Authors: Julie Johnston
Little Red Lies (7 page)
Hanging my sweater on a hook near the back door, I hear voices coming from upstairs, one too soft to make out the words and the other, Hazel’s, a loud whisper. “No!” I hear. “Stay upstairs! You don’t need to come down!” It seems an odd way to talk to her mother. I wouldn’t get away with that tone of voice for one minute. My mother is a great demander of respect.
Hazel returns, smiles cheerily, and leads me into the living room, shutting the door. Soon we’re hard at work on the play, with me reading the lines that come just before Hazel’s.
Will that be all, Madam?
I say, with a deep unknowable sadness that may or may not have occurred in the housemaid’s obscure life. This is met with silence.
“Your line is,
Yes, thank you
,” I say.
Hazel frowns.
“What’s the matter? It’s a pretty natural reply. I don’t see why you find it difficult to remember.”
“I know the line,” Hazel says. “It’s just that I don’t understand why you’re making the maid sound as if she’s going to cry. I keep thinking I must have made a mistake and got her all upset, so I have to think back over my lines. It’s very confusing.”
Propping my elbow on my other arm, I press a knuckle into my teeth and wonder if I’ve made a grave error in judgment with Ruthie’s role. “Um,” I say while I think this through. Can it be that I am, in fact, taking liberties with someone else’s work? The answer
yes
pops up.
“Let’s try it again,” I say. This time, I allow the maid to speak as if she has nothing more compelling on her mind than the location of her feather duster. Hazel sails along, belting out the rest of her lines almost perfectly, right to the end of act 1. We both breathe a sigh of relief.
“There, now. You see? You
do
know your lines. You don’t need me to help you. You’ll do fine at the next play practice.”
“No. I won’t. I’ll get distracted. I always do. It’s the stupidest thing, really. I get thinking about the way people talk or move in the play, and sometimes it just doesn’t feel real.”
“But it’s not real. It’s a play. That’s the whole point.”
“You don’t understand. I see the people who are not in the play, the ones helping, and I think they’re saying to
themselves,
This is so phony
. The actors are just pretending to be real people. And when I think about it, I start feeling like some sort of windup toy, pointed in one direction and then another, and that’s when I wind down and forget my lines. I’m afraid it will be just like that when we have an audience.”
I stare at Hazel for a moment, wondering if she has just said something incredibly deep or something incredibly stupid. “But, plays are supposed to entertain, to be a break from reality, aren’t they?”
“Then why write plays about real things?”
“Because it’s entertaining for the audience to see what real life is like from inside someone else’s head. You see, I’m writing a play myself,” I confess (all right, lie), “so I’ve thought about these things.” I’ve never really considered anything remotely like this. Not only that, my play, to date, consists only of a cast of characters; the heading act 1, scene 1; and a jumbled description of the set.
Hazel shrieks her delight. “A play! What’s it about? What’s it called?”
I don’t really have a name for it, but I say the first thing that comes to mind. “
The Wounded Lover
. It’s about this soldier who gets shot, and a nurse rescues him and tries to nurse him back to health.”
“That is so romantic. Do they fall in love?”
“Of course.”
“And do they get married?”
“No. The soldier dies.”
“You can’t let the hero die.”
“He’s not the hero, the nurse is.”
Hazel has to think about this. “Yes, but who will the nurse marry? Stories have to end happily. Is there another lover?”
“I haven’t got that far yet. I’ll let you know how it ends when I figure it out.”
Hazel frowns. “I don’t like stories like that. I wish, just once, someone would write a story where nothing bad happens, where people have only tiny problems and get over them, and then everybody lives happily ever after.” Her voice is unusually quiet.
“How boring! That wouldn’t be a story; that would be the grade one reader.”
Hazel has no comeback, in fact, she isn’t even listening. Her eyes are on the closed living room door. We both listen for a minute and hear someone coming falteringly down the stairs, a woman, singing snatches of a song.
“Wait here,” Hazel says loudly. She opens the door barely enough to slip through, then closes it tightly.
I can make out the muffled sounds of an argument, someone clumping up the stairs. Glass shatters. It’s all I can do not to open the door to see what’s going on.
Hazel comes back a few minutes later, face red, eyebrows fierce. Soon she relaxes. Her eyes show pain, or is it guilt? I’m not sure which. “I have stuff I have to do,”
she yells as politely as possible, “so I guess you’d better go.”
“Will you be all right with your lines?”
“Maybe. If I can keep my mind on them.” Hazel guides me toward the door.
“Forget about the audience. Forget anyone else exists,” I say, hoping this is helpful.
“Easy for you to say.” She’s trying to keep her voice down. Her shoulders have the defeated droop of someone carrying an unbearable burden. Still, she’s lucky enough to be the star of the play; she’s beautiful; her family is rich. What more does she want?
I head for home, the spring breeze tousling my hair. Tousling? Ravaging would be the word. I must look like I’ve been electrocuted. My mind is still on Hazel and her strange family. The mother is obviously a madwoman they keep locked in the attic. She must have managed to get out somehow and found her way downstairs. But, what about the breaking glass? A vase. She threw it at Hazel in an attempt to kill her. Maybe I should be writing my play about that, about having a murderous lunatic for a mother. No wonder Hazel thinks stories shouldn’t have bad things happen.
My mind strays back to my play,
The Wounded Lover
. Why kill off the soldier at all? To kill or not to kill, that is the question. Shakespeare had no qualms about killing off heroes. Look at
Romeo and Juliet
. Look at
Hamlet
—a complete bloodbath at the end.
I walk along with my head down, thinking hard about the best way to end my play, until at last I see that the only answer is to abandon it and write one instead about a madwoman who tries to murder her family. I’m so deep in thought, I don’t notice that I’ve missed my corner and am now about to pass Woolworths.
Good
. A little bag of candies will get my brain working again.
Inside, I stand at the candy counter at the front of the store, pouring over the selection. Mary Foley’s counter, where she sells cosmetics—including lipstick with enticing names—is near the back. I should go say hi to her, but I don’t. I can see she’s busy chatting with some of her girlfriends.
“May I help you?” the salesgirl at the candy counter asks.
Chewing my lower lip, I mull over the selection. I need to make the absolute best choice—peanut brittle or Liquorice Allsorts. “Liquorice,” I say, and just as the girl is about to scoop some into a paper bag, I say, “Wait. I can’t make up my mind.”
She puts down her scoop. “Take your own sweet time, hon, I got nothin’ better to do.”
I stare hard at the peanut brittle, willing it to offer itself to be my choice, savoring in my mind the sweet-salty blend.
As I ponder the difficult decision, the girls who were talking with Mary come up to the candy counter. I don’t actually know them personally, but I’ve seen them around. They’re obviously continuing a conversation started a few
minutes before. They don’t recognize me. They don’t even notice me.
One of them says, “He’s so standoffish and above it all. I don’t know why she doesn’t drop him.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be very patriotic, would it?”
“No, but you know what I mean; he’s let the war go to his head.”
“Oh, for sure! And he wasn’t even an officer or anything.”
“You know Mary. Too nice for her own good.”
I can guess who they’re talking about.
Standoffish!
My brother is the farthest thing from it. At least he wasn’t like that before he went away, I’m sure of that. Now that he’s back, he’s a tiny bit different, a little quieter. But, so what?
The girls buy a bag of chocolate kisses, each of them dipping into it, and leave without even glancing at me.
“Peanut brittle,” I say confidently. The minute I pay, and the girl hands over the small bag, I wish I’d chosen a square of chocolate fudge.
8
“They should give us a week off school every month,” I say as I sprinkle more brown sugar on my cornflakes. It’s the last week of April, and school’s closed for the Easter break. “I love sleeping in.”
“Eight-thirty isn’t much of a sleep-in,” Jamie says.
“It is if you normally have to roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of seven and force your eyelids to stay open for another scintillating day at school.”
We’re in the kitchen having breakfast. Mother has brought the ironing board down from the sewing room and propped it over the backs of two kitchen chairs. She flattens tea towels and handkerchiefs while she keeps up with the conversation. Through the window, we can see Mrs. Hall, next door, hanging out her laundry. Mother waves.
“I need to go away somewhere,” Jamie growls into the newspaper he’s browsing through.
“But you just got home,” Mother says. “We’ve hardly had a chance to talk.”
“Talk! About what?”
“About you, of course, about your war experiences.”
“I didn’t have experiences. The war was about fighting. I wasn’t on a sightseeing tour. We were bombed. We were shot at. And we did the same back. Men died. And that was the war.” He glares at the classified section.
Letters not sent
.
It’s quiet tonight. It won’t last, not after yesterday’s grim exercise. There were ten of us. We had to move quietly, in twos, crouching close to tumbled walls of bombed buildings, slipping into empty doorways. I was with Defazio, who grew up in downtown Toronto. He whispered something like, “This would be fun if I wasn’t so scared I’m gonna crap my pants.” I tightened up, too, because the same thought crossed my mind. Even so, it was a bit like the cops and robbers me and Coop used to play. Coop was always a robber
.
We were in what was left of a small French village, where our job was to flush out a nest of enemy soldiers supposedly guarding a small munitions dump. It was one of those nights when the moon looked like a big silver dinner plate, just
hanging up there. I was shaking like mad and couldn’t stop. That’s when I accidentally nudged an empty tin can, and it rolled down a grade and bumped against a stone wall
.
Immediately, gunfire rattled and whizzed over our heads. It was coming from a bombed-out schoolhouse. I’d given away our position. My first thought was that I’d be court-martialed and imprisoned as a liability. My second thought was that prison would be a whole lot safer than this place. We kept low, slithering along, our faces nearly in the dirt. But at least we knew exactly where the enemy lurked
.
We crept forward when we saw clouds tarnish the moon. We were half protected by an overturned vehicle and some household goods left behind by refugees making their escape. Just then, a dog jumped out of an abandoned car and barked at us. Our sergeant was lying low behind the tank, but he lured the dog to him, silently. I guessed he wanted to quiet him with a tidbit of something he pulled from his pocket, a moment of kindness in the face of battle. A second later, he grabbed the dog and slit its throat. Such is war
.
Enemy fire rattled at and above our cover, but we moved stealthily forward. Everyone looked away from the bloody dog. Defazio silently threw
up. The clouds drifted and we were close enough to see the Germans’ faces
.
“Jeez, they’re just kids, some of them
,”
the sergeant whispered. He passed me his binoculars
.
Some of them looked younger than me. Could have been me and Coop and Tom Klosky back in about grade eleven. “They don’t look dangerous enough to be Nazis
,”
I whispered
.
Somebody muttered, “Worst kind. Hitler Youth. Learn to kill in kindergarten.”
On the order, we threw our grenades. I have to confess, I took the precaution of half-closing my eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable. We fell back to take cover behind a pile of rubble before whatever stores the Germans had were blown sky-high
.
Can’t finish this. We’re on the move again. More later
.
Mother rests the iron on its end and sighs. “Son, why are you
doing
this?”
“Doing what?” He sounds like a sulky kid.
“You’re being sarcastic and sullen. You’ve changed. I want my old Jamie back.”
He put the paper down. “What do you mean, I’ve changed?”
“You used to be a polite, loving son.”
He snorts. “That’s what war does to you, I guess. You’re ordered to throw grenades into the midst of a bunch of schoolboys and blow them sky-high, and the next thing you know, you’re being rude to your mother.”
“Jamie, stop being so difficult!” I say.
He scowls into the newspaper. I scowl at my cornflakes. Mother, tight-lipped, is busy filling her clothes-sprinkling bottle at the sink. I feel like throwing my cereal bowl through the window to relieve the tension. If Jamie doesn’t say something, I’m going to whack him on the head with my spoon.
“I miss my war buddies, I guess,” he says. “I miss the camaraderie, even the taunting and teasing.” The atmosphere improves. He nibbles on a piece of toast.
“You still have friends here,” Mother says.
“It’s not the same. I miss the sweaty smell of fear we all had, and the way we felt lucky and reckless at the same time when we came away from a battle, more or less whole. Once we found a small goat ambling along a road, and we slaughtered it on the spot. We put it on a makeshift spit and cooked it over a fire.”