The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  I walk alone in the sun, almost enjoying its heat. The sheep look beautiful. Strands of barbed wire link wooden stakes, but no blood – this is not Iraq or Afghanistan, just part of a pattern of the country that I’m not a part of myself. Tranquil Devon: gin and tonics, Range Rovers and sheepdogs. And then you die.

  Jessie might not follow me, but I think she will. I know what certainty is this morning, I am drawing things on, but not in any way I have ever wanted. I wait at a gate two or three fields down from the shelter, turn away from it, unable to see it anyway behind the hedgerows but sensing its presence, watching the village roads below me, the car park, the beach.

  Eventually she comes. She climbs the path with no particular excitement, a bored look on her face, a bit pissed off with me for making her walk up here, but also wary – bringing her here must make her more than wonder.

  ‘You lied to me.’ I don’t give her time to say anything. She stops a few feet away, a mound of dead brown grass between us. She frowns, licking a little saliva from the corner of her lip, out of breath from the climb. Her mouth looks weak today, as if someone’s broken it somehow and put it back together wrong, but it also looks as if it could get strong very quickly if it had to, she looks ready to twist my words, turn hard, shut me up.

  ‘You fucking lied to me.’

  She looks away, older sister time, only she’s not so sure. ‘Boring.’ ‘I don’t know what boring is. Everything seems the same to me.

  Have you been to the toilet this morning? Does it hurt? I bet it does.’ This gets her. She turns and confronts me, angry fast, guilty.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, hearing how bitter my voice sounds for the

  first time. ‘Cancer? AIDS? The fact that I’ve got a sister who lets her

  father have her right up her arse?’

  I stare at her, not giving her any help, making her react, waiting for

  her to look away before I do, and I feel like everything changes in that

  moment, I can do it, I can hate her to her face. She shifts her eyes to the sea for a moment, looking troubled, looking more troubled than I can remember her looking, so that I start to feel sick with love and guilt and want to touch her, until she looks back and her mouth changes, protecting herself, not allowing herself to hug me and be my sister and cry because we’re all fucked up, lost, but instead pretending it can go

  on, she can deal with me.

  ‘I saw everything.’

  She stares at me. She can hate me too.

  ‘I watched you.’

  ‘You filthy little creep.’

  ‘Look who’s talking. You love it.’

  ‘You’re weird, Tom. You get off on all of this, don’t you?’ She’s

  desperate. She’s nasty, she has a really deadly edge to her. ‘Come and look! Come here!’ I grab her arm and pull her. She

  could fight but she comes with me, not caring, just thinking her own

  thoughts, working out where this leaves her, whether anything’s really

  changed, how far I will go. I take her up to the shelter. I’m not even sure

  myself what’s in my mind. I’m not going to kill her like this, I want

  them both. I want them to feel what I feel, I want her to be outside this

  shithole and imagine how it was for me. She’s not short of imagination,

  Jessie.

  The sea is there below us as I push her out along the ledge, above

  the matchbox beach huts. It looks unreal. It looks massive, flat, cold,

  sparkling. If we could leap across it to the horizon, maybe we could

  escape. If life worked like that, if we had that power, that size, we could

  just go on, blank out the past, harden ourselves. But we can’t and I

  shove her face up against the stone slit, her short hair bristling under

  my hand, her head compliant, weak, no will of its own.

  ‘Look!’ I tell her. ‘Can you smell it? Can you smell the sickness in

  there? I watched you, Jessie. I watched you go down on your knees

  like a fucking animal and like it. Both of you, you both want it.’ I’m

  blubbing, but I don’t give a shit, I just swallow the tears and let my face

  burn and feel twitchy, wired, scared. I could do it now. One push, we

  could go together.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘What?’

  She’s got a different face looking at me. Humiliation, sadness,

  different steps in her eyes down to a cellar, I don’t know what it is. ‘Are you sure we both want it?’ She leans away from the stone wall, pushes

  a branch out of her face.

  I feel uncertain. My body’s light, shaking, no weight in my legs,

  no certainty in my brain – already I’ve lost the clarity. ‘I don’t know,’ I

  say. She’s telling me what I want to hear, I know that. ‘I—’ ‘Yes?’

  I’m careful. I know her. ‘Do you need help, is that it?’ Those eyes.

  She is totally alive. She can take it all, she wants it all. ‘Is that what you

  wanted? I thought maybe you were scared, you wanted it to stop but

  you couldn’t say it, that’s why you showed me this place with Nick.’ She looks at me with a long laugh. This is a good one. Her eyes

  are sparkling, like the sea, it’s mask time, where’s Dad? I stare at her

  mouth. She likes taking the piss out of me – but gently, she’s my sister,

  she’s just breaking me in for the kind of superior cunts I’m never going

  to meet. ‘You’re mad.’

  There’s nothing to say. She’s playing games with me. I’m back to

  square one, zero option.

  ‘Look,’ she says, getting serious. ‘You shouldn’t have got involved

  with this. I love you, we’ve always been close, but this is different.

  This is fucking dangerous and it’s not something you should even be

  thinking about.’

  I screw my eyes up, wanting to scream, digging my fingernails

  into my palms, trying to hold on, trying to wait, this isn’t the moment.

  ‘What do you expect me to do?’ I ask, beg.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘You can’t do anything. Anything you do will

  damage us all. You don’t want that. Talk to Dad and you’ll freak him

  out completely, he doesn’t know you know anything. Talk to Mum and

  you destroy us. What do you want to do?’

  We’re still on the ledge. I’m between her and the hillside but there’s

  no point in threatening her, threats don’t work, only action and this

  isn’t the moment, not for me; if my whole existence amounts to ending

  theirs, I’m going to get it right. ‘I’d like to fucking kill you!’ People who

  say that don’t do it. Let her feel safe.

  Another face. Close, like when we used to share everything – or

  when she used to, I didn’t have much to share, I think she got a kick

  out of telling me things, exciting me. She takes my hand, clasps it on

  to her arm and drags it so that my fingers scratch her. White tracks

  appear then red but no blood, so she does it again, harder. This time the skin breaks in a couple of places. ‘Hurt me,’ she says. ‘Try it, I want

  you to. You’ll feel better.’

  I’m tempted. But I want to go all the way. I really would like to

  hurt her, even killing her isn’t going to hurt her the way I’d like to – I

  don’t know the way. I take my hand back. A layer of her skin is wedged

  under my nails. Red droplets materialize on her arm, wet, finding each

  other. She holds her arm in front of me for a moment, staring, then

  shifts past me along the ledge as if we’ve had a chat and now it’s over,


  everything sorted out.

  ‘Wait!’ I scramble after her, grabbing her arm again, spinning her

  around. ‘I do want to hurt you. You’re right.’

  She looks surprised for a moment, not very much, but surprised,

  I’ve actually managed to surprise her. She stands, waiting for what’s

  coming, still confident, watching me as I take a box of matches out of

  my pocket. Those surprise her a little more, but she still doesn’t flinch,

  Jessie is totally cool, she’s even smiling.

  ‘Sit down,’ I tell her. She sits on the grass. I kneel next to her, taking

  her arm, not the one she made me scratch, the other one. She’s got some

  kind of a Spanish shirt on with short, puffy sleeves. I make her roll the

  sleeve up on to her shoulder.

  ‘You’re sure about this, are you?’ I ask, not really caring what she

  says.

  ‘Do it.’

  She looks at me, ready, not smiling any more but keeping her face

  still, waiting to feel something.

  I light a match. It takes three before I can keep one going. With

  cupped hands I slowly move the tiny flame toward the top part of her

  arm, the softest part, just where the hair she doesn’t shave peeks out. I

  feel weird. We’re on the grass, on the hill, in bright sunlight, and as I

  watch and think about what I’m doing I hold the burning match to my

  sister’s skin, keeping my hands around it to stop it from blowing out,

  and let it burn a small blister there while she jerks back for a second or

  two before tensing her arm and holding it still for me to finish. From

  the side of my vision I glimpse her teeth and the wetness of her mouth

  as she gasps and bites her lip, but my attention is focused on her arm,

  on the redness, the skin wrinkling and raw.

  I press the match against the burn to stub it out. Jessie lets out one

  small cry, but otherwise says nothing, watching me, watching my eyes, gazing at her arm, her shoulder, then away and back to me. I throw the

  match on the grass and stare at her.

  ‘You’re stupid, Jessie, really stupid. I can’t believe you’re really

  like that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You’re fucking yourself up. Why are you doing that?’ I don’t feel any different, just disappointed with myself that I

  couldn’t wait, that I had to do something now – and something so

  small.

  ‘You’re pretty fucked up yourself, aren’t you?’ She looks at the

  burn on her arm, fascinated for a moment, her mouth twisting with

  the effort of straining her neck around. She pulls the sleeve down over

  it and stares at me, right into my eyes, there’s a hint of concern in hers.

  ‘Well, I suppose you would be.’

  And she leans across, hand on the grass, and does the last thing

  I expect. She kisses me. A sisterly kiss, brief, warm, touching. But it

  comes with a price: ‘Don’t try to stop us, Tom. Please. We’ve only just

  started. I want it to go on for the moment.’

  I know that if my resolve should fail, she will give it back to me.

  She is perfect. Even in being fucked up, she is perfect – she is perfectly

  fucked up. I can’t stop them. I can’t blackmail them or threaten them

  or expose them. Whatever I do, they’ll find a way. There’s always a

  way. The corner I’m in is the only one, made to fit. There’s only this

  moment. I want to think about what her arse looks like to Dad when

  it’s red and sore, whether she’s lying again, whether he did this to her

  when she was a little girl, when we used to have baths together and the

  world always felt strange, like a collision course someone else had set

  up for you to run through. I want to think about what it would be like

  to hit them both with a cricket bat or something else hard, swinging it

  down on them as they dog-fuck each other except dogs don’t do it that

  way, dogs aren’t nearly as fucked up as they are. But there’s only this

  moment. All I can see is Jessica sitting on the grass in front of me, the

  sun is sharp, the sea is wide behind her.

  I am going to do it. Some other time. Soon. Together. ‘Did you

  really?’ I ask her, schoolboy in the playground disbelieving someone

  else’s boast. ‘Did you really just start? I think you’ve been doing it for

  a long time. I think you’ve been doing it all my life.’

  She half gets up, crouching with her arms resting on bended knees.

  She looks like she’s going to tell me something, then her face clouds again and she smiles that nasty smile, games-playing, we’ve used up

  our free exchange. ‘Maybe,’ she says.

  ‘Who gives a shit?’ I stare at her, she can’t control me any more, I

  can fight her and keep on fighting.

  She stands up. ‘Look, just let it run its course. Things end. This

  will.’ Yes, it will. Her eyes seem to be searching mine, honest again,

  looking for an opening. ‘Do you want me to get you something?

  Something from London?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I know, but I want to see what she

  says. She can’t really believe she can buy me off. I get up too. ‘You know what I’m talking about. What do you want – do you

  want to come to London? We’re going tomorrow.’

  This is news to me. ‘Who is?’

  ‘Dad and me. He has to go. I’m going to see Sonny. Do you want

  to come?’

  ‘I can go to London myself if I want to.’ I press her. ‘What can

  you get me – cocaine, dope, money, crank, sweeties? What’s on offer

  here?’

  She is looking at the shelter. I catch her, but she goes on looking

  anyway. We start walking down the hill. ‘Come on, what can you get

  me?’

  She reaches over and lifts the hinged lid off my head. I’m a robot

  for her, she thinks she knows me so well.

  ‘I can get you laid.’

  22

  We’re in the Bentley. We’re safe – I mean even though it’s a heap, it has the power and lines that fuel this country’s divide, it can drive right over your child without stopping,

  it can part the way through police on horseback with visors over their faces at a football match. You can do anything in a car like this, you can fuck your daughter, you can knobble a judge or an MP, you can shoot up and you won’t get caught. It’s not loud, that’s the secret. It’s not even clean. This car knows what it’s about.

  It has taken us up through Devon to skirt around Bristol and follow endless feed roads on to the M4. It all looks the same. At this speed only the trees look alive and not all of them. At this speed there’s only signs and barriers and hard shoulders and the lines diving under the bonnet, and it all looks flat. The trees that are there don’t fit and won’t be there for long, this is inbetween land, no reason for it, this is dead time. If there was a way of getting from nowhere to somewhere – to London – without traveling, this land would not even exist.

  The Prick is driving, wearing a suit and setting himself up for what’s ahead, confrontation time, he’s grim-mouthed but he’s looking forward to this. He talks to us from time to time, but we’re not there, he wants to get to the site and say his piece, and maybe if he shouts loud enough and gets worked up and shoots the Koreans down he can have his daughter for dessert on a nice cozy hotel bed, they’ll get shit stains on the sheets.

  And she is next to me, a world away, listening to her iPod, going through her bag, glancing
at Dad in the mirror, but coolly, as though he’s an encumbrance at this moment, she’s in a different mood and he’s not part of it. I stare at the meaningless stream of traffic, bored with the silence in the car, it’s a phony silence, they could talk but they can’t with me here. A container lorry drags past, going backwards from my point of view, then two cars and a coach. A child’s face peers down at us from the lap of his hawk-faced grand-mother. He has a gun.

  We stop at a motorway service station. I need a piss and Jessie wants a magazine so she goes in the shop. The whole thing is perfect for the Inbetween Land, for my state of mind. You could die here and not even know it. The bogs are awash with blue disinfectant yet still they stink, as if it’s just colored blue, it doesn’t do anything, it just tints the diseases. The food shop – the Pantry! – has the same kind of bluish-green tinge as the disinfectant, they probably flavor the forcegrown fruit and chemical pastry with it. And in the gift shop, where I go to look for Jessie, it’s Christmas all year round, shiny paper and tinsel over everything, toys and tourist tricks that you wouldn’t give to charity.

  She’s there, with him, with the Prick, at the till, hanging on his arm just the wrong way, like a tart, like a fuck, like something he’s picked up on the road. They’re playing a game: maybe they look like father and daughter, maybe they don’t; maybe he’s the freako businessman

  – menopausal-punk hair, soft, weathered face, suit – and she’s the antidote to his life, she lets him feel human or dirty or whatever men like that need to feel, she can give him a thrill just out of buying magazines and chocolates and crap key rings.

  Except he doesn’t look too happy about it. He looks more than a little uncomfortable, the Prick, testy, as if she’s trying his patience. He wants to push her off his arm, but Jessie’s clinging tight, I see her fingers buried in his sleeve as I approach past the plastic-wrapped funeral wreaths.

  They both react when I appear, Jessie holding tight but altering her expression in some subtle way which makes her look the affectionate daughter, flirty but not unnaturally so – a hungry schoolgirl proud of Daddy. The Prick, for his part, frowns and prizes her arm off his, being the adult, being the responsible one, and looks straight at me, his eyes telling me what to think, warning me off, saying, ‘Tom, do you want anything?’