Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

Neville, Dad’s job architect, runs after him and catches his arm. Dad turns, like something spring-loaded himself, like Jason’s cosh, and explodes.

‘Never,’ he pauses, riding the moment, enjoying it to its full, ‘give them the whole fucking picture. Am I clear?’

We drive back, past a billboard which says Docklands is London’s Venice, and I think about how my father would have fitted into Renaissance Italy just fine: they all fucked their daughters and each other in the line of business.

He doesn’t say much in the car, just drives aggressively, stopping punchily at lights and then gunning away. Black spray from the road hits the windscreen and he leans into it, driving faster toward the red lights of a lorry in front.

‘They’re bankers,’ he says, ‘they’re fucking bankers and they don’t understand money.’

We check into a hotel. The Prick has meetings fixed for the morning to play big boys with the Koreans and their money. Jessie is seeing Sonny. I could go and see Luke except that I don’t want to spend any time with my old friends, there’s nothing to talk about, nothing I can talk about, and anyway Jessie says she’s set me up.

‘I’m not interested,’ I tell her, but I am, she knows that. I want to take back everything that she and the Prick have taken from me. I want to meet this person who can paint the greedy black hole that is Jessie. Sonny is part of the tunnel I’m in, I’m convinced of that – part of the pipeline, where time is counting down, where I don’t even have to follow my own reasoning, each moment is the last, nothing is repeatable.

‘Sonny’s brilliant,’ she says, and then with a laugh: ‘Golden showers!’

‘I don’t need your help.’

Then it’s dinner. The weather changes abruptly, lightning flashing across the sky and rain tumbling down moments later. I think about the last time Dad and Jessie and me had dinner together in a London restaurant. Mum was there; this time she’s not and everything has been fucked in the meantime.

Jessie sits next to me. Some kind of weird thin black jacket is all she’s got on over her black stockings and she keeps nudging me with her leg, as if we’re sharing a joke or flirting or something or she just can’t keep herself still. It starts getting to me, really annoying me, because I’m thinking about Mum at home left out of all this, and Jessie and Dad are drinking wine and acting cool, he’s the proper parent and we’re the kids mucking around, he keeps us in line, he’s a wonderful father taking his two kids out like this, we’re a wonderful family, really close, really open with each other – he can talk about his problems and the need for a dynamic architectural language in Britain, and we can listen to his bullshit.

Until I turn and say, ‘Look, fucking cut it out, will you? You keep knocking my leg!’ And Jessie stares at me as if she genuinely didn’t know she was doing it, and the mood of the dinner changes somewhat.

We go back to the hotel, the rain crashing down on the Bentley and the sky flickering neon-white, only it’s weirder than neon, starker, lighting everything. Jessie rides in the back with me but hangs on Dad’s seat, so that he tells her to sit back because she’s obstructing his rear view. The traffic is chaotic because of the rain but he seems steady, as if he’s resolved something in himself about the Koreans tomorrow, his irritability only returning when Jessica suggests we go to a nightclub.

‘I’m not interested,’ he says. ‘Tom can’t go to a nightclub.’ Thanks, Prick, for your sympathy and concern.

‘Yes,’ Jessie says, ‘yes you are,’ leaning forward, pretending I’m not there – or pretending she’s pretending. ‘A friend runs it. It’s only two nights a week. I can get you in and you can leer a lot and dance and make me sit up on the bar and protect me. It’ll be brilliant.’

‘I don’t want to go to a nightclub!’ my father snaps, turning around, flashing anger. ‘Shut up, Jessie, you’re drunk.’

At the hotel, Jessie and I share a room and she stands staring out the window for a long time, still in her jacket and stockings, watching the storm light up the river, looking like an image from one of her hip magazines. She doesn’t say anything to me and I don’t say anything to her, I just get into bed and lie there wondering if she’s waiting for me to go to sleep so she can creep into his room or whether she’s thinking about something else. I feel confused. If I’m going to do it, if I’m going to kill them both, I’m going to have to choose a moment and this would be as good as any. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I don’t seem able to plan it.

The storm moves away for a while, the thunder still close but not overhead. It comes back, circling around, and Jessie pulls a chair to the window and sits. I listen for her crying, because it feels as if she might be, but I don’t think she is. Then she wakes me, shaking my shoulder as I’m drifting off.

‘Have you still got that thing I gave you?’

‘What thing?’

‘In the car. The crystal?’

‘I chucked it,’ I say, but I’m too tired to argue and she knows I’m lying, so I tell her it’s in one of my pockets.

She finds it in the dark and takes it back to her chair. ‘Do you want some?’ she asks.

‘No.’

Outside, a burglar alarm goes off, followed by another. Jessie opens the vial and takes two quick snorts, one in each nostril. Thunder cracks overhead and I listen for sirens but there aren’t any. I get a headache and seem to fall in and out of sleep, but the storm is a separate force waking me and I glimpse Jessie in dramatic, broken flashes of white at the window and hear the alarms and hear her sobbing and feel confused and wonder where we are.

When I wake in the morning, she’s gone, but she’s just in the bathroom and I don’t know whether she slept or not or if she spent part of the night with Dad.

The air in London is black, grainy, as if you can touch the carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or whatever it is that settles on everything, layering it with dust, running streaky when it rains. We walk down the Embankment tube station steps, not really communicating but moving as a unit, brother and sister, through the bewildered foreigners and dossers and shoppers up for the day, clutching their maps and water bottles and asthma inhalers and stepping back as diseased mice dart out from wire-grilled no-go areas and dive under the rails, missing that middle one, the burner, the one with the charge.

The tiles in the station are new, shiny, characterless – a toilet that no one wants you to use, that’s been built just to prove that everything is clean, above board. The whole of the West End is constantly being renovated, laundered, shined-up, rewired, re-alarmed, so that you can see how thick the walls are and the color of what’s inside. They don’t hide the problems – they police them out, they keep them across the river, where we’re headed. It must be a lot like Nuremberg was. Or Dubai. Or Disney World.

I watch Jessie and me at the platform’s edge on a wall-mounted flatscreen as the train comes in. In the picture, we’re two-dimensional, lifeless, green. In the picture, I push or pull her, taking her with me. On this screen I could show my home movies, if I’d taken any. The shoppers and dossers and foreigners could watch as my father parted her bum and stuck his thing between.

The doors close, the walls move and we go under the river. The train stops for a long time and I feel the weight of water above us – if that’s where we are – and sit staring at the three other passengers in our carriage, condemned by their awfulness. An old man sits alone at the far end, his mouth propped open by some tube down his throat, gasping at the air and staring glass-eyed at nothing. A woman with spectacles and an evil, hating face looks up from her yellowed paperback and mentally sorts me out. I’m her son, she will beat me until I bleed and then go on for ever. A skinhead with a blotchy cherry birthmark and a knife scar down his neck sticks his boots up on the seat across from him and stares away from us, frightened by something in his head, moving his lips silently and clutching a brown leather sports bag to his chest, clinging to its scuffed, Union Jack-emblazoned bulk with a curled intensity that only a couple of well-placed kicks to his kidneys would push over into total despair. Jessie sits beside me, her shoes off, a faintly sweet smell rising from them to mix with the stale air of the carriage. She rubs her toes, massaging the digits through the filmy black net of her stockings.