Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

At the end of the railing, I cling on and swing out into the darkness, smelling the cold aura of the water, closer than I want to be to the poor bugger who’s been bloating and festering down there for more than a week now – little bits of him breaking off like meat disintegrating in a fish tank.

There’s a sound water makes when it’s still, or perhaps it’s a nonsound, the suffocating of any other small sounds which might be in the neighborhood, and it’s this I hear as I misjudge my reach around the railing’s end and miss the bar I was trying for. My hand dives through space, taking me down with it, and I only just manage to stop myself in time by grabbing a rail farther along.

I freeze, my face that much closer to the water, my lungs heaving, one leg still swung out beyond the iron bars, counterbalancing my body. Slowly I bring it down and force my head and shoulders up, my foot slipping three or four times against the rails before I get a grip. The site side of the wharf is within reach now: all I have to do is get there. But I cling to where I am, my mind pulsing with a kind of empty, exhausted sickness, suddenly recognizing the fear that this could all be real – this exhaustion could be the last state I know. A part of me just wants to stay here and think about it. But that’s failure’s way, that only guarantees more misery. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now; spontaneous combustion requires a nudge. I’ll nudge it.

The other is when it blows. When I’ve inched back onto the wharf, picked up my petrol and beer and made it safely across the trenches and unseen hazards of the site to the refuge of the pyramid. The scaffolding almost blocks off access to the main entrance – a huge, as yet unfinished stone and steel hole complete with Korean hieroglyphs (or they might be Egyptian; who the fuck knows?) and squared-off pricklike columns on either side – but I twist and duck around the poles, and climb concreted steps littered with masonry slabs into the atrium.

The light from outside doesn’t penetrate far in here, it just throws long shadows of the columns up across the vast space that extends the full height of the steel and glass of one side of the pyramid. It gives me a weird sense of my father now, as if he’s here, I’m inside him, this is his brain and his bowels all in one, the wires and pipes all disconnected and poking out of ducts in the masonry, the mess of service shafts and lift machinery and suspended pitch-black floors overhead like the weirdly floating jigsaw pieces of his ego. I’m dwarfed, I have to admit, by what he can achieve – the size of his will when he wants to fuck the world.

He’s like Jessie: they can reach out and screw it, give it a good hiding; all I can do is piss about. Outside his shitpiles, I can cope, they’re no different to the monuments all the other grim bastards erect, carving their names on the planet’s face with a razor. But inside – inside, they always get to me, as if they’re designed just to show me what I’m not; and I feel his boot crunching down hard on my skull.

What’s hard, though, is to connect all this with the crumbling pisshole I left this morning. Something must have happened to drive him down there, to want to put that distance between him and this, not that I give a fuck. Was it Jessie? Were they already doing it – whatever she says – and he wanted to get her out of London to where he’d have her all to himself?

That doesn’t make sense. There’s more risk of exposure in the village than anywhere. Maybe Jessie wanted it? I know what I saw on her belly last night: a baby, a little embryo in an egg curled up above her cunt, painted in lurid colors like some sort of tribal thing, a tattoo, a taunt.

Maybe she wanted him on hand for the summer – his prick on tap? He’s smaller than her, he’s afraid of something – I feel it here, this isn’t a happy building, it’s a vast empty vault. What’s he got to be afraid of, if it isn’t her?

Me, for one thing. Now I know he’s alive, I can go on hating him. I can do this. But this isn’t for him, it’s for me. He doesn’t deserve this much attention. This is my entertainment, my madness.

I feel sharp. It’s safer in here than it was outside – at least for the moment. I listen and hear nothing, so I test the silence by snapping open the last beer and shiver and drink some down. It’s hard to see much in the darkness, but I know what I’m looking for. Up above me, above what’s going to be the huge Pharaoh’s asshole of a lobby (I never did ask the Prick how the Koreans feel about this whole Egyptian theme, how wouldn’t they rather have something that refers to their own culture – but what do they know, they build shopping centers that come tumbling down on top of their own people?), is a skeleton of metal girders, part cut away.

I see or think I do the round noses, the dense bulks, of oxyacetylene tanks waiting to be used. They’re a fair way up – maybe sixty feet away – but I’m good for the climb, so I drain the beer, stick the can back in its noose with the other, pick up the petrol and navigate around the crap and equipment on the floor, in search of a way up.

The service stairs take me there. The climb is worse than I expected – I’m totally knackered now, running on chemicals I didn’t know I had, losing the clarity that seemed to exist on the ground with each grinding step up, my legs limp and wet and leaden in the same moment.

I’m almost there, moving off the stairs for a second to check how far up I am and get my bearings, when outside the dogs start snarling and howling in a way that seems to lock right into every nerve-end on my body and twist them viciously. But there’s no suggestion of movement, no pack of slobbering monsters tearing up the stairs behind me to deprive me of what’s mine, what’s left to me. So I stumble on, my mind throwing itself against the walls of that stupid joke: How do you get a dog to bark? Pour petrol over it and it goes woof. How do you get petrol to woof? Light a match and it wags its tail.

It’s not easy ripping my T-shirt – I must really be shot, all my strength’s gone – plus I’m cold. I unscrew the cap of one of the plastic containers and fill the two beer cans with petrol, pouring it in slowly with shaking hands through the tear-shaped holes left by the ring-pulls. The smell revives me, the fumes snaking up my nose and into my brain to burn the outer layer, blow away the cobwebs.

I soak the scraps of T-shirt I’ve torn and stuff them into the cans’ holes, poking them in and cutting another finger in the process. Then I’m out over the steel grid – covered for the moment with planks of wood, their distance from the ground startlingly evident through the cracks – lugging the rest of the petrol to what is, as it promised to be, a store of welding tanks. I don’t know if this will work for sure, the tanks may not puncture, their contents not ignite, but it seems my best bet.

I try improving on their arrangement, hoping in the petrol-soaked brightness of my Boy Scout brain to pile them like the sticks of a fire, but I can’t get them to budge, either I’m so weak or they’re so heavy. So I just douse them where they are. I pour petrol over them and splash it all around – pissing in the dark with it, drinking in the smell.

I plant the two plastic bottles on the sodden wood platform, up against the tanks, leaving an inch or so of juice in each, then back off quickly, stumbling a little in the dark, but immune to the drop on either side now, back to the cans.

There probably won’t be everything I asked for in my Christmas stocking. I want at least nuclear fission. I want the Prick’s world and everybody else’s to fall in on itself like a ton of shit, like those endless burning images of the collapsing towers we saw on TV – but without the death, there’s only two people I want dead right now, and they’re not here tonight.