Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

‘Yeah, I do,’ I say, just to say something.

‘Come on, I’m not tired yet, are you? Let’s go down by the water.’ She picks up the candle and something else in the darkness and has me follow her along the verandah, down the steps and over a broken rock wall on to the wooden jetty. There’s a constant hiss from the insects and the sea is lapping, getting on my nerves. There’s no moon, only the stars and the light from the candle. Jessie turns from me and puts it down, dripping a little wax onto the deck of the jetty to stand it in.

She straightens up. She has a fruit knife in her hand.

‘You weren’t much good with one of these, were you?’ I feel sharp again suddenly, like I did with the grass. I want to laugh, but I feel seriously nervous. This is just another game, I tell myself, but there’s a sick feeling in my stomach – not because of the knife; my gut is knotted because of a thought I’ve just had: we have eaten Wolf. That was no meal we had, that was her lover. Those neat white slices I couldn’t chew seemed slightly worn, if I think about it. Sad and tired, with an ingrained stain – like old underwear. This is ridiculous. I’m stoned, but the knife is real.

‘Is this what I’ve come for, then?’ I say.

‘You still don’t know much, do you, Tom?’ She points it at me. Life is perfect. It has its own system of mirrors; it balances. I know now what the Prick saw when I turned the knife on him. It’s so close – your loved one with a knife. The line between holding it and using it is so fine.

She’ll do it if she wants to, I know that, and there’s a part of me that wants to know what it would feel like, but it’s not all of me. Not any more. Her voice cuts across the warm void between us. ‘Were you going to do it that night? Did you really think you could?’

‘I thought I’d try.’ We haven’t moved. I listen to the night: the nerves of the insects, the slap of water on wood. This is a magical place but it’s nowhere special, it’s all the same. Devon could be back up the hill behind me. We need this.

‘You know what really pissed me off?’ I say. She shakes her head.

Should I try something, go for her arm? ‘You did it again – with that body paint or whatever it was. You took my moment from me.’

She laughs. ‘That wasn’t meant for you. You looked so – determined, coming in with the knife. I would have finished it.’

‘Would you?’

‘I might.’ Silence. ‘Move past me to the end of the jetty, will you?’ I stare at her. ‘Why did you ask me here?’

She twists the fruit knife slightly in her hand so that the blade catches the candlelight. It’s small, smaller than the one I had that night. There’s a tiny curve at the end, but the whole thing is so short I wonder how deep it would go in me.

‘I miss you,’ she says. ‘I miss the thought of us.’

‘No, you don’t.’ I watch that hand, the hand with the knife. ‘I was only ever your audience. What do you want? You want me to watch you and Magda knocking around? Or is she going to piss all over me?’

‘I worry about you sometimes.’

‘That’s crap! You’ve never felt guilt in your life.’

‘I have about you.’ She takes a step back. ‘Not guilt, maybe – I just wonder who we are.’ That’s lost on me. ‘Move!’

I walk past her carefully, then think, ‘Fuck it!’ and turn my back on her, saying, ‘What are you going to do, push me in? It’s only about eight feet deep.’

I feel her move behind me. ‘Do you want to know how it started with Dad?’ Her voice is just another part of the night. I stare at nothing – no, at the vague darkness of the water moving.

‘The whole thing was the baby – the night Jack was born. It was the night we’d all been canoeing and swimming in the river – I’d tipped you in, remember?’

She pauses, but I’m not hearing or only half-hearing her. This is someone else’s life we’re talking about; I’m not interested in the past, any past.

‘We were alone in the cottage. You were asleep. I’d wanted him for a long time, Tom. All my life. I was just working up to it.’

I think I hear tears for a moment, like the night in London when a storm raged and I slept fitfully in a hotel bed and thought I heard Jessie sobbing. But it’s just the water lapping at the jetty below.

Her voice continues behind me as if she’s trying to convince herself, not me.

‘It was the birth, all that blood. I’ve thought about this and I’ve come to the conclusion that in a funny way Mum brought it on herself by having us there. I knew what I was doing – I wanted what she’d had! And somehow in my mind it became a kind of weird female solidarity, a sharing – everything was possible, there was nothing to stop us.’ Somehow this hurts more than I thought it could. I turn my head and I’m surprised to find her standing over me – I’m sitting on the jetty and I didn’t even know it.

The thin fabric of her skirt brushes once against my hair and I smell her smell, heavy like the frangipani and oddly threatening. I feel tense and want to move my head, but there’s a dullness now in my mind that won’t let me fight, won’t let me move, as if my every reaction is on trial here when it should be hers.

I sense the knife close to me, like a cold element drawing the air toward it. My feet dangle over the dock. I hear my voice: another part of me, the part that can deal with this. I can’t.

‘And that’s when he did it?’ Him – the Prick – his cuntishness made it happen. I can’t let go of that fact.

She touches me. Her knuckles brush the nape of my neck, chilling my spine.

‘It took half the night to get to it. We were drunk but he wasn’t that drunk. He was sober enough to enjoy the fear. It had started in the river. Well, it had started a lifetime before that – my lifetime! But he was high on the idea of Jack, high and shit-scared at the same time of what he might do. That was the only thing that gave him the balls with me: death rattling off the numbers, reeling him in a little closer. I think he would have fucked anyone that night. I just made sure it was me.’

It’s nothing new. There is nothing in the world she could surprise me with. But still it hurts when I remember how weirdly innocent that day felt – or feels now; perhaps the last time I really thought of us as a family.

My head floats in the night with a knife at my neck, or perhaps it’s still her knuckles?

I want to hit her. I feel a familiar pain – an opening onto a dangerous store of anger I don’t want to touch because it’s too long-established, it’s like going back. I turn to look up at her.

‘The baby – was that just more bullshit, or were you serious?’ She nods. ‘But he’s terrified of fucking me now. Anyway, that’s not what I want.’

‘What do you want?’

I think I know the answer, though I don’t want to admit it – because admitting it means I’ve thought about it too. I stare at her legs. If I grabbed her now and pulled her down, I think I could get rid of the knife without too much trouble.

As always, she’s ahead of me. ‘You’ll see I do this better than you.’

And almost nonchalantly she swipes at me with the blade, cutting my cheek.

I go for her, but she’s above me and she dodges to one side, bringing the knife down to trim a line through the shirt I’m wearing and across my back underneath, then tossing it into the water so fast and so decisively that I’m stunned.

‘There,’ she says, like the schoolgirl she once was, proving her point. ‘I can’t do it either. But I never wanted to.’

I’m on my feet, the cut on my back feeling cool and fresh and dampening a little. Her tongue comes into my mouth and I jerk my head back, frightened by the taste of her, her breath, the hint of rum in her saliva. But I’m lying to myself, because I do want it, the click of our teeth knocking together, the replay of Magda’s kiss running through my brain – as if we’re in competition: I’ve got to go deeper, get beyond anything that mindless Polish zombie could.