Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

The cottage seems cold – like the cold cunt it is. This cottage bears a large part of the guilt for what has happened. I’d like to burn it. She stands, keeping me against the door. I twist a smile at her: ‘No I’m not. You’ve opened my eyes, haven’t you?’

‘Stop trying to psych yourself up for some negative act. It’s not in you.’ She turns away again.

‘Wait and see.’

‘You’d have done it by now.’

‘Sometimes people wait years.’

She’s at the stairs. She glances back. ‘You do what you want. We all will anyway.’ She starts up the first step. ‘But when I try to show you that you haven’t even begun to realize what you’re capable of, you shy away from it.’

‘You’re a slag, Jessie!’ I shout at her back. ‘A lying dyke slag! What you do with Dad isn’t special or anything – it’s sick. Even biologically, it’s sick. And Sonny’s just as sick as you are.’

She turns on me from the stairs. ‘Is that really what you think? Is that what your most profound and private feelings are – as predictable as that?’ She pities me from halfway up, arrested in midstep, one hand on the banister. ‘What’s your life about then? What the hell do you think your next sixty or eighty years are about? Why don’t you just go out and zap the nation with your mathematical skills or whatever you’ll be left with if you stay at one school long enough to learn anything? It’s perfect for you out there now – they like angry little bastards who want to nail everything down. I’ll tell you something, brother – despite all your anger, all that pissing about you get up to, essentially you want everything to be sweet. And it isn’t. If you could face up to that, maybe you could relax. The sweetness is the lie they put out to make us all slave harder. Nature isn’t sweet. I seduced Dad – not him me, whatever you may think – and no way was that sweet.’ She comes down a step, relishing this, enjoying her effect on me. ‘He stinks, Tom – he smells like no one else can. It’s like fucking our childhood, all I can smell is his bloody hot buttered toast first thing in the morning, every morning for the whole of my life. I used to sit on his lap, years ago, and press myself against the pencils he always kept in his shirt pocket, digging them deeper into my arm – I’ve still got the marks, little lead bruises. He was such a fucking prince, even at five I wanted to be his princess! Now I’m his dog.’ She smiles sadly at me as if she wants us to be in this together, us against him as it always was. ‘He made me and I’ve swallowed him whole – I don’t care what’s supposed to be, that is like fucking Creation! Otherwise everything goes on exactly the same.’

‘And this is better, is it?’ This whole outburst – her whole energy – scares me like hell. I’m at the bottom of the stairs, I’m lost, I’m meant to be menacing her not letting her squash me into nothingness, conformity, a living death at an early age.

‘You’ll never know.’

I watch her and shiver, and try not to see the soft stretch of thigh mocking me from beneath the sag of the baggy T-shirt. She stands there and I move forward, up one stair, trying to find a way to answer her. The thought of Mum and Jack at the hospital stabs at my mind and I know that if I kill Jessie and Dad, it’s for me, it’s not for them – Mum would rather deal with a sick, deceitful daughter and a cunt of a husband than with their deaths or mine, but I feel selfish. That was the word Dad used, wasn’t it? ‘ It depends on how selfish you’re feeling. ’ I don’t know when or if it had already started – but he and Jessie must know how it feels.

‘I’ve thought about it,’ I say, two steps away from her now, no need to speak very loudly though there’s no one else to hear. ‘And there’s nothing you can do. Nothing you can say. I’m not interested any more. What you and Dad do, however you do it, whether you enjoy it or not, is like running a knife up and down my back. I feel hollow – which is how you’ll feel soon.’

I think I frighten her a bit – my state of mind, if not the buried threat. I put my hand out to hold on to her as I climb past on the stairs and she flinches a little, she jerks back slightly. That’s good. I smile, feeling her warmth as I pass, smelling yesterday’s dead scent, her slightly stale breath.

‘Don’t feel too safe,’ I say.

And then I’m cycling to see Mum. She’s back at the same hospital in Exeter, which is quite a ride, but it’s good to be on my own, the road is long and straight and I can stare at the ground and watch it moving under me, not stopping, nothingness rolling by like a belt. I pedal harder, working at it, trying to break through to a different level, one that will flood my mind, wash away my thoughts. I keep my head down, hoping to meet the raw edge of a metal bumper, a truck’s rear axle, the tangled blades of a farm machine – lose my nose, my face, in a single slice.

It’s the last day of August. The air is cold, really chill, though summer can’t be over. There’s a wind blowing in the trees and fields on either side that feels unnatural, that feels like the weird currents of air you get at airfields, that sounds – when it swings into me, switching from the push it’s been giving – like the roar of jet fighters flying low. I see encampments up ahead, old hill forts only there in the blackened roof of my skull, and my mind picks through the soil and flint and slime to find little bits of school – a broken chair, a desk – and my dead grandmother, and Jessie’s tin with the crayons and blades. The mounds – they look like burial mounds now – are close and in the distance at the same time and they fill me with a sense of dread, so that I try to cycle faster still, thinking that will get me past them but they move with me.

Jessie and the Prick took the car this morning, soon after I woke, which was soon after I slept. I wouldn’t go with them. They need time together and I can’t watch their necks in front of me, the backs of their heads. The cottage was a shithole without them. It was the shelter, the same decor. I ate a bowl of cereal and left it in the sink where their breakfast things were piled up. I kept thinking I could hear their voices, then I did and I went.

They won’t let me take my bike up to the ward, which almost provokes a scene when I try wheeling it into the lift, but the woman on the desk calls some uniformed Nazi and the bike suddenly seems very important to me even though I couldn’t give a shit about it the rest of the time and don’t even have a padlock for it. He holds it and I try to wrest it from him, and he’s probably just a porter, he’s not trained for trouble, but he looks like he wouldn’t mind a shot now, he’ll have a bash, but then I think, ‘Fuck it, don’t attract attention, just forget it,’ and I let him have it and walk out of the lift and up the stairs instead, leaving him holding it, and I know I’m going to have to face some kind of heavyweight crap when I get it back, but there’s not much they can do.

Mum and Jack are in a cubicle in front of the nurses’ station, and news of my arrival can’t have filtered up yet because they let me straight through, just asking me to wait while they wheel out a flat screen monitor and a blood pressure machine, which makes room for me to sit down nicely but I don’t. Mum already has a prison look to her, despite her tan and the short summer dress she’s got on, and Jack is on a drip like some bag creature from a weird movie, but the cubicle has a sense of peace to it. I like it because it’s nowhere, it’s just a place where they watch you to see whether you live or die, and the Prick’s skills as an architect would get in the way here.