The Big Lie Read Free Page B

saying. We were lying in the grass now, in the shade of the elm, the sound of the river washing away the chatter of the party. She was telling me about something she’d eaten while she’d been away on holiday. ‘And they cut it down the middle …’
    She began to speak quieter so I had to tip my head towards her.
    ‘Then they put chocolate pieces in the gap …’
    And then what?
You couldn’t help yourself. It was her voice.
And then wha
t
?
    ‘And then they put it on the grill …’
    Her eyes went wide, but her voice was still tired.
    ‘And it went all, you know …’
    No, I don’t know. What?
    Her voice lowered. ‘It went all manky inside … but …’
    She held me there for a minute.
    ‘But it tasted
delicious
.’
    No one else could talk about a grilled banana like that.
    I rolled forward and without deciding or meaning to, I kissed her on the mouth. It just felt like the most obvious thing to do. Clementine laughed. It bubbled out beneath my lips. She put a hand to my head and shoved me away. It was a playful move, but there I was, feeling devastated all over again.
    ‘What was that?’ she cried. She was giggling but beneath it all, I could hear it – she was sort of appalled.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
    I didn’t. I only knew how it had felt.
    She stopped her laughter, noticing that I wasn’t joining in. Her eyes were on me, her green stare. (Her eyes were – are – definitely green.) ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, Jess,’ she said. ‘Seriously, it doesn’t but … we’re friends, yeah?’
    It didn’t feel like she was saying anything to contradict me.
    ‘Best friends,’ I managed.
    ‘Yes, best friends.’ She took my hand and squeezed it. ‘But nothing more.’
    I was finding it hard to breathe.
    I had to say something.
Sorry
, maybe. Or,
I promise it will never ever happen again
. Or,
Please don’t tell anyone.
Instead I said, ‘So where was it you went on holiday?’
    My voice was horribly high, so clumsy and fake compared to her effortless drawl.
    ‘America,’ she replied, not missing a beat. She was looking at me strangely now, differently. She wasn’t appalled; I’d got that wrong. She had her eye on something, not me exactly, but something in me.
    ‘Oh,’ I said, not really registering her answer, distracted by her stare. Then, ‘What?’
    ‘Joke!’ She started tearing the yellow heads from a stalk of cudweed.
    I laughed. ‘Like you’d want to go to America! Wander around enemy territory!’
    ‘We holidayed in the Greater German Reich,’ she said, putting on that voice we use when learning things by rote in school. ‘We went to Cornwall. I already told you.’
    Of course, I did want to ask how she had come to lay her hands on a banana – in CORNWALL of all the unlikely places – but I didn’t. Because something was out of joint. Not the kiss. Something else. At the time, I couldn’t have said what it was, or even if there was truly anything at all. It just felt like I had been nudged in my sleep, but instead of waking up I had incorporated the nudge into my dream.
    So I said, ‘Tell me about the place where you used to live, before.’
    ‘I can’t really remember it,’ she replied.
    This was a conversation we ran through all the time. Always the same words. It was a joke, sort of. A distraction, maybe. Perhaps it was how we reassured one another that everything was good.
    ‘I bet it wasn’t as nice as here, was it?’
    ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Nowhere near as nice as here.’
    Sometimes we’d say these lines to one other in a jumbled Mischmasch of our languages. But when I really needed a guarantee, I began the conversation in German. Because I did always wonder, if I had been fooled by her white blonde hair and her so-pale skin and her marvellous way of talking. Perhaps she had been softly, softly knocking and tapping at me all these years. Perhaps she wasn’t really my friend.
    ‘Erzähl mir von dem Ort, an dem du vorher gewohnt hast,’ I said to her