The Deadly Space Between (9 page)

‘Tropical temperatures. We keep them constant,’ said Roehm, fingering more keys as we came to another door. All the keys were for Chubb locks. They looked exactly alike. This time there was a red eye winking above the lock. The door was wired against intruders. I gulped down a viscous cloud of damp air and tasted stale water at the back of my throat and in my lungs.

Inside the second door was a thick dark space. I remained outside in the sweating green while Roehm felt for a light. Before me gleamed a sombre crescent of gold over one desk and the pale blue of a lighted computer swung round to greet us. Something behind glass scuttled and jerked. I couldn’t easily make sense of the objects before me. Here is a desk full of papers and computer printouts. Everything on it is connected with work. There are bound reports and a laser printer. There are no photographs. There is a pile of graphs, which have been amended in red pen. There is a book with a German title and many torn scraps of paper marking the place at intervals. There is another humidity gauge. It is almost as hot as the long glass world of green, but not quite. There is more air and a strange smell. We are being watched. The computer displays rows of different coloured figures. There is a telephone covered in Post-it stickers. Something hums, something ceaselessly hums. Everything is floating in tanks, except for this thing. What is it? It has raw chewed branches on which to clamber and sawdust on the floor. It drinks water. What is it? It has a large cage. It has huge eyes encircled with darkness. It is watching, not me, but Roehm.

‘That’s a ring-tailed lemur.’

Roehm was amused by my startled face. My own imagination had betrayed me. I had assumed that he worked with smoking phials of blood and laser beams, with frightening technology, glittering chrome tubes and robots, but never with living things, not plants and animals. Roehm did not seem to be part of the living world. I had imagined his laboratory as an automated machine, like a car assembly line or an arms factory. Yet all around me living things seethed and scuttled as I approached the cages and glass tanks. There was a faint smell of urine and rotting vegetables. It was unbearably hot. I found myself looking into the single unblinking eye of an iguana. I tugged at my shirt. Roehm settled down to watch the stately process of figures, line after line, marching down the blue screen.

‘You’ve never studied biological sciences, have you?’ He gazed calmly at the steady flood of figures.

‘Maths, French, German, English. I took my French A-level last summer.’ I recited parts of my recently completed UCAS form and stared back into the horrified eyes of the ring-tailed lemur. I tried to identify some of the animals. Something scrabbled into a hutch. It stank of fresh urine.

‘Just rabbits,’ said Roehm.

He knew where I was in the laboratory without looking round.

‘Do you kill them?’

‘Are you involved in the animal rights campaign?’

‘My mother is.’

‘I know.’

‘Does she know what you do?’

‘She’s never been here. And you know better.’

I surprised myself. A rush of pleasure made my fingers tingle. He had given me something special, a secret shared. The rabbit cowered in his hutch. I addressed the creature’s shaking ears.

‘Tough luck, punk.’

Roehm laughed out loud behind me.

There are walls of grey cabinets and here each one is labelled. Dates, coded letters. It’s like the
X-Files
. Nothing so simple as the alphabet. You’d have to know what you were looking for. Roehm’s hand closes over the mouse. I stare at his rings. He has slipped my jacket over the back of his swivel chair. He is still wearing his black leather greatcoat. He is perfectly cool. He is like the salamander. He lives in fire and ice. There is a square white sink, immaculately clean, with long-handled taps, like the ones they have in hospital operating theatres. To the left of the sink stand two waste bins with flip-top lids. One says
ORGANIC WASTE
. The other just says
WASTE FOR SHREDDING
. There is a large box of white plastic gloves, each pair individually sealed as if they were food on an aeroplane. The light remains dull, green. I peer into the retreating gloom. The laboratory appears to recede, long lines of shelves, desks, cages, tanks. There is a row of green overalls hanging on pegs. The smell is growing stronger. Further away, beyond the gold crescent on Roehm’s desk, I can see more glass tanks with oxygen bubbling up in streams. I dare not venture deeper into his strange kingdom.

Roehm stands up, stretches. All the creatures flee into corners, terrified. Laboratory animals are usually bored, morose, unmoving. But these creatures seem to know that they are all doomed and fear their murderer’s every gesture. How do they know that he is going to torture and kill them?

‘You do genetics, don’t you?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Even you must have heard of global warming, Toby.’

It is the first time that he has used my name. I stare back at his huge hands. He has not smoked for over an hour.

‘Well, we are experimenting with strains of plants and animal life that will resist intense heat and cold. Living things that can survive in fire and ice.’

He speaks slowly, unhurried.

‘We must be ready for either. For the ice, or the fire next time.’

I imagine a vast army of monsters, built like Frankenstein’s original creature, all of whom have the same gigantic paranoid eyes of the ring-tailed lemur. Roehm’s printer sucks and buzzes in the gloom. He takes each sheet from the tray as it comes out, face up, and folds it away in a leather portfolio, which zips up all round, so that it is sealed.

‘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.