The Deadly Space Between (24 page)

We didn’t have a television. I wasn’t allowed to listen to the radio. Before I was sixteen I had never been to the cinema. I didn’t have a gramophone, no discs, no tapes, no records. And my mother checked my library books, before they were date-stamped.

My father was given the Haywood congregation as a reward for the horrors he was supposed to have endured in Africa. He went back to his old profession as an accountant. They all had jobs, even the missionaries. The Saints took up their places in the world. We were God’s Spies, working undercover, the Lord’s Legions, created just a little lower than the angels. And so we lived in a leafy suburb and owned an Austin Maxi. He cleaned the car and she cleaned the house. Now you know why I never clean either. We didn’t own much in the way of furniture. Inside it was very spartan and very clean. That was their method of expressing Christian austerity. We were not supposed to be attached to the things of this world. But you couldn’t boast about your righteousness. You had to fast in secret. So we presented a middle-class facade which concealed a righteous interior. A barren interior.

On Sundays there was a lunch party for the gathered saints. Sandwiches and fruit juice. No wine. We only took communion once a year. And even then the wine was grape juice from the Co-op. Wine was the nectar of Satan. Yes, of course some of them drank in secret. One of the elders even had to be dried out in detox. And we all prayed for him like mad as one of the fallen that needed the whisper of grace. We prayed for his soul on swollen knees, but no one went to visit him.

I can’t explain the flavour of the saints. You’ll have to ask Luce. She used to be one of them. They didn’t vote on the grounds that if they were marching to Zion why should they care for earthly powers and principalities? But if they had voted it would have been Tory.

We didn’t have central heating and the dining room was only used for Sunday lunches. Mother laid a coal fire early on Sunday morning and kneeled down before it with a newspaper to increase the draught. When I was a small child I thought this ritual formed part of her Sunday prayers. The smell of musty air in that room never altered. And the Saints had their own odours, mostly mothballs and carbolic soap. They all looked brushed and scrubbed, the women with their hair tied up tightly and their faces naked of adornments. Sometimes the men stood up in their coats indoors, clutching their paper plates and sandwiches, as if they were about to leave.

Those Sunday lunches said it all. The hushed crunch of chicken and salad sandwiches, pious talk or whispered gossip, concentrated fruit juice replete with E-numbers and colouring, mixed in jugs with ice. Mother had dozens of little lace doilies with beads stitched round the edge. And she covered each jug with one of these before we set off for church. The napkins, which she bought in cheap plastic packs of 1,000, turned into mulch in your hands and instant compost if they came in contact with water. Everything was cheap, mean, small. I couldn’t stand their mean-mindedness. They were always ready to think the worst of anyone. So much for the compassion of the Lord. Even their prayers consisted of instructions to the Almighty, explaining where He had gone wrong and what He ought to do to put things right.

The Saints intermarried. We were a bit like the Sikhs who shared our streets in that part of London. The Sikhs and the Saints, passing one another mistrustfully, when they had so much in common. They were all facing a sexual sea change in the mores of their daughters. No one who lived in those times could have been completely protected from the wind of freedom. The Saints were not especially fertile. Most couples only had one child. So if some of us defected there was a dramatic diminution of numbers from which to select suitable marriage fodder. I dare say Mother had her eye on several likely boys. I was taken to supervised dances; embarrassing affairs where we all stood against the walls staring at each other, waltzed badly and then went home with our parents at ten o’clock. But it took courage to leave. The Saints were a secure haven and we were mightily indoctrinated with tales of Satan’s Progress in the outside world. We were prisoners who feared the world beyond the bars.

The Saints believed in Satan, Satan as a roaring lion who stalketh about seeking whom he may devour. I never quite knew how literal this was. Satan was responsible for contemporary evils like rock and roll, the television and
A Clockwork Orange
. He seemed to utilize insidious forms of agency rather than risk any overt appearances. But I sincerely believe that my mother was on the watch for a seductive chap with cloven hooves and horns. Perfectly visible to the naked eye, if you looked closely.

We were antinomians. Do you know what that means? You don’t? Well, it’s simple. It’s a bit like justification by faith, not by works. Oh, that’s no clearer? Listen, Toby, I was washed in the Blood of the Lamb. So I’m clean. It doesn’t matter what I do. I’ve been saved for all eternity. I shall sit upon the right hand of God in the Heavenly City.

Of course it’s all nonsense. But it’s what we believed. Well, if we were safe in Abraham’s bosom why were we always on the lookout for the Evil One? It wasn’t consistent. Mother used to explain it like this. We were all like Adam and Eve, created perfect, but with our own free will. Sufficient to have stood, yet free to fall. To fall? It means to fall from Grace. We could choose to renounce God’s Covenant at any time. Doesn’t that sound magical? Freedom? Choice? I longed to fall from Grace. But it couldn’t just happen. You had to
do
something. And I was too locked into their systems to imagine anything else, any other way to be. I had the habit of obedience.

But is that true? No, it isn’t quite. I wasn’t too crushed to paint. They didn’t want me to study art. I was supposed to do modern languages or Maths. I’m not sure how either of these would be helpful if I were destined to the Higher Calling and to become a missionary in Africa. I suppose they could have sent me to a French-speaking bit. Anyway, I painted them. I painted strange portraits of the Saints. It was a quiet form of revenge, I suppose. Saying my piece in the language I could speak best. But I left those in the cupboard at school. The art mistress came to see my parents at home. She begged them to allow me to do Art GCSE. They made her sit in the dining room, which was cold without the Sunday fire. She sat on the edge of her chair and they never offered to take her coat. I remember that interview. It was very funny in a way. My art mistress was called Miss Shirley. She was a bit like Liberty, short hair and strong hands. She explained that I was potentially very good and deserved the training. They demurred. Art was at best a form of self-indulgence and at worst a pagan imitation of the Lord’s works. Oh no, pleaded Miss Shirley, art is the handmaid of religion. She mounted a huge argument which took in Russian icons, medieval manuscripts, every known form of ecclesiastical fresco, the Sistine Chapel, Piero Della Francesco, Velázquez and Van Gogh’s shoes. Mother put it all down to Satan’s inventiveness, but my father was almost convinced. He did think that sacred art had its uses. He had taken advantage of a picture book in Africa, to teach the story of our Lord’s mission and sacrifice to illiterate children, who then spent the afternoons crucifying each other to see if it hurt. But he never knew about that. And so I was allowed to do my art GCSE, but it had to be an extra, not a substitute for something more useful, like geography.

You’d have kicked over the traces, Toby. And in my way I did too.

I wished for three things. I even prayed for them. I wanted to look different. I wanted to wear different clothes. And I wanted a man to make love to me. Maybe that’s what every naive adolescent girl wants. But I wanted these things with a passion that was almost unbalanced. I wanted to be someone else, someone cool, streetwise, canny, sexy. I wasn’t afraid of whatever was out there, beyond the bars. I wanted to learn the world.

There was a school trip to Germany. At the end of April, not long before our school exams. It was a language course in south Germany, on the Bodensee: lessons in the morning and coach trips to tourist sights or long healthy walks through the forests in the afternoons. All safe back at the hostel and tucked up in our rooms by ten o’clock. It sounded like the Hitler Youth. But I wasn’t fooled. Freedom. I could smell it, taste it almost – freedom. I didn’t really know where the Bodensee was in Germany, but I didn’t care. I signed up. I said they’d given their permission. But of course they hadn’t. I was trying it on. The German teacher rang them up. We did have a telephone, but it was in their bedroom and I wasn’t allowed to make calls. My mother went nuclear straight away. She said it was out of the question. But my teacher took my part. She said that they were holding me back. I wasn’t doing as well as I could have done because I was never allowed to take part in school activities. That cut no ice with my mother. But her next line of attack certainly did. She told them that there were bursaries available. And that was too much for Mother. Her high-mindedness was being interpreted as poverty. Pride got the better of her. I was allowed to go.

I think my parents knew that it would be something of a turning point, but not in the way they imagined. Mother actually cried when they delivered me up to my German teacher at the station. She made me promise not to forget my prayers. And on no account was I to approach any of the churches. Rome was far more dangerous than all the wildernesses of Africa.

The trip turned out to be a poisoned chalice. I’d never been out to a cafe with a gang of girls for an evening, let alone abroad for over a week. I was in for a shock.

I had been forced to put up with quite a bit of teasing at school. They called me Swot or Inkpot in the second form. I was the only girl with a real pen and a bottle of Quink. They also called me Lizard. But oddly enough this was not an insult. One of our first school readers had a wise lizard that knew all the answers and sent the children off on interesting adventures. Like the Lizard I was clever and could do the maths and Latin. I helped them out with prose translations and theorems in geometry. I was useful. And I wasn’t out there all tarted up on the disco floor, wiggling my arse at their boyfriends. So I wasn’t a threat. Now I was out of place, out of my depth. I looked odd. Difference gets masked by school uniforms, but in civvies I was the only one in a Harris tweed skirt to just below the knee and lace-up Hush Puppies. I had that scrubbed sort of face that screams Virgin. I didn’t start conversations. I sat on my own and looked out of the window as the coach rolled away towards Dover. By the time we got to Calais they’d settled on my new name and the general line of attack. They jeered at my hair. And they gave me a new nickname. They called me the Nun.

My hair was really long then, one long blonde plait right down to the small of my back. No one else had hair that long. It did look strange. As if I was suffering from Rapunzel syndrome. But now I think that they picked on that because it was my distinguishing feature. If I’d had spots or been fat they’d have persecuted me for those instead. They made up nasty songs, which they chanted to tunes from
The Sound of Music
, of which, of course, I’d never heard. Then they pissed themselves laughing. My German teacher never quite realized whom all this was aimed at, and anyway it was all going on in the back of the coach and she was sitting up at the front, gripping the map. That journey was purgatory. I’ve earned more years of grace for enduring that coach trip than all the tortures of my subsequent life put together. For the first time I had tried to join the group and found the gates barred by a mass of schoolgirls all standing there with drawn swords. I didn’t cry in front of them. Not a drop. That was a mistake. They’d have let up if I’d cried.

We stopped, long after dark, at a hotel near Strasbourg. And by the second night we were there.

We took possession of an entire
Jugendherberge
. There were
Steppdecken
sitting on the beds, arranged in two double pyramids like a king’s crown. Everything was eerily clean and white, as if we had moved into an asylum. My period came on in the night and I awoke in a pond of fresh blood. That was the end. I sicked up my breakfast in the lavatory and was confined to my room for the rest of the day. My teacher was sympathetic, but she was busy organizing the language classes. The pack backed off. The Nun’s sick. Poor old cretinous Nun. Leave her alone.

My roommate looked incredulously at my bulky pack of STs. The Saints weren’t allowed to use tampons. Fuck that, Nun. Here, try these. You just take them out of the wrapping and shove them up. Not directly upwards. Backwards, towards your bum. Go on. It might even give you a thrill. I spent the morning crying into fresh sheets and pillows. They all went off to see the Schloss Neuschwanstein in the afternoon. I got up and walked down to the lake.

I remember it all, the still water and the quiet day. The mud smelt of late spring. Fresh reeds were rising from the wet banks. There were moorhens nesting under the jetty. That part of the Bodensee was a wildlife reserve. And I sat there all afternoon, sniffling. Not even the moorhens were afraid of me.

Then I saw him, rowing slowly towards me, a simple painted rowing boat and a giant man cradling the oars.

Roehm looked much the same as he does now, not so heavy perhaps, but much the same. He hasn’t changed. He was leaning on the oars, watching me. I had the distinct impression that he was rowing in towards the jetty with the single intention of speaking to me. Have you noticed how he addresses you by your name? Roehm always makes you feel chosen. It’s part of his endless, sinister charm. There was a slow dip and splash as he came, the rowlocks creaking in their sockets. He looked up. His face was white, strange, hairless, as if he never shaved. I remember his rings. He wore golden rings, too many for an ordinary man. It was as if he belonged to many different secret societies and wore a seal for each one. I stared at his rings. I knew he was old enough to be my father. But still, I stared at his face, fascinated. The boat slowed and hovered, unsteady in the shallows. He leaned on his oars, looking into my face, waiting.