The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, as I heaved out great gulping breaths. ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

  She ran a soothing hand over my hair, down the skin of my neck. I could feel my heart thundering against her chest.

  And then I kissed her. No, she kissed me.

  No – we kissed each other.

  APRIL 2013

  Clementine got suspended.

  Dad told me when I came home for breakfast after skating that I wasn’t to knock for her as she wouldn’t be going to school.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because the school needs some time to decide on a suitable punishment.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure I like your tone of voice, young lady,’ he replied.

  I hadn’t slept.

  I’d tripped over my own skates at least three times at the rink that morning. In the build-up to that blasted camel spin, I’d caught my toe pick in the ice and bent both hands backwards as I tried to break my fall.

  ‘Verdammt, Jessika!’ Ingrid raged from the benches. ‘Since when do you land like that?’ She leapt onto the rink, struck over to me in short, angry thrusts, stopping messily on purpose, spitting ice over my legs. I pulled myself up onto my elbows and tried to move my wrists but they were numb, fixed like concrete. Please don’t let them be broken, I was willing. Please don’t let them be broken.

  ‘Answer me!’ Ingrid snapped. ‘Antworte mir!’

  The pain was coursing through the cold now, forcing hot tears onto my cheeks. I hadn’t realised there was a question; I couldn’t answer her.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Ingrid sighed, crouching down and making a grab for one of my hands. But I snatched it away.

  ‘Don’t!’ I barked.

  ‘I was only going to …’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’

  Ingrid recoiled. I think I had really upset her. She placed her knees onto the ice and sat back on her heels.

  ‘I just don’t want anyone to touch me,’ I said, trying to make it sound calmer now, more reasoned. It was the truth though. Nothing good came from physical contact.

  She stared at me, her eyelashes batting at her long fringe. Each blink a thought.

  ‘And why’s that?’ Her voice had lowered like mine. ‘Why are you crying, Jessika?’

  If this had been Coach Dorothea, she would have smacked my ear for speaking to her like that, for showing emotion after a fall. I think I would have appreciated it. Smack! That’s for how you enjoy being touched, by boys, by girls, fingers, lips, skin … For letting your tongue slip so easily into GG’s mouth without anyone telling you to put it there. Smack! That’s for being helpless to stop your best friend from having her insides sliced out.

  ‘Come on, I need to examine your wrists, Jessika.’ Ingrid offered me her open palms, as if beckoning a toddler. ‘You know that’s not how you save yourself.’

  I did know. (Anticipate the fall, bend your legs to get closer to the ice, roll forwards and to the side, keep the arms in.) But what if you can’t anticipate the fall? What if you don’t see it coming?

  I gave in. I put my wrists onto the warmth of Ingrid’s gloves. She nodded herself a point won.

  ‘Please don’t make the last ten years a total waste of time,’ she muttered as she slowly rotated my left wrist, her fingers interlocked with mine. ‘I’m talking about myself, of course.’ She smirked, though I understood it was no joke. ‘Please don’t make my last ten years a total waste of time.’

  I was Ingrid’s first ever student. I was the first girl she had secured a place for at skate camp.

  ‘Will you get a medal when I go?’ I asked.

  ‘Bloody deserve one!’ she scoffed.

  She looked for the smile and I gave it to her. Another nod, another point won. She started work on my other wrist, loosening the joint. I had only jarred them. I would be all right. The worst I’d have would be bruising, some pain when extending my hands for expression.

  ‘I don’t care about any medals,’ she said, shaking her head, slowly for emphasis. ‘I just want you to always have this in your life.’ Her eyes flickered upwards and caught mine. ‘Because where else can you be truly free,’ she whispered, ‘except on the ice?’

  I hadn’t slept because I had been trying to work out a solution, a way to save Clementine. Inspiration had slunk into the room at 4 a.m.

  This was a terrible mistake. An administration error. I would convince the authorities. Use my position. After all, on the surface, didn’t it look all wrong? Only the proper idiot girls had this operation. The deaf ones too, the deformed ones, the ones who fell into jerking fits in the middle of the street. The horrible drunks. Basically, the type of girl who was grateful for it, because she didn’t have the money or the sense anyway. Clementine was not like that. We would write a persuasive letter of complaint, draw people’s attention to the situation, the injustice of it, and then in the face of reason they would have no choice but to reconsider.

  In the daylight my plan seemed even more promising. Dangerous, but promising.

  I poured myself some milk and tore at a bread roll, scattering the poppy seeds over the striped cloth.

  I would take my best writing paper and fountain pen to school with me, then, if my nerve held, I would go straight to Clementine’s. Mum would be picking up Lilli and taking her to gymnastics. No one would ever know that I was there.

  I could feel Mum’s glare on me, because of the mess I was making. I started brushing the table with the side of my hand, aiming for my palm but sending most of the seeds onto the floor.

  ‘Jessika! Come on!’

  I let out a massive yawn.

  ‘And hand over mouth!’

  I dusted the seeds from my fingers and covered my mouth like she’d asked, though it was too late now.

  Dad was watching me during all this. Chewing and thinking. Thinking and chewing. My eyes were jittery with tiredness and the seeds looked like they were moving – little black insects colonising the table.

  ‘And you’re not to go over to Clementine’s house at all until this has been resolved,’ my father added.

  A guilty throatful of orange juice came back up into my mouth. I swallowed it back. The idea that he could actually read my mind seemed very real. He knew everything, saw everything.

  ‘Sit straight, Lilli!’ Mum snapped, just as my little sister thought all the attention was going my way.

  ‘Your time is better spent across the road with Fräulein Gubbins,’ my father said.

  With GG?

  I looked up to see if this was a test, but Dad seemed entirely earnest. He posted the last chunk of his bread and Leberwurst into his mouth as a full stop.

  My throat burned with the orange juice acid of guilt, but there was another sensation beneath it all. A very small victory. I knew something he didn’t.

  Still, I hid from GG at lunchtime. Because I also knew that my father’s permission was misguided. I went into one of the high-sided wooden cubicles in the library and pretended to study. Biology. Humans and Nation. ‘If the quality population have an average of two children and the inferior population have an average of four children …’ There were small illustrations of the smiling, upright two-children-family and the wonky, bandy four-children-family, then a bar chart to show the fall in quality population.

  Now: 97% quality, 3% inferior.

  After 120 years: 67% quality, 33% inferior.

  After 300 years: 3% quality, 97% inferior.

  I let my head rest on the book, on a page of images of great German nationals who would never have been born under the two-children rule. Schubert, Bismarck, Adolf Hitler … My eyes must have closed.

  She found me. Her voice was suddenly very close, right inside my ear.

  ‘Come and have a cigarette.’

  I gasped, shot upright and butted her in the chin with the back of my head. She yelped.
All around us there was a rustle of papers and bodies. Everyone had turned to stare. GG was clutching her face and laughing.

  Fräulein Wainwright’s head popped up from behind her reference desk parapet. ‘Girls!’ she hissed.

  GG ducked into the cubicle next to mine, but made no show of getting out her books.

  I turned the page. There was a chart filled with rows of paper doll children, and in each row a single doll coloured black to show the birth number of some of our nation’s greatest men. Bach was the eighth born of twelve children, Wagner was the ninth born of nine …

  ‘Come and have a cigarette,’ she said again, her whisper travelling through the wooden partition.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ I whispered back. ‘It makes your babies come out with two mouths.’

  I was a second child. I would still have been born under the Zwei Kinder System. Did that mean I would never amount to much? But then I saw, right there in the book, an error, or perhaps just an exception that proved the rule. Ludwig Von Beethoven was the second child of six.

  GG’s head appeared around the edge of my booth. She made herself go cross-eyed.

  ‘Come and watch me smoke, then.’

  ‘Girls!’ Fräulein Wainwright was heading for us now, with her frumpy shoes and short hair that refused to grow. She was only twenty-five – if that – but she’d clearly already given up. She dressed like my Oma Davina.

  I closed my book. It was time to leave – or else get an embarrassing dressing-down from Fräulein Wainwright in the reference section. We got up and made for the exit.

  ‘This is a place of study, ladies, not a coffee shop!’ she called after us, trying to be funny. We clattered out of the library doors before I could start to feel sorry for her.

  We walked through the gloomy atrium with its rubber floor of raised Lego circles that felt like cobbles beneath flat buckled shoes. I’d often wondered how they might feel under grown-up heels, like the ones Fräulein Allis wore. Precarious, I think.

  ‘Fräulein Wainwright could actually be quite attractive if she made an effort,’ I said to GG as we pushed out through the second set of swing doors into the sunshine of the courtyard.

  ‘I dunno about that,’ said GG. She made for the alleyway between the library and the science blocks. I followed her. Unthinking. Distracted, maybe. Or perhaps a little thrilled by our small – almost – act of rebellion in the library. Thrilled, at least, to be with GG who could do it with so much more confidence than me.

  ‘If she could get her hair to grow,’ I said. ‘Wore something that fitted.’

  We cut a diagonal across the grass square at the back of the science block. I knew where we were going – beyond the hedges and behind the PE equipment sheds. That’s where GG went to smoke.

  ‘If she put on a bit of weight,’ I went on, ‘maybe she could get a husband.’

  We hitched up our skirts and stepped over the flower-bed that was purple with snake’s head fritillaries. We slipped between the sheds.

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want one,’ GG said, sitting down on an upturned crate.

  I dropped my books, only really understanding as I planted myself on the grass beside her that I had broken a promise to myself – to stay away from her. But then I thought about what my father had said that morning. Your time is better spent with Fräulein Gubbins. Maybe my dad did know best.

  ‘Of course she wants a husband,’ I said.

  GG blew smoke across the town, laid out below us from our vantage point.

  ‘Everyone does,’ I added.

  GG raised her eyebrows, shrugged.

  We let the noise of cars and children drift up to us for a moment.

  ‘You know she failed the physical exam,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t get her certificate to marry’.

  ‘What, Fräulein Wainwright?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘No! What did she get failed for?’

  ‘Dunno. Everyone says one of her uncles was a bit –’ GG stuck her tongue behind her bottom lip and brought up a hand, making it twisted and shaky – ‘you know.’

  ‘Oh my gosh!’

  GG nodded solemnly. ‘And you know who she was going to get hitched to, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  She sucked on her cigarette and made me wait. ‘Herr Manning.’

  ‘No! That’s not true!’

  ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘But he got married to …’

  ‘Cyndi Payton …’

  ‘What, two weekends after she left school?’

  ‘Manning passed his marriage tests with flying colours; wasn’t like he was going to hang about.’

  ‘God.’ I’d always felt a little bit sorry for Fräulein Wainwright. Now I wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye. ‘How many kids has Cyndi got now?’ I asked.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Already!’

  GG started chuckling. ‘Bloody hell, Jess, you know fuck-all, considering you’re …’

  A little stab of adrenaline ran through my jaw. GG gave me a tight smile and went quiet. The moment drifted off across the breeze. I followed her gaze, out over the park below us, the river, the steeple of the Party building, our own desirable estate somewhere beyond the trees.

  ‘Those girls at the other school get it easy, don’t you think?’ she said.

  ‘Do they?’ I couldn’t see how, in any way. Our boys got the best jobs, we got the best husbands.

  ‘I saw one of them in Waitrose …’ GG went on.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, outside, walking past. She was our age. I think she works at the cleaner’s, ironing or something, out back where no one can see her. Mariel, is it? Anyway, she had her hair dyed. Two different colours. Blonde underneath and black on top.’

  I knew who she meant. I’d done the rounds of her estate with Clementine during the Winter Aid Programme the year before last, when Clementine was still in the BDM. We’d taken Mariel’s family a bag of second-hand clothes (mostly donated by Angelika Baker and her sisters – those girls couldn’t walk past a Gratton catalogue without ordering three blouses and a handbag). We also took the family new crockery and bed linen, a rug and some food coupons. Their ground floor apartment was small and filled to the polystyrene ceiling tiles with babies and small children, but it was clean and her family were good stock who were willing to work. A warmth came out of their home that had made me feel strange. Envious, I suppose. But only because it was cold outside and we couldn’t feel our toes. We’d been walking the streets for a good few hours by then, selling little flags as we went, keeping pace with the truck that was still strapped up with the banner from collection week. OPEN YOU’RE PURSES FOR THE WINTERHILFSWERK! Clementine had painted it. She was good at fancy letters.

  When we had handed over the stash to Mariel she had said her thank-yous, then: ‘It’s spelt wrong, your banner. It should be Y, O, U, R. No apostrophe. No E at the end.’

  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.