Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

Still nothing from Jessie – is she asleep standing up, or has she lain down again to spite me? Drip! Normality is outside, not in here, there’s a force field around the clump of earth that’s our garden, from the bent tree to the stone wall, twisting everything that’s inside it. I am sweating. My bed feels like it’s giving me friction burns on my hands, through my jeans, and I’m not even moving. I am inside the long death of a Sunday evening when school is looming closer and everything awful in the world seems to be sucked into the drain that is my life. But it’s not Sunday, and the days to school, which I can count on one hand, are meaningless at last.

Nothing. Even the tap seems to have stopped. But then I hear it, out of step I think, although it can’t be – a muted, echoing plonk as the bullet of water hits its mark. And a creak on the landing. Two more, the hard pat of a bare foot touching bare wood for a moment.

Then silence. Where is she? I know it’s her. I hold back from the door briefly, resting my ear, changing sides. I am going to have to move the bed soon – how can I do it quietly? Or maybe I can climb out the window and creep back in through the kitchen, fetching the slaughter weapon on my way? No.

‘Dad!’

Her voice is quiet but not a whisper. She might be feeling sick. She might be unable to sleep, turning to him for comfort – but it’s none of those things, she wants to talk on her own terms: the word is a command.

I think he grunts. Perhaps it’s his back racking him. I can’t hear clearly – the drip sounds sharper than him. The door clicks shut and I know she’s inside. Like a moon walk, I move off the bed and start to inch it away from the door, scraping it across the floor with an agonizingly slow squeak, convincing me that I will bring one of them out here.

I open my door, adrenalin pumping, suddenly cold and wet with sweat. The landing is a huge, endless black cavern, dripping with stalactites, crisscrossed with ledges and needlelike rock bridges. Lucy is there, vacuuming the entrance to Jessie’s room. Mum is on the stairs, sitting with Jack on her lap, eating cherries and spitting the stones past the line drawn by Lucy’s snaking electrical cord. I am bursting to pee, but I force myself to forget it.

The door to Dad’s room is closed. I cross to it, better than Jessie at muffling my footsteps, the ridged soles of my sneakers absorbing the sound. I wait outside, smelling her in the air – a trace of the oil she orders online from New York on one of Dad’s cards; for two years that’s been part of her Christmas treat. There is smoke here too, the vague dungy essence of what came into the cottage from the barbecue and settled, or traveled in on Dad’s shirt and trousers. Perhaps when I’m done, I can pour what’s left of the paraffin around this shithole and set a funeral pyre? I can be every bit as creative as Jessie.

I hear his voice, irritable, he’s keeping it down, but not as if she’s close: ‘—feel like hell, I want to go to sleep.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She hung up on me. That was enough.’

He trails off. I feel weird out here, as if I’m only getting half the story, they’re sitting in there reading a script around a microphone for some fucking radio play.

‘Did she say anything about me?’

Silence. I think he moves on the bed. Where is she? Sitting on it? Standing? She’s not close to the door.

‘Well, did she? Does she know or doesn’t she?’

The hall is dark, but there’s a crack of light under the door. In the corner of my vision I see something move and feel my arms and shoulders jerk back in a shiver that jolts my whole body. A garden spider – this fucking place is full of them – its spindly legs navigating around my foot, its indecision and sudden changes of direction filling me with a ridiculous dread that it’s going to crawl right up me.

‘I’ll have to tell her. It will destroy her.’

‘No, it won’t.’ Jessie sounds like a complacent little cunt. ‘What about us?’

‘You know what I can’t understand,’ he says, and I wish I had the knife now, I wish I could open the door and surprise him, wash that smug, frank defeat off his face layer by layer – the ease of it, the comfort of slipping into the wreckage. ‘I’ve been the biggest bloody fool on earth, but I still can’t believe you came from me.’

Jessie almost laughs. ‘I’m me,’ she says, ‘that’s what you can’t take.’ And I can’t take any more myself so I go downstairs.

In the kitchen I can breathe normally, I don’t have to think about each breath as I draw it in, hold it, let it out. My feet move silently, carefully, without any effort on my part.

The room is half dark – a thin, spidery light comes from the moon and stars outside. The window is broken where John’s rock went through it, the glass still splintered all over the drainer and the plates. I hear the sea, and for the first time I take it for granted: it’s there, it always was. I could walk out of the door and up the road the bikes took and cross the field and be there, on the hill, looking down, opening my eyes to the night, to the blackness churning on the shore below: long white lips of foam rolling in with their poison, their crap and junk, old torches, plastic bottles filled with petrol, scummy twists of plastic film, diseased fish – all the death we’ve brought to it, getting our own back and more for the dead it’s claimed since time began. It’s like the sky kissing London – man and nature meeting and wrecking each other. But there’s the shelter and all the times they must have used it – even if it was only once, I don’t care, they’ve taken everything from me and they can’t put it back.

The fridge clicks on and makes me start. There’s a coffee mug on the table and a half-empty bottle of milk. The tap that’s dripping is in here, not the bathroom. I could turn it off, but it’s a useful measure of time.

The cutlery drawer slides open with a slight rattle, impossible to avoid but so slight that even I barely hear it. The tap drips. Silence outside – apart from the sea. Upstairs, I think I hear the murmur of voices, but they are less than the sea, dead sounds absorbed into the walls. I don’t need to look. In the darkness of the drawer, in the compartment to the right, my hand finds the smooth rounded end of the red-handled knife. It buries itself in my palm as I pull it out and see the blade now, shining dully in the pale light. I am afraid of blunting it, but feel compelled to dig it into the grain of the table top, carving three tram lines the length of an arm, my arm, past the coffee mug to the milk.

A bird shrieks outside – a seagull at night? – and I’m suddenly conscious of time in a different way: that I might miss my moment, that perhaps already Jessie has gone back to her room, making my task more difficult, less symmetrical, an awkward inky dribble across the fine pencil lines of the architectural plan Dad might draw of their deaths.

I mount the stairs carefully, feeling ordinary, the knife in my hand only a minor variation on countless other stair climbs – though not these stairs – with cups, toys, books. Without excitement or even much interest, I imagine newspaper pictures and unreadable headlines, blurred photographs of the cottage, a particular school picture of me when I was ten, round faced and staring at the camera with a grim smirk. Another family slaughters itself in the countryside. Why must my face look so dumb, so innocent, so much the kind of twerp I would beat the shit out of in the playground?

The landing again. Nothing has changed. The door has not opened. The crack of light is still there, spilling out over the floorboards, accentuating the joins and nailheads. The electrical socket where Lucy plugs in her vacuum is loose on the wall, I know because I’ve noticed it a dozen times now and meant to tell Pricko or do something about it myself. I touch it with my foot, with the rubber cap of my running shoe, and feel the socket shift on its wiggly screws.