‘You’re either feeling guilty or you’re groveling and it’s a sickening sight,’ I tell her in one of my more foul-tempered moments locked inside the cottage’s storm-blackened gloom.
But Jessie is unreachable. ‘You’re not handling this well,’ she says. ‘It’s like pain. Go with it. Enjoy the punishment. You have to want denial. Otherwise it’s boring.’
The ultimate sin. Nothing is boring for Jessie, she won’t allow it. I don’t even know if she cares about not seeing Nick or if pretending she doesn’t is a way of double-thinking Dad, making him feel more uneasy than if she were fretting over the situation. If Dad is what’s important to her, she’s not showing it – unless she is by not showing it. Maybe she’s sucking up to Mum to freak him out? I don’t know. I just know she is not my invention. Lucy, I might have managed, but Jessie, no way. I couldn’t invent her. She cannot be another part of me because I haven’t got it, I don’t have her cool, it’s all head-on confrontation for me – but Jessie, life bends to meet Jessie’s will, life is something she strokes until it comes.
14
Day five of the life sentence. Late afternoon. It’s rained all day but suddenly the sun has come out and it’s hot, so Jessie and I have set ourselves up outside. She’s got her ghetto blaster
playing endless bloody reggae and I’ve erected three deckchairs because Mum is going to join us, we all want reconciliation now. Dad is inside, intermittently screaming down the telephone at his London office, barricaded inside the living room against what is apparently a real crisis, as opposed to the crises which occur once a month. He still loves it, fuck him. He loves the attention, even if it comes as trouble.
Jack is wailing upstairs and Jessie has gone to sort him out, all part of the war effort. Mum flaps down the kitchen step, having failed to find the other wooden sandal she’s been searching for, and sits next to me, impressed to find me reading.
‘What’s it about?’ ‘It’s about death. Drilling holes in your head.’ Actually it’s about cricket, but even that seems like a form of death right now.
‘Why don’t you read the books I buy you?’ Mum sips the drink she has brought out with her. I know there is nothing I could read that would shock her. I bought The Story of O when I was ten, but her only reaction was that I’d find it too intellectual.
‘Because you buy me books I don’t want to read.’
Jessie appears with Jack’s carrycot and hovers over us, supporting it awkwardly with one hand underneath, the other holding the straps.
‘Do you think if we put a towel underneath it, it would be dry enough?’ she asks, dragging the grass with her bare feet and finding it wet despite the sun.
‘Wait a minute,’ says Mum and she goes off to get a bath towel, which I could have done only I’m not into Jessie’s play-ball-with-thescrews number.
‘You know Jack’s secret?’ Jessie asks as Mum returns, spreading our ropiest towel on the ground in the shade of one of the chairs. ‘He wants to be at the center of everything all the time. He was screaming because he was upstairs on his own. The best place for him would be in with Dad, listening to the bullshit.’ She sits down. Mum is fussing over Jack, who throws an ugly glance in my direction. Jessie pouts at him, pulling her T-shirt over her head to point her brown tits at the sun. ‘He’s totally sweet.’
‘He’s part of the same disease that we are,’ I say, staring at Jessie’s skin which is dark, foreign, usable – not like my prissy English anemia.
But Mum and Jessie ignore me, Jessie turning up the Rasta music she uses like a drug so that Mum can’t even hear me. Mum sits down again, stretching her legs out and reaching for her glass. There’s a dead fly floating where the ice cubes have melted but she doesn’t seem to care.
‘You drink too much,’ I shout above the noise, looking for an argument, conversation, anything. ‘You and Dad. You’re always drinking.’
She smiles, puts the glass down beside her. ‘Are you surprised? It’s parenthood. You try it.’
‘Jessie’ll get there first at the rate she’s going,’ I say, suddenly struck by the horror of the thought – I wasn’t thinking specifically of Dad, but what if his sperm made a baby inside her? No, Jessie takes micro-estrogen or something. Does she? I’m not sure. Anyway, no one listens.
I stare at the book in my lap. I’ve got my swim shorts on and there’s a boil on my thigh just where the corner of the book is touching it, headless, the muck spread out under the skin in a welt, impossible to squeeze. Jessie talks to Mum over the grinding reggae, every track the same, and I tie a line between the rotting cells in my leg and the tree by the collapsing stone wall at the end of the garden. It had leaves less than a week ago and now it’s dead. The few that are left are grey and yellow at the edges, their texture turned to paper. We’re not halfway through August and something’s wrong, not just with my life but with all the systems, natural, man-made, whatever. Or is it me, am I the only one, is everyone else having a ball?
‘Penelope’s brother is selling his car,’ my sister informs my mother as Jamaican poverty thumps out of Chinese plastic on a Devon lawn. ‘It’s a brilliant soft-top Morris, lime green, you saw it when she came to pick me up that day. Do you think there’s any chance—?’
‘Yes?’ My mother sounds only half interested. She has her eyes closed; she looks beautiful like that, vulnerable.
I sit musing over how Jessie came by that particular piece of information about Penelope’s brother since we’re banned from using the phone and she hasn’t been checking her email as far as I know. But Jessie always has ways.
She scratches one armpit, then on down to a rubbery nipple. She looks at me. I look away. ‘Well, Dad said that when I can drive next year, you’d get me a car. I know it’s a bit early, but it’s the only one like it, I used to see it all over London, you could spot it everywhere, I don’t think they can clamp it. It’s perfect.’
She waits. Mum doesn’t open her eyes, but she tilts her head in Jessie’s direction. ‘I wouldn’t mention it at the moment if I were you,’ she says. ‘Not quite yet.’
And Jessica bites a finger, running her teeth thoughtfully up and down it in the absence of anything else, timing this conversation perfectly, helped by the insistent distraction of a driven black voice intoning a song which seems to consist entirely of listing the chapters and verse of the Old Testament. It doesn’t ring true. She doesn’t. It’s as if she’s trying to react as she normally would in this situation, trying to reassure Mum that she’s got the same preoccupations as any girl her age – any spoilt middle-class brat, as we both are.
‘Do you think Dad means it about Nick?’ she goes on, closing her eyes now, screwing them up as she faces the sun. I move my legs, impatient with her, and knock my book on the grass, tipping Mum’s drink over.
‘You know your father as well as I do,’ Mum says, watching me right her glass and not offer to get more. The music rocks on, music to praise Haile Selassie to, music to start a riot to. ‘You haven’t mentioned Nick before, have you? What’s he like?’
Jessie frowns, eyes still closed, the toes of one foot clenching and unclenching on the ground, wearing away at the grass, digging a hole with her big toe. I get up.
‘He wasn’t interesting before,’ she says
▪
And upstairs I’m on my own. Dad is shut away below me arguing over steel or titanium cladding or something, dredging out the drawings and files that had been dumped in the musty understairs cupboard when we arrived here. Mum, Jessica and Jake are safe outside, baking now that we’re back to fission heat, not likely to move except to pee and, later, get dinner. I’m on my own and I know what I’m doing. I’m not a victim, I’m not going to be a victim, I’ve got to take this matter in hand. Jessie is confident about every situation, except sometimes she’s not, just occasionally there’s a chink in her armor when she thinks she’s not beautiful, when she thinks she’s not blessed, when the world falls apart and she can’t fight it and she’s alone and anonymous
and the smallest thing could crush her, reduce her to nothing, a hole, a mistake, a blob of human fear. I know that feeling – I can’t say I have it all the time, but I’m familiar with it, far more so than her, and it’s because of that that I’m still frightened by the possibility that Dad may be the one, that Jessie is wrong, this is his sickness. I don’t know which is worse, whether I want them both to be guilty, or one, or whether I really think they’re guilty or sick at all. So far they haven’t hurt me, not reached out and torn my skin, burrowed into my head with a power drill. They’re in my head but it’s all inside, it hasn’t broken through the bone yet one way or another – and it’s what happens when it does that worries me. But maybe it’s not sick, maybe Jessie’s right, there shouldn’t be any boundaries. Maybe incest is safe sex in the world of AIDS.
But I’ve got to move forward, I can’t just sit back and let it all run away from me. I need to know what’s happening, it’s worse not knowing. And at the moment, I don’t know. At the moment, Dad and Jessie are playing charades for Mum’s benefit, and maybe for mine – does Dad know I know? Jessie won’t stop. Even if Dad started it, she won’t stop. However it started, this is too dangerous for her to want to give it up. I could see Dad chickening out – maybe – though he’s a lot like Jessie, she took his madness and amplified it. But not Jessie. I’ve got to stop it.
So I’m looking for clues. I’m alone in her room feeling a charge in my heart as scary as if I were committing a real crime. I’m sweating with the excitement, leaving little damp patches where my soles have been, but it’s too urgent to put some shoes on now or to grab some jeans to stop the trickles running down my legs. She’s a few feet away, diagonally down in the garden, and she’s extra-sensitive, Jessie. If I’m not careful, her antennae will prick and she’ll know better than me what I’m looking for and whether she has anything to fear from what I might find.
The room isn’t a mess but somehow it isn’t tidy either. I pass it all the time and yet now it feels more foreign than ever, I’m trespassing, I am the intruder. The bed’s rumpled and she’s left a pile of her jewelry in the middle of it, some of the stuff she makes herself – all spikes, teeth and coils, like a tribal punishment – and the rest is stuff that Mum has given her or men have given her or she’s stolen. Her cardboard boxes are all around the room, waiting to go back to London and art college, and there’s a new picture stuck on the window, cutting down on the light coming in through the small panes, giving the fleeting impression of a shrine. I haven’t seen it before and it’s amazing, a head-and-shoulders portrait of Jessie, clumsy, like a graffiti cartoon, yet it’s her, there’s something in the daubed mouth and slashed eyes which is Jessie when all the hunger’s there, when nothing is enough, she can’t push herself far enough. It’s signed ‘Sonny’ and there’s the Greek infinity symbol underneath the name. It makes me feel strange, that someone else can see her like that, paint her that clearly. It makes me feel as if she’s watching me now, watching my smallness as I slide out the drawers of the old dresser which still has the lace cover that was here when we came, part-buried now under a pile of Jessie’s make-up and CDs.
I go through the drawers quickly: two filled with clothes, nearly all black, some underwear, boxes of tampons, unopened packs of tights and ankle socks, a tin of oil pastels and scalpels, more make-up. The bottom drawer has a different character to it, stashed with Jessie’s shoes and belts and two packs of condoms and a pair of what look like elbow-length black rubber gloves that I didn’t know she had, plus a buff colored envelope which may be the treasure I am seeking – letters, information, evidence. But there’s nothing inside of much use, just some unwritten postcards from various galleries, empty envelopes with foreign postmarks and pointless messages scrawled in a variety of hands – ‘The burglar alarm just went off, LB’ ‘Keep crossing the Albert Bridge’ – and books of matches from cafés and bars I’ve never even heard of.
I shove it all back in and go back to the drawer above, drawn there suddenly by the tin of crayons and blades. It doesn’t fit somehow. I take out the scalpels and dig underneath, the crayons rattling against the box. There’s pencil shavings and other shit at the bottom, but there’s also a folded-up wadge of paper which when I open it out contains cocaine. I taste it. I’ve had it before – I think. I was never sure if it was the real thing. This seems to be, and this is something – the fact that Jessica keeps cocaine in her bedroom might be something, but it’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I’m looking. I fold it up and put it back, my tongue wiping my teeth, numbed.
The reggae pumps up from the garden again after a pause in which I die for a moment and Jessie changes CDs. I glance at the picture of her, which seems bored now, as if I’m wasting her time. I close the drawers of the dresser and look around, deciding that to go through the cardboard boxes is just an impossible task. Trying not to let the floorboards creak too much, I go down on my knees and peer under the bed, my ear and nose brushing against the slightly sour-smelling old rug which, like everything else, came with the cottage.
There’s nothing under there, just more shoes and a heap of Jessie’s paintings, all different sizes and scraps of paper piled up, the bigger ones on top sagging over smaller ones underneath. I pull them out, disturbing a spider which nearly scares the shit out of me. I would have left them where they were but the one on top is just weird. In fact, it’s a very dull picture by Jessie’s standards. No figures, no flesh, no pain. Most of Jessie’s pictures are like her – all impact. She wants to worry you, she wants to get you going. This one does, but in a different way. It’s just a railway line, wasteland, dingy houses, under a drunken mackerel sky – but it’s my railway line, my sky, my London. It’s like looking at a moment in time that was mine, not hers, and I’m fucked if I know how she knew about it. Jessie doesn’t see like this, I’m sure of it. She’s too busy being Jessie. So why did she paint it? Am I that transparent? Does she break into my thoughts while I’m asleep?
I quickly sort through the others to see if there are any more little surprises for me. The paper is mostly stiff with paint and smells funny, dry, powdery – memories of flames licking the art department stockroom. There are some houses on top, all done in Caribbean colors but without the brilliance of the head-and-shoulders of Jessie that Sonny or whoever it was did. Still, this all comes as news to me – I didn’t know Jessie did houses, I didn’t know that anything that couldn’t sweat or fuck interested her. There are a couple of collages in the middle, cut out from magazines, the images small and oddly disturbing, twisted and contorted in intricate patterns, but they’re nothing special. I almost give up, then I lift a crumpled and dog-eared sheet of dull green paper and underneath find gold, though it doesn’t look like gold – it doesn’t look like anything much at first. It’s a chalk sketch, the soft, grainy white lines leading nowhere until I realize that the scribbled mass is hair and the rest of it takes on a solidity that is a cock in close up, extreme close up, sort of halfway through raising itself, neither limp nor properly hard, the foreskin still folded hoodlike over the end.
It’s not just this one – one would be nothing – it’s what follows that freaks me out. To see a prick the way she sees it, and she’s really studied them. This is something she cares about, these pictures aren’t for effect, she wanted to get at something. There’s a whole stash of them and the detail turns me cold. It’s too much.
Whose are they? Is it all the same one? A couple have a hand in them, beautifully drawn, drawn better than I thought Jessie knew how. The prick – or pricks – are unidentifiable, but the hand is Dad’s. The skin is old, older than Nick’s or any of Jessie’s friends (unless she has some buzz for older men that I don’t know about, anything is possible), but the clincher is Dad’s ring, clearly visible, tight up against a familiarly swollen knuckle. The hand isn’t doing anything in one of the pictures, but in the other it’s holding the penis and that makes me sick. It’s posed, he sat there or lay there while she
sketched it, holding his dick for his daughter to draw. I’m stupid, I’m naive, I don’t know how the world works. Maybe all dads are like this? I don’t know him, maybe I don’t know anybody. There’s a gulf between us all – me and him, Jessie and me, Mum and me – but it won’t swallow me up like I want it to, it won’t open its jaws wide enough to take me in, it just makes me feel more outside. I can’t feel the horror enough, it’s a failure in me – I want it to hurt and it won’t. Not enough.
The music has stopped. I feel panicked again – Jessie could be on her way up here now. I leap up and cross to the window, the pictures heaped on the floor in two piles – the prick pictures and the others. Down in the garden, Jessie is still in her deckchair, sitting with Mum and Jake like a normal daughter, soaking up the sun. No danger. But there’s a fourth figure, the old woman from the village, standing by the wall on the road side, staring at Jessie’s brazen bare tits with evil eyes and cackling to Mum with words I can’t hear but can imagine. Mum is mediating in her best fashion, playing it quiet and slow, and Jessie’s obviously enjoying the old bint’s nuttiness, though she looks just a little uneasy.
The fact is, although the old woman is something of a local curiosity, she’s part of a trend. We’re not really liked here – not really. They’re polite and all that, but we don’t quite fit in, not even among the other aliens, the rebaptized city dwellers who’ve come to the country to renew their bigotry. We’re a little too odd, a little too private – already I know that I’m going to have to put up one hell of a show at school to convince them that I’m a real scum-bag, it’s something I’ve worked for, not simply my birthright. We haven’t taken down here as a family and, quite frankly, I’m not surprised.
The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 10