Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I feel like I have a role here: there’s a reason for me coming, she wants me here. I have a sort of knight errant fantasy of myself rescuing her from all this – but to what? And does she want to be rescued?

I go downstairs and out onto the verandah looking for her, but instead find Magda, kneeling on all fours on the wooden slats, still in her baggy shorts and loose shirt, working out. I’m behind her and she doesn’t hear me – or doesn’t want to – and I watch a moment as she raises one leg off the floor and extends it, pointing her toes in a white line against the brilliant Picasso blue of the painted wood. She does this several times, then switches to the other leg, aware by now that I’m watching but buggered if she’s going to acknowledge me in any way at all. I find myself tempted to kick her off balance, to hook my foot under her straightened leg and dump her down on the boards, but I resist, instead taking a nectarine from a bowl on the table and biting into it – the first food I’ve had since a lukewarm bowl of cereal on St Vincent this morning.

One triangle of the verandah is in sunlight, fat bees hovering there at a large trough of violent red flowers. I cross toward it, scuffing my sandals on the wood deliberately to announce myself.

‘Do you know where Jessie went?’ I ask, feeling like an intruder, feeling momentarily that what Magda clearly thinks is right – I shouldn’t be here.

She looks around, a little breathless, pouting in that Polish way I’ve seen my mother do (but not so much Jessica), her face lined with sweat but whiter than ever. The stare is a practiced one – everything about Magda is practiced – but the annoyance seems real enough, and I take it as a small personal triumph that I’ve got something out of her more than plain boredom.

I take another bite of the nectarine, which is disappointingly dry and grainy, and turn away, finding my way down some wooden steps to the sea.

Then we’re swimming, Jessie and me, just the two of us, bare-arsed in the water, out in the bay away from the house.

‘Where’s Adolf, then?’ I ask, schoolboy-stupid again with Jessie. She still has this effect on me – I feel about nine years old and want to throw myself on her and fight. ‘When am I going to meet him?’

She rises up on a wave, a little above me, her eyes shining down, her tits refracted weirdly in the clear blue-green water.

‘You’ll meet him,’ she says, poking me with a toe. ‘He’s working hard on his castle. He’s so committed to it, it’s an obsession with him, yet it’s nothing much.’

She sounds almost sad for a moment, her voice small in the expanse of the bay. I watch her swaying up and down with the pull of the tide, but I ought to remember that this is when she’s at her most dangerous.

She fixes me with a smile and says: ‘I call it his pillbox, it’s not much bigger than one of those wartime fortifications, really. You remember the shelter, don’t you?’ And I don’t know what she expects – a prize for dragging my thoughts back to the shithole between us?

There are several small boats moored in the bay and we swim across to them, acting like brother and sister almost – pulling on their mooring ropes and diving beneath their hulls. I catch my back on one, which rakes my sunburned flesh, stinging like hell in the salt water and more sensitive to the harsh late afternoon sun when I surface.

‘These are all built here,’ Jessie shouts, swimming out in a wide arc around a tiny sailing vessel painted a soft white. ‘There are only two main livelihoods locally, other than tourism – boat-building and whaling.’

I cut across to her, then float, out of breath, on my back, half-listening to the words and wondering what she’s trying to convince me of.

‘The kind of whaling they do here is pre Moby Dick. ’ She turns onto her back also and I glance at her, naked in the water, tanned and curved and beautiful. I shut my eyes on the image, trying to shut my mind, too. ‘They go out, eight or twelve of them in a boat, and practically throw spears at the creature – if they find one. Last time they caught a whale was nearly two years ago. But when they do, it’s a feast, it’s a carnival, the whole island turns out…’

‘You weren’t here two years ago.’ I keep my eyes shut, drifting, water knocking at my ears, feeling the orange light through my eyelids pulse inside my head. I’ve known moments like this: this is too perfect.

‘You’re right—’ Jessie is inside there too, unscrewing my brain. ‘There are drawbacks. Some nights I go crazy, wanting just to get zonked and go out, go somewhere new. There’s very little outside stimulus, all the drinking water has to be imported, and if you want to eat, you’d better like fish because meat is hard to get – it’s fish for dinner tonight, okay?’ I hear her kick her feet and splash or do something in the water. ‘But the rest of the time, it’s brilliant.’

That one word does it. I hear her voice, that Chelsea cool, drawn out even further by God knows what influences here, and I know she wants something.

I open my eyes and turn over to find I’m facing the house, the bluepainted verandah like a matchstick model at the base of the dry, wooded hills behind it, seemingly alone in the water some considerable distance from the shore. Just for a moment, I panic, then I spot Jessica’s head as it breaks through a wave, farther from me than I would have thought possible in the time since she spoke, and I start swimming hard to follow her, follow her arse as it dips beneath the surface once more.

She’s laughing when I finally catch up with her. I think I actually resent the fact that she seems to be having a good time; I know I resent that she always leads and I always follow. But she’s broke, I tell myself, and in many ways she’s trapped on the island. ‘Why did you ask me here?’ I try, wondering if she expects me magically to unlock the Prick’s bank account.

But before she can answer – if she was going to answer – we’re distracted by a foreign voice calling her name. Magda is standing on the wooden jetty and though it’s hard to see her face, her cry (the only word I have heard her speak, I realize) and her whole stance suggests that her mood has not improved since I left.

‘Come on,’ Jessie says, swimming for the shore, but I hold her back.

‘How can you stay with these people?’ I ask, not caring whether my voice carries across the water to Magda. ‘They’re morons.’

And I stare at the whiteness of Magda’s arms and legs against the shoreline and instead see Wolf, grinning from the deck of his fishing boat. My hand nudges Jessie’s tit as I grasp her arm, the two of us treading water, and I try to imagine Wolf’s prick inside her, but I can’t – it just comes out as a fat, pulpy blob.

‘They feed me well and fuck me well,’ she tells me, pulling away with what might just be a desire for her girlfriend not to see us so close together. ‘God, you’re starting to sound so superior!’

I glance at the jetty; Magda has gone inside.

‘You like Magda, do you? Does she know she’s brain dead?’

‘Go to hell, Tom!’

And she puts her whole weight on me to push me under.

Dinner is on the verandah, with no sign of Wolf. To my astonishment, Magda does everything, insisting that Jessie sit and relax. She still won’t address me directly but does at least plonk plates on the table in front of me and then hovers, drinking iced rum and pineapple from a large square glass and looking oddly flirtatious in a fine white evening micro-dress, while Jessie and I are in loose, casual clothes.

I start hitting the rum myself, partly because the burn on my back is biting again but also because this place is getting to me – Magda’s performance, Wolf’s absence, the too-perfect setting. The air is stoned on this incredible sweet fragrance which Jessie tells me is from the frangipani trees around the house; and the sea, as the sun starts to set, seems to effervesce like soda water.