The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Alexander Stuart

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  There is a timeless gap before the police arrive, another moment of unreality in which I feel outside my life: the Prick and Jessie are just characters from a dream I keep returning to, and anything that happens is fine, because there is no code of behavior in a dream, you can fuck and maim and die and nothing touches you except the fear that everything is going to go on and on and you are going to come back here again.

  Dad is walking now, rejecting Jessie’s and my support, holding his lower back and trying to straighten up, the effort making him sweat, streaks of it running down his lined madman’s forehead and swimming down the sides of his cheeks.

  We make it to the kitchen as the piggy wheels draw up outside, and Dad takes my shoulder and presses it hard, and I’m not sure how he’s looking, there’s an effort to conceal something – pain, maybe, or regret – but he’s also trying to draw me into this by keeping me out. ‘Go upstairs,’ he tells me. ‘Don’t get involved.’ And there’s a kind of pleading there, like he needs my help. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he adds, and I think: Fuck you – but fuck them, too, the pigs.

  And now Jessie’s all over the place, vicious suddenly – even her fear is loaded – and she pulls away from us both with a look of contempt, flashing resentment at me as if I’m the cause of all this, and she takes the board where she’s been chopping the onions, pronging the sausages, and opens the cupboard door where the waste bin is and rams it all, board and sausages, into the bin, saying, ‘You didn’t want a barbecue, did you?’

  Then the police are at the front door and Dad answers, and I crawl up the stairs, letting them see me, letting them see I’m not interested in what they can do. Jessie is still in the kitchen, and one glimpse of the complacent family mug of the mustached copper on the step lets me know that she’ll take the fall for this – but not in any real sense: they’ll take one look at her, her fierce eyes and her belly button mouthing, ‘Fuck you!’ and they’ll put it down to boyfriend trouble that’s got a bit out of hand, and think the Prick’s a prick for letting her out like that.

  And I’m right. It takes for ever and I wait in my room, waiting for one of them to come up and plant something on me – they don’t want us here, they know who we are: tourists, and sick ones at that – but they don’t even bother, they’re not even interested in asking whether I’ve noticed my dad boffing my sis lately and then taking it out on the local scumbags.

  I hear the muffled voices, the Prick entertaining them in the living room – he knows how to handle tits like these: offer them a drink, nothing too obvious, they know you’re patronizing them, but they’ll play along anyway – and I peer out the window and see the car with its reflective stripe down the side, and the mad old cunt squinting at it, tottering past it on the other side of the road and nodding her head.

  She’s probably the one who called them; I’d love to tell her what she’s really missing, sell her a season ticket to the shelter – ‘There, feast your eyes on that, you old cow!’ – she’d probably love it.

  I’m right. I hear the mustached one’s voice in the hall, all forced cordiality, advising the Prick that perhaps the young lady should stay out of the local pub for a night or two so as to avoid any repeats of tonight’s little flare-up, and Pricko agreeing that that’s a splendid idea

  – but perhaps it might be more to the point if the local constabulary kept a watch on Nick and his companions and generally made life painful for them.

  And Mr Bill times it perfectly at the door. He says, ‘You know, there’s only three people from London I’ve met that I’ve liked—’ and I can picture him standing there, his uniformed boyfriend already heading back to the car, leaving him to handle the local diplomacy bit. I bet Dad looks at him, wanting to get rid of him as much as I do.

  The mustache f lickers up, a suggestion of a smile, this is community policing – imagine what it’s like if you’re poor.

  ‘And now there’s you, sir. Good night.’

  ▪

  The door closes and there’s a pause and then the Prick’s feet on the stairs and he’s at my door – he must be feeling guilty, he must be feeling terrible, even the pleasure he took from creasing Nick’s nose can’t wipe away the strain that’s showing in his features now.

  He comes inside, a hand on the door, hunched slightly from some evident difficulty with his back, his face grey and hollow, the lizard skin sagging, cracked and wrinkled, though he’s shaved tonight at some point – earlier, before the fun began. I stare at him and he keeps his hand on the door and I notice his trousers, dirty with grease and grass, and imagine the scruffily hairy legs inside – that sack of crap and cock that’s had Jessie must be ready to drop, wondering what went wrong.

  ‘Can we talk?’ he asks and the gravity of his voice makes me want to puke or laugh. ‘Just tell me!’’ I want to shout. I know it all anyway. Don’t fuck around.

  He shuts the door. I’m on the bed and I stay there – maybe he wants me, too? But he looks like a pensioner at this moment, someone who’s lost all his balls. He moves to the window and looks out, as if he’s never been in this room before, as if he’s piecing together how much I’ve been able to see all along.

  Of course, I could be wrong. This might be something else altogether. Mum could have interpreted my parting remark in a dozen different ways. Maybe she hasn’t rung at all. Maybe she’s too caught up in Jack even to think about anything else at the moment. But ever since I got back, I’ve felt it in the air – this is when it happens, this is where I find my strength. I can feel the patterns changing, the walls moving back to show me the darkness. At the hospital, when I got my bike back, they treated me as if I was sick, as if we had just suffered a deep and damaging loss in the family. They humored me. They told me I was a stupid little boy, and they treated me like a joke. I wanted to grab them by their pudgy authoritarian faces and ram them up against the wall, tell them, ‘Don’t underestimate me, cunts! There’s going to be damage like you’ve never seen before.’ And it’s going to be tonight, I can feel it, I’m ready for it just as Dad was with Nick. We all have our mythologies to act out.

  He keeps his face away from me and I glance at his back, the back that’s giving him so much trouble tonight. He’s outside the depressing ring of light my bedside lamp gives out and I wish he wasn’t there at all because he’s taking a lifetime to say something and, however he says it, he won’t choke on the words the way I want him to. All I can think about is how stupid he is – how incredibly, inhumanly stupid – and how stupid he has been. I’m the fool for ever believing in him, but then I had no choice: he drew the lines for what honesty was.

  ‘Well, what do you make of all this?’ he says after a long time, a long time of standing there with his back to me and his hands creeping around to strangle each other against his trouser seat.

  I bring my knees up in front of me and stare past them at the wall. I could take one of my sneakers off and throw it at him to wake him up, but why bother? What am I supposed to say – ‘I don’t make anything of it, squire – you go ahead and fuck Jessica if you want to’?

  ‘I think you need your head examined,’ I tell him.

  He turns slowly. No anger, he’s treading warily with me now. His face in the semi-shadow is all misarranged, like one of Jessie’s paintings. ‘Do you?’ His voice is trying to stay with me, but it’s prissing up, it’s getting pompous and superior, just like Jessie.

  ‘If you think we’ve got anything to talk about, you do.’ I swing my knees around to block him out. I can do it tonight. If I had a knife I could do it now, but they’re all in the kitchen. I know the one I’ll use – smooth red handle, razor-edge, with a neat little curve at the end of the blade to decorate his paunchy, desperately exercised gut before going on to autograph Jessie’s.

  He takes a step forward, but not too close. I remember a hiding he gave me, one of the few times I can remember him really smacking me. I was about six at the time and I can’t remember what it was about, but it had so
mething to do with a toolbox. Now his whole being looks like a pathetic apology, a non-person desperately seeking absolution and admission to the world again. ‘Fuck off, my son!’ I want to say. I’ve always fancied being a priest.

  ‘I’ve been a prick, Tom,’ he mumbles – or is it just my imagination? If he gets any more humble, I think I’ll kill him now and put an end to it – knife or no knife I’ll find a way. ‘I think you know what’s been going on.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I say, jaunty, trying to really screw him into a corner. ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Tonight, with our friends on the motorcycles—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t be a prat, Tom. You heard them, though I don’t think you needed to. Jessie’s a closed book where you’re concerned, but I’ve felt you looking at me like a piece of shit – I’m not completely stupid.’

  He’s right. Stupidity doesn’t cover it; there’s sickness, ego, greed, the fact that he’s from another planet, his total inability to care about or love anyone but himself…all the great parental virtues. And Jessie doesn’t grass on me. I’ll bear that in mind. I’ll kill her tenderly.

  ‘I—’

  I can feel it coming. This is where my life turns, even more so than with Jessie, this is where the madness has to be confronted: its ugly adult form is showing its head. It’s actually happening, it’s been happening and we’re not in some TV show, on some council estate with the kids screaming and the cat shitting and the smell of cooking and half a discount store’s worth of iPods and PSPs and computer junk in a corner – see, I’m an elitist at heart, I revert to type. But this is my life we’re talking about, and it’s tiny, flat and insignificantly fucked up.

  His hand wipes his mouth, eradicating a smile, spit, nothing, he’s just nervous. I had never realized how womanly his lips are – a female reptile’s razor slit, pursing in an unlizardlike way. His voice is slightly huskier than usual, like when Scotch catches in his throat – or is it the fading memory of sluicing Jessie’s juices, snuffling at her crotch, as he makes a grand gesture and gives up a part of it: the easy freedom to do it again?

  ‘I’ve been carrying on with Jessie,’ he says.

  Right. Sid James and Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor probably got a look in, too. Is that the best he can do? Can’t he find a better way to put it than that? What is there? ‘I’ve been banging your sister . . . getting my oats with Jessie when no one was looking . . . bonking her brains out . . . fucking her quietly with my song . . . poking her up the arse . . . enjoying a bit of rumpy-pumpy with your old cot-mate’? It’s all crap. It all slams into my face, missing the flesh but hitting the bone inside. It’s a laugh, innit? Maybe I should use two knives, try to stick them both at once.

  ‘Right,’ I say.

  My life is over; I’d like to spew up every memory I ever had. What I’ve got now is the thrust of my hate, like a cuddly teddy bear, my pristine vision of the Prick and Jessie as apocalyptic angels rolling around in the shit waiting for me to strike them down.

  Where is Jessie now? She’s keeping out of this one. She’s letting Daddy handle it. Maybe he’s handled it all along; maybe we’re all berks and he’s the big bad demon after all, she’s been fooling herself, he’s ridden her from the start?

  Looking at him now, even in his most abject weakness and disgrace, I can almost imagine that, almost blame him entirely. But I don’t think he can take all the credit for me, and nor do I think he can even begin to control Jessica, she has her own charge in her that could blitz us all.

  If I kill him, I am his flesh, does that make it suicide on his part? If I kill her, I feel like I’m killing something from the stars, some megaforce that’s lit by the sun’s light. But he’s just standing there anyway and I’m on the bed, both of us lost, two total pits of human refuse wasting the air we breathe.

  ‘Tom—’ A f lash of anger, pain, some sort of near-human response. ‘I’m trying to find a way to . . .’

  ‘What did you say? Just now? I didn’t hear you.’

  Strained eyes. A frown. ‘Don’t play games with me, I…’

  ‘Get fucked.’ No emotion. I don’t want to push it. I get up off the bed. ‘You’re not my father and I don’t want to have this conversation.’

  ‘Tom—’

  There are no tears in my eyes, though there could be – there’s a hollow draught burning my nose and a welling in my head that wants release – but I’m concentrating my energy on dealing with this now, getting him out of here, out of my room, leaving me alone.

  I push him and it feels good but he catches my arm and holds it steady, trying to transmit by osmosis or something the suggestion that we are not irretrievably torn apart, there is still some chance of repairing the damage.

  I’m not as strong as him, but his back is a handicap now and a knife will help. Just give me a little time. I push him toward the door again and he surrenders a couple of feet.

  ‘You should have screwed someone else the night you made me! Where was Jessie? Wasn’t her cot close enough to hand?’

  The words just come out and he slaps me across the face, which is brilliant. I want more of it. I want to feel the crunch of my father’s knuckles on my skin – I can slide so easily then into what I have to do.

  I push him to the door. He looks at me, helpless. He could hit me again, he could reassert himself, he could beg – but I think he knows none of it would do any good.

  I get my hand off him. This could be the last conversation we ever have. If I were Jessie, I’d do it with style – I’d pull him to me and kiss him, just to see what kissing dead flesh is like, just to remind myself that I thought I loved him once. Then I’d stick the knife in. But I don’t and my life doesn’t have any shape or form except anger. Anger is the one thing I feel clean in.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I shouldn’t have hit you.’

  And just for a second – less – I remember two or three times in my life when I actually felt we made contact, when I thought for a moment I might have some clue as to who the fuck he is. He wasn’t so bad at times – that’s the joke. He did it so well.

  ‘We must talk,’ he says, as if I’m one of his problems, something that can be solved.

  The door closes, shutting him out forever. ‘In the morning . . .’ His voice hangs outside the room. He’s waiting there, waiting for the knife or something else instead – he knows he’s got it coming.

  And I slide my bed up against the door, just to find some peace, to arm my mind for the night ahead.

  28

  Sleep would have been the only escape. But I’m in the kitchen. It’s three in the morning and I’ve got all my clothes on, not simply because I haven’t undressed but because I want to be ready for

  anything, inside or out. I need every advantage now. Jessie came to me, earlier, later, after Dad had walked away from my barricaded door, and spoke to me through it.

  ‘This is stupid.’ I heard her voice, a sister’s voice, a voice I have heard every day of my life, playing, messing around, arguing, on the phone, happy, sad, whispering secrets and slander at boring receptions and inaugural parties Dad has taken us to. ‘I didn’t say some of the things I said, OK?’

  She was alone on the landing outside my door. She was worried now, like when she used to go too far in her temper with me and smash up what she could of mine and then fret over the fact that I, twisted individual that I am, would want to take the blame for it, not out of any desire to protect her – she didn’t need protecting, she was happy to accept the consequences of anything – but because I wanted to play some part in her emotional world, I wanted her to have some debt to me that she couldn’t quite cancel out.

  ‘I go mad sometimes like you do.’ I almost considered letting her in – we could plot, as we used to, how we would survive if Mum and Dad broke up, died. ‘It’s all gone too far. We’re the guilty ones and yet somehow we’re putting the blame on you.’

  ‘Oh, Jessie,’ I wanted to say. I wanted to push ba
ck the bed, open the door and hug her – but I wasn’t sure she was there. I think she was. I think I could hear her scratching the names of my crimes in blood on my door: I invented Nick, I brought him here tonight, I recounted to Mum in graphic detail how her daughter had supplanted her in her bed, I went to Dad and told him the jig was up, that a sealed envelope containing a dossier of all their lurid copulations, including copies of Jessie’s prick pictures, was at this moment in the post on its way to the hospital social workers, his partners at the practice, Jessica’s college, the Daily Mail, 10 Downing Street.

  I heard her voice, outside my door. ‘Are you satisfied?’ it said, with real loathing, with an honesty of passion rare in our family. ‘Did you have fun?’

  ▪

  And then I heard her go to him. Hours passed – though in fact we’re outside normal time, normal time doesn’t matter anymore. I heard them both going to bed, using the bathroom, cleaning their teeth, flushing the loo, Dad first, then Jessie some time later. Some sort of strained conversation had gone on downstairs, I caught its long pauses, its leaden awfulness, but not the words. I don’t think they ate; I didn’t. I haven’t eaten since breakfast this morning and the nagging tightness of my stomach, ground hollow by the bike ride, suits me fine tonight. I don’t think I’ll be eating for a long time.

  They went to separate beds but couldn’t sleep, I bet. I sat slumped against the door on mine, my ear pressed to the cool gloss paint, shifting slightly as cramp stabbed my shoulder or the door felt too warm, listening for the sounds of Jessica wanking herself in her room or the Prick trying to ease his back straight on the mattress. I could hear a tap downstairs, in the bathroom I think, spacing time out – little bits of a lifetime slowly dancing together like water to form a whole, then hanging, kicking, throttled, before gravity cuts the drip from the tap’s hollow mouth and obliterates it, and the slow dance begins again.