Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘No, I mean you’re concentrating too much energy on the wrong things. This is something that’s over, it can’t be changed. You ought to concentrate on your own life more. I know,’ she says before I can stop her, ‘this is as much about you as me and I’m sorry, I am sorry. But you should be careful.’

I feel awkward suddenly. She can do that to me. I feel a hole somewhere gaping in me, an emptiness. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’re too serious, you’re too hostile. All right, I deserve that at the moment, but it’s not good for you.’

I can hardly hear her. I’m not sure I want to. I cross the room back toward her, just to say this: ‘You’re really concerned about what’s good for me, aren’t you? You and Dad. Did you ever think about the rest of us before you started? I don’t know how the hell it did start but you certainly weren’t showing how much you cared for me.’

Jessie faces me in the darkness, leaning down to scratch her leg. She’s totally naked but she might as well be driving a tank for all the impact I’ve made on her. But I’ve got the pictures and that must make a difference.

‘Life doesn’t have to be a constant battle,’ she whispers. ‘The week’s almost finished. Get out. Spend some time with Caz’s brother.’ She looks at me, right through me. ‘Go and see Lucy.’ I blush. She sees everything, she gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. ‘I think she might be interested if you approached her right.’

‘Fuck off!’

‘Do you want me to have a word with her?’

She’s doing it again. I thought this was my confrontation, she’s meant to be on the defensive – but she’s turning the tables. She can’t let it stop until she feels she’s on top. I walk away. Jake is wailing now in the other room and Mum must have her hands full trying to quieten him. Jessie takes advantage of the cover to throw a thought at me, spoken so I can hear it clearly, so it knocks around my brain.

‘Do you think she wanks in the toilet?’

‘What?’

‘Lucy?’ I can feel Jessie smiling at the back of my neck. ‘Do you think Lucy wanks in the toilet when she’s feeling neglected. I do.’ And she scratches her pubic hair as I turn, to point out to me how it’s done.

I struggle to block my mind from thinking about anything but Jessie and the power she has over me. I don’t want to hear things like that about Lucy – but I do, and about herself. I like her to try and shock me, to open doors I didn’t know were there. She’s an evil little cunt but she’s my sister and all she’s doing is driving me nuts.

Jake has stopped crying. Mum must have heard us, some of it, but if so why hasn’t she come through? If she came through now, it would all have to come out, there’d be a way of telling her, I’d have to, but she doesn’t.

I’m at the door. There’s no one on the landing. Mum and Dad’s room is quiet, no voice asking, ‘Who is that? What are you two doing out there?’ Jessie is back on her bed, sitting on it, one leg on the floor, the other curled up, her foot almost in her lap.

‘Remember, I’ve got the pictures,’ I say and I go back to my room, not even very quietly, the floorboards creaking and my mind all over the place, not caring, making myself not care. That’s the thing: not to care.

So Mum asks me what’s wrong. ‘What’s wrong?’ she says when I spend a couple more days moping around the house even after our internment has ended. ‘What is it? Is it being here? Is it really that bad?’

‘Yes.’

We’re on our own together. She’s sorting through a stack of photographs of Jake, choosing ones to print for relatives. The TV is on on the kitchen counter, an Australian soap opera with some young beach blond in her knickers but they all look the same. Mum’s face is alive as she looks at the pictures, a delicate smile hovering on her lips, real delight showing there, this is her escape, this is her baby, she doesn’t need the rest of us. She looks at me, reading my thoughts – everyone can do that.

‘Talk to me, Tom. Is it the baby? Does that make you feel different?’

She’s astute, my mum. She likes people, she’s genuinely fascinated by them. I wonder if she fucks her clients? I’ve often thought she must, she and Dad have their own lives so much and he’s always been a bastard, I bet – I mean he used to seem like God to me and still could, almost, but he’s also like Jessie, selfish, able to justify anything to himself. If Mum did make love to one of her clients I think it would be important to her, it wouldn’t be something she’d enter into lightly. With Dad it’s just greed, he’s a slobbering prick, he doesn’t give a shit either.

‘I know this hasn’t been a good summer for you,’ Mum says, watching me, making me want to cry stupidly but I don’t. ‘You didn’t want this move but you’re stuck with it and you’ve behaved pretty well, really.’ Have I? This must be a mother’s eyes. Whatever, it’s distressing to hear good of yourself.

‘It won’t be for ever,’ she says. She holds a strip of negatives up to the light to identify a frame. She likes real photography, my mum, the warmth of film. Life isn’t digital for her. Not yet. ‘We’ll go back to London. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

This sounds surprisingly definite. But perhaps she’s just trying to make me feel better. She doesn’t know, how can she when I won’t tell her? It’s all nonsense, like the shouting match on TV, two bad Australian actors trying to act emotional. It’s all crap, except the part that hurts and that doesn’t fucking hurt enough.

‘What’s the point of me going through the horror of starting a new school if I have to leave the dump after a term or two?’ I ask. ‘I mean I know I don’t exactly have the most brilliant record with educational establishments, but this is doomed from day one.’

‘I know.’ She puts the negatives down and writes numbers in a box on the flap. She looks at me, her mouth open in a pout that’s a lot like Jessie’s for a moment, only more concerned. Mum cares, she feels for me, but just not enough to go to war on my behalf. ‘It’s a good school,’ she says. ‘You might like it.’

How can I tell her? She doesn’t want to know about Jessie and Dad, it will destroy her. She’s got her baby and she’s got her career and she thinks she’s still got us in the background and she’s probably happier now than she has been for years – I ought to be glad that someone is. Why?

‘I might be miserable,’ I point out, no surprises, she’s used to me like this. ‘I’m good at that. I get a lot of practice.’

I’m not alone, at least I know that. Other people are unhappy, maybe more so. This village is a sham, the quiet lives everyone leads. Only this evening the television news had the story of another village, not so different, where someone went mad with a gun and topped all the old familiar faces – his neighbors, his teacher, his parents and finally himself. Was his dad skewering his sister, or did he have another excuse? What good is life if everyone else can lose theirs so easily? It’s rubbish, it’s more Australian soap opera. I sit in my bedroom with the lights turned out and the window open and for once I think I can hear the sea and I wonder if I could do it, if I could just get a gun and open fire indiscriminately, and then I wonder why I don’t – is it just some chemical in my brain and in most other people’s that stops us from acts like these? Is it just some component of my blood preventing me from crossing the edge, or even now are Dad and Jessie not clear enough targets for me?

Jessie is seeing Nick, but that means nothing.