The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

  ‘Come on,’ Jessie says, swimming for the shore, but I hold her back.

  ‘How can you stay with these people?’ I ask, not caring whether my voice carries across the water to Magda. ‘They’re morons.’

  And I stare at the whiteness of Magda’s arms and legs against the shoreline and instead see Wolf, grinning from the deck of his fishing boat. My hand nudges Jessie’s tit as I grasp her arm, the two of us treading water, and I try to imagine Wolf’s prick inside her, but I can’t – it just comes out as a fat, pulpy blob.

  ‘They feed me well and fuck me well,’ she tells me, pulling away with what might just be a desire for her girlfriend not to see us so close together. ‘God, you’re starting to sound so superior!’

  I glance at the jetty; Magda has gone inside.

  ‘You like Magda, do you? Does she know she’s brain dead?’

  ‘Go to hell, Tom!’

  And she puts her whole weight on me to push me under.

  ▪

  Dinner is on the verandah, with no sign of Wolf. To my astonishment, Magda does everything, insisting that Jessie sit and relax. She still won’t address me directly but does at least plonk plates on the table in front of me and then hovers, drinking iced rum and pineapple from a large square glass and looking oddly flirtatious in a fine white evening micro-dress, while Jessie and I are in loose, casual clothes.

  I start hitting the rum myself, partly because the burn on my back is biting again but also because this place is getting to me – Magda’s performance, Wolf’s absence, the too-perfect setting. The air is stoned on this incredible sweet fragrance which Jessie tells me is from the frangipani trees around the house; and the sea, as the sun starts to set, seems to effervesce like soda water.

  ‘Isn’t the Caribbean where the Yanks dump all their nuclear waste?’ I inquire. ‘And toxic chemicals. They aim it at Cuba, but some of it must overshoot. Is this fish we’re having?’

  ‘No.’ It’s the first word Magda has spoken to me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not fish.’

  ‘Oh.’ I glance at Jessie, who seems surprised too. I can’t believe that

  Magda would go to any great trouble for me, and yet she prepared the meal – apparently the maid only works in the afternoons. Suddenly Magda is almost voluble. ‘Cesar came while you were swimming.’ This is to Jessie, not me. ‘He brought a delivery.’ She stares at the serving dish in front of her. ‘Pork.’

  Jessie knows I don’t like pork, but this hardly seems the time to get fussy. She says nothing, just starts talking about the sunset, which is completely different from what she’d led me to expect – like a weird memory of England. The sky is a shade of pale tropical orange I’ve never seen before, but the clouds are spread out in a familiar dappled fishscale pattern – little hints of purple and blue here and there – stretching down to an horizon which only needs a railway track or a few Devon sheep superimposed over the palm trees to be somewhere else in my life entirely.

  ‘We should have driven over to the other side of the island,’ Jessie says, staring at me with those eyes that cut right through to my soul. ‘You could have watched the sunset better from there.’

  ‘Are you painting?’ My voice sounds more aggressive than I’d intended, but I feel angry – she stole it from me once along with everything else, a sky like this, the world through my eyes.

  ‘A little. Not enough, probably.’ She reads my anger; does she understand? ‘This island is hard on you. It’s too easy to make pretty pictures.’

  She picks up her fork and digs it into one of the disturbingly neat slices of meat Magda has cut. She hesitates. Magda is still standing, drink in hand, some element in the thread of her hostess dress catching the fastdying greenish light and sparkling. My eyes keep returning to her – she’s like an actress in a dream that’s almost real. She sees me looking and stares straight through me.

  Then Jessie wheels around to her, fork in hand. ‘For God’s sake, stop this shit and sit down!’

  The force of her outburst surprises us all, I think. It relieves the tension, but only momentarily. Magda pointedly finishes her drink, turns the glass in her hand rattling what’s left of the ice against the side, then finally sits at the table with us.

  ▪

  Jessie starts to eat and I try to do the same, but the taste of pork has always made me gag and each mouthful requires an effort of will to swallow. I feel Magda somehow knows this, though, and I will not give her the satisfaction of asking for something else, hungry as I am. She picks at her food, not speaking, staring past me along the verandah most of the time, and for a while there is only the strained clink of forks and knives on the plates and the roll of the sea below the house. The sun dips and disappears quite abruptly and the electric light, when Jessie turns it on, flickers.

  ‘Will Wolf be joining us?’ I ask finally, sick of game playing, this sense that I’m simply an unwelcome foil for Magda to respond to.

  ‘I thought he would.’ Jessie’s voice, even when she pisses me off, is a ticket to some special, protected place. ‘But sometimes he sleeps on the job.’

  This sparks a snort from Magda, which I realize after a moment is intended as a show of humor on her part. It’s clearly a private joke. She leans one cheek on the back of her hand and peers at me. ‘We have no telephone here at the house,’ she says. ‘He could be dead on the road and we wouldn’t know it.’

  This is all I’m getting. She looks away. I push my plate back, tired suddenly, and sit watching the two of them. The light flickers again, but my eyes feel heavy and I think it’s the rum. Then I’m plunged into darkness and Jessie says ‘Shit!’ and I know it’s not me, the power has failed, but it’s all right. It’s more peaceful not having to watch Magda act and I just want to sleep.

  ‘We have a backup generator—’ Jessie bangs her chair on the floor of the verandah as she gets up. ‘But it’s too much hassle to start.’

  I hear her go. I’m too smashed to move or do anything. The sound of the waves makes me think for a moment that I’m back on the beat-up ferry that brought me here, but then I hear Magda put something down on the table (her glass? the darkness is total, I can barely make out where she is) and Jessie comes back carrying a candle and a thick wooden bowl.

  She puts the candle on the table and sits with the bowl in her lap. It’s weed and there’s a flatly-rolled spliff already prepared. When she offers it to me, I take it and light it with the candle flame, hoping it will bury the thought that’s forming in my head. It doesn’t. If anything it makes it sharper, and as I smoke and pass it to Jessica and she passes it to Magda, I have the unsettling conviction that our roles have reversed, that she needs me, that I’m the stronger one – she may be older, but now I’ve a clearer idea of who I am, what I want.

  But do I? I want to be involved, I know that, I want to be locked into some struggle that’s happening somewhere, Tibet maybe or Somalia. I don’t care how I’ll do it. I’ll use the Prick’s money happily, I’ll take it from anywhere I can get it. I don’t want this: a slow death in a tropical paradise, a nice bourgeois fuck-party, two dykes and an absent Kraut. But I want Jessie, I know that. There is no one I can find like her, that’s the trouble – yet if our roles have reversed, it’s no good, it’s another one of those twisting never-ending mind-fucking puzzles.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ The question is out before I even realize it.

  Jessie looks at me, laughs. Her voice is stretched and a little twangy from the grass. ‘Tonight? Or for the rest of my life?’

  Magda gets up and moves around to sit on the verandah railing across from me, her back to the night. Jessie watches her. It’s a stupid question.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  I stare at Magda, paler than ever by candlelight, as if she’s trying for total anemia, the sight of her putting the mockers on anything I might think I’ve resolved. She sits on her perch, facing me, her straw-blonde hair limp around her shoulders, the white dress taut across her
legs, and I realize I have a fine view where her panties might be of her cunt, which has been shaved. The unsteady light makes it deeper and more shadowy than it might otherwise seem, like a face grinning sideways at me in the dark. For a moment I’m riveted by it; I can’t take my eyes off it, but then I start to recognize the hand of Jessie, consciously or otherwise arranging things, and I see now that Magda is watching me stare, and I explode:

  ‘Why don’t you both just go and fuck each other?’ I get up, turning to Jessie. ‘This is another one of your parties, right?’

  But Jessie takes hold of my arm and pulls me back.

  ‘Sit down, Tom. You’re being foolish. You always get things out of proportion.’

  ‘Do I?’ I sit down.

  But my anger seems to have done the trick. Snow White gets down off the verandah railing and says good night. Not to me, of course, but to Jessie, bending to kiss her slowly on the mouth, her tongue pressing between Jessie’s lips and teeth in what I take to be a Polish finger directed at me.

  ▪

  And we’re alone.

  ‘You love it, don’t you?’ I tell her. ‘Winding me up and watching me

  dance.’

  ‘You’re just too easy to provoke.’ She smiles and her eyes have the

  deep, sharp light I miss when she’s not there. ‘You know I love you.’ She looks so beautiful – she always looks beautiful to me – that she

  makes me doubt myself again, doubt that I’ve come any distance from

  the cottage. I’m not stronger, I’m lost. She called and I came running. She

  has twisted the shape of my life – always – yet I give her more love, more

  commitment than I can ever find for any girl I’ve met – or for Jack or for

  Mum. I don’t know how or where she stacks up against the Prick’s sick

  greed and yet I think of Jessie as a person, damaged or not, and I tend to

  think of them only as victims.

  ‘Yeah, I do,’ I say, just to say something.

  ‘Come on, I’m not tired yet, are you? Let’s go down by the water.’ She picks up the candle and something else in the darkness and has me

  follow her along the verandah, down the steps and over a broken rock wall

  on to the wooden jetty. There’s a constant hiss from the insects and the

  sea is lapping, getting on my nerves. There’s no moon, only the stars and

  the light from the candle. Jessie turns from me and puts it down, dripping

  a little wax onto the deck of the jetty to stand it in.

  She straightens up. She has a fruit knife in her hand.

  ‘You weren’t much good with one of these, were you?’ I feel sharp again suddenly, like I did with the grass. I want to laugh,

  but I feel seriously nervous. This is just another game, I tell myself, but

  there’s a sick feeling in my stomach – not because of the knife; my gut is

  knotted because of a thought I’ve just had: we have eaten Wolf. That was

  no meal we had, that was her lover. Those neat white slices I couldn’t chew

  seemed slightly worn, if I think about it. Sad and tired, with an ingrained

  stain – like old underwear. This is ridiculous. I’m stoned, but the knife is

  real.

  ‘Is this what I’ve come for, then?’ I say.

  ‘You still don’t know much, do you, Tom?’ She points it at me. Life is perfect. It has its own system of mirrors; it balances. I know

  now what the Prick saw when I turned the knife on him. It’s so close – your

  loved one with a knife. The line between holding it and using it is so fine.

  She’ll do it if she wants to, I know that, and there’s a part of me that wants

  to know what it would feel like, but it’s not all of me. Not any more. Her voice cuts across the warm void between us. ‘Were you going to

  do it that night? Did you really think you could?’

  ‘I thought I’d try.’ We haven’t moved. I listen to the night: the nerves

  of the insects, the slap of water on wood. This is a magical place but it’s

  nowhere special, it’s all the same. Devon could be back up the hill behind

  me. We need this.

  ‘You know what really pissed me off?’ I say. She shakes her head.

  Should I try something, go for her arm? ‘You did it again – with that body

  paint or whatever it was. You took my moment from me.’

  She laughs. ‘That wasn’t meant for you. You looked so – determined,

  coming in with the knife. I would have finished it.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘I might.’ Silence. ‘Move past me to the end of the jetty, will you?’ I stare at her. ‘Why did you ask me here?’

  She twists the fruit knife slightly in her hand so that the blade catches

  the candlelight. It’s small, smaller than the one I had that night. There’s a

  tiny curve at the end, but the whole thing is so short I wonder how deep

  it would go in me.

  ‘I miss you,’ she says. ‘I miss the thought of us.’

  ‘No, you don’t.’ I watch that hand, the hand with the knife. ‘I was only

  ever your audience. What do you want? You want me to watch you and

  Magda knocking around? Or is she going to piss all over me?’ ‘I worry about you sometimes.’

  ‘That’s crap! You’ve never felt guilt in your life.’

  ‘I have about you.’ She takes a step back. ‘Not guilt, maybe – I just

  wonder who we are.’ That’s lost on me. ‘Move!’

  I walk past her carefully, then think, ‘Fuck it!’ and turn my back on

  her, saying, ‘What are you going to do, push me in? It’s only about eight

  feet deep.’

  I feel her move behind me. ‘Do you want to know how it started with

  Dad?’ Her voice is just another part of the night. I stare at nothing – no, at

  the vague darkness of the water moving.

  ‘The whole thing was the baby – the night Jack was born. It was the

  night we’d all been canoeing and swimming in the river – I’d tipped you

  in, remember?’

  She pauses, but I’m not hearing or only half-hearing her. This is

  someone else’s life we’re talking about; I’m not interested in the past, any

  past.

  ‘We were alone in the cottage. You were asleep. I’d wanted him for a

  long time, Tom. All my life. I was just working up to it.’

  I think I hear tears for a moment, like the night in London when a

  storm raged and I slept fitfully in a hotel bed and thought I heard Jessie

  sobbing. But it’s just the water lapping at the jetty below.

  Her voice continues behind me as if she’s trying to convince herself,

  not me.

  ‘It was the birth, all that blood. I’ve thought about this and I’ve come

  to the conclusion that in a funny way Mum brought it on herself by

  having us there. I knew what I was doing – I wanted what she’d had!

  And somehow in my mind it became a kind of weird female solidarity, a

  sharing – everything was possible, there was nothing to stop us.’ Somehow this hurts more than I thought it could. I turn my head and

  I’m surprised to find her standing over me – I’m sitting on the jetty and I

  didn’t even know it.

  The thin fabric of her skirt brushes once against my hair and I smell

  her smell, heavy like the frangipani and oddly threatening. I feel tense

  and want to move my head, but there’s a dullness now in my mind that

  won’t let me fight, won’t let me move, as if my every reaction is on trial

  here when it should be hers.

  I sense the knife close to me, like a cold element drawing the a
ir

  toward it. My feet dangle over the dock. I hear my voice: another part of

  me, the part that can deal with this. I can’t.

  ‘And that’s when he did it?’ Him – the Prick – his cuntishness made it

  happen. I can’t let go of that fact.

  She touches me. Her knuckles brush the nape of my neck, chilling

  my spine.

  ‘It took half the night to get to it. We were drunk but he wasn’t that

  drunk. He was sober enough to enjoy the fear. It had started in the river.

  Well, it had started a lifetime before that – my lifetime! But he was high

  on the idea of Jack, high and shit-scared at the same time of what he might

  do. That was the only thing that gave him the balls with me: death rattling off the numbers, reeling him in a little closer. I think he would have fucked

  anyone that night. I just made sure it was me.’

  It’s nothing new. There is nothing in the world she could surprise me

  with. But still it hurts when I remember how weirdly innocent that day

  felt – or feels now; perhaps the last time I really thought of us as a family.

  My head floats in the night with a knife at my neck, or perhaps it’s still

  her knuckles?

  I want to hit her. I feel a familiar pain – an opening onto a dangerous

  store of anger I don’t want to touch because it’s too long-established, it’s

  like going back. I turn to look up at her.

  ‘The baby – was that just more bullshit, or were you serious?’ She nods. ‘But he’s terrified of fucking me now. Anyway, that’s not

  what I want.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  I think I know the answer, though I don’t want to admit it – because

  admitting it means I’ve thought about it too. I stare at her legs. If I grabbed

  her now and pulled her down, I think I could get rid of the knife without