The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  ▪

  This is the picture I’m stuck with, then: Devon, tranquil Devon, the Devon we have moved to, maybe not as tranquil as it used to be, but too bloody tranquil for me. Rubbers in the river are nothing – I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone kiosks, the heat from a burning car. London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well, the country doesn’t know what to do with itself any more. It doesn’t even know how to be healthy: the water we’re paddling through must be thick with invisible pollution, radioactive fallout and yet –

  And yet Jessica has just slipped out of the canoe to swim in that muck. It’s clear enough, even the green and slimy weed three feet down is visible, but it feels too warm to me. English water is never warm, not outside, not without the help of some factory somewhere, pumping out hot waste – or a minor cockup at the nearest reactor. But there’s no time to think such thoughts. Something else is happening, something I can’t put my finger on but which leaves me feeling disturbed. Perhaps I’m just tired, confused, heat-hazed?

  We have turned a bend in the river and are well out of sight of the boys on the bridge. The trees here grow close to the water, their branches almost meeting overhead so that the sun shoots a web of light across us all. Jessie is swimming close to the canoe, her back flashing in the triangles of sun, her skin browner than I ever manage to get. She kicks hard, reaching awkwardly behind her to untie her bikini . . .

  ▪

  But wait a minute. None of this is going to mean anything unless I can make you understand how weird we all felt that afternoon, how watching a fresh little bastard come sliming into the world from the collective pool of your family blood makes you think about things you might otherwise not choose to consider. We felt close, all right, but it was a closeness that cut through the bullshit of family life and suspended the rules. I’m talking about honesty. And, you know, when you get down to it, honesty – life without the lies, the protective film of accepted behavior – is bloody dangerous.

  2

  Three o’clock in the morning and the family is on the road, Jessie wearing sunglasses, tight black jeans and a T-shirt that doesn’t quite fit. She’s developed well, Jessie has. If she wasn’t my sister,

  I could take a lot of interest in equipment like that. But the sunglasses? I think it’s the hospital – she doesn’t want to be seen there looking like someone’s daughter. Maybe she’s out to score one of the doctors, I don’t know. I’m scared of those places, too. Scared of the power they have over you, the way they stomp all over you with their jack-bootadministration mentality, leveling everyone to cases, to broken arms, drug overdoses, pregnant bellies. They know it. They revel in it, the control, the right to tell you they don’t give a fuck who you are, what unique traits of character you may possess; you need them and they know it, so don’t come the smart dick around here, sonny.

  But we’re not there yet, far from it. We have only just left the village, and that was a struggle. The car doesn’t like those hills by daylight. By night, it has a whole different vocabulary of bollockbreaking metal-wrenching exhaust-farting outbursts with which to remind us that living in a valley is a dumb thing to do. And this is a Bentley. Not a new one, admittedly. It has seen finer days, it was proud once – just not during our tenure.

  It has an excuse, of sorts: parked in the front passenger seat, right in front of me, is the unnatural load of Mother’s weight, itself enough to sink many a worthy ship. I see them as two separate things, Mum and the cargo she carries. My mother is the same as she always was – warm, pretty, a lot tougher than she looks. She has impressive reserves of temper, my mother, most of them reserved specifically for me. She can match me, foul language for foul language, if she chooses. But I have the trump card: I can make her cry. And when I do it makes me feel like crying, so then we’re both happy. She has that occasionally mournful quality anyway, that sense of being somewhere else, of drifting to some far-off memory (she’s part Polish; I think it comes with the territory), and it’s a quality I’ve noticed I already find attractive in the girls I want to boff.

  But this belly of hers is something else. I’ve seen pregnant women before, of course, and they’ve always worried me. They patrol the streets and supermarkets like God’s Chosen Few, innocent of every crime, swinging those great protruding whales of flesh before them like the perfect weapon. They look so fucking self-righteous! And now my mother’s joined their ranks I look at her and think: it’s a pod, it’s an alien, it’s a foreign thing growing inside her, poking at her flesh, stirring the soup of her insides. It smells already of milk and shitsmeared nappies. And when I consider its connection with me, the fact that I set up tent under her skin once, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to think about wobbling bent-double in her jar – it makes me feel less individual, less me.

  ▪

  ‘Well, this is fun,’ Jessie says in that wonderful, Chelsea-schoolgirl voice of hers – a schoolgirl on the make. (I have never fathomed how, given the obvious bond between us, we can sound so different. She’s all gymslip-deb, while I’m one of Nature’s born-again yobs, at least, that’s what I’ve worked for.) The car has just hit a rut in the road and shot us all about six inches into the air. ‘You should have babies more often. Of course, this one may come out wearing splints and a crash helmet, but think how boring London would have been, only five minutes from the hospital on well-paved streets.’

  ‘Well-lit streets,’ I add, just to exercise my mouth, as the Bentley’s full headlights sweep across another turn in the endless wall of hedgerow lining the road.

  ‘How far are we?’ Mum asks.

  ‘One more bend,’ says Dad, taking it too fast, ‘and we hit the main road. Then we’ll sail through – fifteen minutes, maybe twenty to the door.’

  ‘That might not be soon enough.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He looks at her. She’s sucking in breath like a Rasta taking a toke. The sweat is pouring off her, but it’s hot, it’s a hot night for rattling through Devon back roads with a baby bursting to get out (though it was her choice to have it in the first place, you’ve got to admit).

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says. She doesn’t look it. She holds her stomach, as though she’d like to disown it, as though she’d be more than happy to watch, just watch, but why does she have to go through this pain? ‘I’m great,’ she says. ‘Just get us there.’

  I feel for her. I feel for us all in this heat, sticky arms and sticky arses niggling the seat leather, the air in here – even with the sunroof and windows open – too close to breathe. It’s not what you expect of an English summer night, not at this time in the morning, but if the heat can surprise you, can inconvenience you at all, it will. It’s OK, though, this heat. It makes tonight more of an adventure, so long as it doesn’t actually lay Mum out or anything. I like it, I like my crotch itching and my armpits smelling, the fact that no one can disguise their own distinctive whiff, even if Jessie’s lively musk-odor is largely hidden by the powerful and predictable memory of her sunscreen.

  There’s something wild in the air tonight, on top of this heat. The heat has laid its fat palm over the countryside, smothering us all, making us struggle to break through, to get at the oxygen we know is up there somewhere, but it’s not. Behind the heat, riding its back, is a threat, a rawness, a great maw of savage breath and glinting teeth. There’s a monster out here tonight, and it’s us. It’s Mother, with her dam ready to burst. It’s Jessie, wanting to be in on the woman-secrets of childbirth without for a moment having to lower her guard of Twenty First Century cool. It’s Dad, the thirst for a beer raging in his throat, sleep in his eyes, driving like the filth, all concern and uprightness, adrenalin masking his conviction (come on, Dad, I can read you, I see it) that, basically, he’s done his bit on this one, now he’s just putting in time. It’s me, happy to chuck a petrol-bomb on any blaze, hungry, always hungry, for the details of my
life to burn more brightly, alive to the crackle and fizz and pop on the wires tonight as we tear through Devon on a mission from God. Who gives a fuck what anyone else is doing? We’re the action now, we’re hooked into life’s bubbling hotpot, we’re going to let rip with a new scream just as some old sucker cops it elsewhere. Listen to those jungle drums.

  ‘God, he thinks he’s bloody Jesus Christ again!’

  Jessie’s voice calls up to me as she elbows my ribs. I am standing, arms outstretched, my head sticking up through the sunroof as I fly into the night. It’s beautiful up here, the wind burns my skin, tears drag over my eyes, smearing stars into wet ribbons in the sky.

  ‘Good, is it?’ Jessica asks, pulling herself up into the gap beside me and scratching my arm with her nails in the process.

  ‘I can’t see a bloody thing behind me,’ Dad says, his voice below us, far away. We must be blocking his rear vision. ‘But that’s all right, I’ll find a low bridge somewhere, that’ll sort you two out.’ ‘Slow down,’ Mum says, holding her stomach. ‘They’re getting closer.’ What are? Oh, yes. ‘And Jessica, Tom – sit down!’

  ‘In a minute,’ Jessie answers for both of us. ‘This is brilliant. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.’

  I wish she hadn’t said that.

  It’s like a replay goal, perfect slow motion, every movement already determined, impossible to escape. Jessie is standing beside me, cropped hair erect in the warm rush of wind, wraparound shades still hiding her eyes. Our feet jostle for position on the Bentley’s back seat. We balance precariously, leaning forward, a twin-headed creature riding through the night, our necks wide open to a guillotine slice from the lip of the sunroof.

  The road is clear, climbing steadily through low-rise woodland to a hill, nothing dramatic, no real peril to compensate for the lack of red traffic lights to beat, no drunken arseholes gunning at you from hidden side streets or negotiating one-way circuits the wrong way. At Mum’s request Dad has momentarily slowed the car, but can stand the gut-grinding distress of the Bentley at low speed no longer and is already letting his foot edge back down on the accelerator. My mother, beside him, has slumped in the seat, her knees crammed up in front of her, both hands resting on the mountainous belly where her seat belt (I know what is coming) should be.

  We are almost over the hill. The trees on either side bend over backwards to give themselves – and us – some space, some air. Stoned by the heat, Jessie and I let out jungle cries, bird shrieks, monkey calls which Mum and Dad can’t hear. ‘EEEEIIIRRK!’ we scream, competing to split each other’s eardrums. ‘AAAARRCH!’ Then, in unison, as the car reaches the top and we see what lies ahead, only a few yards away: ‘SHHIIITT!’

  There is a tree across the road, a big one, big enough to block both sides. Dad hits the brakes, but to those of us poking vulnerably out of the sunroof, it’s clear he hasn’t a hope in hell of stopping. We drop, Jessie and I, but we are not fast enough. We miss the worst option – decapitation – but as we dive back into the inner space of the decelerating car, it punches into the fallen tree, throwing my head against Jessica’s shoulder in a spasm of pain and light.

  ▪

  Not my first thought, but almost my first, is to wonder how Mum is. My head feels mushy, like battered fruit, but only on the inside. I could throw up if it wasn’t for the effort it would take. Jessie is leaning forward, clutching her shoulder, trying to reach between the seats to Mum. Dad, I see in lurid nausea colors as I pick myself up, is conscious but holding his neck at a weird angle and working his jaw as if trying to click something back into place. My own bones all seem to have taken a trip independently of the others.

  ‘Mum—’ Jessie says, before I can.

  ‘Sonia,’ Dad says. ‘Christ . . .’

  Her eyes are open. There is a trickle of blood from one corner of her

  mouth. She is crying through clenched teeth, sobbing hard and long, leaving the tears to run with the blood and sweat.

  ‘Help me,’ she says, heaving on the seat to raise herself a little.

  ‘Mum—’ I say.

  Then she lunges forward, letting out a scream that scares me shitless. Dad reaches across, but he looks as panicked as I feel.

  ‘No, leave me,’ she says as he tries to move her. She is panting, whimpering, doglike. ‘Leave me!’ She looks back at Jessie and me. ‘I’m OK.’ She tries to crack a smile, but her face looks swollen and bruised. ‘It’s started. Just give me a minute.’

  It takes two hours. Two hours of stuff I know nothing about. Two hours of what sounds like hell. I never knew it was such hard work. Those films they show you, of the hump-bellied woman, legs apart, beaching a gunk-smeared nipper then smiling into camera, don’t show the half of it. It hurts, I see that now. It hurts bad. Coming into this world is clearly on a par with bursting the sound barrier – and if you’re the mother, you are the sound barrier! And there was I thinking it was going to be like Bambi.

  It’s complicated by our situation. We are stuck on the road, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, a huge great bloody tree blocking our path, the car knocked about a bit, all of us badly shaken, probably suffering from shock (I know I am), with a woman who is now in the throes of giving birth. It could be worse. It could be raining. Instead, the sun has decided to stir, the birds are screaming blue murder at one another, and already it is so hot that I’ve stowed my damp and fragrant T-shirt in the back of the car.

  Jessie and I hang around outside for most of the time. Her shoulder isn’t too bad, though she has some things to say about the rocky consistency of my skull. More seriously, her sunglasses are broken and there is nothing she can do about it. If we ever get to hospital, she’s going to be in trouble.

  Dad has already inspected the tree and given up on it. I’m not surprised. It’s an oak and about the size of two London buses laid end-to-end. What’s astounding is what it took to tear this bugger from the earth. A net-work of cracks extends from the crater where its roots used to be, as if the ground suddenly retched and shook and spewed this thing up. It’s the heat, this country can’t take it. Even the land is cracking up.

  Mum is grunting powerfully from the car as I stand staring at the roots, watching fleshy, leggy things crawl over the parched fibers, out of their element. My mother’s pain worries me, but what can I do? I’m thinking about football, maybe it’s a reaction, a defense mechanism. There’s been no traffic, not a car on the road as yet, Jessie has gone back to ours to speak to Dad, and I’m thinking about football. I was watching a DVD of the 1986 World Cup before I went to bed this evening – earlier this evening, tonight, whatever, before I got up again for this gig. Not the final, but the crucial England-Argentina quarterfinal, which we fucked up as always. What wankers! We never pull out the stops until it’s too late, no wonder luck and the refs never shine on us. On screen, you can watch and watch Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal and, fuck it, you just know that if one of our boys had scored that way, he would have owned up. We’re strong on appearances, we Brits, I think we use it to mask something else – a lack of passion maybe, a deep-seated sneakiness that’s always liked putting the boot in where the bruises won’t show. We should have kicked the Argies anyway.

  Jessie comes over. ‘Dad wants us to find a phone and call for an ambulance.’

  ‘Is Mum all right? Has it happened yet?’

  ‘Moron. We would have told you.’ Would they? ‘But we ought to get someone here, a doctor or something.’

  ‘It’s going to be dead easy, finding one of those around here.’ ‘Well, let’s try.’

  ‘We’ll probably meet some nutter who’ll rape us both and bury us in a ditch. Devon’s full of wonderful people.’

  But as we turn to go, we hear the first sign of civilization in ages

  – a lorry straining up the hill behind us, out of sight. Terrified that it’s going to come rolling over the top and straight into our family group, we run to flag it down. It’s moving on overdrive, a massive articula
ted Eurotruck which makes even the fallen oak look small. We stand in front of it, forcing the driver to stop, almost blown off our feet by the hiss of hydraulic brakes.

  The driver gets out, jabbering. He is young, tanned, French, wearing the kind of vest they just don’t sell over here. His companion follows, heavier-set, another Gauloise-smoking-beach-bum-muscle-prick. They both have arms like weightlifters. I can feel Jessie’s hormones humming beside me as she appraises them; I bet the boys are loving the shot of her navel they’re getting where her T-shirt doesn’t meet her jeans.

  Jessie’s French is a lot better than mine – I don’t have any – so she takes the lead. Predictably, it’s her they want to speak to anyway. They follow us, prattling and watching her arse quite blatantly in front of me, as we go over the hill back to Mum and Dad.

  The one word I recognize as we all come face to face with the tree and the battered Bentley is ‘Merde!’ The lads are clearly impressed. Either they haven’t been listening to Jessie or she’s got something wrong, because when they see Mum lying across the front seats of the car, her bare feet jammed against the doorframe, her sweat-soaked maternity dress barely covering the rain forest between her legs, they actually look embarrassed. Of course, I am too – a bit – and not just because they are here. Mouths which moments before had smirked with Gallic lust suddenly hang open, unsure of the ground rules for this sort of thing in Protestant Britain.

  ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,’ says my father, who is attending to Mum in much the same manic way he does to the car’s engine when it gives out – without a clue. ‘Any chance you could help?’

  Jessie has cooled noticeably with the French boys in front of Mum’s sprawled helplessness (or does she just feel they’ve had enough encouragement, I don’t think Jessie turns off ever), but Dad takes over, babbling fluently in the way that always makes me feel out of it. God, I hate French at school – not just the language, but their whole prissy Paris Match culture. They’d let a dog fuck their country if they could carry on looking chic.