Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘Can we talk?’ he asks and the gravity of his voice makes me want to puke or laugh. ‘ Just tell me! ’ I want to shout. I know it all anyway. Don’t fuck around.

He shuts the door. I’m on the bed and I stay there – maybe he wants me, too? But he looks like a pensioner at this moment, someone who’s lost all his balls. He moves to the window and looks out, as if he’s never been in this room before, as if he’s piecing together how much I’ve been able to see all along.

Of course, I could be wrong. This might be something else altogether. Mum could have interpreted my parting remark in a dozen different ways. Maybe she hasn’t rung at all. Maybe she’s too caught up in Jack even to think about anything else at the moment. But ever since I got back, I’ve felt it in the air – this is when it happens, this is where I find my strength. I can feel the patterns changing, the walls moving back to show me the darkness. At the hospital, when I got my bike back, they treated me as if I was sick, as if we had just suffered a deep and damaging loss in the family. They humored me. They told me I was a stupid little boy, and they treated me like a joke. I wanted to grab them by their pudgy authoritarian faces and ram them up against the wall, tell them, ‘Don’t underestimate me, cunts! There’s going to be damage like you’ve never seen before.’ And it’s going to be tonight, I can feel it, I’m ready for it just as Dad was with Nick. We all have our mythologies to act out.

He keeps his face away from me and I glance at his back, the back that’s giving him so much trouble tonight. He’s outside the depressing ring of light my bedside lamp gives out and I wish he wasn’t there at all because he’s taking a lifetime to say something and, however he says it, he won’t choke on the words the way I want him to. All I can think about is how stupid he is – how incredibly, inhumanly stupid – and how stupid he has been. I’m the fool for ever believing in him, but then I had no choice: he drew the lines for what honesty was.

‘Well, what do you make of all this?’ he says after a long time, a long time of standing there with his back to me and his hands creeping around to strangle each other against his trouser seat.

I bring my knees up in front of me and stare past them at the wall. I could take one of my sneakers off and throw it at him to wake him up, but why bother? What am I supposed to say – ‘I don’t make anything of it, squire – you go ahead and fuck Jessica if you want to’?

‘I think you need your head examined,’ I tell him.

He turns slowly. No anger, he’s treading warily with me now.

His face in the semi-shadow is all misarranged, like one of Jessie’s paintings. ‘Do you?’ His voice is trying to stay with me, but it’s prissing up, it’s getting pompous and superior, just like Jessie.

‘If you think we’ve got anything to talk about, you do.’ I swing my knees around to block him out. I can do it tonight. If I had a knife I could do it now, but they’re all in the kitchen. I know the one I’ll use – smooth red handle, razor-edge, with a neat little curve at the end of the blade to decorate his paunchy, desperately exercised gut before going on to autograph Jessie’s.

He takes a step forward, but not too close. I remember a hiding he gave me, one of the few times I can remember him really smacking me. I was about six at the time and I can’t remember what it was about, but it had something to do with a toolbox. Now his whole being looks like a pathetic apology, a non-person desperately seeking absolution and admission to the world again. ‘Fuck off, my son!’ I want to say. I’ve always fancied being a priest.

‘I’ve been a prick, Tom,’ he mumbles – or is it just my imagination? If he gets any more humble, I think I’ll kill him now and put an end to it – knife or no knife I’ll find a way. ‘I think you know what’s been going on.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I say, jaunty, trying to really screw him into a corner. ‘What’s that then?’

‘Tonight, with our friends on the motorcycles—’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t be a prat, Tom. You heard them, though I don’t think you needed to. Jessie’s a closed book where you’re concerned, but I’ve felt you looking at me like a piece of shit – I’m not completely stupid.’

He’s right. Stupidity doesn’t cover it; there’s sickness, ego, greed, the fact that he’s from another planet, his total inability to care about or love anyone but himself…all the great parental virtues. And Jessie doesn’t grass on me. I’ll bear that in mind. I’ll kill her tenderly.

‘I—’

I can feel it coming. This is where my life turns, even more so than with Jessie, this is where the madness has to be confronted: its ugly adult form is showing its head. It’s actually happening, it’s been happening and we’re not in some TV show, on some council estate with the kids screaming and the cat shitting and the smell of cooking and half a discount store’s worth of iPods and PSPs and computer junk in a corner – see, I’m an elitist at heart, I revert to type. But this is my life we’re talking about, and it’s tiny, flat and insignificantly fucked up.

His hand wipes his mouth, eradicating a smile, spit, nothing, he’s just nervous. I had never realized how womanly his lips are – a female reptile’s razor slit, pursing in an unlizardlike way. His voice is slightly huskier than usual, like when Scotch catches in his throat – or is it the fading memory of sluicing Jessie’s juices, snuffling at her crotch, as he makes a grand gesture and gives up a part of it: the easy freedom to do it again?

‘I’ve been carrying on with Jessie,’ he says.

Right. Sid James and Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor probably got a look in, too. Is that the best he can do? Can’t he find a better way to put it than that? What is there? ‘I’ve been banging your sister… getting my oats with Jessie when no one was looking… bonking her brains out… fucking her quietly with my song… poking her up the arse… enjoying a bit of rumpy-pumpy with your old cot-mate’? It’s all crap. It all slams into my face, missing the flesh but hitting the bone inside. It’s a laugh, innit? Maybe I should use two knives, try to stick them both at once.

‘Right,’ I say.

My life is over; I’d like to spew up every memory I ever had. What I’ve got now is the thrust of my hate, like a cuddly teddy bear, my pristine vision of the Prick and Jessie as apocalyptic angels rolling around in the shit waiting for me to strike them down.

Where is Jessie now? She’s keeping out of this one. She’s letting Daddy handle it. Maybe he’s handled it all along; maybe we’re all berks and he’s the big bad demon after all, she’s been fooling herself, he’s ridden her from the start?

Looking at him now, even in his most abject weakness and disgrace, I can almost imagine that, almost blame him entirely. But I don’t think he can take all the credit for me, and nor do I think he can even begin to control Jessica, she has her own charge in her that could blitz us all.

If I kill him, I am his flesh, does that make it suicide on his part? If I kill her, I feel like I’m killing something from the stars, some megaforce that’s lit by the sun’s light. But he’s just standing there anyway and I’m on the bed, both of us lost, two total pits of human refuse wasting the air we breathe.

‘Tom—’ A flash of anger, pain, some sort of near-human response. ‘I’m trying to find a way to…’

‘What did you say? Just now? I didn’t hear you.’

Strained eyes. A frown. ‘Don’t play games with me, I…’

‘Get fucked.’ No emotion. I don’t want to push it. I get up off the bed. ‘You’re not my father and I don’t want to have this conversation.’