Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

It stinks in there. It smells fouler than I could imagine – years of urine and cat shit and rat shit and God knows what else, like milk and piss turned sour and mixed with a fishy smell and the tight stink of hardened crap. I cannot imagine that Jessie would want to lie down in there, no matter how funky she thinks she is. There’s dirt and stones and dry leaves and an old stained and ravaged mattress, and when I kick my feet around the floor, the cigarette packets and odd, gritty condom make it obvious that Jessie and Nick or Jessie and Dad aren’t the first, though nothing suggests frequent use, which doesn’t surprise me.

The slits of light worry me most. It’s like a prison cell or a church, dark and claustrophobic, an unsealed tomb where you could bed down in the soil and get eaten alive by worms. The problem is visibility. If I use the camera through any but one of the slits, I’m going to stand out against the light like a sore thumb. The one slit that’s almost blocked off by ivy and some kind of tough, reedy bush involves climbing out along the narrowest part of the ledge, where only the knotted roots of the brambles stop the earth from crumbling away entirely and dropping on to the beach huts below.

But I’m born to this, I realize that now. Jessie is pushing me farther into it, but I’m good at stealth and observation, at getting where other people wouldn’t go. I’m aware of the risk I’m taking leaving the camera hidden here – both of it being found by someone else or missed at home – but I can’t easily walk around with it, it’s too obvious. I know I’ve got to keep the battery charged or I’m buggered. And the last thing I need is for some ramblers or locals or tourists to show up while I’m shooting and ask what I’m doing or what time it is or if they can walk to hell and back from here, before I can duck out of sight. This is a popular hike, up the hill and along the cliff, but this must be an issue for Jessie, too, and presumably she’ll choose her moment or Dad will.

That’s if I’m right. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe Jessie and Dad have stopped. Or maybe they never come here, or won’t come here again, or I’ll miss them – I can’t keep track of them both all the time. But if they are still doing it, they must do it somewhere. I don’t think they could go to a hotel. They could use the car, of course, the torn leather of the Bentley’s back seat would be a different world from this shit hole. Or there must be a thousand other places they could go. But this is one of them, this is it. Jessie has shown me this for a reason. And I’m not going to waste it.

So I wait. I watch and I wait. I watch Jessie most, because I can read her better than Dad – I think. Anyway, he’s foul-temperedly working again, hunched over his computer with a Scotch most of the time, swearing at himself or, like this morning, at everyone else, as he tried to scan some of his magisterial architectural plans and email them to his Docklands office. ‘What’s the matter, Francesca?’ I hear him ask his assistant at the other end of the line, no humor in his voice, no let at all. ‘Is it your period, or did you hit your head climbing out of the pub toilet?’

He seems changed to me all the time now. Even in the few weeks we’ve been down here, he’s lost the heady calm he had when we arrived, the excitement he seemed to feel about Jake being born. Or perhaps it’s just the way I see him. Him and Jessie is new to me – it makes me want to kick the fucker every time I see him, it makes me not want to look at him or be looked at by him – but is it to them? I can’t believe I wouldn’t have noticed before, but I don’t know, I don’t know anything.

Jessie gives me nothing much to go on, as if her appearance with Nick at the beach was all I’m going to get on a plate. She cadges a lift from Mum into Exeter and starts talking about spending a couple of days in London before she goes back there full-time for college, but otherwise she’s on the phone most hours of the day or in Sidmouth with me, sitting on the sea wall or the beach, both of us playing it innocent, working hard to pretend there’s nothing to say except the things we always used to talk about, and making fun of the local morons who can’t think of a better pick-up line for her than, ‘You look foreign, darling. Where you from – Malta, Tenerife?’ or asking if she’s the waitress who spilt ketchup over them in the Devon tea room up the street.

Except I can’t resist asking, ‘Are you seeing Nick?’ Because I sense there’s something different, they’ve had a row or she’s got bored. ‘I saw you at the beach the other day, all lovey-dovey by the water. Is it still going well then?’

‘He’s a Buddhist,’ she says, as if that’s an answer. ‘He chants. Can you imagine? They are all bloody hippies down here.’

‘Does it make a difference?’

‘He’s serious about it.’ We’re on the wall, eating ice lollies. She has to purse her lips to help her teeth cope with the cold so it’s hard to tell whether she gives a shit about this, but my guess is she does: Nick interests her more than either of us thought. ‘He wanted me to chant with him.’

This makes me laugh. ‘Did you?’

She slides the last of the orange ice off the stick with her lips then chucks the stick down on the pebbles, where a wasp immediately lands on it. ‘I told him I’d chant, yes. But I don’t think he felt my heart was in it. He’s not used to meditating doggy-position.’ Doggy-position! I want to ask what that is exactly, though I can guess. Just the words fill my mind with weird images of her. ‘He said I had no balance or something, I’m an unsettling influence.’ She smiles at the wasp, circling some litter now, brilliant yellow in the sun yet somehow dirty-looking, corrupt. ‘He’s really not that sure of himself, you know.’

‘Yeah, you said,’ I tell her, wondering if it’s true and feeling strangely disappointed. I think I’d like someone to take Jessie over and give her a run for her money; she needs it. Maybe we all do, but she really needs someone to straighten her out.

I wait and nothing happens. I kill an afternoon with Neil, cycling into Seaton to steal stereos from grock cars, wondering all the time if this is it – if this is when Dad and Jessie are going to get their act together and I won’t be there to accuse them, to watch them, to pin them down. It’s only when we run a close one, when we tamper with a quartz job in a Mercedes outside the boat shop and some moron with a beard and his debbie fuck come charging out after us, it’s only then in the heat of action that I know I’m going to get it, I know I’m right, I’ve just got to be patient.

And then it rains. It pisses down for a whole day and we all stay inside, the whole happy family. I have moments of paranoia about the camera – that it’s already been taken or that the plastic bag I’ve taped it in will leak and wreck it – but I also have the sense that it’s going to be today. Dad has stopped fucking about with his grand design and seems in a better mood, lighter, as if he’s actually trying, which he probably is. He takes me with him in the car when he goes out to get some beer and we chat a bit and once again I feel guilty. I remember how much I can like him, that it was him who gave me the video camera in the first place – I’m the traitor even though I know I’m not.

‘You’re not worried about school, are you?’ he asks, racing Mum’s Volvo down the hill into Sidmouth, memories of Nick’s motorcycle, the night helicopter patrol. We have an off-license in the village, but Dad suddenly decided he wanted a local bottled brew and remembered they were out of stock, though this all seems to me like an elaborate ruse to avoid being seen by the locals today – just in case it might make a difference in him being recognized walking on the clifftop later on. ‘Your mother told me you were still anxing about it.’