Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘I’m unhappy.’ My voice sounds strange in the closed environment of the carriage. I don’t know why I’m telling her. It won’t make any difference to either of us.

‘Oh?’

‘I’ve never been this unhappy.’

She works her toes, poking her finger and thumb into the nylon, forcing a channel to touch the tiny cunt between each one. ‘I can understand that.’

Can you? Thank you, sister.

‘Sonny will sort you out.’

The train moves again.

Clapham North. We come out of the tube and set off on foot, Jessie leading the way, looking oddly at home here – I didn’t know this was her territory. We cross the road from the station, running in the path of a huge articulated truck which deafens us with a slow wail of its horn, the narrowness of our escape showing me a picture of Jessie dead – by my hands not the truck.

I don’t know death, but it doesn’t seem so far away. The Prick’s mother died, but she was just someone from my childhood. She was a grandmother, a warm presence at Christmas, someone who hugged me, but she was old and smelt of oldness and old perfumes, she was a bit dead already.

Jessie walks in front of me now, the truck forgotten, wearing black stockings, a short tartan skirt and the jacket from last night and I think about her stiff, cold, still. Her body would look sad, dead – I would have to join it, to follow her; I think I’d float her in a bath and climb in beside, slopping water over the top, using her cocaine blade to slice little chunks off myself under the surface.

I know I want to kill them, but it worries me sometimes whether I can. Killing Dad will be a struggle – his surprise, his resistance, his refusal to bend to anyone else’s will. I’m smaller than both of them, though not much smaller than Jessie, but I’m expecting a superhuman strength. The thing that frightens me most is not being able to finish them off. I know I can start it, but can I keep it up – if I use a knife will I lose my nerve once it’s in, will I do one and not the other, or will I just fall back when they try to fight me off and collapse in a corner regretting my whole fucking life?

We walk to Brixton, my eyes on Jessie’s legs, the side of her head, the heat and the movement around us. An army tank rumbles down Railton Road, charging along, clearing everything in its path, an army goon standing up in the turret, imagining himself in Kabul, Mosul, Tehran – somewhere where he can open fire on the bastards.

A bunch of schoolkids watch him from a wall, turning up their boombox and jeering, sticking their heads into plastic bags and sucking the nitrous oxide in, or whatever it is, chucking the petrol bombs in their brains instead of on the streets. Three Muslim men walk toward us, a huge dog on a leash tugging at one of them, a woman walking beside him in full chadur . Her veiled eyes stare at Jessie as if she can’t decide, but then she does and turns away.

We cross and head up toward Herne Hill, the traffic at a standstill, the sky a chemical green, hot, threatening rain. A bus has broken down and a ripped seat has been stuck out on the road behind it. Fat women with prison faces wheel shopping trolleys in and out of the legs, the litter, the broken pavement slabs. A businessman walks in the street shouting obscenities at the thin air. Cracked toilet bowls and stained sinks are piled outside, offered for sale. An ancient poster of Bush with ‘World’s No.1 Terrorist’ in bold letters across it is plastered across a closed Post Office door.

Jessie leads me up a side street, past the razor-wire-topped fence of a dismal school playground, down the side of two houses and through a rickety back garden gate to a kitchen door. She knocks and we wait but no one answers. She tries it and it’s locked, but Jessie seems to be expecting this. She stands back and aims her foot at the bottom righthand panel and kicks. The first kick doesn’t do it, so she kicks again and then twists the handle and the door pushes inwards, jamming on a mat.

We go inside the kitchen, a pisshole of a place with cups and dishes stacked up alongside rusty housepaint pots and rags. The walls are peeling and damp and the floor is covered with grit and bits of rubble where something has recently been smashed. Jessie takes me through the house, up the stairs to a landing with three locked doors. She tries one, but this time when it doesn’t give she leaves it and takes me back down to the kitchen. So far we’ve hardly said a word since we left the tube. She starts digging in the cupboard under the sink and asks me something I don’t catch.

‘What?’

‘I said, “Coffee?”’

‘Yeah, OK.’

She finds some, and retrieves a kettle from behind a black plastic rubbish sack. She fills it and puts it on to boil, tipping coffee from the jar into two of the cups and hunting around for something to stir it with. I watch her, thinking she’s a stranger, wishing she was, wishing she was just someone I’d met who’d brought me back here – then, even if she was meeting the Prick and I was going to watch, it wouldn’t be so bad, the betrayal would seem almost normal.

‘Will you tell me something?’ I say as she pours hot water on the coffee and stirs it with a discolored spoon.

‘No milk.’ She holds out a cup.

‘Did you fuck Dad last night?’

The cup burns my hand. I let it. Jessie leans against the sink and looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, but I think she wishes she could be rid of me, her eyes have that hard look. It’s not hard enough, though – she doesn’t want it enough to do anything about it. I’m just making her life more difficult.

Then we hear the front door open. It slams shut and someone mounts the stairs. Jessie calls out ‘Sonny?’ and dumps the coffee down and vanishes into the hall. I tip mine into the sink, regretting coming, feeling that even by going along with Jessie this much I am weakening my drive, dragging out the inevitable, but I’m desperate to taste what it is that’s so all-powerful, that’s rammed the Prick into Jessie with no regard for anything – what sex is. I’d rather do it without Jessie’s interference, but there’s not time. I don’t care how it happens, how anything happens. I don’t care.

At the top of the stairs a door is open and in it stands a beautiful black girl who has one hand on Jessie’s neck. They are leaning back from each other, taking each other in, staring at each other in a way that doesn’t surprise me one bit, though it’s something I understand almost without understanding. She is stunning. My heart sinks at the thought that I’m the joker here again – she’s Jessie’s girlfriend, why bring me? – but Jessie must know something, she’s promised me this payment, this bribe.

Sonny is taller than both of us. Her legs – long, slender, shiny – disappear into a strange frilly outfit that’s like a 1950s bathing suit and I can’t take my eyes off them, their length, their color, their finely honed muscularity – like my mother rather than Jessie: Sonny is someone who works on her body.

She catches me looking, hovering still at the top of the stairs, and scowls, spinning her eyes to Jessie then me then Jessie and back again.

‘Definitely related!’ she says with a slow laugh and some kind of wonderful mixed South London accent.

She shows us into her room, which is stacked high with magazines and newspapers and dominated by a huge canvas, unmistakably the same style as the picture of Jessie, this one a six-paneled group scene of floating women’s and men’s torsos, the women all loaded with tits and the men’s dicks each bloating into a goldfish bowl.

‘Sit down, boys and girls,’ Sonny says, standing in the doorway where we’ve passed her, staring at us, staring at me, the door still open. Her eyes are liquid and yet I feel like I’m being medically examined, sliced up and peeled apart, searched for further evidence of closeness to Jessie.