Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

But then he’s laughing, too. And suddenly we’ve all got our shorts off, swimming bare-arsed in the middle of Devon on a Thursday afternoon, and it’s only me who’s feeling weird, who’s feeling as if there’s a party going on and I’m not invited.

Jessie and me are close. We talk a lot. We talk about everything. She’s a major source of information for me when it comes to the inner rumblings and eruptions that go through girls’ heads, and

I want to know that stuff, especially the darker side, the really funky, creamy, fuck-the-feminists-and-fuck-all-men-this-is-really-what-I’mabout sort of thinking. I’m already developing my own style. I’ve found I don’t just want to fuck girls’ bodies – I want to get inside their minds. Because unless you get that mental bang, unless you listen and you probe and you challenge and you push (to the edge, if need be), sex is like pissing about with a chemistry set without reading the instructions. You’re missing the potential for real danger.

And it seems to work. I’m doing OK. I’ll be honest – I haven’t actually got there yet, not all the way. But it’s getting closer. And even the dumbest girls I’ve met have a kind of poetry about them, if you can get past all the teen magazine and cosmetic counter bullshit they get brainwashed with.

But how do you ask your sister, ‘Is something happening with you and Dad?’

It’s not easy.

Jump ahead a week, maybe two. I’m not sure when, but there’s more water, it’s raining – the kind of warm, hard, summer rain that gets you properly drenched, like standing under a shower with your clothes on.

It’s one of those summer holidays that makes you wonder if the rest of your life’s going to be like this: always waiting for something to happen, while the world turns somewhere else. I remember when we first went into Iraq, when Bush really screwed things up, these were weird distant shapeless events that seemed like a bad dream but terrified the hell out of me because they were happening – in fact we seemed to be rolling toward disaster all too fast, and no one had asked me! I remember the words ‘National Service’ or ‘Conscription’ suddenly coming back into the vocabulary, and I thought, fuck, if this thing develops, if this thing goes on for long enough, it could drag me down with it.

But nothing has any moral certainty anymore, thank God. The ‘War on Terror’ was a video-age gig: the will isn’t there, not among the country as a whole, not this country, anyway. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a major Western war like the Second World War again. Not now. Not with a population whose priorities are a flatscreen TV and a weekend in Dubai.

Anyway, it’s one of those days. My life feels like it’s stuck away from the action, which is hardly surprising in Devon. Clutching at straws, I’ve actually been shopping with my mother. The compulsion suddenly hit me that I had to have a particular DVD and have it now, so I struck a deal with Mum: I’d go with her and carry the food if she’d get me the DVD. Of course, I’d forgotten we were in the wilderness. Not only did the shop in Sidmouth not have what I wanted, but it was a real struggle finding something worth buying. I’m starting to dream of London megastores, I can almost taste them: the iron-clad plasticwrap around every new release, the weird anti-shoplifting tabs, the desperate film company displays. It’s all bullshit, but I’m getting to the point down here where I’d love to be exploited, I want them to take my money (or Mum’s) and fuck my mind.

We drive through the village and up to our cottage, which looks oddly deserted in the rain – or vulnerable, like a house in a horror movie, waiting for the maniac to call. What I like about the house is its oldness: there’s lichen and stuff in the cracks between the stones, tree roots poking up right outside the front door, which itself is so hard to open and close that it might be easier to climb in through a window, and the garden is overgrown with the sort of lushness you see in old country graveyards (what’s under that soil?). What I hate about the house is its oldness: I bang my head on a beam every time I go upstairs, those tree roots outside work hard at breaking your legs and at night the timber and plaster that just about hold the cottage together sound as if they’re wanking in unison.

‘Tom, you carry the bags in, will you? I thought I heard Jack.’ This is one of the first times Mum’s left the baby with Dad and Jessie. I’ve noticed that although Bratto is already clearly an independent being, she still has some kind of radar link with him. It must he hard for her, I suppose, letting go of something that’s your flesh, though Jake (he looks like a Jake to me, none of this Jack shit) – Jake, I’ve watched him, just regards her as dependable room service.

I grab the thin white plastic carrier bags, all set to split, and leave Mum to run through the rain to the front of the cottage while I perversely walk around the back, slipping and sliding along the grassy bank on which I’ve already twisted my ankle once since we’ve been here. This route takes me past the bathroom – and the bathroom takes me somewhere else.

It’s occupied. I know this even before I’m close, because I can hear water (more water, there’s enough out here) swilling about. No voices, just water. Something makes me stop and approach more warily, so that even though the window panes are frosted and rainstreaked, whoever’s in there won’t be able to see the shape of me and the white bags outside. I’m a natural spy, not just a nosy bastard but someone who prides himself on being able to enter a room, give it a thorough search and get out again without leaving a trace of my being there. This time I’m outside, but I’m totally frozen, silent, wet, looking in.

From where I’m standing, body pressed against the wall in best guerrilla fashion, legs angled against the treacherous bank, I can just see past the small top window, which is open. The bank gives me some height – the cottage windows are low to start with – and by straining I have a clear view of part of the bathroom mirror, opposite. This in turn lets me see who’s there.

I hear Mum shouldering open the front door, the scrape as it jams open on the hall floor and the double grind as she struggles to close it (I should have done it for her). The effect of these sounds on the steamy figures in the mirror (unless I’m misinterpreting, and I don’t think so) is powerful.

Jessie is in the bath, her face dripping, her short hair clinging wetly to her scalp as if she’s just ducked under the water, her tits like a burn in my brain, closer than the image in the mirror, so that I can feel the pulse beating beneath them, even while my own has stopped.

Dad is kneeling, facing her. His knees (I register this in a flash, like part of a puzzle) must be between hers. In the instant I witness, as the first scrape of the front door takes effect, Jessie’s hands are scooping water to pour over the part of him that bobs above the surface of the bath – a string-operated thing, his tackle, a horse’s prick, uglier and more fascinating and more threatening than I’ve ever seen it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my mind has just run off through the rain and what I’m seeing is a waking blast from a weird dream. But the bags are at my feet, crammed with cereal boxes, salad stuff, baked beans. The cheap white plastic stretched around these lumps and corners has rivulets of water running off it on to the tangle of dead and living grass on the bank. This much is real, sharp, hyper-real if you like. And in the mirror, my sister’s eyes lock with my dad’s as he lurches forward, struggling to support his hands as he clambers out of the bath, suddenly too big for it.