The Book of Lies Read online

  ‘Your dad said the swastika was an ancient Buddhist symbol before the Nazis used it. It meant being at one with the earth. I gatecrashed one of his Occupation Society tours. Fascinating, it was. He knew every little detail, which was kind of weird, don’t you think?’

  I smiled encouragingly but also silently.

  Michael held my gaze for a few seconds, then walked to the other side of the tower. He kept glancing out through the tiny windows at the rain, like he was willing it to stop. It made me think of the flea-bitten tiger trapped in its tiny cage at the Guernsey Zoo.

  ‘If you want,’ I said, ‘I can lend you some of Dad’s books. He knew everything about the German Occupation. It’s hard to imagine now what it was like for the islanders back then, to be cut off from the outside world and to have no weapons or way of fighting back.’

  Michael smiled. ‘There’s always a way of fighting back.’

  He’d stopped in front of the ladder that was bolted to the tower wall. I walked over to stand beside him and we were so close I could smell the leather of his jacket. Well, I think it was leather.

  He was looking up. ‘You know what you see when you climb up there? Everything.’

  I nodded and said things like ‘Wow’ and ‘Amazing.’

  Michael sighed. ‘No it’s not. It’s fucking depressing.’

  ‘Oh,’ I tried to smile, ‘so I’m not missing anything? What a relief, because I’d be way too scared to ever climb up there. I’d be afraid of falling.’

  Michael turned and narrowed his eyes enticingly. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

  It was like he hadn’t been listening! He jammed the can of paint back into his jacket and started up the ladder. Of course I went straight after him. We climbed and climbed. The ladder was so rusty it scratched my hands. I was definitely scared but I didn’t look down or up, I just followed Michael as quickly as I could and thought about how relieved I’d be to get to the top.

  I don’t know how long it took but when I reached the ledge where the ladder stopped I was flushed. Michael turned to face me and there we were – stranded on this narrow ridge of cement that runs all around the tower. It felt very precarious.

  ‘Be careful.’ He pushed me back against the wall. I tried to look as appealing as possible, like he could kiss me if he wanted to.

  ‘Go on. Turn around.’

  I slowly turned and looked out of one of the square windows. It was terrifying to be so high up and to see so far, and I tried to grab Michael’s arm for comfort, but he was busy re-lighting his large-ish not-a-cigarette. After a minute he offered it to me, glancing out of the window.

  ‘So there you have it. That’s all there is.’

  I couldn’t focus too well but I stared down at the craggy slopes of Pleinmont. It didn’t feel as vast or impressive as I thought it would, and there was a bank of fog rolling in off the empty sea. I suddenly understood what Michael had meant. Everything was too small. I looked back at him and tried to pout like Nic, but it was difficult because I’d singed my lips on one of Jason’s B&H. Michael’s smoke blew in my face and I vaguely wanted to kiss it.

  ‘You know,’ Michael gazed out at the view, ‘when you get up high like this you’re not really afraid of falling – you’re more afraid of wanting to jump. There’s a pull.’

  I asked if he meant gravity, which we’d learned about in Second Form, but he shook his head.

  ‘Nah, this is different. It’s psychological, not physical, more the brain than the body. There’s this town in Europe, it has even less taxes than here,26 and it’s built in a valley, and there’s this road around it with lots of bridges, and people are always jumping off the bridges and killing themselves.’

  I told Michael how Dad had always liked to dive off the top steps of the Moorings, even though it was dangerous. Michael said diving was a lot like falling, and that falling was like being free.

  ‘I want some of that, me. I’m going to travel the world.’

  ‘To anywhere in particular?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe Australia. Mum’s got a brother there she’s not seen for years.’

  I wanted to tell him I’d be going there, too, one day, but before I could he’d turned and walked casually over to the other side of the tower. (He didn’t hold on to the wall or anything!)

  I’d drunk quite a lot earlier but that little walk sobered me up no end. When I caught up with him by the window facing the car park he put an arm around me, which made it all worthwhile. Then I realised he was trying to help me out of it. I looked at him like he was nuts.

  ‘It’s easy,’ he said, ‘turn around and push your head out and then sit on the ledge like this.’ He demonstrated the manoeuvre.

  ‘Not a chance,’ I told his thigh.

  I’m glad to say he slid back in.

  I stared down to the car park, where Jason’s and Pete’s cars were parked side-by-side. I cupped my hands around my mouth and called Nic’s name, to see if she could hear me.

  ‘You want to get her attention?’ Michael bent away from me and rummaged in his jacket. ‘I know a way.’

  He’d pulled out another can of what I thought was spray paint, only this one had something sticking out of it. He flicked his cigarette lighter and I saw a little flame.

  ‘And here’s one I made earlier,’ he held it up to show me.

  Before I could say anything he’d stuck his head out of the window and lobbed it through the air. It flew in an arc and went bouncing off some rocks down below, and exploded with a crack and smoke. I looked at Michael, he was laughing, then he shouted ‘You-fucking-loser!’ so loudly I was scared. Jason had got out of his car and was shouting back. Michael nodded to me like I should scream, too. That’s when I noticed his T-shirt: it was black with white letters that read ‘NEW ORDER’. Most people think this is the name of a pop group, but as far as I know Hitler only liked opera. Anyway, in that moment, for whatever reason, I took those two little words as a sign to do exactly what Michael said. I screamed and swore my head off.

  Then Michael took my bottle of Unlabelled Sinister Import and threw it out the window as well. It smashed on some rocks into lots of little pieces. I felt dizzy and ducked back inside. Then I heard car engines start.

  ‘That’s shown them, eh?’

  I looked across at Michael and his eyes glittered darkly.

  ‘What were we trying to show them?’

  He frowned like he was irritated by my (perfectly reasonable) question. ‘Does it fucking matter?’

  I was sitting down but I still felt like I was falling. I thought about Nic and Pete and Pagey and Jason.

  I tried to smile. ‘The thing is, they’re my friends.’

  Michael re-lit his cigarette and handed it to me. I took a long drag and held the smoke in my mouth. Seconds passed. I remembered to breathe. I tried again. My head felt hot.

  Michael sighed. ‘With friends like those, who needs enemies?’

  And unfortunately he had a point. I should’ve seen that. Why didn’t I realise? On an island this small, your friends and your enemies quickly end up the same.

  15th December 1965

  Tape: 2 (A side) ‘The testimony of C.A. Rozier’

  [Edits from transcript compiled and corrected by E.P. Rozier]

  Hé bian, Emile, we live so close on this little island, friends and enemies live side by side. The English must wonder how we do it. They have all that open space whereas we are pocket-sized. So why did the Germans even want us, eh? Why couldn’t they just bomb us and leave be? That would’ve been so much the better. But instead they had to come and live amongst us, they came and took our homes, they got right under our skin, as close to us as our own flesh and blood, so close we couldn’t breathe.

  Reckon all of us remember when and where we got our first glimpse of the jodhpurs and the jackboot, and you know what shook me most? His handsome face. Underneath that queer-shaped helmet, glittering in the sun, he had a fine chiselled chin and greenish eyes. They was a colour I’
d not seen before or since.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, with a whisper of a smile. Then ‘What are you doing here?’ like I was the trespasser!

  Cor là, that made my little head spin, all right, but then I was a good few feet above him and I’ve never had much head for heights. I was perched on that old stone wall at the back of the Royal Hotel, doing my own reconnaissance. I’d heard from our neighbour Blanche Gaudion (that font of island gossip) that the Germans had arrived and were meeting with our local States deputies. That’s when I saw the swastika for myself – they’d had one whipped up by Creasey’s and paid for in full. I sat there for hours, keeping lookout, expecting gunshots and more bloodshed or drama, and to tell the truth I was disappointed. The only noise came from the planes high up in the sky. Over the next few days we saw hundreds of Junkers, Dorniers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts landing at the airport. I was no mechanic, but I made it my business to learn the differences between them.

  Whoever said Hitler wasn’t planning an invasion is a fool. Just look at the guns, planes and troops that poured onto this tiny island. The War Office reckoned we were of ‘no significance’, but the Germans didn’t agree. They covered the island in concrete soon enough, and anyone who has seen that very special species of vandalism blighting our beautiful coast cannot deny it. Look what they did at Pleinmont!27 The Germans made this little rock their own and the Bailiff shook their hands and promised we’d offer no resistance. That’s not what you’d expect from such a stubborn and independent people, is it? Of course, you could say that we had no guns to fight back, but we could have made our own bombs, or booby-trapped our homes.

  Still, better to live a martyr than die as one. You know who told me that? That German with greenish eyes. His name was Unteroffizier Anton Vern,28 and the next time I saw him he was standing in our parlour.

  He was tall and thin, but very dignified, not at all what I’d expected from my comic books. He called our father ‘Sir’.

  ‘You have nothing to fear as long as you do what we ask,’ he said. ‘We are required to print notices informing the population of the new military occupation of the island. The Bailiff and Attorney General have agreed to this new order. You are ordered to assist us and I hope you can see it is in everyone’s best interests.’ We listened carefully as Vern moved about the room, light as air, making little gestures.

  ‘We are not pointing a gun to anyone’s head. We are all merely following orders. Yes?’

  Pop slowly nodded.

  ‘Good. We have control of the newspapers, but we cannot presume everyone will read them, therefore we shall display notices in prominent public places. I have yet to identify these places.’ He turned back and smiled at me. ‘I find your small and winding roads more than a little confusing, perhaps I need a guide?’

  I was about to tell him to go to Hell when Pop spoke in my place, and I don’t know what it was he said since to my shame it was in German. Maybe two or three sentences then passed between them, and I couldn’t believe my ears. I later learned that Pop was explaining to Vern how he’d learned the basics as a prisoner of war. Of course, he was trying to unsettle this young sap and put him in his place, but I was wound up so tight, like the coil of a spring, so I didn’t care a tuppenny for Pop’s motives. To hear my own father speak that foul language was more than I could stand for. I was flushed and well near choking with anger.

  ‘Why should we take orders off of you?’ I asked. ‘In a few months you’ll be out!’

  I felt a sharp dig in my ribs, courtesy of La Duchesse.

  ‘Kique tu fais?’ she hissed, ‘Tais ta goule. T es têtu!’

  I glowered as Vern blinked in confusion.

  ‘Excuse me, madam?’

  La Duchesse pulled herself up. ‘It is our local patois. I was calling my son here a blockhead. I presume I am still allowed to discipline my own son?’

  Vern seemed amused. ‘It would be better you did so than I. But this patois you were speaking sounds quite French.’

  La Duchesse glowered back at him. ‘We have Norman blood in our veins, and it was the Normans who beat the English in 1066, as you should well know.’

  ‘Aha!’ Vern’s slight smile broadened. ‘Well, I understand a little French, so now we have several languages in common.’

  Languages in common! I looked from my parents back to this interloper, and couldn’t for the life of me decide which was worse. It was beyond me. What could we share with this man? He was a greenfly, a slug, a filthy Hun. Is this who I’d be taking orders from now? Not that I was any good at taking orders before! And them Germans did love to tell us what to do. Au yous, Emile, all too soon it was ‘verboten’ this and ‘verboten’ that. Vern had us churning out red and black Bekanntmachungen, making curfews, banning meetings and dances, demanding we surrender our cars and our boats. They forbade the buying and selling of liquor and fuel, they closed down shops, they even banned the boy scouts. Hé bian! We heard that Hitler wanted to bring a ‘New Order’ to Europe, well here we was getting a ‘new order’ every day.

  And the fact that we had to work for them, to have their sickly green uniforms always in our sights. It was too, too terrible! I made plenty of noise about it, but La Duchesse told me to pull myself together. She said that if we didn’t do what Jerry asked then someone else would.

  ‘We’ll lose the business and be out on the streets. Do you know what it’s like to go hungry? I do, and I won’t go through that again. We have to make do.’

  She was right, of course, but I didn’t want to hear it. I watched planes take off from the airport, on their way to blitz London. Nobody fought back. Unless you call hiding pigs or pulling down the road signs good enough resistance. Au yous, plenty of folk would like to take the credit for pulling down the road signs but I reckon more people did it than there were ever road signs! These were dark days. I hated the Hun for many things but what I hated most was what they did to our parents. Young and old stood divided, and that was a rift that never healed.

  ‘It isn’t black and white no more,’ said Hubert. ‘The Germans are in charge and we don’t know how long for. We none of us know what will happen next.’

  We don’t know what will happen next! Was it a game of Nuts in May where we could change sides as we pleased?

  ‘You cannot be serious,’ I told him. ‘You cannot believe the Germans will win.’

  And of course he couldn’t answer me because in truth they already had.

  15TH DECEMBER 1985, 1.34 p.m.

  [Fermain, sitting on bench, trying to look Intellectual.]

  I was in the watchtower for ages with Michael, but I don’t know what we talked about. I only remember three little words going round and round in my head. ‘The Nazis Won’. Very romantic, it was.

  I suppose I’d smoked a lot by then, which made it hard to climb down. Somehow I managed it, but by the time I got outside my head was spinning. No wonder I fell flat on my face and decided to stay there. The rain had stopped so Michael propped me on some rocks with my head between my knees. I think I stayed like that for quite a long time, which is obviously embarrassing. But it was more embarrassing that Mr McCracken found me.

  Yes. I know. This is another illustration of how small Guernsey is.

  I never understood why Mr McCracken was driving into the Pleinmont car park at the precise moment that I was hugging it. I certainly didn’t have him down as a Sunday-Afternoon-Driver,29 but maybe he was lost in the fog.

  I don’t remember seeing him drive in, but I do remember his headlights were on. Then I heard his voice.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  For some reason Michael got the giggles and said we’d been repelling enemy invaders.

  I sat up and assured Mr Mac that I was honestly A-OK.

  Mr Mac looked from me back to Michael.

  ‘Has she been drinking? You know she’s under-age.’

  ‘Oooo! Are you a policeman?’ Michael wiggled his fingers. ‘Like I’m scared.’

  Mr McC told Mi
chael not to be such a bloody idiot, but I couldn’t hear most of it because my ears were ringing, and all I knew for sure was that my bum was getting cold. Michael had lent me his 100% acrylic Burton jumper (I still have it) but my legs had scary purple goosebumps. I stood up (a bit too quickly).

  The next thing I knew I was in the McMobile, being bombarded with awful hippy music.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked. ‘You can’t take me home.’

  Mr Mac sighed. ‘Well, I can’t leave you there. What were you doing anyway?’

  So I talked about my long-standing fascination with the Nazi German fortifications and how the guns the Germans had used at Pleinmont were manufactured by Skoda, which was the same make as his car, and wasn’t that remarkable? I then admitted that the view from the top of the tower was quite disappointing, and therefore not strategic.

  Big Mac said that it was very dangerous to go climbing the old German towers, but I explained that there was nothing else for young people to do on a Sunday afternoon on account of THE GAPING WOUND/Vacuum. It was therefore inevitable that we would all turn into hooligans and do stupid and dangerous things that might eventually get us killed. At this point McCrack stopped at a filter-in-turn.30 He squinted from left to right and seemed unsure about which way to go. I told him it was left.

  ‘Bloody roads!’ he muttered.

  I explained how during the Occupation the islanders took down all the signposts so as to confuse the Germans, and never put them back up because they realised it was the best way to cause endless suffering for holiday-makers. I thought McDoodle was enjoying my stories, I mean, that little nugget was right up the Rue-McClever. But he gave me such a filthy look.

  ‘How did you let yourself ever get in such a state?’