Alexander Stuart - The War Zone - 20th Anniversary Edition

I’m frozen for a moment longer as Dad, grabbing a towel, vacates the bathroom with a guilty speed. Jessie is left alone, left with a backward glance from him that in one shot is so much the father I know and a person I don’t that I want to stick my fist through the glass to let him know I’m here.

Mum is with Jack, I can hear him crying now. I can imagine Dad walking into the bedroom, having toweled himself furiously, playing it cool: ‘Sorry, Jack was so quiet we left him. I needed a bath, it’s so fucking sticky. Jessie’s just gone in now.’

And there she is, flushed with the heat or something, soaping herself like some prim tart in a TV commercial. God, I’d like to know what goes through that head of hers, what makes her radiate rightness and ripeness. She’s so like me, so much my sister, my flesh, that the truth dangles in front of me, a carrot I can’t quite touch.

‘Fuck them both!’ my mind cries, as rain snakes unpleasantly down my back. I kick the carrier bags, which is a stupid thing to do, since it only makes me lose my footing and land hard on the unyielding rim of a tin. ‘I don’t want to know,’ I try to kid myself. ‘I don’t even care.’

There is a moment which is so beautiful it makes everything else worthwhile. You stand on the cliff above the village, early in the morning or late in the evening, and you gaze out at the sea – a huge, changing wash of light and movement, bigger than any of us, a joker with a patience longer than any one life and an inconceivable strength that can snap your back against the rocks as easily as you might flick a fly off your nose.

I can feel how cold it is, even when it’s warm. Even when the water’s not skimmed with a purple film of oil, and the pebbles and seaweed are stewed in the sun, I can sense the ocean’s cold heart further out, out by the skyline. Jessie’s tried to paint it, but she can’t get close. Either the beauty is there or the darkness, but not both. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about art, but I’ve noticed that in British paintings the sea always looks sort of murky or angry or drab or just somehow different from the way it really is. Jessie’s pictures are nothing like that: she sees with a foreigner’s eyes. If my sister’s a reincarnation, I’d say she was African, via the slave route to Barbados, then on to Nicaragua or the like (and she probably fucked herself into some luxury and some whiteness along the way). But even she can’t get to the heart of the water, not with her powder blues and her baked-earth red.

It’s not just the color, it’s the color of light, it’s the mood of the sky and your own cross-wired soul. Down on the beach, it’s the druggy thunder-hiss of the surf dragging at thousands of pebbles, as if the sea’s in training for the greatest glue-sniffing contest on earth. Up here, with a view of the sheep and the cottages and the coastline, there’s just the image, no sound, and a faint tang of brine in the air, like a taunt or a memory.

It’s more than a moment. It’s repeatable, though it’s never the same twice. It’s where I go to stay sane down here, it’s where I go when I miss London, when I want to work out what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

I’d be there now, getting soaked, if I wasn’t so determined to speak to Jessica. If I can get her alone, there are a good few questions I’m going to ask, but it’s as if she senses this. She’s playing for time, Miss Florence Nightingale, helping Mum change the baby and scrub the vegetables for dinner. I’m in the doghouse, meanwhile, for dumping all the shopping in the rain.

I watch Dad. I watch everyone. Suddenly I feel like a spy. I’m the one who’s different, I’m the one with the knowledge – I wouldn’t trust me, if I was them.

What’s changed? My mind is working overtime, reassessing everything. But Dad seems the same, snapping open a beer as he dumps himself into one of the cottage’s chintzy armchairs to sort through a pile of unopened office mail.

‘How far would we have to go, do you think,’ he ponders aloud, screwing his face up into a mask of weariness and disgust, ‘to get away from all this crap?’

‘Not much further,’ Mum offers from the kitchen. ‘Another phone call like yesterday’s, and they’ll probably take you at your word.’

There’s a long pause in which Dad seems to be replaying yesterday’s phone call, enjoying the recollection of what was obviously a choice exchange.

‘They love it,’ he says. ‘Panics the accountants. They won’t know what they’ve got unless they’re made to sweat blood for it.’

When it comes to work, Dad likes a bit of passion to enter into things. I don’t think he’s happy unless emotions are aroused, and certainly where his current scam is concerned – a bloody great steel and glass pyramid for a Korean bank in Docklands – he’s played devil’s advocate from day one. Bad enough that he has to work for these wankers, he says – no reason to make it easy for them. But I think it’s a bluff. I think his work is what drives him, and coming down here to Devon has nothing to do with getting away from it all, it’s just another way of giving them the finger.

Dad peers in the direction of the kitchen, stuffing the torn envelopes he’s been opening into one of the big manila ones. ‘Why?’ he asks Mum. I stare at his eyes, his mouth, my dad, my chum, and see him pointing his dick at Jessie. ‘Does it bother you?’

‘What?’ Mum is slicing carrots or something, chop, chop, on the wooden board. Jessie darts through the room and goes upstairs, trying to avoid my eye but not quite succeeding.

‘The phone call. Would you care if I just said forget it?’

Mum appears in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, and lets him have her shrewdest gaze.

‘The only way you’d forget it would be if you could take it away from them, and even then you’d want to twist the knife an extra turn. We could be in Peru and you’d still find a way to fight them longdistance.’

This seems to satisfy Dad, which is no doubt what it’s designed to do. Mum’s great strength is that she’s a master bullshit-detector; she keeps us all on course, and how do we repay her?

‘You’re right,’ Dad says, suddenly restless in his chair. What’s he thinking now, is it the way Mum’s holding the knife? A thought knocks through my mind – it’s chaos in there. ‘Peru wouldn’t solve a thing.’

Jessie is upstairs, doing whatever it is sisters do in their rooms by themselves. I burst in. She’s got one shoe off, one bare ankle on the bed, the other decorating the floor, her back to me, her leg twisted sideways out from under her, an incredibly awkward position which seems to have her deep in thought rather than involved in any change of footwear.

She turns as I come in, guilty, lost, absolutely aware of the power she has over me.

‘Are you happy?’ she asks.

‘Why, don’t I look happy?’

‘Don’t know.’ She brings her foot down to the floor, kicks the other shoe off. ‘How do you look when you’re happy?’

‘I’ll let you know. Jessie, I want to talk.’

‘Right.’ She’s marvelous. Her guilt – if that’s what it is – is instantly banished. ‘I’m looking for something. You can help or keep out of my way.’

She dives into a large cardboard box crammed with the stuff she wouldn’t let the removal men touch when we came down here. I don’t know how to start. I stand staring at a postcard tucked into her mirror, a Rodin sketch of a woman contorted into a far more uncomfortable position than Jessie’s when I entered, her muscles all pushing against her penciled flesh like life trying to get out.