The Deadly Space Between Page 20

  ‘I’m not a trick of Satan, child. I’m your aunt Luce. And you’re going to live with me from now on.’

  ‘You didn’t even know that your mother has a sister, did you? Well, she still does, even if she won’t admit to me. I went to the bad a long time ago. People like Katie shouldn’t have children. They need dolls or robots. Objects that don’t shit or have sex. And she’s so fastidious I wonder how she even managed to change your nappies.’

  ‘Your haircut’s great. How’d you get away with that? Needs a trim. We’ll do it tomorrow. This is the car. Get in. I’ll come back for your things. Knowing Katie she’ll probably leave a pile on the doorstep. It’s not your father, dear. He wouldn’t throw you out. He probably welcomes sinners. Thinks we’re a challenge. This is all your mother’s doing. And she’ll have told herself it’s all because she loves you. I say, don’t cry. We’ll be OK together. Here, have a Kleenex.’

  ‘How did I know what was going on? Your art mistress. She’s a close friend. It was my way of keeping an eye on you. I couldn’t interfere. I never interfere. Anyway, you might have turned out to be an insufferable, self-righteous little cow just like my sister. In which case they’d have been welcome to you. But it’s clear that the genes have gone sideways. Shirley tells me that you’re very talented and very clever. You ought to have been my daughter. If I’d had children they’d have been dolts.’

  ‘Good God, child, where did you get those awful shoes? You look as if you’ve developed two club feet.’

  ‘I live miles away on the other side of town. You need never see them again if you don’t want to. I’m an atheist and I don’t go to church, so you’ll be spared all the righteousness. I’ll find you another school for the autumn. You can still be bang on course for your O levels next year. I’ve booked you a hospital appointment. Well, it’s a private clinic. We’ll have to pay, but we can jump the queue. You can’t be more than three months gone, but we’ll still have to move fast. It’s a perfectly simple operation. You’ll be out the same day.’

  ‘Of course you can’t have the baby. It’s out of the question. You aren’t even sixteen yet. I won’t allow you to wreck your life. But we’ll have to be honest with each other. Hold on, it’s a red light. I’m going through.’

  ‘Now, Isobel, I don’t make judgements, God knows. But I must be kept informed. Who is the father and where did this happen? Speak up.’

  8

  FIRE

  ‘Put on the haut parleur. Then we can both hear what she says.’

  ‘OK. It’s ringing.’

  ‘Luce?’

  ‘Iso! And it’s about time too. Where the bloody hell are you? And where have you been?’

  ‘Luce, I’m not in England. I’m in Germany.’

  ‘Germany? What on earth are you doing in Germany? Are you ill? The college have been ringing me to find out where you are. Your answerphone is full of desperate messages. Have you any idea where Toby is?’

  ‘Yes. He’s here with me.’

  ‘Oh, thank God for that. His school has been on the line too. He’s always skipped some classes, but not all of them. What are you doing? You can’t be on holiday. It’s term time. Come back at once.’

  ‘We will. We’re going to. Luce, I’ve got something to tell you. It’s very important.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Roehm is dead.’

  ‘Now I know that you’re quite out of your mind. Roehm’s no more dead than you are, thank God. He was round here last night. Looking for you.’

  9

  ICE

  We fled south the same night. I drove illegally and fast into the frosty dark. My driving test was two months away, but Iso’s hands were shaking too much to change gear. She had difficulty reading the map. After several cups of black coffee at one of the motorway service stations outside Bern, she finally felt strong enough to take over. She shouted at me if I dozed off beside her, but, long before dawn, we were both too exhausted to drive any further and fell helplessly asleep in a lay-by, clutching each other across the gear stick and the brake. We awoke, stiff, pathetic and red-eyed as the rush hour traffic began, a dense stream of oncoming yellow lights. We took it in turns to piss in the ditch, shameless, uncaring who saw us. Then we plunged onwards.

  Tense as bank robbers at petrol stations, keeping close to walls, we filled the Renault up to the gunwales every time, just in case it became too dangerous to stop. Irrational and terrified, we rumbled into the breaking day, our heads aching, our senses befuddled by lack of sleep.

  ‘Iso,’ I begged, ‘we must stop. We’ll crash or something.’

  Finally she agreed. We had reached the great lake at the edge of the Alps.

  ‘We must make a plan,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve got to sleep,’ she groaned.

  So we stopped at an old hotel which had cleared the ice from its steps. I looked up at the Italian structure with pale green shutters. Would we be safe here? We were in his country, a strange expensive place which we did not know and where he moved with ease. On the other hand perhaps he would never think to look for us in Switzerland.

  ‘We should hide the Renault,’ I said.

  ‘Oh God, what for? He can probably see through walls.’ Iso staggered up the steps clutching her carpet bag.

  We looked like tramps. I thought that the hotel would throw us out. We saw well-groomed, wealthy people sitting down to breakfast, and waiters in black and white lined up behind them. But Iso’s gold Barclaycard did the talking. And so we teetered up the stairs, to a huge double room with a balcony and a lake view. Frost had sealed the windows.

  ‘Did you check us in as husband and wife?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything. I just demanded a double room. Look, Toby, don’t go out alone. Not even into the hotel. Keep the door locked. Don’t leave my side even for a second. I’m going to have a bath. Then I must go to sleep. I can’t drive another kilometre without sleep.’

  We locked the shutters and shut out the light, snuggled into a mass of clean, white pillows, and curled up, back to front, like spoons laid in velvet. Iso fell asleep at once. Exhaustion was more powerful than fear.

  When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images, which rose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. He was with us, he was present in the room, spread across the floor-length drapes, the high moulded ceilings. His giant shape blotted out the fainter shadows. He possessed and occupied the corners and crevices of space. He loomed from the folds and undulations of the artificial dark, as if he were transformed to liquid cold, a smooth rush of nitrogen. Roehm had become one with the ice world. His touch was upon our faces. He would be with us always. He had become our master.

  I opened my eyes in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my imagination for the realities around me. I see them still: the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through and the sense I had that the glassy lake and the white high Alps were beyond.

  Iso breathed deeply and peacefully beside me, lost in sleep. It was as if Roehm cradled her in his arms with a father’s tenderness. We had slept for over ten hours. We had lost a day. I was again buffeted by the strangeness of our situation and completely disoriented by the fact that the daily banality of our lives had been so utterly destroyed. My shoulder bag was full of school books, but not enough clean clothes. The steady world of school, home, supper and TV had vanished. We were wandering across the Continent on the run from a man who was either our visiting angel or the monster we had desired.

  ‘Iso. Wake up. You’ve been asleep for a whole day.’

  She stirred, her face bleary with sleep. But when she saw me her eyes cleared, and she smiled.

  ‘I’m terribly hungry,’ she said.

  We assaulted a cordon bleu meal in the hotel restaurant and guzzled a b
ottle of Chablis. The restaurant did not pipe music down our gullets. We ate in time to the distinguished clink and rustle of stiff linen napkins and real silver. The decor was at odds with our appetites. The waiters were amused.

  ‘Another day here and we’ll be bankrupt.’

  ‘Iso, that’s the least of our worries. What can he do if he finds us?’

  ‘I don’t know. He might kill us both. But somehow I don’t think so. We just have to hide. Lie low. We’re safest together.’

  ‘Won’t he set the police on us? Have us arrested?’

  ‘Roehm! The police? No, never. He’d never go to the police.’

  I stared at her certainty. How did she know that? I assumed that we were fleeing before an implacable band of official uniforms, all linked by computer, rabid for victory, like Eliot Ness and the Untouchables.

  ‘Look,’ said Iso, ‘we’re safest when we’re surrounded by other people. And I get nervous when we’re not. Let’s go out.’

  We marched down the lighted arctic streets looking for crowds. I suggested the cinema, but she was afraid of the dark. Inexorably we sailed through the portals of the Casino. Here were the lights, huge chandeliers of nineteenth-century Venetian glass, fluttering in the rising heat. Here were the hushed thick carpets, and the muted scrabble of the gaming tables, the rattle of the ball on wood and the swirling wheel. The croupiers wore evening dress and white gloves. Bonsoir, Mesdames et Messieurs. They chanted the gambler’s swift litany of adrenaline and despair. Faîtes vos jeux. Rien ne va plus. The atmosphere of passionate concentration suggested a collective examination. Everyone played against the clock even though they had settled in for the rest of the night.

  The less luxurious section of the casino designated for the impecunious and the underdressed was packed with slot machines. Glitterboxes, taller than a man, these machines resembled the illuminated pages of the Internet: jumbled flashy cartoon iconography, crocodiles, chipmunks, yellow chimes, spaceships and planetary rings, black hats and guns, icons of the Wild West, all thumping steadily. Some machines appeared to be luckier than others, and collected queues of people waiting to play. A pink light, like a gay police siren, topped every machine. When the punter hit the jackpot the thing lit up and flashed, a torrent of metallic music like a counterfeit jukebox poured out and the rush of jettons pounding into the metal tray beneath caught the imagination of the crowd, who played on with redoubled energy. I was baffled by the passion of the players and the actual process of working the machines. The system could not have been complex for each gambler hammered his or her machine with unselfconscious and rapid expertise, as if they were all carrying out a complex sequence of repairs. It appeared to come naturally.

  There was no money in the machines. You had to exchange cash for a child’s sand bucket full of jettons, with pink chips that were easily swallowed by the slots. You were playing with children’s toys. The game therefore had no consequences. This must have been part of the explanation, for people sat hypnotized on their stools before us, losing fortunes with avid complacency.

  A cash dispenser, accepting all known credit cards, was suggestively placed on the right-hand side of the bar. We arrived in the casino at around ten o’clock. It felt like three in the morning. The place smelt of darkness and people who moved in the night. The muted lights could not compete with the tacky glitter of the machines. A row of them sported card games where you could play blackjack against yourself – and the machine. Isobel was fascinated by a line of floating dinosaurs on the PREHISTORICS MONSTER MASH. You had to understand the codes. Three pterodactyls were not worth as much as two velociraptors, but if you managed to hold a Tyrannosaurus rex in the middle and doubled your stake you could win the Jurassic Jackpot.

  She lurched onto the stool and handed me two 500-franc notes.

  ‘Here, get me some jettons. I want to have a go. Quick. I can’t squat here without playing.’

  I pushed into the jetton queue while she studied the form.

  Iso was a natural at gambling. She poured money into the thing, carelessly, ceaselessly. She became the rhythm of her machine. She was placing her bet against life itself. She played as if someone was standing over her with a stopwatch. Within five minutes she had won 4,000 francs. I supplied her with buckets of jettons.

  ‘I’ll have to lose this slowly,’ she grinned, beginning to pour a fresh stack of pink chips into the mouth of the monster.

  ‘Why not stop when you’re winning?’

  ‘Don’t be such an arsehole, Toby. The point is to lose.’

  I shrugged, unable to understand the fascination or the thrill.

  ‘Why don’t you play?’

  ‘I can’t. I’m under age.’

  ‘I think that rule only applies to the roulette tables. We aren’t dressed for the main salles; you’d look funny in jeans. Doesn’t matter on the machines. Anyway, no one’ll ask to see your passport. Go get yourself some chips.’

  She handed me a wad of notes.

  ‘I’ll get a drink,’ I said and pushed off through the mass, leaving her pummelling the machine, which thudded and clattered in the half-dark. She was absorbed, cheerful and content.

  I had a good view of the main floor of the casino from my perch in the bar. Each table was a little island, like an upturned hull in a green sea, with people in evening dress, clutching the rim. It looked like the aftermath of the Titanic. The croupiers all stood poised above the green. They seemed contemptuous of the punters, their white-gloved hands deft as those of a professional puppet master. Their set faces never changed. They worked to a concentrated rhythm and I calculated that they needed to keep the speed of the wheel steady at the roulette tables, so many spins per hour, so that the house went on winning, rapidly, inexorably. I began counting; the average was forty spins per hour. The point is to lose. How could Isobel see that so clearly and yet go on playing? I had lived a safe life. She had invested in our safe lives. And now, stripped of her job and our daily domesticity, my mother made what seemed, quite inexplicably, to be the easy choice: to live at risk.

  I watched the wooden rods scraping the green baize tables. Faîtes vos jeux. Rien ne va plus. The muffled repetition of the script continued in the background, like a congregation repeating the prayers. I studied the faces of the staff, all dressed in black and white, starched, bizarre. The women wore simple sleeveless black dresses, black stockings and high heels. They watched impassive, indifferent to the concentrated passion on display before them. My mind was blurred with alcohol and unease.

  Then I felt that someone was watching me.

  I had already been given the once-over by staff and punters alike. My jeans, sweatshirt and trainers had already attracted disapproving stares from the bar waiters, which I had cheekily ignored. It was clear that the bouncer in the bar had wanted to send me straight back to the slot machines, where no one was wearing a tiara. But he had lost interest and was no longer glaring as if I was an unsightly blob in the decor. Someone else was watching me. There was someone out there, someone further away. I felt my face and shoulders growing colder. I looked across the floor.

  He was standing next to one of the security staff by the entrance. Either he was disguised as one of the croupiers, or he really was one of them: evening dress, black bow tie, short clipped grey hair, his massive shoulders steady and inevitable. As I watched he slowly raised his cigarette to his mouth. I felt the familiar gesture in my muscles, all along the surface of my skin, I felt his cold breath sucked in, contained for a moment, exhaled – but I was too far away to see his eyes. My body became ice cold. I stood fixed, gazing intently; I could not be mistaken. His gigantic stature, the ease with which he took possession of all the space around him. This was the father I had kissed and attempted to kill. We were now standing at the crossroads with the plush green space of passion and chance between us. I considered the being who had cast me among mankind. He had sought me out, this man, the man my mother had loved, who had the will and the power to effect his own purposes of
horror. He seemed to be a vampire of my own creating, my own spirit let loose from the grave and forced to destroy the person who was most dear to me. Roehm.

  I leaped off the bar stool and launched myself into the mass of gamblers. I pushed and jostled the shifting stream of wealth and ageing jewelled elegance. The irritated punters huffed, glared and swore. One of the bouncers stepped forward. But I was heading straight towards him – and the door. If I had not rushed outside I would have been thrown out. I flung myself across the marble foyer, past the guarded cloakroom, the piano and the potted palms, out of the double doors and into the white night of snapping frost. Where are you? Come back, come back. On the bald, quiet boulevard the flowerbeds lay turned and dead, the barren trees opaque with frost, the blank lake, eerie, white and still. The cars passed before me with a slick, damp hiss. The mountains hung perpendicular against the black. The pavement and the steps were empty. He was gone.

  I decided at once to say nothing to Isobel. When I crept back among the noisy clatter of the machines I saw her sitting jubilant among the dinosaurs, watching the jettons pumping into her lap, over her feet, onto the floor. The music chanted victory and the whirling pink lights bubbled and flashed. She had won, again and again and again.

  ‘Iso, let’s go back to the hotel.’

  ‘I suppose we’d better. It’ll take me three days to lose this lot.’

  One of the house officials dimly helped her to load up her loot into buckets. There was no way she could have cheated the machines. She was just lucky.

  ‘How much have you won?’

  We waited for the jettons to be counted up by the rapid, red-nailed fingers of the cashier.

  ‘Oh, about £11,000. All told.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was playing one hundred quid a shot. If you win when you’re playing for high stakes then you really can win a lot of money. I was gambling with Roehm’s cash. The money that was paid over to me by the gallery in Germany – for my ice pictures.’