The Deadly Space Between (21 page)

‘But he isn’t.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Why’re you so suspicious? Why did you believe me? I had difficulty believing myself.’

She took a deep breath.

‘Because, Toby, my sweet, he leaves no trace. This may come as a shock to you, but I smelt a rat early on. And I’ve only ever seen him once. The car registration doesn’t exist. I’ve checked. The tax disc is fraudulent. The insurance refers back to the vanished Web site. They’re on-line insurers, based in the Haute-Savoie. The labels in his posh clothes come from no known designer, nor even a private tailor. Oh yes, I even looked inside his pockets, and apart from his cigarettes, there’s nothing. Not even a Kleenex. I don’t recognize his after-shave and he always pays in cash. He must do. Toby, this man has neither chequebook nor credit cards. He therefore cannot possibly be a fully paid-up member of the patriarchy. No one hides their tracks so carefully and turns out to be honest.’

‘So you think he’s a crook? Or a spy?’

‘I’ve no idea. I don’t think any more. I just fear that Iso may be getting herself mixed up in something weird. Or dangerous. Toby, the man is nebulous as an apparition.’

But Roehm seemed too substantial, too fleshy and too solid to fit this description. He felt more real than I did. And it was this fact which frightened me most. I had persistent feelings of unreality, as if my familiar surroundings were fake. I was living in front of a row of one-dimensional facades, which resembled the lots at Universal Studios. I was made of painted paper, fraudulent. But Roehm was real, like the gunfighter in
Westworld
; he might come swinging through the saloon doors at any time.

Iso withdrew from me during the grey days of frost. I hunted for crocuses in the garden, anything that might give her pleasure. I tried to cook suppers that did not rely on a central dish of junk food surrounded by chips. She was perfectly pleasant, but she avoided confiding in me. I felt the distance between us widen, inevitable as an expanding glacier. I circled the house like a buzzard, lonely, angry, bored. If I had had more courage I would have gone out with other people, but my
noli me tangere
policy at school had been all too effective. I had no close friends. The only person I trusted was Liberty.

I bought Iso a cheeky padded red heart for Valentine’s Day and hid it underneath her letters, among the Luxurious Glass Conservatory offers and invitations to view Knock Down Curtain bargains. I watched her turn it over, puzzled. Then she picked up her knife from the breakfast table and slit the unaddressed envelope open. I saw a slim line of butter, skimming the rim. I watched her pale face change, lighten.

‘Oh, look!’ She was smiling. Then she said, ‘It’s from you, Toby, isn’t it?’ And she didn’t even try to hide her disappointed indifference. She didn’t bother to read the message.

She had lit the match. I crumpled, shrivelled, then blazed up. Months of jealousy and suppressed terror that I was at last losing her detonated inside me like a landmine. Neither my feelings nor my behaviour were especially dignified. I leaped up from the table and flung my coffee cup at the fridge. The result was spectacular. Far more coffee than could ever have been in the cup drenched the front of the fridge and the cork tiles. The cup itself shattered into thousands of shards, which flew round the kitchen like shrapnel. I felt one sting my cheek. The noise exploded before us like a bomb in a litter bin.

I was transformed into a gigantic green monster, the Incredible Hulk, and I was screaming,

‘You fucking bitch! You fucking sex-crazed stinking bitch! Is that all you’ve got to say to me? I live here. With you. Remember? And I’ve sent you a Valentine every year since I was in primary school. And you’ve kept them all. So what’s different now? You are. You’re the one who’s changed. You’re . . .’

I ran out of steam and stood there, white and shaking.

‘Shut up, Toby and sit down,’ she yelled, her mouth taut. The adrenaline suddenly returned.

‘No, I fucking won’t sit down. I don’t have to listen to you any more.’

‘No, you don’t. You’re eighteen years old, even if you are acting like an infant, and you’re free to walk out that door any day you choose.’

‘Are you throwing me out?’ I hit an unfortunate top note, like an opera star on a bad day. I was terrified of losing face and bursting into tears. She sat down, and let me sweat it out. Then she spoke, her voice deadly.

‘Listen, Toby. I know perfectly well what this jealous scene is all about. I’ve put up with your sulks and tantrums for months. I’ve ignored your silences and prying. I’ve paid no attention to the fact that you’ve behaved like a perverted voyeur. I’ve waited for you to grow up and come to your senses. And since it’s clear that you’re not going to I may as well put all my cards on the table. I have a lover and I want him. Can’t you grasp that? Or is it beyond you? I want to sleep with him and I want to spend time with him. If he asks me to marry him I shall say yes.’

By the time she got to the end of this speech she was banging on the table and shouting like a demented auctioneer with the last lot to sell.

‘Have you understood me? I’ve chosen Roehm.’

There was one second of white-faced hesitation between us. Then I grabbed the front of her flannel shirt and hauled her upright. Two of the buttons tore off. She was so startled that she did not resist me. We were face to face. I ripped her old painting shirt open and the well-washed material gave way at once. Her breasts shuddered beneath my hands as I spun her round and yanked the shirt up her back. She fought back like a cornered stoat, jammed her elbow into my ribs and sent one of the chairs flying. A plate slithered off the table; it did not break but rocked back and forth on the cork floor. Then she punched me in the face. I sent her spinning backwards.

‘Is that what you want? You want a man who does that to you?’

She staggered against the fridge and her upper arm came away from the surface sticky with dripping coffee.

‘Fucking hell, Toby.’

She was afraid of me. But now I too was afraid of her. I had glimpsed her back. It was smooth, white, lightly freckled, her bony shoulder blades elegant and perfect. She did not have the shadow of a mark upon her. She stood trembling, half-naked in front of me. My penis was hot and swollen against the buttons of my jeans.

‘I’m . . . I didn’t . . .’

‘Get out of here. Get out,’ she screeched. Her entire body flinched and shrank. She was breathless.

_{*  *  *}

I packed the minimum and set off across town. She didn’t have to order me out of the house. I wanted to put the miles between us. I couldn’t look at her again. I was unable to cry or to speak. The day was murky and grey, the light pinched. I sat on the train and the tube holding my collection of short stories by Thomas Mann in front of me without being able to see clearly. My legs no longer obeyed my brain. I had to sit down after every hundred yards and catch my breath, as if I was scaling a vertical rock face. I was white with cold. I minced unsteadily down the slippery pavements towards Luce’s house. I saw the spotlights on in her studio, but she must have been on the phone. It was a moment or two before she opened the door.

‘My God, Toby! Why aren’t you at school? Oh my sweet boy, what on earth has happened to you?’

The bruise on my cheekbone was red and swelling. Her blow was being slowly coloured into the flesh.

I don’t think either of us ever did explain exactly what had happened. Luce spent several hours on the phone to her and came down the stairs with her eyes and jaw set, intent and savage as a cannibal. Liberty made up an ice pack to deal with the swelling. She didn’t ask too many questions either.

‘Looks like you’re staying with us for a while, kiddo.’

I learned that Iso rang Luce every night to see how I was. But she didn’t ask to speak to me and I had nothing to say. My black eye was vivid and glamorous. Liberty was impressed.

‘She gave you a superb shiner, babe. Even Luce can’t pack a punch like that. You must have asked for it something terrible.’

And in the weeks that followed I came to realize that I had been living under siege. I no longer waited in the kitchen, angry and sullen, for her daily return. I no longer behaved like an amateur spy, checking the post and the phone calls. I no longer lay awake at night, listening. I ceased going through the dustbins, bent on gathering evidence. I no longer ached with the pain of separation from the woman I had always loved too much, without measure or restraint. I had made our lives a hell of claustrophobic tension, unaware of the monster I had become. I stayed home from school during the rest of that first week away and slept for almost three days. I was exhausted, finished.

In the absence of detailed explanations Luce assumed that we had passed through a domestic crisis, understandable in the circumstances, and that we simply needed time, for Iso to regain her equilibrium and for me to think better of the whole thing. I wasn’t allowed to cook in Luce’s kitchen and spent my time upstairs revising for my mocks or watching TV. Liberty was more suspicious. We were rarely alone, but after a week or so she came upstairs to call me for supper and took advantage of the moment.

‘All this was about Roehm, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘In the flesh? Christmas Eve.’

‘Well, listen. I put the girls onto him and fuck the cost. And they’ve drawn a complete blank. We can’t even find out what his first name is, for Christ’s sake. It’s as if he didn’t exist. And we imagined him.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘I know. The girls think he works for MI6. The problem is that we haven’t even got a photograph.’

‘But he looks so strange. All you have to do is describe him.’

‘But, Toby, even the manager of L’Escargot had trouble placing him.’

‘I can’t understand that. Everybody knew who he was when we went in there.’

‘Well, they obviously didn’t.’

Pause.

‘Liberty. There’s one other place you could ask. In Old Compton Street. A club called Veritable Cuir.’

‘He’s never queer.’

‘I think he is.’

She gasped. Then she said, ‘Well, that takes the biscuit. Did he take you there?’

‘No. But he said he might.’

‘Has he ever made a pass at you?’

‘No. Well, sort of.’

‘SUPPER!’ We heard Luce shouting downstairs. ‘What are you two doing up there?’

Liberty hardly listened to Luce over supper. She just sat there, staring at me.

I had to travel all the way across London and then out west to get to school. It could take over two hours. If my classes were at inconvenient times I was often late or just missed them altogether. Luce read me a lecture about educational opportunities and My Future, so I guessed that the school had started ringing Iso. It was nearly three weeks after the row and my anger and alienation began to subside. I had slept, dreamless, for nine hours every night. Liberty had frog-marched me out to the Heath every day for punishing runs. I had put on weight. I looked better, happier. But I missed my mother. I missed my room, my computer, the daily smells of the house, my Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli CDs. Luce and Liberty lived in a germ-free habitat, scoured by Mr Muscle, which made me feel scruffy and underdressed. I didn’t discuss my movements with them. The timing was coincidental. I did not plan. I suddenly decided to go home.

It was a grim, cold day at school. The pipes had frozen in the boys’ loos and we entertained a row of puzzled plumbers trying to thaw out a joint with a blowtorch. Snow was forecast for that night. Our French teacher sent us home early. She had a long way to drive and we were fed up to the back teeth with Gide and his Arab boys. I slunk out of the kitchen gate by the dustbins, so that the staff on duty in the front hall wouldn’t see me go, and set off home. It’s about forty minutes on foot. At first I marched along cheerfully, convinced that the tension between Iso and myself was like a lanced boil. The pus had drained and dried. We could resume our old rapport. I simply suppressed the ugly and uncanny aspects of my last days in the house. I had been overwrought, wired up, exhausted. Something had sucked me into a dark corridor of hysterical jealousy and had distorted the daily scale of things. I had imagined the welts on her back. I must have done. Because when I looked again they weren’t there. Roehm was just a big, busy man, who travelled a lot. He probably wouldn’t continue to be part of her life for much longer. And the iBook could remain switched off and packed up under my bed. When the weather was better I’d put an ad in
On Line
, delete all my files, and then sell the thing. After that I need never open it again.

I turned the corner into our road. The trees hung in frail white strands of frost. The grass on the lawns was spiky with white ice. The world was frozen and still. I noticed a black patch of dead Michaelmas daisies that had never been cut back lolling among the decomposing white heaps of exhausted plants. The winter held its breath. There were no lights in the house.

I noticed that something was wrong as soon as the door thudded shut behind me. There was a strange fluttering in the air. The red light winked on the answerphone. Two messages. The house was ice-cold. The central heating had either broken down or been switched off. I turned on the hall light. Nothing happened. I went straight through to the kitchen. There was frost on the inside of the windows. I stared at the spider’s web of cold extending in circular patterns, projecting away from the thick point of frozen damp. My breath hung in a white cloud. The remains of a congealed meal lay like a corpse upon the table. The sink was full of unwashed dishes. The washing machine had turned itself off but had not been unloaded. The orange switch glowed. Cycle complete. Unthinking, I switched it off. It was the second thing I had touched in the quiet, vacant house. It was ice-cold.