Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘Isn’t the Caribbean where the Yanks dump all their nuclear waste?’ I inquire. ‘And toxic chemicals. They aim it at Cuba, but some of it must overshoot. Is this fish we’re having?’

‘No.’ It’s the first word Magda has spoken to me.

‘What?’

‘It’s not fish.’

‘Oh.’ I glance at Jessie, who seems surprised too. I can’t believe that Magda would go to any great trouble for me, and yet she prepared the meal – apparently the maid only works in the afternoons.

Suddenly Magda is almost voluble. ‘Cesar came while you were swimming.’ This is to Jessie, not me. ‘He brought a delivery.’ She stares at the serving dish in front of her. ‘Pork.’

Jessie knows I don’t like pork, but this hardly seems the time to get fussy. She says nothing, just starts talking about the sunset, which is completely different from what she’d led me to expect – like a weird memory of England. The sky is a shade of pale tropical orange I’ve never seen before, but the clouds are spread out in a familiar dappled fishscale pattern – little hints of purple and blue here and there – stretching down to an horizon which only needs a railway track or a few Devon sheep superimposed over the palm trees to be somewhere else in my life entirely.

‘We should have driven over to the other side of the island,’ Jessie says, staring at me with those eyes that cut right through to my soul. ‘You could have watched the sunset better from there.’

‘Are you painting?’ My voice sounds more aggressive than I’d intended, but I feel angry – she stole it from me once along with everything else, a sky like this, the world through my eyes.

‘A little. Not enough, probably.’ She reads my anger; does she understand? ‘This island is hard on you. It’s too easy to make pretty pictures.’

She picks up her fork and digs it into one of the disturbingly neat slices of meat Magda has cut. She hesitates. Magda is still standing, drink in hand, some element in the thread of her hostess dress catching the fastdying greenish light and sparkling. My eyes keep returning to her – she’s like an actress in a dream that’s almost real. She sees me looking and stares straight through me.

Then Jessie wheels around to her, fork in hand. ‘For God’s sake, stop this shit and sit down!’

The force of her outburst surprises us all, I think. It relieves the tension, but only momentarily. Magda pointedly finishes her drink, turns the glass in her hand rattling what’s left of the ice against the side, then finally sits at the table with us.

Jessie starts to eat and I try to do the same, but the taste of pork has always made me gag and each mouthful requires an effort of will to swallow. I feel Magda somehow knows this, though, and I will not give her the satisfaction of asking for something else, hungry as I am. She picks at her food, not speaking, staring past me along the verandah most of the time, and for a while there is only the strained clink of forks and knives on the plates and the roll of the sea below the house. The sun dips and disappears quite abruptly and the electric light, when Jessie turns it on, flickers.

‘Will Wolf be joining us?’ I ask finally, sick of game playing, this sense that I’m simply an unwelcome foil for Magda to respond to.

‘I thought he would.’ Jessie’s voice, even when she pisses me off, is a ticket to some special, protected place. ‘But sometimes he sleeps on the job.’

This sparks a snort from Magda, which I realize after a moment is intended as a show of humor on her part. It’s clearly a private joke. She leans one cheek on the back of her hand and peers at me. ‘We have no telephone here at the house,’ she says. ‘He could be dead on the road and we wouldn’t know it.’

This is all I’m getting. She looks away. I push my plate back, tired suddenly, and sit watching the two of them. The light flickers again, but my eyes feel heavy and I think it’s the rum. Then I’m plunged into darkness and Jessie says ‘Shit!’ and I know it’s not me, the power has failed, but it’s all right. It’s more peaceful not having to watch Magda act and I just want to sleep.

‘We have a backup generator—’ Jessie bangs her chair on the floor of the verandah as she gets up. ‘But it’s too much hassle to start.’

I hear her go. I’m too smashed to move or do anything. The sound of the waves makes me think for a moment that I’m back on the beat-up ferry that brought me here, but then I hear Magda put something down on the table (her glass? the darkness is total, I can barely make out where she is) and Jessie comes back carrying a candle and a thick wooden bowl.

She puts the candle on the table and sits with the bowl in her lap. It’s weed and there’s a flatly-rolled spliff already prepared. When she offers it to me, I take it and light it with the candle flame, hoping it will bury the thought that’s forming in my head. It doesn’t. If anything it makes it sharper, and as I smoke and pass it to Jessica and she passes it to Magda, I have the unsettling conviction that our roles have reversed, that she needs me, that I’m the stronger one – she may be older, but now I’ve a clearer idea of who I am, what I want.

But do I? I want to be involved, I know that, I want to be locked into some struggle that’s happening somewhere, Tibet maybe or Somalia. I don’t care how I’ll do it. I’ll use the Prick’s money happily, I’ll take it from anywhere I can get it. I don’t want this: a slow death in a tropical paradise, a nice bourgeois fuck-party, two dykes and an absent Kraut. But I want Jessie, I know that. There is no one I can find like her, that’s the trouble – yet if our roles have reversed, it’s no good, it’s another one of those twisting never-ending mind-fucking puzzles.

‘What are you going to do?’ The question is out before I even realize it.

Jessie looks at me, laughs. Her voice is stretched and a little twangy from the grass. ‘Tonight? Or for the rest of my life?’

Magda gets up and moves around to sit on the verandah railing across from me, her back to the night. Jessie watches her. It’s a stupid question.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

I stare at Magda, paler than ever by candlelight, as if she’s trying for total anemia, the sight of her putting the mockers on anything I might think I’ve resolved. She sits on her perch, facing me, her straw-blonde hair limp around her shoulders, the white dress taut across her legs, and I realize I have a fine view where her panties might be of her cunt, which has been shaved. The unsteady light makes it deeper and more shadowy than it might otherwise seem, like a face grinning sideways at me in the dark. For a moment I’m riveted by it; I can’t take my eyes off it, but then I start to recognize the hand of Jessie, consciously or otherwise arranging things, and I see now that Magda is watching me stare, and I explode:

‘Why don’t you both just go and fuck each other?’ I get up, turning to Jessie. ‘This is another one of your parties, right?’

But Jessie takes hold of my arm and pulls me back.

‘Sit down, Tom. You’re being foolish. You always get things out of proportion.’

‘Do I?’ I sit down.

But my anger seems to have done the trick. Snow White gets down off the verandah railing and says good night. Not to me, of course, but to Jessie, bending to kiss her slowly on the mouth, her tongue pressing between Jessie’s lips and teeth in what I take to be a Polish finger directed at me.

And we’re alone.

‘You love it, don’t you?’ I tell her. ‘Winding me up and watching me dance.’

‘You’re just too easy to provoke.’ She smiles and her eyes have the deep, sharp light I miss when she’s not there. ‘You know I love you.’ She looks so beautiful – she always looks beautiful to me – that she makes me doubt myself again, doubt that I’ve come any distance from the cottage. I’m not stronger, I’m lost. She called and I came running. She has twisted the shape of my life – always – yet I give her more love, more commitment than I can ever find for any girl I’ve met – or for Jack or for Mum. I don’t know how or where she stacks up against the Prick’s sick greed and yet I think of Jessie as a person, damaged or not, and I tend to think of them only as victims.