The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Alexander Stuart

  ‘I’m unhappy.’ My voice sounds strange in the closed environment of the carriage. I don’t know why I’m telling her. It won’t make any difference to either of us.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve never been this unhappy.’

  She works her toes, poking her finger and thumb into the nylon,

  forcing a channel to touch the tiny cunt between each one. ‘I can understand that.’

  Can you? Thank you, sister.

  ‘Sonny will sort you out.’

  The train moves again.

  ▪

  Clapham North. We come out of the tube and set off on foot, Jessie leading the way, looking oddly at home here – I didn’t know this was her territory. We cross the road from the station, running in the path of a huge articulated truck which deafens us with a slow wail of its horn, the narrowness of our escape showing me a picture of Jessie dead – by my hands not the truck.

  I don’t know death, but it doesn’t seem so far away. The Prick’s mother died, but she was just someone from my childhood. She was a grandmother, a warm presence at Christmas, someone who hugged me, but she was old and smelt of oldness and old perfumes, she was a bit dead already.

  Jessie walks in front of me now, the truck forgotten, wearing black stockings, a short tartan skirt and the jacket from last night and I think about her stiff, cold, still. Her body would look sad, dead – I would have to join it, to follow her; I think I’d float her in a bath and climb in beside, slopping water over the top, using her cocaine blade to slice little chunks off myself under the surface.

  I know I want to kill them, but it worries me sometimes whether I can. Killing Dad will be a struggle – his surprise, his resistance, his refusal to bend to anyone else’s will. I’m smaller than both of them, though not much smaller than Jessie, but I’m expecting a superhuman strength. The thing that frightens me most is not being able to finish them off. I know I can start it, but can I keep it up – if I use a knife will I lose my nerve once it’s in, will I do one and not the other, or will I just fall back when they try to fight me off and collapse in a corner regretting my whole fucking life?

  We walk to Brixton, my eyes on Jessie’s legs, the side of her head, the heat and the movement around us. An army tank rumbles down Railton Road, charging along, clearing everything in its path, an army goon standing up in the turret, imagining himself in Kabul, Mosul, Tehran – somewhere where he can open fire on the bastards.

  A bunch of schoolkids watch him from a wall, turning up their boombox and jeering, sticking their heads into plastic bags and sucking the nitrous oxide in, or whatever it is, chucking the petrol bombs in their brains instead of on the streets. Three Muslim men walk toward us, a huge dog on a leash tugging at one of them, a woman walking beside him in full chadur. Her veiled eyes stare at Jessie as if she can’t decide, but then she does and turns away.

  ▪

  We cross and head up toward Herne Hill, the traffic at a standstill, the sky a chemical green, hot, threatening rain. A bus has broken down and a ripped seat has been stuck out on the road behind it. Fat women with prison faces wheel shopping trolleys in and out of the legs, the litter, the broken pavement slabs. A businessman walks in the street shouting obscenities at the thin air. Cracked toilet bowls and stained sinks are piled outside, offered for sale. An ancient poster of Bush with ‘World’s No.1 Terrorist’ in bold letters across it is plastered across a closed Post Office door.

  Jessie leads me up a side street, past the razor-wire-topped fence of a dismal school playground, down the side of two houses and through a rickety back garden gate to a kitchen door. She knocks and we wait but no one answers. She tries it and it’s locked, but Jessie seems to be expecting this. She stands back and aims her foot at the bottom righthand panel and kicks. The first kick doesn’t do it, so she kicks again and then twists the handle and the door pushes inwards, jamming on a mat.

  We go inside the kitchen, a pisshole of a place with cups and dishes stacked up alongside rusty housepaint pots and rags. The walls are peeling and damp and the floor is covered with grit and bits of rubble where something has recently been smashed. Jessie takes me through the house, up the stairs to a landing with three locked doors. She tries one, but this time when it doesn’t give she leaves it and takes me back down to the kitchen. So far we’ve hardly said a word since we left the tube. She starts digging in the cupboard under the sink and asks me something I don’t catch.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, “Coffee?”

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  She finds some, and retrieves a kettle from behind a black plastic

  rubbish sack. She fills it and puts it on to boil, tipping coffee from the jar into two of the cups and hunting around for something to stir it with. I watch her, thinking she’s a stranger, wishing she was, wishing she was just someone I’d met who’d brought me back here – then, even if she was meeting the Prick and I was going to watch, it wouldn’t be so bad, the betrayal would seem almost normal.

  ‘Will you tell me something?’ I say as she pours hot water on the coffee and stirs it with a discolored spoon.

  ‘No milk.’ She holds out a cup.

  ‘Did you fuck Dad last night?’

  The cup burns my hand. I let it. Jessie leans against the sink and looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, but I think she wishes she could be rid of me, her eyes have that hard look. It’s not hard enough, though

  – she doesn’t want it enough to do anything about it. I’m just making her life more difficult.

  Then we hear the front door open. It slams shut and someone mounts the stairs. Jessie calls out ‘Sonny?’ and dumps the coffee down and vanishes into the hall. I tip mine into the sink, regretting coming, feeling that even by going along with Jessie this much I am weakening my drive, dragging out the inevitable, but I’m desperate to taste what it is that’s so all-powerful, that’s rammed the Prick into Jessie with no regard for anything – what sex is. I’d rather do it without Jessie’s interference, but there’s not time. I don’t care how it happens, how anything happens. I don’t care.

  ▪

  At the top of the stairs a door is open and in it stands a beautiful black girl who has one hand on Jessie’s neck. They are leaning back from each other, taking each other in, staring at each other in a way that doesn’t surprise me one bit, though it’s something I understand almost without understanding. She is stunning. My heart sinks at the thought that I’m the joker here again – she’s Jessie’s girlfriend, why bring me?

  – but Jessie must know something, she’s promised me this payment, this bribe.

  Sonny is taller than both of us. Her legs – long, slender, shiny – disappear into a strange frilly outfit that’s like a 1950s bathing suit and I can’t take my eyes off them, their length, their color, their finely honed muscularity – like my mother rather than Jessie: Sonny is someone who works on her body.

  She catches me looking, hovering still at the top of the stairs, and scowls, spinning her eyes to Jessie then me then Jessie and back again.

  ‘Definitely related!’ she says with a slow laugh and some kind of wonderful mixed South London accent.

  She shows us into her room, which is stacked high with magazines and newspapers and dominated by a huge canvas, unmistakably the same style as the picture of Jessie, this one a six-paneled group scene of floating women’s and men’s torsos, the women all loaded with tits and the men’s dicks each bloating into a goldfish bowl.

  ‘Sit down, boys and girls,’ Sonny says, standing in the doorway where we’ve passed her, staring at us, staring at me, the door still open. Her eyes are liquid and yet I feel like I’m being medically examined, sliced up and peeled apart, searched for further evidence of closeness to Jessie.

  ‘How have you been?’ Jessie asks, sitting on a mattress in a corner of the room, picking up a monstrous bone-crushing glossy magazine and opening it.

  ‘I’m good.’

  Sonny shuts the door and turns away from us, walk
ing through into what looks like a tiny kitchen and loo combined. I sit on a chair and watch her legs while her back’s to us, feeling sick with myself just for being here, for getting excited like this, getting a hard-on.

  ‘I’ve just seen Jazz,’ she says, bending to open a midget fridge, my eyes following the line of her thighs to the two fingers of blue polkadotted bathing suit that meet where she meets under the frills. She turns and peers over her shoulder. ‘I’m getting a car, can you believe that? I’m going to be driving!’

  She comes back into the room with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. ‘Here,’ she says, giving them both to me. ‘You’re the man.’ And she laughs.

  ‘If the car is from Jazz,’ Jessie says, turning the pages of the magazine, her legs no doubt losing all feeling beneath its weight, totally ignoring me as I struggle with the bottle, ‘I wouldn’t count on doing too much driving.’

  ‘No, it’s great, I’ve seen it.’ Sonny flits back into the kitchen, a thick, flower-sweet perfume wafting from her. ‘It’s wheels, anyway. A car with no name. And no owner. Probably has different number plates front and back—’

  ‘If it has them at all.’

  ‘—if it has them at all.’

  Sonny emerges with two glasses and a paper cup. She puts them down in front of me and shoots me another fierce scowl as I struggle on with the cork.

  She retreats over to a small stereo system on a table by the window and turns on a CD. Something old comes on, music I know but can’t place – old American city music, conjuring up grainy black and white YouTube videos of summertime ghettoes, burning tenements, spouting water mains and beatings from visored cops.

  Sonny sits on the bed next to Jessie. ‘Martine’s been messing me about again,’ she says, leaning her arm and chin affectionately on Jessie’s shoulder, so that a thought I’ve been fighting since the first moment I saw them together returns with a vengeance – the physicality of their relationship, another part of her world that she’s kept me out of, another dimension to Jessie that seems to diminish rather than increase what truth I know about her. ‘She is so immature.’ Sonny pulls back and seems to study Jessie’s ear. ‘She has a real nigger attitude, you know what I mean?’

  ‘She’s a cow.’ Jessie turns and I hardly recognize the look: jealousy, a kind of one-sided hostility that expects to bite more than get bitten.

  ‘I know you don’t like her…’ Sonny leans back and gets her cigarettes and a mirror and a paper sachet. ‘But she’s beautiful when she’s not coming on like some smug self-satisfied bitch.’

  I finally manage, flushed and straining, to force the cork out of the bottle and pour with a shaking hand two glasses. I hand them over with a stupid terror: I am headed toward oblivion, yet here I am, desperate before a stunning black dyke whom I’d love to fuck but whose only interest in me is probably as some sort of cat toy for her and Jessica.

  ‘Do you have any beer?’ I ask.

  ‘Beer!’ she screams. ‘Look in the fridge.’ And without missing a beat, to Jessica: ‘You look great.’

  ‘So do you.’

  I go to the fridge, which is almost empty, but there are two cans of beer there, so I take one and hold back a moment, drinking it and glancing at the toilet, the basin Sonny uses as a sink and the postcards covering the wall, dozens of them, some just straight-on shots of ugly hotels, others more touristy, exotic.

  There’s a couple of art cards and a bunch of pictures of Sonny and friends, and a picture I recognize of Jessie when she was about nine or ten, which freaks me out: it’s like seeing a part of my childhood pinned to a foreign wall in a dream. Then I see a shot of Sonny naked, bending over and peeking between her legs while a white girl who’s also naked except for a Fulham FC hat rests a long spirit-level on her arse.

  The two women together look somehow complete, like the Prick and Jessie, like the rest of the world, enjoying things I know nothing about. I stare at Sonny’s tiny ridge in the photograph and the black hair and her dark brown skin and the pinkish lips and feel she’s expecting me to look at this, or Jessie is – it’s all part of the game and I’m determined to break it, to not be a part of it.

  ▪

  I go back through. Sonny and Jessie are laughing at some private remark and doing coke, so I walk right over to them and say to Jessie, ‘This is boring, I’m leaving.’

  And Sonny looks up at me, dabbing her tongue with the coke on her finger, and says, ‘No – wait. Have a toot. Relax.’ Then to Jessie, ‘Does he?’ And me again: ‘It gets better. I’ve got toys to play with.’

  Her mouth is in my eyes as I look away – wide, smiling – and I know she resents my presence, whatever she pretends, but something about the curve of her accent as she says ‘toys’ sparks a dull electric charge in my gut and in my prick, and maybe the coke will numb it, will help me just to stop caring, so I crouch over the mirror and snort, feeling cold, wishing I could bash Jessie now – and Dad and Sonny – and crawl into that lifeless bath with her.

  Sonny leans across to reach a small cupboard door with a key in the lock. Her thighs are virtually in my face now as I hover over the mirror and I can smell her skin, the focused finger-point of her perfume, but it’s Jessie she’s leaning on, Jessie her blue frills are crushed against, Jessie she wants to touch. The key is just out of reach and as she gets up to go to it, their eyes meet. ‘You think he’ll like them?’

  ‘Tom’s up for anything, aren’t you, Tom?’ Jessie says, rescuing the magazine that Sonny’s been sitting on, pushing it at me. ‘Have you seen this?’

  I take it, hefting its weight, and sit on the floor and stare at the ad it’s open at. A large photograph of Sonny, the full height of the page, confronts me with what looks like Paris in the background, and the brand name of a high-end tequila.

  ‘Fueling the capitalist machine,’ Sonny says dismissively, glancing over as she turns the lock. ‘But fucking it too.’ She grins. ‘A dozen crates of that stuff and you could overturn an economy – shit!’ The door is jammed and she has to brace herself against the wall to pull it open.

  My head is starting to feel sharp as Sonny unloads the cupboard, kneeling by it and removing weird solid shapeless white objects that I find I can focus on to the exclusion of everything else. I stare at them where they litter the floor around Sonny’s knees and feel a kind of ruthless certainty that I’m going to screw her, whatever she’s interested in. She struggles to lift a larger, heavier one, swinging it onto the floor closer to me, and suddenly it’s obvious – this last one has hips and thighs attached and rests on its arse, the legs reaching out into space then stopping where they’re cut off.

  ‘My pussy collection!’ Sonny confirms, and Jessie pisses herself laughing. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘It’s brilliant,’ I tell her, not really sure what to say, but not caring either. I’m going to fuck her. ‘You do a lot of those?’

  ‘They’re like beautiful sea creatures,’ Jessie says, picking one up and fingering it. ‘Where’s mine?’

  ‘It’s here,’ Sonny says, finding it and passing it to her. She turns to me, her voice deepening and sounding grand as if she wants to convince me, though I know she’s taking the piss, too. ‘These are a national art treasure. To redress the balance. I take plaster casts of my friends –’ a glance at Jessie ‘– and one day when I’m ready, I’m going to dump them all on the Royal Academy.’

  ‘The Royal A-cunt-omy,’ Jessie corrects, handing me hers.

  ‘Right.’

  I turn Jessie’s cast over in my hand and feel a chill.

  It’s all there, all the detail of her cunt and arse, Dad’s playground, like a relic that will be left when they’re dead. I feel her watching me and stare at Sonny, who seems to be enjoying this, sitting on her heels with the big sculptured torso between her legs, the white of the plaster a shock against the smooth brown of her thighs. She runs a finger down the tract in the middle, stroking the molding with a tiny circling motion performed deliberately for me.

&nbs
p; ‘This one’s mine,’ she says and I see Jessie watching me still, drinking her wine.

  ‘Show it to him,’ Jessie says, putting the glass down.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘No, I mean show it to him,’ Jessie repeats, getting up off the mattress and onto her knees.

  She looks at me and with total confidence puts her hand on Sonny’s groin, sliding the plaster torso aside and slipping her fingers under the tight blue polka-dotted gusset of Sonny’s outfit and pulling it back, stretching it taut to reveal – what? Black bristles, pinky-brown lips, a sort of affronted vertical gasp that opens and closes again as it adjusts to Jessica’s pressure on it.

  My eyes fly between Sonny’s cunt and her face, wanting to look but wanting to look away, too – Jessie is playing with both of us, but we’re letting her, we could stop her if we had the will.

  ‘Tom’s interested all right, aren’t you?’ she says, grinning at me and resting her other hand on Sonny’s shoulder, massaging her neck. ‘He likes to look.’

  ‘You ever seen one of these before?’ Sonny asks, and the flash of her eyes convinces me that I do hold some interest for her – as Jessie’s brother, as a sort of male extension of Jessie. ‘Chocolate fudge split.’ She draws the words out, accentuating them, and suddenly I realize I’m more embarrassed by her reference to her color than I am by staring between her legs.