Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘How have you been?’ Jessie asks, sitting on a mattress in a corner of the room, picking up a monstrous bone-crushing glossy magazine and opening it.

‘I’m good.’

Sonny shuts the door and turns away from us, walking through into what looks like a tiny kitchen and loo combined. I sit on a chair and watch her legs while her back’s to us, feeling sick with myself just for being here, for getting excited like this, getting a hard-on.

‘I’ve just seen Jazz,’ she says, bending to open a midget fridge, my eyes following the line of her thighs to the two fingers of blue polkadotted bathing suit that meet where she meets under the frills. She turns and peers over her shoulder. ‘I’m getting a car, can you believe that? I’m going to be driving!’

She comes back into the room with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. ‘Here,’ she says, giving them both to me. ‘You’re the man.’ And she laughs.

‘If the car is from Jazz,’ Jessie says, turning the pages of the magazine, her legs no doubt losing all feeling beneath its weight, totally ignoring me as I struggle with the bottle, ‘I wouldn’t count on doing too much driving.’

‘No, it’s great, I’ve seen it.’ Sonny flits back into the kitchen, a thick, flower-sweet perfume wafting from her. ‘It’s wheels, anyway. A car with no name. And no owner. Probably has different number plates front and back—’

‘If it has them at all.’

‘—if it has them at all.’

Sonny emerges with two glasses and a paper cup. She puts them down in front of me and shoots me another fierce scowl as I struggle on with the cork.

She retreats over to a small stereo system on a table by the window and turns on a CD. Something old comes on, music I know but can’t place – old American city music, conjuring up grainy black and white YouTube videos of summertime ghettoes, burning tenements, spouting water mains and beatings from visored cops.

Sonny sits on the bed next to Jessie. ‘Martine’s been messing me about again,’ she says, leaning her arm and chin affectionately on Jessie’s shoulder, so that a thought I’ve been fighting since the first moment I saw them together returns with a vengeance – the physicality of their relationship, another part of her world that she’s kept me out of, another dimension to Jessie that seems to diminish rather than increase what truth I know about her. ‘She is so immature.’ Sonny pulls back and seems to study Jessie’s ear. ‘She has a real nigger attitude, you know what I mean?’

‘She’s a cow.’ Jessie turns and I hardly recognize the look: jealousy, a kind of one-sided hostility that expects to bite more than get bitten.

‘I know you don’t like her…’ Sonny leans back and gets her cigarettes and a mirror and a paper sachet. ‘But she’s beautiful when she’s not coming on like some smug self-satisfied bitch.’

I finally manage, flushed and straining, to force the cork out of the bottle and pour with a shaking hand two glasses. I hand them over with a stupid terror: I am headed toward oblivion, yet here I am, desperate before a stunning black dyke whom I’d love to fuck but whose only interest in me is probably as some sort of cat toy for her and Jessica.

‘Do you have any beer?’ I ask.

‘Beer!’ she screams. ‘Look in the fridge.’ And without missing a beat, to Jessica: ‘You look great.’

‘So do you.’

I go to the fridge, which is almost empty, but there are two cans of beer there, so I take one and hold back a moment, drinking it and glancing at the toilet, the basin Sonny uses as a sink and the postcards covering the wall, dozens of them, some just straight-on shots of ugly hotels, others more touristy, exotic.

There’s a couple of art cards and a bunch of pictures of Sonny and friends, and a picture I recognize of Jessie when she was about nine or ten, which freaks me out: it’s like seeing a part of my childhood pinned to a foreign wall in a dream. Then I see a shot of Sonny naked, bending over and peeking between her legs while a white girl who’s also naked except for a Fulham FC hat rests a long spirit-level on her arse.

The two women together look somehow complete, like the Prick and Jessie, like the rest of the world, enjoying things I know nothing about. I stare at Sonny’s tiny ridge in the photograph and the black hair and her dark brown skin and the pinkish lips and feel she’s expecting me to look at this, or Jessie is – it’s all part of the game and I’m determined to break it, to not be a part of it.

I go back through. Sonny and Jessie are laughing at some private remark and doing coke, so I walk right over to them and say to Jessie, ‘This is boring, I’m leaving.’

And Sonny looks up at me, dabbing her tongue with the coke on her finger, and says, ‘No – wait. Have a toot. Relax.’ Then to Jessie, ‘Does he?’ And me again: ‘It gets better. I’ve got toys to play with.’

Her mouth is in my eyes as I look away – wide, smiling – and I know she resents my presence, whatever she pretends, but something about the curve of her accent as she says ‘toys’ sparks a dull electric charge in my gut and in my prick, and maybe the coke will numb it, will help me just to stop caring, so I crouch over the mirror and snort, feeling cold, wishing I could bash Jessie now – and Dad and Sonny – and crawl into that lifeless bath with her.

Sonny leans across to reach a small cupboard door with a key in the lock. Her thighs are virtually in my face now as I hover over the mirror and I can smell her skin, the focused finger-point of her perfume, but it’s Jessie she’s leaning on, Jessie her blue frills are crushed against, Jessie she wants to touch. The key is just out of reach and as she gets up to go to it, their eyes meet. ‘You think he’ll like them?’

‘Tom’s up for anything, aren’t you, Tom?’ Jessie says, rescuing the magazine that Sonny’s been sitting on, pushing it at me. ‘Have you seen this?’

I take it, hefting its weight, and sit on the floor and stare at the ad it’s open at. A large photograph of Sonny, the full height of the page, confronts me with what looks like Paris in the background, and the brand name of a high-end tequila.

‘Fueling the capitalist machine,’ Sonny says dismissively, glancing over as she turns the lock. ‘But fucking it too.’ She grins. ‘A dozen crates of that stuff and you could overturn an economy – shit!’ The door is jammed and she has to brace herself against the wall to pull it open.

My head is starting to feel sharp as Sonny unloads the cupboard, kneeling by it and removing weird solid shapeless white objects that I find I can focus on to the exclusion of everything else. I stare at them where they litter the floor around Sonny’s knees and feel a kind of ruthless certainty that I’m going to screw her, whatever she’s interested in. She struggles to lift a larger, heavier one, swinging it onto the floor closer to me, and suddenly it’s obvious – this last one has hips and thighs attached and rests on its arse, the legs reaching out into space then stopping where they’re cut off.

‘My pussy collection!’ Sonny confirms, and Jessie pisses herself laughing. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s brilliant,’ I tell her, not really sure what to say, but not caring either. I’m going to fuck her. ‘You do a lot of those?’

‘They’re like beautiful sea creatures,’ Jessie says, picking one up and fingering it. ‘Where’s mine?’

‘It’s here,’ Sonny says, finding it and passing it to her. She turns to me, her voice deepening and sounding grand as if she wants to convince me, though I know she’s taking the piss, too. ‘These are a national art treasure. To redress the balance. I take plaster casts of my friends–’ a glance at Jessie ‘–and one day when I’m ready, I’m going to dump them all on the Royal Academy.’