Tying Down The Lion (12 page)

“Hold the bus,” Dad says as the guard opens the passenger door and Mum’s reel of crochet cotton unspools over the rough ground. “We’ve shown you all we’ve got.”

“He wants all that is in the car, Roy. Every little thing.”

“Fu…”

“Roy.”

In deathly silence we all help to unload, although it’s difficult with damp shaky hands and an over-inflated bladder. It seems to take hours. My face is scorching. We have to place everything on a slab of concrete like a small railway platform, and they want it stacked, not just in a heap.

“You’ll not have my diamonds, you swine,” Grandma mutters, all jokes forgotten as she fastens her cardigan up to the neck over her bead necklace.

“They won’t pinch the iced-gems will they?” Victor whispers, watching a guard take our tartan shopping bag and pick out the remains of our slimy sandwiches and orange peel.

“How do I know?” I tell him, dumping cardigans and comics onto the sacrificial altar.

A guard picks up
Mandy
and
Commando
, flicks through the pages and tosses them into a bin. He confiscates all Victor’s Red Indians, even Sitting Bull. Happily, the Comanche tribe and their horses stayed at home.

Victor bursts into tears and I have to deal with it. Mum and Dad’s hands are full explaining the thick coil of rope we packed in the boot in case we need a tow, a distinct possibility.

“Apparently rope strong enough for a hot-air balloon is not allowed here,” Mum says. “People have escaped that way.”

“They’ve banned it?” Dad says, the disbelief in his voice painful.

“There’s a bandit?” Victor squeaks.

“Victor, we’ll get you another
Commando
and some Apaches when we’re back in England,” Dad promises. I can tell how badly he wishes we were on a quiet English back-road to Clacton.

“King of the road indeed,” Grandma says, her voice quavering. “The open road’s only open when you’re allowed to use it on your own terms, son.”

In this hostile place, a stomach-turning trail of homesickness is winding through me, probably through us all, except Mum.

“Why have they thrown my Navajo away?” Victor persists.

“Because they’re not allowed to see all our nice things,” I explain, hardly understanding it myself.

“The Navajo aren’t always nice.”

“Well, all your toys seem especially nice here.”

“They aren’t toys.”

“Sorry. I mean, your tribes would make everyone here want nice things too.”

“I don’t mind them having a read of
Commando
.”

“I know. It just isn’t allowed, Victor, and that’s that.”

From our stack, the guard pulls out a Dusty Springfield LP Dad thought Beate would like. We own three of them because Dad’s great-aunt has sent the same Christmas present since 1964. But the LP is thrown away. Dad’s cigarette is just about balancing on his lip, while, lost for words, he stares at Dusty in the bin.

After we are allowed to rescue our belongings, minus the ones too exciting for communists—and that includes Grandma’s liver salts—we are allowed back inside the car. It felt like a tortuous sweatbox before, but is now a haven.

By a miracle, T-K survived the search by camouflaging himself inside the bundle of windscreen rags.

“Lucky he was on night manoeuvres,” Victor says. We all laugh in a moment of total family harmony. And when the car starts first time we laugh again in total relief. Grandma pats the beads under her cardigan then rubs her glasses on it to unclog the mist on the lenses.

After a short drive, we have to stop again and get out. Guards guide us into a crummy little building with Lenin staring at us from a huge portrait. A tiny hatch opens. A hand reaches out. Mum explains in German, using their harsh tone of voice, that the other guards still have our documents.

“You could get yourself a job here, Bridge,” Grandma says. “You’d be well suited to it, duck.”

Yet again we wait. Some holiday. The only sound is my own heart clanging. Lenin is trying to read my mind, but there’s nothing else for me to look at. Victor is sobbing, but I’ve exhausted my entire range of sisterly patience. Mum searches for a tissue but gives up and, with a furtive glance round, uses the hem of Victor’s shirt to wipe his nose. Bloody ugh.

“They arrest people for being a cry-baby,” I whisper in his ear. This country has turned me evil. Where did the serene Tuesday go? I can only hear the retreating echo of her clicky white boots.

We wait ages for the papers to be returned, like greyhounds watching for the release of the hare, and have to pay a toll of ten Deutschmarks for the privilege of using the transit road. I hope Dad can find the money, but I also hope he can’t, so we could turn round and go home.

It takes him an age to uncurl the note. The back of his neck flares up like a beacon. The waiting guard sits motionless, trapped in his little booth, staring, appearing not to breathe. He seems mechanical, not in a robot way, but like a person whose fellow-feeling has been sucked out. He still has a rounded baby-face, so I can imagine him wearing a bonnet and sitting on his mother’s lap while doctors in long black boots inject him, and in among the usual jabs is an extra one that dilutes Emotions.

An indifferent nod dismisses us outside into the sunshine that seems drab here, and channels us into a long queue. The funnel tightens. No space to turn round, to retreat.

Another show of papers and a tedious wait before we are rubber-stamped and furnished with a pass. The next barrier is raised.

“Free at last,” Dad mutters.

To me, it feels like being sucked deeper inside.

“Light me a cigarette, Bridge,” he says. “Bloody hell, it’s more of a struggle to get you back into Germany than it ever was to get you out.”

“Yes,” Mum says. “I feel like a criminal when they stare unwinking at my passport, as if I am being snuggled in.”

“Er, smuggled, Bridge, I think.”

“Ah yes. But you know, Roy, snuggled or not, I have nothing to hide. I am an ordinary citizen for the first time.”

Call this ordinary? At least her grenade doesn’t seem to be sparking and she’s actually almost bearable.

“Right we’re off again, folks. Berlin, here we bloody well come. Study the map, Bridge, mate,” Dad says, blowing out plumes of smoke like steam from a thoroughbred’s nostrils. “There are three turn-offs to West Berlin. If I don’t get it right first time we might fall off the transit route and be floundering around in East Germany. And keep that map safe because I think we have to give it back again.”

“It’s like that daft Monopoly,” Grandma says. “Do Not Pass Go.”

“I don’t think Get Out of Jail Free would work here though,” I tell her.

Every vehicle travels at the same speed in a long procession, the slow-motion world of a dream. Dad has to concentrate harder than ever. No one passes, although we should be used to that in this car.

Dad pauses for a wee at one of the approved places and, after the usual stalling session, we set off again and the road mutates into a steep track into the woods.

“This isn’t bloody well right, Bridge.”

“Please do not speak as if it is my fault, Roy.”

“Well it’s not T-K holding the map, is it? Mind you, he’d have more road-sense.”

If it is possible for a map to make aggressive noises, this map does. The tension stretches tighter than Grandma’s whalebone. Victor hides under my cardigan.

A huge shadow wraps around the car and aircraft noise hovers overhead. Mum opens her window and strains to look up.

“It is something big,” she says.

“Very helpful, Bridge.”

Victor cranes his neck and announces, “I spy a helicopter gunship.”

“Christ Al-bloody-mighty.”

“Roy, you must not panic.”

“What else can I ruddy well do, Bridge?”

The car is spluttering as if it’s being throttled.

“Dad, the helicopter’s right overhead. T-K can see guns.”

“Bugger T-K, Victor,” Grandma says. “Just let your dad drive.”

“But Roy, this is not the right way.”

“I’m not turning back, Bridge. They might start firing.”

This is too much for Victor. His arms bristle with goose-pimples.

“Now you know why they call it the Cold War, duckie,” Grandma says, offering him a nip of her brandy. I drape my cardigan over his knees, its waft of home-smell conjuring the relative peace of Audette Gardens.

“I want to go home,” Victor whispers. “Mum and Dad don’t know what they’re doing. And Dad said bugger. He said it about T-K.”

Since he’s whimpering all over my twinset, I have to take a stand.

“Dad, for once, just turn round and go back. All you did was veer off the road after your wee-stop. So just turn round and veer back on it again. Just this once, Dad, please veer.”

“Veer? What is veer?” Mum asks. It actually seems like an invented word now I’ve said it so many times, but, thank the Beatles, all four of them, Dad gets the message.

“All right. I’ll show you how to spin a youey,” he says.

The Traveller objects to U-turns.

“Sod it, I’m going nowhere.”

“Dad, it’s bound to be hard because this track is all rutted and narrow. Just keep going.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I mean just keep doing what you’re doing. Backwards and forwards.”

“I should just put my hands up and surrender.”

“Well, for God’s sake don’t. You need both on the wheel.”

The manoeuvre becomes a twenty-eight-point-turn, but, as Dad keeps telling us, considering it was executed with dodgy brakes on a sloping path with a camber, whatever that is, and in the shadow of a gunship, it is a triumph.

On the move again and with no more turning back now, I grow tired of looking at Mum’s car-crazed hair and the damp back of Dad’s neck. I draw a cobweb on my notepad cover and try not to think about home, which I suppose is what Mum has done for years. I scribble a cluster of petrified flies and a forked twig caught up in the delicate threads. Spiders discard unwanted foreign objects that drift into the web by cutting off that section and letting it fall, which reminds me of Peter.

I draw a black-widow, the star of last year’s project. She weaves a tangled structure, a coarse and criss-crossed funnel-shape with a prey-trapping tunnel at the core, wide and open at the top, easy to topple into and impossible to leave. She might as well be the star of this project too.

Victor is still uneasy, but I have used a year’s worth of patience on him.

“Get lost,” I growl, trying to draw another fine line of cobweb while he burrows his head into my arm.

“What’s cobweb made of?” he asks, snuffling.

With a chance to show off, I unearth a stockpile of patience.

“Well, it’s made of spider-silk, which is five times stronger than steel of the same diameter. If you have enough, it could tether a lion. The faster and tighter the spider draws the strand, the tougher the silk becomes. When the strand is under massive pressure, it breaks off to spare the rest of the web. If it tried to cope with the strain, all the other crisscrossed strands would be weakened too. One snapped connection, one sacrifice, means the whole structure is safe.”

This is straight from last year’s project. I don’t know how Gillian managed to beat me with Famous Dogs. But her star page featured Pickles the mongrel sniffing out the stolen World Cup trophy in someone’s back garden, and with Miss Whipp being a Dandie Dinmont breeder, she was bound to mark it high.

“But doesn’t the spider need every single strand to make the pattern?”

“No, one thread isn’t missed. He can lose the odd bit. It’s still his lair and still a death-chamber for flies.”

I let Victor rub out two or three lines to show the web still holding fast, but this has to stop when he wears a hole in my paper.

“So they’ve twitched the Iron Curtain aside to let you back in, Bridge,” Grandma is saying. “First the war drives you out and now you’ve slipped through again. Blooming game, isn’t it? You land on the wrong square, you miss a turn and now you get another go. Maybe you could stay on when we all leave, eh?”

“Hey, Ma, just hold the bus,” Dad says. “Bridge is here for a visit. That’s all there is to it.”

“But Batty’s a widow coping alone with a little lad, isn’t she? High time you gave her a hand, Bridge.”

“It’s Beate, Nell. Bay-arter is how you pronounce it.”

“Well, why don’t we drop you off with Bee-tear, leave you to it and bugger off to Clacton?”

“Nell, put that brandy away or I vill confiscate it.”

“Ooh, you and whose army?”

“Ma, stop now or I’ll get T-K to take his hatchet to your teeth and chuck them out the window.”

“Son, that’s no way to talk to your mother.”

“And that was no way to talk to my wife.”

Grandma stuffs in three pink marshmallows and starts a chorus of sniffing until Dad apologises and Mum promises to buy her an ashtray in the shape of a flugelhorn.

T-K is battling a tube of Refreshers. “Blam, blam, take it on the nose, you pig-dog.”

I concentrate on my project until Checkpoint Bravo. Grandma falls asleep, her curls fluttering in the rackety breeze that cuts through Dad’s maximum half-inch allowance of window-air.

“We are near the canal in the south of Berlin,” Mum says. “But it is part of the border now. And instead of a hedge or a fence, some of the houses near here have the Wall twisting around their gardens, even when it separates an entire village.”

I look at the picture of Bernauer Strasse tucked inside my notepad and want to tell her that some houses have actually become the Wall, but the reflection of her face pressed to the window looks sad, as if she is lost inside her old German self.

After a long silence, she rummages in her bag and takes out a creased photograph, one edge looking a bit singed. She passes it to me.

“Careful with it,” she says, keeping her voice low to avoid waking Grandma.

I am holding a portrait of a little girl in a puffy party frock, clutching a china doll. Her parents smile from behind, their hands clasping her shoulders. The girl has long black hair and dark eyes. I only know she’s my mother because she’s so close to being me.

“Is that Jacqueline?” Victor asks. “What an ugly face.”