The Spark Gap

by Julie Bertagna

Kerrie feels trapped. She can't spend another day in her chaotic mother's house. Then Kerrie finds an escape. On the rooftop of a nearby tower block live two castaway teenagers, Mauve and Skip. As Kerrie starts to share their sky-high home, she relishes her new-found freedom. And when a freak fire destroys their towerblock, Kerrie decides to leave the city with Mauve and Skip. She thinks that she can leave her problems behind in Glasgow but what will happen when Kerrie stops running?

Genres: Young Adult, Fiction

181 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 1996

About the author

Julie Bertagna was born in Ayrshire and grew up near Glasgow, where she now lives with her family. After a degree in English Language and Literature, she was the editor of a small magazine, a teacher and a freelance journalist. She has written many critically-acclaimed, award-winning novels for teenagers and younger readers. She speaks in schools, libraries and at book festivals across the UK.

Reviews

[Anne Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dithered seriously over whether to give this book three or four stars. It's flooding here and we had a blackout as I was writing this review. As I get back to this 24 hours later, I have a different view as I've reflected on what I've written.

So four and a half stars.

The novel has only got 192 pages and it takes all of 163 of them before it mutates (briefly) into something approaching a fantasy - or magic realism - or at least to introduce the speculative fiction element that explains its title The Spark Gap.

The story begins with an off-putting image: Great drops of rain burst in the shape of fried eggs and streamed messily down the tall windows...

I almost needed as much grit and determination as the protagonist Kerrie to keep reading after an assault on the senses like that. It's far from the only time there was a too-vivid image that pushed me out of the story. Another example: Two great legs of sunshine appeared, moving over the mountain behind them like searchlights.

Kerrie is out practising music with her school friends who've formed a band, The Restless Souls, when her gran dies. In the midst of her grief and guilt, she realises she may have to go back and live with her mother, a scatter-brained woman who left Kerrie to fend for herself when her husband walked out on her. But Kerrie can't face the prospect of having to share space with her mum and new boyfriend.

Instead, with the help of her school friends, she finds a place to live on the roof-top of a Glasgow tenement. It's primitive but she makes a go of it. On the other side of the roof is the ultra-shy Skip, a boy around her own age who indulges in the occasional bit of glue-sniffing and has a laser toy he calls his 'sparkly'.

Ahhh, my preciousss, as Gollum would say.

Except that Skip is prepared to give up the sparkly, if it means restoring a budding friendship with Kerrie who he thinks he has offended.

Skip has another friend. Mauve is a talented artist. They have a 'Light and Vision' show by which they earn enough to scrape by. He busks, she sells paintings.

Mauve had renamed herself one day by picking a colour from one of her little pots of paint.

'I could have been Indigo or Russet,' she'd told Kerrie, after an afternoon of being pestered by questions. 'But I knew I was Mauve as soon as I tried it out.'

Mauve's old name had been a nothing name, a name for nobodies, a name you'd just throw at a baby if you couldn't be bothered, she'd said. It was only a label till she'd found her real name.

In a strange inversion of faery, the True Name is the one on show and the Use-Name is secret.

Like Kerrie and Skip, Mauve has her background of serious childhood dysfunction. She escapes into her painting and splashes the grim cityscape of Glasgow across her canvases, using Skip and Kerrie as otherworldly figures, almost like alien waifs or magical creatures in a bleak urban landscape. She paints Skip with eyes reminiscent of his ever-present sparkly and Kerrie with an emerald, symbolising the green metallic sweet paper she keeps to remind herself of her gran.

'Out of place, out of time, out on a limb,'

as one prospective purchaser describes the effect.
'Topical enough...but will it sell?'

Even as I'm writing this, I suddenly realise there were hints, ever so vague misty hints, of the 'spark gap' to come. Maybe I should announce:

*spoiler alert*

Mauve makes a huge sale to a gallery. At the same time, there's a fire in the tenement and, although Skip and Kerrie head down to the evacuation centre, they realise quickly it's not the place for them.

With the money Mauve has made, she decides to head for the Highlands. She invites Skip and Kerrie along to be her models. They spontaneously decide to get off the train at a station in the middle of nowhere. Staying overnight in a luxurious B&B, they decide to remain in the area. A tiny caravan, not really big enough for the three of them, is available at a nearby farm.

Skip loves the moor and never wants to leave. He has a book that he reads obsessively about its history. Mauve is out all day, getting inspiration for her paintings. Kerrie is bored witless.

She persuades Skip to go into town - by crossing the track across the moor. The day turns wet and bitterly cold as they come across cairns to ancient battles and long-dead shepherds.

Struggling with lack of food and hypothermia, Kerrie and Skip encounter a ragged band of tinker children who steal everything they have, including Skip's sparkly. But are the children real or just a figment of their imaginations?

Kerrie encounters the children a second time and decides they are ghosts. But then, a soldier appears out of the mist, dressed in old-time garb. He's there to kill the children and take their heads to the king for a reward. Kerrie has stepped across time, like a spark across a gap, and she is witnessing the hunting of children of the MacGregor clan for the price on their heads. Picking up a 'weapon' - Skip's sparkly - she aims it at the leader of the soldiers. He perceives the multi-coloured light as the daggers of a witch and flees, his men with him.

It seems like an hallucination born of hypothermia. Until Skip finds the story in his book of the history of the moor. Perhaps being

'Out of place, out of time, out on a limb'

has its advantages after all.

Kerrie begins to hope.
If she can change the past, why can't she change the future?

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this when I was quite young - don't remember much about it, but I remember liking it.

[Evangeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember the author came to my school. could relate to her and this good book.