Alexander Stuart: The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition

But we’re not there yet, far from it. We have only just left the village, and that was a struggle. The car doesn’t like those hills by daylight. By night, it has a whole different vocabulary of bollockbreaking metal-wrenching exhaust-farting outbursts with which to remind us that living in a valley is a dumb thing to do. And this is a Bentley. Not a new one, admittedly. It has seen finer days, it was proud once – just not during our tenure.

It has an excuse, of sorts: parked in the front passenger seat, right in front of me, is the unnatural load of Mother’s weight, itself enough to sink many a worthy ship. I see them as two separate things, Mum and the cargo she carries. My mother is the same as she always was – warm, pretty, a lot tougher than she looks. She has impressive reserves of temper, my mother, most of them reserved specifically for me. She can match me, foul language for foul language, if she chooses. But I have the trump card: I can make her cry. And when I do it makes me feel like crying, so then we’re both happy. She has that occasionally mournful quality anyway, that sense of being somewhere else, of drifting to some far-off memory (she’s part Polish; I think it comes with the territory), and it’s a quality I’ve noticed I already find attractive in the girls I want to boff.

But this belly of hers is something else. I’ve seen pregnant women before, of course, and they’ve always worried me. They patrol the streets and supermarkets like God’s Chosen Few, innocent of every crime, swinging those great protruding whales of flesh before them like the perfect weapon. They look so fucking self-righteous! And now my mother’s joined their ranks I look at her and think: it’s a pod, it’s an alien, it’s a foreign thing growing inside her, poking at her flesh, stirring the soup of her insides. It smells already of milk and shitsmeared nappies. And when I consider its connection with me, the fact that I set up tent under her skin once, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to think about wobbling bent-double in her jar – it makes me feel less individual, less me.

‘Well, this is fun,’ Jessie says in that wonderful, Chelsea-schoolgirl voice of hers – a schoolgirl on the make. (I have never fathomed how, given the obvious bond between us, we can sound so different. She’s all gymslip-deb, while I’m one of Nature’s born-again yobs, at least, that’s what I’ve worked for.) The car has just hit a rut in the road and shot us all about six inches into the air. ‘You should have babies more often. Of course, this one may come out wearing splints and a crash helmet, but think how boring London would have been, only five minutes from the hospital on well-paved streets.’

‘Well-lit streets,’ I add, just to exercise my mouth, as the Bentley’s full headlights sweep across another turn in the endless wall of hedgerow lining the road.

‘How far are we?’ Mum asks.

‘One more bend,’ says Dad, taking it too fast, ‘and we hit the main road. Then we’ll sail through – fifteen minutes, maybe twenty to the door.’

‘That might not be soon enough.’

‘Are you all right?’

He looks at her. She’s sucking in breath like a Rasta taking a toke. The sweat is pouring off her, but it’s hot, it’s a hot night for rattling through Devon back roads with a baby bursting to get out (though it was her choice to have it in the first place, you’ve got to admit).

‘I’m fine,’ she says. She doesn’t look it. She holds her stomach, as though she’d like to disown it, as though she’d be more than happy to watch, just watch, but why does she have to go through this pain? ‘I’m great,’ she says. ‘Just get us there.’

I feel for her. I feel for us all in this heat, sticky arms and sticky arses niggling the seat leather, the air in here – even with the sunroof and windows open – too close to breathe. It’s not what you expect of an English summer night, not at this time in the morning, but if the heat can surprise you, can inconvenience you at all, it will. It’s OK, though, this heat. It makes tonight more of an adventure, so long as it doesn’t actually lay Mum out or anything. I like it, I like my crotch itching and my armpits smelling, the fact that no one can disguise their own distinctive whiff, even if Jessie’s lively musk-odor is largely hidden by the powerful and predictable memory of her sunscreen.

There’s something wild in the air tonight, on top of this heat. The heat has laid its fat palm over the countryside, smothering us all, making us struggle to break through, to get at the oxygen we know is up there somewhere, but it’s not. Behind the heat, riding its back, is a threat, a rawness, a great maw of savage breath and glinting teeth. There’s a monster out here tonight, and it’s us. It’s Mother, with her dam ready to burst. It’s Jessie, wanting to be in on the woman-secrets of childbirth without for a moment having to lower her guard of Twenty First Century cool. It’s Dad, the thirst for a beer raging in his throat, sleep in his eyes, driving like the filth, all concern and uprightness, adrenalin masking his conviction (come on, Dad, I can read you, I see it) that, basically, he’s done his bit on this one, now he’s just putting in time. It’s me, happy to chuck a petrol-bomb on any blaze, hungry, always hungry, for the details of my life to burn more brightly, alive to the crackle and fizz and pop on the wires tonight as we tear through Devon on a mission from God. Who gives a fuck what anyone else is doing? We’re the action now, we’re hooked into life’s bubbling hotpot, we’re going to let rip with a new scream just as some old sucker cops it elsewhere. Listen to those jungle drums.

‘God, he thinks he’s bloody Jesus Christ again!’

Jessie’s voice calls up to me as she elbows my ribs. I am standing, arms outstretched, my head sticking up through the sunroof as I fly into the night. It’s beautiful up here, the wind burns my skin, tears drag over my eyes, smearing stars into wet ribbons in the sky.

‘Good, is it?’ Jessica asks, pulling herself up into the gap beside me and scratching my arm with her nails in the process.

‘I can’t see a bloody thing behind me,’ Dad says, his voice below us, far away. We must be blocking his rear vision. ‘But that’s all right, I’ll find a low bridge somewhere, that’ll sort you two out.’ ‘Slow down,’ Mum says, holding her stomach. ‘They’re getting closer.’ What are? Oh, yes. ‘And Jessica, Tom – sit down!’

‘In a minute,’ Jessie answers for both of us. ‘This is brilliant. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen.’

I wish she hadn’t said that.

It’s like a replay goal, perfect slow motion, every movement already determined, impossible to escape. Jessie is standing beside me, cropped hair erect in the warm rush of wind, wraparound shades still hiding her eyes. Our feet jostle for position on the Bentley’s back seat. We balance precariously, leaning forward, a twin-headed creature riding through the night, our necks wide open to a guillotine slice from the lip of the sunroof.

The road is clear, climbing steadily through low-rise woodland to a hill, nothing dramatic, no real peril to compensate for the lack of red traffic lights to beat, no drunken arseholes gunning at you from hidden side streets or negotiating one-way circuits the wrong way. At Mum’s request Dad has momentarily slowed the car, but can stand the gut-grinding distress of the Bentley at low speed no longer and is already letting his foot edge back down on the accelerator. My mother, beside him, has slumped in the seat, her knees crammed up in front of her, both hands resting on the mountainous belly where her seat belt (I know what is coming) should be.

We are almost over the hill. The trees on either side bend over backwards to give themselves – and us – some space, some air. Stoned by the heat, Jessie and I let out jungle cries, bird shrieks, monkey calls which Mum and Dad can’t hear. ‘EEEEIIIRRK!’ we scream, competing to split each other’s eardrums. ‘AAAARRCH!’ Then, in unison, as the car reaches the top and we see what lies ahead, only a few yards away: ‘SHHIIITT!’