The Big Lie (17 page)

‘Interesting interpretation,’ I heard Fräulein Eberhardt snigger to Dirk as I took a breath.

‘In you go, Fräulein Baker!’ yelled Fisher. ‘Go! Go! Go!’

Angelika leapt forwards, put her head to my chest, and clamped a hold around my neck. She yanked me backwards. The hand that she smacked across my mouth smelt of grass and mud from the squat thrusts and press ups we’d done earlier in the meeting.

‘And release!’ instructed Fisher. Angelika let go. I shook my head to get rid of the little white dots dancing in my vision. My glance landed, quite by accident, on GG. I thought of the smell of her that day on the cross-country run when she’d grabbed me. From the less-than-a-second that our eyes met before flickering apart, I would have bet everything that she was thinking of it too.

No one on the train made eye contact with anyone they did not know. All the world’s eyes were on us and they belonged to fake American journalists. And spies! And TERRORISTS!

Even Ruby Heigl understood that this wasn’t the time for a sing-song, and she’d been known to strike up a verse of ‘Eine Flamme Ward Gegeben’ at a public hanging, just so she could make it all about her. Instead we stared out of the windows. And at each other – safe faces.

‘How can you possibly eat at a time like this?’ Angelika Baker muttered as I stuffed the Zimtschnecken into my mouth. ‘Just watching you is making me want to puke.’

Angelika had woven little red, black and white ribbons through the French braids that started at the front of her head and worked their way round her scalp like a mountain road. Or rather, Frau Baker had. No one had enough hands or mirrors to have attempted that construction by themselves.

My hair had been rushed and would probably work loose the second we started marching. I could feel the pastry grease smeared on my chin. But I had to eat, even if it made me feel queasy, or I would collapse later from jelly-legs after all that skating practice. I didn’t want Fräulein Eberhardt seeing me swoon and thinking it was because I was too excited about a stupid boy who couldn’t even find a pair of trousers to fit.

Because, actually, we’d all forgotten about him. When Ingrid had mentioned him that morning, there had been a brief moment when I’d honestly caught myself thinking,
What boy?
Even the girls who had got a thrill from Jay Acker at the start had lost interest. In the beginning his song was weird and exciting and new, but after hearing it day in and day out on the People’s Radio it felt normal and tired and obvious. Maybe if they had given us something new we would have stayed enthralled. Instead those repeated words got stuck in our heads.

It had become something of an earworm. The song went round and round and round and round, until you were forced to sing it out loud, just to set the pest free. The opening piano notes were enough to make you reach for the radio’s off switch. Is that what it would be like when he finally stepped out on stage to sing? Thousands of German kids groaning out a sigh and ramming their fingers in their ears?

All this, for that.

When we got to Trafalgar Square, we were escorted straight to the grand hotel that we would be using as our base. We stashed our flags and supplies in one of the larger meeting rooms and were given a tour of the public areas by a pretty, bossy girl with looping plaits. It was the most stunning place – beautiful, so stylish – yet the bossy girl acted as if it was all nothing – irritating, even. The lighted pillars, the screens made from suspended cord that shimmered as someone passed, all of those high-powered men and women in pristine uniform, sitting about the lobby in little leather seats with moulded feet having Kaffee und Kuchen – oh, it was all so TIRESOME to her.

We were taken down the glass-panelled stairs to a moody lower-ground floor where the walls were coated in a textured navy blue, and directed towards the toilets to freshen up. The bossy girl didn’t come in with us, so that meant we were free to strike poses in front of the two-metre high gilded mirror and squeal with delight at the sensor taps. We used two flannel hand towels each, just because we could, and rubbed the lovely hand cream into our skin, right up to our elbows. Fräulein Eberhardt hissed out a few ‘Calm down, girls,’ but I’d seen her pout her lips as she looked at her reflection in the mirror. She was as swept away by it all as we were. In a tense day, it was a longed-for moment of release.

Back upstairs and back on our best behaviour, a high-ranking man from the Schutzstaffel led Fisher, Dirk and Fräulein Eberhardt up to the top floor of the building. We went too, following behind in a neat line, our hands behind our backs, but all of the Sturmbannführer’s words were directed at the older three, as if he didn’t quite know how to speak to young people, especially not girls. I got a nod, of course. He had to acknowledge me.

He led us through a gorgeous suite with a vast landscape of thick-pile carpet that made you worry about the fact we were all wearing shoes, past a purple-quilted bed and a door giving us a peek into a marble-sinked bathroom, then out onto a balcony that ran along three sides of the building. It had the most amazing view of the square and the city. The streets were dressed in red, white and black as far as the eye could see. It was one of those moments, staring down on the domed rooftops of our elegant capital, where an intense rush of love for the Fatherland was unavoidable.

But we hadn’t been taken up there for the view. We were there to see the rope ladders that were stored by the railings of the balcony.

‘Another potential escape route,’ said the Sturmbannführer.

I wanted to ask if we were the ones who would need the escape route, or if we were to stop others (Journalists! Spies! Terrorists!) from using the escape routes. Then I realised the clue was in the ladders. As if we would be providing means for the enemy to make their run for it. But then another question – if it was us making the escape, what exactly would we be escaping from? (Journalists? Spies? Terrorists?) No one asked. Not Fräulein Eberhardt, not Dirk, not Fisher. I assumed it would all become crystal clear when the general escaping started to happen.

The Sturmbannführer turned and walked back through the glass sliding doors of the hotel suite and, like the tail of a snake, we followed. It was a moment’s job, I thought, to flip one of those ladders over the side of the balcony, to make it an entrance route as well as an exit. It seemed to me that this was something the Sturmbannführer hadn’t considered – that people might want to get in as well as escape. I quickly pushed the thought from my mind before I felt compelled to say something out loud. All I had to do was stay quiet, but that felt like an impossible task, treacherous. Even though I had nothing to tell, not really. No details. But I had a feeling, an understanding that couldn’t be shaped into words … I had that.

As we passed the bed, I let my hand fall away from behind my back to stroke the silkiness of the bed linen, just to distract me, just to see if I dared. The excess and the decadence of this room – it was all wrong. But, it existed, for someone. I wanted to touch it. I saw that GG, immediately behind me, had let her hand drop to casually do the same. Our hands traced the same line along the neat stitching. I didn’t risk turning around to see her smile. But I knew it would be there.

The Sturmbannführer escorted us outside next, through the square, past the statue of Himmler, past the lions in their flag jackets and around the fountains where mermaids and dolphins and tritons flipped about in nothing because the water had been drained away. This would be our route to the vast stage beneath the pillars of the National Gallery. This monster stage had huge red, black and white wings. Television screens were suspended where the monster’s horns might be. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Not even at the birthday celebrations on 20
th
April. Fisher hollered back to us the instructions he was receiving from the Sturmbannführer. We couldn’t hear him ourselves, now that we were out in the open. Helicopters were circling and light aircraft were crossing overhead, leaving strange trails.

We passed other groups of HJs and BDMs, picking up snatches of their instructions from their SS escort. We straightened our backs and eyed them suspiciously. They eyed us back. Usually in situations where we met other troops, the girls would be giggly, checking out the new crop of boys. The boys would be swaggering, trying to impress. Not that day. This was the enemy. What songs and marches had they got up their sleeves? Would they be putting on a better show than us? Could we honestly say that our troop had done all we could to prepare?

Once our instruction was over, the order for the shooting came. Wehrmacht boys started working their way through the square, picking off the gulls and pigeons. Each soldier had a dog at his heel to retrieve the bird corpses to put into their sack. A man in a bright yellow jacket followed, hosing away the blood.

The gunshot continued all week, every day. The pigeons didn’t seem to get the message that this wasn’t a safe place to be. Or maybe they were up for the fight. They kept on returning, in their battalions.

Our moment arrived.

The square was an unending mass of upturned faces, bobbing on a sea of white and brown shirts. Special instruction had been given that we should remove our jackets because of the heat.

The crowd joined in with us as we sang – one voice – so that it was never very clear if we were performing or them. I don’t remember if we made any mistakes. I’m sure we were perfect. The routine was etched so deep into our muscle memory that none of us was conscious of it any more. We just did it. Like when you properly nail an ice routine, you don’t worry about which foot, which edge, which way to turn, what speed to reach – you just go. And that frees you up to concentrate on the emotion.

So what was my emotion on that stage as we marched and sang and banged our drums and waved our flags? A sort of terror, I think. An anticipation of something beyond this, bigger than this. I thought about Clementine – could she see me? Because she said she would find a way to be there, somehow, to see history happening right now. And also to say goodbye. She promised me she would say goodbye. I thought about my father who could certainly see me, supposedly making him proud. But mostly I thought about myself – which version of me was on display that day? Good Jess? Bad Jess? Moments earlier I had saluted and curtsied to a line-up of dignitaries in the hotel lobby, a line-up that included my father. I was but a few metres away from our dear, great Führer. Did I tremble? Yes. But I’m ashamed to say my overriding emotion was one of regret – the regret that I could not enjoy it more.

When we finished our march, we stayed on the stage, just as we had rehearsed over and over. Each of us had our own small X taped onto the floor. Miss it at your peril. On the day of the actual concert, there were Wehrmacht boys just beyond the footlights, on the stone stairs, holding their rifles, and I had to wonder if they’d been put there to pick us off like unwanted pigeons should we stand out of line. We eyed them when we could – and the small monitor screens next to them showing what images were being relayed to the people at home and the people around the world. It was confusing, because there we were standing upright on the stage, looking pretty/formidable, ready to be the human scenery to Jay Acker’s performance, but there on the screens was footage of us marching ten minutes ago. The day’s so-called ‘live’ events were going out with a time delay. If we had messed up our march, would they have cut it? Were they going to edit out parts of Jay Acker’s performance?

He had arrived that morning.

No one could hand-on-heart claim to have actually seen him, but we knew he was in our midst because this weird, electric ripple had gone through all the HJ and BDM troops waiting in the hotel for the show to start. We squinted through the quivering cord screens and craned our necks around doorways eager to be the first to see a real-life American, but we only caught glimpses of his entourage – fat men dressed strangely, in pyjamas and farmer’s trousers, with hooded jackets, as if this trip to our great nation was an everyday event and really not worth dressing up for. It didn’t quite occur to us that these fat men counted as a sighting of a real-life American too.

There were also women in the entourage, dressed a little like the women who had clambered over Frau Hart’s fence, and very much like the women in Clementine’s camouflaged magazine – tight painful trousers, snug little jumpers that left a strip of belly skin exposed. These were the wives we guessed, or secretaries. They busied about, carrying flat touch-screen computers – computers that were nowhere near as fast or as super as ours, especially not in the hands of these women who chewed gum like idiots and jabbed at the screens, sighing and squawking out their every thought.

‘How are we supposed to make this work, if we haven’t got the fucking VPN we were promised?’

It didn’t seem to occur to them to ask the pretty, bossy girl with the looping plaits for what they needed. It would have been brought to them straight away. I think they utterly underestimated our efficiency.

Once positioned on our Xs on the stage, we stood with our backs to these American people, as they waited, chatting in the wings. I did wonder if the gunfire might come from behind us, not from the Wehrmacht boys out front. We could be shot right in the exposed parts of our necks and fall neatly in our rows, on top of one another, like dominoes.

After our songs and marches (were we the best? In the end it didn’t really seem to matter) Herr Dean gave his speech. On stage, we weren’t allowed to move or react, but the girls in the front of the crowd, the girls specially selected to stand on the raised stone sections to our left and right, did enough of that for all of us. They clutched one another and jumped up and down, squealing and gasping. We saluted and gave our victory cries in unison, our fingers quivering, while behind us came unmistakable whispers of ‘Jesus Christ’ and ‘fucking hell’, in weird elastic accents. When one American voice raised itself to something closer to a mutter, we heard a scuffle break out. Then quiet. But we were good. We stayed still, we faced forward and listened to our Führer’s wonderful words about music and art and youth and the German spirit.

Then all of a sudden, it was happening. HE was being introduced, being called out onto the stage by our dear, great Führer. I thought the whole square might implode from the incomprehensible excitement of it all. Here was one god introducing another! Well, in a way. And then THERE HE WAS – this pure blood boy, this first American on British soil, on any German soil, in over sixty years, one of the most in-demand celebrities of our time and …

He was very small. Like a squirrel.

And in the same way his entourage hadn’t bothered to dress up for this momentous occasion, he hadn’t either. Here we were bestowing a great honour upon him and he had chosen to wear too-big shorts in the colours of a tiger. They were slipping down low over his tight, black underpants. He walked from the side of the stage in a stuttery, lopsided way, which made me think for a moment that he must be damaged ( …
the diseased, the damaged, the dissolute
… ) before I realised it had something to do with his huge, clumpy running shoes that were clearly the wrong size, these things not being so readily available in his country.

No one in the crowd quite knew what to do. There had been this build-up of pressure, this massive intake of breath, but no one dared let it out. There was an awkward smattering of applause, which stopped as soon as it had started when the few realised the many weren’t really going for it. How were we supposed to worship this boy, when our true hero, our Führer, was already before us? And actually, were we supposed to worship him? The inspirational poster on the wall of the hotel reception that day read:
WE JOIN IN THE PRAYER OF A GREAT GERMAN: ‘AND THOUGH THE WORLD WERE FILLED WITH DEVILS, WE MUST STILL SUCCEED.’

Was this the devil the poster was talking about? Someone to succeed despite of? Was this a Trojan Horse? Nothing but a great big challenge? Because we German people like a challenge – it’s a chance to show our mettle.

Some odd little squeaks and gasps came from across the square.

Jay Acker seemed unfazed by this almost silent reception. He unzipped his hooded pyjama jacket as he made his way to Herr Dean’s podium. Without missing a step, he took the jacket off, bunched it up and tossed it at one of the HJ boys standing in the front line of the formation up on stage. It hit his uniformed chest and flumped onto the floor. The HJ boy did not react at all, not for a second – which we were all thinking was pretty impressive, until there was a cross little bark from below front of stage which made the boy quickly drop to his knees and retrieve the discarded item of clothing.

Underneath the pyjama top, Jay Acker was wearing a white vest. Underwear, basically. There was writing and drawings all over his arms – foreign letters, flowers, the face of a dog and … a big, red triangle on his deltoid muscle. We saw it. Herr Dean saw it. We saw Herr Dean see it. We saw him hesitate to offer a handshake, especially as the boy hadn’t saluted. But we also saw Herr Dean glance down at the photographers poised at the front of the stage ready to catch this momentous image. Our Führer took the boy’s hand, manoeuvred him so the shoulder with the triangle was away from the cameras, and clamped an arm across his back to freeze the pose. The cameras flashed, blinding all of us who were stood behind.

Before our eyesight had had a chance to return, the orchestra struck up its chord to play our Führer off the stage. It was time. IT WAS TIME! We blinked away the comets dancing across our vision and … the boy ran away. Off stage. Gone. Where to? Wohin? The desire to turn our necks was just too too much.

But there was no chance to ask ourselves any more questions. There was an almighty sound. ALMIGHTY. The loudest gasp you have ever heard and it burst free of the speakers. ‘AAAHHH!’ Like a pressure cooker firing off its lid. It made all of us on stage leap thirty centimetres in the air. Up started the solid beat, the
ting-ting-ting
of a cowbell over the top. Then an echoey, disembodied voice was telling us to dance. But to what? Because this wasn’t music. This was the sound of sandpaper going back and forth. This was a women yelling like she was a kid in a playground calling someone else her ‘baby’. A synthesiser kept starting a tune but never really finishing it. It was the weirdest, weirdest thing. ‘Owwww!’ cried the woman on the music, like she’d trapped her finger in a door. And all the time we had to keep our faces forward, looking pretty and formidable.

‘Come on, Great Britain!’ said a man with a microphone who hadn’t bothered to learn the correct name of our country. He bounded on stage. He stuck out his lips like a monkey, jerked his chin to the beat, clapped his hands above his head, making the microphone
thud-thud-thud
. The suggestion was we should do the same as him. But no one did. Because who was he? This wasn’t Jay Acker. Why should this stranger be telling us what to do? All the kids in the square were staring up, white-faced at the television screens above the stage, screens that, being on stage, we couldn’t see. Or else they were searching for the faces of their troop leaders in the crowd, or Herr Dean himself, looking for clues as to how to behave. But our leaders were only doing what we were doing – staring forward, enduring it. This was awful.

Then the ‘music’ changed. THANK GOD. But – DISASTER – it had been put on at the wrong speed, either that or the tape player was chewing up their cassette. Yet they let it run for the longest time without sorting it out – this weird monster voice saying something about parties that we couldn’t understand. The voice of a girl wobbled over the top – worse than Angelika Baker milking a solo.

‘Yeah! Yeah!’ bellowed the microphone man at the end of every line. Again, I think we were supposed to join in. We didn’t.

‘Who
is
he?’ mouthed the lips of just about everyone in the crowd.

They were all getting itchy. This wasn’t what we wanted, what we expected.

But that’s when the song came on.

A single quivering violin snapping everyone’s jaws shut – just like that.

Jay Acker’s voice – strange but clear and delicious, singing low, full of something, luring us in, talking about how in the very beginning there was no light, no colour, and how he sometimes felt like he couldn’t go on, but then, but then … Oh, goodness! There came a piano, a cry, a WONDERFUL EXPLOSION.

OH!

I had never felt anything like this before. Never. No, that’s not true. It felt like being kissed, like being touched, like watching the person you love swing through a shaft of the last summer sun. The stage spots danced to the same frantic beat as the song. Jay Acker leapt across the stage, telling us we were LUMINOUS, we were LOVED, we were BLESSED, we were TOGETHER. WE WERE ONE! And you almost couldn’t notice it to begin with, because it grew so gradually. But we were moving. It was impossible to stay still. We tried, because we were terrified of being punished, but somehow this was stronger. The audience was rolling in waves, like a beautiful sea, the lights painting them pink, then blue, then yellow, then pink again. GG grabbed my hand in the excitement, because no one would notice, because everyone in that square was doing something they shouldn’t. I squeezed it back. In front of us the kids had their hands in the air. They clapped, they bounced, they sang. They worshipped this devil, this truth, this light.

It was awful. So BRILLIANTLY awful that I entirely forgot, about the something beyond this, the something bigger than this.

And then she burst onto the stage.

I didn’t know that it would be this. She’d told me her family were going to escape. That the concert would be their ‘final day’. Their summer holidays in Cornwall were all about meeting their connections and planning their route out. People had done it before, she said.

‘But you don’t know anyone in America,’ I said, scared for her.

‘Oh, I know plenty,’ she replied. ‘I speak to them all the time.’

She communicated via short little messages on a programme on the Hart’s illegal computer. Her dad knew how to stop everyone else in the Reich using the networks, so of course he knew how to do it himself and go undetected. She spouted a bunch of initials at me, systems, communication routes, ways to distribute information – her father’s value.

‘But have you ever actually met these people you’re talking to?’ I asked her.

‘No.’

‘Then how can you say you really know them?’

I didn’t tell my father; I did as she asked. I thought I was helping her to escape. But it was a fantasy. Why didn’t I see that? There was no longer any chance that that could happen. My hope had made it real, because I was willing to let her go. That was how much I loved her. I knew she would be happier somewhere else. Somewhere nicer than here. But nothing nice could come of this. It was just like she’d said, she hadn’t been taunting me – Clementine was going somewhere she couldn’t come back from.

She was wearing her BDM skirt and necktie, but she had removed her blouse – the title of Jay Acker’s song, FEELING FREE, was scrawled across her small, bare breasts; red triangles were drawn on her arms. She had a Party flag around her neck like a cloak, which is what I think fooled everyone, stopped anyone from reacting straight away. The Americans thought this was something to do with us. The Germans thought, obscene as it was, it was something to do with the boy’s song. She was a devil that we all had to endure for the greater good. She had found her own microphone. It seemed rehearsed. And I suppose it probably was. As much as it could have been.