Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

A moment’s pause. It sounds fucking terrible to me, but I’m not going to give him any satisfaction. So we’re dead for a week – so what? I scowl across at Jessica, trying to look unmoved. Her expression surprises me. She is staring at him with what at first might be hatred – instant hatred, the kind you can whip up pretty quickly when you need it. But it goes deeper than that; it’s a kind of interest, I can’t put my finger on it but it’s a kind of excitement.

Mum, Jack and me are the fools. We might as well not be here. I don’t know if Mum suspects anything – maybe not, because there’s nothing obvious and it’s the last thing she would suspect. I’m sure it’s never even crossed her mind. But I’m stuck with it. I’m stuck with the knowledge and it turns everything to shit. I can’t even get angry with him in the normal way. I can’t even resent this punishment. Nothing’s normal any more.

Dad puts his hand on Mum’s shoulder, breaking the spell with Jessie, resisting the impulse thank God to ruffle Jake’s minimal hair. Mum looks tired and tense. She is usually the one who mediates in these situations, giving shape to Dad’s anger, which is erratic and shortlived. But she’s feeding Jack and she looks ready to accept anything that will cut this drama short.

Then Dad makes his mistake. And mine. ‘Have either of you got anything to say?’ he asks.

Another silence. I hear myself breathing from a long way away. Saliva forms in the bottom of my mouth. My tongue prods against my teeth. My lips peel apart. The kitchen divides into irregularly shaped pieces: the pots and plates on the old enamel drainer, the dead flies in the lightbowl, the cups on the table, the ponderous drip of the cold tap, the cracks in the flagstone floor, my family’s faces, the ivy at the window. The fragments split and dance in space, jostling with swimming purple flecks of light.

‘Yes.’ The whole kitchen explodes. ‘Go fuck yourself.’

Sometimes it’s worse when they don’t get angry. You provoke a response, you demand attention, emotion, balls. You have to give a little bit of your life to get angry with someone. When you cross the edge and nothing happens there’s something wrong. You don’t want permission to piss around.

So Dad must really be off course not to rise to that. If Jessie had said it at this particular moment, I think he would have slapped her, which is not something I can remember him doing in a long time, but the rules have changed, they look like they want damage, those two, they’re locked into something like two fighters circling each other jabbing for first blood.

But I said it, and Dad’s self-control is the last thing I want. He stands there, waiting, letting me reflect on my words, watching Mum to see if she’s going to comment but she’s less excited by language than action. ‘You’re tired,’ he tells me finally. ‘And it’s our fault. Go to bed.’

And in the bathroom, trying to clean the shit out of my mouth, Mum makes a point of hugging me – sternly, to let me know that this has been a hard night all around, but a hug just the same. ‘Why do you always make things worse for yourself?’ she asks, the voice of my childhood when I used to drive them both wild ripping up papers, drawings, court documents.

I almost want to cry and I swallow some toothpaste trying not to. It would be so easy just to sink into her arms instead of resisting the cuddle, maintaining my stance, the struggle, my independence. How can I tell her that nothing is all right, it’s all bad and getting worse? Would she believe me anyway? Do I want her to know? She ought to – I need her to, I need her help. I don’t know how much more I can handle on my own, but the weird thing is I don’t want it to stop. Not now, not at the moment. I’m tired and my eyes are stinging and the toothpaste has burned my throat, but when I’m not tired, when I’m fresh and awake and reasonably conscious, what I have, to fight the feeling of my life slipping away and the summer holidays sinking toward term-time and hell, is Dad and Jessie.

Mum has stopped holding me. She’s standing watching me in the mirror, loving me, she never stops loving me. But she can’t stop the system that grinds us all down and maybe Dad and Jessie can, they should be able to fuck the machinery if anyone can. I don’t know what I’m thinking any more, except that I think I need the idea of Dad and Jessie in my mind like I need London. While it’s only me who knows, in a way I control it.

The birds are singing outside. Mum’s in the mirror and so is the bath, but this is a different angle and Dad’s still in the kitchen and Jessie’s upstairs and it’s not raining and she’s not sloshing water over his peeled-back foreskin.

I could tell her now, but I don’t.

Sometimes when the cells in my body are really buzzing and the blood’s pumping and I’m feeling truly insane, I know that the weather is just another part of my dream. I create everything – you, me, my parents, day, night, this shitty cottage, the mosquito spattered on the bedroom wall, the ugly old woman from the village who walks past our scrawny front garden at least three times every day and squints in with eyes diseased with resentment and age and a life which has either turned her into an aching sour cunt or was something she never understood, never grasped, in the first place. Is this suffering all my doing? I must have tumors warping my brain. I want to start again, clean. Scrub this out, dig the pen in deep as I scribble over and over and over again, eradicating it, removing the pain.

So the weather’s my fault too. And it’s weird, it’s like me, up and down, changing every minute, blowing hot, cold, grey, black. I lie on my bed trying to listen to my iPod or read a comic book or squeeze my eyes shut and make myself stoned, and the weather keeps getting in the way. Sunlight flashes in through the window like photographic arc lamps, blazing hot for a moment then dimming as the sky darkens and a wind shoves dishwater clouds across the sky. Minutes pass and it’s bright again and I can feel the heat nudging me, edging into the room. Then thunder, great intestinal cracks from the sky, and it pisses down, torrents of rain beating against the earth, smashing the grass down, pummeling everything in its reach, wanting – and I understand this – to hurt.

Lucy comes, soaked to the skin, and rattles on to Mum for hours about her aunt in France and then starts vacuuming, and I wish I could control her, my creation, better. I’ve been shut inside for three days, allowed out only within a short radius of the cottage like a dog on an extending but finite leash, and the flashes of light have just been false holes in the prison sky, impossible to get to grips with, insufficient to recharge my failed batteries.

Her hair smells when she comes into my room and she seems to have grown larger, firmer, as if she’s been exercising, toning up for more vacuuming or whatever else it is that she does with her time.

I don’t shift from the bed. If Lucy is my invention, her damp and wrinkled clothes will simply cease to exist, her jaw will lose the bored, slightly clenched set it has to it and she’ll vacuum me with her mouth, the cord tying us together in an unmanageable, flailing heap. But she goes on and I lie there listening to noises coming through my headphones, music starting and stopping and starting again, jerking forward and backward like my life, words drumming in my head meaning nothing. You can’t tell me what it’s like to be black in England, I think, as I listen to a singer using New York beats to describe Notting Hill. Because you’ve got a fucking MySpace page and you wear a baseball cap with your band’s name on it.