The Deadly Space Between (25 page)

I wasn’t sure what language to use. I had to be the one to speak first. How did I know that? It was a question of permission. Almost an invitation. Roehm could not come ashore unless I invited him to do so. I knelt on the jetty and stretched out my hand for the rope.

‘Thank you.’

Those were the first words I heard him say. His voice is the same.
Un de ces voix
, as Françoise describes it. She always comments on his voice. Maybe that’s all she knows. I can’t remember if she’s ever seen him. I caught the rope and pulled him towards me. The boat bumped against the jetty and the moorhens scuttled for cover in the reeds. He shipped oars and reached inside his jacket. He wore a black suit, a white shirt with the top buttons undone, as if he had been wearing a tie, but had hauled it off. He was oddly overdressed for a boating expedition.

‘Are you English?’ I asked, curious. I sat on the jetty above him, my legs swinging, looking down into the boat. Roehm lit a cigarette and looked up at me. He had shiny, city shoes.

‘No. Would you like a cigarette?’

I shook my head.

‘Your parents won’t let you smoke.’ It was a simple statement of fact, something he already knew.

‘They won’t let me do anything,’ I snapped bitterly.

Roehm laughed, that wonderful, eerie, resonating laugh.

‘Then I’m glad they’re not here.’

‘So am I.’

And I smiled at him from my perch above. Roehm always seems to know more about you than you’ve ever told him. Have you noticed that? He puts you at your ease. I knelt on the jetty and reached out for his hand. I had no fear of him. His face was terribly still. He took my hand. I let out a cry. His hand was so cold. I thought it was his rings, the chilly gold of his rings.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, rising, ‘I’m unusually cold. You are beautifully warm.’

This was a compliment, a caress. He swung himself onto the jetty beside me and the boat sank alarmingly beneath him. We sat side by side, looking across the lake. He held my hand secure on his lap. I felt the icy gold of his rings.

‘You have something to give me. And I have something to give to you.’ He delivered these lines as an utterly factual, undramatic statement. Even in my innocence I thought that he was a bit extraordinary.

‘What?’

‘You’ll see.’

There was silence. A ragged chevron of ducks banked away over the lake, their necks outstretched, calling into the watery sun.

‘What is your name?’

‘Isobel. And yours?’

‘Roehm.’

I sat wondering at his name. Was he Mr Roehm? Or did he have just one name, like Heathcliff, or Madonna? He heard me thinking.

‘Just Roehm. It’s easy to remember. What do you hate most?’

‘My hair.’

I banged my heels indignantly on the struts of the jetty.

‘They won’t let me cut my hair. All the other girls have waxed spikes. Dyed orange and green sometimes. And I sit here like Julie Andrews. They say I look like Julie Andrews. Do you know what they call me? The Nun! I hate it. If I had short hair they wouldn’t laugh so much and I’d look more normal. My clothes are awful enough. Especially my shoes. Who wears Hush Puppies with lace-ups? Only health visitors or your dead grandmother. But the plait is the first thing they see.’

I turned to face him and grimaced, my mouth sulky and hard. He squeezed my hand. I felt like his accomplice being trained for my special mission, whatever it was.

‘Would you like to have it all cut off?’

‘Well, maybe not all of it. But I wouldn’t dare. My parents would never forgive me. It says in the Bible that a woman’s hair is her crowning glory, so I can’t have it cut.’

‘Hmmm. Yes. But St Paul was addressing a first-century audience. If he was preaching now he might think that it was nothing but vanity.’

I was puzzled by his accent. He spoke perfect English but was obviously foreign. Remember that I was only sixteen. Or nearly sixteen. I felt safe as houses. I never suspected Roehm. He seemed reliable, even protective. And I was very struck by his innovative biblical interpretations.

He took me to the most expensive hairdressers’ in the town. We walked in as if he had already made the appointment. It was air-conditioned. I noticed the purged chill in the stale air. The room stank of artificial hairsprays. There were long lines of black chairs receding endlessly. Some of them were occupied by women in expensive clothes with old faces and liver-spotted hands; their lank thin hair hung defeated, festering on their ears and shoulders. I hesitated in front of the desk and leaned back against Roehm.

‘Are you nervous? Have you changed your mind?’

His voice against my cheek was subtle as a kiss.

‘Oh no. I want it off. All of it.’

‘Farewell the crowning glory. It is a little old-fashioned.’

A young woman slid towards us across the marble tiles. Roehm twisted the plait around my throat.

‘Here is my Rapunzel,’ he said in English. The girl looked confused. I winced.

She ushered me to one of the black chairs. I saw myself suddenly in the great gilt-framed pool of glass. I was an English schoolgirl in a white shirt and green cardigan, pleated navy skirt, knee-high white socks, lace-up flatties, my cheeks a little sunburnt, my nose freckled and gleaming. I looked at least five years younger than I was. Even my breasts looked hard and small. Roehm lifted the offending plait and kissed the nape of my neck. I felt his tongue on the last vertebra just below my collar.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll buy you new clothes.’

The woman carrying a pile of gold and white towels took in the suggestive curl of his kiss and stood still, shocked. She had assumed that I was his daughter. I blushed, shrinking into the chair. Roehm won back the ground, easy, charming, speaking fluent German, explaining how he wanted her to cut my hair, shorter here, above the ears, layer the top, a bit of energy, to give her height. But keep the plait entire. I shall hoard it up, to remember her childhood. When I hold it again I shall remember her, as she is now, freckled cheeks, white arms and this long thin torrent of gold. He meets my eyes in the mirror.

‘I want to keep my plait,’ I said, suddenly perverse. I was afraid of him owning anything of mine.

Roehm cuffed my cheek and laughed. He said nothing. Then he turned to the hairdresser who had already swaddled me in towels and was glaring sadistically at the plait.

‘I’ll return in an hour.’

The old women had begun to stare at him. Graceful as a dancing master, he strode away down the long marble room passing from mirror to mirror, drawing each glance into the frame and then beyond, staring after his huge shoulders, white jowls and giant hands, with the great bands of heavy gold. I watched him go. Then I noticed the scissors approaching my head. My attention snapped back to the woman’s hands. Roehm had gone.

I looked very different with my hair bobbed short. I’ve worn it like that ever since. I see no reason to change. I looked older, taller. I sat with the plait in a large envelope on my lap.

‘Here it is.’ I offered the thing to Roehm when he appeared in the doorway.

‘I thought that you wanted to keep it.’

‘Well, I don’t now. You have it.’

I never saw what he did with it. The plait mysteriously disappeared. We walked down the pedestrian streets peering into clothes shops. Everything gleamed. There was no rubbish under the benches. The geraniums in pots lolled sideways as if they had been drugged. Roehm was smoking. He held me firmly with his other hand and my flesh burned with the imprint of his cold rings.

‘You’ll have to choose, Isobel. I have no idea what the young girls are wearing these days.’

‘Don’t you notice?’ I wanted at least two obscene tight black tops and skin-tight black jeans or a micro-skirt with patterned black tights. I wanted, at last, to be seen.

‘No. I never notice these things.’

I chose a black leather jacket, with patterned studs. It was fabulously expensive. I thought, He’s my lover. He can pay.

Roehm smiled slightly.

The shops paraded clothes for fat middle-aged women. So how did he know which passage to turn down, which square to traverse, how to find the tiny little caves which contained fake silver trinkets and elastic flesh-gripping tops? One of the boutiques was so small he couldn’t fit into the space, so he waited outside as I frisked and pranced in the sunshine, parading one set of black clothes after another. The skin-tight tops showed off my breasts, made them seem bigger, softer. He only looked into my face, and at my smile rimmed by the swinging blonde bob of short hair. He made me feel Hollywood beautiful.

I danced back to the hostel carrying bags of new clothes, which I hid in my suitcase. I couldn’t hide the fact that my plait had gone. At first my German teacher was appalled.

‘Isobel! What have you done?’

‘As you see.’

‘Well . . .’ She smothered a laugh.

‘What will your parents say?’

‘Look, the Nun’s had her plait off.’

‘That’s better.’

‘You look almost normal, Lizard.’

I glittered with pleasure.

‘Got a few things too. Want to see?’

The dormitory was all admiration at my conquest and my purchases.

‘This your sugar daddy’s hand-out?’

‘He likes giving me things.’

I am very haughty. I let the money do the talking.

Pause.

‘Cool.’

I have had two of my three wishes.

I lay awake that night and hatched my plan. Deceit came easily. I had to cry off the school trip. I had to find Roehm again.

I wilted theatrically during the language lessons, and then lied about my period pains, which had in fact all but disappeared. The other girls were in on it. They seconded my performance. My German teacher wasn’t quite taken in. The shrinking violet had done a bunk the day before. She listened to my faded excuses, but didn’t insist. I wasn’t one of the usual suspects.

I don’t quite know what I felt about Roehm then. Gratitude, certainly. Curiosity? Fascination? I was a village girl, come to the city, seeing the serpent dance for the first time. I wanted to see him again. I felt like the woman of Samaria. I had been standing by the water when I had met a man who told me all I ever was and all I ever did. For the first time someone had given me his attention, had looked at me carefully, closely. I was known and recognized. Was I in love with him? Does it matter? I wanted to feel those eyes upon me.

Once the school coach had safely disappeared I dressed up in the sexiest of the clothes he had bought me and then ran all the way through the narrow streets down to the lake.

Roehm was waiting for me at the end of the jetty where I had first seen him. He was standing on the grey-baked planks, looking out over the water. I saw the smoke rising above the bulrushes, static in the afternoon glare. He turned to look at me.

‘Well, Isobel,’ was all he said, and he stretched out his arms towards me.

I rushed into his embrace.

He was unnervingly cold to my touch. His cheeks and hands were cold.

‘You’re very beautiful.’

‘You’re cold.’

He laughed.

‘Warm me up, then.’

He put his arm around my waist and carried me away to a sunny patch of damp grass enclosed by the reeds. The daisies flattened under his jacket as he set me gently down, still looking only into my face. I was stirred to the core by the intensity of that gaze. No man had ever looked at me like that before. And so he began to strip me of all my glittering borrowed robes. He never took his eyes off my face. I felt his cold hands on my breasts, my arms, my back, but all I saw were his cold grey eyes. He began to kiss me, my cheeks, my throat, my mouth. His lips were cold and dry. My whole body was shaking with pleasure. Then I remembered the illegal tampon in my vagina.

Nothing could have been more unromantic.

Roehm roared with laughter.

‘You are the most charming, beautiful, perverse little virgin I have ever known,’ he said, licking my ear.

I was almost in tears.

‘It’s not my fault that I’m a virgin,’ I snapped.

Roehm held me fast in his cold hands and parted my thighs.

Was that the first time?

I never saw his body. He never removed a stitch of his own clothing. But I was naked, white, utterly safe in his embrace. He gave me nothing but joy and a huge sense of space, all the kingdoms of this world stretched out before me. I can still feel the cold passion of his kisses in every pore of my skin. He made all things seem possible. I had had my third wish.

How did he know where we were staying? He must have followed me. On the last day before we left he passed a message to me through one of the kitchen staff. Just an address in town and a time. Recreation time, after
Abendbrot
. We were allowed out for a couple of hours. But we had to stick together and be back by ten thirty. The German teacher issued dire threats of punishments which would come into force if we returned drunk or late. I was now a schoolgirl with accomplices. I set out with them. We were all going to
Zum wilden Jäger
, a
Gasthof
by the lake with candles on the tables and fairy lights in the Italian gardens. I agreed to meet them there, just in time to walk back all together.