The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  17

  J

  essie is seeing Nick, but that means nothing.

  ▪

  I’m playing cricket. I’m doing what she suggested, hanging out with Neil, Caz’s brother, knocking a ball about with his mates. There’s a green of sorts down behind the car park on the approach to the beach, flatter than any other spot in the village and well placed for watching for approaching problems if we decide to break for a quick spliff. Neil’s mates seem virtually subhuman, hopeless cases, but they can play cricket and Simon, whose brother’s a fucking police cadet, seems to have an excellent source of skank, no doubt recycled from the porkers’ training college.

  My side’s just about bowled out when Jessie and Nick appear on the bike, rolling into the car park as I make a run, so that I glimpse them through a haze of sweat and spliff-brightened colors and think – even in that instant – that this is a setup, she’s brought him here for the sole purpose of being seen by me. She watches my movements as much as I watch hers. I slide into the wicket, wrenching a muscle in my leg, only to find that I’m too late, I’m out, my concentration’s gone, I must have walked the last two yards.

  Jessie is wearing her jeans with the seat cut out and while I try to ignore her and keep my back to her, half the team is glancing her way, unable to keep their minds on the game.

  ‘Your sister, isn’t it?’ says the Einstein of the bunch. ‘I wish she was my sister,’ Simon says, rubbing the cricket ball against his leg.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I say, trying to watch her and not to watch her. ‘Come on, let’s play!’

  But my mind is working overtime, struggling through its stoned clutter to decide what it is Jessie wants me to think. She knows I’m not going to be easily convinced by a chance appearance right under my nose. Unless I’m being too complicated – but I don’t think so. I move next to Neil as we wait to take over the bowling and position myself so that I can see Jessie and Nick walk on to the beach, climb the first ridge of pebbles, then drop out of sight.

  ‘Fuck, you look rough,’ Neil says to me as I aim a ball of spit at the grass. ‘Are you sure you’re up to bowling?’

  ‘No problem,’ I say, trying to clean my mouth out by sucking air hard through clenched teeth. I can see them both now on the next ridge, against the sea. He puts his hand on her shoulder, she slips hers around his leg.

  Simon nudges me on the back, passing another joint. ‘I wouldn’t want to get high with you in a boat,’ he says and laughs.

  By the time I’ve had my over, Nick and Jessie have come back from the beach and climbed halfway up the hill toward the cliff, my sanity haven, she probably knows about that too – if this is all a put-up job she’d add her little twist to it, bonk him in broad daylight in my most private spot. But they disappear before they get there, they just step out of view over the edge, which makes me think for a moment how steep the hill is there, are they nuts enough to jump? That doesn’t fit with anything, though, so I cool it for a few minutes and pretend to watch the ball, then I say to Neil, ‘Yeah, I do feel a bit rough. Think I’ll take a walk. My mind’s just not there.’

  Neil and the others hardly notice as I take off, walking backwards for a bit toward the car park to show I’m still interested. I stagger on to the pebbles, feeling weird, watching for Jessie and Nick, but they’re still out of sight so I may have lost them. Then I start jogging along, clumsily, lurching into dips, and I see how steep the hillside is as it becomes a cliff and realize that there’s nowhere they could have gone, they must be there somewhere. I hear a final distant whack as the bat makes contact with the ball and I see it spinning like a planet in front of me, even though it’s way off out of my range of vision, it seems to draw me on, sweeping over the pebbles, bouncing across the water.

  Then I twig it – where Jessie and Nick have gone. Right on the edge of the hill, on a ledge cut out of the earth but totally overgrown now, about a hundred feet or maybe a hundred and fifty above a bunch of clapped-out beach huts, is an old wartime shelter. I’ve seen it when I’ve gone up there, but I’ve never given it much thought. It’s set right into the hillside, a low-built slab of weathered concrete with slits for windows and a clear and unassailable view of the coastline in both directions. I’d assumed people just use it to piss in now, though I haven’t needed to myself, but presumably once it was a significant strategic sentry post with some duffer with a rifle or maybe some serious dude with a machine gun defending our shores from Jerry. It’s perfect for my sister and Motorcycle Boy now, I’m amazed it didn’t occur to me before – the perfect mix of dirt and danger, the risk of being caught at it in a semi-public place. She’d like that and she’d particularly like the fact that I’m thinking about it now down here on the beach, staring up with the seagulls crapping all around me. Performance is all to Jessica; she likes an audience.

  But I have to keep asking myself why am I here? She got me here, I’m sure of it. It can’t just be to drum in the fact that she and Nick like screwing. I don’t even know what I want to think. I’ve got the upper hand, I keep telling myself that again and again in my head. I’ve got the pictures. If she and Dad aren’t going to let it happen again, then there’s nothing to see, so why am I watching her? To make sure. To know. Or is it because whether I believe her or not, and I don’t, it doesn’t feel like it’s stopped? It all seems to revolve, like the cricket ball spinning, whirling into an impossible blur of motivations and possibilities. I stand under the cover of one of the beach huts and stare up. Does she really know I’m here? Is she watching me through one of the slits – would she tell Nick? Maybe they’re both making a joke of me, the prurient younger brother: ‘Oh, Tom’s just weird. It’s a difficult age. He doesn’t get any. The little voyeur.’

  No, this is Jessie I’m dealing with. Nothing simple. Nothing straightforward. I think – and this is real madness now, this is just my head, this is the most desperate part of me trying to find the sanity in this situation – I think she’s led me here because she wants me to see the shelter. I think she comes here with Dad and she wants me to know that because she wants me to stop it. She can’t stop it. She doesn’t even want to, on the surface, but underneath she’s in trouble. Or maybe she’s not in trouble, but she’s not strong enough to stop it, she wants to but she doesn’t want to enough. Shit, this is all nonsense. Jessie knows her mind better than anyone on earth. She loves danger, she loves the thought of doing anything other people would shy away from, anything that says ‘Fuck you!’ to normality.

  I’m here, that’s what I’ve got to concentrate on. I’m here and Jessie’s up there. If I doubled back along the beach, scrabbled across the ditch and up on to the path, I could be standing at the edge looking down on the shelter within three or four minutes. I could get closer. If I was quiet, I could peer in through one of those slits without them even knowing I was there, but Jessie and Nick don’t interest me. I know what I need now if I’m going to save us all.

  I need proof. I need something even stronger than Jessie’s pictures. Proof that will scare all of us – that I’ll use if I have to.

  18

  The video camera just about registers in the dark of the shelter but it’s not much, in fact it’s impossible to make out any detail, so I probably won’t get more than shifting digital noise, but the

  soundtrack will do on its own. If I get one, the soundtrack will burn with the truth, they won’t be able to hear it without knowing – even fleetingly – what it feels like to be me.

  It stinks in there. It smells fouler than I could imagine – years of urine and cat shit and rat shit and God knows what else, like milk and piss turned sour and mixed with a fishy smell and the tight stink of hardened crap. I cannot imagine that Jessie would want to lie down in there, no matter how funky she thinks she is. There’s dirt and stones and dry leaves and an old stained and ravaged mattress, and when I kick my feet around the floor, the cigarette packets and odd, gritty condom make it obvious that Jessie and Nick or Jessie and Dad aren’t th
e first, though nothing suggests frequent use, which doesn’t surprise me.

  The slits of light worry me most. It’s like a prison cell or a church, dark and claustrophobic, an unsealed tomb where you could bed down in the soil and get eaten alive by worms. The problem is visibility. If I use the camera through any but one of the slits, I’m going to stand out against the light like a sore thumb. The one slit that’s almost blocked off by ivy and some kind of tough, reedy bush involves climbing out along the narrowest part of the ledge, where only the knotted roots of the brambles stop the earth from crumbling away entirely and dropping on to the beach huts below.

  But I’m born to this, I realize that now. Jessie is pushing me farther into it, but I’m good at stealth and observation, at getting where other people wouldn’t go. I’m aware of the risk I’m taking leaving the camera hidden here – both of it being found by someone else or missed at home

  – but I can’t easily walk around with it, it’s too obvious. I know I’ve got to keep the battery charged or I’m buggered. And the last thing I need is for some ramblers or locals or tourists to show up while I’m shooting and ask what I’m doing or what time it is or if they can walk to hell and back from here, before I can duck out of sight. This is a popular hike, up the hill and along the cliff, but this must be an issue for Jessie, too, and presumably she’ll choose her moment or Dad will.

  That’s if I’m right. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe Jessie and Dad have stopped. Or maybe they never come here, or won’t come here again, or I’ll miss them – I can’t keep track of them both all the time. But if they are still doing it, they must do it somewhere. I don’t think they could go to a hotel. They could use the car, of course, the torn leather of the Bentley’s back seat would be a different world from this shit hole. Or there must be a thousand other places they could go. But this is one of them, this is it. Jessie has shown me this for a reason. And I’m not going to waste it.

  ▪

  So I wait. I watch and I wait. I watch Jessie most, because I can read her better than Dad – I think. Anyway, he’s foul-temperedly working again, hunched over his computer with a Scotch most of the time, swearing at himself or, like this morning, at everyone else, as he tried to scan some of his magisterial architectural plans and email them to his Docklands office. ‘What’s the matter, Francesca?’ I hear him ask his assistant at the other end of the line, no humor in his voice, no let at all. ‘Is it your period, or did you hit your head climbing out of the pub toilet?’

  He seems changed to me all the time now. Even in the few weeks we’ve been down here, he’s lost the heady calm he had when we arrived, the excitement he seemed to feel about Jake being born. Or perhaps it’s just the way I see him. Him and Jessie is new to me – it makes me want to kick the fucker every time I see him, it makes me not want to look at him or be looked at by him – but is it to them? I can’t believe I wouldn’t have noticed before, but I don’t know, I don’t know anything.

  Jessie gives me nothing much to go on, as if her appearance with Nick at the beach was all I’m going to get on a plate. She cadges a lift from Mum into Exeter and starts talking about spending a couple of days in London before she goes back there full-time for college, but otherwise she’s on the phone most hours of the day or in Sidmouth with me, sitting on the sea wall or the beach, both of us playing it innocent, working hard to pretend there’s nothing to say except the things we always used to talk about, and making fun of the local morons who can’t think of a better pick-up line for her than, ‘You look foreign, darling. Where you from – Malta, Tenerife?’ or asking if she’s the waitress who spilt ketchup over them in the Devon tea room up the street.

  Except I can’t resist asking, ‘Are you seeing Nick?’ Because I sense there’s something different, they’ve had a row or she’s got bored. ‘I saw you at the beach the other day, all lovey-dovey by the water. Is it still going well then?’

  ‘He’s a Buddhist,’ she says, as if that’s an answer. ‘He chants. Can you imagine? They are all bloody hippies down here.’

  ‘Does it make a difference?’

  ‘He’s serious about it.’ We’re on the wall, eating ice lollies. She has to purse her lips to help her teeth cope with the cold so it’s hard to tell whether she gives a shit about this, but my guess is she does: Nick interests her more than either of us thought. ‘He wanted me to chant with him.’

  This makes me laugh. ‘Did you?’

  She slides the last of the orange ice off the stick with her lips then chucks the stick down on the pebbles, where a wasp immediately lands on it. ‘I told him I’d chant, yes. But I don’t think he felt my heart was in it. He’s not used to meditating doggy-position.’ Doggy-position! I want to ask what that is exactly, though I can guess. Just the words fill my mind with weird images of her. ‘He said I had no balance or something, I’m an unsettling influence.’ She smiles at the wasp, circling some litter now, brilliant yellow in the sun yet somehow dirty-looking, corrupt. ‘He’s really not that sure of himself, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, you said,’ I tell her, wondering if it’s true and feeling strangely disappointed. I think I’d like someone to take Jessie over and give her a run for her money; she needs it. Maybe we all do, but she really needs someone to straighten her out.

  I wait and nothing happens. I kill an afternoon with Neil, cycling into Seaton to steal stereos from grock cars, wondering all the time if this is it – if this is when Dad and Jessie are going to get their act together and I won’t be there to accuse them, to watch them, to pin them down. It’s only when we run a close one, when we tamper with a quartz job in a Mercedes outside the boat shop and some moron with a beard and his debbie fuck come charging out after us, it’s only then in the heat of action that I know I’m going to get it, I know I’m right, I’ve just got to be patient.

  ▪

  And then it rains. It pisses down for a whole day and we all stay inside, the whole happy family. I have moments of paranoia about the camera

  – that it’s already been taken or that the plastic bag I’ve taped it in will leak and wreck it – but I also have the sense that it’s going to be today. Dad has stopped fucking about with his grand design and seems in a better mood, lighter, as if he’s actually trying, which he probably is. He takes me with him in the car when he goes out to get some beer and we chat a bit and once again I feel guilty. I remember how much I can like him, that it was him who gave me the video camera in the first place – I’m the traitor even though I know I’m not.

  ‘You’re not worried about school, are you?’ he asks, racing Mum’s Volvo down the hill into Sidmouth, memories of Nick’s motorcycle, the night helicopter patrol. We have an off-license in the village, but Dad suddenly decided he wanted a local bottled brew and remembered they were out of stock, though this all seems to me like an elaborate ruse to avoid being seen by the locals today – just in case it might make a difference in him being recognized walking on the clifftop later on. ‘Your mother told me you were still anxing about it.’

  ‘What’s changed?’ I say. ‘I wasn’t happy about the idea before. Why should I feel different now?’

  ‘Just don’t burn this one,’ he tells me and smiles. We enter town

  and make an illegal right-hand turn that nearly panics some old codger

  in a VW into a fit. ‘I didn’t like school much either, but let me tell you

  the one thing it is, is a training ground for dealing with the pillocks

  you encounter once you’ve left.’

  I’ve heard this speech before and it didn’t convince me then, either.

  Dad was brilliant at school and had everyone fawning over him. His

  idea of rebellion was weaseling exemption from religious instruction

  to fit in an extra afternoon’s rugby practice a week.

  ‘I’d just prefer the pillocks to be London pillocks.’ My familiar

  refrain.

  We park up on the curb outside the off-license. The window looks

/>   sickeningly dull – the same posters and logos as London, but stuck

  there for ever to fade and peel.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find someone who fits the bill,’ he says, no hint that

  there might be some foundation in truth in Mum’s mention of going

  back. We dive through the rain and enter the shop, a dad and his son,

  makes your heart weep, doesn’t it? ‘Pillocks don’t vary that much from

  county to county.’

  ▪

  The rain stops. Jessie goes out to see Caz, which is the first signpost, because Jessie and Caz aren’t that close, Jessie doesn’t turn to Caz for anything much other than a cover for seeing Nick or, if this is it and I know it is, for this.

  It’s six o’clock. The TV’s on, the news. Jessie goes out and for ten minutes or so, nothing. Mum’s feeding Jake. The news drones on. Dad’s washing up – this is really significant, this is pre-emptive guilt, not that he never does it, but not at this time of day, more likely first thing in the morning when he gets up. It’s all coded. Not one action is simple, unconnected. It’s all part of the dream I’m moving through, every detail dull with reality, I’m being tested, this is all a test, a run-through but soon my real life will start and that will seem like a rehearsal for something else, too.