‘Yes, darling? What can I get for you?’
The man behind the bar was brisk and knowing. He wasn’t young. There were very few young men in the pub. I muttered, ‘A half of Flowers.’ The beer appeared before me. I had intended to guzzle it down and then wait outside, but he vanished away to serve someone else while I was still fumbling for the money. I was completely unnerved by the fact that the men didn’t just take you in and look away as locals do when you enter their strange, flyblown cafes. A good many of them just went on staring. I leaned on the bar, mortified. I couldn’t face the mirror and so began reading the cocktail suggestions and the notices about Happy Hour. A man in a checked shirt and leather trousers with thongs up the sides caught my elbow as he pushed past.
‘Sorry, love.’
He turned sideways and smiled. He had a heavy florid face and a wide smile.
‘New girl here, aren’t you?’
I nodded, turning even redder. It seemed to me that everyone was listening and I was too self-conscious to speak.
‘What’s your name?’ He settled onto the stool beside me.
‘Toby.’
‘You on your own?’
‘No. Well, sort of . . . I’m waiting for someone.’
He gave me an amused, private smile. But he was neither threatening nor unfriendly. I began to relax.
‘I see.’
He paused, smiled again.
‘Maybe I’m the man you’ve been waiting for?’
I was terribly serious. I took everything seriously. While it was happening I didn’t even realize that I was being picked up.
‘I don’t think so. He’s called Roehm.’
My companion burst out laughing.
‘Well, at least you know his name already.’
I felt another rush of panic and tried to catch the barman’s eye. I still hadn’t paid. The red-checked man read my mind.
‘I’ve already bought you that one. Drink up and let me buy you another.’ He turned back to the bar and waved to the nearest white T-shirted tattooed arm and shaved head. I was suddenly aware of Roehm standing behind me. The red-checked shirt had seen him first.
‘Whoops. Here’s your date. Looks like Big Daddy’s here.’
‘Good evening.’
Roehm simply occupied all the space around us. There he was, like a Zeppelin slowly inflating.
‘Just keeping your seat warm for you. And Toby entertained.’
The two men actually shook hands, meeting each other’s eyes. Both were unworried and calm. Someone shut the outer door and the cold dark gust which had licked in behind Roehm settled about him.
‘We’ve met, haven’t we?’ said the man who had been chatting me up, but had never given me his name.
‘Yes,’ said Roehm, ‘we have. I hope we’ll meet again.’
‘Oh, we shall. I’ll see to that.’
The stranger stroked my cheek reassuringly as if I was a nervous horse, then slipped away. I had no time to draw back or speak. I was left gazing into Roehm’s heavy white face and grey eyes. He looked patient and amused. He didn’t say anything. I gulped down my beer and stared. He was wearing a huge leather trenchcoat with padded shoulders, which made him even larger than he actually was.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked at last.
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘Come, then.’
Roehm nodded to the bar staff, one of whom saluted, and then strolled out of the Earl of Rochester. I trailed along behind him, like a tug attached to an Atlantic cruiser. On the street, groups of men gathered and talked, their breath forming smoky gusts in the frosty air. The tarmac glittered beneath their feet as if they were walking in pools of red and gold. Roehm waited for me to catch up.
‘Did you really know that man?’
‘Yes. After a fashion. We met in that club over there.’
I saw a blue neon sign curved over a tacky black doorway.
VERITABLE CUIR
MEN ONLY
I stood, open-mouthed with surprise, puzzled by the name in French. Then I realized that it was a joke. Roehm smiled slightly, enjoying my discomfort.
‘I’ll take you one day. You’re over eighteen. You’d be quite a hit.’
He made it sound like a day trip to the Asterix theme park. I didn’t like Roehm’s smile. His smile, private, ambiguous, amused, was the perfect echo of the smile on the face of the man we had left behind. I was angry and confused. If Roehm was queer then what was he doing with my mother? If she knew he was queer then what was she doing with him? I sank into a cantankerous adolescent silence. I hated ambiguity, indecision and muddles, including those of my own making. I had wanted to find out who this man was, but he appeared to be a dozen different things. The bizarre thought actually crossed my mind: he’s a completely unsuitable candidate to be my stepfather. Neither Luce nor the social services would give their approval.
Roehm coasted easily through the stealthy narrow alleys. I could smell burning fat and greasy pots; the odours rushed out from the lighted kitchen doorways. A cook leaned against the dustbins. I could just see a pile of plates and pans, stacked in the chaos behind him. Roehm paused and asked him for a light. While he leaned forward, concentrating on the flame, I stared at Roehm’s illuminated face behind the huge cupped hand. There was an odd fluidity in his heavy features, as if there were no bones beneath the skin. I stared at his rings. He wore a gold signet ring on the third finger of his right hand. The emblem was blurred. The next ring had a pattern of interlocking leaves, also rubbed and worn. The third was a wedding ring, perfectly plain, made of reddish old gold. He looked into my eyes, spread out his hand and extended it towards me.
‘They’re family rings. I wear them all the time, so that I don’t lose them. Even in the lab. If I need to, I wear gloves.’
It seemed amazing that he actually had a family of any kind. He indicated the signet ring with the obliterated crest and laughed.
‘There’s our coat of arms. As you can see, we’ve practically faded into obscurity.’
I peered at his hairless white fingers and the smooth bulk of his hands. Chain-smokers usually have yellowed fingers; Roehm’s hands were perfect, white.
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ He offered me his cigarettes. I shook my head. ‘But that’s not because your mother won’t let you, is it?’ Roehm chuckled to himself. He was remembering something. Then he slid his arm through mine, as if we were two girls exchanging confidences. It was a very intimate gesture. I felt like a reluctant courtier, being drawn closer to the monarch and implicated in the royal conspiracies, much against my better judgement. But I did not pull away from him, nor did I resist.
‘Look,’ said Roehm.
We turned out of the murky back passages and found ourselves in Chinatown. The restaurants were hung with giant red lanterns trailing golden tassels and long comic dragons hanging from the pointed eaves, glimmering red and fierce in the night air. I stared into the bulging eyes and fine painted teeth of the nearest monster.
‘It’s a festival,’ said Roehm.
I drew closer to him and looked up. Above us, like great gleaming moons, the lanterns swarmed, tier upon tier, looming and swaying above the people who pressed past on the road. The smell of gunpowder rose from the pavements. I heard the sharp crack of fireworks let off by children, a sequence of small explosions, random, dangerous. But above the whiplash of firecrackers, the music was techno, a bizarre throbbing pulse, at odds with the lanterns and the soaring dragons.
‘We won’t eat here,’ said Roehm.
He had the art of creating a secure circle around him, as firm and clear as if he had drawn the macrocosm in chalk before him on the gleaming roadway. I felt as if I had acquired a particularly lethal bodyguard who was armed to the teeth beneath his black leather coat and loose suits. Roehm always wore loose clothes so that his exact size and shape remained imprecise. His outline was comfortable, rumpled. He could become larger if he wished; there was room inside his clothes. My arm felt like a
twig against the great trunk of his sleeve. He consolidated his hold upon me.
‘Come,’ said Roehm.
I trotted along beside him, intimidated, bewitched. Suddenly he turned inside an almost invisible doorway, pushing back the leather curtain, and we found ourselves in a hushed French space with no music, smelling of herbs, wine and money. It was a familiar smell. This was where I had come with my mother over a year ago, after the big sales in the gallery in Germany. The head waiter wore evening dress. We were whisked into a corner surrounded by mirrors and art deco coils of green glass. I saw Roehm reflected into infinity, gradually decreasing in size. He took my jacket from my shoulders as if I were a woman, and placed me where he could watch the restaurant and I could only see him. On his way back from the coat stand he paused and peered into the tank, where beautiful speckled fish circulated sadly in a mass of maidenhair weed and pumped oxygen, waiting to be chosen by one of the customers. There were lobsters and giant crayfish waving their pincers and whiskers gently on the bottom. In one corner the crabs were piled one upon the other, like crashed tanks.
Roehm looked back at our table and smiled.
How can I describe his face? He was heavy rather than fat. His cheeks were oddly white, as if he never saw the sun. There were long black hairs in his nostrils, but his skin was smooth and strange, as if he never had to shave. His hair was grey and clipped very short. He smelt of cinnamon and cigarettes. I tried to fix his image in my memory, but something always escaped me.
The menu and the wine list, as I had remembered, were handwritten. I looked around over the crisp white napkins stiffened into bishops’ mitres and the array of wine glasses lined up for battle. The waiter removed our plates. Then I noticed that we had come in through a back door, a secret entrance. Behind me was the front of the restaurant with a reception desk and a couple of men in a refrigerated glass box, opening oysters and arranging shellfish on huge tiered platters banked with crushed ice and sliced lemons. Roehm was decrypting the menu. I couldn’t understand the handwriting.
‘Want any help?’ He looked up.
‘Yes, I do. You can tell me what all this means. But I also want to know how you met my mother.’ This came out more sharply than I had intended, as if I was the juge d’instruction beginning my inquiry. Roehm laughed.
‘I bought one of her pictures. And I liked it so much that I went back to the gallery and bought another. And then another.’
I listened, open-mouthed. He owned somewhere with walls. He became more and more corporeal before my eyes. Something that had stood, solid and messy in my mother’s studio, had been translated into an object on his walls. The thing had undergone a double metamorphosis. To us it had become money, and then, on Roehm’s walls, it had become art. He had purchased her work and therefore wanted to meet the artist. This was a twist I had never considered.
‘Which ones?’ I asked, amazed.
‘Do you remember her white paintings? The ice monoliths. Different textures of white. Huge things, uncanny, vast.’ His rings flickered as he drew the paintings in the air. I followed the glowing line of the cigarette. ‘Well, I bought eight of those.’
I thought, he must own chateaux, castles with great halls and wide staircases. I didn’t say anything, but Roehm added,
‘You need a lot of high spaces to show them off.’
‘She’s doing some more. They sold very well in Germany.’
‘I know. That’s where I bought them.’
‘Oh,’ I paused, stared at the menu, ‘and you came to find her just because you liked her paintings?’
‘That’s almost right. I thought I had recognized her in her paintings.’
This was beyond me. How could he recognize someone he had never met? Something was wrong. ‘This is Roehm. We’ve known each other since God knows when.’ When? The waiter arrived. Roehm ordered snails for both of us, followed by salade aux anchois, rôti de porc, a 1992 burgundy, un grand Badoit, et un cendrier. ‘J’ai le droit de fumer ici? Merci.’ I faltered along behind him. He spoke flawless French with no accent whatsoever.
‘How many languages do you speak?’
My interrogation began again. I decided that I was not going to be battered into submission quite so easily.
‘As many as you do. And the same ones. My Italian is very rudimentary.’
Roehm then began to ask me about my studies and my reading. We still studied literature at my school. But it was considered an extravagance and was under perpetual threat from the Cuts. I was wary of Roehm’s questions. He was very interested in what I had read. But why? At first I was careful, guarded, even monosyllabic. I had learned not to admit to the possession of too much knowledge. It was safer to be ignorant, belligerent and philistine. But Roehm’s manner was gentle and encouraging and the wine untied my tongue. He had already read everything I mentioned. His grey eyes and white face appeared to shift and soften. I had been reading Camus. The other students in my A-level French class were all girls, who had disliked L’Étranger for its chilly racism and misogyny. They had written angry essays, which got good marks. I went home and read all his other books. I dared not confess to this at school. Only pooftahs liked reading. And so my cautiously held opinions poured out for the first time. I had just read Camus’s Le Premier Homme. Roehm said he hadn’t read that.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Roehm.
‘The manuscript was with him in the car crash when he was killed in 1960. It wasn’t published until 1994. I saw his daughter, Catherine Camus, speaking about the book on French television. When we were in the Alps. My mother has friends who have a chalet above Chamonix. She was painting those great white canvases that you bought. Just the small-scale versions. She works them up to the bigger scale later. When she’s home. Of course the publication of a new, unknown novel by Camus would be a big thing, a major literary event. But the interviewer didn’t really want to talk about literature. He asked the daughter what the great man was like in private life. She looked puzzled and confused and said, ‘I don’t know how to answer that. He was my father. C’était mon papa.’ I found her simplicity electrifying. She said that Camus’s emotional feelings were perhaps more present in this book than any other. She’s right. I thought that Camus was, I don’t know, a cold writer. He had a ruthless, chilly sort of intellect. Which is always evident in all his books. Even as terrifying a book as La Peste. You say you like that one best. I’m surprised. It’s a heroic book. And you don’t strike me as the sort of person who would go in for heroism.’
Roehm laughed. I pounded on, astounded by my own loquacity.
‘I want to read books that make me think, pull me up short, put my life in question. Camus made me think, but he wasn’t moving. You don’t feel his books. You think about them. But this one made me so sad. Really sad. Sad enough to cry. Le Premier Homme is about his childhood in Algeria, his mother, his poor neighbourhood, the life of those times. Like a lost world. There are so many worlds you can never get back. Some worlds you can only find again in memories. He was like me, he was brought up by women in a woman’s household. And so he was closer to women. He never had a father, and I didn’t either. At least Catherine Camus could remember him. Some of the scenes are so vivid, that I can taste them now: killing the hen for Christmas, the children mixing poisons, the old Arabs in their cafes. They’re just ordinary poor lives. But he describes them with such passion. I revised my opinion of Camus as a result of reading that book. I’ll read every other account of childhood and test it against what he wrote. It’s like a glimpse into his workshop. Or like watching her in the studio. All his notes, sketches, the illegible words in brackets – I loved all the loose ends, the rawness of an unfinished book. It was like touching how he thought, how he worked. Catherine Camus said that he would have edited out all these passionate, personal feelings because he was so private and reserved. Well, if he’d have done that, then I’m glad he never finished the book. As it stands, it’s finished. Read it. Tell me what you think.’
&n
bsp; ‘Thank you,’ said Roehm, ‘I will.’
He never interrupted me, nor patronized me. He had the listening gift. I gabbled on. Suddenly I wanted to tell him everything I had ever thought or ever known. I began telling him about my hideout in the library at school. About the way I had to hide my books to stop people ripping out the pages. About the thugs in my class who had menaced me because I liked reading, the teachers who were a mixed pack of wolves, some of them as violent as the students they attempted to educate. One of the sports masters was suspended for attacking a pupil. Everyone agreed that knocking that particular child unconscious was the best thing he could have done and at least the teacher was strong enough to protect himself. The parents were summoned, but they never came. My French mistress was very beautiful. She had been threatened by some of the older boys who were wearing Bobby Kennedy masks when they did it. It happened just outside the school. She was unlocking her car. They surrounded her. Jostled her. Pushed her against the wing mirror, so hard that it broke off. Other people were witnesses. Nobody tried to stop them.
‘The bitch needs a good fuck.’
‘Go on. Give it to her.’
‘Fuck the Bitch, Fuck the Bitch.’
‘She wants a good big one up her.’
Behind the masks the voices were unrecognizable, but we all knew who they were. The incident was reported in the local paper. Everyone was questioned. No one talked.
The violence which simmered just below the surface of suburbia was generated by boredom and drugs. I never took drugs for the not very creditable reason that everybody else did and I was determined not to belong, but to be different. Everything was on offer in the changing rooms, even crack, at a good price. Periodically there were sudden staff swoops and searches, and some of the fourth-formers, the well-known pushers, were expelled. Drugs were egalitarian and casually crossed all the class boundaries. Drugs were cool. It was the done thing to be out of your head from time to time. No one regarded drugs as criminal. They were an essential leisure activity. It was a crime to be bookish, clever, a pooftah, or to have a middle-class accent. It was still worse to be black. None of this could be policed, contained or controlled. Sometimes the teachers fell ill, gave up, went home early or absented themselves without notice, if disciplining their classes proved too exhausting and too dangerous. There were numerous cases of arson. Someone started a fire in the bike sheds and it was only the smell of burning rubber which alerted the caretaker. Everything was chained down and locked up. Otherwise it would have been stolen and sold.
The Deadly Space Between Page 5
