whatever is coming, ‘but I still love you all.’
He is a slimy reptile. No! Reptiles aren’t slimy. I think he means
it, I think he has a place inside for loving me – and Mum and Jack.
Somewhere just above his bowels. He could almost be a human being
if it wasn’t for the fact that he was never one to start with. I stare at him, trying to reach what it is that will make it happen.
I speak slowly, thinking out loud: ‘I want to hear you say, “Otherwise,
you’re fine.”’ Time drags. My armpits are wet: I can smell them on my
T-shirt.
‘What?’ He looks totally mystified.
‘Say, “Otherwise, you’re fine.”’
‘Tom, this is nonsense—’
‘Say it!’
He is having a hard night. The dressing to the side of his right
shoulder blade has darkened since he moved. There is sweat clogging
his chest hair. He keeps the duvet balled protectively over his tool, but
I’ve seen it – grey and shriveled, swinging like one of the poncy curtain
tassels every time he tries to stand up. His voice is flat and resentful, as
if I’m just trying to embarrass him, and that in itself is enough. ‘Otherwise—’ He searches my face for some sort of explanation.
‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’
‘SAY IT!’
He’s like a robot – it means nothing to him:
‘. . . you’re fine.’
Nothing. I look at Jessie, try to imagine him banging into her, but
instead think of Sonny peeing all over my face. What does it take? My
hand with the knife is steady, but it’s going to shake soon. My other
arm aches. I’m against the door and they are waiting there, on the bed, by the cot. I’m not as strong as they are – my dad is going to count on
that in a moment – and still I’m pissing about.
Jessie speaks quietly. I think she wants to help.
‘Give me the knife. I’ll do it. I’ll kill him quite happily.’ ‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Dad says, and he laughs, his patience for sane
argument exhausted, sick of the both of us.
I believe her. I rock slightly, gripping the red handle tight, my other
fist clenched, and look at her properly for the first time since I came
into the room. She is in a fine state, wrapped in Mum’s robe, her hair
all tight and damp-looking the way it was that day in the bath, in the
mirror, her smudged mouth set with a kind of manic determination
that I think certain girls’ schools – I’ve seen it on her friends’ faces,
though never like this – must teach.
‘I’ve been trying to find out at what point it changes,’ she says,
and Dad leans back hard against the wall, banging his head in a sort
of gesture of defeat, and pressing one hand down onto the pillow for
support. ‘At what point do you give it all up – your daring, the link
between how you live and how you dream? Dad’s got us–’ she turns
on him with the kind of contempt I thought she only reserved for me,
‘– but we’re not what he wanted, we’re about two per cent of what he
thought he was capable of.’
‘Right!’ says Dad, looking for a fight now, straightening his back
as if he doesn’t fucking care how much it hurts anymore. ‘Is it just fear?’ Jessie’s hand reaches behind her, searching for
something – the cot, a reference point. ‘Are you just afraid that what’s
in you isn’t so very special? Or do you just bury it? You work and
you fuck and you load it with trinkets, property, children. You half
remember it and something happens, you get extra-daring one day,
really charged with your own –’ she searches for the word, watching
him, watching him listen to this and try to deny it in his head, ‘–
essence, and you fuck me, but then you lose it again, you suffocate it,
it’s dead, it’s worse than before.’
All through this her other hand has been toying with the belt,
twisting the half-knot, untying and retying it, letting the robe slacken
a little, then pulling it tight.
‘God, you’re fucked up!’ she says. ‘You’ll do this —’ And she turns
and hitches the bathrobe up, sticking her bum out at us so we can see
where she’s smeared it with lipstick or something, right down the crack, a violent, raging red. ‘You’ll stick your cock up my bum, but you
won’t give me what I want. You won’t give me a baby!’
I feel winded. She’s knocked all the fight out of me. I stare at them
both with a strange kind of concentration, watching under water,
watching him move as she turns back to us, opening the robe and
shaking it down from her shoulders to show something quite obscene
and wrinkled on her belly. He grabs for her, but his movement is
impeded by one hand sinking into the mattress for support, so that he
has to reach out twice.
I start toward him with the knife, but Jessie is still talking, her eyes
locked on mine, confusing me with my own guilt: this isn’t something
I should see, we’ve run into each other in the middle of a dream, in
a school corridor or in Sonny’s bathroom or on some weird sea wall
with the water thrashing, and I’ve been watching her play with herself.
I step outside myself even as I lunge forward and see how guilty I am:
I’m at fault here; I keep having these dirty thoughts.
‘I want him to make me pregnant, Tom,’ she says, ‘but that’s the
one thing Daddy won’t do.’
‘Jessie!’ he screams, catching hold of the robe which is hanging from
her elbows now, and tugging her to him. But I slash with the knife,
throwing myself on the bed and getting close but not close enough,
burying it deep in the duvet, the mattress, and dragging it back. He lets
go of Jessie and pushes me off, his hand ramming into my skull with
a blinding pain, so that I stumble back off the bed but manage to stay
on my feet with the knife still in my hand.
He comes for me now and I move for his arm, his right bicep,
not certain how much I want to achieve, but buggered anyway from
anything more than a surface gash by his other hand swinging around
to force my wrist up behind my neck, his strength – even though I’ve
allowed for it – surprising me, it’s so long since we’ve tangled with
each other.
The knife knocks against the door and he bellows, ‘Drop it!’’ and
I could laugh because Jessie is yelling ‘Don’t!’’ – and I don’t know
whether she means don’t drop it or don’t fight.
I try to floor him with a knee to his exposed groin, but he anticipates
this and smashes my leg with his own, jarring me with the pain. ‘Stop this fucking nonsense!’ he says, trying to push my hand with
the knife back, but I grab the handle with my other hand, cutting the soft pulpy bits of my fingers in the process, but bringing it down fast
enough to stick him below the ribs with the blade.
And I feel sick. Suddenly everything looks different. I get the full
belt of his breath in my face as he wheezes out, and I realize that I
don’t want to hurt him like this. Some other way – but not like this.
His stomach is wet with blood, though I didn’t think I cut him that
deep, and Jessie looks stunned, bending to support him, Mum’s robe
still
half off her, that thing on her stomach smudging up against him
as she stares at me and says nothing more useful than ‘Fuck!’
▪
I have an impulse to take my father and hug him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I feel freaky, more wired up and frightened than ever, not sure what I’ve done. I want to stay but I want to run more and I pull open the door and look back at Jessie who has got Dad on the bed
– there’s an awful lot of blood – and hear her say, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t go now!’ but I’m down the stairs and the front door opens with the third tug and outside the day is starting. I chuck the knife back behind me, taking in the wrecked barbecue and the smashed table on the lawn like a still life in some crisp arty photograph, and race around the gate to where my bike is against the wall and run with it, hearing the chain spin and catch, feeling terrified and empty and realizing with a totally misplaced sense of shame that I’ve emptied my bladder in my jeans.
29
I
keep moving, but there’s nothing behind me. Even before I am out of the village, the day seems disconnected from the night. The sun comes up and it’s like something artificial – the sky on a dimmer
switch. The rush of birdsong sounds electronic, an extension of the sea’s interference noise, another track on the ambient CD to create the total effect. A farm harvester (or whatever it is) crawls uphill in front of me, blocking the road, moving even slower than I can pedal, its heavy machinery like sculpture: weird forms caked in a dried mud and dust that have nothing to do with the experience of my life.
▪
I am back on the road to Exeter – three times in less than twenty-four hours, but the slog is druglike, I can deaden my mind through the sweat on my body, the ache in my injured arm and fingers as I grip the handlebars, pushing the pedals down/around/up, identifiable twisted bits of tree and broken bush approaching then vanishing behind me.
I pass the space where the oak was that caused us to crash the night Jack was born, but farther on there’s another space – another clearing in the hedgerow, another pit in the ground – and the fact that I don’t really know which one it is seems to drag the shock of stabbing Dad back into some past and no longer reachable place in my brain.
I am not complete. I don’t think I killed him, but if I did, it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like I wanted it to. I want more – but not more of the same. If I’ve killed him, he won’t suffer. I don’t want him to be dead, I want him to suffer. I think he will. But what I’m looking for now is personal satisfaction. The suffering is up to him.
There’s a dead bird on the road and I run over it with my bike, little globs of it sticking to my front tire then working their way off as I come into Exeter. My mother is here in the hospital and the bird gives me a mental picture of Jack’s stomach, though I hope he’s in better shape than that. It should be my father’s guts I see but it’s not and I’m here only because I’ve got to be somewhere. I head for the station, not the hospital, staggered by how long everything takes to do – the time it takes to cycle the length of a street, the dreamlike whir of a milk van moving in front of me, my almost stationary poise as I wait at lights, feet off the ground, swaying slowly as gravity enters my mind and pulls me sideways.
I abandon the bike and buy a ticket, puzzled by the money in my pocket – almost eighty pounds, although I don’t remember putting it there or where it came from. Dad gives me money. Mum gives me money. I used to steal it from them, too, but they never noticed so I stopped. I walk onto the platform, making a deliberate effort to move like everyone else. I am surrounded by faces I would not want to see at my trial, anyone’s trial: they know they’re right, this is the time for them, they’ve got their lives organized – even though they’re fucked, they’re making sure someone else is fucked worse than them.
▪
The train journey has a reality of its own, woven in and out of my attempts to stay awake. If I could feel it, the speed would help. But only when another First Great Western express flashes past in the opposite direction on a parallel track does any real sense of the danger penetrate the carriage. The possibility of swinging a door open as one approaches and diving out into its path occurs to me, but if I did that I’d want to take one or two of my turd-faced fellow passengers with me and it might get complicated. As it is, I want to remain anonymous, drinking a foul cup of coffee and dozing in my sweaty T-shirt and piss-stained jeans among these clean livers. If Dad is dead, I may face problems in London – that’s why I bought a ticket, rather than risk a charge through the gate at Paddington. If Dad is dead (and if he is, I should be traveling under the train, my spine coupling the carriages), I don’t see how Jessie can avoid involving the law. If he isn’t, he won’t go out of his way to look for trouble.
▪
I want darkness again, and it’s a long wait until then. Paddington seems vast and echoing when I arrive, a huge distortion of sound and movement. I pick my way through the crowd, the fast food smells, stumbling into a knot of German tourists in Union Jack bowler hats, twisting my leg on a plastic bag as I move to get out of the way of an electric mail cart driving right at me and towing its own train of crap, watching as two uniformed guards manhandle a dosser through a door marked ‘PRIVATE’.
I am clumsy and hungry but the burger I buy becomes a lump in my throat which even a flat, syrupy Coke can’t dislodge and I wind up in the gents, my stomach feeling like a bag of wet sand that has to be dropped, my dead brain calculating that if I make it to tonight I will have been up for almost sixty hours without more than three or four of sleep.
I head off into the underground, refusing to make it easy on myself by taking the Docklands line, which is too clean, too bright, too much like something the Prick would create. I stare at the tube map, my eyes adding colors to it and failing to follow the same line for any distance. Finally I trace a route to Wapping, using my finger and moving my lips as I think, then lose myself in an unending circle of escalators and platforms until I smash my knee on a wall and sort myself out.
▪
Twice I miss Whitechapel, where I’m supposed to change lines – once on the way there, then again when I switch trains and come back. A woman, a young mother not much older than Jessie, stands over me at one point in the empty carriage, a sick-faced leering toddler at her feet, and says in a really aggressive voice – as if she’s prepared to back up her words with a fight – ‘Have you got any money? I saw you counting your change just now. All my kid’s had since yesterday breakfast is a bag of crisps and some Orangina.’ I must look abusable, beatable – at Earl’s Court I had a man stick his clammy hand on the seat of my jeans.
The sun is out at Wapping and the river is so bright it just flashes on my brain, leaving shrinking purple images. I try to work out which way to walk by following it, but have trouble remembering which side of my body to keep it on. There’s a lot of new building going on here, like my father’s wharf but not so poncy, less full of itself, its reconstitutedneo-Victoriana-crappiness. In fact, it’s ugly, that’s what it is, it’s fucking awful. It’s hard to choose between the new functional ugliness and the old functional ugliness, so why not nuke it all? The people around here wouldn’t mind – not the ones who’ve been here a lifetime. They’re used to being blitzed. Hitler’s dead; the IRA’s history; now we’ve got homegrown jokers willing to blow it all up – it doesn’t make much difference to the locals. Because outside the electric gates and barbed-wire fences, not a lot’s happening.
There’s a whole stretch I walk through where even the newly remodeled tenement houses are boarded-up, windows broken, colored paint peeling off the doors. With a suddenness that really frightens me, I remember being high up on a roof with the Prick when I was little. We were standing on top of an office block that was waiting to be demolished, I think, and gazing at the view; he had his hands tight on my shoulders, probably convinced that I was going to go running off across the flat, unwalled roof. There was a
high-rise of grim flats some distance away, close enough to see the layers of weather- stained, wood-clad balconies where people kept their window boxes, the junk they couldn’t fit inside their flats, maybe even a rabbit or pigeons. Out of the lot of them – I don’t know, maybe fifty or sixty – one had had its creosoted brown wood painted orange and my father drew my attention to it.
‘Look at that,’ he said, and his voice was almost bitter or defeated or something. ‘One desperate attempt at individuality.’
It didn’t mean anything to me – I was six, maybe, or seven – but I think the extent of his own silence that followed worried him. Now, stepping along, seeing the wreckage around me, thinking about what I’m going to do, I think I can understand what it was – the fact that nothing he could build could be anything those people would care about, anything less than his own huge wank, his own shot at imperialism. He should thank me.
▪
I sleep on the grass in a tiny park by the water, but I’m troubled by the look on Dad’s face as I stuck him, the sight of Jessie’s stomach as she bent to help him.
Then there’s a terrible moment when I hear bird sounds and trucks moving and I stir, thinking the crane operator who drowned off Dad’s wharf has come out of the river and is standing over me, sludge dripping off him, his face horribly mutilated by the action of a ship’s propeller
– but there’s no one here, only an old man on the path, talking to his dog and staring up at a grim statue against an orange sky.
I relent and find a working phone outside a petrol station, feeling worse for the sleep, surprised at how near to evening it is. I don’t have a plan; I don’t need one – just minimal preparation and luck. The sun is cooler now, and I find my confidence draining with the warmth as the phone rings and rings. I begin to panic and try to calm down, forcing myself to put the phone back and walk out onto the petrol station forecourt. If he’s dead, what would have happened? Surely there’d be someone there? They could just be out, seeing Mum – telling her what, how would he explain this? Or of course he could be in hospital himself – was the wound deep? It felt like nothing, less resistance than sticking a knife in fruit.
The War Zone Page 22
