Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘And you only said you did.’

We’ve left behind us a Barclays Bank – little more than a concrete hut, presumably where Jessie would collect the wire transfers from the Prick when they were still coming.

‘How’s Dad?’ she asks.

‘He should stand for Parliament. He’d fit right in.’

‘What’s he working on?’

I look at her seriously for a moment. ‘Christ, Jessie, don’t ask me. I don’t care what he’s doing, I don’t want to talk about him. Doesn’t he email you?’

‘An occasional lecture about the diseases carried by decaying German architects. I must have them all by now. He told me he’d seen Sonia—’

‘Mum.’ Jessie won’t call her that any more, as if somehow Mum can be shafted with some of the blame. They don’t communicate, Jessie and Mum, not even at birthdays or during the drunken sentiment of Christmas/New Year.

‘He wants to see Jack.’

‘Well, he can’t.’

‘Ever? What’s she telling the child?’

Child? He’s her brother. It really is as if she’s severed some biological cord. ‘I don’t know. Mum can be every bit as ruthless as you, you know.’

She keeps her eyes on the road as we reach the top of the hill, and I get some idea of how small the island is – you could walk across it in a couple of hours. We drop down into a patchy forest of tall, feathery trees, and I watch Jessie drive, grateful for the silence and shade.

She seems different. Her hair is longer, her face finer than when I last saw her – though the rest of her has gained weight and form. She looks healthy, but there’s something else. She seems vulnerable, I realize, in a way she never was before. Breakable. In place – in the sense that she really does seem at home here – but as if something’s missing.

‘Are you happy?’ I ask.

She looks at me, driving the jeep fast over the bumps and ruts of what is now a dried-mud track. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Somehow this doesn’t seem enough.’

She laughs. ‘It’s more than enough! I was thinking – before you came – I can see myself here, a crazy old bint, running a bar on the beach when I’m eighty.’

‘They’re all Seventh-Day Adventists, aren’t they? Do they drink?’

‘There are always yachts in Port Elizabeth—’

Suddenly the jeep hits a rock and she slams against me, her head butting into my ear, dizzying me momentarily. She touches my cheek with her knuckles, driving with one hand.

‘But you’re right, it’s not enough.’

They’re not living in the Wagnerian thing yet, which apparently is cut right out of the hillside, and which I notice Jessie doesn’t take me to see straight away. They’re in a house in Industry Bay, a clapboard box on the water’s edge with a wooden jetty and a bluepainted verandah that looks as if the waves wash right under it.

There is no sign of Wolfgang, but Magda is there, who is Wolf’s girlfriend and Jessie’s too, I presume.

Compared to Magda, Sonny was like a sister to me. Magda cuts me dead. She’s sitting inside the house in virtual darkness when we arrive, on the floor, back against a vast, low armchair, pasty white knees angled up out of a pair of long baggy shorts and a shirt that swamps her.

‘This is Tom,’ Jessie says and Magda’s eyes flicker up from the book she’s reading, glance at me, then fix on Jessica as if the words mean nothing to her. My eyes adjust to the gloom and I see just how white she is – startlingly so for someone living here, with a ponytail of bleached blonde hair which seems totally out of place, far too arch for the instant dismissal meted out to me. It’s as if she’s decided I’m an arsehole from the moment I walked in and doesn’t give a fuck who knows it; though she’s the type, I try and comfort myself, who doesn’t give a fuck about anything. Maybe Jessie has fed her too much information about me? Or maybe I am just a prick – if Jessie tells me I’ll like her, what else should I expect but a hard time? They’ve probably got some subtle humiliation lined up for me later.

‘We’ll eat early,’ Jessie says – for my benefit? Magda’s? ‘Dinner is always early here. Life stops when the light goes, but we’re up at dawn mostly. It’s impossible to sleep past six o’clock.’

She seems uncomfortable for a moment – more uncomfortable than I’m used to Jessie being – working overtime to make me feel like a welcome guest. But then Sister Midnight puts her book down on the floor, pages open, and gets up, her legs unfolding with Swiss finishing school finesse. She goes out, one hand brushing Jessie’s arm on the way in a gesture that may mean something and may not, I’m starting to feel so paranoid. We’re alone.

‘Fuck that,’ I mutter.

‘Oh, Tom—’ Jessie seems to think the whole thing’s a huge joke; she’s laughing. ‘It’s so good to see you! You’re here!’ She hugs me again, tighter than on the dock, and I think maybe I’m overreacting, why should I care what Magda thinks? ‘What do you want to do? Rest a while? Your room’s ready.’

Jessie is close, I can smell a deep flowery oil on her and her hand keeps snaking around my back, giving me a playful squeeze. Through the open French windows leading to the verandah, I can hear birdsong and the waves breaking and see a rectangle of dazzling blue sky, but the room is dark and despite the bag at my feet and the colors and buzz of two days of traveling, I know where I am: I’m back in Devon, back in the cottage, with the unwashed dishes in the kitchen and the shithole shelter up the hill and the presence of the Prick near at hand.

Only he isn’t here, and I’ve yet to meet his substitute, his island-life doppelganger – the fat bearded Biermeister grinning inanely from the deck of a fishing boat in the framed photograph on the bleached-wood drinks trolley (it has to be Wolf, I know it, and the certainty numbs me in some strange way – that Jessie will let him fuck her).

Magda is Sonny and this is Brixton, too, and I understand still more that the world is a small place, you take it with you wherever you go, you can’t escape it – your own particular heaven and hell is ground into the meat you drag behind you from your umbilical cord when you crawl out of the womb.

‘I’d like a swim,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll just dump my bag and then I’d like a swim.’

A maid shows me my room – Jessie is cut off from all income, to the best of my knowledge, yet she’s living like this, with a maid.

It must be Wolf’s room, or a room he uses often, because there are old suits hanging in the wardrobe and a big, crumpled hat up on top, and there’s a shaving brush and a tube of soap on the chest of drawers and a thin, minty scent in the air, which I take to be his smell: his territory, marked like a dog’s.

There’s another photograph of him on the wall, no fishing boat this time and he looks years younger, this must be how he remembers himself – unbearded, still all of his hair on top, a wide, mobile mouth pulled back in a jokey grimace, but already a vaguely anguished look in his eyes, as if there’s guilt there or an anticipation of some horror to come.

But there’s no Wolf. He’s not here and I feel puzzled by his absence, though why he should go out of his way to meet me as soon as I arrive, I don’t know.

I stash my bag unopened at the bottom of the wardrobe and sit a moment on the bed, feeling weird, high on the heat and the unfamiliar bird calls and insect hum through the window, but confused too: pissed off with Magda, despite my attempts to ignore her, and somehow disappointed that this is all Jessie has managed, however exotic and nutty it may be – but, above all, thrilled to see her.