Rose Under Fire (Code Name Verity, #2)(50)

‘Nail varnish!’ Karolina hissed in delight. ‘You are a painted woman! No wonder they slapped you with a French prisoner’s triangle!’

It is true. The nail polish for my date with Nick still hadn’t come off. My toenails had grown out a bit, so there was a bare gap between the nail bed and the enamel, but if you didn’t look too closely and you didn’t look at the skin of my blistered feet, my toenails were still pretty.

Ró?a rolled her eyes. ‘Karolina is the vainest creature in the world. Last time she tried to grow her hair out they made her wear a sign that said, “I have violated camp rules by curling my hair.”’

‘Shut up, Ró?yczka. What’s the colour called? The colour of the varnish?’

‘Cherry Soda,’ I said. ‘It was a little bottle I brought with me from America.’

Karolina and Ró?a both sighed in ecstasy.

‘Cherry Soda! No wonder your toes look like balls of candy.’

‘My mother never let me wear make-up – ever,’ Ró?a vowed with vivid envy.

‘You were fourteen when you were arrested!’ I protested. ‘My mother didn’t let me wear make-up either when I was fourteen!’

‘Did you paint them yourself or was it done by a beauty specialist? How long does it last? What shoes did you wear with it? Were they open-toed – could you see your toenails with your shoes on?’

‘Sandals. It was for a date with my boyfriend, Nick.’

‘Did he like them?’

I shrugged and looked away. I don’t think he’d noticed them. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of Nick, and the thought of him always made me ache. What would he think if he could see me now? There wasn’t any way I could ever be mistaken for anything but a concentration camp prisoner, hairless, in my torn dress with its missing collar and big mismatched fabric X’s and the brown striped bloodstains across my backside. Early on I used to dream about him, though I stopped dreaming about anything but food after a while – I dreamed he was touching my head and asking, ‘Where is your hair?’

Karolina stifled a giggle. ‘Let’s name your toes. That’d be a hilarious little cartoon, a row of dancing toes like the Rockettes! Each a different flavour. Cherry! Peppermint!’

‘Redcurrant!’ said Lisette.

‘Beetroot,’ said Irina.

‘Beetroot!’ Ró?a sneered.

‘It is sweet. And red.’

They coaxed me into putting the rhymes together.

‘Strawberry, cranberry –’

‘– grenadine, raspberry!’

And I made a rhyme about painted toes. It is a sort of insanely starved person’s version of ‘This Little Piggy’.

No penny candy

so stubbornly sweet

as plops of red sugar

adorning my feet –

strawberry, cinnamon,

redcurrant, cranberry,

peppermint, sugarbeet,

grenadine, raspberry,

cherry and mulberry –

come look at Rose

and join in the feast

of my lollipop toes!





Of course, it was not just the illicit beauty of my toes that everyone admired – it was also, and in a big way, the fact that they looked so edible.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been scavenging that day. Irina turned out to have an entire newspaper hidden in her shirt. She must have picked it up in the maintenance shed we’d been working in, though I hadn’t noticed a thing at the time (she was fantastic at organising paper, it turned out). As we were climbing into the bunks, just before the lights went out, she pressed most of the paper thin and hid it wedged between the bunk slats and frame. But one last piece she twitched in front of Ró?a’s nose, and when she’d got Ró?a’s attention, folded the scrap of paper while we watched.

It was only about as wide as her palm. Her hands moved so quickly you couldn’t follow what she was doing. Oh, Irina’s hands were pretty! And suddenly she’d transformed a yellowed corner of a stolen Nazi newspaper into a little paper airplane with short, broad wings. She held it out to Ró?a.

‘Fly this,’ Irina said. She mimed the action of throwing a dart.

Ró?a lifted the paper plane towards the ceiling and pitched it across the bunks. She didn’t even throw it very hard, but it glided away into the gloom, and after a moment someone threw it back with a sharp cautionary warning in Polish. It flew better than any paper airplane I had ever seen.

‘I like to fly them over the walls,’ Irina said. ‘When no one is looking.’

You know how I stood in roll calls making up poems to keep from going crazy with fear and boredom? Irina made up aircraft.

That was a good day, nylon socks and painted toes and Irina’s first paper airplane. Some of the ones she made later Karolina decorated – she’d put Nick as the pilot, though of course she didn’t know what he looked like. He was our hero – I whispered stories about Nick to Karolina and Ró?a after lights-out, where he’d come to rescue us, sneaking into the power plant with wire-cutters and disabling the electric fences, carrying a knapsack full of chocolate bars. Karolina made him look like Clark Gable. Or she’d draw caricatures of us on Irina’s planes, with Irina and me in the cockpit, and Karolina and Ró?a and Lisette as our passengers. They were very funny and she could do them so fast – sometimes, when we were standing in a roll call, she’d make doodles of the turkey buzzard guards with her toes in the cinders at our feet. Just a couple of broad swipes and you’d see it and you’d have to pretend to sneeze so you didn’t burst out laughing. And then she’d kick it into dust before she got caught.