would be interrogated. We might never see her again.”
Dad reaches back and holds Mum’s hand, his thumb kneading her finger, pushing her wedding-ring round in circles. It’s a bit disgusting to watch, but it means the air has cleared, apart from Grandma’s jubilant deflating after an entire packet of Garibaldi.
“Ilse must be careful of the secret police,” Mum continues. “The Stasi can take you off the street or out of your home for no reason. They even remove both parents from their children, who are then adopted by strangers. Informers are everywhere. No one can trust anyone, not even close friends or family. If the Stasi believe you are an enemy of the state, they make you disappear.”
I imagine husbands spying on wives, sons on mothers, nieces on uncles. Even on Christmas Day, a grandmother could be examining the innards of a cracker for coded escape plans while an auntie stuffs her head in the roast goose to search for blueprints of a secret tunnel.
“Hey, Bridge,” Dad says, “don’t scare the children with these Stasi thugs. They sound worse than the Cybermen.”
Victor’s eyes are bulging like poached ostrich-eggs. Oh dear Ringo, he’s actually whimpering.
“Christ alive, lad,” Grandma says to Dad. “How could you bring up them ghastly Cybermen at a time like this?”
“Well, Bridge brought up the bloody Stasi.”
“Yes, but they’re only in the East,” Mum says. “And when Jacqueline and I cross over, they will leave us in peace. I only want you to realise how careful Ilse has to be.”
“I suppose if they think she’s planning on escaping with you,” Grandma says, “then those Stasi will torture her. Maybe you as well, I shouldn’t wonder, Bridge.”
Victor howls.
“Mum,” I shout above the din, “the Stasi may not be in the West, but the Cybermen aren’t in Oaking either. It doesn’t mean Victor isn’t scared to death of them. Before he goes to bed, he even checks they aren’t hiding in his toy-cupboard. Which means his Totopoly falls out and whacks him on the head.”
I’m not telling them I still check behind my door for escaped train robbers.
Victor is so distraught he crawls through to the front and perches on Grandma’s lap. Dad flails his hand about because of the trespassing and his cigarette scorches Victor’s sandal.
“It’s made a hole in my sock as well,” Victor wails.
“Oh simmer down. Fart-arsing about over socks when I’ve got less than half-an-hour to get us docking on the Maid-of-Bloody-Kent without any brakes for God’s sake. God-all-bloody-mighty, son.”
There’s a foul smell of melted nylon and a torrent of German swear words, after which Dad and Mum refuse to exchange a word for miles. He mutters the worst word of all, twice. Once when he realises Dover isn’t as close as he thought it was and Grandma suggests they might have moved that too. And the second time when the thermos rolls onto the centre console and disgorges the last of the tea.
As Grandma falls asleep, it’s up to me to ease the tension in the stuffy, sun-baked car. I ask Mum what school is like in Germany, working on the basis that adults respond well to serious questions. If olden days are thrown in, they are compelled to show a keen interest.
“The first day is the best,” she says, casting her mind back before the war. “Every child is given an enormous cone of sweets and small presents. Every family has a photograph of their child with the cone. Mine was taken by the piano. I remember seeing my reflection in the marble floor, and my mother smiling when I said the cone was as tall as I was.”
Victor sniffs and sits up straighter. He asks if we’ll ever see the picture of Mum with her cone of sweets and she looks sad. “No, Victor. It was lost. In the war, almost everything was destroyed. Years later, in one of her letters to me, Beate remembered how she felt the foundations of the house shifting just before it fell, and as she ran for her life, it
Joe R. Lansdale, Mark A. Nelson
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