‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she asked again.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bruno, trying to think quickly. ‘I didn’t quite hear you. Could you say that again?’
‘Who did you say you should be with?’ she shouted, leaning forward so there could be no mistake this time.
‘I never said I should be with anyone,’ he said.
‘Yes, you did. You said that someone will think you’ve forgotten them.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Bruno!’ she said in a threatening voice.
‘Are you mad?’ he asked, trying to make her think that she had entirely made it up, only he wasn’t very convincing for he wasn’t a natural actor like Grandmother, and Gretel shook her head and pointed a finger at him.
‘What did you say, Bruno?’ she insisted. ‘You said there was someone you should be with. Who was it? Tell me! There’s no one around here to play with, is there?’
Bruno considered the dilemma he was in. On the one hand his sister and he had one crucial thing in common: they weren’t grown-ups. And although he had never bothered to ask her, there was every chance that she was just as lonely as he was at Out-With. After all, back in Berlin she had had Hilda and Isobel and Louise to play with; they may have been annoying girls but at least they were her friends. Here she had no one at all except her collection of lifeless dolls. Who knew how mad Gretel was after all? Perhaps she thought the dolls were talking to her.
But at the same time there was the undeniable fact that Shmuel was his friend and not hers and he didn’t want to share him. There was only one thing for it and that was to lie.
‘I have a new friend,’ he began. ‘A new friend that I go to see every day. And he’ll be waiting for me now. But you can’t tell anyone.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s an imaginary friend,’ said Bruno, trying his best to look embarrassed, just like Lieutenant Kotler had when he had become trapped in his story about his father in Switzerland. ‘We play together every day.’
Gretel opened her mouth and stared at him before breaking into a laugh. ‘An imaginary friend!’ she cried. ‘Aren’t you a little old for an imaginary friend?’
Bruno tried to look ashamed and embarrassed in order to make his story more convincing. He squirmed on the bed and didn’t look her in the eye, which worked a treat and made him think that perhaps he wasn’t such a bad actor after all. He wished that he could make himself go red, but it was difficult to do that so he thought of embarrassing things that had happened to him over the years and wondered whether these would do the trick.
He thought of the time he had forgotten to lock the bathroom door and Grandmother had walked in and seen everything. He thought of the time he had put his hand up in class and called the teacher ‘Mother’ and everyone had laughed at him. He thought of the time he’d fallen off his bicycle in front of a group of girls when he was trying to do a special trick and cut his knee and cried.
One of them worked and his face started to go red.
‘Look at you,’ said Gretel, confirming it. ‘You’ve gone all red.’
‘Because I didn’t want to tell you,’ said Bruno.
‘An imaginary friend. Honestly, Bruno, you’re a hopeless case.’
Bruno smiled because he knew two things. The first was that he had got away with his lie and the second was that if anyone was the Hopeless Case around here, it wasn’t him.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I want to read my book.’
‘Well, why don’t you lie down and close your eyes and let your imaginary friend read it to you?’ said Gretel, delighted with herself now because she had something on him and she wasn’t going to let it drop in a hurry. ‘Save you a job.’
‘Maybe I should send him to throw all your dolls out of your window,’ he said.