Synopses & Reviews
Chapter OneMemoryShe came home smelling of cigarettes. She didn't smoke. So either she sat in a place where everyone else smoked, or she was going out with someone who did. Someone who smoked bitter, foreign cigarettes. Someone I hadn't met. Someone I had never seen. Where did she go? I began asking myself questions. Endless staff association meetings? She was no longer chairwoman. The Art Group Collective? This had been dormant since the last exhibition. The pub? Which pub? She never went to the pub. She never met her friends in the pub. She met them in restaurants. If she intended to meet them she told me where she would be in advance, or she rang from the restaurant itself, warning me that she would not be back for supper. Yet she came home late, smelling of cigarettes. She must be going out with someone who smokes.It began in October, three weeks after my eighteenth birthday, the year I was preparing for my A-level exams. The wind was increasing, leaving damp leaves in piles down the pathways. She came home after dark. Once a week at first, on different days, then more often than that, late, often slightly anxious, jittery, excited. She kissed me quickly and asked me what homework I had to prepare. Then she flung her bags into the corner of her studio, that long room of shadows and gaunt spaces all along the back of the house, and made off into the kitchen. I heard the radio, the sound of water bursting from the taps, and the fridge door, opening, closing, again and again.The smell of cigarettes, passing, incriminating, pungent, the smell I could taste, just for a moment, when she held me in her arms.I can't remember any other house. I have always lived here in this draughty,comfortable, mid-Victorian mass of red brick and white gables. I have always played in the attics, come in at dusk from the long garden, knees stained green with moss. I marked the trees with my knife as a child and watched the bark ooze round the cuts as the years passed. I saw the white shed rot, turn green and black at the corners and finally end up on one of the Guy Fawkes bonfires. I killed woodlice on the tiles in the back porch, watching the remaining carapaces, squat like small tanks, scuttle into the cracked skirting boards for safety. And it was I who warned her when the greying stained floor above the cellar was rotten and dangerous.My childhood is a long peaceful memory of rain. An English childhood of respectable suburbs, minor events and a pale stream of drizzle, punctuated by the odd June day of green lawns, pale sunshine, the sound of mowers cruising through damp grass, croquet and daisies.This is my first experience of sex. I fell in love with the neighbour's daughter when I was five and she was seven. I followed her about down the prickly trails in the next-door garden, which was wilder than our garden and flowered weeds, turbulent, unchecked, unkempt. The girl accepted my adoration as a form of homage that was legitimate and deserved. My mother was obscurely disapproving. Then, one day, when I was playing with my tractor in the long grass, the neighbour's daughter declared, 'Let's show our bottoms!' and pulled down her plain white panties. She sat down flat on the grass with her legs apart and presented me with a surprising, narrow pink slit. I stared at it amazed. She assured me that I could lick it if I wanted to, but that I had to promise not to tell and that itwould be our secret. I wasn't sure that I did want to, but I said that I might reconsider the situation on Sunday afternoon. This was my first sexual excuse, an attempt to buy time. She pulled her pants back up and stormed off to her room in a huff. She didn't make her offer twice. I forgot all about the incident until, years later, after the family had moved away and I was about ten years old, my mother told me that the child's father, a paediatric physician, had been jailed for abusing his patients. He was also accused by his daughters, one after another, as they grew up. I asked what abuse meant, fearing that it might involve whipping. She said that it was fiddling with children in a way you shouldn't. I asked whether that involved licking other people down there. She stared at me and said that she supposed it might. I said nothing more, but was very pleased that I hadn't taken up the neighbour's daughter on her kind offer. It was clearly a game that led straight to jail.Other people had grandparents. I didn't. When I reached the plastic animal and model weapons stage I asked my mother why. Other people's grandparents were a great source of Lego battleships and red-eyed dinosaurs. She hesitated a little, then told me part of the truth. They were serious, religious people. She had been very wild when she was younger. She had not been married to my father. Her parents had not been able to accept her decision to keep the child. She was speaking to me. But she still said 'the child' as if I were royalty and she had to use the third person. Or as if I were someone else. The Christian charity of her parents' religion did not extend to children that were loved, but not legal. I didn'tunderstand this. No, she never wrote to them and they never wrote to her. No, they never sent Christmas or birthday cards. Then, oddly, as if she were imparting a mighty revelation, she told me that some things, sometimes, could never be forgiven. Somehow I knew that she was...
Synopsis
A solitary boy in a family of independent, unconventional women, Toby Hawk's small, closed world consists of school, family, and surfing the Internet. An incestuous relationship with his mother, a mere 15 years his senior, is a seemingly natural consequence of this stilling life. However, when a mysterious German man by the name of Roehm begins to seduce his mother, the tormented teen hunts the web for clues about this ambiguous man who so easily lures his mother away.
Roehm's sexual presence both disrupts and reassures mother and son who are now forced to negotiate a world in which their daily reality becomes unstable and duplicitous. As the enigma of Roehm's identity is shockingly revealed, mother and son no longer know if they are the hunters or the hunted.
Synopsis
A solitary boy in a family of independent, unconventional women, Toby Hawk lives in a small, closed world that consists of school and surfing the Internet. His mother, Isobel, a painter on the brink of commercial success, is only fifteen years his senior and the two share an unusually intimate bond. But everything changes when Isobel takes up with Roehm, a fascinating and enigmatic scientist. As he begins his slow dance of courtship and seduction, alienating mother from son, their world becomes unstable and duplicitous. Toby turns to the Web for clues about his mothers hauntingly irresistible, predatory lover -- and the answers he finds transform his life.
An eerie psychological ghost story with echoes of Faust, Freud, and Frankenstein, The Deadly Space Between is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passions -- a rich and dark exploration of sexual ambiguity and longing.
About the Author
Patricia Duncker teaches writing and nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is the author of two previous novels, Hallucinating Foucault, which won Dillon's First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize for best first novel, and The Doctor, as well as a collection of stories, Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees.