Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

Finally, the cottage. I hate it. I hate every drab, weathered stone in its walls. I hate the ground it stands on, its gloomy roof, its oldness. It’s evil, but it’s a shapeless evil, it can wreck your life but it can’t scare you, just depress you. I want to weep. Suddenly I know the difference between crying and weeping, like I know the difference between London and this death trap. In London, I would know what to do, I would know how to cope. In London the rest of my life would not look so unutterably hopeless; I could escape somehow, somehow this wouldn’t be a blank wall.

The back door is open. I pass through the kitchen, empty, into the hall, a dull, dark tunnel at the edge of my vision. Mum is on the floor of the living room, her back to me, sponging up a pool of something Jake has brought up. She has tiny flowers on her dress. Her arse sticks up at me like a part of the furniture, a flowery cushion, not like Jessie’s at all. I want to cry when I see her, but I don’t want to look at her face, look into her eyes, speak.

She hears me. The light in the living room is fading, thick, a shadowy mist. Everything is gloomy, compressed. She turns. I’m on the stairs before she calls out my name.

Upstairs, I ram the door of the bedroom shut with my bed. She must hear the shunting noise as I shift it across the floor, but I don’t care. No one else cares. I’d always imagined I might persuade Lucy one day to do this with me; put the bed against the door and screw on it. But now I don’t think I’ll ever do that myself. Dad and Jessie have done all the fucking for me. ‘Otherwise, you’re fine.’ His voice creeps into my head, like he was appraising cattle or something, gripping her rump on a monthly or weekly basis or whatever it is and grading the meat. He has had Jessie where she craps and I don’t think there will ever be anything as disgusting in my life again.

I do not cause a scene. I just need time. I just need a hostage and a gun and I could be happy.

They come back – singly, Jessie first, then Dad – but not before Mum has asked me what’s wrong. She knocks on the door but knows better than to try and open it. ‘Leave me alone,’ I tell her. ‘I want to think.’ She persists for a few minutes, but gives up and goes back to her baby. I can’t protect her.

I am going to kill them. I don’t know what happens after that, but until then every road leads to that door, until then I can face anything because I have a purpose, I have a reason for still being here.

Next day. I am the same person. I let the milk soak into my Shredded Wheat. I step into my underpants wondering whose legs these are receiving messages from my brain, my foot going through the hole with remarkable precision then holding my weight as I repeat the exercise with the other.

Breakfast is a bit dead. No one speaks much, or is it me who thinks that, is breakfast always a bit dead because we’re all a bit dead first thing in the mornings? We ate last night too and no one said much then, but Dad claimed he was tired by his run and Jessie said she’d eaten at Caz’s but I know she’d done coke, she tried so hard to be relaxed about everything when in fact she sounded flat, lifeless. I hardly looked at her. If I think about her too long, if I get too close to her, I will lose my resolve. I try to concentrate on her hole clenched tight around Dad’s pole. His penis is the foot of a chair leg in my mind, I cannot explain, it is just a chair leg digging into the ground. The thought of them both in the ground frightens me but I’m going to do it. Mum, I’m sorry. I’m sorry we’re all failing you at once. I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this but either there is something you’re responsible for, or life makes no sense, it really is just shit and only other people escape the pain.

‘I want to talk to you.’ Jessie is on the stairs, going up. I’ve filled the deadness in my stomach. I want to get out of the cottage. Even to me, my voice is an absolute, it cannot be denied.

‘Yes?’

‘Not here. Outside. I’m going up the hill. Follow me in a minute.’ I open the front door and walk out. It opens easily, which it doesn’t usually. It’s bright outside so that I have to squint at first. I walk in the road waiting for the sudden impact of a car’s bonnet from behind. The world seems spread out before me. There is the cottage, here is the village, my cut-out family is behind the cardboard walls, school lurks at the edge of the cereal packet base, the full meaning of which will be revealed if and when I go there in a week and a half’s time and burn it or break it or just shovel earth over the headmaster’s dog.

I walk alone in the sun, almost enjoying its heat. The sheep look beautiful. Strands of barbed wire link wooden stakes, but no blood – this is not Iraq or Afghanistan, just part of a pattern of the country that I’m not a part of myself. Tranquil Devon: gin and tonics, Range Rovers and sheepdogs. And then you die.

Jessie might not follow me, but I think she will. I know what certainty is this morning, I am drawing things on, but not in any way I have ever wanted. I wait at a gate two or three fields down from the shelter, turn away from it, unable to see it anyway behind the hedgerows but sensing its presence, watching the village roads below me, the car park, the beach.

Eventually she comes. She climbs the path with no particular excitement, a bored look on her face, a bit pissed off with me for making her walk up here, but also wary – bringing her here must make her more than wonder.

‘You lied to me.’ I don’t give her time to say anything.

She stops a few feet away, a mound of dead brown grass between us. She frowns, licking a little saliva from the corner of her lip, out of breath from the climb. Her mouth looks weak today, as if someone’s broken it somehow and put it back together wrong, but it also looks as if it could get strong very quickly if it had to, she looks ready to twist my words, turn hard, shut me up.

‘You fucking lied to me.’

She looks away, older sister time, only she’s not so sure. ‘Boring.’

‘I don’t know what boring is. Everything seems the same to me. Have you been to the toilet this morning? Does it hurt? I bet it does.’ This gets her. She turns and confronts me, angry fast, guilty.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, hearing how bitter my voice sounds for the first time. ‘Cancer? AIDS? The fact that I’ve got a sister who lets her father have her right up her arse?’

I stare at her, not giving her any help, making her react, waiting for her to look away before I do, and I feel like everything changes in that moment, I can do it, I can hate her to her face. She shifts her eyes to the sea for a moment, looking troubled, looking more troubled than I can remember her looking, so that I start to feel sick with love and guilt and want to touch her, until she looks back and her mouth changes, protecting herself, not allowing herself to hug me and be my sister and cry because we’re all fucked up, lost, but instead pretending it can go on, she can deal with me.

‘I saw everything.’

She stares at me. She can hate me too.

‘I watched you.’

‘You filthy little creep.’

‘Look who’s talking. You love it.’

‘You’re weird, Tom. You get off on all of this, don’t you?’ She’s desperate. She’s nasty, she has a really deadly edge to her. ‘Come and look! Come here!’ I grab her arm and pull her. She could fight but she comes with me, not caring, just thinking her own thoughts, working out where this leaves her, whether anything’s really changed, how far I will go. I take her up to the shelter. I’m not even sure myself what’s in my mind. I’m not going to kill her like this, I want them both. I want them to feel what I feel, I want her to be outside this shithole and imagine how it was for me. She’s not short of imagination, Jessie.