too much trouble.
As always, she’s ahead of me. ‘You’ll see I do this better than you.’
And almost nonchalantly she swipes at me with the blade, cutting my
cheek.
I go for her, but she’s above me and she dodges to one side, bringing
the knife down to trim a line through the shirt I’m wearing and across my
back underneath, then tossing it into the water so fast and so decisively
that I’m stunned.
‘There,’ she says, like the schoolgirl she once was, proving her point.
‘I can’t do it either. But I never wanted to.’
I’m on my feet, the cut on my back feeling cool and fresh and
dampening a little. Her tongue comes into my mouth and I jerk my head
back, frightened by the taste of her, her breath, the hint of rum in her
saliva. But I’m lying to myself, because I do want it, the click of our teeth
knocking together, the replay of Magda’s kiss running through my brain –
as if we’re in competition: I’ve got to go deeper, get beyond anything that
mindless Polish zombie could.
I grip her, our mouths still locked, but hesitating, the part of me that
wants to wrestling with a resistance to bending to her will, becoming her
puppet once again. But that’s a lie, too – there is nothing here but weakness
and selfishness on my part. I want her, there’s no excuse, no reason, and
as I realize this and my mind enters a sort of limbo that’s always been there, on the border, an element of doubt creeps in. She is struggling, she is fighting to push me away. But suddenly I am super-powerful and it’s like traveling home: I span the sea, I’m in England one minute, here the next – what’s to stop me? Anyway, I’ve been through too much, she owes
me. She owes me this one fucking thing.
I force her down on the deck, keeping her away from the edge where
we might both roll in. The skirt she’s wearing is fine and loose and it
bunches in folds when I shove it up to free her legs from her bikini string.
I drag myself half out of my shorts and hoist myself on to her, but then I
hesitate again, hearing the water and seeing the candle’s suddenly blinding
light. Like a shared thought, Jessie clamps her teeth down on the hand
that’s been covering her mouth and directs it – with a shaking, determined
grip – toward the candle’s tiny flame. I feel the bite and then the burn but
stifle a cry, just as Jessie is silent, letting her hold my hand there a moment
more.
She lets go and I crash on to my elbow, my hand crumpling with the
pain. There is pain everywhere: across my back, across my face, driving
me on with the realization that if I stop now the pain will never ever stop,
I’ll feel more appalled with myself than if I continue. She tries to slide out
from under me, but I pull her back.
‘Oh God, Tom,’ she gasps, a hand clenching my Adam’s apple tight,
throttling me to hold me off. ‘Do it right. This isn’t the first time.’ And that stops me. I try to think of a connection, my mind flailing, a
familiar sick hole boring its way through my stomach.
‘It wasn’t Sonny,’ she says. ‘You’re not Sonny’s style.’
She is unbeatable. There is nothing other than her, though I’ve got
to find something if I’m going to survive. She can live like this; I can’t. I
stay where I am, smelling the frangipani in the air and I realize it’s Jessie
that I smell – it’s a bit like I imagine death might smell. She is death for
me. Whatever else I might do, finally I come back to this: the soft clasp of
Jessie’s thighs and the furry mouth inbetween.
‘Do it right,’ she says, turning away. ‘I’ll be a terrible mother, I’ll let the
kid just shit where it stands. But I want a baby. Do it right.’
She crawls onto all fours, rolling her skirt up. She is facing the island,
a soft, velvety black land-mass in the starlight.
It’s taken this long, but I love her.
▪
The Opening Chapter of the US Edition When The War Zone was first being prepared for publication in the United States (simultaneous with its British publication), my American editor at Doubleday in New York, David Gernert, suggested that perhaps I should think about changing the opening chapter of the book, because he thought the first sentence, “Two pictures of England: I know which one I’d choose,” might discourage some American readers from buying it.
His argument was that those readers might think it contained specifically English subject matter, whereas David – who was very excited by the novel, and whose remarkable enthusiasm not only excited me in turn but seemed to galvanize everyone at Doubleday to get behind it – told me that he believed it to be among “the four or five most important novels” he had ever published.
I chose to open this 20th Anniversary edition of the book with the original British chapter, because I like the energy of it and I still remember the Friday afternoon in London when I wrote the words and knew that I had found the “voice” for the book.
But I thought it might be interesting to include the first chapter of the US edition for comparison – since it was a challenging exercise to try to find a new opening for the novel: one that did not dilute the power of what I hope the original British opening chapter achieved. Over the years, I have come to like both almost equally.
Alexander Stuart May 2009
1
(US Edition)
A
lie: the three of us together on the water, me and two people I’m tied to for life. It’s a perfect day, if you trust perfection. We’re on the river, me, Dad and Jessica, piled into a canoe. We’ve had no sleep. Our new brother has been born this morning and it’s jolted me, it’s no small thing, it has taken me where I breathe and chucked me onto the rails of some thundering, life-fucking train I knew nothing about. Or maybe I did. Maybe it’s just confirmed that so much of what we’re told is important all the time is crap. We’re afraid of what’s real, what’s there, just under the surface. I know I am.
▪
So we’re celebrating. We are having a good time. At least, I think that’s what we’re doing. I, for one, am so wired by the night and the incredible sunshine we’re having and by what happened to the car that the details tend to be a little blurry. Of course, it could be the wine. Dad brought a bottle of wine, so he had no option but to share it with us. What did happen with the car? When we left it wherever we left it, its nose was all punched in, like a prizefighter down on his luck. Did that happen before the baby was born or after? I’m not sure. The last twenty-four hours seem to have got all twisted, so that today still feels like yesterday and the soccer match I watched on TV last night when we were all so restless might have been this morning, after the birth but before this drunken cavort on the river.
Actually, I’ve had very little of the wine. Dad and Jessie polished off most of the bottle. It always tastes like petrol to me, but I love the burn in the stomach, the buzz in the head.
▪
We are drifting under a bridge now, using the paddle to avoid scraping against the moldy brickwork on one side. The air down here is dark and dank and cooler than in the sun. This is it, the English countryside, green and untouched – well, maybe just fingered a little by the bastards whose chemical plants pump out crap right into this water, or the other sort, the really desperate buggers who wait here in the gloom with the bats and water rats, hungry for a friend, waiting to pump something else out, hungry for their brief taste of life on the TV news or in the tabloids. At least Devon has some balls. It’s a little bit wild, not all afternoon tea and morons who actually believe what the
y hear on BBC radio. But it’s not the city.
As we emerge back into the light, a hail of small pebbles hits the water around the canoe, thrown by three kids, a little older than me, a little younger than Jessie. They whistle and shout at her, not bothered by Dad’s presence, asking if she isn’t too hot in her bikini. They seem very keen to draw her attention to something floating on the water, one of them curving a cigarette packet through the air to splash down close to the object in question. I stare at it, puzzled at first by what looks like an old surgical glove or a monkey’s bulbous arse at the zoo. Then I realize the truth: it’s a condom, swollen with water (and milk or something, I don’t want to know) and tied like a balloon. Jessica smiles darkly and looks back at the boys, insects all, waving and jeering. They haven’t a clue. They haven’t a clue what they would be tangling with if they tangled with my sister.
▪
This isn’t my life, my life was something else. Days ago, that’s all, but already out of my reach. North London. The Harrow Road. I’ve cycled up here from the poncy foreign calm of Bayswater. Two black kids have just tossed a woman’s shopping bag off a moving bus, then jumped after it. They don’t want what’s in it, they just don’t want anything to stand still. A plastic carton of eggs hits the pavement near the relics of a secondhand furniture shop. Squeeze-wrapped sausages vanish under a car tire. My bike scrunches across a box of cornflakes and one of the kids chucks a loaf of bread at my face. It’s amazing, the punch sliced white can carry.
‘Fuck off!’ I shout.
‘Fuck you, Maurice!’ the other one yells, making the name sound French and faggoty. A ketchup bottle buzzes past my ear and smashes in the road.
‘Maurice?’ I wonder. I pedal harder as both of them come after me, one on the pavement, the other dodging the traffic to try and catch hold of my rear mudguard. I turn two corners and wheel down a street pitted with ruts and potholes, then slide through a piss-smelling alley between dark houses and come out onto waste ground. The boys will find me if they want to, but I don’t think they’re that motivated.
I take a breather and stare out over the view, my pulse racing. Through a wire fence and down an embankment, railway tracks stretch into the distance. A single line curls off at one point into a shed half buried by the shadow of the road bridge. Nearby, the gravel under the sleepers is stained with rust, a color you don’t see much of in Bayswater.
I’m on high ground and the land dips away from me across the tracks, toward the poky back gardens of terraced houses. Their scraggly lawns and washing lines edge onto a dumping ground littered with rotting mattresses, a wrecked pushchair, black rubbish sacks, the scarred remains of a fire.
Above all this hangs a big expanse of sky, blood red where it touches the backbone of the houses, spilling out overhead into a great, glowing fish tank of orange and blue. London is wonderful, I love it. It’s alive, spreading out before me, old and new, humming like the railway track, telling me everything’s great, I can do anything here – if only we weren’t moving next week.
▪
This is my sentence, then, for a crime I’m guilty as hell of but can’t put my finger on just now, there are so many. Devon, tranquil Devon, the Devon we have moved to, maybe not as tranquil as it used to be, but too bloody tranquil for me. Rubbers in the river are nothing – I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone booths, the heat from a burning car. London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well the country doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. It doesn’t have a hope, it doesn’t know how to be healthy: the water we’re paddling through must be thick with invisible pollution, radioactive fallout, and yet. . .
And yet Jessica has just slipped out of the canoe to swim in that muck. It’s clear enough, even the green and slimy weed three feet down is visible, but it feels too warm to me. English water is never warm, not outside, not without the help of some factory somewhere, pissing out hot waste – or a minor cock-up at the nearest reactor. But there’s no time to think such thoughts. Something else is happening, something I’m a part of but can’t quite understand. Perhaps I’m just tired, confused, heat hazed?
We have turned a bend in the river and are well out of sight of the boys on the bridge. The trees here grow right by the water, their branches almost meeting overhead so that the sun shoots a web of light across us all. Jessie is swimming close to the canoe, her back flashing in the triangles of sun, her skin browner than I ever I manage to get. She kicks hard, reaching awkwardly behind her to untie her bikini top. . .
▪
But wait a minute. None of this is going to mean anything unless I can make you understand how weird we all felt that afternoon, how watching a fresh little bastard come sliming into the world from the collective pool of your family blood makes you think about things you might otherwise not choose to consider. We felt close, all right, but it was a closeness that cut through the bullshit of family life and suspended the rules. I’m talking about honesty. And, you know, when you get down to it, honesty – life without the lies, the protective film of accepted behavior – is bloody dangerous.
Afterword by
Tim Roth
In 1996, when I decided to look for material to direct, the first thing that came through the door was The War Zone. Sarah Radclyffe – a producer I had worked with as an actor some years before, on A World Apart – heard I was interested in directing and gave a copy of Alex’s novel to my agent, Ilene Feldman. I sat down, read it and it made me cry, it just broke my heart. It was beautiful and sad, and thankfully I felt it was really cinematic.
This was important to me, because I didn’t want to make a faux documentary, I wanted to make a piece of cinema. I grew up watching great British and European films, with widescreen images and beautiful lighting, and I was inspired by two of our most extraordinary directors, Alan Clarke and Ken Loach – people who made films that came from their hearts. And to a certain extent I wanted to make traditional, old-fashioned cinema – a grown-up film about what people do to their children. The emotions the book brought out in me are what I went on, gut reaction, but the film would have to work on a suspense level as well, in terms of Tom’s discovery of what was happening around him. I saw in it the opportunity to make the kind of film that we just don’t see enough of any more, a film that genuinely has the potential to say something.
The War Zone was the first thing that came along, but it was also the hardest. I had no sense before I read it of what kind of film I wanted to direct, except that I knew I wanted to jump in the deepest part of the deep end and find out if I could do the job. People asked, ‘Why this subject? Why this film?’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do, a light comedy? To get my toes wet, see if I can direct? What’s the point?’
I thought it was a universal story, a family with two kids. They seem to love each other, and they do love each other. The parents want the best for their children, and the kids just want to be kids: like all children that age, they are trying to define themselves. But the family harbors a secret. The book showed that incest is everywhere, even in a family that truly love each other. It is the universal taboo. But Alex’s novel wasn’t the horror we read about in the newspaper and see on the evening news. It wasn’t sensationalist or something only affecting other people; it felt real and complex, and you could see how damaged the characters were right away. Jessie was hurting and defiant, and Tom was wonderful. He was going through his own hard adolescence when he witnessed this horrible act. Ultimately, all the love in the family couldn’t hide what the father was doing. He seemed at first like a great dad, a dad you’d want to have – then you found out what he was, and it was devastating. That was what I wanted to portray: I wanted a family that anyone could identify with, Black, Asian, American, English, a family that has a dark secret.
I see film as a medium that can be understood across all boundaries. I believe in the importance of images. A story on film
must be told not through dialogue, like a play, but with what you see. I wanted to end up with a film that honored the book and honored the subject. The worst adaptation is a literal adaptation – somehow you must follow your instincts and be true to the sadness of it. I wanted the audience to receive the impact of the book in the same way that I had.
Before The War Zone, I had been told by directors I had worked with I should direct, but I didn’t want to give up acting to do it. It did intrigue me – the machinations of film-making, the fact that you have to have eighteen-hour conversations about wallpaper, about every single detail of the film; to do it just fascinated me, the chance to get involved with all the elements of film-making that had passed me by as an actor. But then there was the insecurity of an actor as well – if I gave up my job for two years to make this film, would they want me back?
What surprised me about the process of making the film was everything. The screenplay, the crew, the actors, the family we invented. Everyone put such warmth and effort into the production. It was like no set I had been on before. I saw the trailer the other day – and that surprised me, too. They got it right first time, the team who made it. I sat down and started watching it and I had to stop and see it again – it made me cry.
On the day we started filming, I had a general fear of shooting for the first time, but once I’d got the first take under my belt and talked to my actors, it was down to business, to making it work, trying to get the cast up to the emotional standard I wanted. Directing has to be about communication, that was what Alan Clarke had – an absolute ability to communicate with the cast and crew. You either know or you don’t know about directing, and that’s what you have to find out.
I think I knew I had a sense of composition, of filmmaking, and I surrounded myself with the best technical people, so I knew that would work, but to me the one thing that scared me was the actors, because I’d been badly directed myself in the past and I knew what that felt like – it’s a scary thing to be out there as an actor in the first place, and I was asking them to do things that I didn’t know I could do myself. And they did extraordinary stuff.
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