Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

What’s the Prick doing while this is happening? Taking a slash? Watching the timer on the stove, waiting for the buzz when their allotted five minutes is up? He’s probably reading the fucking paper, his feet up, water on the boil to chuck in Nick’s face, scratching his skull manically the way he does when he’s under pressure so that he looks really crazy.

My angle on Jessie is weird – hair, brow, nose pointed at Nick, all lit by the calculation of how to get rid of him the fastest.

Nick’s face I can see. ‘Let’s go!’ he tries, winding himself up, both hands on the Norton’s tank now, leaning forward though he knows it’s a lost cause.

‘You heard him.’ She is standing to one side, a distance between them.

Nick shakes his head. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He wants to spit, I see it. He should. He mumbles something I can’t hear. Then: ‘You’re acting like a cow – is this what two days in London does to you?’

‘Wait a minute—’ Jessie is barely even listening. There has been a minor collapse at the barbecue, a limp combustion chucking out a few sparks and a billowing cloud of smoke which spreads over the garden, catching the weird dying light and bringing cancer to our already strangled and wrecked grass. In the absence of the tongs, which Dad has taken in with him, Jessie kicks the hibachi’s legs to aerate it and turns back to Nick, her belly flashing, a sort of bored, half-interested mood to her now, as if she might come alive if he made the effort. ‘Come over here!’

Nick stays put, straddling the bike, and I suddenly remember Jessie telling me that he does Buddhist chants. If so, they’re not doing much for him now. He looks distinctly rattled. He looks like he’s half a mind just to take off out of here now and forget it, but then Jessie goes back over to him and wraps herself over one leg – a change of tactics; hard to tell who she’s working on: him or the Prick in the kitchen, watching. Her left hand delves down into his groin while her right embraces his neck.

It all seems so transparent to me that I can’t believe Nick goes for it for a moment, but he must be playing along because he says something and I catch a characteristically haughty ‘Yeah, yeah’ from her. She whispers something close to his ear and blows it – because suddenly Nick pushes her off.

‘I want to get things straight, Jessie, that’s all.’ It’s hard to stand up to Jessie when she’s determined, she makes sure of that, but Nick is armed and ready. ‘I thought we were close—’ His voice cuts through the evening air; he’s nervous about something. ‘—I just didn’t expect competition from your old man.’

If the Prick hears that, it must throw him. How do you handle this one? Rush out there hot with denials and fury? Laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion? Write it down and instruct your solicitor – in this case, your wife when she gets back from the hospital – in the good old middle-class way? It certainly must give Jessica something to think about, wondering how dangerous this is, whether the bomb’s really dropped or if Nick is just stabbing in the dark.

He looks at her, standing where she’s stepped back, having been evicted from his thigh. She looks cool, fascinated – this is just another night in her life, an accusation of rogering Dada, so what?

‘John saw you together,’ Nick says, weakening his case with explanation. ‘In the car – in Harpford.’ He’s starting to doubt himself; she sees that. He takes hold again: ‘Of course he could be lying, but I wouldn’t say it was the kind of thing John’s imagination runs to.’

Can Dad hear this? I hope so. I hope it buries itself deep inside him and twists and tears there. On the lawn, Jessie is horrified – her Sunday School disbelief could almost fool me.

‘You are a sick bastard,’ she tells him. ‘You and John! Go away!’

It’s an impressive performance, but not quite up to scratch for Nick obviously. His eyes fix on her for a long moment and even at this distance, I can see a kind of pain there. ‘Trust me, Jessica—’ He reaches out and takes hold of her arm. ‘I know when you’re lying.’

‘Fuck off and leave me alone!’

She pulls away but he grabs her with some force, swinging his head toward her from his heavy mount on the bike so that for one instant I think, ‘Yes! Right!’ and I’m him, I’m locked physically with him as he rams into her, nutting her hard on the skull, sharing that splintering crack as his forehead meets her forehead and he says – the anger coming out now, forget all that Buddhist humming – ‘I fucking love you!’

She is not worth it. She pulls away and staggers back and I see her pass below me, out of my sight, leaving Nick on his own, stuck on the bike in the middle of our piss-awful garden, the barbecue chugging away behind him.

‘Tell me to go!’ he shouts after her, and it suddenly occurs to me that this little scene might be attracting the attention of the neighbors – I’m sure one or two lights have gone on down the hill – and I don’t want that, tonight is mine, I can feel it, I don’t want any poxy interference from the forces of sanity outside. ‘Tell me the truth!’ he shouts. ‘I’m not leaving until you come back out here and tell me what’s what.’

The motor of his bike kicks into life, but he’s not going anywhere, I know that – and I want him gone now too, I’m keen to be rid of him before he brings the bloody filth down on us. He overrevs it, tearing at the night air with the sound, so that I don’t hear his mates’ bikes approach until they’re on the road outside – and neither does he.

‘Here, Nick—’ John’s voice is like an old friend punching you in the cheek at the pub, it has the warm, sodden crunch of teeth, blood and alcohol about it. He sits on his bike at our gate. ‘Where is she then?’

Nick has already got his Norton on the move, rolling it around the uneven turf of our lawn, circling the barbecue, guiding it carefully for the moment through the narrow gap between the grill and the trestle table. He ignores John, though he doesn’t seem surprised to see him, riding close to the house now as he shouts, ‘You think you’ve got something so fucking valuable that everyone wants to take it!’

‘Where’s the perv?’ I see Toe-rag’s familiar twisted grin in my mind as I hear him call out behind John. ‘ Pervy perv! Is he home?’

‘Shut up,’ Nick says, but he doesn’t really care any more, and he aims his bike straight at the barbecue this time, knocking it onto the grass, scattering hot charcoal and sparks and setting little patches briefly alight. Then John is over the tree roots and he’s in the garden too, followed by Toe-rag, though I think ape-face Colin on his wimp machine stays behind. I run downstairs – I want to be in on this – to find Jessie struggling with Dad to stop him from going outside.

‘Just ignore them, they’re morons. They’ll get bored and go away.’ She doesn’t sound entirely convinced of this, holding her head where Nick cracked her and trying to hold on to the Prick at the same time.

He looks at me quickly, his lizard face, the lines around his jaw tightening as he takes me in, sweat or saliva on his lip, his eyes like reactivated sheep’s eyes in Biology, two tiny torches shining through dead meat at the danger outside and – if he can read my mind – here in the kitchen.

‘You’re back. Are you OK? Did you come through that?’

He indicates the roaring bikes outside, one trying to outdo the other. There is a loud, splintering crash, followed by another, as John and Toe-rag ram the garden table from both ends. But I’m wrong – it must be Nick, because suddenly something hard flies through one of the small kitchen window panes, smashing the glass and breaking the plates on the drainer, and then the kitchen door slams open as the wheel of John’s bike hits it and comes inside, his face following, bringing the sharp smell of the smoke with him, his mouth stretched wide, rat’s teeth showing as he leers and shouts, ‘HEEEEEEEERE’S JOHNNNY!’