The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  So I stare right back and don’t even look at the counter or the bored, mindfucked girl on the register (‘Where do you work?’ ‘I work on the M4.’) or the travelers who clearly buy their clothes and eat their food and make their lives at these places, and I say, ‘Why? It’s all shit,’ and then walk out to the car.

  ▪

  We move on. I listen to Jessie’s iPod because I haven’t brought my own. She sits glancing at her magazines, full of packaged artiness, hip-wank pictures and hip-wank writing. Dad drives, moving from lane to lane just to break the tedium, letting the weight of the Bentley barrel through the formations, the retired minds in the slow lane, the serious movers in the fast, none of them equal to his determination to maintain speed without actually arriving, his need not to get to the next moment.

  No one speaks. We each inhabit our space in the Bentley, plotting our sex and our murders and our own destruction until, as the suburbs of London begin and the pattern of the motorway changes – more signs, more slip roads, the necks and heads of streetlights and streets and houses in the afternoon quiet – Dad says, ‘Fuck it, I didn’t have to bring you two! This is a boring enough trip as it is without this conspiracy of silence. I can get depressed without your help!’

  So something’s working. Something’s getting through. I almost smile. ‘I didn’t have to come,’ I say. ‘It was Jessie’s idea.’

  ‘Tom needed glue or paint thinner or whatever it is he sniffs,’ Jessie says in a bored voice. Her hand finds mine on the car seat and presses something small and hard into it. I finger it for a moment before looking down. It’s a bottle, a little glass vial of crystal. I try to give it back – I hate the stuff, it gives me headaches, and I don’t want any of Jessie’s bribes – but she pushes it into my pocket.

  ‘Tom doesn’t need anything to get high,’ the Prick says, as if I’m not there, as if he feels safe, he’s got me sussed. ‘His mind is strange enough to start with.’

  And I lick my finger and write ‘Fuck you’ on the seat, meaning him but meaning Jessie too. She sees it and stares at me, really stares, longer than I can bear. It’s not an angry stare or a disdainful one or anything I can adjust to, it’s just bored and unbeatable, as if she’s got the time, she can wait me out, she can fuck me over in ways I can’t even imagine.

  We go through the center, past the airport, past the warehouses and odd light industrial factory unit, past the hotels and the billboards, up the ramp and into the heart of my world: chaos, fumy and bright at the same time; short-fused snarl-mouthed achievers bullying past spacey dong-faced tourists; tatty high street secretaries, magazine gloss career women and the others, the boys and girls like me, street fucks and street fighters, all adrift on a set of poncy old buildings and banks and shops-with-no-name; trendy, hip, faceless.

  Sometimes when I dream at night, when I can, when it’s not blocked by my twisted emotional musings, I see it all burning – like the Great Fire, only better. It’s not the people I want to burn, not especially, but the city would look brilliant all ablaze. I’d love it.

  The Prick likes it too, that’s why we go this way, why we don’t skirt around it. It torments him. He loves to sound off about it, to pinpoint its madness, the crap that’s preserved, the total shit that’s been built in his lifetime, the detritus that’s going up now. ‘We have political and aesthetic masters,’ he says, sliding the gearstick like it’s some part of Jessie, ‘whose idea of taste is anaglyptic wallpaper in a nice house on a mock-Tudor estate. What can you expect?’

  And we’re into the City, the nation’s hard-on, although it’s been a little bit limp lately, flailing around and fucking up, a little bit like I hope The Prick feels sometimes when he can’t get it up. I hope that lies in his future, what future he’s got: a lot of really depressing, really embarrassing, sad-sack limpness.

  From the car, I see them, I see all the little semen squirreling about trying to find an egg to crack, or maybe just trying to find a job. Not many, it’s not chucking-out time yet, they’re still at their screens, on their phones, in the toilets with their rolled-up notes shoved up their nostrils or each other’s arses – but there’s a few around, holding hands and talking, trading the world.

  ▪

  Then a hiccup. The old London, like the old New York, like the old quarter in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Right next to those slabs of money, just down the street from those monuments to greed, are the tiny shops and slumholes of the Proles. God, they let them get close. It must have been a mistake. Or maybe they knew they were no threat, they could be contained easily enough.

  Beaten old farts sit in the scummy windows of an establishment which offers – get this – reconditioned toasters, electric razors and irons. Wire grilles front a shop selling historic knives and guns and implements of torture – the only one doing well, the only one with anything to steal. I should tell the Prick to stop here; I could use his cash to buy the instrument of his death. Wooden boards, reinforced at diagonals to make them stronger, patch the broken door of a makeshift mosque. It looks disused but I hope it’s not; I hope all kinds of insurrection go on in there, I hope they stick pipe bombs up the City’s arse.

  The Docks next – no longer a part of the old world, but too desperate in their longing to be a part of the new.

  The Prick drives the Bentley over polished cobblestones, past tower blocks so tall you could see New York if you shut your eyes and imagined a bridge built entirely of money held together with shit. Then on around the few remaining hulks of gargantuan Victorian warehouses, beautiful in their ugliness but most already gone – cleaned up and renovated, turned into f lash global power-bases, media fiefdoms, multi-million-pound apartments.

  The Prick’s wharf is one of the last to be developed. Across the water the shell of a part-demolished warehouse looks like something you might see at the Tate Modern: a great bite chewed out of its massive floors, twisted metal and rubble and gaping holes where windows or loading bays must once have been, leading the way to a pillared chasm, dark, totally empty – the sort of place you could take your father and your sister and beat the shit out of them, then slide them down the old tobacco chutes to nowhere.

  But the Prick’s little toy is growing, not crumbling. The pyramid is going up, sticking its nose onto the skyline, dwarfing everything around it with its newness and its meanness. Even covered in scaffolding it makes me wonder what the fuck Dad thinks he is doing here.

  This is his statement, this is his finger raised at everything that’s ever been built here. But it’s the same, it’s no different. It’s another fucking ego trip, another pile of emptiness erected with a huge concentration of effort and no real fucking reason.

  This is what Dad does. He builds things. Why? Because he has to put food on our plates – and because maybe the charge he gets out of designing something other people have to live with, have to confront daily, something that attracts attention in all those self-obsessed architectural journals and even the tabloid press, maybe it all gives him a feeling of specialness, a feeling of righteousness, a sense that, ‘Yes, I shape people’s environments, I define their lives. I am different, I am special, I can fuck my daughter and keep it quiet from my family. I can keep my wife and baby on hold, and my son where he belongs – outside, in the cold.’

  When Dad is gone, when Dad is cold and in the ground, one day this will follow – this monkey-puzzle of steel and glass, this cage. There’ll be another pile of rubble and another son staring.

  ▪

  Jessie gets out of the car first, attracting whistles and cat calls from shirtless construction men high on girders. The site foreman, Bernie, comes to meet us, issuing hard hats and riding the storm as Dad ploughs into him before we even reach the site office.

  ‘What’s the story, Bernie?’ Dad slaps his hand on Bernie’s shoulder in a determinedly unmatey way. ‘A fucking holiday all around?’

  But Bernie can take it, Bernie can take most things. He’s a hardnosed bastard, a thug in a suit with a hare lip an
d a lisp and the eyes of an ex-boxer, smooth as shit when he wants to be, which isn’t now.

  ‘They want to get paid for what they do,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘You’d better wait out here,’ Dad says to Jessie and me as we reach the office, which is a joke having come this far but he seems decided. He opens the door of the transportable shack and goes inside, followed by Bernie, who winks at Jessie, breathing through his mouth as though he’s going to tell her something but doesn’t.

  So we stand in the sunshine, not wanting to talk, not really wanting to be with each other at this moment. The water at the edge of the wharf is dark and deep and freaky, not like the sea, lacking that size, that scope, and one of the boys tells us – tells Jessie – that a crane operator died in it the week before, just came off his lunch break, sober, took a dive off the crane and never came up. They never found the body.

  It makes me feel like I’m wasting time; it makes me feel like I’m losing the edge: hanging on to Jessie and Dad, not looking for an opportunity to do it but rather an excuse not to.

  Time passes. One of the security guards, Jason, shows us the cosh he carries – ‘Just in case things get serious.’ He got it in Shanghai, it’s spring-loaded and telescopes out to become a terrifying weapon. I could use one of those.

  Dad’s voice is audible even outside the shack. He shouts, then it goes quiet for a few minutes; it’s like a piece of music. Finally he opens the door and comes out, and I glimpse two Korean men in expensive, carefully tailored suits, and a Korean girl in a skirt so short it’s not there, on her knees on the floor picking up the pieces of a scale model of Dad’s gleaming pyramid. A wire-faced ginger-bearded Irishman in sunglasses stares at her arse.

  Neville, Dad’s job architect, runs after him and catches his arm. Dad turns, like something spring-loaded himself, like Jason’s cosh, and explodes.

  ‘Never,’ he pauses, riding the moment, enjoying it to its full, ‘give them the whole fucking picture. Am I clear?’

  ▪

  We drive back, past a billboard which says Docklands is London’s Venice, and I think about how my father would have fitted into Renaissance Italy just fine: they all fucked their daughters and each other in the line of business.

  He doesn’t say much in the car, just drives aggressively, stopping punchily at lights and then gunning away. Black spray from the road hits the windscreen and he leans into it, driving faster toward the red lights of a lorry in front.

  ‘They’re bankers,’ he says, ‘they’re fucking bankers and they don’t understand money.’

  ▪

  We check into a hotel. The Prick has meetings fixed for the morning to play big boys with the Koreans and their money. Jessie is seeing Sonny. I could go and see Luke except that I don’t want to spend any time with my old friends, there’s nothing to talk about, nothing I can talk about, and anyway Jessie says she’s set me up.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ I tell her, but I am, she knows that. I want to take back everything that she and the Prick have taken from me. I want to meet this person who can paint the greedy black hole that is Jessie. Sonny is part of the tunnel I’m in, I’m convinced of that – part of the pipeline, where time is counting down, where I don’t even have to follow my own reasoning, each moment is the last, nothing is repeatable.

  ‘Sonny’s brilliant,’ she says, and then with a laugh: ‘Golden showers!’

  ‘I don’t need your help.’

  ▪

  Then it’s dinner. The weather changes abruptly, lightning flashing across the sky and rain tumbling down moments later. I think about the last time Dad and Jessie and me had dinner together in a London restaurant. Mum was there; this time she’s not and everything has been fucked in the meantime.

  Jessie sits next to me. Some kind of weird thin black jacket is all she’s got on over her black stockings and she keeps nudging me with her leg, as if we’re sharing a joke or flirting or something or she just can’t keep herself still. It starts getting to me, really annoying me, because I’m thinking about Mum at home left out of all this, and Jessie and Dad are drinking wine and acting cool, he’s the proper parent and we’re the kids mucking around, he keeps us in line, he’s a wonderful father taking his two kids out like this, we’re a wonderful family, really close, really open with each other – he can talk about his problems and the need for a dynamic architectural language in Britain, and we can listen to his bullshit.

  Until I turn and say, ‘Look, fucking cut it out, will you? You keep knocking my leg!’ And Jessie stares at me as if she genuinely didn’t know she was doing it, and the mood of the dinner changes somewhat.

  We go back to the hotel, the rain crashing down on the Bentley and the sky flickering neon-white, only it’s weirder than neon, starker, lighting everything. Jessie rides in the back with me but hangs on Dad’s seat, so that he tells her to sit back because she’s obstructing his rear view. The traffic is chaotic because of the rain but he seems steady, as if he’s resolved something in himself about the Koreans tomorrow, his irritability only returning when Jessica suggests we go to a nightclub.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ he says. ‘Tom can’t go to a nightclub.’ Thanks, Prick, for your sympathy and concern.

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie says, ‘yes you are,’ leaning forward, pretending I’m not

  there – or pretending she’s pretending. ‘A friend runs it. It’s only two

  nights a week. I can get you in and you can leer a lot and dance and

  make me sit up on the bar and protect me. It’ll be brilliant.’ ‘I don’t want to go to a nightclub!’ my father snaps, turning around,

  flashing anger. ‘Shut up, Jessie, you’re drunk.’

  ▪

  At the hotel, Jessie and I share a room and she stands staring out the window for a long time, still in her jacket and stockings, watching the storm light up the river, looking like an image from one of her hip magazines. She doesn’t say anything to me and I don’t say anything to her, I just get into bed and lie there wondering if she’s waiting for me to go to sleep so she can creep into his room or whether she’s thinking about something else. I feel confused. If I’m going to do it, if I’m going to kill them both, I’m going to have to choose a moment and this would be as good as any. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I don’t seem able to plan it.

  The storm moves away for a while, the thunder still close but not overhead. It comes back, circling around, and Jessie pulls a chair to the window and sits. I listen for her crying, because it feels as if she might be, but I don’t think she is. Then she wakes me, shaking my shoulder as I’m drifting off.

  ‘Have you still got that thing I gave you?’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘In the car. The crystal?’

  ‘I chucked it,’ I say, but I’m too tired to argue and she knows I’m

  lying, so I tell her it’s in one of my pockets. She finds it in the dark and takes it back to her chair. ‘Do you want some?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  Outside, a burglar alarm goes off, followed by another. Jessie opens the vial and takes two quick snorts, one in each nostril. Thunder cracks overhead and I listen for sirens but there aren’t any. I get a headache and seem to fall in and out of sleep, but the storm is a separate force waking me and I glimpse Jessie in dramatic, broken flashes of white at the window and hear the alarms and hear her sobbing and feel confused and wonder where we are.

  When I wake in the morning, she’s gone, but she’s just in the bathroom and I don’t know whether she slept or not or if she spent part of the night with Dad.

  23

  The air in London is black, grainy, as if you can touch the carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or whatever it is that settles on everything, layering it with dust, running streaky

  when it rains. We walk down the Embankment tube station steps, not really communicating but moving as a unit, brother and sister, through the bewildered foreigners and dossers and shoppers up for the day, clutchin
g their maps and water bottles and asthma inhalers and stepping back as diseased mice dart out from wire-grilled no-go areas and dive under the rails, missing that middle one, the burner, the one with the charge.

  The tiles in the station are new, shiny, characterless – a toilet that no one wants you to use, that’s been built just to prove that everything is clean, above board. The whole of the West End is constantly being renovated, laundered, shined-up, rewired, re-alarmed, so that you can see how thick the walls are and the color of what’s inside. They don’t hide the problems – they police them out, they keep them across the river, where we’re headed. It must be a lot like Nuremberg was. Or Dubai. Or Disney World.

  I watch Jessie and me at the platform’s edge on a wall-mounted flatscreen as the train comes in. In the picture, we’re two-dimensional, lifeless, green. In the picture, I push or pull her, taking her with me. On this screen I could show my home movies, if I’d taken any. The shoppers and dossers and foreigners could watch as my father parted her bum and stuck his thing between.

  The doors close, the walls move and we go under the river. The train stops for a long time and I feel the weight of water above us – if that’s where we are – and sit staring at the three other passengers in our carriage, condemned by their awfulness. An old man sits alone at the far end, his mouth propped open by some tube down his throat, gasping at the air and staring glass-eyed at nothing. A woman with spectacles and an evil, hating face looks up from her yellowed paperback and mentally sorts me out. I’m her son, she will beat me until I bleed and then go on for ever. A skinhead with a blotchy cherry birthmark and a knife scar down his neck sticks his boots up on the seat across from him and stares away from us, frightened by something in his head, moving his lips silently and clutching a brown leather sports bag to his chest, clinging to its scuffed, Union Jack-emblazoned bulk with a curled intensity that only a couple of well-placed kicks to his kidneys would push over into total despair. Jessie sits beside me, her shoes off, a faintly sweet smell rising from them to mix with the stale air of the carriage. She rubs her toes, massaging the digits through the filmy black net of her stockings.