The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

  Roehm’s face shimmered behind a dense cloud of cigarette smoke. He listened with absolute attention. He made no comment.

  ‘My school’s like a police state where the militia can’t really control the underworld. There are more of us than there are of them. They may have more power, but we have more information.’

  ‘And what’s your strategy for survival in all this? Apart from the bunker in the library?’

  ‘Well, there are always a few of us who want to work. Doesn’t do to sit at the front, though, mid-class is safer. It’s OK now that I’m in the sixth. Everything’s calmer. I steer clear of the more aggressive gangs. Don’t go outside during break. Don’t take showers after PE. It’s safer to go home filthy. I fought once. I stabbed one of them with a compass. He’s still got the scar. But we even talk to each other sometimes now. If they know you’ll fight they’ll leave you alone. And they realize I’m not a snitch. I didn’t say anything after they threatened to rape my French teacher. I vary my route to school. I don’t leave my bike in the sheds. I lock it up behind the paper shop. Jess lets me do that. They’re Pakis. And I used to do one of his morning rounds when I was younger. Then I help them scrub the graffiti off the shop windows and walls. Sometimes we have to paint it over. You can still see the swastikas, but only very faintly now. I walk the last half-mile or so to school. But I even vary that route. I haven’t been beaten up for over two years. There are girl gangs too. But they only pick on other girls.’

  ‘I don’t think that your mother knows anything about this.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. I wouldn’t tell her. She’d be worried. And then she might get in touch with the school. She thinks you can change things by protesting and making a fuss. That would only make life hell for me. Word gets around. If the parents kick up, the children get done over. I’ve seen it happen. Anyway, she wouldn’t understand. They don’t have discipline problems at the college. Everybody’s there because they want to be.’

  ‘But she does worry about you. She says you don’t appear to have any friends.’

  I suddenly resented this. I didn’t like her talking about me to Roehm. If I had no friends it was my business.

  ‘I’m OK. I keep busy.’

  My bottom lip set into a tight line.

  Roehm reached across the table and stroked my face. I drew back at once. We had been in the restaurant for hours, and I was sweating, but his touch was still cool and dry. I felt his rings on my skin, sharp, chilly and cold. He frightened me a little, yet I wanted him to touch me again.

  ‘Don’t be angry with her for loving you. She tries not to be possessive.’

  I wanted her to be possessive. I gazed at Roehm and suddenly hated him for all the confidences I had poured onto the emptying plates between us. Just because a man listens carefully doesn’t mean that you have to gush secrets for hours on end, as if you were sitting in a confessional. He’s not my doctor or a psychotherapist. So I got bullied at school. Lots of people get bullied. It’s nothing special and I’ve come out all right. Roehm watched me closely. I realized that he knew what I was thinking.

  ‘Then perhaps we can be friends,’ he offered, his voice slow, unhurried.

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  I wasn’t taking any prisoners. I had said too much already. Roehm threw a bridge across the table towards me.

  ‘Would you like to see where I work? I have to close down one of the experiments.’

  We were contemplating the cheese board. My curiosity got the better of me.

  ‘The lab?’

  ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘OK.’

  It would have been taking a risk to sound excessively enthusiastic. Roehm was too strange a man for me to take any risks.

  We left the restaurant in Soho well after ten. Roehm paid in cash. The streets were still bright with voices and music and the air smelt of boiling fat. The Dragon festival, now in full swing, had drawn crowds, musicians, street vendors selling imitation Rolex watches, leather hats and African jewellery. I saw a gaggle of children playing with phosphorescent yo-yos. The glowing yellow circles spun and danced in the dark. Roehm took hold of me again as if I had been arrested and marched me up Charing Cross Road. Some of the shops were still open. Roehm paused to look into Borders Books. There was an exhibition on Switzerland and the Alps. He pointed out images of the ibex and the chamois.

  ‘We used to hunt them. They’re protected species now. That’s the summer coat of the chamois. They have a brown stripe down their backs and those dark bands on either side of their muzzles. The hunting lodges had their horns stuck up all over the walls. At one point we hunted them practically to extinction.’

  I suddenly realized that this was the longest speech I had ever heard Roehm make.

  ‘You used to hunt?’

  ‘Yes. Disgraceful, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s what your mother says.’

  ‘Oh, she’s very ecological. Where did you hunt?’

  ‘Switzerland. In the mountains.’

  ‘With a gun?’

  Roehm laughed. ‘Yes, of course. When I was your age I used to set traps too.’

  ‘So you can shoot?’

  ‘To kill. Every time. With all sorts of guns. I grew up in those mountains.’ He indicated an Arctic-looking range of ice peaks on the cover of a book about rock-climbing. ‘My father used to take me with him on his climbs, when he came back from the war.’

  I stood wondering which war he meant. Roehm was absorbed by the display in the window.

  ‘Look. Heinrich Harrer’s book, The White Spider, Die Weisse Spinne. So that’s been reprinted. I’ll get it for you in German. It’s the classic account of the ascent of the Eiger. The North Face. So many people were killed on that face they called it the Mordwand, rather than the Nordwand.’

  ‘When was it climbed?’

  ‘Successfully? In 1938. A joint rope of Austrians and Germans. Harrer was one of the victorious four. The Nazis exploited their success for publicity purposes. The ascent of the North Face presented Aryan manhood at its zenith. They were congratulated by Hitler. Harrer doesn’t mention any of that.’

  ‘How could he avoid it?’

  ‘He just leaves it out. He doesn’t tell his reader that he was a member of the SS either. He says other things that are true. Ordinary people don’t usually understand mountaineers. They don’t understand why we do it in the first place. But the mountains are the most beautiful pure space I have ever known. The rock face, snow, ice, the avalanches and the storms, they bring you face to face with the limits of who you are. You are stripped of all pettiness. The mountain reduces you to simplicity. That’s a very liberating thing.’

  He stopped.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  Roehm smiled slightly. ‘Why are you so fascinated?’

  We marched past the YMCA.

  I suddenly felt childish and naive. Never in my life had I ever wanted to hunt, shoot or fish. I loathed outdoor sports. I had barely learned to ski. I had never played football for pleasure. In fact I had never done anything that men were supposed to do. I hardly ever went to pubs. I had never had a girlfriend. And so far as our trips to the mountains were concerned, only Liberty actually enjoyed skiing or snowboarding with the French entourage. My mother spent her time walking in the snow, then struggling back to the chalet to paint what she had seen. When we returned from the morning walk I just sat in my mother’s room, reading. Luce enjoyed the endless aperitifs and actually drank cocktails at lunchtime. She then settled down to spend the afternoons channel-hopping on satellite television. Her favourite foreign channels were Spain and the United Arab Emirates: Spain because the women paraded about in revealing clothes wiggling their breasts and bottoms in a permanent sensual fit that looked very odd, and the Arab states because they broadcast public prayers and had long stretches of the Koran simply pasted up on the screen. Luce found the koranic script very soothing. She said that an hour or two of the Koran
was like having a hot bath and she dozed off in front of the descending scroll. We enjoyed the fresh air and the views. No one had ever felt driven to climb one of the mountains. And no one ever went hunting.

  Yet I found it hard to imagine Roehm as part of a milieu that dressed up in furs and strode across cols and glaciers, tracking ibex and chamois. His skin was too perfect, too white, too smooth. He smelt of indoors.

  We turned up Gower Street. Now the pavements were empty. Roehm increased his stride. I realized that I was in fact only a head shorter than he and that I could keep pace easily. It was his overall size that diminished me. Beside him I was insubstantial, like a thin thread of ectoplasm, easily dissolved. Roehm squeezed my arm gently, acknowledging my hesitation. He always appeared to know things, without being told, and it was this uncanny intuition, even sympathy, that increased my confidence in him. Everyone loves someone who listens, but the quality of his attention was in itself seductive. He persuaded me that, under his surveillance, I could never come to harm. Yet he was not in himself an altogether safe presence. I felt that no amount of explanation would ever quite tell me who he was. I did not and never would have quite enough information.

  ‘You’re not tired? It’s just here.’

  ‘No. I want to see where you work.’

  It was as if he was presenting me with a gift. We turned suddenly into the side gates of a hospital. The porter on duty simply nodded at Roehm, who produced a set of keys and opened the first door. We strode onto a long outstretched corridor of polished green linoleum as if we were visiting politicians arriving on the carpet. Now it was the Minotaur who led me on, into the heart of the labyrinth.

  Hospitals always smell the same. We could have been anywhere. I followed him past the trolleys heaped with soiled linen and rooms furnished with pinboards and computers. The lights were on, the computers were running, the in trays were full and the papers neatly stacked. But there was no sign of the night staff. We saw no one. Wherever we went, the long empty spaces hung before us, antiseptic and void. Roehm suddenly turned down a staircase and we began the long descent, one landing, then another. I heard his shoes clicking like dog’s claws on the polished floors. Again, we saw no one. The staircases were deserted. At last we stood before a pair of green double doors. The sign simply said:

  UNIVERSITY COLLEGE HOSPITAL

  DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY

  EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORIES

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  And underneath, glowing yellow and black, was the radiation-warning symbol. Roehm used two different keys to unlock the doors. Inside, beyond green barriers, I could hear a dense high-pitched hum. There were no obvious overhead lights, but the space, a vibrating echo of endless low ceilings reaching away into the dark, glowed fluorescent green. It was unbearably warm and humid. Great glass walls contained swirling funnels of green. My eyes adjusted to the half-dark. I stumbled against the hot pipes, which ran along the bottoms of the huge glass tanks. The floor was damp. Everything smelt of damp ferns and moss, like a tropical forest. I gazed at each plant as we walked past. They appeared to consist of endless varieties of begonia, some speckled, some semi-succulent, others with a deep, furry green sheen on the surface of the leaves. There were leaves shaped like arrowheads or covered in golden spots, and some were huge with arteries spreading out like fingers on an open hand. Nothing flowered. There was nothing in the giant glass tanks but oozing, seething green.

  Shouldn’t everything be labelled? I looked for labels, but there were none. The smell of wet compost was overpowering. I stripped off my coat, jacket and pullover. There was a humidity gauge in a glass box, running with condensation, the needle tracing a steady purple line across the turning graph paper inside the still, damp world. I heard the timbre of Roehm’s shoes change as they hit the surface of the floor. We were in another part of his underworld. He was walking on concrete. And now I could clearly hear the humming throb of the generators, pushing out slabs of wet heat.

  ‘Tropical temperatures. We keep them constant,’ said Roehm, fingering more keys as we came to another door. All the keys were for Chubb locks. They looked exactly alike. This time there was a red eye winking above the lock. The door was wired against intruders. I gulped down a viscous cloud of damp air and tasted stale water at the back of my throat and in my lungs.

  Inside the second door was a thick dark space. I remained outside in the sweating green while Roehm felt for a light. Before me gleamed a sombre crescent of gold over one desk and the pale blue of a lighted computer swung round to greet us. Something behind glass scuttled and jerked. I couldn’t easily make sense of the objects before me. Here is a desk full of papers and computer printouts. Everything on it is connected with work. There are bound reports and a laser printer. There are no photographs. There is a pile of graphs, which have been amended in red pen. There is a book with a German title and many torn scraps of paper marking the place at intervals. There is another humidity gauge. It is almost as hot as the long glass world of green, but not quite. There is more air and a strange smell. We are being watched. The computer displays rows of different coloured figures. There is a telephone covered in Post-it stickers. Something hums, something ceaselessly hums. Everything is floating in tanks, except for this thing. What is it? It has raw chewed branches on which to clamber and sawdust on the floor. It drinks water. What is it? It has a large cage. It has huge eyes encircled with darkness. It is watching, not me, but Roehm.

  ‘That’s a ring-tailed lemur.’

  Roehm was amused by my startled face. My own imagination had betrayed me. I had assumed that he worked with smoking phials of blood and laser beams, with frightening technology, glittering chrome tubes and robots, but never with living things, not plants and animals. Roehm did not seem to be part of the living world. I had imagined his laboratory as an automated machine, like a car assembly line or an arms factory. Yet all around me living things seethed and scuttled as I approached the cages and glass tanks. There was a faint smell of urine and rotting vegetables. It was unbearably hot. I found myself looking into the single unblinking eye of an iguana. I tugged at my shirt. Roehm settled down to watch the stately process of figures, line after line, marching down the blue screen.

  ‘You’ve never studied biological sciences, have you?’ He gazed calmly at the steady flood of figures.

  ‘Maths, French, German, English. I took my French A-level last summer.’ I recited parts of my recently completed UCAS form and stared back into the horrified eyes of the ring-tailed lemur. I tried to identify some of the animals. Something scrabbled into a hutch. It stank of fresh urine.

  ‘Just rabbits,’ said Roehm.

  He knew where I was in the laboratory without looking round.

  ‘Do you kill them?’

  ‘Are you involved in the animal rights campaign?’

  ‘My mother is.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Does she know what you do?’

  ‘She’s never been here. And you know better.’

  I surprised myself. A rush of pleasure made my fingers tingle. He had given me something special, a secret shared. The rabbit cowered in his hutch. I addressed the creature’s shaking ears.

  ‘Tough luck, punk.’

  Roehm laughed out loud behind me.

  There are walls of grey cabinets and here each one is labelled. Dates, coded letters. It’s like the X-Files. Nothing so simple as the alphabet. You’d have to know what you were looking for. Roehm’s hand closes over the mouse. I stare at his rings. He has slipped my jacket over the back of his swivel chair. He is still wearing his black leather greatcoat. He is perfectly cool. He is like the salamander. He lives in fire and ice. There is a square white sink, immaculately clean, with long-handled taps, like the ones they have in hospital operating theatres. To the left of the sink stand two waste bins with flip-top lids. One says ORGANIC WASTE. The other just says WASTE FOR SHREDDING. There is a large box of white plastic gloves, each pair individually sealed as if they were food o
n an aeroplane. The light remains dull, green. I peer into the retreating gloom. The laboratory appears to recede, long lines of shelves, desks, cages, tanks. There is a row of green overalls hanging on pegs. The smell is growing stronger. Further away, beyond the gold crescent on Roehm’s desk, I can see more glass tanks with oxygen bubbling up in streams. I dare not venture deeper into his strange kingdom.

  Roehm stands up, stretches. All the creatures flee into corners, terrified. Laboratory animals are usually bored, morose, unmoving. But these creatures seem to know that they are all doomed and fear their murderer’s every gesture. How do they know that he is going to torture and kill them?

  ‘You do genetics, don’t you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Even you must have heard of global warming, Toby.’

  It is the first time that he has used my name. I stare back at his huge hands. He has not smoked for over an hour.

  ‘Well, we are experimenting with strains of plants and animal life that will resist intense heat and cold. Living things that can survive in fire and ice.’

  He speaks slowly, unhurried.

  ‘We must be ready for either. For the ice, or the fire next time.’

  I imagine a vast army of monsters, built like Frankenstein’s original creature, all of whom have the same gigantic paranoid eyes of the ring-tailed lemur. Roehm’s printer sucks and buzzes in the gloom. He takes each sheet from the tray as it comes out, face up, and folds it away in a leather portfolio, which zips up all round, so that it is sealed.