I watch Jack for a moment and feel his heat. He looks sick and I feel sorry for him and think maybe he’s not so strong and wonder how the hell he’s going to cope with everything he has to cope with, and then his head jerks and a spurt of vomit or something comes out of his mouth onto the blanket. I call out ‘Mum!’ not knowing what to do, but then Jessie’s here, pulling on a T-shirt, and we act as if we hardly know each other, she looks at me and I look at her and then she lifts little Jack on to his side and wipes his mouth.
This time, we don’t go with them. Mum has found blood in Jack’s nappy and the Prick drives her to the hospital because it’s faster than waiting for an ambulance to come. Mum’s eyes glisten as she carries Jack out to the car, and I realize I love her and that Dad and Jessie seem like actors in a hospital drama, another Australian soap, going through the motions of love but being driven further into lies with every moment. The car disappears into the darkness of the village – you can watch its lights dip down and up the hill – and I wonder if anything really exists, if there really is a hospital at the edge of this blackness or whether Mum and Dad and Jack have simply faded out to leave me and Jessie alone.
▪
The cottage is quiet, strangely dead with only us here. Jessie and I are still outside, shivering a little. My concern for Jack vanishes with the car headlights. He is there and Jessie is here and though I prevaricate and have internal debates and feel stupid some of the time and think normality is there – I can touch it, this horror is all in me, I’m the one
– I know that one thing is constant:
‘I’m going to kill you soon.’
She is just going through the door. She doesn’t even turn. ‘Oh, Tom – shut up.’ Her hair, which is about half an inch longer than it usually is, is flattened on one side and bent, like Dad’s is sometimes, so that she almost looks like a younger, female Dad for a moment.
‘Does he do it up your arse all the time? Is that the only way you like it? With Nick too? Is it only Sonny who can touch your twat?’
Her body stops and revolves on its base like a shop-window dummy to face me. The T-shirt she’s got on is too big for her and suddenly it seems to swamp her, but it can’t hide the nasty yet hurt look in her eyes, as if her only defense is attack. She might almost scratch her cunt. ‘You could if you wanted to.’
The words confuse me. I can’t cope with her, I should know that. ‘I don’t!’ I say hastily and close the door behind us, shutting us in.
‘You really are constricted, Tom.’
The cottage seems cold – like the cold cunt it is. This cottage bears a large part of the guilt for what has happened. I’d like to burn it. She stands, keeping me against the door. I twist a smile at her: ‘No I’m not. You’ve opened my eyes, haven’t you?’
‘Stop trying to psych yourself up for some negative act. It’s not in you.’ She turns away again.
‘Wait and see.’
‘You’d have done it by now.’
‘Sometimes people wait years.’
She’s at the stairs. She glances back. ‘You do what you want. We all will anyway.’ She starts up the first step. ‘But when I try to show you that you haven’t even begun to realize what you’re capable of, you shy away from it.’
‘You’re a slag, Jessie!’ I shout at her back. ‘A lying dyke slag! What you do with Dad isn’t special or anything – it’s sick. Even biologically, it’s sick. And Sonny’s just as sick as you are.’
She turns on me from the stairs. ‘Is that really what you think? Is that what your most profound and private feelings are – as predictable as that?’ She pities me from halfway up, arrested in midstep, one hand on the banister. ‘What’s your life about then? What the hell do you think your next sixty or eighty years are about? Why don’t you just go out and zap the nation with your mathematical skills or whatever you’ll be left with if you stay at one school long enough to learn anything? It’s perfect for you out there now – they like angry little bastards who want to nail everything down. I’ll tell you something, brother – despite all your anger, all that pissing about you get up to, essentially you want everything to be sweet. And it isn’t. If you could face up to that, maybe you could relax. The sweetness is the lie they put out to make us all slave harder. Nature isn’t sweet. I seduced Dad – not him me, whatever you may think – and no way was that sweet.’ She comes down a step, relishing this, enjoying her effect on me. ‘He stinks, Tom – he smells like no one else can. It’s like fucking our childhood, all I can smell is his bloody hot buttered toast first thing in the morning, every morning for the whole of my life. I used to sit on his lap, years ago, and press myself against the pencils he always kept in his shirt pocket, digging them deeper into my arm – I’ve still got the marks, little lead bruises. He was such a fucking prince, even at five I wanted to be his princess! Now I’m his dog.’ She smiles sadly at me as if she wants us to be in this together, us against him as it always was. ‘He made me and I’ve swallowed him whole – I don’t care what’s supposed to be, that is like fucking Creation! Otherwise everything goes on exactly the same.’
‘And this is better, is it?’ This whole outburst – her whole energy
– scares me like hell. I’m at the bottom of the stairs, I’m lost, I’m meant to be menacing her not letting her squash me into nothingness, conformity, a living death at an early age.
‘You’ll never know.’
I watch her and shiver, and try not to see the soft stretch of thigh mocking me from beneath the sag of the baggy T-shirt. She stands there and I move forward, up one stair, trying to find a way to answer her. The thought of Mum and Jack at the hospital stabs at my mind and I know that if I kill Jessie and Dad, it’s for me, it’s not for them – Mum would rather deal with a sick, deceitful daughter and a cunt of a husband than with their deaths or mine, but I feel selfish. That was the word Dad used, wasn’t it? ‘It depends on how selfish you’re feeling.’ I don’t know when or if it had already started – but he and Jessie must know how it feels.
‘I’ve thought about it,’ I say, two steps away from her now, no need to speak very loudly though there’s no one else to hear. ‘And there’s nothing you can do. Nothing you can say. I’m not interested any more. What you and Dad do, however you do it, whether you enjoy it or not, is like running a knife up and down my back. I feel hollow – which is how you’ll feel soon.’
I think I frighten her a bit – my state of mind, if not the buried threat. I put my hand out to hold on to her as I climb past on the stairs and she flinches a little, she jerks back slightly. That’s good. I smile, feeling her warmth as I pass, smelling yesterday’s dead scent, her slightly stale breath.
‘Don’t feel too safe,’ I say.
▪
And then I’m cycling to see Mum. She’s back at the same hospital in Exeter, which is quite a ride, but it’s good to be on my own, the road is long and straight and I can stare at the ground and watch it moving under me, not stopping, nothingness rolling by like a belt. I pedal harder, working at it, trying to break through to a different level, one that will flood my mind, wash away my thoughts. I keep my head down, hoping to meet the raw edge of a metal bumper, a truck’s rear axle, the tangled blades of a farm machine – lose my nose, my face, in a single slice.
It’s the last day of August. The air is cold, really chill, though summer can’t be over. There’s a wind blowing in the trees and fields on either side that feels unnatural, that feels like the weird currents of air you get at airfields, that sounds – when it swings into me, switching from the push it’s been giving – like the roar of jet fighters flying low. I see encampments up ahead, old hill forts only there in the blackened roof of my skull, and my mind picks through the soil and flint and slime to find little bits of school – a broken chair, a desk – and my dead grandmother, and Jessie’s tin with the crayons and blades. The mounds – they look like burial mounds now – are close and in the distance at the same time and they fill me with a sense of d
read, so that I try to cycle faster still, thinking that will get me past them but they move with me.
Jessie and the Prick took the car this morning, soon after I woke, which was soon after I slept. I wouldn’t go with them. They need time together and I can’t watch their necks in front of me, the backs of their heads. The cottage was a shithole without them. It was the shelter, the same decor. I ate a bowl of cereal and left it in the sink where their breakfast things were piled up. I kept thinking I could hear their voices, then I did and I went.
26
They won’t let me take my bike up to the ward, which almost provokes a scene when I try wheeling it into the lift, but the woman on the desk calls some uniformed Nazi and the bike
suddenly seems very important to me even though I couldn’t give a shit about it the rest of the time and don’t even have a padlock for it. He holds it and I try to wrest it from him, and he’s probably just a porter, he’s not trained for trouble, but he looks like he wouldn’t mind a shot now, he’ll have a bash, but then I think, ‘Fuck it, don’t attract attention, just forget it,’ and I let him have it and walk out of the lift and up the stairs instead, leaving him holding it, and I know I’m going to have to face some kind of heavyweight crap when I get it back, but there’s not much they can do.
▪
Mum and Jack are in a cubicle in front of the nurses’ station, and news of my arrival can’t have filtered up yet because they let me straight through, just asking me to wait while they wheel out a flat screen monitor and a blood pressure machine, which makes room for me to sit down nicely but I don’t. Mum already has a prison look to her, despite her tan and the short summer dress she’s got on, and Jack is on a drip like some bag creature from a weird movie, but the cubicle has a sense of peace to it. I like it because it’s nowhere, it’s just a place where they watch you to see whether you live or die, and the Prick’s skills as an architect would get in the way here.
‘How is he?’ I say, thinking: You’re going to be OK, Jack – Dad and Jessie have seen to that, this would be too easy a way out. ‘Did you cycle all the way here?’ Mum asks, hugging me. She feels warm, alive, anxious. I hug her back, wishing I could feel something. ‘Why on earth didn’t you come with Jessie and Dad?’
‘I fancied a ride,’ I say, wondering once again, if she’s guilty, what her crime is. You must have one, Mum – or several. Maybe you’re too fucking perfect, too fucking tolerant. You’ve always tolerated me. Maybe you actually love the Prick. Or maybe I don’t know you either, you also have a secret life I know nothing about.
You touch my chin before letting me go. ‘You look good for it,’ you say. A smile. You’re so easily fooled – I feel dead, I feel only the hate in me is thriving – yet usually you’re the one who sees through us all. ‘You must have needed the exercise.’
Jack stirs and makes a strange snorting noise – the sound of someone blowing through a Christmas cracker toy. Mum turns to him and his face screws up and he wails and I think he’s just a small animal suffering pain, and then I look at him and it’s more than that, it’s not just the physical pain, there’s an intelligence there, and that’s the disease – he knows. It’s knowing that’s the sickness; not knowing something, just knowing.
‘Is he all right?’ I ask.
‘Poor angel, he’s been peeing blood and it hurts.’ Mum opens the cubicle door and calls to a nurse, frustration and worry in her voice: ‘He’s peed again and I wasn’t able to get a sample.’
The nurse comes in and for a moment I fade to nothing. They change him, and I watch Mum, strong, rationing her emotions, saving her energy for Jack. She must have been like this with me once and yet I can’t remember. I vaguely remember crawling into bed with her and Dad when I was very sick, but they were comforting forces in a giddying dream, they weren’t distinct people and I never thought what it meant to them. I search my mind for a link between that tenderness and what Dad and Jessie have been doing together – could it be a small step, from that closeness of childhood into a deeper, more devastating closeness? – but there has been no tenderness in what I’ve witnessed, I think they’re past tenderness into a dog-like slavering for each other, a kind of supremacy over guilt. I should have put the Prick out of his misery while I had the chance – in his bed, in the heady flush of childhood sickness.
The nurse is still there, staying too long, taking precious minutes from my time with Mum, keeping me outside in the ether so that I may not be able to get back. ‘He looks cooler, has he been drinking at all?’ she asks, and I think she means alcohol, the Prick’s Scotch or his beer, and I want to blame him for this sickness – maybe he is to blame, what do I know?
Then she goes, which Mum hardly registers, standing over Jack for a while longer, rocking slightly on her feet, her eyes wishful, compassionate.
‘He’s OK,’ I say, without much confidence. He’s OK now, but maybe I’m the one who’s going to fuck things up for him.
She looks at me when I speak, remembering I’m there. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
‘We’re in trouble,’ I tell her. Except I don’t. I’m not sure how much I say any more and how much I imagine, but I don’t say this.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ she says.
‘I said I needed something to do.’
Now I sit down. The phone rings at the desk and I catch the sister or whatever she is glancing my way. She looks irritated by the call and watches me, but I stare back at her blankly and after a while she looks away. My mother fusses around a bit, pulling the cover down off Jack because it’s hot in here, turning up the fan and moving a book off her chair and then putting it back because she can’t find a spare surface for it.
‘Would you like some juice? Or a cup of tea? I could make you one.’
‘No, I’m not thirsty.’ A lie. I’m gasping, but I don’t want anything that is going to separate us for even a minute.
She picks up the book again and sits, keeping the book in her lap. Her legs underneath it are someone else’s legs, the legs of a woman in the street who’s had a wonderful summer. My mother’s had a good summer, but it’s going to get worse. Her eyes seem lost in her face, unsure where to go, flickering back and forth to Jack in the cot then settling on me with a concern that suddenly seems directed more at me than at him.
‘Are we bad parents?’ she asks and the question startles me. It seems to open the door to so many more.
‘Why?’
‘I was wrong, you don’t look great. You look terrible.’
‘I’m just tired. I was up last night anyway.’
‘I lay here this morning thinking about all of you. Jessie – I don’t know what’s wrong between me and Jessie, but she resents me for some reason at the moment, doesn’t she? She tries to disguise it, but I really feel it. Maybe it’s just a phase – or the baby. Or a boy.’
She seems almost hopeful when she says this, but I feel numb. My mind has already started to dive-bomb at the prospect of this all becoming a reality, becoming something we – Mum and me, we’re all that’s left – can say out loud.
The nothingness of the cubicle intensifies. The edges blur. This is an experiment – I am a rat in a tank, some thought-drug has just been injected into my skull. I stare into the light.
‘Has she said anything to you?’
‘About what?’ I sound hostile.
My mother’s face is a few feet from me across the room. She frowns, her lips arch like Jessie’s sometimes do. ‘I’m sorry – I shouldn’t talk to you like this.’
‘No,’ I say, a dimness in my brain. ‘I want you to.’
Where does this go? Where do we go from here – is this the time to go all the way, expose it for what it is? I can’t face it. Not here, not with all these watchers around, ready to intervene, ring their alarm bells, take it farther.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘With Jessie?’
‘With either of you?’
The sister outside the c
ubicle peers in, as if she’s expecting to find a scene of bloodshed and mutilation, me reveling in the carnage like the freak I am. Her face is a thousand other faces – the mad old cow in the village, a face on the tube, a grandmother on the motorway – all watching, waiting for a slip. Mum has no idea, I’m sure of that. She may have doubts, feelings, but she’s swimming in a different sea. In mine, you can’t come up for air.
‘Yes.’ I watch to see if she’s expecting something. Her face is alert, involved, her courtroom face. ‘No. I mean – you know my problem.’
I can’t fucking say it. The moment has passed again. On every front, I let time slip away. I want it to happen for me, but it won’t – I have to make it happen.
She moves the book, bends her legs sideways, massages her brow above one eye with a hand that used to hold mine. ‘Can you give it till Christmas?’ she asks.
‘What’s different at Christmas?’
‘We could get our house back in London. We only have to give three months’ notice.’
‘We could rent in London now,’ I say. We’re drifting further from the point. London is irrelevant; London has no power any more.
‘I’d like to stay here a little longer.’ Would she? ‘So would your father.’
My father would like a lot of things, half of which you know nothing about, Mum. You could fuck a doctor, every patient in the hospital, I would forgive you – but he, he has wedged the knife firmly in our backs.
Suddenly I feel angry with her. Maybe she’s not so perfect. She picked him, she fucked him to make us, and now she can’t see the poison when it’s stuck right under her nose.
The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition Page 18