Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

She scratches one armpit, then on down to a rubbery nipple. She looks at me. I look away. ‘Well, Dad said that when I can drive next year, you’d get me a car. I know it’s a bit early, but it’s the only one like it, I used to see it all over London, you could spot it everywhere, I don’t think they can clamp it. It’s perfect.’

She waits. Mum doesn’t open her eyes, but she tilts her head in Jessie’s direction. ‘I wouldn’t mention it at the moment if I were you,’ she says. ‘Not quite yet.’

And Jessica bites a finger, running her teeth thoughtfully up and down it in the absence of anything else, timing this conversation perfectly, helped by the insistent distraction of a driven black voice intoning a song which seems to consist entirely of listing the chapters and verse of the Old Testament. It doesn’t ring true. She doesn’t. It’s as if she’s trying to react as she normally would in this situation, trying to reassure Mum that she’s got the same preoccupations as any girl her age – any spoilt middle-class brat, as we both are.

‘Do you think Dad means it about Nick?’ she goes on, closing her eyes now, screwing them up as she faces the sun. I move my legs, impatient with her, and knock my book on the grass, tipping Mum’s drink over.

‘You know your father as well as I do,’ Mum says, watching me right her glass and not offer to get more. The music rocks on, music to praise Haile Selassie to, music to start a riot to. ‘You haven’t mentioned Nick before, have you? What’s he like?’

Jessie frowns, eyes still closed, the toes of one foot clenching and unclenching on the ground, wearing away at the grass, digging a hole with her big toe. I get up.

‘He wasn’t interesting before,’ she says

And upstairs I’m on my own. Dad is shut away below me arguing over steel or titanium cladding or something, dredging out the drawings and files that had been dumped in the musty understairs cupboard when we arrived here. Mum, Jessica and Jake are safe outside, baking now that we’re back to fission heat, not likely to move except to pee and, later, get dinner. I’m on my own and I know what I’m doing. I’m not a victim, I’m not going to be a victim, I’ve got to take this matter in hand. Jessie is confident about every situation, except sometimes she’s not, just occasionally there’s a chink in her armor when she thinks she’s not beautiful, when she thinks she’s not blessed, when the world falls apart and she can’t fight it and she’s alone and anonymous and the smallest thing could crush her, reduce her to nothing, a hole, a mistake, a blob of human fear. I know that feeling – I can’t say I have it all the time, but I’m familiar with it, far more so than her, and it’s because of that that I’m still frightened by the possibility that Dad may be the one, that Jessie is wrong, this is his sickness. I don’t know which is worse, whether I want them both to be guilty, or one, or whether I really think they’re guilty or sick at all. So far they haven’t hurt me, not reached out and torn my skin, burrowed into my head with a power drill. They’re in my head but it’s all inside, it hasn’t broken through the bone yet one way or another – and it’s what happens when it does that worries me. But maybe it’s not sick, maybe Jessie’s right, there shouldn’t be any boundaries. Maybe incest is safe sex in the world of AIDS.

But I’ve got to move forward, I can’t just sit back and let it all run away from me. I need to know what’s happening, it’s worse not knowing. And at the moment, I don’t know. At the moment, Dad and Jessie are playing charades for Mum’s benefit, and maybe for mine – does Dad know I know? Jessie won’t stop. Even if Dad started it, she won’t stop. However it started, this is too dangerous for her to want to give it up. I could see Dad chickening out – maybe – though he’s a lot like Jessie, she took his madness and amplified it. But not Jessie. I’ve got to stop it.

So I’m looking for clues. I’m alone in her room feeling a charge in my heart as scary as if I were committing a real crime. I’m sweating with the excitement, leaving little damp patches where my soles have been, but it’s too urgent to put some shoes on now or to grab some jeans to stop the trickles running down my legs. She’s a few feet away, diagonally down in the garden, and she’s extra-sensitive, Jessie. If I’m not careful, her antennae will prick and she’ll know better than me what I’m looking for and whether she has anything to fear from what I might find.

The room isn’t a mess but somehow it isn’t tidy either. I pass it all the time and yet now it feels more foreign than ever, I’m trespassing, I am the intruder. The bed’s rumpled and she’s left a pile of her jewelry in the middle of it, some of the stuff she makes herself – all spikes, teeth and coils, like a tribal punishment – and the rest is stuff that Mum has given her or men have given her or she’s stolen. Her cardboard boxes are all around the room, waiting to go back to London and art college, and there’s a new picture stuck on the window, cutting down on the light coming in through the small panes, giving the fleeting impression of a shrine. I haven’t seen it before and it’s amazing, a head-and-shoulders portrait of Jessie, clumsy, like a graffiti cartoon, yet it’s her, there’s something in the daubed mouth and slashed eyes which is Jessie when all the hunger’s there, when nothing is enough, she can’t push herself far enough. It’s signed ‘Sonny’ and there’s the Greek infinity symbol underneath the name. It makes me feel strange, that someone else can see her like that, paint her that clearly. It makes me feel as if she’s watching me now, watching my smallness as I slide out the drawers of the old dresser which still has the lace cover that was here when we came, part-buried now under a pile of Jessie’s make-up and CDs.

I go through the drawers quickly: two filled with clothes, nearly all black, some underwear, boxes of tampons, unopened packs of tights and ankle socks, a tin of oil pastels and scalpels, more make-up. The bottom drawer has a different character to it, stashed with Jessie’s shoes and belts and two packs of condoms and a pair of what look like elbow-length black rubber gloves that I didn’t know she had, plus a buff colored envelope which may be the treasure I am seeking – letters, information, evidence. But there’s nothing inside of much use, just some unwritten postcards from various galleries, empty envelopes with foreign postmarks and pointless messages scrawled in a variety of hands – ‘The burglar alarm just went off, LB’ ‘Keep crossing the Albert Bridge’ – and books of matches from cafés and bars I’ve never even heard of.

I shove it all back in and go back to the drawer above, drawn there suddenly by the tin of crayons and blades. It doesn’t fit somehow. I take out the scalpels and dig underneath, the crayons rattling against the box. There’s pencil shavings and other shit at the bottom, but there’s also a folded-up wadge of paper which when I open it out contains cocaine. I taste it. I’ve had it before – I think. I was never sure if it was the real thing. This seems to be, and this is something – the fact that Jessica keeps cocaine in her bedroom might be something, but it’s not what I’m looking for. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I’m looking. I fold it up and put it back, my tongue wiping my teeth, numbed.

The reggae pumps up from the garden again after a pause in which I die for a moment and Jessie changes CDs. I glance at the picture of her, which seems bored now, as if I’m wasting her time. I close the drawers of the dresser and look around, deciding that to go through the cardboard boxes is just an impossible task. Trying not to let the floorboards creak too much, I go down on my knees and peer under the bed, my ear and nose brushing against the slightly sour-smelling old rug which, like everything else, came with the cottage.