The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Alexander Stuart

  I get up and go over to her. If the sister’s watching, let her wonder. I lean over her. I’m shaking. I’m ready to run. I can’t say what I’m going to say and stay.

  ‘You’re going to misinterpret this—’

  My voice is tiny, it sounds girlish to me, someone else’s voice, far away.

  ‘It’s not going to help you, stuck in here alone with Jack—’

  I touch her arm briefly, to convince me she’s there. The words won’t come. I don’t know what to say. Then:

  ‘Don’t trust him.’

  ▪

  I’m across the room before the words mean anything. I didn’t think she’d take me seriously, but her eyes look panicked – maybe it’s me she’s worried about, my games are getting crazier, Dad and me have come to blows?

  It’s not enough, but it’s said. Her mouth opens with a question, but I’ve got the door open.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  27

  A

  nd I’m home. I’m knackered. The ride back has finished me, I just want to be dead, but as I approach the cottage, standing on the pedals to force my bike up the hill, I spot the Prick in the garden trying to get a fucking barbecue going. I skirt around and ditch the bike behind our wall, avoiding him and climbing in through a window so that when I walk into the kitchen where Jessie is, I can feel the pain smash into her chest when she turns and finds me there.

  ‘Christ, Tom!’ I’d like to spit at her gaping face as she stands there staring at me, but I’m too busy taking in the detail – the pronged sausages on the board, the chopped onion, the fork in her hand.

  ‘This is nice,’ I say. ‘Life goes on as normal. Mum’s in the fucking hospital with Jack and you two throw a party!’

  ‘God, you’re a shit.’ Jessie looks different: a little cowed, as if it’s all getting too much for her. Something’s been said in my absence – I wonder what? ‘One day,’ she says to me, ‘you’ll make somebody a lovely wife.’

  I ought to punch the coiled little navel that is poking its ugly mouth in my direction from between her black jeans and black hacked-off top, but I’m distracted by a spark of life outside – the Prick pouring lighter fuel onto the barbecue coals. The flames cough hungrily, the smoke thickens and Jessie bares her tanned, deceitful neck at me, the hair bristling, color rushing there like what’s left when you take raw meat off a plate. She stares out the window and utters, in that dulcet, girls-school tone of hers, ‘Oh, fuck!’

  ▪

  I can hear what’s happening before I see it – the uneven blast of Nick’s motorcycle as he runs it at the stumpy tree roots guarding our path, the skid of his back wheel on the lawn as it churns up clumps of turf and throws them into the barbecue smoke. Then the sight of Nick’s leather jacket shining, his smooth, sharp face staring first at the cottage, then turning to deal with Dad – a doomy prick playing with fire, preoccupied by some inner hole, unprepared for this invasion of his sovereign state.

  Nick looks different from when I first saw him at the pub – his hair shorter like Jessie’s, younger, as if he’s not caught up in the game everyone else is of trying to look older. He stops the bike and steadies it, two maybe three feet from the barbecue flames, the sputtering smoke wafting past him as Dad beats the tongs on an invisible drum, trying to adjust his mind to this confrontation.

  ‘My daughter doesn’t want to see you.’ The Prick’s voice swings clearly through the open door as Jessie goes to sort them both out. He sounds like any other uptight, reactionary prick on a summer’s evening

  – not the slobbering leech he is. He puts the tongs down on the grill and blocks Nick’s view of the house – and mine of Nick – by stepping in front of the bike.

  But Jessie is already there, wiping her hands on the seat of her jeans and advancing toward Dad’s back as if he’s something she can walk through.

  ‘Brilliant move, coming here now, Nick – why couldn’t you call?’ Dad steps aside to look at Jessie when he hears her voice, his eyes hard, his face corrugating into a real bastard’s mask – the mask he uses on site.

  ‘Go back inside, Jessie. I’ll deal with this.’ The force of his anger surprises her – but not that much. ‘Let me talk to him, I can—’

  ‘I SAID GO BACK INSIDE, JESSIE!’

  Now Nick is the voice of reason. He sits back on the bike, letting go of the handles, keeping its weight between his legs, his manner that of someone who has some kind of an ultimatum to deliver. ‘There’s no need for argument,’ he says, his soft voice accented with his country twang, yet tougher for a moment than either of them – ruthless in its decisiveness. ‘It will take us two minutes alone to find out if there’s even anything to argue about.’

  Dad stares at him. He’d like to swat him, he’d like to smudge Nick’s fluids all over a rolled-up newspaper – I can see the fear in his eyes, the competition. ‘Don’t try to be reasonable with me,’ he says, acting the affronted father but taking it past the accepted limits, locked in a hostile, patronizing style that he brings his own evil twist to. ‘Reasonableness is an insult to my intelligence. I know you’ve fucked my daughter, and I want you out of my garden – now!’

  I think Jessie gets a kick out of this. I think Jessie gets a kick out of seeing Nick’s astonishment at these words, even if the openness of them worries her just a tinge. I think – and this is just my feeling, right, I’m just a sick observer in all of this – I think Jessie would like to get down on the grass with Dad now and do him in front of Motorcycle Boy. But Dad’s said his piece and he’s obviously cheered by it, because he tells them, ‘All right, five minutes. You can say your goodbyes, tell your lies, and see if you can pull the wool over my eyes.’

  He starts back toward the kitchen and I disappear fast. There is a truly ugly mood settling over tonight – he’s cracked, something’s snapped in him – and I want to be part of it, but at my own speed. The beauty of this is he doesn’t even know I’m home yet; he’s got that surprise to come. If I thought there was going to be some pain in the Prick’s countenance while he times them out there, I might hang around, but on this one he’s won – it’s already over, any fool can see that: Jessie just wants Nick to go.

  ▪

  Upstairs I lie on my bed, my legs like lead from the bike ride, and try to rest a moment, but Jessie won’t let me go. The window is open and I could get up and shut it, but I’m finished so I lie there in the half light – it’s darkening outside; inside it’s the same old Afghan bombsite

  – and hear their words, closer than I want them to be, the garden’s too fucking small, I’m between them, particled in the air displaced by their breath.

  ‘What’s going on, Jessie?’ This is said as if he’s got a right to know. Nick’s a trier – for a boring old hippie, he keeps on trying, but he’s losing my sympathy fast. He should belt her.

  ‘Don’t ask me. You started it.’ Sister, dear – definitely a bit defensive tonight. Could my warning to Mum have sparked a call? She’s stuck there in the hospital; maybe she’s had time to work things out?

  ‘Want to come for a ride?’ The Norton is switched off at the moment, but I can picture Nick’s hands on the key even as he doubts the point of this – he knows something, or thinks he does. He’s impatient for an answer.

  Silence. I lie there but it’s no good: I have to see what’s going on. I stumble across the room, kick a chair leg and curse – I’d like to kick Jessie’s guts. The air at the window is warmer than it’s been all day. Everything’s weird. I can hear the sea – a low interference noise in the background, lapping around Britain, keeping us apart, sloshing around the cottage, keeping our nonsense in.

  What’s the Prick doing while this is happening? Taking a slash? Watching the timer on the stove, waiting for the buzz when their allotted five minutes is up? He’s probably reading the fucking paper, his feet up, water on the boil to chuck in Nick’s face, scratching his skull manically the way he does when he’s under pressure so that he looks really crazy.

>   My angle on Jessie is weird – hair, brow, nose pointed at Nick, all lit by the calculation of how to get rid of him the fastest.

  Nick’s face I can see. ‘Let’s go!’ he tries, winding himself up, both hands on the Norton’s tank now, leaning forward though he knows it’s a lost cause.

  ‘You heard him.’ She is standing to one side, a distance between them.

  Nick shakes his head. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He wants to spit, I see it. He should. He mumbles something I can’t hear. Then: ‘You’re acting like a cow – is this what two days in London does to you?’

  ‘Wait a minute—’ Jessie is barely even listening. There has been a minor collapse at the barbecue, a limp combustion chucking out a few sparks and a billowing cloud of smoke which spreads over the garden, catching the weird dying light and bringing cancer to our already strangled and wrecked grass. In the absence of the tongs, which Dad has taken in with him, Jessie kicks the hibachi’s legs to aerate it and turns back to Nick, her belly flashing, a sort of bored, half-interested mood to her now, as if she might come alive if he made the effort. ‘Come over here!’

  Nick stays put, straddling the bike, and I suddenly remember Jessie telling me that he does Buddhist chants. If so, they’re not doing much for him now. He looks distinctly rattled. He looks like he’s half a mind just to take off out of here now and forget it, but then Jessie goes back over to him and wraps herself over one leg – a change of tactics; hard to tell who she’s working on: him or the Prick in the kitchen, watching. Her left hand delves down into his groin while her right embraces his neck.

  It all seems so transparent to me that I can’t believe Nick goes for it for a moment, but he must be playing along because he says something and I catch a characteristically haughty ‘Yeah, yeah’ from her. She whispers something close to his ear and blows it – because suddenly Nick pushes her off.

  ‘I want to get things straight, Jessie, that’s all.’ It’s hard to stand up to Jessie when she’s determined, she makes sure of that, but Nick is armed and ready. ‘I thought we were close—’ His voice cuts through the evening air; he’s nervous about something. ‘—I just didn’t expect competition from your old man.’

  If the Prick hears that, it must throw him. How do you handle this one? Rush out there hot with denials and fury? Laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion? Write it down and instruct your solicitor – in this case, your wife when she gets back from the hospital – in the good old middle-class way? It certainly must give Jessica something to think about, wondering how dangerous this is, whether the bomb’s really dropped or if Nick is just stabbing in the dark.

  He looks at her, standing where she’s stepped back, having been evicted from his thigh. She looks cool, fascinated – this is just another night in her life, an accusation of rogering Dada, so what?

  ‘John saw you together,’ Nick says, weakening his case with explanation. ‘In the car – in Harpford.’ He’s starting to doubt himself; she sees that. He takes hold again: ‘Of course he could be lying, but I wouldn’t say it was the kind of thing John’s imagination runs to.’

  Can Dad hear this? I hope so. I hope it buries itself deep inside him and twists and tears there. On the lawn, Jessie is horrified – her Sunday School disbelief could almost fool me.

  ‘You are a sick bastard,’ she tells him. ‘You and John! Go away!’

  It’s an impressive performance, but not quite up to scratch for Nick obviously. His eyes fix on her for a long moment and even at this distance, I can see a kind of pain there. ‘Trust me, Jessica—’ He reaches out and takes hold of her arm. ‘I know when you’re lying.’

  ‘Fuck off and leave me alone!’

  She pulls away but he grabs her with some force, swinging his head toward her from his heavy mount on the bike so that for one instant I think, ‘Yes! Right!’ and I’m him, I’m locked physically with him as he rams into her, nutting her hard on the skull, sharing that splintering crack as his forehead meets her forehead and he says – the anger coming out now, forget all that Buddhist humming – ‘I fucking love you!’

  She is not worth it. She pulls away and staggers back and I see her pass below me, out of my sight, leaving Nick on his own, stuck on the bike in the middle of our piss-awful garden, the barbecue chugging away behind him.

  ‘Tell me to go!’ he shouts after her, and it suddenly occurs to me that this little scene might be attracting the attention of the neighbors – I’m sure one or two lights have gone on down the hill – and I don’t want that, tonight is mine, I can feel it, I don’t want any poxy interference from the forces of sanity outside. ‘Tell me the truth!’ he shouts. ‘I’m not leaving until you come back out here and tell me what’s what.’

  The motor of his bike kicks into life, but he’s not going anywhere, I know that – and I want him gone now too, I’m keen to be rid of him before he brings the bloody filth down on us. He overrevs it, tearing at the night air with the sound, so that I don’t hear his mates’ bikes approach until they’re on the road outside – and neither does he.

  ‘Here, Nick—’ John’s voice is like an old friend punching you in the cheek at the pub, it has the warm, sodden crunch of teeth, blood and alcohol about it. He sits on his bike at our gate. ‘Where is she then?’

  Nick has already got his Norton on the move, rolling it around the uneven turf of our lawn, circling the barbecue, guiding it carefully for the moment through the narrow gap between the grill and the trestle table. He ignores John, though he doesn’t seem surprised to see him, riding close to the house now as he shouts, ‘You think you’ve got something so fucking valuable that everyone wants to take it!’

  ‘Where’s the perv?’ I see Toe-rag’s familiar twisted grin in my mind as I hear him call out behind John. ‘Pervy perv! Is he home?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Nick says, but he doesn’t really care any more, and he aims his bike straight at the barbecue this time, knocking it onto the grass, scattering hot charcoal and sparks and setting little patches briefly alight. Then John is over the tree roots and he’s in the garden too, followed by Toe-rag, though I think ape-face Colin on his wimp machine stays behind. I run downstairs – I want to be in on this – to find Jessie struggling with Dad to stop him from going outside.

  ‘Just ignore them, they’re morons. They’ll get bored and go away.’ She doesn’t sound entirely convinced of this, holding her head where Nick cracked her and trying to hold on to the Prick at the same time.

  He looks at me quickly, his lizard face, the lines around his jaw tightening as he takes me in, sweat or saliva on his lip, his eyes like reactivated sheep’s eyes in Biology, two tiny torches shining through dead meat at the danger outside and – if he can read my mind – here in the kitchen.

  ‘You’re back. Are you OK? Did you come through that?’

  He indicates the roaring bikes outside, one trying to outdo the other. There is a loud, splintering crash, followed by another, as John and Toe-rag ram the garden table from both ends. But I’m wrong – it must be Nick, because suddenly something hard flies through one of the small kitchen window panes, smashing the glass and breaking the plates on the drainer, and then the kitchen door slams open as the wheel of John’s bike hits it and comes inside, his face following, bringing the sharp smell of the smoke with him, his mouth stretched wide, rat’s teeth showing as he leers and shouts, ‘HEEEEEEEERE’S JOHNNNY!’

  Dad swings around to grab his tire, but John is already rolling back out, and the Prick has to let go or get his fingers mashed under the mudguard. He follows him outside, but gets thrown by Toe-rag, who drives straight at him, yelling, ‘It’s Larry-boy! Watch out, the dirty old sod’s getting it out!’’

  I just stand and watch as my father flings himself out of the path of the bike and recovers his balance with surprising speed. Jessie is at the door, but he shouts at her to stay back, and for once she listens. He picks himself up in the middle of the madness, looking crazed himself, his face grey in the lingering smoke, the bikes spinn
ing around him in a field of dazzling flashes and burns, lights streaking past the windows and door of the kitchen as Nick and his crew try to scare the Prick shitless, running their bikes at him in kamikaze collision courses across the tiny lawn.

  The Prick stands there, enjoying the chaos, ready for this, as if it’s something he’s been waiting for: steeling himself to lash out at the furies or whatever are circling him, like the hero or poor diseased god he has been forced to play in some mental Greek myth.

  Jessie has been yelling pointlessly at Nick to go away, and there’s the faint peep of a siren audible in the brief lulls between the roaring of the motorcycles, but Dad doesn’t want any help from anyone – he wants this fight for his daughter’s cunt – and he dives side-on at Nick, taking him by surprise, knocking the bike over and throwing himself on top.

  ‘FUCK OFF OUT OF HERE, THE REST OF YOU!’ he screams, his head jerking around to show that he’s ready to take on all comers, and then he lands a punch right on Nick’s face as Nick struggles up, scrunching his nose down with a force that shocks me – its bite, the pleasure the Prick takes from it.

  Jessie is through the door in an instant, and I follow.

  John and Toe-rag are down on him now with their bikes like a ton of bricks, and one of them obviously whams hard into Dad’s back, because in a moment he’s on the grass, reeling, spitting air out and coughing, then dragging it back in as if he’s going to be sick. Jessie pulls him back from the tangle of Nick and his bike, and I must admit I help: though he’s still the Prick, part of me sides with him against these local wankers; the other wants to put the boot right into where he’s been nicely softened by the bike.

  But it’s over. Nick doesn’t want to fight anymore – maybe it’s against his hippie principles to risk losing and try to finish it – and the others’ adrenalin is draining, as he wipes the dark jam flowing from his nose and picks up his machine. The siren is down the dip of the hill now, getting closer, and someone – it has to be Colin – points this out, so they leave the garden, the bikes revving and bouncing over the tree roots at the gate, and take off up the road to the beach, John pouting his rubber lips and waggling his tongue back at us in a totally obvious fashion, while Toe-rag’s accompanying animal grunts fade into the night.