The Book of Lies Read Online Free

his gang. Happens I thought a lot of things that day which never quite proved true. As the sun sank into the horizon I was back to the little kid I’d ever been, too scared to go home and face the wrath of our mother. Au yous, back then she had a tongue as sharp as any knife. You know why we called her La Duchesse? She didn’t just act like she was royalty but she made her word the law. The youngest out of seven children, she’d had to fight for everything. Now she was always fighting me.
    I see her standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips, still wearing her fancy coat with lace about the collar. She’d waited two hours to give me a good lamming.
    â€˜Why do you test me so?’ she asked, twisting my ear this way and that. ‘Making a scene in front of our neighbours. As if I haven’t got enough on my plate with a baby to look after and your father working all hours to keep the business going!’
    Hé bian, the business. Our parents had decided to stay on the island to keep their livelihood. Our father had started his own printing firm, called The Patois Press. It was everything to him and I’m glad you mean to continue. You, Emile, and you alone, can prove it was worth all the trouble and pain. Back then, we only printed posters for the Odeon, local advertisements and parish newsletters – nothing fancy like what you have planned. Pop was a quiet soul, wanting a quiet life. Arlette was the firecracker, always going off. Of course, she came from a lesser family so she had more to prove, and as for Pop, well, he was much changed from his time in France, fighting in that ‘war to end all wars’. It must’ve cut him to the quick to see another coming.
    Not a day passed when we didn’t see German planes circling in the skies. We knew something bad was coming our way. Boatloads of refugees arrived from France, telling tales of the barbarous Hun. At every street corner I gobbled up gossip, making notes in my little pocket pad. And the stories I heard!
    â€˜They slice the arms off little kids for sport. They are man-eaters. They use women and babies as cannon fodder.’
    The French are a race prone to exaggeration, as I now know, and they never stopped stoking my fevered imaginings. If only I’d stayed in school and listened to my teachers, eh? But the schools were all closed down, so I was on the loose.
    Hubert would shake his head at me, like he saw the bad things stewing in my brain.
    â€˜Si nous pale du guiabye nous est saure d’l’y’vais les caurnes’ is what he said . . . ‘Speak of the devil and you shall see horns’. He was always talking in patois to me.
    Hé bian, that language has been dying for longer than I’ve been living. I miss hearing it spoke and I miss hearing him speak it.
    He’d make me sit with him in the office so as to keep me out of trouble. Of course, with half the island gone our business had gone with it. There were signs on every hedgerow saying ‘Why Go Mad? There’s No Place Like Home’, but by then we were going mad being stuck at home. Pop turned to his Bible and I hid my head in stupid comics, losing myself in cartoon adventures. What I knew of the War came from Rover or Wizard , and of course our father had no time for it. I caught him flicking through them once, mumbling to himself.
    â€˜It won’t be like that,’ he said, his long arms hanging limply at his sides.
    â€˜So,’ I placed myself squarely in front of him, ‘tell me what it will be like.’
    He shook his head. ‘There aren’t words to describe the horror.’
    It wasn’t the first time I’d asked him, nor the first time he’d refused.
    â€˜Who wants the truth, eh? What I’ve seen, Charlie, it won’t make a good adventure story for little boys like you.’
    How it made my young blood boil! Now, though, I understand it all too well. If you have seen something so