Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘What’s changed?’ I say. ‘I wasn’t happy about the idea before. Why should I feel different now?’

‘Just don’t burn this one,’ he tells me and smiles. We enter town and make an illegal right-hand turn that nearly panics some old codger in a VW into a fit. ‘I didn’t like school much either, but let me tell you the one thing it is, is a training ground for dealing with the pillocks you encounter once you’ve left.’

I’ve heard this speech before and it didn’t convince me then, either. Dad was brilliant at school and had everyone fawning over him. His idea of rebellion was weaseling exemption from religious instruction to fit in an extra afternoon’s rugby practice a week.

‘I’d just prefer the pillocks to be London pillocks.’ My familiar refrain.

We park up on the curb outside the off-license. The window looks sickeningly dull – the same posters and logos as London, but stuck there for ever to fade and peel.

‘I’m sure you’ll find someone who fits the bill,’ he says, no hint that there might be some foundation in truth in Mum’s mention of going back. We dive through the rain and enter the shop, a dad and his son, makes your heart weep, doesn’t it? ‘Pillocks don’t vary that much from county to county.’

The rain stops. Jessie goes out to see Caz, which is the first signpost, because Jessie and Caz aren’t that close, Jessie doesn’t turn to Caz for anything much other than a cover for seeing Nick or, if this is it and I know it is, for this.

It’s six o’clock. The TV’s on, the news. Jessie goes out and for ten minutes or so, nothing. Mum’s feeding Jake. The news drones on. Dad’s washing up – this is really significant, this is pre-emptive guilt, not that he never does it, but not at this time of day, more likely first thing in the morning when he gets up. It’s all coded. Not one action is simple, unconnected. It’s all part of the dream I’m moving through, every detail dull with reality, I’m being tested, this is all a test, a run-through but soon my real life will start and that will seem like a rehearsal for something else, too.

Where is Jessie now? She’s been gone twenty minutes, maybe more. She could be anywhere in the village. She could have met Nick at some prearranged spot and hopped straight on his bike, they could be in Sidmouth by now. But they’re not. She’s not. In my mind I can see her and she’s waiting somewhere, she’s between two stools, vacant, emptying her thoughts of any awkward emotional bonds she might have which could get in the way of what she’s about to do.

The local news begins. The telephone rings. A signal? I want to get it, but I can’t reach, I’m too far up, I’m on an elevated column, totally remote, looking down at my family in a zoo, running through the corridors. I can’t reach out to touch them or anything near them. I’m moving, getting higher all the time, more and more precarious.

It’s for Mum. Dad plays with Jake while she talks. How can he do that? If this is it, how can he play with Jake one minute and then—? He looks relieved when Mum hangs up. Far away, he looks relieved. She takes Jake. ‘Who was it?’ he asks. He’s not really interested. A friend of hers from London who’s just had a baby too. He picks up a newspaper, puts it down, turns a half circle, looks at Mum, tit out to Jake, looks away. His head is below me, at the foot of my column; I could drop a rock on it. ‘I’m going for a run,’ he announces, glancing out the window. ‘It looks all right out now.’ These words are coded. Listen to the radio, a state of war exists but only I know it. ‘I’m out of shape. Do you know where my sports socks are?’

He leaves little to chance, my dad. Before he goes out, hairy legs looking too old or too hairy for synthetic blue running shorts, his face wearing an odd, slightly puzzled, slightly pained expression, he tells Mum he’s not taking a key, will she be here? Of course she will. Where’s she going to go? Take Jake for a drink? He looks at her for a moment longer than necessary before jogging out the door and then I watch him, a forty-year-old man, or early forties or whatever he is, pumping away, running over bumps and gravel and grit, running steadily up the climbing village road, a steep overgrown grass verge on either side, the hill and the cliff ahead, the sky orange and purple, stretched out with cloud, on fire after the rain. I watch him. His mouth turns grim with the effort, he stumbles a little over a ditch then rights himself, not losing pace, running because at the moment he thinks he’s got something, he can’t recognize the taste of shit in his mouth.

And then I follow.

It’s my place. Not right here, not the shelter, but this stretch of hill and the cliff is important to me. It can be so fucking beautiful, it is now – it’s just that they’re inside together and I’m right when I really would have liked to be wrong, I would have liked something to scramble it all up and say, ‘Look how stupid you’ve been, you arsehole, you joke, you waste of space.’

I’m cold. There’s no wind, it’s August, the sun’s still highish, and I’m numb, no sense in my fingers or my back, it won’t come back, I know it, I can feel where the nerve cords have severed themselves, my body is crippling itself to match my mind.

I can taste metal in my mouth. Everything’s metallic. The fields are liquid gold, even the sheep, but it’s not a pretty color, it’s not like one of those shitty commercials where everything has the same quality, where cow crap would look as glorious as a steaming plate of instant anything. My body is wrecking itself, molding itself into the twisted shapes cars make when they run under a lorry. The camera in the bag is one more part of me, screwed up in supermarket plastic, incomplete. I remembered the tiny lithium battery. Even though it was in my hand, I couldn’t feel it and I kept telling myself that I’d forgotten it but I hadn’t, it’s here.

Dad walked some of the way. There’s this prize at the end of it for him, his daughter waiting with wide-open legs, and still he can’t make it, he can’t run it, he has to take breathers every now and then. He didn’t look back once. Maybe that’s part of his deal with whatever drives him, not to look back, but I was there and I just hope to fuck he felt something was following him, I hope he felt a little uneasy, a little dirty about this.

They’re in there. Jessie must have got here first, I didn’t see her enter, but she’s there, I can sense her as much as hear her voice. I’m outside, on the ledge, moving like a ghost despite my paraplegic body. I’m careful. Having come this far, I want to get it now, I want to nail it, I don’t just want to disturb them and get some fucked-up, feeble excuse.

I breathe. I touch the concrete wall of the shelter, my numb fingers resting on it, telling me from a long way away that it’s chill beneath what’s been warmed by the sun, drawing the dampness out from inside, trying to touch what’s there, to know what they feel. I move around, sucking in as I dodge past the light slits, wanting to look but knowing I must wait for the farthest one, the one that’s covered. Every inch, every step seems to produce a million sounds all orchestrated at once: the brush of my jeans on the wall, the wet rustle of the bushes being drawn aside, the slow thud of a misplaced foot hitting the earth.

I’ve got the camera in my hand, and even though it’s small, it’s an unnatural weight throwing my balance off – the ledge is narrower than I thought. I breathe carefully. I do everything carefully. Something sharp, a thorn or something, scratches my arm and makes me want to cry out, but I stifle it and when I look and see my skin bleeding it seems fine, I can’t feel it, it should bleed some more.