Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I lie on the plastic sacks, mummified, sucking insufficient air through the towel. My back is dappled with patches of Sonny’s urine, the bags sticky from my sweat where they’re not already wet. For a second Jessie moves off me and lets go of the towel. There is a movement, a suppressed whisper – which one of them, I can’t tell. I could tear the towel off my face, get up, but I’m dead.

And then Jessie’s grip is back on it, tightening it over my eyes, my Adam’s apple, her knees shifting around, thumping my shoulders. I feel Sonny lower herself on to my penis and start to rock and this is it: I am in an anonymous wet hole, my body functions and I am the same as them – Jessica, the Prick, Sonny, Lucy.

Killing will come like this, a brief spasm in someone else’s being.

The Prick drives us back. This time, Jessie sits in the front. The towel has grown onto my face, bonding with my skin, entangling my hair, choking me still – but shutting them out.

It’s dark and it’s cold tonight and the car is the same one Jake was born in. Do they use it? The leather in the back is sharp where it’s torn and cuts against my fingers if I rub it right. It could tear little holes in Jessie where her stuffing would come out.

I feel the city leave us, like a physical presence that hangs back, like Jessie’s and Sonny’s hands fingering the mask I have on, holding onto me but letting me slip through. I have been to London and nothing has changed. London is with them, not me. Like everything else, it fucks around. Life is what it is. Only if the car crashes through the central divide and slams sideways into the paired lights racing toward us will things be made more simple.

In the timelessness of space, the Prick’s voice comes to me: ‘I spoke to your mother today.’

The car drones. Lights sweep toward us, silhouetting a blurred image through the towel of his head and shoulders and hers next to him.

‘Jack managed a proper smile for the first time.’

One push to his hands on the wheel. One.

‘She said she couldn’t find the video camera.’

Jack is sick and Mum is in the hospital with him. It happens the night after we come back, in the middle of sleeplessness, when I have patrolled the toytown village several times in my mind and uncovered the plot, the truth that Dad is mad and this is where they send him. Or we are all inmates, me especially, and everyone else is a warder watching every move – but just not closely enough. Hours pass and no one is sleeping, or maybe Dad and Jessie are. There is a sense of urgency, of unease, in the cottage; I hear noises as Mum moves from the bed to the cot to the kitchen and back again.

I play the radio, headset on, and find only foreign stations broadcasting to American soldiers, English farmers stationed in Africa, Dutch- and French- and Arabic-speaking insomniacs. The village feels at the edge of the sea now, it’s an island remote from the security of London, except that London has died in my imagination – I could have walked to London before in the pitch-black on bare feet just to enter the chaos, but now I would go there only to pour petrol over myself and light a match – to show it I don’t give a shit.

I listen to a baseball game fading in and out from a lifetime away. I listen to an American preacher, his voice like the boom of Armageddon, talking about the Rapture and the Judgment of the Lord and His Justice, and I know that this man could build a pyramid in Docklands too, he could bugger his daughter, and if when the daylight comes the world is blistered and burning and sick, this man, this preacher, and my father, will be the only healthy ones left and they will take turns with Jessie as she tries to remember what she will not tell me: how it started.

Instead of sleep I feel nervy, unable to lie still, feeling my body spark and twitch at random. I take my headset off and move around the room, not wanting the light on, wondering who on the outside would be left to inquire after us if we as a family ceased to exist – if, when morning came, we simply were not here.

I open the window more and breathe in the air and listen to what might be a cow, miles in the distance, and try to remember who I was only weeks ago and if that was the same life and the same me and wish I could go back.

Mum startles me with my name, looking in the door and whispering, ‘Tom – I thought you were up. Jack isn’t well and I’m going to ring the hospital. Would you stay with him while Dad brings the car around?’

Suddenly my sense of unease seems justified – something is happening, but divorced from my thoughts, something else that has nothing to do with the cartoon blackness of my mind. I go into my parents’ room, grateful to have something to do, and brush against the Prick on his way out. He looks worried, he has normal dimensions, he is not holding hands with the preacher – but still I can’t trust him. He takes his car keys off a chest of drawers and I stand over little Jack, who is red-faced and crying.

I watch Jack for a moment and feel his heat. He looks sick and I feel sorry for him and think maybe he’s not so strong and wonder how the hell he’s going to cope with everything he has to cope with, and then his head jerks and a spurt of vomit or something comes out of his mouth onto the blanket. I call out ‘Mum!’ not knowing what to do, but then Jessie’s here, pulling on a T-shirt, and we act as if we hardly know each other, she looks at me and I look at her and then she lifts little Jack on to his side and wipes his mouth.

This time, we don’t go with them. Mum has found blood in Jack’s nappy and the Prick drives her to the hospital because it’s faster than waiting for an ambulance to come. Mum’s eyes glisten as she carries Jack out to the car, and I realize I love her and that Dad and Jessie seem like actors in a hospital drama, another Australian soap, going through the motions of love but being driven further into lies with every moment. The car disappears into the darkness of the village – you can watch its lights dip down and up the hill – and I wonder if anything really exists, if there really is a hospital at the edge of this blackness or whether Mum and Dad and Jack have simply faded out to leave me and Jessie alone.

The cottage is quiet, strangely dead with only us here. Jessie and I are still outside, shivering a little. My concern for Jack vanishes with the car headlights. He is there and Jessie is here and though I prevaricate and have internal debates and feel stupid some of the time and think normality is there – I can touch it, this horror is all in me, I’m the one – I know that one thing is constant:

‘I’m going to kill you soon.’

She is just going through the door. She doesn’t even turn. ‘Oh, Tom – shut up.’

Her hair, which is about half an inch longer than it usually is, is flattened on one side and bent, like Dad’s is sometimes, so that she almost looks like a younger, female Dad for a moment.

‘Does he do it up your arse all the time? Is that the only way you like it? With Nick too? Is it only Sonny who can touch your twat?’

Her body stops and revolves on its base like a shop-window dummy to face me. The T-shirt she’s got on is too big for her and suddenly it seems to swamp her, but it can’t hide the nasty yet hurt look in her eyes, as if her only defense is attack. She might almost scratch her cunt. ‘You could if you wanted to.’

The words confuse me. I can’t cope with her, I should know that. ‘I don’t!’ I say hastily and close the door behind us, shutting us in.

‘You really are constricted, Tom.’