The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Alexander Stuart

  ‘I’ll take the fudge,’ Jessie says, rolling down a strap of Sonny’s suit and unpopping a tit which she immediately kisses. ‘And Tom can provide the cream.’

  ‘Oh God, Jessie,’ Sonny groans, dipping down to meet her face with her own and laughing. ‘You can get out of here right away. You know I’m not into that.’

  ‘But he’s my brother,’ Jessie croons in her ear. ‘Close your eyes and you won’t know the difference.’

  ▪

  I feel like a dumbo. I feel more excluded than ever – watching Jessie like this is almost worse than seeing her in the shelter, because this is her trick, her taunt, this is the absolute proof of her total control over me. I am not as strong as her, I have to take account of that – I should never have come along, I have to make her an abstract entity, something I can deal with at a distance, someone I can force through to a torturous death without entering into conversation.

  ‘I’m not your fucking puppet!’ I tell her, erupting out of my own thoughts into their snogging and pushing myself up, ready to kick them both where they are and get out of here.

  ‘Calm down,’ Jessie says sharply, pulling back from Sonny as if she can switch gear whenever she wants, we’re all just balls in her juggling act. ‘This is going to be worth it for you, I promise. You need to see, Tom, what your life is about. This is going to open your eyes totally.’ And she sounds for a moment like Mum wanting me to be there when the baby is born.

  Sonny looks at her, one tit hanging out, the dark brown nipple wet where Jessie has been chewing on it, and then she grins and starts rocking and singing, ‘It’s a fam’ly affair…’

  I feel shock for a moment and wonder how much she knows, but decide she’s just thinking about this, now, Jessie, me – though why it shouldn’t be more, I don’t know – maybe she’s totally clued up about the Prick, maybe she and Jessie get together and act out an all-girl version of their scenes, what do I know?

  Then Jessie takes Sonny’s hand and plants it on the fly of my jeans, jerking our strings some more, pushing Sonny’s fingers between the buttons, and I’m standing here – two good strides would take me out of the room – and I can’t leave: if I leave Jessie will think I’m scared. If I stay she’s won, but if I go she’s won too.

  Sonny’s hands pull my fly open with no great excitement – this isn’t where her interest lies – so I shift my anger to her, my mind drumming ‘I’m going to fuck you, whatever you want,’ over and over, as she uncovers my dick and holds it like a wet fish flapping in her palm.

  I grab her waist nervously, but I’m clumsy and knock her off balance, and she shoves me, angry for an instant, complaining, ‘Take it easy!’ But there’s a numbed simplicity to everything that must be the coke and I put my mouth to her tit where Jessie’s saliva is still damp, and see Jessie’s hands roll down the rest of Sonny’s bathing suit and linger in the space between her legs even as she warns me, ‘Treat Sonny gently, Tom – she’s got a fierce temper!’

  And they both laugh and Sonny turns around, virtually kneeing me in the groin as she thrusts my jeans down with her leg. Then she steps out of the frills Jessie is holding and over to the stereo, which has been quiet for some time. Jessie crouches in front of me, the only one of us who’s still fully clothed, and tugs my jeans over my shoes, glancing at my prick as if it’s some kind of toy version of my father’s

  – a cheap, molded plastic imitation. ‘Just be patient,’ she whispers at me. ‘Don’t blow it.’

  ▪

  Sonny slips a new CD in and goes through to the kitchen-loo, swaying to the music, totally relaxed and happily naked because of Jessie, not me. I crouch on the floor, my dick dangling pathetically, and watch her as she opens a drawer, her arse bobbing to the beat, her breasts dancing on their own, the nipples drawing a line across my brain like a flesh-brown jet trail.

  I feel condemned, the way I did in the tube, only different – dumped in a room – a music video set in a riot zone, only there’s no riot; another pathetic empty box where my life moves from A to B: this is where I experience sex, if you don’t count watching my father bugger my sister; this is where she looks on as I get my dick up some friend of hers whose cunt she no doubt knows better than I ever could.

  Sonny comes back through, clutching a handful of black plastic rubbish sacks, humming a sort of counterpoint to the music in a rich, clear voice. I stare at the dark ridge of her cunt as she walks toward me and think about the photo in the kitchen and Lucy – I wish this was Lucy and I was alone with her now – but then I’m distracted by the bags and wonder what the hell they mean as Sonny tells Jessie, ‘Help me spread them on the floor.’

  They lay them out, lifting the plaster cunts and using them as weights, then Jessie tells me to take my shirt off and lie down, but I crouch there not moving and watch as Jessie starts to perform for me with Sonny.

  ‘Go on,’ Jessie urges when Sonny, finding herself behind her, cradles her bum with the fur of her crotch, rubbing against the back of Jessie’s skirt with an exaggerated circling motion aimed, like both their eyes, at me. ‘This is Tom’s education, he needs to lose his fear. He doesn’t think women function like boys do, he needs to see how we work.’

  That’s not the truth and she knows it, I have other fears, other horrors, to haunt me – she has taken everything: all the love, all the feeling, all my worth.

  She eases around in Sonny’s grasp and draws Sonny’s head down to her skirt where Sonny’s hands have already been playing. They get down on to the floor and Sonny draws Jessie’s knickers off, casting them in my direction, where I gaze at a vague golden stain inside their front and at Sonny’s angular, high-boned face plunged between the elastic tops of Jessie’s stockings, lapping at her cunt.

  ‘Wait,’ Jessie says, her eyes not leaving me, her voice a little throatier than usual. ‘I want Tom to try this too. Lie down,’ she tells me, ‘so Sonny can sit on you.’

  And we all move around like fucking musical chairs – Sonny and I have surrendered all rights to our will, to our individuality. I am led by my prick almost literally, by an overpowering need to do it now even if it means I’m a total sad wanker – even if it means that whatever is left of my sense of righteousness falls apart next to Jessie’s because she is always so clear and unsentimental about what she wants.

  With the strange plasticky touch of a garbage sack under my head, Sonny sits on my face and Jessie stands over her so that our two tongues can work at once. The force of Sonny’s weight nearly blacks me out at first and I have to push her off and let my tongue strain uncertainly up into the arena above, my mouth and nose almost clogging with the sudden clash of tastes and smells – sharp, uriney, sweaty, then something sweet like jam.

  I open my eyes to Sonny’s chin and Jessie’s arse and skirt overhead and think, despite all my pathetic self-recriminations and doubts, that I can’t hold out, I’m going to come in a moment, and I don’t want it to be yet, not until I’m inside Sonny – but then she changes everything, lifting herself off me to examine the arm Jessie has just exposed from her jacket, saying, ‘What is that, honey?’ in a voice of real concern.

  It’s a put-up job, another one, it has to be. Everything is arranged, everything is planned. It’s all fiction – Jessie’s fiction, not mine. I lie here, some kind of rank, porky smell on my lips, and Sonny poised over me staring at the burn on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  ‘Tom did that.’

  ‘Tom?’ Sonny looks down at me in a new light.

  ‘You wanted it,’ I remind Jessie, feeling defensive suddenly, feeling

  very young, lying here naked with Sonny’s knees rooted firmly on either side.

  ‘You enjoy that, do you?’ Sonny asks.

  ‘Not particularly,’ I say. ‘No.’

  ‘What are we going to do with him?’ Sonny asks Jessie, settling her shins down into the flesh of my arms, her arse on my chest, so that I’d have to fight to move, and right now I seem to have lost any will to figh
t.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jessie is behind me, her knees edging on to the tips of my hair, tugging it painfully, but out of my line of sight even when I roll up my eyes.

  ‘I think we’ve got to do something,’ Sonny says, sitting hard on me, taking Jessie’s outstretched hand above my head and kissing her fingers. ‘Maybe he’ll enjoy this . . .?’

  And I feel a thin trickle, burning hot at first, start at my chest and run down to my armpit, followed by another running toward my neck. I hear the music playing and feel Jessie’s knees forcing down my hair and see the pouting, heavy lower lip of Sonny’s broad mouth as she gazes down at me with a kind of consternation, and realize that she’s pissing on me, she’s peeing all over me, lifting herself forward now so that my face is her target.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I manage, twisting my head sideways.

  ‘Taste that,’ she says, moving with me as I try to struggle out of range, spraying my cheeks and mouth. ‘It’s straight from the source.’

  ‘Drink it, Tom,’ Jessie tells me, ramming her knees onto my shoulders but keeping my face clear for Sonny. ‘You need this. It’s as natural as breathing, it will open all those strange, dark doors you keep locked.’

  I try to shut my mouth as hard as I’ve got my eyes shut but some of it gets in, I’ve got gulps of warm piss going down my throat and a taste on my tongue that’s flat and dry, making me swallow, my mind reeling with a sense of humiliation at Jessie’s hands – this is it, she has sealed our fate, all of our fates, she is no part of me, she’s just an animal I’m going to crush.

  Somewhere beyond the sick black walls of my eyes, the spurts die to a trickle and Sonny dumps herself back down onto my chest, crushing my ribs, twisting herself over me in a loose rhythm to the music that’s still playing. I feel the hem of Jessie’s skirt brush over my face as she moves forward, her knees cutting into me harder than ever, shooting veins of lightning across my head. I keep my eyes closed, hearing the music, feeling wet and uncomfortable all over, sensing the soft contact of their mouths and not wanting to live at this moment, not wanting to have to face them here in this room.

  ▪

  But Sonny’s not finished. ‘You’ve been a good little boy,’ she says, working her way down my stomach to sit on my dick. ‘You could get to like it as much as Jessie here—’

  And I open my eyes as Jessie takes herself off me and see Sonny lifting my prick and wedging it between her legs so that it sticks up as if it’s a part of her. ‘If only you didn’t have this thing.’

  And for a moment of blind panic I think they’re going to do something really crazy, like cut it off. I force myself up on to my arms, as far as I can go, but Jessie’s ready for me.

  She has a towel in her hands and in an instant it’s around my head, tight, gagging my mouth, locked around my throat, my brow, the rough, furry weave rubbing against my eyes, her knees pushing me back down.

  ‘Don’t struggle or I’ll pull it tighter,’ she says and for a curious, floating moment I’m back in our childhood together when we used to play games like this and sometimes take them too far. But this is now and we’re older – we aren’t playing.

  ‘Jessie, you cunt!’ I hear the muffled fear in my voice. ‘I’ll tell—’ But who am I going to tell? Mum? The Prick? This is just another corner of the web.

  ‘Is that a bad thing or a good thing to say about your sister?’ Sonny asks, tweaking my foreskin back painfully with her nails, then grabbing my flailing arms with her hands.

  ‘He loves me really,’ Jessie tells her. ‘That’s the thing he can’t stand. Listen—’ I can feel her face close to mine on the floor, her breath hot through the towel. ‘I’m going to live up to my part of the bargain

  – you’re going to get laid. Now you live up to yours. No running to Mummy or anyone else. No more watching or interfering.’

  For a moment I could almost convince myself that it is Sonny and her she is talking about, protecting the two of them, but that would be too simple, that would be no problem at all.

  ‘It doesn’t have to hurt anyone. It was never meant to—’ ‘ What—’ The towel tightens with the opening of my mouth, cutting a line across my neck, strangling my words. ‘What about me?’

  ‘It doesn’t have to hurt anyone else then, Tom. I’m truly sorry you found out, but try to understand. It’s not so foreign to you, admit it. Let me explore.’ She relaxes the towel where it’s garroting me, but only enough to let me breathe. ‘I know I can’t scare you…’

  One hand is on my head now, stroking my brow, the line of my hair through the cloth. ‘…so try to understand and…’ I listen to the words, trying to work out even now how much Sonny knows, whether it’s everything or if she’s totally lost, guessing or not caring what Jessie is talking about. Jessie’s hand abandons my hair, her voice retreating in space: ‘…sympathize a little.’

  There is an argument outside in the street, the abuse close through the open window. The music stops again and inside the room there is silence. I know Brixton is there, with its warring moods and its chemical sky and the nasty houses opposite – and London, which is no good either: it’s not interested in my protection. Somewhere, too, the Prick is with the Koreans – or has he brought them here, all of them, now, watching?

  ▪

  I lie on the plastic sacks, mummified, sucking insufficient air through the towel. My back is dappled with patches of Sonny’s urine, the bags sticky from my sweat where they’re not already wet. For a second Jessie moves off me and lets go of the towel. There is a movement, a suppressed whisper – which one of them, I can’t tell. I could tear the towel off my face, get up, but I’m dead.

  And then Jessie’s grip is back on it, tightening it over my eyes, my Adam’s apple, her knees shifting around, thumping my shoulders. I feel Sonny lower herself on to my penis and start to rock and this is it: I am in an anonymous wet hole, my body functions and I am the same as them – Jessica, the Prick, Sonny, Lucy.

  Killing will come like this, a brief spasm in someone else’s being.

  24

  The Prick drives us back. This time, Jessie sits in the front. The towel has grown onto my face, bonding with my skin, entangling my hair, choking me still – but shutting them out.

  It’s dark and it’s cold tonight and the car is the same one Jake was born in. Do they use it? The leather in the back is sharp where it’s torn and cuts against my fingers if I rub it right. It could tear little holes in Jessie where her stuffing would come out.

  I feel the city leave us, like a physical presence that hangs back, like Jessie’s and Sonny’s hands fingering the mask I have on, holding onto me but letting me slip through. I have been to London and nothing has changed. London is with them, not me. Like everything else, it fucks around. Life is what it is. Only if the car crashes through the central divide and slams sideways into the paired lights racing toward us will things be made more simple.

  In the timelessness of space, the Prick’s voice comes to me: ‘I spoke to your mother today.’

  The car drones. Lights sweep toward us, silhouetting a blurred image through the towel of his head and shoulders and hers next to him.

  ‘Jack managed a proper smile for the first time.’

  One push to his hands on the wheel. One.

  ‘She said she couldn’t find the video camera.’

  25

  Jack is sick and Mum is in the hospital with him. It happens the night after we come back, in the middle of sleeplessness, when I have patrolled the toytown village several times in

  my mind and uncovered the plot, the truth that Dad is mad and this is where they send him. Or we are all inmates, me especially, and everyone else is a warder watching every move – but just not closely enough. Hours pass and no one is sleeping, or maybe Dad and Jessie are. There is a sense of urgency, of unease, in the cottage; I hear noises as Mum moves from the bed to the cot to the kitchen and back again.

  I play the radio, headset on, and find only foreign stations broadca
sting to American soldiers, English farmers stationed in Africa, Dutch- and French- and Arabic-speaking insomniacs. The village feels at the edge of the sea now, it’s an island remote from the security of London, except that London has died in my imagination

  – I could have walked to London before in the pitch-black on bare feet just to enter the chaos, but now I would go there only to pour petrol over myself and light a match – to show it I don’t give a shit.

  I listen to a baseball game fading in and out from a lifetime away. I listen to an American preacher, his voice like the boom of Armageddon, talking about the Rapture and the Judgment of the Lord and His Justice, and I know that this man could build a pyramid in Docklands too, he could bugger his daughter, and if when the daylight comes the world is blistered and burning and sick, this man, this preacher, and my father, will be the only healthy ones left and they will take turns with Jessie as she tries to remember what she will not tell me: how it started.

  ▪

  Instead of sleep I feel nervy, unable to lie still, feeling my body spark and twitch at random. I take my headset off and move around the room, not wanting the light on, wondering who on the outside would be left to inquire after us if we as a family ceased to exist – if, when morning came, we simply were not here.

  I open the window more and breathe in the air and listen to what might be a cow, miles in the distance, and try to remember who I was only weeks ago and if that was the same life and the same me and wish I could go back.

  Mum startles me with my name, looking in the door and whispering, ‘Tom – I thought you were up. Jack isn’t well and I’m going to ring the hospital. Would you stay with him while Dad brings the car around?’

  Suddenly my sense of unease seems justified – something is happening, but divorced from my thoughts, something else that has nothing to do with the cartoon blackness of my mind. I go into my parents’ room, grateful to have something to do, and brush against the Prick on his way out. He looks worried, he has normal dimensions, he is not holding hands with the preacher – but still I can’t trust him. He takes his car keys off a chest of drawers and I stand over little Jack, who is red-faced and crying.