The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘Come,’ says Roehm, ‘let’s go.’

  But we don’t go back. We go on, deeper and deeper into the sweating green gloom. Roehm unlocks and relocks door after door, never hesitating over the identical keys. Here are luminous eels flickering in the oxygenated tanks; some of them glow strangely as we stride past, others dive for their artificial caverns. I gaze at Roehm’s heavy, smooth white cheek. He smiles slightly. I am sweating. Everything appears to be afraid of Roehm. We burst through an aluminium grille into the chill and brightness of an underground car park. Roehm relocks the last door behind us. There is nothing written on this door. It could have led to a service unit, a staircase or a lavatory. I look at my watch. It is almost midnight.

  ‘I could catch the last train if we rush.’

  ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  ‘It’ll take hours.’

  ‘Get in.’

  The car was oddly spartan inside. Roehm’s choice of food and wine suggested sybaritic wealth on a Roman scale. But he had no extras. No radio, no phone. And the thing made no sound, neither without nor within. We said very little to each other. He drove fast. I scanned the road for dead eels, lemurs, rabbits. London seemed alien, strange. The suburbs dropped away beneath the motorway. When we reached my mother’s house Roehm pulled up short of the gate on the far side in the same place where I had first identified the car. We got out and stood next to one another, leaning against the panzer. Roehm was very relaxed. His weight appeared to menace the car. He lit a cigarette. He seemed in no hurry to be gone. I lingered, getting colder. My sensations were obscure. I didn’t want to leave him.

  ‘Thanks for the lift. I could have caught the last train.’

  ‘I know. But your mother would have worried.’

  She wouldn’t even have noticed. She was always late. She had no sense of time.

  ‘I looked up your plates. They’re French. 74. That’s the Haute-Savoie. Where we go skiing. Where Françoise has her chalet in the mountains.’

  Roehm chuckled.

  ‘Oh, you looked that up, did you? Find out anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  I blushed, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the house.

  ‘I’m the director of another research institute over there. Near Chamonix. Where you go for your winter holidays.’

  ‘Do you want to come in? She’s still up. Her lights are on.’

  ‘No. She’s not expecting me.’

  It began to rain.

  ‘OK. Well . . . thanks for supper. And for showing me your lab. It was great. Goodnight.’

  ‘Come here, Toby.’

  Roehm unhurriedly flicked his cigarette away into the drizzling suburban dark and placed his right hand on my neck. I felt the eerie chill of his rings. His touch was very cold and slow. I had never been so close to him. He smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. His face loomed, white and blank, close to mine. He suddenly appeared to occupy more space than he had done all evening, like a cartoon drawn on an ever larger scale.

  ‘You’re very like her,’ said Roehm softly.

  I didn’t move.

  ‘So everyone says.’

  Then he kissed me, a soft, cold kiss on my lips. I stood still and frozen, longing for him to take hold of me. But he only smiled slightly, and turned away, nodding his goodnight. I ran across the road and into the house. I didn’t hear the car start. I didn’t look behind me.

  3

  BONFIRE

  I dreamed about him that night. I saw him in the laboratory, but there were no more walls, no doors, no locked spaces.

  He is standing by his illuminated computer in a drenched and streaming torrent of thick green, a sinister vegetable green. The plants rustle and gleam all around him, fresh, succulent and suggestive. There is an evil smell of rotting compost. I look carefully into the shifting, glistening vegetation and see the terrified mass of eyes, dilated, feral, all fixed upon him. I am the only person who is not afraid. Roehm’s gaze holds me in thrall. His glare is fertile with intent, but he is waiting, waiting for me to make the first move. I remember his kiss, that stealthy, gentle kiss, the taste of his cigarettes and his cold lips. He is waiting for my permission, my invitation. It is up to me. And in my dream I see myself as if I am two people. And one is pressed, sweating, terrified, against the damp slab of heat and the other, supple, erotic, a boy sure of his power to entice and to possess, reaches out a hand towards this strange and powerful man whose gaze never ebbs, whose attention, predatory and passionate, is all my own. It is my desire that you should come to me, come to me. You who are all to me, call to me. I reach out for you, for your arms, for your cold kisses and your cold, cold, golden love. Give me your cold love and free me from the kingdom of this world, from this endless thriving green. I see myself, erect and untouched, pushing towards him through the ensnaring green. Roehm does not move, but he smiles, eerie, suggestive, ambiguous, triumphant. And then I know that I love this man, that he has come back for me, that he has never forgotten me. It is my desire that you should come for me. And I am unafraid.

  I woke in the half-light sweating and trembling, the damp flood of semen drenching the sheet. I sat up feeling sick, and swallowed the stale water left on my desk. As the dream receded I felt dizzy, filthy and ashamed. Roehm had simply kissed me goodnight, yet that was enough to unleash a sombre gust of queer fantasies. I heard the school thugs hissing ‘faggot’ and shivered. Her bedroom light was still on as I crept down the corridor to the bathroom. I looked at my watch. Not yet 5 a.m. I pushed her door open, just a little.

  She had her mattress on the floor with a giant Indian bedspread suspended from the ceiling above, like a rajah’s tent. Her nightlight was an illuminated plastic banana, now elderly and peeling, but still operational. She was asleep, her fingers clenched around the book. She had been reading The Talented Mr Ripley. The cover illustration was of a handsome young man in an Italian straw hat. I looked down at her sleeping face. Her hair was damp with sweat about her ears, her nightshirt tight across her breasts. I turned off the light. She stirred slightly and the room gradually shifted from black to grey and finally to orange as the streetlights leered through her open curtains. I waited until the darkness had cleared from my eyes, then abandoned her to her own unconscious terrors. I shuffled up the last flight of stairs. My bed smelt of unconsummated sex. The smell was disgusting. I ripped off the sheets and flung them into the corner. Then I pulled my sleeping bag out of the suitcase stowed under the bed and climbed into a blue nylon cocoon. After that I didn’t dream again, but slept on, exhausted and inert, until midday.

  She had left me a note on the kitchen table.

  Gone shopping. Don’t forget that we’re invited to Luce’s tonight. Hope you had a good time with Roehm.

  I thought about the eyes of the animals in Roehm’s lab and decided not to tell her that I’d been there. There was a Greenpeace protest poster on the back of the kitchen door, which denounced experiments on laboratory animals. I had ceased to notice the tragic rabbit with electrodes riveted to his skull. He had become part of our daily furniture. I now dismissed the creature and her ethics of pity. I would neither betray nor condemn whatever happened in the experimental tanks and the hot green underworld I had unwittingly entered. What Roehm did with his rabbits was his own business.

  But she never asked where we had been, what we had done. I prepared a cautious story about the restaurant and Chinatown, but was never required to stand centre stage and deliver the script. She brushed me off with a handful of clichés.

  ‘You had a good time?’

  ‘Oh, I’m pleased about that.’

  ‘The food’s always excellent at L’Escargot.’

  ‘He’s a nice man, isn’t he?’

  Nice was the very last word any sane person would use to describe Roehm. Nice people were simply not on that scale.

  ‘I dreamed about him last night,’ I said, suddenly spiteful, courting a reaction.

  ‘Oh, did you?’ She walked out of the kit
chen and locked herself in the downstairs lavatory.

  At last, I had drawn blood.

  * * *

  Luce’s house looked different. I couldn’t work out how or why. Here were the patterned cobblestones and the bower of ferns, neatly cut back for the winter, the tiny trimmed evergreens and the bank of Dutch bulbs, recently mulched, and all professionally cultivated by the landscape design team. No one ever pottered in Luce’s garden. It was kept under control by uniformed officials. The original creator of her courtyard landscapes had enriched his portfolio of ideas by a visit to Japan. The bamboo was strategically placed in relation to a group of stones and a still pool containing three lilies and a flotilla of psychotic carp. They circled endlessly, staring. The light over the front door signalled the end of the Japanese theme. Here beginneth modernism. One of the architects who built the Centre Pompidou at Beaubourg had also designed Luce’s house. The interior was all parquet floors and huge service tubes suspended from the ceiling, even in her abattoir kitchen. Luce owned a painting by Tamara de Lempicka, which represented two women intertwined. The figures also contrived to look like steel tubes. The place bristled with burglar alarms. There was one just inside the door. You had thirty seconds to switch the thing off before the entire house exploded with wailing sirens and the security service employed to watch the house from all angles, at all times, arrived in military-style armoured cars. There were tiny red eyes in the corners of every room which followed you around even when the alarm was supposedly at rest. The red eyes also operated outside the house. One of them was trained on the carp pool. I looked at Luce’s house and at the lady herself, sunk into her raw silk white sofa, and wondered how I could have spent my life with women.

  It was as if they talked in secret codes, like Freemasons. Luce, Iso and Liberty settled down to look at one another, to observe shifts, changes, tiny lines, hardening around the eyes, the gentle sea tides of each other’s appearance. They studied one another carefully, in case one of them needed instant rescue, but was unable to voice her plea. If all was well within their kingdom they would begin to build their conversational card houses. Each of them added another card to the edifice and even when they contradicted one another they never disputed the point or began an argument, because that would interfere with the programme of steady construction. They simply picked up the opposing point of view and ran with that. The link in the chain was always more important than either the subject or their differences. I had never noticed how the women talked before. It all seemed unnecessarily complex and pointless.

  I made all the usual gestures, reported on my A-level work, opened the wine, carried the sizzling prawns to the table. But I noticed the silences in Iso’s chatter. She had no intention of telling them about Roehm. We did not even need to discuss this. If she said nothing then he remained our secret.

  Our hidden complicity gave me an odd rush of pleasure. But I was now outside the triangle of women, observing them and their carefully tended trellis of love, which they built across their divisions. Luce boasted of her forthcoming certain triumphs in Paris and America. Her unspoken assertions were suddenly clearer to me than they had ever been and so was the fact that they were addressed primarily to Iso.

  ‘There’s a spring showcase of British fashions and British designs on at the Arches. Next year’s collections. You will both come, won’t you? I’ve got your invites here. And some more for the people at the gallery. I think it would be wonderful to hold a show at the gallery, Iso. When you’ve hung the next exhibition. But that’s a long-term plan. The Arches will be mostly dealers and people in the trade, but I’ve got a whole section of my stuff being presented. Two young women who want to make themselves rich and famous. Don’t we all? They’ve got talent, but no backing. I didn’t charge my usual. Should’ve, I suppose. But they’re great girls and no one gave me a hand when I was starting out. We all need a leg-up sometimes. Especially when you’re young. Beauty doesn’t always pay the bills, does it, Iso?’

  ‘I needed you,’ replied my mother simply and all three women exchanged a long look of intimate sympathy. It was as if they were completing a quadrille. No one else knew the steps of the dance nor did anyone see how they circled one another. Why had I never seen this? Luce was profligate in her love and reassurance. She never counted the cost. I am doing all this for you. I make money so that I can protect you, provide for you, care for you. Liberty and I were included in her largesse. We too were her beneficiaries. But the person my great-aunt loved most in all the world was my mother.

  ‘Your mother was an awkward bugger when she was your age, Toby. She never admitted that she needed anybody then.’ Luce waved her cigarette in the air, then puffed like a dragon. ‘Who’d like a chocolate?’

  Liberty leaned her elbows on the table and sniffed the perfumed deadliness of her Poire Williams.

  ‘Did you get this in France, Luce?’

  ‘Well, they don’t sell it here.’

  Luce turned to Iso.

  ‘Do you remember when we were in Normandy, and we’d rented that dreadful draughty house, and Toby was at the bucket and spade stage of seaside holidays and we were bored out of our minds and that old codger offered to take us round the Normandy landings? And I was all for it, well, anything to get off that beach, and you said, “No thanks, I don’t want to take my son on a tour of bellicose artefacts,” and I was so desperate that I said, “Nonsense, the boy needs a thorough grounding in murder techniques.” And you made a scene, right there in front of the antique war veteran who was all but sporting rows of D-Day medals.’

  ‘I remember. Oh my God, I remember.’

  ‘And you shrieked a lot of mad statements about nuclear weapons, Greenham Common and the force de frappe, replete with statistics, while the dear old hero gibbered on about sacrifice and our boys and so I trudged all round a bloody museum, full of dotty jingoistic balderdash, being polite to a sad old man who’d left most of his friends behind in French graveyards and couldn’t forget them. And when I escaped I bought you the bottle of Poire Williams to make up for being tyrannical.’

  ‘And that’s the last of the Poire Williams.’ Liberty drained her glass. ‘Have some Calvados instead, Toby. It’ll awaken your fighting spirit.’

  ‘Don’t encourage his masculinity. We’ve kept it under wraps till now. Iso, my sweet,’ Luce turned to my mother, ‘we must arrange our trip to France at New Year.’

  ‘I haven’t got my diary, Luce.’

  She was making excuses, backing off. Luce didn’t see it. But I did.

  We drove home from the overflowing supper table well after midnight. Iso was slightly drunk. I offered to drive. Encouraged by a crime report in the local paper, I’d been practising up and down our road when she wasn’t there. Two children, aged six and eight, had stolen a Mercedes. They were both too small to drive the car alone, but one stood on the seat and clutched the wheel and the other worked the pedals. They had got as far as the motorway before the police and the social workers caught up with them.

  ‘You don’t even have a learner’s licence, Toby, and I haven’t put you on the insurance.’

  ‘I drove the tractor last summer in Cornwall.’

  ‘That was in a field, not on a road.’

  ‘I’m eighteen.’

  ‘OK, OK. So get yourself a provisional licence and I’ll teach you to drive. But not tonight.’

  Iso swerved.

  ‘You’re pissed.’

  ‘So’re you.’

  We stopped at a red light. The roads were empty, evil in the orange glow. Why had I never seen how streetlights unmasked the dark? Why did I, suddenly, unbidden, long for nights without cities or stars? The car jerked away from the kerb.

  ‘Keep an eye out for the fuzzies,’ Iso giggled.

  ‘If you lose your licence, you’re screwed.’

  ‘Don’t tempt fate.’

  We pulled off the dual carriageway onto the slip roads curling out towards our suburb. I squinted into the polluted gardens spinning
past.

  ‘We could’ve stayed over at Luce’s.’

  ‘Yeah, we could’ve.’

  ‘Iso, why didn’t you say anything about Roehm?’

  Suddenly she was sharper, sober, listening.

  ‘Why didn’t you? You were out with him till all hours last night.’

  I had not expected her to attack me so directly.

  ‘But it’s up to you to tell Luce and Liberty if you’ve got a boyfriend. I’m not going out with him. You are.’

  ‘Well, you could’ve fooled me. It was nearly two when you came in.’

  She was shaking with anger.

  ‘You’d missed the last train. I was worried sick.’

  ‘Why? You’ve never worried before. You knew who I was with.’

  ‘Oh God, you don’t notice anything, do you?’

  I waited before I answered this. What should I have noticed? We turned into the avenue of nearly barren trees.

  ‘You knew where I was. Why are you so upset?’

  She stamped on the brakes and the car stopped dead some fifty yards short of the house. The back tyres skidded slightly into a bank of wet leaves and rain speckled the windscreen. Then the engine stalled. She turned off the lights. We were jutting out into the road like a beached ship.

  She turned towards me.

  ‘Look, Toby. I haven’t said anything to Luce because I know she won’t approve of Roehm. She’s going to America. Leave it till she gets back. OK, so I’m a coward. But I can’t face Luce.’

  I was genuinely mystified.

  ‘Why should she be cross?’

  ‘Maybe you haven’t registered the fact, but Roehm is even older than Luce is.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Luce hates Germans.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. And anyway, he isn’t German, he’s Swiss.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’ she yelled. ‘You know nothing whatsoever.’