But nothing has any moral certainty anymore, thank God. The ‘War on Terror’ was a video-age gig: the will isn’t there, not among the country as a whole, not this country, anyway. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a major Western war like the Second World War again. Not now. Not with a population whose priorities are a flatscreen TV and a weekend in Dubai.
Anyway, it’s one of those days. My life feels like it’s stuck away from the action, which is hardly surprising in Devon. Clutching at straws, I’ve actually been shopping with my mother. The compulsion suddenly hit me that I had to have a particular DVD and have it now, so I struck a deal with Mum: I’d go with her and carry the food if she’d get me the DVD. Of course, I’d forgotten we were in the wilderness. Not only did the shop in Sidmouth not have what I wanted, but it was a real struggle finding something worth buying. I’m starting to dream of London megastores, I can almost taste them: the iron-clad plasticwrap around every new release, the weird anti-shoplifting tabs, the desperate film company displays. It’s all bullshit, but I’m getting to the point down here where I’d love to be exploited, I want them to take my money (or Mum’s) and fuck my mind.
▪
We drive through the village and up to our cottage, which looks oddly deserted in the rain – or vulnerable, like a house in a horror movie, waiting for the maniac to call. What I like about the house is its oldness: there’s lichen and stuff in the cracks between the stones, tree roots poking up right outside the front door, which itself is so hard to open and close that it might be easier to climb in through a window, and the garden is overgrown with the sort of lushness you see in old country graveyards (what’s under that soil?). What I hate about the house is its oldness: I bang my head on a beam every time I go upstairs, those tree roots outside work hard at breaking your legs and at night the timber and plaster that just about hold the cottage together sound as if they’re wanking in unison.
‘Tom, you carry the bags in, will you? I thought I heard Jack.’ This is one of the first times Mum’s left the baby with Dad and Jessie. I’ve noticed that although Bratto is already clearly an independent being, she still has some kind of radar link with him. It must he hard for her, I suppose, letting go of something that’s your flesh, though Jake (he looks like a Jake to me, none of this Jack shit) – Jake, I’ve watched him, just regards her as dependable room service.
I grab the thin white plastic carrier bags, all set to split, and leave Mum to run through the rain to the front of the cottage while I perversely walk around the back, slipping and sliding along the grassy bank on which I’ve already twisted my ankle once since we’ve been here. This route takes me past the bathroom – and the bathroom takes me somewhere else.
It’s occupied. I know this even before I’m close, because I can hear water (more water, there’s enough out here) swilling about. No voices, just water. Something makes me stop and approach more warily, so that even though the window panes are frosted and rainstreaked, whoever’s in there won’t be able to see the shape of me and the white bags outside. I’m a natural spy, not just a nosy bastard but someone who prides himself on being able to enter a room, give it a thorough search and get out again without leaving a trace of my being there. This time I’m outside, but I’m totally frozen, silent, wet, looking in.
From where I’m standing, body pressed against the wall in best guerrilla fashion, legs angled against the treacherous bank, I can just see past the small top window, which is open. The bank gives me some height – the cottage windows are low to start with – and by straining I have a clear view of part of the bathroom mirror, opposite. This in turn lets me see who’s there.
I hear Mum shouldering open the front door, the scrape as it jams open on the hall floor and the double grind as she struggles to close it (I should have done it for her). The effect of these sounds on the steamy figures in the mirror (unless I’m misinterpreting, and I don’t think so) is powerful.
Jessie is in the bath, her face dripping, her short hair clinging wetly to her scalp as if she’s just ducked under the water, her tits like a burn in my brain, closer than the image in the mirror, so that I can feel the pulse beating beneath them, even while my own has stopped.
Dad is kneeling, facing her. His knees (I register this in a flash, like part of a puzzle) must be between hers. In the instant I witness, as the first scrape of the front door takes effect, Jessie’s hands are scooping water to pour over the part of him that bobs above the surface of the bath – a string-operated thing, his tackle, a horse’s prick, uglier and more fascinating and more threatening than I’ve ever seen it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my mind has just run off through the rain and what I’m seeing is a waking blast from a weird dream. But the bags are at my feet, crammed with cereal boxes, salad stuff, baked beans. The cheap white plastic stretched around these lumps and corners has rivulets of water running off it on to the tangle of dead and living grass on the bank. This much is real, sharp, hyper-real if you like. And in the mirror, my sister’s eyes lock with my dad’s as he lurches forward, struggling to support his hands as he clambers out of the bath, suddenly too big for it.
I’m frozen for a moment longer as Dad, grabbing a towel, vacates the bathroom with a guilty speed. Jessie is left alone, left with a backward glance from him that in one shot is so much the father I know and a person I don’t that I want to stick my fist through the glass to let him know I’m here.
Mum is with Jack, I can hear him crying now. I can imagine Dad walking into the bedroom, having toweled himself furiously, playing it cool: ‘Sorry, Jack was so quiet we left him. I needed a bath, it’s so fucking sticky. Jessie’s just gone in now.’
And there she is, flushed with the heat or something, soaping herself like some prim tart in a TV commercial. God, I’d like to know what goes through that head of hers, what makes her radiate rightness and ripeness. She’s so like me, so much my sister, my flesh, that the truth dangles in front of me, a carrot I can’t quite touch.
‘Fuck them both!’ my mind cries, as rain snakes unpleasantly down my back. I kick the carrier bags, which is a stupid thing to do, since it only makes me lose my footing and land hard on the unyielding rim of a tin. ‘I don’t want to know,’ I try to kid myself. ‘I don’t even care.’
5
There is a moment which is so beautiful it makes everything else worthwhile. You stand on the cliff above the village, early in the morning or late in the evening, and you gaze out at the sea – a
huge, changing wash of light and movement, bigger than any of us, a joker with a patience longer than any one life and an inconceivable strength that can snap your back against the rocks as easily as you might flick a fly off your nose.
I can feel how cold it is, even when it’s warm. Even when the water’s not skimmed with a purple film of oil, and the pebbles and seaweed are stewed in the sun, I can sense the ocean’s cold heart further out, out by the skyline. Jessie’s tried to paint it, but she can’t get close. Either the beauty is there or the darkness, but not both. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about art, but I’ve noticed that in British paintings the sea always looks sort of murky or angry or drab or just somehow different from the way it really is. Jessie’s pictures are nothing like that: she sees with a foreigner’s eyes. If my sister’s a reincarnation, I’d say she was African, via the slave route to Barbados, then on to Nicaragua or the like (and she probably fucked herself into some luxury and some whiteness along the way). But even she can’t get to the heart of the water, not with her powder blues and her baked-earth red.
It’s not just the color, it’s the color of light, it’s the mood of the sky and your own cross-wired soul. Down on the beach, it’s the druggy thunder-hiss of the surf dragging at thousands of pebbles, as if the sea’s in training for the greatest glue-sniffing contest on earth. Up here, with a view of the sheep and the cottages and the coastline, there’s just the image, no sound, and a faint tang of brine in the air, like a taunt or a memory.
It’s more than a moment. It’s repeatable, though it’s never the same twice. It’s where I go to stay sane down here, it’s where I go when I miss London, when I want to work out what the fuck I’m doing with my life.
▪
I’d be there now, getting soaked, if I wasn’t so determined to speak to Jessica. If I can get her alone, there are a good few questions I’m going to ask, but it’s as if she senses this. She’s playing for time, Miss Florence Nightingale, helping Mum change the baby and scrub the vegetables for dinner. I’m in the doghouse, meanwhile, for dumping all the shopping in the rain.
I watch Dad. I watch everyone. Suddenly I feel like a spy. I’m the one who’s different, I’m the one with the knowledge – I wouldn’t trust me, if I was them.
What’s changed? My mind is working overtime, reassessing everything. But Dad seems the same, snapping open a beer as he dumps himself into one of the cottage’s chintzy armchairs to sort through a pile of unopened office mail.
‘How far would we have to go, do you think,’ he ponders aloud, screwing his face up into a mask of weariness and disgust, ‘to get away from all this crap?’
‘Not much further,’ Mum offers from the kitchen. ‘Another phone call like yesterday’s, and they’ll probably take you at your word.’
There’s a long pause in which Dad seems to be replaying yesterday’s phone call, enjoying the recollection of what was obviously a choice exchange.
‘They love it,’ he says. ‘Panics the accountants. They won’t know what they’ve got unless they’re made to sweat blood for it.’
When it comes to work, Dad likes a bit of passion to enter into things. I don’t think he’s happy unless emotions are aroused, and certainly where his current scam is concerned – a bloody great steel and glass pyramid for a Korean bank in Docklands – he’s played devil’s advocate from day one. Bad enough that he has to work for these wankers, he says – no reason to make it easy for them. But I think it’s a bluff. I think his work is what drives him, and coming down here to Devon has nothing to do with getting away from it all, it’s just another way of giving them the finger.
Dad peers in the direction of the kitchen, stuffing the torn envelopes he’s been opening into one of the big manila ones. ‘Why?’ he asks Mum. I stare at his eyes, his mouth, my dad, my chum, and see him pointing his dick at Jessie. ‘Does it bother you?’
‘What?’ Mum is slicing carrots or something, chop, chop, on the wooden board. Jessie darts through the room and goes upstairs, trying to avoid my eye but not quite succeeding.
‘The phone call. Would you care if I just said forget it?’
Mum appears in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, and lets him have her shrewdest gaze.
‘The only way you’d forget it would be if you could take it away from them, and even then you’d want to twist the knife an extra turn. We could be in Peru and you’d still find a way to fight them longdistance.’
This seems to satisfy Dad, which is no doubt what it’s designed to do. Mum’s great strength is that she’s a master bullshit-detector; she keeps us all on course, and how do we repay her?
‘You’re right,’ Dad says, suddenly restless in his chair. What’s he thinking now, is it the way Mum’s holding the knife? A thought knocks through my mind – it’s chaos in there. ‘Peru wouldn’t solve a thing.’
▪
Jessie is upstairs, doing whatever it is sisters do in their rooms by themselves. I burst in. She’s got one shoe off, one bare ankle on the bed, the other decorating the floor, her back to me, her leg twisted sideways out from under her, an incredibly awkward position which seems to have her deep in thought rather than involved in any change of footwear.
She turns as I come in, guilty, lost, absolutely aware of the power she has over me.
‘Are you happy?’ she asks.
‘Why, don’t I look happy?’
‘Don’t know.’ She brings her foot down to the floor, kicks the other shoe off. ‘How do you look when you’re happy?’
‘I’ll let you know. Jessie, I want to talk.’
‘Right.’ She’s marvelous. Her guilt – if that’s what it is – is instantly banished. ‘I’m looking for something. You can help or keep out of my way.’
She dives into a large cardboard box crammed with the stuff she wouldn’t let the removal men touch when we came down here. I don’t know how to start. I stand staring at a postcard tucked into her mirror, a Rodin sketch of a woman contorted into a far more uncomfortable position than Jessie’s when I entered, her muscles all pushing against her penciled flesh like life trying to get out.
‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask her, trying to edge into this and wondering why I don’t just go on the attack – ‘Fuck it, I saw you! What were you doing?’ But I don’t. Instead, brother-sister conundrum number four thousand and forty-eight: ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask, ‘which are your real feelings – the ones you use as cover or the ones you never use?’
She turns, looks up over the seat of her jeans which faces me. ‘You’ve been reading comics again, haven’t you?’
‘Well?’
‘I’m trying to find something.’
‘Jessie . . .’ I’m not feeling patient.
She bobs back inside the box, retrieves a tattered brown envelope which rips as she picks it up, scattering scraps of paper, letters, drawings, what looks like an old napkin smudged with crayon. ‘Shit!’ She straightens up, arches her back, shoots me a bottomless glance. ‘How do you use a feeling, tell me.’
I sit on the bed. Somehow or other, I’m going to get through this.
‘OK.’ Jessie moves to the mirror, touches the Rodin postcard, as if I had willed her to do it. She picks up a scent spray, feels its weight, pulls the front of the black camisole-thing she is wearing above her jeans and belts a jet of lighter fuel down her tits. Well, it smells like lighter fuel and it’s designed to have much the same effect. She knows I hate that stuff.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘you don’t like it down here, do you? You don’t like Devon. But there’s not much you can do about it, is there, except complain? But the more you complain, the worse you feel – unless you get a buzz off complaining, which you probably do. What don’t you like? It’s all instinct or emotion or something. If you wanted to like it, if you wanted to find things to like, you could. At least you could make it better than it is . . .’ I’m barely listening. This is not what I’ve come here for. ‘What’s real about any of that? Is there something wrong with Devon or with you? Of course, if you ask me—’
‘Jessie,’ I blurt, ‘I didn’t drop the shopping in the rain.’
‘It got wet.’
And I’m off and running again, a mad, tangential babble: ‘Do you remember that time I was meant to be marking them in as they came back from the cross-country run? I was pissing about with Steve down by the stream and I fell in? I got soaked, everything. I had to say I fell in a puddle.’
She knows what it is now. I can see it in her eyes.
‘What’s this about?’
‘You.’
And I start to cry. I can’t believe this, but I’m sitting on the bed blabbing. Her arm goes around me. ‘Christ, Tom, shush, what is it?’ I feel her warmth, her closeness as she hugs me. This is why I love her
– she’s my sister. But she’s also someone I don’t know nearly as well as I think, she’s a body – a very pliant body – into which all kinds of men I’ll never meet will be sticking more than just a casual finger. And then there’s my dad.
‘I saw you.’ I stop sobbing, feeling sick, heaving for air. I pull away, my face burning. I get up and swing the bedroom door shut, this is private, whatever happened this is between Jessie and me. ‘In the bath. With Dad.’ I’m still gulping air, the fear wrapped tight around my throat.
‘Yes?’
‘What does it mean?’
Any hint of knowledge in her eyes has been banished. I am faced with such young, cl
ear-faced honesty that I doubt myself. I want to doubt myself.
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
It’s not enough. I want more. I’m up on that cliff above the village. The truth is bigger than anything else, it doesn’t care about the rules. You make the rules, then you find yourself in the middle of that cold ocean anyway.
She goes on: ‘We had a bath. I got in, he got out.’
‘That’s not what I saw.’
‘Well, that’s all there was.’ She draws back. A certain petulant set to her mouth makes me doubt her now, not me. ‘Christ, where were you? What do you think you saw?’
‘Don’t give me a hard time! I don’t want to talk about this, it’s scaring the shit out of me, it makes me feel like throwing up. I feel sick, Jessie. I’m not being melodramatic, but I feel like I want to die. This is real.’
I break through for a moment, then it’s gone.
‘Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah, now I’ve thought about it. And I have thought about it.’ ‘You’re wrong.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m just telling you you’re wrong.’
I want to grab her, shake her, hurt her in some way, but I just take hold of her wrist. ‘Please don’t lie to me.’
I grip tight. ‘I’d rather know. We don’t bullshit each other – we don’t, do we?’
Jessie lets me hold her, as if this gives her the edge. I’ve lost and she knows it. I know what I believe, but I’m going to let her tell it her way because I don’t want to be shut out.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘you saw me in the bath with Dad, right? I don’t know what you saw, but you know what I’m like, I like physicality. God, we touch each other enough—’ She looks at my hand, grasping her wrist – ‘but it doesn’t mean anything earth-shattering. I tell you everything. I’d tell you.’
The War Zone Page 4
