Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I am tempted to wet my fingers – my other hand, the hand not holding the knife – and jam them down between the white plastic cover and the wall. I could take it, I could take the surge of electricity through my being. I could take anything right now. I hear the Prick’s voice, impatient with her, untroubled by the tap the socket makes against the wall as my foot nudges it.

‘Jessie—!’

‘No.’

‘Go back to bed.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know when to give up. Don’t make it more difficult—’

He’s pissed off with her now, and maybe with the situation: having to keep his voice down, to hold back from waking me.

‘It can’t be more difficult. It’s impossible, so why stop tonight?’ Jessie wants to be heard. She sounds reckless in the way that’s always made me sick about her – there’s so much more ground to throw away when you’re a daughter, so much more room for easy damage, and even then she’s always been so fucking protected. I grip my knife, let my foot shift from the socket to the door. I think she moves closer to him. ‘If there were no consequences,’ she says, nagging him, keeping up the pressure, ‘if no one gave a shit, you’d do it. You’re afraid.’

‘Stop it!’

And I open the door. I don’t even knock.

‘Hello,’ I say, feeling quite perky, thinking about John’s head popping into the kitchen – was that this evening? It seems only moments ago.

I wish I’d had a drink downstairs, though, a beer or something from the fridge; there’s a dead spot in my stomach like cancer, I need a burn there, a buzz.

I grip the red handle – I can see it now, the light over Dad’s bed is on. He’s sitting on the far edge, the duvet pulled up around him, the side of his neck and shoulder closest to me uncovered except for various wads of gauze taped clumsily onto him over a battleground of bruised and battered flesh .

He turns, and my eyes move to Jessie. I was wrong, she’s not naked. She’s not wearing her shades. What she’s got on is Mum’s bathrobe, and she looks strangely uncomfortable in it – it’s wrapped too tight or something, as if she’s suddenly turned frigid and decided to batten down the hatches. She is standing over Dad’s side of the bed, sandwiched between it and Jack’s cot, her body moving back and up as I enter, as if she’s been leaning her hands on the mattress or on him. Her face is odd when she looks at me – her mouth smudged with make-up, her eyes saddened with colors I’m sure weren’t there earlier, in the kitchen. Just for a moment, until I focus on her bare legs and bare feet, she reminds me of two nights ago in the hotel, sitting at the window in her jacket and stockings, staring out at the storm lighting up the river and crying, although I couldn’t be sure that she was – only there’s no sense of utter loneliness now, just the stale reek of our parents’ bed, the Prick’s spirity dressings, her pharmacist-blended oil. ‘Tom, what’s the matter? Are you all right?’ Dad says this even as he registers the knife in my hands. His face is wearied by the sight of it rather than shocked or scared – as if this is another regrettable mistake, further evidence of my stupidity, my inability to behave like a sane human being.

My mind is blank, but I manage ‘Don’t!’ as he tries to slide his naked trunk off the bed and stand, the effort obviously stirring some temporarily banished pain in his back. He grimaces. Jessie stands, making no attempt to help him, her expression hardening in response to me, him, both.

I push the door shut behind me and lean against it, holding the knife in my hand, blade up, in what seems to me a perfectly serious manner.

‘Stay there,’ I say, analyzing the relationship between their body sizes and mine. I need that super-human strength now if I’m to do this. I should have pushed my hand in the socket outside.

‘Tom, you never could handle a carving knife,’ Jessie says, trying that sister crap on me, although I think she is genuinely not frightened.

But she knows my state of mind well enough to understand that this is more than a joke.

‘I think I can do all right with this one.’

And I hold out my left arm, the one that’s not carrying the knife, turn my palm up and draw the tip of the metal down the underside, from elbow to wrist, avoiding the artery, cutting not enough to weaken the arm, just enough to give me the extra degree of commitment I need.

Even after the tram lines on the kitchen table, the blade is sharp. It doesn’t need any pressure. It doesn’t drag at all, just slices neatly down, parting the skin like plastic, not even hurting for a second or two, then stinging as the blood comes.

My demonstration seems to impress everyone. ‘Tom, put the knife down,’ my father suggests, his brow cragging with the realization that I might just be unsettled enough to do something.

I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite work.

‘Everything you think, you’re right in.’

This is his serious voice, his man-to-man voice, the one he uses when he wants to bare his soul, or whatever it is he has. It’s warm in here. This is a warm room. ‘You have every right to–’

‘SHUT UP!’

I didn’t need to shout. I think my voice broke as I said it. My back presses against the door. It’s been stripped, this one, and left unvarnished. It feels grainy and satisfying to the touch. I let my left hand rest there, the arm aching a little from the cut, which is bleeding a little now.

There aren’t any pictures of me and Jessie in Mum and Dad’s bedroom – not even of Jack. I hate that in other kids’ parents’ bedrooms: the smiling-faced family groups propped up in frames all over the furniture. Our smiling-faced pictures are downstairs in the hall, where you can barely see them even in daylight.

‘Who are you going to do first, Tom? Me or Dad?’ Jessie tries to sound the way she does sometimes – like my sister. ‘You’ll chicken out.’

But she touches her shoulder through the robe where I burned her, and I see or think I see something like approval in her eyes.

‘Watch me!’ I say, staring at the belt tied around her waist, the soft rainbow colors of the toweling. Her tan underneath is like a Greek girl’s skin or an Arab’s. I feel momentarily confused – disoriented – as if I’m somewhere else. This cottage is somewhere else to me, it has no bearings, it floats on the sewage of my brain.

My father sees my state and seizes on it, trying to lever himself up off the bed with one arm. I point the knife and jerk it at him, kicking the door with my foot in a sort of reflex action.

‘If either of you gets too close,’ I warn them, no conscious thought involved in the words, ‘I’ll use this on me. I don’t care about you.’ He eases himself back down on the edge of the mattress, watching me, better placed for movement than before – but I’m watching him, too. ‘I know you must find this hard to believe,’ he says, and I do, whatever is coming, ‘but I still love you all.’

He is a slimy reptile. No! Reptiles aren’t slimy. I think he means it, I think he has a place inside for loving me – and Mum and Jack. Somewhere just above his bowels. He could almost be a human being if it wasn’t for the fact that he was never one to start with. I stare at him, trying to reach what it is that will make it happen.

I speak slowly, thinking out loud: ‘I want to hear you say, “ Otherwise, you’re fine .”’ Time drags. My armpits are wet: I can smell them on my T-shirt.

‘What?’ He looks totally mystified.

‘Say, “ Otherwise, you’re fine .”’

‘Tom, this is nonsense—’

‘Say it!’

He is having a hard night. The dressing to the side of his right shoulder blade has darkened since he moved. There is sweat clogging his chest hair. He keeps the duvet balled protectively over his tool, but I’ve seen it – grey and shriveled, swinging like one of the poncy curtain tassels every time he tries to stand up. His voice is flat and resentful, as if I’m just trying to embarrass him, and that in itself is enough. ‘ Otherwise —’ He searches my face for some sort of explanation.