Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(30)

Elodie had it. She handed me the patch quietly, and her mouth twisted in a quick little grin. The scar on the side of her face made her pretty smile lopsided.

It wasn’t till I was sewing it on my sleeve that I realised she’d swapped our numbers. All the shuffling around had just been a show to distract Effi Moyer from Elodie’s sleight of hand. She’d sewn my 51498 on to the sleeve of her pale-blue shirtwaisted sailor dress with the too-long skirt that came down to her ankles, its big collar ripped off so that it wouldn’t hide the contrasting prison X across the front and back of the bodice. And now I sewed Elodie’s 51497 on to my too-tight brown gingham. Effi Moyer had been so busy making sure we put on the dumb dresses we’d been ‘issued’ with, she hadn’t paid any attention to the numbers we’d sewn on them.

We put our badly fitting clothes back on, wearing each other’s numbers, and lined up in front of the quarantine block to be counted.

The siren for the 9 o’clock roll call had come and gone and thousands of other prisoners had already gone to bed, but for us it was our first real roll call – Z?hlappell – outside, beneath the glaring electric lights, the long shadows of the dogs and the infinite rows of barbed wire making eerie pictures on the high concrete walls. It seemed to take forever. We stood there until after they turned the street lights out, the SS guards shining flashlights in our faces and making sure we didn’t try to sit down.

Elodie and I were still the last two in our group, so by the time they got to us the guards were utterly fed up with everybody and ready to go to bed too, and here we were, the last two ‘French’ women with our numbers the wrong way round.

‘Fabert, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertsiebenundneunzig! Justice, Einundfünfzigtausendvierhundertachtundneunzig!’ – Fabert 51497, Justice 51498. Somebody prodded Elodie’s sleeve with a club.

‘No, I’m Rose Justice!’

Two guards used their clubs to guide us out of line while a third stood hanging on for dear life to one of the awful German shepherds, and a fourth stood glaring down at her clipboard with its endless list of names, flashlight tucked under her arm and pencil in the other hand. Her hair was hanging in her eyes and she looked incredibly grouchy. She didn’t watch us at all. She couldn’t have cared less what was going on. She was just waiting to get the stupid numbers to come out right.

They made us strip naked again.

They gave me three cracking truncheon wallops – in the stomach and the small of my back and over my shoulders – the first blow made me bend over and the second knocked me to my knees, leaving my back wide open for the third. While I crouched there gasping and reeling, they got out those dreaded shears and cut all Elodie’s golden hair off. I didn’t have any hair to cut off, so I got beaten up instead.

When they’d finished battering and disfiguring us, one of them took Elodie’s dress with my number on it and threw it at me, and then took my dress with Elodie’s number on it and threw it at her. They made us get dressed again. And then they shoved us back in line and checked our numbers off the list – Fabert 51497, Justice 51498.

Elodie whispered, ‘La victoire!’ – victory.

I was black and blue for a week and Elodie had had to stand stark naked in the Lagerstrasse, the main camp street, in the middle of the night and get her hair sheared off. But she was right – we’d beaten Effi Moyer. We were wearing the dresses that fit us, and our own numbers.

You know, if it had just gone on like that for six months, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad.

I hadn’t seen evil. Or if I had, I didn’t recognise it yet. I didn’t realise they’d made the schmootzichs. All I’d seen in the guards were bad tempers and meanness. But not evil. Not horror. Not really. Only . . . You know, they were always so random about dealing out their meanness. I think the randomness should have tipped me off. It was dark when they beat me up and cut off Elodie’s hair that night. They didn’t even have the benefit of much of an audience. It wasn’t humiliating; it was just vicious.

The randomness has left its mark. I am scared of anything arbitrary now – of anything that happens suddenly. I am scared of the telephone ringing. It rang this morning, when the Embassy called to see if I was OK. I am scared of loud noises in the street. I am scared of dogs, and of talking to people for the first time. It is not a normal kind of being scared – the telephone made me burst into tears. A horse-drawn cart clattering by made me crouch behind the vanity table. It took me about an hour to get the courage to go into the Embassy the other day – I just stood there against the wall outside the gate watching everybody else go in and out. I was scared of Fernande the first time she showed up.

I am not scared of this room, but I feel like a flea in a jewellery box. And I am utterly lost in the beautiful double bed, that’s for sure.

The bunks in quarantine Block 8 were triple-deckers, bare boards two planks wide, one bug-infested straw mat about half an inch thick with a couple of grubby cotton blankets between four of us. It was a one hundred per cent improvement over where I’d slept the night before. Elodie and I clung to each other because it was the only way to avoid falling out. We were on a top tier, under the wooden roof and above the windows. I was hungry, but not yet starving; my knees, shoulders, ribs and back were incredibly sore; and I was exhausted but wide awake. I still wasn’t really scared. I was just seething. So angry! This stupid fight over the dresses. I could have understood if they had a prison uniform they wanted us all to wear. They used to have one, ugly grey sacks with blue stripes – a lot of the women who’d been there a while still wore them. If we’d all been wearing the same ugly uniform I’d have understood. But why should we have to swap our own perfectly decent clothes for someone else’s that didn’t fit? What was the SS going to do with a hand-me-down Air Transport Auxiliary uniform? I’d have been perfectly happy to let them sew a big X across my uniform if only they’d let me wear it. Or – not exactly happy. But willing.