Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘Tom—’

There are no tears in my eyes, though there could be – there’s a hollow draught burning my nose and a welling in my head that wants release – but I’m concentrating my energy on dealing with this now, getting him out of here, out of my room, leaving me alone.

I push him and it feels good but he catches my arm and holds it steady, trying to transmit by osmosis or something the suggestion that we are not irretrievably torn apart, there is still some chance of repairing the damage.

I’m not as strong as him, but his back is a handicap now and a knife will help. Just give me a little time. I push him toward the door again and he surrenders a couple of feet.

‘You should have screwed someone else the night you made me! Where was Jessie? Wasn’t her cot close enough to hand?’

The words just come out and he slaps me across the face, which is brilliant. I want more of it. I want to feel the crunch of my father’s knuckles on my skin – I can slide so easily then into what I have to do.

I push him to the door. He looks at me, helpless. He could hit me again, he could reassert himself, he could beg – but I think he knows none of it would do any good.

I get my hand off him. This could be the last conversation we ever have. If I were Jessie, I’d do it with style – I’d pull him to me and kiss him, just to see what kissing dead flesh is like, just to remind myself that I thought I loved him once. Then I’d stick the knife in. But I don’t and my life doesn’t have any shape or form except anger. Anger is the one thing I feel clean in.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I shouldn’t have hit you.’

And just for a second – less – I remember two or three times in my life when I actually felt we made contact, when I thought for a moment I might have some clue as to who the fuck he is. He wasn’t so bad at times – that’s the joke. He did it so well.

‘We must talk,’ he says, as if I’m one of his problems, something that can be solved.

The door closes, shutting him out forever. ‘In the morning…’ His voice hangs outside the room. He’s waiting there, waiting for the knife or something else instead – he knows he’s got it coming.

And I slide my bed up against the door, just to find some peace, to arm my mind for the night ahead.

Sleep would have been the only escape. But I’m in the kitchen. It’s three in the morning and I’ve got all my clothes on, not simply because I haven’t undressed but because I want to be ready for anything, inside or out. I need every advantage now. Jessie came to me, earlier, later, after Dad had walked away from my barricaded door, and spoke to me through it.

‘This is stupid.’ I heard her voice, a sister’s voice, a voice I have heard every day of my life, playing, messing around, arguing, on the phone, happy, sad, whispering secrets and slander at boring receptions and inaugural parties Dad has taken us to. ‘I didn’t say some of the things I said, OK?’

She was alone on the landing outside my door. She was worried now, like when she used to go too far in her temper with me and smash up what she could of mine and then fret over the fact that I, twisted individual that I am, would want to take the blame for it, not out of any desire to protect her – she didn’t need protecting, she was happy to accept the consequences of anything – but because I wanted to play some part in her emotional world, I wanted her to have some debt to me that she couldn’t quite cancel out.

‘I go mad sometimes like you do.’ I almost considered letting her in – we could plot, as we used to, how we would survive if Mum and Dad broke up, died. ‘It’s all gone too far. We’re the guilty ones and yet somehow we’re putting the blame on you.’

‘Oh, Jessie,’ I wanted to say. I wanted to push back the bed, open the door and hug her – but I wasn’t sure she was there. I think she was. I think I could hear her scratching the names of my crimes in blood on my door: I invented Nick, I brought him here tonight, I recounted to Mum in graphic detail how her daughter had supplanted her in her bed, I went to Dad and told him the jig was up, that a sealed envelope containing a dossier of all their lurid copulations, including copies of Jessie’s prick pictures, was at this moment in the post on its way to the hospital social workers, his partners at the practice, Jessica’s college, the Daily Mail, 10 Downing Street.

I heard her voice, outside my door. ‘Are you satisfied?’ it said, with real loathing, with an honesty of passion rare in our family. ‘Did you have fun?’

And then I heard her go to him. Hours passed – though in fact we’re outside normal time, normal time doesn’t matter anymore. I heard them both going to bed, using the bathroom, cleaning their teeth, flushing the loo, Dad first, then Jessie some time later. Some sort of strained conversation had gone on downstairs, I caught its long pauses, its leaden awfulness, but not the words. I don’t think they ate; I didn’t. I haven’t eaten since breakfast this morning and the nagging tightness of my stomach, ground hollow by the bike ride, suits me fine tonight. I don’t think I’ll be eating for a long time.

They went to separate beds but couldn’t sleep, I bet. I sat slumped against the door on mine, my ear pressed to the cool gloss paint, shifting slightly as cramp stabbed my shoulder or the door felt too warm, listening for the sounds of Jessica wanking herself in her room or the Prick trying to ease his back straight on the mattress. I could hear a tap downstairs, in the bathroom I think, spacing time out – little bits of a lifetime slowly dancing together like water to form a whole, then hanging, kicking, throttled, before gravity cuts the drip from the tap’s hollow mouth and obliterates it, and the slow dance begins again.

There are twenty-four forks downstairs in the cutlery drawer, eleven of them dessert forks, all of them probably sharp enough to inflict a fatal wound or wounds if used with sufficient force and imagination. There are thirty-nine spoons, counting soup spoons and tea spoons, all virtually useless unless perhaps rammed down someone’s gullet. There are forty-five knives, I’ve counted them, including cheese knives, steak knives, a huge heavy-handled carving knife, several smaller sharp blades and the red-handled one I intend to use. There are also two potato peelers, a manual can opener and two or three sharpish-looking instruments, but I have made my choice.

Jessie’s weight moves off the bed in her room – I hear it – and pauses for a moment. It’s warm tonight, far warmer than for last night’s hospital panic; she won’t be wearing a T-shirt. What would she put on to go in to see Dad? Nothing. Why put on anything? Maybe her sunglasses – but I don’t think Jessie’s sense of humor is her strong point just now.

The pause is much longer than I expect. Perhaps I’m wrong: she’s staying where she is? I jam my ear to the door, making it hurt, sending black waves of pain to my brain, wondering how I’m going to move the bed, go downstairs, get the knife and come back up silently enough to surprise them both, one after the other. I need them together. I’ve always wanted them together for this.

Drip! The door numbs my ear. How many thousandths or millionths of a second does it take for the sound of water falling from the tap and smashing in the basin to climb the stairs and penetrate my door? Drip! Silence from Jessie’s room. Maybe she’s already gone in to Dad? But I haven’t heard the creak of a floorboard, the oiled grind of metal upon metal as a hinge turns. Drip! Normal time is happening somewhere else – in the village, in the black empty mass between here and London, the streets there hazy from shop-window lights and drunks pissing against the walls and dark, ratlike faces in waiting cars who know where the action is, know where the party’s happening, know their lives are just starting, while I’m about to add the royal crown to the fuck-up that mine is already.