Tying Down The Lion (34 page)

Eventually Helmut cries, “Is done!”

His hair flopping out of its Brylcreem, Dad climbs in and switches on the engine. Reluctant at first, it finally starts to purr. “My angel!” he shouts.

“Not last long,” Helmut says, pointing at the car and shaking his head.

But the engine is chugging and that’s good enough for Dad. He leaps out, shakes both Helmut’s hands for ages, then plies him with spare cigarettes and Grandma’s emergency marshmallows.

“Ready for the off then?” he says, rasping his hands.

“Not yet. Now police come,” Helmut says. “I haff call them, in case we not fix.”

“No, not the police,” Dad keeps repeating. “Not the police.”

“They will just make sure the car is safe to drive, Roy,” Mum says.

“And if it conks out again, we’ll get a ride in a police-car,” Victor adds, as if this clinches it.

Pale as a ghost, Dad struggles to light a cigarette. “I don’t want to get involved with German paperwork and all that bloody jazz. And that’s final. Everyone just get in. We’ll make a bolt for it.”

“No,” Mum says. “We do not need to run away, Roy.”

“Get in! Now!”

“You are
Dummkopf
, Roy,” Mum shouts at him. “Why can you not be a normal man?”

“Hold the bus right there, Bridge,” Grandma says, drawing herself up to her full height and standing beside Dad.

“He is bloody normal,” I tell Mum, glaring.

Dad climbs back into the driver’s seat. He doesn’t shut the door. He just holds onto his precious steering-wheel, the edge of his car-coat flapping in the breeze. All the anger has drained out and he is part of the car, broken and running short of hope.

“I am sorry,” Mum says. “But I do not understand.”

“You never bloody do, Bridge,” Grandma says.

I don’t want to let Dad down, but I ought to tell Mum the truth. She looks so confused I feel sorry for her. But Grandma beats me to it.

“Christ alive, Bridge, open your eyes. There’s not just a wall in Berlin, is there? There’s one in your daft head. Look at Roy. Look at him. What do you see? I’ll tell you, shall I? His eyes won’t look at us. See that? And when did that last happen, Bridge? Well, I’ll tell you when. It happened the day he came in and said he’d passed his driving test.”

“Nell, what…?”

“Lord preserve us, can’t you see? He didn’t pass. He’s been pretending. And all for you, for your Berlin.”

As Mum gasps, a siren blares and Dad’s face turns whiter than milk.

“How did you know, Ma?”

“I’m a mother, that’s why.”

“But you tore up the red L,” Mum squeaks. “The pieces are still in the gloves-box.”

“Anyone can tear up a bloody L-plate, Bridge,” Grandma says. “It doesn’t always mean victory.”

“Here zey come!” trills Helmut.

“Jesus wept, it really is the
Polizei
.”

“The secret ones, Dad?”

“No, that’s the other side.”

“We wouldn’t be able to see them if they were secret, would we, duck?” Grandma says.

“Don’t worry, Dad. You’re King of the Road,” Victor reminds him.

“Thanks,
Herr Kommandant
.”

“Roy, please.”

“Sorry, Bridge.”

But his hands are so tense on the wheel that his blue-white knuckles poke through the holey pattern of his gloves.

“Get out, son. Hurry,” Grandma says.

“Look, the bloody Gestapo’s coming, Ma. I don’t need orders from you as well.”

But Grandma insists. “Shift it, son. Quick. Let me get in. Ooh lummy, does this seat go back a bit?”

“What the…?”

“Don’t forget I drove an ambulance in the war, son. My licence is in my bag.”

Helmut takes one look at Grandma in the driving seat and refuses to get in. When the police eventually allow us on our way, we leave him standing in a blackish cloud of exhaust.

***

“Wow,” Victor keeps saying.

“If you say that once more, I’ll throttle you,” I tell him.

“That was T-K speaking. Don’t you know anything?”

Mind you, wow is the only word. Blue lights are flashing in the distance. Grandma can’t keep up with them, but she keeps yelling, “Come on, girl. You can do it.”

I don’t know if she’s talking to herself, to Mum in the ambulance storming ahead or to the Traveller she’s now nursing along, but I do know that Dad is holding Mum’s hand in the ambulance and we have left the Bad-Moon girls way behind us, for now.

Mum has hung onto her appendix for much too long. When she doubled over and screamed, the policeman pursing his lips at the car called an ambulance and the ambulance-man said the grenade was about to explode.

I feel grown up and fabulous sitting in the front seat. I am an office junior earning six pounds a week, chauffeur-driven every day. I buy myself real flowers and have Bwa-Bwa’s perfect fingernails. The chauffeur says, “What’s that wonderful perfume? I wish every woman smelt like you.” And when he turns round to give me a diamond-ring in a velvet box, guess who he is—wait for it—only Paul-bloody-McCartney.

A fur-trimmed telephone glides out of a mahogany box and I ring Gillian, who has broken out in terminal acne, and tell her, plus the entire party-line, that I am engaged to a pop-star and about to fly to Cannes for my tea.

“Got any Poppets left?” Victor says. I ignore him. Office juniors shouldn’t be pestered by small boys.

I know T-K is flashing a Nazi salute behind me before hiding out in his pre-fab, but I don’t care. I’m allowed to light Grandma’s cigarettes and she keeps saying, “Thanks, duck. Don’t let on to your mum.”

As the car splutters on its way, I try to think about Peter, but he is asleep after laying our new carpet. In any case, I can’t help worrying about Mum and wondering how painful it was for her to reveal her great secret. This is the first time I have thought of it as a secret, rather than a lie. Perhaps if you are meant to know something, people will tell you when the time is right for you to hear it. Maybe she thought Berlin was the perfect place to let me in on her special news, as if it had been waiting there, hidden spy-fashion behind a loose brick in a wall, for us to open together. I guess she hoped I would be mature enough to understand, but I threw a fit instead. In spite of all the biology lessons, I didn’t think once about her Finer Feelings. So in the future, before I start tramping over other people’s Emotions with my own spiky-heeled opinions, maybe I should change into my felt shoes first.

A person’s blood-history shouldn’t be important. It’s what follows that counts.

And what follows is the Traveller’s doors falling off.

“Blood and sand, Jacqueline, what’s Victor up to back there?” Grandma shouts, the force of her massive weight on the brake slowing the car down.

“It’s not me,” he shouts. “It’s the bloody doors! And the tartan bag. And the suitcase. They’re all on the ground!”

We become an island surrounded by hooting cars. A sea of confused faces presses at the remaining windows and surges into the open back.

“Oh, do come in, everyone. Have a cup of tea and a French Fancy,” Grandma titters, flicking ash into the thermos.

The spectators look bewildered, as if they want to know why an English family would be so daft as to drive all this way in this flea-bitten half-timbered wreck. Well, the wreck is our temporary home, thanks, I wish I could tell them. And the dreams? Well, that’s holidays for you.

Before we know it, we are sitting in a very clean lorry towing the Traveller. When it deposits us at a repair shop, Grandma gives the driver a wodge of money from her spare denture pochette.

“Is that from the accumulator the day before the holiday?” Victor asks. He knows far too much about turf accountancy.

“No, lad, from Helmut. Best your dad didn’t get his mitts on it,” Grandma says.

Saved by the Tyrolean bell.

The head-shaking, lip-pursing mechanic, the same you find the world over, tells us that under the floor, the main body of the car is just cardboard and old newspaper.

“Ooh, you don’t half look like Claude Rains when he’s not smiling. Only handsomer,” Grandma tells him, applying her standard flirtation technique for making sure a repair-man does a good job. But this is a German repair-man.

“Grandma, I think he’s saying the car isn’t going anywhere.”

“Strike a light, Jacqueline. We have to get to Bridge in the hospital. Have you got any more of those dratted tosh-marks?”

“It’s Deutschmarks, Gran. And Victor’s the only one with any money.”

But this time even Victor can’t come up with the reddies.

“Jacqueline,” Grandma hisses in my ear, “get your project out of the car, and let’s hop it before Claude Rains makes us pay him.”

“We can’t just leave it, Grandma,” Victor says.

“I’ll tell him we’ll be back in a minute,” Grandma says. She points at her watch and shouts, “Other fish to fry, Claude!”

Lord Ringo knows what he’ll make of that, but we manage to scarper. The walk is long. Grandma is wheezing, Victor whining and I develop three blisters and a black toe-nail. We trudge on, deflated to leave the car behind, Dad’s dream in tatters.

At the hospital, I become utterly adult and pretend to Dad, just for now, that the car is still in one piece. Grandma’s orders.

“White lies are all right,” she says.

“What about Victor? He can’t keep secrets.”

“T-K can ruddy well gag him.”

Grandma starts thrusting threepenny bits in the chocolate-machine. Dad, grey-faced, comes back from Mum’s room for a smoke and I am allowed to see her for a few minutes.

She is woolly-headed from the pain-killing medication, but I have to show her the project. I can’t wait. I spread the notepad out on the bed and turn the pages for her.

I read out Mum’s memories of her life before and during the war and the new memories she will have of her crushed city, rebuilt and cut like a cake into slices, and of the time we spent together, crossing the border on the train.

She listens like a child, so intent she almost forgets to breathe.

She even manages to smile at me. I can see my mum is not a hard person. When she ate the rabbit and laughed at Victor, she was trying to see eye to eye with Beate. All her different selves are either ill or scared in this city. She is never here at the right time.

She asks me to show her every page again, not wanting it to end.

“Have I started seeing double?” she asks, frowning at the words with their feathery shadows.

“No, Mum, my pen nib’s split.”

“And I have lived the life of two people, I suppose.”

She laughs at this, although I can tell it hurts, and keeps looking, asking me to turn the pages time and time again, reliving her incredible life.

When she sees the picture Ilse gave me, taken so soon after she became Birgit, she weeps to see this glimpse of herself. And when she unfolds the music her father composed, it is too much for her. Her hands tremble so much I take the papers back with a promise to arrange her a session on Gillian’s piano. I hope I can sit in their lounge, if Gillian’s mother allows me to dent her new white sofa cushions, and listen to Mum play it.

“When must you give this to the teacher, dear?” she asks, reluctant to let the project go. I tell her I have no idea because I am wavering about handing it in. This is Mum’s story, plus a little of mine, and something about the two of us together.

“I think it might be a bit too much for Miss Whipp actually, Mum.”

She smiles, but her eyes are closing. I notice Dad has taken her sewing out of her bag, the dress with the endless running-stitches, and left it on the bedside locker, hopeful she will soon be well enough to carry on where she left off. And for the first time, I realise this is a task she will never finish. She always unpicks the thread and then starts again, never able to decide whether or not she wants those stitches running round the hem and the arm-holes.

“Jacqueline, dear,” she mutters. “I have seen Berlin.”

“I know, Mum.”

“But I do not recognise it, dear. They have cut out its heart. I came here because of the past, but I did not find it.”

“I know, Mum.”

“It has cut me in half too, into the person I was and the person I am.”

“A bit of you will stay here, Mum. Perhaps the bit they are going to cut out, the useless bit hurting you.”

A tear rolls down her cheek and we are silent for a while until it seems like the right time for me to say, “You could get a job at the mop-and-brush, Mum, if you want, for when me and Victor are at school.”

It sounds mad; Mum with a card to punch, a time to clock in and a time to clock out. Her own position.

“I would like to be handed my own envelope of money every Friday,” she says, her cloudy eyes brightening. “So
wunderbar
to buy your new shoes without having to wait for the racing results.”

And she needs somewhere to go. Not the place that belongs to Grandma, where she is a wife, a daughter-in-law and a mother. Not a hiding-place. Not exile. Just a place she has chosen herself.

“I miss my mother, Jacqueline,” she mumbles. “Her name was Idit, you know. A gentle lady, she wore silk and the sweetest scent. She taught me to waltz. She always kept a pure-white handkerchief in her sleeve, the lace edge poking out. Her beautiful life was cut short, but because of how much she loved me, I still have mine.”

I imagine trailing dresses that ripple on a marble floor a long way from the front-room of Audette Gardens, a voice never raised, the perfume of mauve roses wafting from long, dark hair; a perfect mother, even though her name is sadly awful. Mum says it means ‘choicest’. Sounds like one of Stan’s expensive steaks or a brand of tinned dog food to me. I can’t imagine Lennon and McCartney writing a song about an Idit. Even so, I’m glad to have it. And I wish the original Idit, my other—utterly different—grandma, could have known about me.

I hold onto Mum’s fingers and, because of her delicate state, squeeze them as much as I dare, but enough to show how glad I am she survived.

“I am so happy I saw Ilse and Beate,” she says. “But I will never come back here again.”

The nurse comes to get her ready for the operation, but just before I go, Mum whispers, “Jaqueline, do you think we should give your project to Beate? It is her story too.”