▪
There are twenty-four forks downstairs in the cutlery drawer, eleven of them dessert forks, all of them probably sharp enough to inflict a fatal wound or wounds if used with sufficient force and imagination. There are thirty-nine spoons, counting soup spoons and tea spoons, all virtually useless unless perhaps rammed down someone’s gullet. There are forty-five knives, I’ve counted them, including cheese knives, steak knives, a huge heavy-handled carving knife, several smaller sharp blades and the red-handled one I intend to use. There are also two potato peelers, a manual can opener and two or three sharpish-looking instruments, but I have made my choice.
Jessie’s weight moves off the bed in her room – I hear it – and pauses for a moment. It’s warm tonight, far warmer than for last night’s hospital panic; she won’t be wearing a T-shirt. What would she put on to go in to see Dad? Nothing. Why put on anything? Maybe her sunglasses – but I don’t think Jessie’s sense of humor is her strong point just now.
The pause is much longer than I expect. Perhaps I’m wrong: she’s staying where she is? I jam my ear to the door, making it hurt, sending black waves of pain to my brain, wondering how I’m going to move the bed, go downstairs, get the knife and come back up silently enough to surprise them both, one after the other. I need them together. I’ve always wanted them together for this.
Drip! The door numbs my ear. How many thousandths or millionths of a second does it take for the sound of water falling from the tap and smashing in the basin to climb the stairs and penetrate my door? Drip! Silence from Jessie’s room. Maybe she’s already gone in to Dad? But I haven’t heard the creak of a floorboard, the oiled grind of metal upon metal as a hinge turns. Drip! Normal time is happening somewhere else
– in the village, in the black empty mass between here and London, the streets there hazy from shop-window lights and drunks pissing against the walls and dark, ratlike faces in waiting cars who know where the action is, know where the party’s happening, know their lives are just starting, while I’m about to add the royal crown to the fuck-up that mine is already.
Still nothing from Jessie – is she asleep standing up, or has she lain down again to spite me? Drip! Normality is outside, not in here, there’s a force field around the clump of earth that’s our garden, from the bent tree to the stone wall, twisting everything that’s inside it. I am sweating. My bed feels like it’s giving me friction burns on my hands, through my jeans, and I’m not even moving. I am inside the long death of a Sunday evening when school is looming closer and everything awful in the world seems to be sucked into the drain that is my life. But it’s not Sunday, and the days to school, which I can count on one hand, are meaningless at last.
▪
Nothing. Even the tap seems to have stopped. But then I hear it, out of step I think, although it can’t be – a muted, echoing plonk as the bullet of water hits its mark. And a creak on the landing. Two more, the hard pat of a bare foot touching bare wood for a moment.
Then silence. Where is she? I know it’s her. I hold back from the door briefly, resting my ear, changing sides. I am going to have to move the bed soon – how can I do it quietly? Or maybe I can climb out the window and creep back in through the kitchen, fetching the slaughter weapon on my way? No.
‘Dad!’ Her voice is quiet but not a whisper. She might be feeling sick. She might be unable to sleep, turning to him for comfort – but it’s none of those things, she wants to talk on her own terms: the word is a command.
I think he grunts. Perhaps it’s his back racking him. I can’t hear clearly – the drip sounds sharper than him. The door clicks shut and I know she’s inside. Like a moon walk, I move off the bed and start to inch it away from the door, scraping it across the floor with an agonizingly slow squeak, convincing me that I will bring one of them out here.
I open my door, adrenalin pumping, suddenly cold and wet with sweat. The landing is a huge, endless black cavern, dripping with stalactites, crisscrossed with ledges and needlelike rock bridges. Lucy is there, vacuuming the entrance to Jessie’s room. Mum is on the stairs, sitting with Jack on her lap, eating cherries and spitting the stones past the line drawn by Lucy’s snaking electrical cord. I am bursting to pee, but I force myself to forget it.
The door to Dad’s room is closed. I cross to it, better than Jessie at muffling my footsteps, the ridged soles of my sneakers absorbing the sound. I wait outside, smelling her in the air – a trace of the oil she orders online from New York on one of Dad’s cards; for two years that’s been part of her Christmas treat. There is smoke here too, the vague dungy essence of what came into the cottage from the barbecue and settled, or traveled in on Dad’s shirt and trousers. Perhaps when I’m done, I can pour what’s left of the paraffin around this shithole and set a funeral pyre? I can be every bit as creative as Jessie.
I hear his voice, irritable, he’s keeping it down, but not as if she’s close: ‘—feel like hell, I want to go to sleep.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She hung up on me. That was enough.’
He trails off. I feel weird out here, as if I’m only getting half the story, they’re sitting in there reading a script around a microphone for some fucking radio play.
‘Did she say anything about me?’
Silence. I think he moves on the bed. Where is she? Sitting on it? Standing? She’s not close to the door.
‘Well, did she? Does she know or doesn’t she?’
The hall is dark, but there’s a crack of light under the door. In the corner of my vision I see something move and feel my arms and shoulders jerk back in a shiver that jolts my whole body. A garden spider – this fucking place is full of them – its spindly legs navigating around my foot, its indecision and sudden changes of direction filling me with a ridiculous dread that it’s going to crawl right up me.
‘I’ll have to tell her. It will destroy her.’
‘No, it won’t.’ Jessie sounds like a complacent little cunt. ‘What about us?’
‘You know what I can’t understand,’ he says, and I wish I had the knife now, I wish I could open the door and surprise him, wash that smug, frank defeat off his face layer by layer – the ease of it, the comfort of slipping into the wreckage. ‘I’ve been the biggest bloody fool on earth, but I still can’t believe you came from me.’
Jessie almost laughs. ‘I’m me,’ she says, ‘that’s what you can’t take.’ And I can’t take any more myself so I go downstairs.
▪
In the kitchen I can breathe normally, I don’t have to think about each breath as I draw it in, hold it, let it out. My feet move silently, carefully, without any effort on my part.
The room is half dark – a thin, spidery light comes from the moon and stars outside. The window is broken where John’s rock went through it, the glass still splintered all over the drainer and the plates. I hear the sea, and for the first time I take it for granted: it’s there, it always was. I could walk out of the door and up the road the bikes took and cross the field and be there, on the hill, looking down, opening my eyes to the night, to the blackness churning on the shore below: long white lips of foam rolling in with their poison, their crap and junk, old torches, plastic bottles filled with petrol, scummy twists of plastic film, diseased fish – all the death we’ve brought to it, getting our own back and more for the dead it’s claimed since time began. It’s like the sky kissing London – man and nature meeting and wrecking each other. But there’s the shelter and all the times they must have used it – even if it was only once, I don’t care, they’ve taken everything from me and they can’t put it back.
The fridge clicks on and makes me start. There’s a coffee mug on the table and a half-empty bottle of milk. The tap that’s dripping is in here, not the bathroom. I could turn it off, but it’s a useful measure of time.
▪
The cutlery drawer slides open with a slight rattle, impossible to avoid but so slight that even I barely hear it. The tap drips. Silence outside –
apart from the sea. Upstairs, I think I hear the murmur of voices, but they are less than the sea, dead sounds absorbed into the walls. I don’t need to look. In the darkness of the drawer, in the compartment to the right, my hand finds the smooth rounded end of the red-handled knife. It buries itself in my palm as I pull it out and see the blade now, shining dully in the pale light. I am afraid of blunting it, but feel compelled to dig it into the grain of the table top, carving three tram lines the length of an arm, my arm, past the coffee mug to the milk.
A bird shrieks outside – a seagull at night? – and I’m suddenly conscious of time in a different way: that I might miss my moment, that perhaps already Jessie has gone back to her room, making my task more difficult, less symmetrical, an awkward inky dribble across the fine pencil lines of the architectural plan Dad might draw of their deaths.
I mount the stairs carefully, feeling ordinary, the knife in my hand only a minor variation on countless other stair climbs – though not these stairs – with cups, toys, books. Without excitement or even much interest, I imagine newspaper pictures and unreadable headlines, blurred photographs of the cottage, a particular school picture of me when I was ten, round faced and staring at the camera with a grim smirk. Another family slaughters itself in the countryside. Why must my face look so dumb, so innocent, so much the kind of twerp I would beat the shit out of in the playground?
The landing again. Nothing has changed. The door has not opened. The crack of light is still there, spilling out over the floorboards, accentuating the joins and nailheads. The electrical socket where Lucy plugs in her vacuum is loose on the wall, I know because I’ve noticed it a dozen times now and meant to tell Pricko or do something about it myself. I touch it with my foot, with the rubber cap of my running shoe, and feel the socket shift on its wiggly screws.
I am tempted to wet my fingers – my other hand, the hand not holding the knife – and jam them down between the white plastic cover and the wall. I could take it, I could take the surge of electricity through my being. I could take anything right now. I hear the Prick’s voice, impatient with her, untroubled by the tap the socket makes against the wall as my foot nudges it.
‘Jessie —!’
‘No.’
‘Go back to bed.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know when to give up. Don’t make it more difficult—’
He’s pissed off with her now, and maybe with the situation: having to keep his voice down, to hold back from waking me. ‘It can’t be more difficult. It’s impossible, so why stop tonight?’ Jessie wants to be heard. She sounds reckless in the way that’s always made me sick about her – there’s so much more ground to throw away when you’re a daughter, so much more room for easy damage, and even then she’s always been so fucking protected. I grip my knife, let my foot shift from the socket to the door. I think she moves closer to him. ‘If there were no consequences,’ she says, nagging him, keeping up the pressure, ‘if no one gave a shit, you’d do it. You’re afraid.’
‘Stop it!’
▪
And I open the door. I don’t even knock.
‘Hello,’ I say, feeling quite perky, thinking about John’s head popping
into the kitchen – was that this evening? It seems only moments ago.
I wish I’d had a drink downstairs, though, a beer or something from the fridge; there’s a dead spot in my stomach like cancer, I need a burn
there, a buzz.
I grip the red handle – I can see it now, the light over Dad’s bed is
on. He’s sitting on the far edge, the duvet pulled up around him, the
side of his neck and shoulder closest to me uncovered except for various
wads of gauze taped clumsily onto him over a battleground of bruised
and battered flesh.
He turns, and my eyes move to Jessie. I was wrong, she’s not
naked. She’s not wearing her shades. What she’s got on is Mum’s
bathrobe, and she looks strangely uncomfortable in it – it’s wrapped
too tight or something, as if she’s suddenly turned frigid and decided
to batten down the hatches. She is standing over Dad’s side of the bed,
sandwiched between it and Jack’s cot, her body moving back and up as
I enter, as if she’s been leaning her hands on the mattress or on him. Her face is odd when she looks at me – her mouth smudged with
make-up, her eyes saddened with colors I’m sure weren’t there earlier,
in the kitchen. Just for a moment, until I focus on her bare legs and
bare feet, she reminds me of two nights ago in the hotel, sitting at the
window in her jacket and stockings, staring out at the storm lighting
up the river and crying, although I couldn’t be sure that she was – only
there’s no sense of utter loneliness now, just the stale reek of our parents’
bed, the Prick’s spirity dressings, her pharmacist-blended oil. ‘Tom, what’s the matter? Are you all right?’ Dad says this even
as he registers the knife in my hands. His face is wearied by the sight
of it rather than shocked or scared – as if this is another regrettable
mistake, further evidence of my stupidity, my inability to behave like
a sane human being.
My mind is blank, but I manage ‘Don’t!’ as he tries to slide his
naked trunk off the bed and stand, the effort obviously stirring some
temporarily banished pain in his back. He grimaces. Jessie stands,
making no attempt to help him, her expression hardening in response
to me, him, both.
I push the door shut behind me and lean against it, holding the
knife in my hand, blade up, in what seems to me a perfectly serious
manner.
‘Stay there,’ I say, analyzing the relationship between their body
sizes and mine. I need that super-human strength now if I’m to do this.
I should have pushed my hand in the socket outside.
‘Tom, you never could handle a carving knife,’ Jessie says, trying
that sister crap on me, although I think she is genuinely not frightened.
But she knows my state of mind well enough to understand that this
is more than a joke.
‘I think I can do all right with this one.’
And I hold out my left arm, the one that’s not carrying the knife,
turn my palm up and draw the tip of the metal down the underside,
from elbow to wrist, avoiding the artery, cutting not enough to weaken
the arm, just enough to give me the extra degree of commitment I
need.
Even after the tram lines on the kitchen table, the blade is sharp. It
doesn’t need any pressure. It doesn’t drag at all, just slices neatly down,
parting the skin like plastic, not even hurting for a second or two, then
stinging as the blood comes.
My demonstration seems to impress everyone. ‘Tom, put the knife
down,’ my father suggests, his brow cragging with the realization that
I might just be unsettled enough to do something.
I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite work.
‘Everything you think, you’re right in.’
This is his serious voice, his man-to-man voice, the one he uses
when he wants to bare his soul, or whatever it is he has. It’s warm in
here. This is a warm room. ‘You have every right to–’
‘SHUT UP!’
I didn’t need to shout. I think my voice broke as I said it. My
back presses against the door. It’s been stripped, this one, and left
unvarnished. It feels grainy and satisfying to the touch. I let my left
hand rest there, the arm aching a little from the cut, which is bleeding
a little now.
bedroom – not even of Jack. I hate that in other kids’ parents’ bedrooms:
the smiling-faced family groups propped up in frames all over the
furniture. Our smiling-faced pictures are downstairs in the hall, where
you can barely see them even in daylight.
‘Who are you going to do first, Tom? Me or Dad?’ Jessie tries to
sound the way she does sometimes – like my sister. ‘You’ll chicken out.’
But she touches her shoulder through the robe where I burned her, and
I see or think I see something like approval in her eyes.
‘Watch me!’ I say, staring at the belt tied around her waist, the soft
rainbow colors of the toweling. Her tan underneath is like a Greek girl’s skin or an Arab’s. I feel momentarily confused – disoriented – as if I’m somewhere else. This cottage is somewhere else to me, it has no
bearings, it floats on the sewage of my brain.
My father sees my state and seizes on it, trying to lever himself up
off the bed with one arm. I point the knife and jerk it at him, kicking
the door with my foot in a sort of reflex action.
‘If either of you gets too close,’ I warn them, no conscious thought
involved in the words, ‘I’ll use this on me. I don’t care about you.’ He eases himself back down on the edge of the mattress, watching
me, better placed for movement than before – but I’m watching him,
too. ‘I know you must find this hard to believe,’ he says, and I do,
The War Zone Page 21
