The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  Mum seems to go into a new gear as the French prats concentrate their attention on the tree. They even give it a shove with those wellpacked arms of theirs, but they have to be joking. Next, they want to try and lift the car off, but suddenly it’s fireworks time, it’s all happening. Mum is screaming and moaning and moving her head around as if she wants to be in ten different places at once.

  I don’t know where to look. Her dress is pushed back now and between her hot, spreadeagled thighs is the kind of vivid detailing of wet cunt that even the magazines I buy never manage to provide.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ Jessie asks, a little girl again, gripping Dad’s arm as we all look on.

  ‘Yes,’ Mum gasps. ‘Yes, it does.’

  She yelps, and I think we all move forward into the haze of sweat, motor oil and birth smells that hang over the open door. Dad takes Mum’s hand as something foreign pushes its way past her hole, and slowly a wrinkled curve of skin and bone becomes a head. My face burns, with what I’m not sure, either it’s the thought of those two French bozos being here to witness this, or the waves of realization that hit me concerning my own humble beginnings. It’s one thing to know that we were all born once, quite another actually to see a straggly ape take its place in the world as your brother (so this is the idea, is it, Mum, of having us kids along for the ride?), especially with all this nature around – collapsing trees, symphonic birds, the sun’s heat. It’s a shock to the system: my cells seem to recoil from the reminder of where they came from – and where they’re going to. For standing here, watching a new life take shape, watching the blood, the pain, watching my mother on her back like an animal, I understand for the first time in my life that I am going to die one day – we all are, Mum and Dad, Jessie, me, even the baby. It’s so obvious that it hits home like a hammer and yet it doesn’t depress me, fuck it, I can take it, I can live up to it, when it comes I’ll go fighting. I’ll take some life with me!

  The kid is out now, squirming in the light, eyes peeling apart through layers of blood and muck, its mouth opening and closing but making no sound so that my mother urges Dad, ‘Quick, slap it, make sure it’s breathing . . .’

  It is. ‘God, what a sound’ I say. Its wail seems filled with such rage and indignation that, I swear, already it’s blaming us for something.

  Mum is laughing and crying at once. ‘What is it?’ she asks. ‘An alien,’ Dad says, wiping some of the gunk from the creature’s face. ‘A boy, I think . . . Right, it’s a boy.’ He stands back from it, turning to us, grinning like a witchdoctor, his hair and eyes alive in the morning light. ‘This is just the start,’ he says, staring at his offspring. His face contorts as he looks at it, getting ugly for a moment, almost scaring me, then brightening, grinning again. ‘It’s too late, skip,’ he tells it. ‘You’ve got your papers. You’re stuck here with the rest of us now.’

  ‘What the hell do we do with this?’ Jessie asks, touching the limp cord of flesh that connects our brother’s belly to a disgusting lump of liver and blood. (Funny to think that her navel had one of those once. And mine. Of course, Jessie’s is still on display, what’s left of it – a neatly curled little bump, protruding slightly from her soft tanned belly, beaming satellite messages at those French bastards.) ‘We can’t just leave it like that.’

  ‘That’s the beauty of hospitals,’ my father says. ‘They do all that for you.’

  ‘Tie it,’ my mother says, lying back exhausted.

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Find something,’ Mum says. ‘A shoelace…’

  But we’re all wearing sandals or slip-ons. Then one of the French dickheads obliges with some kind of canvas cord from the back of their giant truck. They have been standing about through all this, unable to go but not able to do much either except cry when the fucking baby appears as if it’s one of theirs. Now, they take the lead. After checking that Mum can withstand a bit of movement, they trot around to the wrecked nose of the Bentley and start hefting it off the tree. Dad stands by at the open driver’s window and steers as he helps push it back to the verge of the road. It rolls on to the rough grass with a gliding, uncontrollable scrunch, then sits there, dead, useless, an expensive junkheap.

  And the boys aren’t finished yet. Having cleared a path to the tree, they get the life roaring in that great shitpile of theirs, haul it up over the brow of the hill and aim its huge metal bumper at the heart of the oak. A belch of diesel, the rumble of literally man-sized wheels, then branches splinter and the metal bar takes whole chunks out of the timber, but nothing budges. The muscle-bound dick at the wheel spits past his vast side mirror, kicks the machine into lower gear and lets the engine burn itself into a frenzy of deafening, air-blackening meanness. Choking on the fumes, my father tries to stop the contest, aware that the last thing Mum needs now is this. He’s pissing in the wind. Even if they could hear him, these boys are determined. No tree is going to fuck with them and get away with it. The French choose their battles well.

  It ends predictably. The tree doesn’t want to win, that’s its problem. It just lies there, taking a beating, letting the artic pound away at its bark. The driver is smart. Having failed to get it rolling head-on, he maneuvers the lorry perilously close to the dipped verge and pushes from the side. There is a glorious moment of doubt, when it looks as if the truck is going to tip over, rather than the tree move, but then something snaps in the tree’s resolve and it goes. With a sound like splintering beer crates, the trunk is shunted free of the road.

  ▪

  The rest is anticlimax. A timeless journey in the elevated cabin of that lumbering Eurogiant. These truckers don’t have it bad. Behind the driving cab, their sleeping space is like a budget hotel room: curtains, a washstand, a portable TV, a fridge full of plonk. And the art on the walls makes it interesting. If those girls are French – if those girls are my age, which they look – maybe I’ve been wrong about the race, maybe another trip is overdue.

  Mum lies on the bed with her newborn. For a while there, she was glowing; now she just looks washed-out, eager to hit the hospital sack. Dad plays with the baby, teasing its tiny fingers and staring at it, trying to read its mind, trying, from the look of him, to leap inside its skull and get some answers. The kid just frowns, mistrustful of everyone for the moment, as well he should be. Jessie plants herself firmly next to Dad and the baby, giving the French boys nothing now, staring straight at them when they glance back with ugly scowls. And me? I’m all over the place. I’m knackered, my bones ache, but I’m flying. The morning feels great, sleep seems like a drug I’m not ready for, and I’m even getting to like the idea of having a kid brother.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I think. ‘This could get awfully boring.’

  3

  So we’re back in the canoe. Mum is in hospital, and we’re lazing on the water, trying not to think, which isn’t difficult. That slightly sick feeling you get in your stomach with lack of sleep

  goes well with the heat and the wine. Dad and I are paddling. Jessie’s between us, doing a Cleopatra number, radiant in the sun on her barge while her minions sweat.

  I dip my wood in the water, test its weight. I feel like everything’s fine, this is one of those times that is preordained. Nothing can cock this up, we’re all too powerful.

  ‘I could take more afternoons like this,’ I say generously.

  ‘God, he’s actually enjoying himself.’ Jessica’s voice is like a cool breeze behind me.

  ‘Don’t pressure him. Can’t you see he’s suffering withdrawal symptoms?’

  I glance back at Dad, who is scratching his leg beneath his ridiculous Hawaiian shorts. ‘I’m not giving any ground,’ I warn him. ‘The country still feels like bullshit to me. It’s not real.’

  Jessie prods me in the back. ‘You mean you get confused because you can’t tell the difference between a flower and a tree.’

  ‘Nothing’s real,’ Dad says, ‘that’s part of the problem. I heard some Ministry of Defense wanker the other night, talking about ho
w defense contractors had to learn what it was like in the real world. Everyone thinks that some other part of life is more real than their own, or that theirs is the only real world. They’re both equally dangerous points of view.’

  ‘What’s real to you?’ I ask him.

  He thinks about that. This is an afternoon that makes you challenge ideas of reality. School’s out, everybody’s holidaying. Is anyone working today? Well, those hospital Nazis looking after Mother – all crisp linen and fluorescent faces. But they enjoy their work, stoking the boilers with anaesthetized patients.

  Dad answers me. He sounds like a chum, not my father. I think we could get on well, if we could ever get rid of these family ties between us.

  ‘The fact that life goes on,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t stop going on – well, it might, but I wouldn’t want it to. And you two. No escaping you two.’

  ‘You wouldn’t last a minute without us,’ Jessica tells him. ‘And Mum.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  I can hear him smile.

  ▪

  We pass through a village, marvelously deserted on this weekday afternoon – but not in a cozy way, more as if the entire population had been wiped out and the buildings left standing. Radio One drifts hollowly from open windows and open doors of cream-grey Devon cottages and ugly new houses, full of themselves, full of premeditated, parceled country charm. A Ford estate car stands silent outside the confectioners-and-sub-post-office. A new bike is upturned against a wall, awaiting a puncture repair. The sun beats down, accentuating any cracks in the road visible from the river.

  Then someone appears to spoil the illusion: an old woman, older than we allow them to live in London, wearing a cardigan – in this weather – over her faded summer dress. She calls across the street.

  ‘There’s fluoride in that water. They put it in for the teeth, none of us want it, but they put it in anyway.’

  ‘Not in the river, surely?’ Dad shouts.

  She makes no move toward us, just stands in front of the shop next to the sub-post office, its windows empty save for a small yellow notice taped up inside.

  ‘The sheep drink it,’ she says. ‘They make sure we get it, one way or another. The sheep drink it, or we do.’

  We stop paddling as we approach the village ford, where the water is barely deep enough to let us pass. The canoe scrapes the concreted bottom, but we push it on with our hands and float under a road bridge and away from the centre of town.

  ‘Why’d you only bring one bottle of wine?’ Jessie asks Dad, as we pass a dingy white shed, its paint peeling, a pile of abandoned oil drums outside. ‘I feel like getting smashed.’

  ‘That’s why.’

  ‘It’s not enough.’

  She shifts her weight behind me, rocking the canoe. I turn to make a face. She is holding the empty wine bottle in the river, enjoying the push of the water against it.

  ‘You could,’ I point out, half complaining, ‘always try paddling.’ But she shakes her head, studying the bottle’s neck in her hand. She looks far away, like Mum does sometimes.

  Then she looks around at Dad. Neither of us is paddling now. He is sitting, head back, cocked toward the sky, eyes closed.

  ‘Do you feel older . . . ?’ She pauses, trying to pin down a thought in her mind.

  ‘He looks it,’ I offer, to help wake him up. He does and he doesn’t. He hasn’t shaved, so the slight sag of his jaw is usefully hidden by stubble. His hair is as wiry and uncontrollable as ever, but the skin around his eyes looks tired, dark and folded like a wary old lizard.

  ‘. . . or different?’ Jessie goes on. ‘Having a new son? I mean, it’s been a while.’

  Opening his eyes to an impending collision, Dad quickly cuts water with his paddle to curve us away from the bank. He shoots me a look. ‘One of us ought to watch where we’re going.’ Then, to Jessie: ‘I feel – I feel like it’s time to let loose. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Was it like that with us?’

  ‘Was it? I don’t know. I was a different person then. You gave me my balls. I’d got one in! I felt on fire. I felt, “Piss on anyone who doesn’t think my daughter is the best thing in the world!”’

  ‘And me?’ I ask, thinking: let’s see how he handles this one. But I have to look away, because we’re about to hit a sapling growing right in the water. Trees seem to have it in for us today.

  ‘You I was just worried about. You were a forceps delivery, you came out with this great strawberry mark all over your face . . . I thought: it doesn’t matter, he’s healthy, that’s what counts, but already I could see you having a hard time. By that evening you were fine, it had gone, it was just the forceps that had done it, but you looked like a little bruiser.’

  ‘Still does,’ says Jessie.

  We are approaching another road bridge. The banks here are steep and grassy, and there’s a smell of cow-shit from somewhere. Or horseshit – I wouldn’t know the difference, right? Jessie has taken the bottle out of the water and is rolling the wet glass over her skin. I know, because she tried it on mine. It’s not cold enough, that’s the problem. It’s not even cool – there is definitely something strange about this water.

  ‘I sort of wish Mum hadn’t wanted us there, last night,’ I say. ‘It’s going to make it harder being rotten to him.’

  ‘Dad . . .?’ Jessie asks. ‘Have you and Mum ever really had problems over us? Do we make it more difficult, if one of you wanted to leave?’

  We’ve thought a lot about that, Jessie and I. Whenever serious bother has hit our household, we’ve nearly always been able to pin its cause down to one of us. Those nights when voices have been raised after we’ve gone to bed, when silence has seemed more threatening than a row, we’ve wondered: how does this measure on the scale of things? Most of our friends’ families are divorced or remarried or something; we’ve always felt like the odd ones. But you never know what’s coming. This move to Devon was long talked about, but no tempers were lost – except over me.

  ‘You want an honest answer?’ Dad says. We’re under the bridge now. There’s a smell of mould.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dad pushes us off the brickwork with his paddle. ‘It depends on the time of day. It depends on how selfish you’re feeling.’

  ▪

  Then we’re out into the light, and pebbles are raining down on all sides. There’s a Durex in the water and some boys are taunting Jessie. I’m sure she enjoys it. A little further on, she slides out of the canoe and swims alongside, her turquoise bikini dazzling against the dull green fur of the riverbed.

  The trees form a sort of cathedral around us. Sunlight plays on her skin, on her bruised shoulder (and my bruised head), as she unties her bikini top, then turns on to her back to let her tanned breasts bob out of the water. Her feet kick and she glides away, struggling to remove the other half of her bikini without touching the weed under her feet. Then she rolls over again and swims back toward us, evil intent in her eyes. She grabs hold of the canoe with one hand, hesitating only a moment before putting her full weight on it to tip us in.

  ‘You stupid bitch!’ I think, without malice, as I go under: I was just getting comfortable. But really it’s OK, the water feels good even if it is giving me cancer.

  The canoe floats upside down. Jessie pisses herself laughing as Dad thrashes about, trying to locate the car keys (our other heap, not the Bentley, that’s definitely out of commission for a while) before remembering that they’re in the buttoned-down pocket of his shorts.

  But then he’s laughing, too. And suddenly we’ve all got our shorts off, swimming bare-arsed in the middle of Devon on a Thursday afternoon, and it’s only me who’s feeling weird, who’s feeling as if there’s a party going on and I’m not invited.

  4

  Jessie and me are close. We talk a lot. We talk about everything. She’s a major source of information for me when it comes to the inner rumblings and eruptions that go through girls’ heads, and

  I want to know that
stuff, especially the darker side, the really funky, creamy, fuck-the-feminists-and-fuck-all-men-this-is-really-what-I’mabout sort of thinking. I’m already developing my own style. I’ve found I don’t just want to fuck girls’ bodies – I want to get inside their minds. Because unless you get that mental bang, unless you listen and you probe and you challenge and you push (to the edge, if need be), sex is like pissing about with a chemistry set without reading the instructions. You’re missing the potential for real danger.

  And it seems to work. I’m doing OK. I’ll be honest – I haven’t actually got there yet, not all the way. But it’s getting closer. And even the dumbest girls I’ve met have a kind of poetry about them, if you can get past all the teen magazine and cosmetic counter bullshit they get brainwashed with.

  But how do you ask your sister, ‘Is something happening with you and Dad?’

  It’s not easy.

  ▪

  Jump ahead a week, maybe two. I’m not sure when, but there’s more water, it’s raining – the kind of warm, hard, summer rain that gets you properly drenched, like standing under a shower with your clothes on.

  It’s one of those summer holidays that makes you wonder if the rest of your life’s going to be like this: always waiting for something to happen, while the world turns somewhere else. I remember when we first went into Iraq, when Bush really screwed things up, these were weird distant shapeless events that seemed like a bad dream but terrified the hell out of me because they were happening – in fact we seemed to be rolling toward disaster all too fast, and no one had asked me! I remember the words ‘National Service’ or ‘Conscription’ suddenly coming back into the vocabulary, and I thought, fuck, if this thing develops, if this thing goes on for long enough, it could drag me down with it.