Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘How is he?’ I say, thinking: You’re going to be OK, Jack – Dad and Jessie have seen to that, this would be too easy a way out.

‘Did you cycle all the way here?’ Mum asks, hugging me. She feels warm, alive, anxious. I hug her back, wishing I could feel something. ‘Why on earth didn’t you come with Jessie and Dad?’

‘I fancied a ride,’ I say, wondering once again, if she’s guilty, what her crime is. You must have one, Mum – or several. Maybe you’re too fucking perfect, too fucking tolerant. You’ve always tolerated me. Maybe you actually love the Prick. Or maybe I don’t know you either, you also have a secret life I know nothing about.

You touch my chin before letting me go. ‘You look good for it,’ you say. A smile. You’re so easily fooled – I feel dead, I feel only the hate in me is thriving – yet usually you’re the one who sees through us all. ‘You must have needed the exercise.’

Jack stirs and makes a strange snorting noise – the sound of someone blowing through a Christmas cracker toy. Mum turns to him and his face screws up and he wails and I think he’s just a small animal suffering pain, and then I look at him and it’s more than that, it’s not just the physical pain, there’s an intelligence there, and that’s the disease – he knows. It’s knowing that’s the sickness; not knowing something, just knowing.

‘Is he all right?’ I ask.

‘Poor angel, he’s been peeing blood and it hurts.’ Mum opens the cubicle door and calls to a nurse, frustration and worry in her voice: ‘He’s peed again and I wasn’t able to get a sample.’

The nurse comes in and for a moment I fade to nothing. They change him, and I watch Mum, strong, rationing her emotions, saving her energy for Jack. She must have been like this with me once and yet I can’t remember. I vaguely remember crawling into bed with her and Dad when I was very sick, but they were comforting forces in a giddying dream, they weren’t distinct people and I never thought what it meant to them. I search my mind for a link between that tenderness and what Dad and Jessie have been doing together – could it be a small step, from that closeness of childhood into a deeper, more devastating closeness? – but there has been no tenderness in what I’ve witnessed, I think they’re past tenderness into a dog-like slavering for each other, a kind of supremacy over guilt. I should have put the Prick out of his misery while I had the chance – in his bed, in the heady flush of childhood sickness.

The nurse is still there, staying too long, taking precious minutes from my time with Mum, keeping me outside in the ether so that I may not be able to get back. ‘He looks cooler, has he been drinking at all?’ she asks, and I think she means alcohol, the Prick’s Scotch or his beer, and I want to blame him for this sickness – maybe he is to blame, what do I know?

Then she goes, which Mum hardly registers, standing over Jack for a while longer, rocking slightly on her feet, her eyes wishful, compassionate.

‘He’s OK,’ I say, without much confidence. He’s OK now, but maybe I’m the one who’s going to fuck things up for him.

She looks at me when I speak, remembering I’m there. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’

‘We’re in trouble,’ I tell her. Except I don’t. I’m not sure how much I say any more and how much I imagine, but I don’t say this.

‘I didn’t hear you,’ she says.

‘I said I needed something to do.’

Now I sit down. The phone rings at the desk and I catch the sister or whatever she is glancing my way. She looks irritated by the call and watches me, but I stare back at her blankly and after a while she looks away. My mother fusses around a bit, pulling the cover down off Jack because it’s hot in here, turning up the fan and moving a book off her chair and then putting it back because she can’t find a spare surface for it.

‘Would you like some juice? Or a cup of tea? I could make you one.’

‘No, I’m not thirsty.’ A lie. I’m gasping, but I don’t want anything that is going to separate us for even a minute.

She picks up the book again and sits, keeping the book in her lap. Her legs underneath it are someone else’s legs, the legs of a woman in the street who’s had a wonderful summer. My mother’s had a good summer, but it’s going to get worse. Her eyes seem lost in her face, unsure where to go, flickering back and forth to Jack in the cot then settling on me with a concern that suddenly seems directed more at me than at him.

‘Are we bad parents?’ she asks and the question startles me. It seems to open the door to so many more.

‘Why?’

‘I was wrong, you don’t look great. You look terrible.’

‘I’m just tired. I was up last night anyway.’

‘I lay here this morning thinking about all of you. Jessie – I don’t know what’s wrong between me and Jessie, but she resents me for some reason at the moment, doesn’t she? She tries to disguise it, but I really feel it. Maybe it’s just a phase – or the baby. Or a boy.’

She seems almost hopeful when she says this, but I feel numb. My mind has already started to dive-bomb at the prospect of this all becoming a reality, becoming something we – Mum and me, we’re all that’s left – can say out loud.

The nothingness of the cubicle intensifies. The edges blur. This is an experiment – I am a rat in a tank, some thought-drug has just been injected into my skull. I stare into the light.

‘Has she said anything to you?’

‘About what?’ I sound hostile.

My mother’s face is a few feet from me across the room. She frowns, her lips arch like Jessie’s sometimes do. ‘I’m sorry – I shouldn’t talk to you like this.’

‘No,’ I say, a dimness in my brain. ‘I want you to.’

Where does this go? Where do we go from here – is this the time to go all the way, expose it for what it is? I can’t face it. Not here, not with all these watchers around, ready to intervene, ring their alarm bells, take it farther.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘With Jessie?’

‘With either of you?’

The sister outside the cubicle peers in, as if she’s expecting to find a scene of bloodshed and mutilation, me reveling in the carnage like the freak I am. Her face is a thousand other faces – the mad old cow in the village, a face on the tube, a grandmother on the motorway – all watching, waiting for a slip. Mum has no idea, I’m sure of that. She may have doubts, feelings, but she’s swimming in a different sea. In mine, you can’t come up for air.

‘Yes.’ I watch to see if she’s expecting something. Her face is alert, involved, her courtroom face. ‘No. I mean – you know my problem.’

I can’t fucking say it. The moment has passed again. On every front, I let time slip away. I want it to happen for me, but it won’t – I have to make it happen.

She moves the book, bends her legs sideways, massages her brow above one eye with a hand that used to hold mine. ‘Can you give it till Christmas?’ she asks.

‘What’s different at Christmas?’

‘We could get our house back in London. We only have to give three months’ notice.’

‘We could rent in London now,’ I say. We’re drifting further from the point. London is irrelevant; London has no power any more.

‘I’d like to stay here a little longer.’ Would she? ‘So would your father.’

My father would like a lot of things, half of which you know nothing about, Mum. You could fuck a doctor, every patient in the hospital, I would forgive you – but he, he has wedged the knife firmly in our backs.

Suddenly I feel angry with her. Maybe she’s not so perfect. She picked him, she fucked him to make us, and now she can’t see the poison when it’s stuck right under her nose.