Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

But I light the fuse anyway. I toss the first can before it can blow up in my hand, and watch it sail toward its target, a trail of flame from the burning plug of T-shirt. I reach for the second, but before I can grab it, there’s a flash the colors of old Catholic paintings – the colors of Jessie in Sonny’s painting – and as I spin myself around, a blast tears across my back and shunts me off the platform, into the night.

The burn on my back hurts like hell. But I must want pain, I must feed on it, because this morning at the harbor in Kingstown, I had my shirt off again and refused to put it back on even when an evil-eyed St Vincent priestess refused to serve me in a café, and shouted after me into the street, as if my naked chest was some sort of personal affront. I think I’m trying for total skin cancer as a surprise gift for Jessie; she always liked to see me suffer. I reckon if one morning on the beach in Barbados can sear a blister right across my spine, a little lunchtime sun in St Vincent ought to do the rest.

The Prick is paying for this trip, which is a joke in itself. For five years I’ve made him sweat over every penny he’s tried to spend on me, refusing presents, then accepting them, then giving them back or, better, sending them back with sick reminders of what he’s done glued together from newspaper and magazine print like anonymous, threatening letters.

Now I’ve decided he’s had enough. He’s done his bit to undo the damage; he even persuaded my mother to see him last month for dinner, but she was like a one-woman assault force before it and came home afterwards, shut herself in her bedroom and wept, so I think Jack might be seven, eight or older before he gets a chance to learn at first hand what a cunt he’s got for a dad. But I think he’s had enough, Dad. He’s taken his punishment like a man. Now I’m going to start taking his presents graciously. His presents, his checks, his car, his selfrespect, maybe even his girlfriends if I get the chance. Me and him can become good mates now. There are times when I’m with him when I almost start liking him again, but I won’t let that stand in my way.

The boat to the island is typical Jessie: a fucked-up old sailing hulk peopled by an ugly mix of holiday-tanned tourists and yachting types and the quieter, funkier faces of locals who have learned to live with nutters like her making their homes here. There’s even a scraggly goat tied up to the bow, together with a couple of pigs lying heaving in the sun between the crates of Coca-Cola and the baskets of green bananas. I could never quite work out if it was Jessie who influenced Sonny, or the other way around, but whatever it was, Sonny seems to have left her mark.

Jessie told me in her emails about the skies here – sunsets rapid, green and sharp, as if the sun’s on coke – but in the half hour since we left St Vincent it’s clouded over in readiness for giving me a hard time. The sea has quite a swell now and the boat is constantly tilted one way or the other, but somehow the heat and voices and the sight of flying fish skipping over the water make it seem less vast and daunting than it used to in Devon – smaller, as if a few years or a few thousand miles have diminished its strength, its scope for impressing me. Maybe it’s just the absence of cold – but perhaps it is cold down there, deep down there.

The world seems a small thing compared with my life these days. It took only a few seconds for Jessie’s last email to reach me, but the decision to come was still more instant and the trip itself was arranged in less than a week. Of course, Jessie and I never stopped seeing each other the way everyone else did. Even the month Mum had to spend with me in hospital, right after the blast (which was what saved me, me being thrown from the platform), when I was under psychiatric observation and the police were poking around and she was fighting like hell not to go to pieces in front of them – out of some weird, misplaced loyalty to Dad or to Jack or someone, or some middleclass resistance to outside interference: a determination that we could drive our own wedges between each other, pass sentence ourselves on the freaks and sinners in our midst – even then, Jessica managed to engineer a couple of meetings when Mum was gone and I was mobile enough to hobble down to the hospital chapel or the toilets to tell her what a hopeless bitch she is.

It’s funny but this trip now – standing here, holding the side of this lurching, beat-up old ferryboat, halfway across the world from everything I know – has the inevitability that drives some things in life, like a short circuit leapfrogging time, distance. She didn’t so much invite me as order me to come (‘You’ll be a prick if you don’t, this is the best time of the year. And, yes, I miss you – there’s no one to pry into my personal life, and I’ve a friend I think you’d like.’), but I know there’s more to it than that.

Dad has cut off her money because of the setup she’s fallen into: a threesome built around an ageing Kraut architect and his fuck – or other fuck, I suppose. I don’t think Dad’s anger has anything to do with age, race or the risk of physical violence Jessie might run if passions get aroused on a remote island. It’s more a question of professional rivalry – even if all this Nazi has achieved in the past three years is to rebuild some strange Wagnerian-style folly that was already there on the island.

Dad has done some sterling work himself in accepting that Jessie sleeps with other men (she claims, though I’m not sure if I believe her, that he now finds this a relief: he’s lost the taste for his own flesh) – but another architect, as old or older than himself, is asking too much.

I think he was happy for me to come out here because I might bring her back. I’m happy to be here because, without Jessie, there’s no pain. I am definitely addicted to her, and as this tub draws closer to where she is, I can see her, only in my mind as yet, I can smell her breath, her skin – and I’m ready for her, for it to start again.

She picks me up in a clapped-out jeep at Port Elizabeth, waiting on the quay with what looks like a markedly less aggressive assortment of the harbor life that hassled me and hustled me in Kingstown: porters ready to help unload the baskets and crates and trunks, townsfolk waiting to greet their relatives and friends from other islands, passersby just excited by the ferry’s arrival, a Rasta selling fruit from a stand right in front of the tiny police station, children running everywhere in faded cockatoo colors, shouting and giggling and – unlike the St Vincent waterfront brats – not demanding money from every foreigner.

‘So what do you think?’ Jessie asks after we’ve hugged a welcome that feels only slightly forced, false. She looks like she was born here: more tanned than ever, wearing a bikini top and a loose, flowery skirt which she hauls up around her brown thighs to drive the jeep.

‘You couldn’t pick an island with an airport?’

She turns by the police station, shouts something in French at the Rasta, who laughs, and heads us up a road past scattered shacks and bungalow-type buildings, the whole hillside covered with huge banana palms and God knows what else.

‘They’re talking about building one,’ she says. ‘It will ruin this place. What’s home like – hot, cold?’

‘Awful. I can take the weird weather but not what we’ve become. No one gives a shit about anything and meanwhile we’re practically a police state. More security cameras per square foot than any other country on the planet. We’re a real banana republic!’ I look at her. ‘But you never did care about those things.’