The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Alexander Stuart

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  I can’t do this all in one go. I realize now it’s not going to be easy. Two cans of petrol are the most I can manage, and I don’t even have the cans. So I walk into the forecourt shop, in my jeans, sneakers and T-shirt, trying to look casual, trying not to look as young as I am, and I pick up two five-liter cans of oil, surprised by how expensive they are – I’m not going to be able to afford to fill them both with petrol, maybe I should just buy one? But like an arrow that points forward, I see a stack of large plastic containers of bottled water for sale, two for less than half the price of one can of oil, and I put the oil down and pick the water up, and the woman behind the register doesn’t give a shit what I do as long as I get out of her life now, so I push it – with a tired, shrill voice I tell her my dad’s run out of petrol and I’m going to empty the water out and fill them both at the pump, is that all right?

  She looks at me with a sort of bitten lip and small, hard eyes that she’s probably got doing this job, and I gild the lily, I tell her it’s a Bentley, a real old wreck, one of these plastic bottles isn’t even going to get it sparking. And she knows I’m lying, and she knows I know it, but she doesn’t want the aggravation so she says, ‘Give me the money for the petrol first’, and stares with relief over my head as another customer comes in, a pompous little git in a suit impatient for a token for the car wash. She takes my money and gives me the change and I tell her it’s wrong; then she gets nasty, but we sort it out, and I feel her small, hard eyes on me as I fill the containers at the pump, the rich stench of the petrol settling on my lungs, and I wonder if a match now would make her happy.

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  I don’t hang around to try the phone again but walk on, carrying the petrol for a mile or so, getting lost and getting stuck in dead ends a couple of times. My head is sharper now, but in a disjointed way that makes it difficult to hold a thought for more than a moment. Part of me is looking for another phone; part of me is trying to keep moving toward the docks. I reach some traffic lights which seem familiar, but have to duck out of sight of an approaching police car, and try then to keep to the back streets, losing any real sense – without the river – of where I am.

  In one narrow residential street there’s a parade of three shops – two boarded-up, one a Chinese off-license – and I realize I’ve hardly drunk anything all day, apart from the Coke and some water from an ancient, grimy drinking fountain in the park. I walk on and stash the petrol against the corrugated-iron doorway of a blackened, burned-out house that someone’s already done a job on, then double-back to the shop and walk inside.

  It’s as much a food shop as an off-license – there’s even a stand of unidentifiable withered vegetables in front of the register – but I settle for just two small bags of peanuts, fix in my mind the location of the fastest-reached beer by the door, pay for the nuts and grab a four-pack on the way out, running like hell holding the awkward, hard-rimmed mass of cans to my stomach, one of them splaying out and dropping from its plastic loop to bounce on the pavement as I go.

  The old Chinese man who served me doesn’t follow me on to the street, but seconds later as I look back a young kid not much older than me – his son? grandson? – comes sprinting out, fast enough to worry me, and I leg it around a corner, down another dark, narrow street and through a brick passageway into a gloomy, forbidding courtyard at the back of a Victorian office building. I decide to fight, if that’s what he wants; I’ve never fought anyone Chinese, but he hardly looked like a killer, spindly arms caught inside a black, numbered baseball jacket, and I’d win because I’ve got to – I’ve got other business tonight.

  But he doesn’t appear, and I open a beer waiting for him, keen to get out of the courtyard, which seems filled with death, and keener still to get my petrol back. The first gulp of beer does it for me instantly

  – I’m so tired and freaked out anyway, it’s like a sane hand on my shoulder – and I drink the rest down, chuck the can into a basement hole, and walk out onto the street, clutching the other two cans and getting a weird sense of déjà vu as I try to connect last night with now and go back for the petrol.

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  I know where I am. I’m in a phonebox, one of the old-style thick-paned red ones. It stinks of piss, which is no surprise, but the phone works, which is.

  My hand hurts. I cut it open again opening the second can of beer

  – let the ring-pull slice right into the dead flap of one of the fingers I cut last night switching hands with the knife in my tussle with Dad. I’ve kept the can as a souvenir, but not the ring-pull.

  I am on the Isle of Dogs. I know exactly where I am. Not much of an island, is it? How do you get a dog to bark? Pour petrol over it, set it on fire and it goes woof. Well, I’ve got the petrol. The phone is ringing

  – the other end, not here. Still nobody home. Let it ring.

  The entrance to my father’s construction site is four streets from here. I’ve been there once already since it’s got dark, walked right under the shadow of the bloody great pyramid and back again. Nobody stopped me. But no phones in there, not ones I can use anyway. It’s still ringing.

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  Click.

  ‘Hello?’ Jessie’s voice.

  Silence. London-to-Devon static. I wish I could touch her. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jessie—’

  ‘Tom, are you OK?’ Cool; not entirely interested in my condition. ‘I’m fucking brilliant. How’s Dad? Is he hurt bad?’ ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just tell me, will you? Is he all right?’

  ‘He’s not dead. You really are a—’

  But I’ve cut us off.

  30

  I’m alive for about two minutes of it. The rest is like watching a video I’ve seen over and over; I’ve done this in my head so many times already tonight.

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  The first is out over the water, after I’ve tossed the beer cans (one empty, one full) and petrol over the fence, ready for me, and waited for the dogs to bark, the lights to blaze – but nothing. Stillness.

  It’s dark out here. The pyramid is lit up, maybe forty or fifty feet away, but softly from below, like a part-built aviary or tomb or something, sheathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting which ripples as it breathes the dank dockside air. Weird shapes inhabit the night here, the ghosts of huge Victorian cranes, old chimneys pointing up to nowhere, exposed bellies of warehouses thick with the sweat and greed and cheap pain that drove everything on.

  I climb along a railing that carries the fence a few feet out over the water from the wharf. It’s the only way in, short of walking up to the gate and blagging it with the guards – maybe Jason’s on, with his cosh? The rust on the bars in the dark is like ground glass, savaging my cut hand and engraving itself on the other. There’s virtually no toe-hold – the railing has been wired over to block the gaps inbetween, where my feet might have wedged – but I drive my sneakers in against the wire anyway and use the crazy strength I’ve got now to drag myself along, inches above the black gaping mouth of the dock.

  At the end of the railing, I cling on and swing out into the darkness, smelling the cold aura of the water, closer than I want to be to the poor bugger who’s been bloating and festering down there for more than a week now – little bits of him breaking off like meat disintegrating in a fish tank.

  There’s a sound water makes when it’s still, or perhaps it’s a nonsound, the suffocating of any other small sounds which might be in the neighborhood, and it’s this I hear as I misjudge my reach around the railing’s end and miss the bar I was trying for. My hand dives through space, taking me down with it, and I only just manage to stop myself in time by grabbing a rail farther along.

  I freeze, my face that much closer to the water, my lungs heaving, one leg still swung out beyond the iron bars, counterbalancing my body. Slowly I bring it down and force my head and shoulders up, my foot slipping three or four times against the rails before I get a grip. The site side of the wharf is within reach n
ow: all I have to do is get there. But I cling to where I am, my mind pulsing with a kind of empty, exhausted sickness, suddenly recognizing the fear that this could all be real – this exhaustion could be the last state I know. A part of me just wants to stay here and think about it. But that’s failure’s way, that only guarantees more misery. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now; spontaneous combustion requires a nudge. I’ll nudge it.

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  The other is when it blows. When I’ve inched back onto the wharf, picked up my petrol and beer and made it safely across the trenches and unseen hazards of the site to the refuge of the pyramid. The scaffolding almost blocks off access to the main entrance – a huge, as yet unfinished stone and steel hole complete with Korean hieroglyphs (or they might be Egyptian; who the fuck knows?) and squared-off pricklike columns on either side – but I twist and duck around the poles, and climb concreted steps littered with masonry slabs into the atrium.

  The light from outside doesn’t penetrate far in here, it just throws long shadows of the columns up across the vast space that extends the full height of the steel and glass of one side of the pyramid. It gives me a weird sense of my father now, as if he’s here, I’m inside him, this is his brain and his bowels all in one, the wires and pipes all disconnected and poking out of ducts in the masonry, the mess of service shafts and lift machinery and suspended pitch-black floors overhead like the weirdly floating jigsaw pieces of his ego. I’m dwarfed, I have to admit, by what he can achieve – the size of his will when he wants to fuck the world.

  He’s like Jessie: they can reach out and screw it, give it a good hiding; all I can do is piss about. Outside his shitpiles, I can cope, they’re no different to the monuments all the other grim bastards erect, carving their names on the planet’s face with a razor. But inside

  – inside, they always get to me, as if they’re designed just to show me what I’m not; and I feel his boot crunching down hard on my skull.

  What’s hard, though, is to connect all this with the crumbling pisshole I left this morning. Something must have happened to drive him down there, to want to put that distance between him and this, not that I give a fuck. Was it Jessie? Were they already doing it – whatever she says – and he wanted to get her out of London to where he’d have her all to himself?

  That doesn’t make sense. There’s more risk of exposure in the village than anywhere. Maybe Jessie wanted it? I know what I saw on her belly last night: a baby, a little embryo in an egg curled up above her cunt, painted in lurid colors like some sort of tribal thing, a tattoo, a taunt.

  Maybe she wanted him on hand for the summer – his prick on tap? He’s smaller than her, he’s afraid of something – I feel it here, this isn’t a happy building, it’s a vast empty vault. What’s he got to be afraid of, if it isn’t her?

  Me, for one thing. Now I know he’s alive, I can go on hating him. I can do this. But this isn’t for him, it’s for me. He doesn’t deserve this much attention. This is my entertainment, my madness.

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  I feel sharp. It’s safer in here than it was outside – at least for the moment. I listen and hear nothing, so I test the silence by snapping open the last beer and shiver and drink some down. It’s hard to see much in the darkness, but I know what I’m looking for. Up above me, above what’s going to be the huge Pharaoh’s asshole of a lobby (I never did ask the Prick how the Koreans feel about this whole Egyptian theme, how wouldn’t they rather have something that refers to their own culture – but what do they know, they build shopping centers that come tumbling down on top of their own people?), is a skeleton of metal girders, part cut away.

  I see or think I do the round noses, the dense bulks, of oxyacetylene tanks waiting to be used. They’re a fair way up – maybe sixty feet away

  – but I’m good for the climb, so I drain the beer, stick the can back in its noose with the other, pick up the petrol and navigate around the crap and equipment on the floor, in search of a way up.

  The service stairs take me there. The climb is worse than I expected

  – I’m totally knackered now, running on chemicals I didn’t know I had, losing the clarity that seemed to exist on the ground with each grinding step up, my legs limp and wet and leaden in the same moment.

  I’m almost there, moving off the stairs for a second to check how far up I am and get my bearings, when outside the dogs start snarling and howling in a way that seems to lock right into every nerve-end on my body and twist them viciously. But there’s no suggestion of movement, no pack of slobbering monsters tearing up the stairs behind me to deprive me of what’s mine, what’s left to me. So I stumble on, my mind throwing itself against the walls of that stupid joke: How do you get a dog to bark? Pour petrol over it and it goes woof. How do you get petrol to woof? Light a match and it wags its tail.

  It’s not easy ripping my T-shirt – I must really be shot, all my strength’s gone – plus I’m cold. I unscrew the cap of one of the plastic containers and fill the two beer cans with petrol, pouring it in slowly with shaking hands through the tear-shaped holes left by the ring-pulls. The smell revives me, the fumes snaking up my nose and into my brain to burn the outer layer, blow away the cobwebs.

  I soak the scraps of T-shirt I’ve torn and stuff them into the cans’ holes, poking them in and cutting another finger in the process. Then I’m out over the steel grid – covered for the moment with planks of wood, their distance from the ground startlingly evident through the cracks – lugging the rest of the petrol to what is, as it promised to be, a store of welding tanks. I don’t know if this will work for sure, the tanks may not puncture, their contents not ignite, but it seems my best bet.

  I try improving on their arrangement, hoping in the petrol-soaked brightness of my Boy Scout brain to pile them like the sticks of a fire, but I can’t get them to budge, either I’m so weak or they’re so heavy. So I just douse them where they are. I pour petrol over them and splash it all around – pissing in the dark with it, drinking in the smell.

  I plant the two plastic bottles on the sodden wood platform, up against the tanks, leaving an inch or so of juice in each, then back off quickly, stumbling a little in the dark, but immune to the drop on either side now, back to the cans.

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  There probably won’t be everything I asked for in my Christmas stocking. I want at least nuclear fission. I want the Prick’s world and everybody else’s to fall in on itself like a ton of shit, like those endless burning images of the collapsing towers we saw on TV – but without the death, there’s only two people I want dead right now, and they’re not here tonight.

  But I light the fuse anyway. I toss the first can before it can blow up in my hand, and watch it sail toward its target, a trail of flame from the burning plug of T-shirt. I reach for the second, but before I can grab it, there’s a flash the colors of old Catholic paintings – the colors of Jessie in Sonny’s painting – and as I spin myself around, a blast tears across my back and shunts me off the platform, into the night.

  31

  The burn on my back hurts like hell. But I must want pain, I must feed on it, because this morning at the harbor in Kingstown, I had my shirt off again and refused to put it back on even when

  an evil-eyed St Vincent priestess refused to serve me in a café, and shouted after me into the street, as if my naked chest was some sort of personal affront. I think I’m trying for total skin cancer as a surprise gift for Jessie; she always liked to see me suffer. I reckon if one morning on the beach in Barbados can sear a blister right across my spine, a little lunchtime sun in St Vincent ought to do the rest.

  The Prick is paying for this trip, which is a joke in itself. For five years I’ve made him sweat over every penny he’s tried to spend on me, refusing presents, then accepting them, then giving them back or, better, sending them back with sick reminders of what he’s done glued together from newspaper and magazine print like anonymous, threatening letters.

  Now I’ve decided he’s h
ad enough. He’s done his bit to undo the damage; he even persuaded my mother to see him last month for dinner, but she was like a one-woman assault force before it and came home afterwards, shut herself in her bedroom and wept, so I think Jack might be seven, eight or older before he gets a chance to learn at first hand what a cunt he’s got for a dad. But I think he’s had enough, Dad. He’s taken his punishment like a man. Now I’m going to start taking his presents graciously. His presents, his checks, his car, his selfrespect, maybe even his girlfriends if I get the chance. Me and him can become good mates now. There are times when I’m with him when I almost start liking him again, but I won’t let that stand in my way.

  The boat to the island is typical Jessie: a fucked-up old sailing hulk peopled by an ugly mix of holiday-tanned tourists and yachting types and the quieter, funkier faces of locals who have learned to live with nutters like her making their homes here. There’s even a scraggly goat tied up to the bow, together with a couple of pigs lying heaving in the sun between the crates of Coca-Cola and the baskets of green bananas. I could never quite work out if it was Jessie who influenced Sonny, or the other way around, but whatever it was, Sonny seems to have left her mark.

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  Jessie told me in her emails about the skies here – sunsets rapid, green and sharp, as if the sun’s on coke – but in the half hour since we left St Vincent it’s clouded over in readiness for giving me a hard time. The sea has quite a swell now and the boat is constantly tilted one way or the other, but somehow the heat and voices and the sight of flying fish skipping over the water make it seem less vast and daunting than it used to in Devon – smaller, as if a few years or a few thousand miles have diminished its strength, its scope for impressing me. Maybe it’s just the absence of cold – but perhaps it is cold down there, deep down there.