The Big Lie Read Online Free PDF Page A

will pick Lilli up from school, what to pack in my trunk for when I go away to skate camp, period pains, how to manage them … Dad taught me how the world works, the difference between right and wrong. He was the neighbourhood’s barometer. Mine too.
    Over breakfast he read things out from the People’s Mail. Warnings. That was how I found out about the Jay Acker music cassettes turning up in our schools.
    ‘It appears,’ my father told me, ‘that they have laced the cassettes with traces of radiation.’
    I stopped chewing my jam and bread. ‘But how can that be if it’s our people smuggling them in?’
    ‘Finish your mouthful!’
    The unchewed crust scraped down my throat in one breathtaking lump. ‘Sorry, Dad.’
    ‘Excellent reasoning, Jessika!’ He was smiling now. I gulped milk to shift the last of the bread. ‘But that is exactly what they want you to believe!’
    ‘So … it’s nothing to do with us?’ I said, slowly, trying to make the picture to fit together in my mind.
    Dad shook his head. ‘Nope!’
    I allowed myself a small moment of pride because I did always catch on very quickly to the things that Dad explained to me. Lilli was too young to understand so, without a son to talk to, Dad had to pass all his knowledge on to me.
    ‘Don’t get sucked in, Jess,’ he told me. ‘Not only will they corrupt your mind, they’ll give you a deadly cancer into the bargain.’
    I was destined to be a great skater for my country, and then, after that, a great mother, so I often wondered if Dad felt his great knowledge was wasted on me.
    ‘They just want us to be diseased,’ Dad went on, ‘like they are.’
    We had learnt all about that at school – the filth, the brutality, all those people living alongside each other, corrupting one another. I would try to imagine it sometimes, how it actually looked and felt. I would see teeth – sharp and hungry. And then nakedness. And then after that I’d see beetles and weevils, people in rags, things smeared in excrement. Medieval scenes.
    Dad talked me through the amnesty that the newspaper had set up, the rewards on offer. Hand in a cassette and you could get sweets, chocolate and music from our own bands.
    ‘But how do you pick these cassettes up?’ I asked Dad. ‘Without getting the cancer on your fingers?’
    ‘You use a bag, of course,’ he said. ‘Just like you would when picking Wolf’s turds up off the lawn.’
    And from then on I made sure I kept an empty Waitrose carrier in my school bag to handle any enemy music, should I find it.
    And I did find it – in Clementine’s bedroom, one day after school. But she didn’t have a Jay Acker music cassette. Oh, no. Clementine Hart had a Jay Acker compact disc.
    And, it turned out, a machine to play it on.
    ‘Do you h-have a licence for that?’ I stammered as she dragged the big black oblong out from under her bed, followed by its pair of speakers on their cable leashes. She shrugged as if my question was nothing. Then I saw the ‘property of the security police’ symbol etched into the player’s casing, and thought I might drop dead right there on the spot.
    ‘Oh, hell, Clem!’ I hissed.
    I was hyperventilating. I was going to pass out.
    ‘Calm down, Jess, will you?’ she said. ‘It’s fine!’
    ‘It’s not fine,’ I told her. ‘It’s a million miles away from being
fine
.’
    She put one of her hands on my back and started rubbing, which did help. She’d been avoiding contact with me since that day by the river. I’d felt the absence as strongly as I would have done a punch. No casual arm slung across my shoulder, no tipping of her head into the crook of my neck. I suppose she saw it as a kindness, an honesty, but it was painful. I was just grateful that she still wanted to be friends. There was no way I could imagine living without her. ‘You’re not going to get into any trouble,’ she said. And her words helped me feel even calmer. Because what Clementine said was always