The Lie Read Online Free PDF

Bodmin Barracks, I was still the tallest in the line.
    I’ve been squatting here too long. The cold has got into me, and my hands are shaking. I grip them tight. The brightness of the day was a deception. I say aloud the name: ‘Felicia.’ I daren’t say Frederick’s name aloud, even out here in the sunlight. I don’t know what he’d say if he saw me here, scratching in Mary Pascoe’s plot of earth. He wouldn’t understand that I’m lucky. Ex-servicemen are selling matches, dusters and fretwork boxes all over London, door to door and on street corners.
    I’ve seen them carted down the line through the muck, the lucky ones on their stretchers. I’ve joined in with the grunt of ‘Lucky bastard, he’s got a Blighty one.’ Even a man with his leg hanging at the knee, we thought: He’s well out of it, and pictured him going back and back, out of the line. We thought of the hospital ship we’d seen in harbour, on the way out. Now we knew why it was big enough to hold a townful of men.
    I get up, and overbalance because my legs are cramped. My clumsiness disturbs something by the wheel of my barrow, where last night’s rain has puddled. A toad. It hops, with heavy grace, into a patch of sunlight. I have never thought of a toad as liking sunlight. It hunkers, its legs packed away again, its body pulsing. We used to say there was a jewel in the head of a toad. I remember Jimmy Kitto got hold of one and dug into its forehead to see where the jewel was, but he found nothing. Only blood, and some whitish stuff which might have been its brain.
    A jewel. The toad looks at me and I look back. Its eyes might be the jewels. They are hooded and ancient. They are the kind of eyes that believe in nothing but what they see in front of them, and maybe not always that. The toad is so close that I can see the snake-like scaling between its eyes, and the dabs of cream and greenish-brown beneath its chin. Its mouth is a thin line.
    For Christ’s sake, it’s only a toad. I never saw many in France, although often the shell-holes were full of frogs. There are enough slugs here to feed twenty toads. It’s waiting for me to go, so that it can slip back into the shade. I put my hand towards it. Into my head there comes a picture of my own hand lifting a piece of granite, smashing it down on the toad. I see the forelegs sticking out from the mash of the body.
    These pictures frighten me. They are too sharp and too bright, much brighter than the day around me. They flash on to my mind like the flash of a shell-burst, and they mark it. I put my hand down flat on the earth and press hard, keeping it still. The toad stretches itself and hops leisurely out of the sunlight, and back to its puddle. In the shadow of the barrow, it’s almost invisible.
    It’s good to have toads in a garden. They rid it of pests, and besides, they are company. The hens pother about, picking grubs and insects, but a toad works seriously, all day long.
    I’m very tired. I ought not to have let myself think about Frederick. It seems safe enough to do so in the daylight, but there’s an afterlife to every thought. I stretch myself, like the toad, to ease my back. From here, I can see the footpath to Senara, although I can’t be seen. If anyone walks by, I keep still. They might glance across and notice that Mary Pascoe’s land has been dug and planted, as it was years ago. What I fear most is the sight of children. Those terrible pictures rise up in me. I see a child hurled off a cliff, with its petticoats blowing. I see a child on the ground, bloody and broken.
    I am afraid to go into crowds. In Turk Street it seems to me that every creature is in disguise. Their skin is a veil to hide the intestines and the raw, slimy flesh within. I see how their bones would split and separate. I see a jagged edge protrude through a thigh or an elbow. I see bodies picked up, torn to pieces, flung on to the ground.
    As I ease my back, the sun slides out from the clouds. I look