The Big Lie Read Online Free PDF Page B

screwed up with fury, her lips quivering.
    ‘It means …’ I said, trying to make my voice rise above hers, ‘it means … budgets and … stuff.’
    She laughed at my answer, hard, spraying my face with little bits of her spit.
    This was not the usual Clementine, the way she was speaking to me. There is a hierarchy in every friendship and I was always the leader. I had been chosen to represent the Princely State of England as a skater. I did well at school. I had been given responsibilities at the BDM, responsibilities that would never have been offered to Clementine. Not everyone can be a leader. Some people need to follow. Not a criticism. Being a follower is an important job in itself. I didn’t think Clementine was completely lacking in qualities. Of course I didn’t. I adored her. She was an excellent pianist, something that often made me feel horribly envious. I would thrash away at those BDM typewriters pretending that I was clattering through a Beethoven piano sonata at the Royal Albert Hall but really, I didn’t know a B flat from my elbow. Clementine could have represented our country as a concert pianist, if she had wanted to. Except that was always the problem with Clementine, her fatal flaw. She had the ability, a wonderful talent, but she could never be bothered to apply it. Or she wasn’t willing to.
    I used to believe that this behaviour was somehow criminal.
    Instead, she sat writing songs in her bedroom.
    ‘My own little
Götterdämmerung,
’ she told me.
    The Wagner opera.
    I had nodded, smiled, pretended that I knew what that collection of music sounded like. The meaning of the title had no impact then. The twilight of the gods. A catastrophic end.
    We were face to face. She was bristling with something – upset, resentment … radiation, maybe. I could only imagine that this was a side-effect of picking up that CD. But, still, I was furious about her questioning of my dad. No one questioned my father.
    ‘And what about your mum …?’ I tried to be smiling and angry, just like she’d been with me, though I’m sure I was nowhere near close to achieving it. ‘Your mum, the
typist
!’
    To have a mother that had a job was shameful enough. I expected Clementine to be thoroughly embarrassed that I’d also unearthed her little lie.
    ‘No,’ she replied. So cool. ‘She’s a journalist. I told you, remember?’ Her answer whizzed past me like a ball I couldn’t hit back.
    ‘Oh,’ I said.
    ‘What?’ she said, grinning. ‘Is that not what
Vater
led you to believe?’
    Yes, it’s true that we slip between our languages. It’s just how we talk. It’s as easy as sliding a pair of sunglasses up onto your head and then back down onto your nose. We do it without thinking. We mix things up. It means nothing. But that word was chosen.
    ‘My
father
,’ I said, indignant for the both of us, ‘has got better things to be doing than gossiping about your family.’

DECEMBER 2012
    We first heard about it on the People’s Radio. I got the real sense that Dad knew already, though I couldn’t understand how. Even the People’s Mail and Evening News didn’t get to report anything until the day after the announcement was broadcast. Dad had been in the rankest of moods all week, and when the speech came, it was just so obvious that this was the earthquake his tremors had been leading to.
    When our leader’s voice came on the radio set, he refused to sit down. Herr Erlichmann had been everything to us, but Herr Dean …? We just weren’t worshipping him in the same way.
    ‘That idiot,’ Dad spluttered at the radio set. ‘Does he want to send this nation to the dogs?’
    He paced, he stomped, he threw things about. It was exactly like having my sister Katrin back in the house.
    I could see why Dad was angry. One minute we were being told we mustn’t touch that boy’s music or risk catching cancer; the next we’re offering him a stage in Trafalgar Square. And more than that, with all the