leaves her bristles in the wash-basin.

***

Grandma announces every shop-sign and pub-name we pass.

“They’ve moved all of them since I was last this way,” she keeps saying.

“Who’s they?” I ask her.

“People,” she says. “People who move things. Look, there’s The Green Man. He definitely used to be further along.”

We stop to eat the remainder of our picnic—Grandma found the cheese-and-HP sandwiches before we left Oaking—on a patch of brown grass next to the car. The sun disappears and we all flop on the prickly ground, too glum to get the rug out of the boot, although Grandma hauls out the tiny milking-stool she always takes on picnics.

Dad would usually whisper, “She looks like a heifer perched on three cocktail sticks,” and Mum would wink at him. But the air is still so stiff from the car-squabbles you could slice it.

No one speaks. While we wait for the picnic food to be unwrapped, Grandma crams a pink coconut Allsort into her mouth and lights up a Senior Service. She makes those throat sounds and puffs out those sing-song sighs old people always have to make when the conversation dries up.

But once the wicker basket is emptied out, the plastic picnic-plates distributed and the greaseproof paper unfolded, Grandma launches into attack.

“Ugh, strike a light! Tastes like a clod of German earth,” she says, flinging Mum’s homemade pumpernickel into the cow-parsley. “And it looks like cackers, Bridge. The constipated kind.”

Mum mutters some German words I try to memorise. I don’t blame her. She’s had to suffer all kinds of disgusting English food. She didn’t heave after a basin of winkles. Or even after a dish of Grandma’s Gooseberry Surprise. And the surprise is, it’s inedible.

“Nell, do you want a piece of my Herman-the-German cake or will it give you stomach-pain in the car?” Mum asks in her strained voice, not even trying to pronounce stomach properly.

“What she means is,” Victor tells me, “will it make Grandma erupt like Vesuvius?”

I smile, trying to be sisterly while Mum and Dad are not speaking.

“There is also cold chicken schnitzel, Nell.”

“Bridge, when will you get the hang of meat? Ooh, I could just sink my teeth into a bit of cold pork and soggy crackling.”

“I still have much to learn about foreign food, Nell.”

“We’re well aware of that, love. Hold the bus a minute, English food isn’t blooming well foreign. But honestly, it’s still like war rations at times with all those dried-up kugel buns of yours, whatever they are when they’re at home.”

Mum searches through the tartan bag, utterly defeated. I nudge Grandma hard. I have to or she can’t feel it through the whalebone. She takes the hint.

“If there’s a pilchard bap, Bridge, I’ll have it. No onions mind. They get me inflating and I’ve not got my good stays on. Can’t trust these Woolworth’s poppers.”

“Only corned-beef, Ma,” Dad says, handing her a sandwich wrapped in a Sunblest wrapper.

“Oh, that’ll do. At least I can see the meat in yours. Elsie gets a hundred and ten slices out of a tin and one of them’s the white fatty lagging on the end. I don’t know. Married to a master-butcher and the scrawny old bird’s as tight as a fish’s arse.”

“Have a potato crisp, Nell.” Mum says, offering the bag.

“Thanks, duck. You’ve not put on a bad spread, I suppose. Better at picnics than you are at the stove. Lawks, those chicken dumplings last night! The pawnshop could hang three of those up on an iron bracket. Good as any stonework.”

This is a top-notch compliment—the bit about the picnic anyway.

“She’s really creeping,” Victor whispers. “She’s trying to make Mum happy again.”

“This is better than Elsie’s kidneys would have been,” Grandma says. “She won’t open her sherry when I’m there, you know. Doesn’t like Stan and me singing ‘Blue Moon’. Dry old do, it is. I’m glad I came along with you all. Thank you for having me, son. And you, Bridge.”

Mum tries to smile and Grandma beams. Mum and Dad start talking to her, rather than each other, but Grandma eats and talks to everyone, salvaging our crusts for a grey squirrel who keeps inching closer. Eventually he takes a digestive from her, clutching it in his tiny hands. “Must be like nibbling at a ruddy great cart-wheel,” Grandma says and everyone laughs. Dad steals a glance at Mum and the thaw begins.

“I hope Elsie doesn’t feed Deborah grapes when she’s on the perch,” Grandma says. “Or else Stan will have to change the wallpaper. And she won’t scratch properly if there’s more than a dozen stinkies in her gravel.”

“Dad, there’s only one other cub in my pack whose Dad’s got a car,” Victor says. “And his has only got three wheels.”

Sometimes, even seven-year-olds know how to soften icicles. Even though the clouds are packing together, the thermos is leaking and the salted peanuts have all fallen out of the packet, this picnic has become officially groovy. Last time we had one, Victor fell in a cowpat, and Dad had to fish out T-K and wipe him clean with the last of the lemonade.

And Mum is actually showing an interest in my project. She thinks it’s still the one about spiders’ webs from last year, but at least she’s talking to me. I don’t have the chance to explain it properly to her yet because it starts raining hard. We pile inside the car with the leftover food, our damp clothes and sweaty Spam steaming up the windows.

We set off again, Grandma sitting in front with the flattened Five-Boys on her lap.

“Dad, where will we eat on the way to Berlin?” Victor asks. “Will you stop at a German café? Will it have those hot-dog things?”

“Well, there are rest-stops on the autobahn. Hey, Bridge, once we hit that stretch of road in the East, couldn’t Ilse just meet us there for a cup of tea?”

“Then you wouldn’t get shot at, Mum,” Victor says, thrusting T-K at her, his well-chewed hands bent in prayer.

“How about it, Bridge?” Dad says. “It’s not as if there’ll be much to see on the other side of the Wall. It’s all miserable flats in great blocks, isn’t it? Shops with nothing on the shelves. Sandwiches with nothing in the middle.”

As he slows down even more to avoid smashing into the lorry in front of us, I hear him murmur, “Christ, this pedal feels like melted caramel under my shoe.”

Mum sighs. “I wish you could all meet Ilse. She is so enchanting. We all took ballet lessons for a while. Beate and I were like baby-elephants, but Ilse was so light on her feet. She was never still. During air-raids she was like a caged bird.”

“Isn’t she still like a caged bird?” Victor says.

Sometimes he is less bone-headed than most seven-year-old boys. He even has a girl’s train of thought. I make a note of the caged bird idea for the project, wanting to understand the broken pieces of Mum’s Berlin, although why I think I can do a better job than Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, I haven’t the foggiest.

Mum is stroking Victor’s head in an absent-minded way, as she often does when she’s misty-eyed about the past. I know for a fact she’ll find nits. I can see one steeplechasing through his fringe.

“Yes, Ilse is in a kind of cage, Victor,” she says. “Beate is confined in a different way. She can travel everywhere she likes except to the other half of her own country, and not even into the other half of her own city. Ilse is so completely trapped that even if she met us at the rest-stop, she would be in danger of arrest.”

“But she’d still be in the East, Bridge,” Dad says. “It’s a sort of motorway funnel, isn’t it?”

Mum shakes her head. “Meeting someone from the West in that way is not legal. The border guards know the amount of time needed to reach the exit from the moment of entering the transit route. If Ilse took longer than that, she would be interrogated. We might never see her again.”

Dad reaches back and holds Mum’s hand, his thumb kneading her finger, pushing her wedding-ring round in circles. It’s a bit disgusting to watch, but it means the air has cleared, apart from Grandma’s jubilant deflating after an entire packet of Garibaldi.

“Ilse must be careful of the secret police,” Mum continues. “The Stasi can take you off the street or out of your home for no reason. They even remove both parents from their children, who are then adopted by strangers. Informers are everywhere. No one can trust anyone, not even close friends or family. If the Stasi believe you are an enemy of the state, they make you disappear.”

I imagine husbands spying on wives, sons on mothers, nieces on uncles. Even on Christmas Day, a grandmother could be examining the innards of a cracker for coded escape plans while an auntie stuffs her head in the roast goose to search for blueprints of a secret tunnel.

“Hey, Bridge,” Dad says, “don’t scare the children with these Stasi thugs. They sound worse than the Cybermen.”

Victor’s eyes are bulging like poached ostrich-eggs. Oh dear Ringo, he’s actually whimpering.

“Christ alive, lad,” Grandma says to Dad. “How could you bring up them ghastly Cybermen at a time like this?”

“Well, Bridge brought up the bloody Stasi.”

“Yes, but they’re only in the East,” Mum says. “And when Jacqueline and I cross over, they will leave us in peace. I only want you to realise how careful Ilse has to be.”

“I suppose if they think she’s planning on escaping with you,” Grandma says, “then those Stasi will torture her. Maybe you as well, I shouldn’t wonder, Bridge.”

Victor howls.

“Mum,” I shout above the din, “the Stasi may not be in the West, but the Cybermen aren’t in Oaking either. It doesn’t mean Victor isn’t scared to death of them. Before he goes to bed, he even checks they aren’t hiding in his toy-cupboard. Which means his Totopoly falls out and whacks him on the head.”

I’m not telling them I still check behind my door for escaped train robbers.

Victor is so distraught he crawls through to the front and perches on Grandma’s lap. Dad flails his hand about because of the trespassing and his cigarette scorches Victor’s sandal.

“It’s made a hole in my sock as well,” Victor wails.

“Oh simmer down. Fart-arsing about over socks when I’ve got less than half-an-hour to get us docking on the Maid-of-Bloody-Kent without any brakes for God’s sake. God-all-bloody-mighty, son.”

There’s a foul smell of melted nylon and a torrent of German swear words, after which Dad and Mum refuse to exchange a word for miles. He mutters the worst word of all, twice. Once when he realises Dover isn’t as close as he thought it was and Grandma suggests they might have moved that too. And the second time when the thermos rolls onto the centre console and disgorges the last of the tea.

As Grandma falls asleep, it’s up to me to ease the tension in the stuffy, sun-baked car. I ask Mum what school is like in Germany, working on the basis that adults respond well to serious questions. If olden days are thrown in, they are compelled to show a keen interest.

“The first day is the best,” she says, casting her mind back before the war. “Every child is given an enormous cone of sweets and small presents. Every family has a photograph of their child with the cone. Mine was taken by the piano. I remember seeing my reflection in the marble floor, and my mother smiling when I said the cone was as tall as I was.”

Victor sniffs and sits up straighter. He asks if we’ll ever see the picture of Mum with her cone of sweets and she looks sad. “No, Victor. It was lost. In the war, almost everything was destroyed. Years later, in one of her letters to me, Beate remembered how she felt the foundations of the house shifting just before it fell, and as she ran for her life, it seemed to sigh.”

“I’d have been furious,” I say to cover up Victor’s
Commando
-style war-mongering noises.

“They were too tired for fury,” Mum says. “Too hungry and thirsty. After the bombs had wrecked the city, the triumphant Soviet soldiers looted the banks for money and jewellery. They demolished shops for fun, throwing the shelves, the counters, out onto the street. The people of Berlin, desperate for food, had to watch these shrieking, laughing men toss out all the bags of flour and rice, spilling it everywhere. No one dared pick it up, not with rifles pointing at them. They had to creep out at night to collect what they could find in the rubble.”

I imagine the horrible contrast between plump little girls clutching cones of sweets and hollow-eyed young women wasting away.

“Where were you, Mum?” I ask her.

She is quiet for a moment, the side of her face speckled with leaf patterns from the sunlight flickering through the passing trees. Dad murmurs something to her while the mad spotted shadows prance through the car. I can’t hear him. He is concentrating on her, not the road ahead in the blinding sun. I have to scream that the traffic is slowing down for the turn-off to the docks.