Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I am going to do it. Some other time. Soon. Together. ‘Did you really?’ I ask her, schoolboy in the playground disbelieving someone else’s boast. ‘Did you really just start? I think you’ve been doing it for a long time. I think you’ve been doing it all my life.’

She half gets up, crouching with her arms resting on bended knees.

She looks like she’s going to tell me something, then her face clouds again and she smiles that nasty smile, games-playing, we’ve used up our free exchange. ‘Maybe,’ she says.

‘Who gives a shit?’ I stare at her, she can’t control me any more, I can fight her and keep on fighting.

She stands up. ‘Look, just let it run its course. Things end. This will.’ Yes, it will. Her eyes seem to be searching mine, honest again, looking for an opening. ‘Do you want me to get you something? Something from London?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I know, but I want to see what she says. She can’t really believe she can buy me off. I get up too. ‘You know what I’m talking about. What do you want – do you want to come to London? We’re going tomorrow.’

This is news to me. ‘Who is?’

‘Dad and me. He has to go. I’m going to see Sonny. Do you want to come?’

‘I can go to London myself if I want to.’ I press her. ‘What can you get me – cocaine, dope, money, crank, sweeties? What’s on offer here?’

She is looking at the shelter. I catch her, but she goes on looking anyway. We start walking down the hill. ‘Come on, what can you get me?’

She reaches over and lifts the hinged lid off my head. I’m a robot for her, she thinks she knows me so well.

‘I can get you laid.’

We’re in the Bentley. We’re safe – I mean even though it’s a heap, it has the power and lines that fuel this country’s divide, it can drive right over your child without stopping, it can part the way through police on horseback with visors over their faces at a football match. You can do anything in a car like this, you can fuck your daughter, you can knobble a judge or an MP, you can shoot up and you won’t get caught. It’s not loud, that’s the secret. It’s not even clean. This car knows what it’s about.

It has taken us up through Devon to skirt around Bristol and follow endless feed roads on to the M4. It all looks the same. At this speed only the trees look alive and not all of them. At this speed there’s only signs and barriers and hard shoulders and the lines diving under the bonnet, and it all looks flat. The trees that are there don’t fit and won’t be there for long, this is inbetween land, no reason for it, this is dead time. If there was a way of getting from nowhere to somewhere – to London – without traveling, this land would not even exist.

The Prick is driving, wearing a suit and setting himself up for what’s ahead, confrontation time, he’s grim-mouthed but he’s looking forward to this. He talks to us from time to time, but we’re not there, he wants to get to the site and say his piece, and maybe if he shouts loud enough and gets worked up and shoots the Koreans down he can have his daughter for dessert on a nice cozy hotel bed, they’ll get shit stains on the sheets.

And she is next to me, a world away, listening to her iPod, going through her bag, glancing at Dad in the mirror, but coolly, as though he’s an encumbrance at this moment, she’s in a different mood and he’s not part of it. I stare at the meaningless stream of traffic, bored with the silence in the car, it’s a phony silence, they could talk but they can’t with me here. A container lorry drags past, going backwards from my point of view, then two cars and a coach. A child’s face peers down at us from the lap of his hawk-faced grand-mother. He has a gun.

We stop at a motorway service station. I need a piss and Jessie wants a magazine so she goes in the shop. The whole thing is perfect for the Inbetween Land, for my state of mind. You could die here and not even know it. The bogs are awash with blue disinfectant yet still they stink, as if it’s just colored blue, it doesn’t do anything, it just tints the diseases. The food shop – the Pantry! – has the same kind of bluish-green tinge as the disinfectant, they probably flavor the forcegrown fruit and chemical pastry with it. And in the gift shop, where I go to look for Jessie, it’s Christmas all year round, shiny paper and tinsel over everything, toys and tourist tricks that you wouldn’t give to charity.

She’s there, with him, with the Prick, at the till, hanging on his arm just the wrong way, like a tart, like a fuck, like something he’s picked up on the road. They’re playing a game: maybe they look like father and daughter, maybe they don’t; maybe he’s the freako businessman – menopausal-punk hair, soft, weathered face, suit – and she’s the antidote to his life, she lets him feel human or dirty or whatever men like that need to feel, she can give him a thrill just out of buying magazines and chocolates and crap key rings.

Except he doesn’t look too happy about it. He looks more than a little uncomfortable, the Prick, testy, as if she’s trying his patience. He wants to push her off his arm, but Jessie’s clinging tight, I see her fingers buried in his sleeve as I approach past the plastic-wrapped funeral wreaths.

They both react when I appear, Jessie holding tight but altering her expression in some subtle way which makes her look the affectionate daughter, flirty but not unnaturally so – a hungry schoolgirl proud of Daddy. The Prick, for his part, frowns and prizes her arm off his, being the adult, being the responsible one, and looks straight at me, his eyes telling me what to think, warning me off, saying, ‘Tom, do you want anything?’

So I stare right back and don’t even look at the counter or the bored, mindfucked girl on the register (‘Where do you work?’ ‘I work on the M4.’) or the travelers who clearly buy their clothes and eat their food and make their lives at these places, and I say, ‘Why? It’s all shit,’ and then walk out to the car.

We move on. I listen to Jessie’s iPod because I haven’t brought my own. She sits glancing at her magazines, full of packaged artiness, hip-wank pictures and hip-wank writing. Dad drives, moving from lane to lane just to break the tedium, letting the weight of the Bentley barrel through the formations, the retired minds in the slow lane, the serious movers in the fast, none of them equal to his determination to maintain speed without actually arriving, his need not to get to the next moment.

No one speaks. We each inhabit our space in the Bentley, plotting our sex and our murders and our own destruction until, as the suburbs of London begin and the pattern of the motorway changes – more signs, more slip roads, the necks and heads of streetlights and streets and houses in the afternoon quiet – Dad says, ‘Fuck it, I didn’t have to bring you two! This is a boring enough trip as it is without this conspiracy of silence. I can get depressed without your help!’

So something’s working. Something’s getting through. I almost smile. ‘I didn’t have to come,’ I say. ‘It was Jessie’s idea.’

‘Tom needed glue or paint thinner or whatever it is he sniffs,’ Jessie says in a bored voice. Her hand finds mine on the car seat and presses something small and hard into it. I finger it for a moment before looking down. It’s a bottle, a little glass vial of crystal. I try to give it back – I hate the stuff, it gives me headaches, and I don’t want any of Jessie’s bribes – but she pushes it into my pocket.

‘Tom doesn’t need anything to get high,’ the Prick says, as if I’m not there, as if he feels safe, he’s got me sussed. ‘His mind is strange enough to start with.’