Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

came along with you all. Thank you for having me, son. And you, Bridge.”
    Mum tries to smile and Grandma beams. Mum and Dad start talking to her, rather than each other, but Grandma eats and talks to everyone, salvaging our crusts for a grey squirrel who keeps inching closer. Eventually he takes a digestive from her, clutching it in his tiny hands. “Must be like nibbling at a ruddy great cart-wheel,” Grandma says and everyone laughs. Dad steals a glance at Mum and the thaw begins.
    “I hope Elsie doesn’t feed Deborah grapes when she’s on the perch,” Grandma says. “Or else Stan will have to change the wallpaper. And she won’t scratch properly if there’s more than a dozen stinkies in her gravel.”
    “Dad, there’s only one other cub in my pack whose Dad’s got a car,” Victor says. “And his has only got three wheels.”
    Sometimes, even seven-year-olds know how to soften icicles. Even though the clouds are packing together, the thermos is leaking and the salted peanuts have all fallen out of the packet, this picnic has become officially groovy. Last time we had one, Victor fell in a cowpat, and Dad had to fish out T-K and wipe him clean with the last of the lemonade.
    And Mum is actually showing an interest in my project. She thinks it’s still the one about spiders’ webs from last year, but at least she’s talking to me. I don’t have the chance to explain it properly to her yet because it starts raining hard. We pile inside the car with the leftover food, our damp clothes and sweaty Spam steaming up the windows.
    We set off again, Grandma sitting in front with the flattened Five-Boys on her lap.
    “Dad, where will we eat on the way to Berlin?” Victor asks. “Will you stop at a German café? Will it have those hot-dog things?”
    “Well, there are rest-stops on the autobahn. Hey, Bridge, once we hit that stretch of road in the East, couldn’t Ilse just meet us there for a cup of tea?”
    “Then you wouldn’t get shot at, Mum,” Victor says, thrusting T-K at her, his well-chewed hands bent in prayer.
    “How about it, Bridge?” Dad says. “It’s not as if there’ll be much to see on the other side of the Wall. It’s all miserable flats in great blocks, isn’t it? Shops with nothing on the shelves. Sandwiches with nothing in the middle.”
    As he slows down even more to avoid smashing into the lorry in front of us, I hear him murmur, “Christ, this pedal feels like melted caramel under my shoe.”
    Mum sighs. “I wish you could all meet Ilse. She is so enchanting. We all took ballet lessons for a while. Beate and I were like baby-elephants, but Ilse was so light on her feet. She was never still. During air-raids she was like a caged bird.”
    “Isn’t she still like a caged bird?” Victor says.
    Sometimes he is less bone-headed than most seven-year-old boys. He even has a girl’s train of thought. I make a note of the caged bird idea for the project, wanting to understand the broken pieces of Mum’s Berlin, although why I think I can do a better job than Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, I haven’t the foggiest.
    Mum is stroking Victor’s head in an absent-minded way, as she often does when she’s misty-eyed about the past. I know for a fact she’ll find nits. I can see one steeplechasing through his fringe.
    “Yes, Ilse is in a kind of cage, Victor,” she says. “Beate is confined in a different way. She can travel everywhere she likes except to the other half of her own country, and not even into the other half of her own city. Ilse is so completely trapped that even if she met us at the rest-stop, she would be in danger of arrest.”
    “But she’d still be in the East, Bridge,” Dad says. “It’s a sort of motorway funnel, isn’t it?”
    Mum shakes her head. “Meeting someone from the West in that way is not legal. The border guards know the amount of time needed to reach the exit from the moment of entering the transit route. If Ilse took longer than that, she