The Book of Lies Read online

  The first time we talked properly was at the party. I was hiding in the kitchen, chatting away merrily to absolutely no one, and Therese wafted in. When she realised I was alone she smiled politely.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.

  I made a joke about how I had lots of imaginary friends who were all very funny and not remotely dangerous.

  ‘Ah,’ she nodded, ‘I’m always talking to myself as well. I say you get a better class of conversation that way. People frown on it but I find it therapeutic.’

  I spread my hands flat on her Italian maybe-marble worktop and told her she had excellent good taste. That’s when she showed me around the house. I was especially impressed by the automatic blinds in the conservatory and the impulse jets in the shower. There were also mirrors everywhere, which reminded me of the house of Victor Hugo, the famous/tortured writer.6 He’d lined his walls with mirrors so as to spy on his family and send them all mad. This was after he was thrown out of Jersey for smoking cannabis and kidnapping street children.

  Therese was definitely riveted when I told her all of this, and I’m sure she would’ve liked to hear more if Nic hadn’t interrupted.

  ‘Sounds like a fucking perv to me,’ she said, leaning against the doorframe.

  I remember how she smiled as I spun round to face her. She could say the meanest things and still look so angelic.

  Of course I told Nic she was very wrong, and that Victor Hugo was an artist-genius type, and therefore eccentric/not appreciated until dead.

  After an awkward silence (which I’m used to), there came the screams from the sitting room. I hoped someone had been mutilated, but they were only playing Twister. We found Vicky crushing Shelley Newman, who had straddled Isabelle Gaudion, whose skirt had somehow vanished. And they thought I had problems.

  Nicolette looked at me, rolled her eyes and nodded to the stairs. She didn’t look back as I followed her up to her bedroom, she didn’t even turn round once we were inside – she just went and stood by the window with the light surrounding her. Then she raised up her arms to pull her hair off her shoulders and spun back, flashing all of her midriff. That was one of her little moves. She always wore short tops that gaped and therefore showed her skin.

  ‘Sit down.’

  I plonked myself on the deluxe-goose-feather-down-duvet-you-can’t-even-buy-in-Creasey’s and watched Nic crouch in front of me. She was rummaging under the bed for something.

  ‘Your mum’s nice,’ I said, trying not to look down her bra.

  ‘She’s a dumb whore.’

  I’d only ever heard of whores in the Bible and Jackie Collins, so I got a bit excited.

  Then Nic stood up and I saw the bottle – whisky. It had been hidden in a sock. She unscrewed the top and took a long gulp, and then offered it to me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I pretended to examine the label. ‘Whisky is my favourite tipple.’

  She laughed. ‘Do you always talk like an old man?’

  People are generally impressed by my use of the English language, so I was annoyed and drank quickly and half-choked. It’s funny because now I can drink a small bottle of it a day, and often do. Well, that’s not funny. Anyway, as I coughed up my guts Nic sank onto her bed and twirled strands of hair around a finger.

  ‘Pathetic party, isn’t it? Next we’ll be pinning the tail on the donkey. I’d rather slit my own throat.’ I felt her eyes turn onto me. ‘You’re a funny one: always on your own, acting like you know better . . . how come you weren’t joining in downstairs?’

  I focused on the glossiness of her lips.

  ‘Because I do know better and I don’t like games.’

  She nodded. ‘Mum thought it was something else. She thinks you’re sad because your dad died.’

  I stared at Nic’s lovely oval face. I scanned her chin with its tiny dimple, the glossy lips, the outlined eyes.

  ‘I don’t feel sad at all.’ I took another swig of whisky. ‘Besides, my dad always said we carry the dead with us, so in theory he’s right here.’

  Nic blinked. ‘If you’re trying to freak me out it won’t work.’

  I handed the bottle back to her.

  ‘Who taught you to do your make-up?’

  ‘Taught myself.’

  I must’ve felt brave on account of the whisky.

  ‘Teach me.’

  Nic pulled a shiny red bag off her dresser and made me sit up straight. We were suddenly very close, facing each other. She sucked her bottom lip.

  ‘Where to start?’

  I stared into her eyes, probably (definitely) hypnotised. I remember how her bangles clinked against me, I remember the smell of her perfume (she called it Anus-Anus but actually it smelled like lilies). She had different coloured creams and powders and pencils and she used a bit of all of them. It was strange, letting her prod at my cheeks and pull back my eyelids, but it made me feel dead special.

  Then Isabelle burst in and ruined it.

  ‘There you are! What are you doing? Oh-my-God!

  Oh-my-God!’

  (Isabelle was very keen on her amateur dramatics.)

  She grabbed the whisky and threw herself on the floor, giggling.

  Vicky was standing behind her.

  ‘A private party, is it?’

  NB: A lot of Guernsey people end their sentences with ‘eh?’ or ‘is it?’, which I think sounds common-as-mud. Dad said it demonstrated the fact that we are more French than English.7 It is also possibly a sign that Vicky/French people are simple-minded.

  ‘Come on in,’ Nic was smudging blusher on my cheek, ‘I’ve finished. You look great, Cat. Much better.’

  No one had ever called me Cat before and I liked it a lot, but Nic was so close it was like she was going to kiss me and I thought she had to be teasing me. There’d been some rumours, you see. Aside from associating me with a leafy vegetable I was also sometimes called G.A.Y. A few months earlier I’d been in the hockey pavilion having a lively chat toute seule and two girls in the Fourth Year had caught me. They’d claimed I was rifling through their gym gear when I was only sitting on it. Very upsetting, it was. Especially since I didn’t ever think about sex, unlike every other girl in my class. They might’ve gone round pinging each other’s trainer bras and pretending to smoke their tampons but I wasn’t bothered with any of that.

  Nic wouldn’t let anyone else near the whisky but she made me drink a lot. I gulped back as much as I could, and was feeling queasy by the time she stood up.

  ‘OK, I’m not playing nanny to you lot anymore. I’m off to have some real fun.’

  Real fun meant having sex with someone called Simon, who was 17 and worked at Fruit Export and drove a lime-green Ford Capri. They did it at Jerbourg Point and Pleinmont and Le Gouffre and he was very good with his tongue but his willy had a kink in it. (I have no idea what that means.)

  Nic asked us to name our best sex positions. Isabelle suggested doggy-paddle and Vicky collapsed under the weight of her own giggles. I felt I had to say something.

  ‘If you’re going to do it out-of-doors, don’t go on the cliffs near me. They found evidence of a mass grave left over from the German Occupation.’

  Isabelle rolled her eyes and muttered ‘Here we go’, so I swore on Dad’s (more recently) dead body and made everyone embarrassed.

  Par le chemin, although I have sometimes made things up, this is rock-solid-Guernsey-granite truth. They were found five years ago, and were believed to date back to the 1940s. Dad said it was obvious they were the bodies of poor foreign slave workers8 who’d been brought over by the Nazis to build their secret bunkers and possible gas chambers but the Guernsey Tourist Board hushed it up because it was in big trouble.9 Of course, Dad hypervented as per THE SHOCKING WHITEWASH and wrote a trillion letters to the newspapers on this very subject, but his letters were never published, which made him hypervent more. (I had a theory that all this hyperventing killed him, but that’s just one of a few.)

  Nic liked my little story of shameful lies and dea
th and licked her Boots 17 Cherry Pie-coated lips.

  ‘Where do you go with your boyfriend then?’

  Vicky said I’d never had much luck with lads since I’d always so closely resembled one. (Ha. Ha.)

  My supposed-to-be best friend then explained how, on our last outing to Beau Sejour Leisure Complex, I’d been stuck in the turnstiles until someone had given me a push, saying: ‘There you go, young man.’

  My hair was Evidently (good word) too short back then. I hate my hair. It’s very fine and straw-like.

  Nic chuckled. ‘Some people go for pale and interesting. That’s what you are: pale and interesting.’

  She winked at me then, and it felt warm and light, like in photosynthesis.

  That was all it took, really: the drink, the smile, the wink. I was different and Nicolette liked different.

  Maybe she sensed the cosmic and magnetic connection between us.

  Maybe she guessed I was ocean-full of deep-sea depths.

  Or maybe she wanted someone fat and frumpy to make her feel better than she already was.

  The plain fact is, I didn’t care – it felt better than the Yellow Sash of Excellence, which I’d already worn three terms on the trot – so I decided not to think too much about it. Nic was like the sister I’d never had but always wanted.

  And remember: two sisters, like two brothers, can be completely different.

  13th December 1965

  Tape: 1 (A side) ‘The testimony of C.A. Rozier’

  [Transcribed by E.P. Rozier]

  P’tit Emile, man buoan fraire. You are my dear and only brother, but how can two brothers be so different, eh? You got the good stuff: the brains, the looks, our mother’s love, whilst I, bian sûr, was poisoned. Nothing is equal between us or ever will be, but I should find some comfort in the fact we do not look alike. 1940 wasn’t a good year for a little blonde boy. They’d started to call me Fritz and would frogmarch around me. I have our mother’s delicate build and colouring, whereas you, Emile, you are more like our father with your steely eyes and wave of coal-black hair. Would that I had your dark and too-good looks! That might’ve saved me some of my troubles.

  I wanted a brother badly, me, and when you came along I was so proud. Had there been less years between us we could’ve been copains, things might’ve turned out different. But you were still a baby when the War broke out and I had no time for playing nursemaid. I was puffing out my pigeon chest and thinking big. I wanted Ray for my brother.

  A damned stupid idea, if ever there was one. Ray Le Poidevoin was two years older and already a strutting cock. Didn’t I know that he was trouble? He was a born fighter, with beady eyes glinting at any opportunity. That day when he plucked me off the boat he’d been collecting all the stuff people had left behind. The wealthy had abandoned their big cars on the docks before running for the boats, the poorest had bundled up their belongings into sheets. No wonder Ray thought it was a party, it was his Christmases and birthdays all rolled into one.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked of me.

  I told him it was Charlie and he ruffled my hair.

  ‘Well, Charlie, when the Hun come they’ll think you’re one of them. How comes you’re so pale? You cannot be an island boy. Perhaps you are a spy.’

  I was so pent-up from the excitement I jumped to my feet, tears of fury in my eyes. But he easily held me back.

  ‘At ease, soldier! I’m kidding.’

  Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a hipflask.

  ‘How old are you?’

  I told him I was a month off thirteen and grabbed at it quickly, taking a greedy slug.

  Mon Dju, I thought, this is how evil tastes!

  Ray was laughing now. ‘We’ll make a man of you yet. Are you ready to kill for your country?’

  ‘I shall be ready,’ I squawked, still feeling the fire in my throat.

  Ray crouched back down and I followed suit.

  ‘You got a weapon?’

  I shook my head and he narrowed his eyes like he was thinking deeply, then he dug into his jacket and pulled out a pocket knife. He’d flicked it open and was jabbing at the air.

  ‘It might not look like much but the blade’s sharp and could slit a man’s throat. You know how to use it? You can have it. I’ve another.’

  He placed it in the palm of my hand and as I turned it over it twinkled like a jewel.

  I thought that meant I was like him, Emile, I thought that meant I was in his gang. Happens I thought a lot of things that day which never quite proved true. As the sun sank into the horizon I was back to the little kid I’d ever been, too scared to go home and face the wrath of our mother. Au yous, back then she had a tongue as sharp as any knife. You know why we called her La Duchesse? She didn’t just act like she was royalty but she made her word the law. The youngest out of seven children, she’d had to fight for everything. Now she was always fighting me.

  I see her standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips, still wearing her fancy coat with lace about the collar. She’d waited two hours to give me a good lamming.

  ‘Why do you test me so?’ she asked, twisting my ear this way and that. ‘Making a scene in front of our neighbours. As if I haven’t got enough on my plate with a baby to look after and your father working all hours to keep the business going!’

  Hé bian, the business. Our parents had decided to stay on the island to keep their livelihood. Our father had started his own printing firm, called The Patois Press. It was everything to him and I’m glad you mean to continue. You, Emile, and you alone, can prove it was worth all the trouble and pain. Back then, we only printed posters for the Odeon, local advertisements and parish newsletters – nothing fancy like what you have planned. Pop was a quiet soul, wanting a quiet life. Arlette was the firecracker, always going off. Of course, she came from a lesser family so she had more to prove, and as for Pop, well, he was much changed from his time in France, fighting in that ‘war to end all wars’. It must’ve cut him to the quick to see another coming.

  Not a day passed when we didn’t see German planes circling in the skies. We knew something bad was coming our way. Boatloads of refugees arrived from France, telling tales of the barbarous Hun. At every street corner I gobbled up gossip, making notes in my little pocket pad. And the stories I heard!

  ‘They slice the arms off little kids for sport. They are man-eaters. They use women and babies as cannon fodder.’

  The French are a race prone to exaggeration, as I now know, and they never stopped stoking my fevered imaginings. If only I’d stayed in school and listened to my teachers, eh? But the schools were all closed down, so I was on the loose.

  Hubert would shake his head at me, like he saw the bad things stewing in my brain.

  ‘Si nous pale du guiabye nous est saure d’l’y’vais les caurnes’ is what he said . . . ‘Speak of the devil and you shall see horns’. He was always talking in patois to me.

  Hé bian, that language has been dying for longer than I’ve been living. I miss hearing it spoke and I miss hearing him speak it.

  He’d make me sit with him in the office so as to keep me out of trouble. Of course, with half the island gone our business had gone with it. There were signs on every hedgerow saying ‘Why Go Mad? There’s No Place Like Home’, but by then we were going mad being stuck at home. Pop turned to his Bible and I hid my head in stupid comics, losing myself in cartoon adventures. What I knew of the War came from Rover or Wizard, and of course our father had no time for it. I caught him flicking through them once, mumbling to himself.

  ‘It won’t be like that,’ he said, his long arms hanging limply at his sides.

  ‘So,’ I placed myself squarely in front of him, ‘tell me what it will be like.’

  He shook his head. ‘There aren’t words to describe the horror.’

  It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, nor the first time he’d refused.

  ‘Who wants the truth, eh? What I’ve seen, Charlie, it won’t make a g
ood adventure story for little boys like you.’

  How it made my young blood boil! Now, though, I understand it all too well. If you have seen something so terrible why tell of it, since words give it fresh life and substance? Bury the past. Deny it as long as you can. The only trouble is, the more you deny something the more power it will have. Look what has happened with our Occupation: our States deputies want it tidied into a tourist guide and treated like a day trip, but there are dead and rotting bodies buried in the tunnels and lying at the bottom of our cliffs. Can’t you smell death? It is a travesty and it is a whitewash!

  Vère dja, j’pourrais t’encaöntair d’pis maïr haôute jusqu’a bass iaôue . . . Emile, I am your big brother, I am your bad brother, and that’s how I’ll be remembered. I’ll admit I did wrong and that I’ve got blood on my hands, but I’ll not stand here alone. There are people on this island who have got away with murder. I’ve been shelled out enough times on this, but I’ll not be silent no more. You write down what I tell you, word for word, and remember it’s all true. Then I’ll die easy.

  You do it for me, Emile, let your pen be my revenge.

  13TH DECEMBER 1985, 5 p.m.

  [Dad’s study]

  I know I shouldn’t call this Dad’s study anymore – he’s been dead a lot longer than Nic – but this is still my favourite room. I do all my best thinking in here, and I like to remember how it used to look. There was a huge desk with paper stacked up all around it, just like the walls of a fortress, and books and box files were jammed onto every spare shelf, or scattered all over the sofa. Dad said he had a system but I never worked out what it was. (Not that I was allowed in here, or could even make it through the door.)

  Today it’s clean and empty: Dad’s books have gone, plus all the files and shelves, and Mum’s painted the whole room white. She said Dad had let things get outof-hand, so what he called his LIFE’S BLOOD was actually mostly scrap paper. There’s a lot more space and light now, and you can even see the carpet, and that definitely makes Mum happy. She’s finally got her own office. People were shocked by how quickly she sprang into action, how she took over the business and turned it around, but she needed a fresh start, and I suppose she had a lot to prove.