Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

And I lick my finger and write ‘Fuck you’ on the seat, meaning him but meaning Jessie too. She sees it and stares at me, really stares, longer than I can bear. It’s not an angry stare or a disdainful one or anything I can adjust to, it’s just bored and unbeatable, as if she’s got the time, she can wait me out, she can fuck me over in ways I can’t even imagine.

We go through the center, past the airport, past the warehouses and odd light industrial factory unit, past the hotels and the billboards, up the ramp and into the heart of my world: chaos, fumy and bright at the same time; short-fused snarl-mouthed achievers bullying past spacey dong-faced tourists; tatty high street secretaries, magazine gloss career women and the others, the boys and girls like me, street fucks and street fighters, all adrift on a set of poncy old buildings and banks and shops-with-no-name; trendy, hip, faceless.

Sometimes when I dream at night, when I can, when it’s not blocked by my twisted emotional musings, I see it all burning – like the Great Fire, only better. It’s not the people I want to burn, not especially, but the city would look brilliant all ablaze. I’d love it.

The Prick likes it too, that’s why we go this way, why we don’t skirt around it. It torments him. He loves to sound off about it, to pinpoint its madness, the crap that’s preserved, the total shit that’s been built in his lifetime, the detritus that’s going up now. ‘We have political and aesthetic masters,’ he says, sliding the gearstick like it’s some part of Jessie, ‘whose idea of taste is anaglyptic wallpaper in a nice house on a mock-Tudor estate. What can you expect?’

And we’re into the City, the nation’s hard-on, although it’s been a little bit limp lately, flailing around and fucking up, a little bit like I hope The Prick feels sometimes when he can’t get it up. I hope that lies in his future, what future he’s got: a lot of really depressing, really embarrassing, sad-sack limpness.

From the car, I see them, I see all the little semen squirreling about trying to find an egg to crack, or maybe just trying to find a job. Not many, it’s not chucking-out time yet, they’re still at their screens, on their phones, in the toilets with their rolled-up notes shoved up their nostrils or each other’s arses – but there’s a few around, holding hands and talking, trading the world.

Then a hiccup. The old London, like the old New York, like the old quarter in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Right next to those slabs of money, just down the street from those monuments to greed, are the tiny shops and slumholes of the Proles. God, they let them get close. It must have been a mistake. Or maybe they knew they were no threat, they could be contained easily enough.

Beaten old farts sit in the scummy windows of an establishment which offers – get this – reconditioned toasters, electric razors and irons. Wire grilles front a shop selling historic knives and guns and implements of torture – the only one doing well, the only one with anything to steal. I should tell the Prick to stop here; I could use his cash to buy the instrument of his death. Wooden boards, reinforced at diagonals to make them stronger, patch the broken door of a makeshift mosque. It looks disused but I hope it’s not; I hope all kinds of insurrection go on in there, I hope they stick pipe bombs up the City’s arse.

The Docks next – no longer a part of the old world, but too desperate in their longing to be a part of the new.

The Prick drives the Bentley over polished cobblestones, past tower blocks so tall you could see New York if you shut your eyes and imagined a bridge built entirely of money held together with shit. Then on around the few remaining hulks of gargantuan Victorian warehouses, beautiful in their ugliness but most already gone – cleaned up and renovated, turned into flash global power-bases, media fiefdoms, multi-million-pound apartments.

The Prick’s wharf is one of the last to be developed. Across the water the shell of a part-demolished warehouse looks like something you might see at the Tate Modern: a great bite chewed out of its massive floors, twisted metal and rubble and gaping holes where windows or loading bays must once have been, leading the way to a pillared chasm, dark, totally empty – the sort of place you could take your father and your sister and beat the shit out of them, then slide them down the old tobacco chutes to nowhere.

But the Prick’s little toy is growing, not crumbling. The pyramid is going up, sticking its nose onto the skyline, dwarfing everything around it with its newness and its meanness. Even covered in scaffolding it makes me wonder what the fuck Dad thinks he is doing here.

This is his statement, this is his finger raised at everything that’s ever been built here. But it’s the same, it’s no different. It’s another fucking ego trip, another pile of emptiness erected with a huge concentration of effort and no real fucking reason.

This is what Dad does. He builds things. Why? Because he has to put food on our plates – and because maybe the charge he gets out of designing something other people have to live with, have to confront daily, something that attracts attention in all those self-obsessed architectural journals and even the tabloid press, maybe it all gives him a feeling of specialness, a feeling of righteousness, a sense that, ‘Yes, I shape people’s environments, I define their lives. I am different, I am special, I can fuck my daughter and keep it quiet from my family. I can keep my wife and baby on hold, and my son where he belongs – outside, in the cold.’

When Dad is gone, when Dad is cold and in the ground, one day this will follow – this monkey-puzzle of steel and glass, this cage. There’ll be another pile of rubble and another son staring.

Jessie gets out of the car first, attracting whistles and cat calls from shirtless construction men high on girders. The site foreman, Bernie, comes to meet us, issuing hard hats and riding the storm as Dad ploughs into him before we even reach the site office.

‘What’s the story, Bernie?’ Dad slaps his hand on Bernie’s shoulder in a determinedly unmatey way. ‘A fucking holiday all around?’

But Bernie can take it, Bernie can take most things. He’s a hardnosed bastard, a thug in a suit with a hare lip and a lisp and the eyes of an ex-boxer, smooth as shit when he wants to be, which isn’t now.

‘They want to get paid for what they do,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’

‘You’d better wait out here,’ Dad says to Jessie and me as we reach the office, which is a joke having come this far but he seems decided. He opens the door of the transportable shack and goes inside, followed by Bernie, who winks at Jessie, breathing through his mouth as though he’s going to tell her something but doesn’t.

So we stand in the sunshine, not wanting to talk, not really wanting to be with each other at this moment. The water at the edge of the wharf is dark and deep and freaky, not like the sea, lacking that size, that scope, and one of the boys tells us – tells Jessie – that a crane operator died in it the week before, just came off his lunch break, sober, took a dive off the crane and never came up. They never found the body.

It makes me feel like I’m wasting time; it makes me feel like I’m losing the edge: hanging on to Jessie and Dad, not looking for an opportunity to do it but rather an excuse not to.

Time passes. One of the security guards, Jason, shows us the cosh he carries – ‘Just in case things get serious.’ He got it in Shanghai, it’s spring-loaded and telescopes out to become a terrifying weapon. I could use one of those.

Dad’s voice is audible even outside the shack. He shouts, then it goes quiet for a few minutes; it’s like a piece of music. Finally he opens the door and comes out, and I glimpse two Korean men in expensive, carefully tailored suits, and a Korean girl in a skirt so short it’s not there, on her knees on the floor picking up the pieces of a scale model of Dad’s gleaming pyramid. A wire-faced ginger-bearded Irishman in sunglasses stares at her arse.