Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I relent and find a working phone outside a petrol station, feeling worse for the sleep, surprised at how near to evening it is. I don’t have a plan; I don’t need one – just minimal preparation and luck. The sun is cooler now, and I find my confidence draining with the warmth as the phone rings and rings. I begin to panic and try to calm down, forcing myself to put the phone back and walk out onto the petrol station forecourt. If he’s dead, what would have happened? Surely there’d be someone there? They could just be out, seeing Mum – telling her what, how would he explain this? Or of course he could be in hospital himself – was the wound deep? It felt like nothing, less resistance than sticking a knife in fruit.

I can’t do this all in one go. I realize now it’s not going to be easy. Two cans of petrol are the most I can manage, and I don’t even have the cans. So I walk into the forecourt shop, in my jeans, sneakers and T-shirt, trying to look casual, trying not to look as young as I am, and I pick up two five-liter cans of oil, surprised by how expensive they are – I’m not going to be able to afford to fill them both with petrol, maybe I should just buy one? But like an arrow that points forward, I see a stack of large plastic containers of bottled water for sale, two for less than half the price of one can of oil, and I put the oil down and pick the water up, and the woman behind the register doesn’t give a shit what I do as long as I get out of her life now, so I push it – with a tired, shrill voice I tell her my dad’s run out of petrol and I’m going to empty the water out and fill them both at the pump, is that all right?

She looks at me with a sort of bitten lip and small, hard eyes that she’s probably got doing this job, and I gild the lily, I tell her it’s a Bentley, a real old wreck, one of these plastic bottles isn’t even going to get it sparking. And she knows I’m lying, and she knows I know it, but she doesn’t want the aggravation so she says, ‘Give me the money for the petrol first’, and stares with relief over my head as another customer comes in, a pompous little git in a suit impatient for a token for the car wash. She takes my money and gives me the change and I tell her it’s wrong; then she gets nasty, but we sort it out, and I feel her small, hard eyes on me as I fill the containers at the pump, the rich stench of the petrol settling on my lungs, and I wonder if a match now would make her happy.

I don’t hang around to try the phone again but walk on, carrying the petrol for a mile or so, getting lost and getting stuck in dead ends a couple of times. My head is sharper now, but in a disjointed way that makes it difficult to hold a thought for more than a moment. Part of me is looking for another phone; part of me is trying to keep moving toward the docks. I reach some traffic lights which seem familiar, but have to duck out of sight of an approaching police car, and try then to keep to the back streets, losing any real sense – without the river – of where I am.

In one narrow residential street there’s a parade of three shops – two boarded-up, one a Chinese off-license – and I realize I’ve hardly drunk anything all day, apart from the Coke and some water from an ancient, grimy drinking fountain in the park. I walk on and stash the petrol against the corrugated-iron doorway of a blackened, burned-out house that someone’s already done a job on, then double-back to the shop and walk inside.

It’s as much a food shop as an off-license – there’s even a stand of unidentifiable withered vegetables in front of the register – but I settle for just two small bags of peanuts, fix in my mind the location of the fastest-reached beer by the door, pay for the nuts and grab a four-pack on the way out, running like hell holding the awkward, hard-rimmed mass of cans to my stomach, one of them splaying out and dropping from its plastic loop to bounce on the pavement as I go.

The old Chinese man who served me doesn’t follow me on to the street, but seconds later as I look back a young kid not much older than me – his son? grandson? – comes sprinting out, fast enough to worry me, and I leg it around a corner, down another dark, narrow street and through a brick passageway into a gloomy, forbidding courtyard at the back of a Victorian office building. I decide to fight, if that’s what he wants; I’ve never fought anyone Chinese, but he hardly looked like a killer, spindly arms caught inside a black, numbered baseball jacket, and I’d win because I’ve got to – I’ve got other business tonight.

But he doesn’t appear, and I open a beer waiting for him, keen to get out of the courtyard, which seems filled with death, and keener still to get my petrol back. The first gulp of beer does it for me instantly – I’m so tired and freaked out anyway, it’s like a sane hand on my shoulder – and I drink the rest down, chuck the can into a basement hole, and walk out onto the street, clutching the other two cans and getting a weird sense of déjà vu as I try to connect last night with now and go back for the petrol.

I know where I am. I’m in a phonebox, one of the old-style thick-paned red ones. It stinks of piss, which is no surprise, but the phone works, which is.

My hand hurts. I cut it open again opening the second can of beer – let the ring-pull slice right into the dead flap of one of the fingers I cut last night switching hands with the knife in my tussle with Dad. I’ve kept the can as a souvenir, but not the ring-pull.

I am on the Isle of Dogs. I know exactly where I am. Not much of an island, is it? How do you get a dog to bark? Pour petrol over it, set it on fire and it goes woof. Well, I’ve got the petrol. The phone is ringing – the other end, not here. Still nobody home. Let it ring.

The entrance to my father’s construction site is four streets from here. I’ve been there once already since it’s got dark, walked right under the shadow of the bloody great pyramid and back again. Nobody stopped me. But no phones in there, not ones I can use anyway. It’s still ringing.

Click.

‘Hello?’ Jessie’s voice.

Silence. London-to-Devon static. I wish I could touch her. ‘Hello?’

‘Jessie—’

‘Tom, are you OK?’ Cool; not entirely interested in my condition. ‘I’m fucking brilliant. How’s Dad? Is he hurt bad?’ ‘Where are you?’

‘Just tell me, will you? Is he all right?’

‘He’s not dead. You really are a—’

But I’ve cut us off.

I’m alive for about two minutes of it. The rest is like watching a video I’ve seen over and over; I’ve done this in my head so many times already tonight.

The first is out over the water, after I’ve tossed the beer cans (one empty, one full) and petrol over the fence, ready for me, and waited for the dogs to bark, the lights to blaze – but nothing. Stillness.

It’s dark out here. The pyramid is lit up, maybe forty or fifty feet away, but softly from below, like a part-built aviary or tomb or something, sheathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting which ripples as it breathes the dank dockside air. Weird shapes inhabit the night here, the ghosts of huge Victorian cranes, old chimneys pointing up to nowhere, exposed bellies of warehouses thick with the sweat and greed and cheap pain that drove everything on.

I climb along a railing that carries the fence a few feet out over the water from the wharf. It’s the only way in, short of walking up to the gate and blagging it with the guards – maybe Jason’s on, with his cosh? The rust on the bars in the dark is like ground glass, savaging my cut hand and engraving itself on the other. There’s virtually no toe-hold – the railing has been wired over to block the gaps inbetween, where my feet might have wedged – but I drive my sneakers in against the wire anyway and use the crazy strength I’ve got now to drag myself along, inches above the black gaping mouth of the dock.