Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

The sea is there below us as I push her out along the ledge, above the matchbox beach huts. It looks unreal. It looks massive, flat, cold, sparkling. If we could leap across it to the horizon, maybe we could escape. If life worked like that, if we had that power, that size, we could just go on, blank out the past, harden ourselves. But we can’t and I shove her face up against the stone slit, her short hair bristling under my hand, her head compliant, weak, no will of its own.

‘Look!’ I tell her. ‘Can you smell it? Can you smell the sickness in there? I watched you, Jessie. I watched you go down on your knees like a fucking animal and like it. Both of you, you both want it.’ I’m blubbing, but I don’t give a shit, I just swallow the tears and let my face burn and feel twitchy, wired, scared. I could do it now. One push, we could go together.

‘Are you sure?’

‘What?’

She’s got a different face looking at me. Humiliation, sadness, different steps in her eyes down to a cellar, I don’t know what it is. ‘Are you sure we both want it?’ She leans away from the stone wall, pushes a branch out of her face.

I feel uncertain. My body’s light, shaking, no weight in my legs, no certainty in my brain – already I’ve lost the clarity. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. She’s telling me what I want to hear, I know that. ‘I—’

‘Yes?’

I’m careful. I know her. ‘Do you need help, is that it?’ Those eyes. She is totally alive. She can take it all, she wants it all. ‘Is that what you wanted? I thought maybe you were scared, you wanted it to stop but you couldn’t say it, that’s why you showed me this place with Nick.’ She looks at me with a long laugh. This is a good one. Her eyes are sparkling, like the sea, it’s mask time, where’s Dad? I stare at her mouth. She likes taking the piss out of me – but gently, she’s my sister, she’s just breaking me in for the kind of superior cunts I’m never going to meet. ‘You’re mad.’

There’s nothing to say. She’s playing games with me. I’m back to square one, zero option.

‘Look,’ she says, getting serious. ‘You shouldn’t have got involved with this. I love you, we’ve always been close, but this is different. This is fucking dangerous and it’s not something you should even be thinking about.’

I screw my eyes up, wanting to scream, digging my fingernails into my palms, trying to hold on, trying to wait, this isn’t the moment.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ I ask, beg.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘You can’t do anything. Anything you do will damage us all. You don’t want that. Talk to Dad and you’ll freak him out completely, he doesn’t know you know anything. Talk to Mum and you destroy us. What do you want to do?’

We’re still on the ledge. I’m between her and the hillside but there’s no point in threatening her, threats don’t work, only action and this isn’t the moment, not for me; if my whole existence amounts to ending theirs, I’m going to get it right. ‘I’d like to fucking kill you!’ People who say that don’t do it. Let her feel safe.

Another face. Close, like when we used to share everything – or when she used to, I didn’t have much to share, I think she got a kick out of telling me things, exciting me. She takes my hand, clasps it on to her arm and drags it so that my fingers scratch her. White tracks appear then red but no blood, so she does it again, harder. This time the skin breaks in a couple of places. ‘Hurt me,’ she says. ‘Try it, I want you to. You’ll feel better.’

I’m tempted. But I want to go all the way. I really would like to hurt her, even killing her isn’t going to hurt her the way I’d like to – I don’t know the way. I take my hand back. A layer of her skin is wedged under my nails. Red droplets materialize on her arm, wet, finding each other. She holds her arm in front of me for a moment, staring, then shifts past me along the ledge as if we’ve had a chat and now it’s over, everything sorted out.

‘Wait!’ I scramble after her, grabbing her arm again, spinning her around. ‘I do want to hurt you. You’re right.’

She looks surprised for a moment, not very much, but surprised, I’ve actually managed to surprise her. She stands, waiting for what’s coming, still confident, watching me as I take a box of matches out of my pocket. Those surprise her a little more, but she still doesn’t flinch, Jessie is totally cool, she’s even smiling.

‘Sit down,’ I tell her. She sits on the grass. I kneel next to her, taking her arm, not the one she made me scratch, the other one. She’s got some kind of a Spanish shirt on with short, puffy sleeves. I make her roll the sleeve up on to her shoulder.

‘You’re sure about this, are you?’ I ask, not really caring what she says.

‘Do it.’

She looks at me, ready, not smiling any more but keeping her face still, waiting to feel something.

I light a match. It takes three before I can keep one going. With cupped hands I slowly move the tiny flame toward the top part of her arm, the softest part, just where the hair she doesn’t shave peeks out. I feel weird. We’re on the grass, on the hill, in bright sunlight, and as I watch and think about what I’m doing I hold the burning match to my sister’s skin, keeping my hands around it to stop it from blowing out, and let it burn a small blister there while she jerks back for a second or two before tensing her arm and holding it still for me to finish. From the side of my vision I glimpse her teeth and the wetness of her mouth as she gasps and bites her lip, but my attention is focused on her arm, on the redness, the skin wrinkling and raw.

I press the match against the burn to stub it out. Jessie lets out one small cry, but otherwise says nothing, watching me, watching my eyes, gazing at her arm, her shoulder, then away and back to me. I throw the match on the grass and stare at her.

‘You’re stupid, Jessie, really stupid. I can’t believe you’re really like that.’

‘No?’

‘No. You’re fucking yourself up. Why are you doing that?’ I don’t feel any different, just disappointed with myself that I couldn’t wait, that I had to do something now – and something so small.

‘You’re pretty fucked up yourself, aren’t you?’ She looks at the burn on her arm, fascinated for a moment, her mouth twisting with the effort of straining her neck around. She pulls the sleeve down over it and stares at me, right into my eyes, there’s a hint of concern in hers.

‘Well, I suppose you would be.’

And she leans across, hand on the grass, and does the last thing I expect. She kisses me. A sisterly kiss, brief, warm, touching. But it comes with a price: ‘Don’t try to stop us, Tom. Please. We’ve only just started. I want it to go on for the moment.’

I know that if my resolve should fail, she will give it back to me.

She is perfect. Even in being fucked up, she is perfect – she is perfectly fucked up. I can’t stop them. I can’t blackmail them or threaten them or expose them. Whatever I do, they’ll find a way. There’s always a way. The corner I’m in is the only one, made to fit. There’s only this moment. I want to think about what her arse looks like to Dad when it’s red and sore, whether she’s lying again, whether he did this to her when she was a little girl, when we used to have baths together and the world always felt strange, like a collision course someone else had set up for you to run through. I want to think about what it would be like to hit them both with a cricket bat or something else hard, swinging it down on them as they dog-fuck each other except dogs don’t do it that way, dogs aren’t nearly as fucked up as they are. But there’s only this moment. All I can see is Jessica sitting on the grass in front of me, the sun is sharp, the sea is wide behind her.