The Big Lie

by Julie Mayhew

  She said nothing. She had a hard little mouth, despite the freckles and the angel wings.

  Then I said, ‘You’re very clever,’ because I thought that a piece of kindness deserved a little bit of kindness in return. (Or a bit of flattery, depending on how you wanted to look at things.) ‘You’re clever to know your way around, I mean. Because everything here looks the same to me.’

  Nothing again. I needed to ask a direct question if I wanted a response.

  ‘So,’ I leant my head towards her, nudging her shoulder with mine, just slightly, to show that we were friends now. ‘How long have you been working here?’

  She stopped walking then. She took the hand that was handcuffed to mine, her strong one, not the free one, so I had to be involved in the movement too, whether I liked it or not, and she struck me hard across the cheek.

  ‘Shut up!’ she said.

  My yelp echoed against the white walls and the white floors.

  This was one person who understood the element of surprise.

  ‘You disgust me,’ the freckly warden muttered, shuddering a little, shaking my words off her shoulders. ‘You really do.’

  She made us continue our walking. I clutched my face but the pain was nothing compared to what I felt inside. I’d failed some kind of test, just when it seemed like I was getting somewhere. I had been stupid. But that’s what desperation does to you, I think.

  Once at the room, the freckly warden told the man in uniform what had happened, except it sounded like something that had happened between two other people. Two other people on some other planet. I didn’t get my say.

  I had doomed myself to go back to the beginning – again – and this time I was even less sure what I was being punished for. The something that they kept saying was inside me, or not inside me … It could have been anything. One of so many things.

  I truly wondered though if it was my power to disgust.

  You disgust me.

  It was a terrifying thing for her to say, considering all the other things that went on in that place.

  I made straight for the meeting hall, taking the shortcut back through the graveyard, crossing over the high street, then up towards the old cricket club.

  I took the path carefully mown flat in the field, looking over my shoulder now and again to make sure no one had followed. All was quiet – only the sound of my feet on the grass, the rasp of stray barley stalks against my shoes. Everyone was at work, or had gone back to school. There were only a few of us who were still in this limbo, waiting to head off. I would be gone in ten days’ time.

  Mum was slowly filling my trunk. It sat open-jawed on the floor of my bedroom. Each day she’d sneak in when I wasn’t there to leave another new thing on my bed. Then she’d wait in the kitchen for me to run downstairs and gush my thanks. She wanted the reaction. Occasionally she’d come into my room while I was there, her face all serious, bowing down on one knee, her skirt and apron spilling, and she’d lay the next new object ceremoniously before me. A warm sweater for training, bed socks, a set of Berlin Girl Mystery Romances, new bright yellow guards for my skates. She would crack her serious face only when I laughed at this solemn act of hers. It distracted her from the fact that I was going away, I think, these offerings from the gods. Lilli would then provide even more distraction by throwing a momentous tantrum over every present – because she hadn’t been given anything lately and it JUST WASN’T FAIR.

  Mum couldn’t afford to be getting everything brand new. We had more money than most, but not so much to place ourselves too far above the workers; that would have been vulgar. It had never bothered me in the past, getting stuff second-hand. Angelika Baker had always been a snob about it, never quite understanding that extravagance was an ugly vanity while frugality showed a dedication to the future of the Fatherland. But these second-hand things bothered me now. I spread the warm sweater out across my bed. Cashmere, the label said. I leant over to sniff it – nice, but ‘other’. It made me uneasy. Where had it come from? Who had it come from? Where was the girl who’d once owned it?

  I let myself into the meeting hall and flicked the switches that made the fluorescents clink and flicker awake. I crossed the room repeating a small, comforting lie to myself (well, a big one, perhaps) that I really wasn’t doing anything wrong. I wasn’t trespassing. This had been my territory for the last eleven years – sewing and singing and hammering and reciting. Why shouldn’t I come here when I needed the place most? I’d be back here tonight with the few others who were left. I’d give a wink to Fisher at the right moment, just to keep the story going.

  The meetings weren’t about us older girls any more. We were only there to pass on what we knew to the little ones who’d moved up into our time slot. They looked young in a way I don’t think we ever did. They seemed silly and soft. I didn’t care about them. It was a terrible thing to admit, but it was true. We had been taught to defend our own Mädelschaft to the death. We’d been filed as sharp as we could ever get on that, and I WOULD have defended them to the death – even Ruby Heigl and Angelika Baker. But the small ones …? They didn’t seem like my sisters. I remember the outgoing girls who spoke down to us last year, they felt it too. You could tell. Indifference. There were some limits to our unity.

  But there I was, in the silence of the hall that afternoon, doing exactly what they’d trained me to – defend one of my sisters to the death. They only had themselves to blame.

  I picked through Fisher’s keys looking for the one that opened the cupboard. Then once inside, I pulled out my favourite machine – the pale blue manual with the least temperamental ribbon. I set it down on one of the tables that was pushed up against the side of the room, lifted a chair off the stack. I’d brought my own paper in my bag and threaded a sheet into the roller.

  I sat there, looking at the empty page for the longest time, scared to start. Above me hung that week’s inspirational poster. IT IS NOT MERELY ENOUGH TO SAY: I BELIEVE. RATHER ONE MUST SWEAR: I WILL FIGHT.

  I pushed down shift-lock, took a deep breath.

  THIS IS CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART

  I bashed those keys like I was clattering through a Beethoven piano sonata at the Royal Albert Hall. I threw the carriage back, hit the line-spacer several times to create the right amount of room. I took the photograph from the front pocket of my bag and held it against the paper, checking that the gap I’d left was sufficient.

  There she was.

  My friend.

  She looked neater and more composed than she ever did in real life. We had traded ID pictures last year, snipping off the bottom image from our strips. She was wearing her BDM uniform – because the photos were for new membership cards. That was why she was giving that face to the camera – half-snarling, certainly defiant.

  And then it hit me, like a cannonball to the gut – she was gone. She was gone. How had I let Herr Hoffman separate me from her, let the news crews twist history? How had I carried on skating, eating, sleeping, going to the BDM meetings? How could I have celebrated my eighteenth birthday in the garden with my family wearing a stupid paper hat when she was gone? I’d been in a dream, a self-induced coma. I felt a shame that I had never felt before.

  The only consolation – she was so alive in my head now I could barely contain her. I could still see her that last day in the garden, the way the sunlight made her look like a goddess. Immortal. The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right. I put her picture down, wiped away my tears.

  THIS IS THE GIRL WHO SET HERSELF ON FIRE AT THE JAY ACKER CONCERT IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.

  I typed.

  THE AMANDA LEVY STORY IS A BIG LIE.

  CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART IS A GERMAN CITIZEN BRITISH CITIZEN, WHO BELIEVES IN FREEDOM.

  The crossing-out was wrong. I was sure that the place Clementine had come from before was Berlin, her father’s hometown. Her German language was always so much slicker than mine – that head-start she’d had when she was little, the immersion. But
Clementine would have liked the crossing-out, the ambiguity of it. It didn’t matter who we were, where we were from, we were all prisoners.

  THEY TOOK AWAY HER PLACE AT MUSIC COLLEGE. THEY TOOK AWAY HER MOTHER’S JOB. THEY TOOK AWAY HER FATHER. THEY WERE GOING TO CUT HER OPEN AND STOP HER HAVING CHILDREN.

  CLEMENTINE AMELIA HART DID WHAT SHE DID BECAUSE SHE WAS DESPERATE.

  AND BECAUSE SHE WANTS YOU TO BE FREE.

  There were gaps in the story. People would add in their own knowledge, their own suspicions, all of the secrets and shame that they kept squirrelled away. Just like I had. That was what would really start this revolution – getting people to think for themselves. I hit the line space lever.

  DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE!

  Her words. I hit the line space lever some more. Then:

  FOR MURDER, THOUGH IT HAVE NO TONGUE, WILL SPEAK WITH MOST MIRACULOUS ORGAN.

  Hamlet. My words.

  I sat back in the chair.

  I had done something that I believed in. Not something I had been instructed to do, something that came from within me. It felt good. It felt like being good.

  Then came a voice: ‘What are you doing here?’

  They pulled it out of me, tipped me upside down and clapped me on the back to make sure I was empty. Then they set about filling me up again.

  ‘Do you know why we didn’t cut off your hair?’ my interrogator asked at the end of my last session. On that brief walk I was given outside, weeks back, I’d seen girls with hair shorn tight against their heads and others with long plaits. Like much of what went on in there, I thought it was all random.

  ‘We don’t do it to the clever girls,’ he told me. ‘The girls with excellent heritage.’

  I nodded. My hair grew very fast at home. Mum would trim it regularly. Here it had grown hardly at all.

  ‘We knew we could re-educate you. And quickly. Quicker than it would take for your hair to grow back.’

  I was supposed to be thankful, but I was nothing but angry – that they thought they had me all sussed out, right from the start.

  It was not only my hair that had stopped growing there, but my nails too. Everything had slowed – my breath, my pulse. I was becoming stiller, a tortoise. I stayed in my shell most of the time.

  ‘We’ve had a few hiccups, haven’t we, Fräulein Keller?’ He grinned. ‘But your mind is clean now. I will personally vouch for that.’ He signed the piece of paper in front of him with a flourish. My skin felt tight over my jaw. It would have hurt to say ‘thank you’, so I didn’t.

  The freckly warden collected me. But she was a different person now. She wasn’t pretty, not viewed from the inside of my shell. Perhaps the place had turned her ugly. We collected my few belongings from the single cell – my toothbrush, spoon, beaker, dish, the warm sweater – and she took me on my first long walk outside in two months. It was freezing, but I didn’t care. The light, the blue, the feeling of the wind pushing my smock between my legs, the birdsong clear, not muffled – I had jumped into a lake after the longest, hottest day.

  ‘This way.’

  We turned the corner of a long, thin building. Ahead a group of women moved rubble from one end of the fenced parade grounds to the other. Wardens stood watching. German shepherd dogs panted clouds into the air.

  ‘You will learn to become useful again,’ the uniformed man had said. ‘And to do that, you must get back in touch with the land, with work.’

  Useful to whom? He didn’t say. I was useful to no one. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. We came to a door.

  ‘We’re putting you in with the politicals,’ the freckly warden said, each word a grudging gift. ‘Count yourself lucky.’ She hooked a finger under the black triangle on my chest and tore it off in a swift yank. ‘Don’t let them see you with that.’ She shoved a flimsy red triangle into my palm instead. ‘If they did, they’d eat you alive.’

  The breast of my smock was ripped and flapping, my loose grey bra on show.

  The freckly warden punched me in the back, her knuckle meeting bone. I thought of Fisher’s gentle touch loosening my spine as he kissed me behind the curtains of the meeting hall. Just a different kind of force – no better. The room was warm and fuggy, and silent as soon as I came in. Heads turned and lifted from their beds.

  ‘Baumann!’ the freckly warden barked.

  A tall woman in a grey smock stepped forward. ‘Yes, Fräulein.’

  ‘She’s all yours,’ muttered the freckly warden, and I was handed over.

  I leapt out of my seat, put myself between the typewriter and the door, my backside on the keys. I thought I had locked myself in. WHY HAD I NOT LOCKED MYSELF IN? My heart was climbing out of my throat. I looked up.

  GG – standing in the spill of light. Dirty riding trousers, untucked shirt, tall black boots. It could have been worse, it could have been one million times worse.

  ‘You have to go!’ I spluttered. ‘Go away!’

  ‘What?’ She grinned.

  ‘I’m serious, G. Go! Pretend you never saw me.’

  ‘What are you doing? Sneaking around in here in the daytime, Secret Agent Keller …’

  She closed the door behind her and headed my way.

  ‘I’m serious, GG.’ My voice climbed an octave. ‘You’re going to get me into trouble, or I’m going to get you into trouble.’

  Killed, I wanted to say. You’re going to get us killed.

  She ignored me, came right up close. I pressed myself back against the typewriter and the table. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. But GG never cried, so that couldn’t have been it.

  ‘Come on, Jess,’ she said all quiet and low. ‘We’re going to be hundreds of miles away from each other in a few days’ time. No one is worried about …’ She didn’t finish. She took a great big stuttering breath and buried her face in her hands.

  There was a weird silence. Then an even weirder snort from behind her fingers.

  It took me a few moments to realise. GG was crying. GG. Crying.

  I wanted to move forward and comfort her, put my arms around her, but I couldn’t. MUSN’T. I kept my hands pinned to the frame of the typewriter behind me.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, coming up for air. ‘I’ve just had to say goodbye to Sassy. Mum and Dad have sold her because I’m going away and …’

  She buried her face in her hands again.

  ‘When do you leave?’ I felt like a monster, just watching her sob.

  She lifted her head. ‘Thursday. You?’

  ‘Next week.’

  She nodded.

  We stood there for a moment in the quiet of the hall, watching dust motes fall from the skylights.

  ‘It’ll be good there,’ she sighed. She was talking about the stables, not skate camp; reassuring herself, not me. Her chest started hiccupping from the tears.

  ‘More horses,’ I offered brightly. ‘New ones that you might like better.’

  She scrunched up her face to show how little I understood.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  She closed the gap between us and peeled one of my hands off the typewriter. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, playing with the end of my fingers. ‘Bit like me saying you’ll find another Clementine at skate camp.’

  She met my eyes. I was speechless. That she had said her name, more than anything. No one had since the concert. Only Herr Hoffman, only to condemn her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  I nodded. I thought about asking her the same thing back. Are you okay? That all along I loved someone else?

  ‘Do you know what’s happened to her?’ asked GG.

  I shook my head. I started to cry. I let myself ask – GG was in all sorts of trouble now anyway, just being in this meeting hall with me. ‘I couldn’t see,’ I said. ‘Afterwards. Did you see?’

  ‘I saw them carry her off stage but …’ She stopped; she shrugged. Then her arms came around me. I let her pull my head into the crook of her neck – figs, brown sugar, mixed with a l
ittle bit of horse.

  ‘I miss her so much,’ I said, tasting my tears and her skin.

  ‘I know you do.’

  What I wouldn’t have given for someone to have done this on the day of the concert. In that blacked-out car that took us home, couldn’t my father have held me then? No one would have seen. My mother could have squeezed me tight when I came into the house, all sooty and stained. Or would that have been an admission? Of something …

  ‘I just want her back,’ I sobbed.

  ‘Me too.’

  She let me cry, then she gently pulled my head away from her neck so she could kiss me full on the mouth. A kiss of life. I kissed her back, hard and urgent. This was all I had wanted, someone to be truthful.

  GG went over to the door and locked it. We took ourselves behind the curtained section at the back of the hall and made a bed of the PE mats. I was grasping at love, I realise, and I knew GG might be the very last of it.

  The tall woman with the cheekbones stepped forward. If not for her grey smock and rubber clogs she would have looked like one of the girls in Clementine’s magazine. Angular, underfed.

  ‘Clara Baumann. Block senior,’ she announced. Her newsreader English made me stand up straighter. The rest of the women in the room started creeping – cats towards a bird.

  ‘Name?’

  I gave her absolutely all of it. ‘Jessika Davina Keller.’

  It wasn’t what she was expecting. Her hard jaw dropped. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Jessika Davina Keller,’ I repeated.

  The cats slunk nearer.

  Clara twisted her neck to look at me with one questioning eye. I thought she was gearing up to slap me, but no, she started laughing.

  ‘You’re kidding me! You’re kidding me!’ She spun round to call to another of the cats. ‘Bells! Bells! Come here, look at this.’

  A short, stout woman elbowed forward and came to stand alongside Clara, making her seem even taller, giraffe-like.

  ‘Daniel Keller’s daughter!’ Clara announced.

  They knew me.

  How could they know me?