The War Zone (10 page)

‘We’re in deep shit, you know that?’ she says, the two of us united again now in joint defense of our misdeeds, except that I haven’t even enjoyed mine, whatever they were, and how can I trust her when she’s wrecked or is wrecking all our futures, even if the wreckage doesn’t show yet? ‘We’ve just got to stay calm and bluff it out. This is probably major coronary time. What did you tell Dad? How long did you say we’d be?’

‘I said it was just a ride, I didn’t give a time.’ I watch her. She’s not really bothered, she’s just going through the motions. Jessie can get away with anything and she knows it. Mum and Dad are going to be furious, but they’ll get over it and so will Jessica.

‘There’s death,’ she says when she’s reasoning her way through a problem, ‘and there’s being crippled or disfigured, but apart from that there’s nothing much, nothing much they can do to you.’ She doesn’t think in terms of humiliation. ‘Everything else passes. People forget. I do.’

I believe this last bit especially. Jessie forgets. She has a highly selective memory, good at remembering useful information but even then not infallible. She doesn’t care, she really doesn’t care. Even a grudge she might wish to repay, a score to be settled, will be forgotten if something more interesting comes along. She lives for the moment.

And the moment is now. We’re at the front door and Jessie looks wrecked, I hadn’t realized how wrecked until now. Maybe she did do something with Nick other than fuck him! But do they know about drugs down here? This is Palookaville, not London, where even your average council estate kid can tell the difference between smack and crack, between street-grade heroin and something special. Jessie has a thin smile on her lips and pink eyes, but perhaps she’s just tired and well-pleased by Nick’s attentions. Certainly she seems to have put our conversation out of her mind.

‘Look repentant but not too much so,’ she advises. She digs in her jeans for the key. There’s a gash on her mouth where I scratched her. And a series of red gouges decorate the calves of her legs where her jeans finish halfway down, which are nothing to do with me. ‘We just lost track of the time.’

If Jessie looks wrecked, Mum and Dad look worse. Mum looks pale under her tan, still dressed in the clothes she was wearing in the pub last night, any relief she might feel at seeing us totally wiped out by the anger which has kept her going until now. Dad has sharp grey lines in the skin at the corners of his eyes which normally appear only after a night up working or a night out drinking with his partners.

‘You two,’ Dad says as we walk in the doorway and they both materialize from the kitchen, ‘are spoilt little arseholes.’ It’s dark in the hall—the cottage seems darker than it ever does at breakfast time, not that breakfast time is ever this early—but Mum’s and Dad’s faces are clearly visible, their eyes raking over the two of us, checking us for damage, speeding ahead of their mouths in accusation. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Mum asks, staring at me but addressing Jessie, the older, more responsible one. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ Dad speaks slowly, trying to find the measure of his anger, close to taking us both and shaking us until it hurts either us or him, ‘if any of your motorcycle-riding friends comes around here looking for you, I’m going to take him off his bike and break both his bloody arms.’

‘Where were you?’ Mum has the aggrieved tone I’ve heard her use with her clients when they do a runner, fail to show up in court or for their probation officer. ‘Why did you turn your phones off? Your father’s been out all night, driving around looking for you.’

‘It was our decision,’ Jessie says, answering them both, making a show of strength which she knows will only count in her favor. ‘Well, not a decision really. We had a party on the beach. We just lost track of the time.’

‘It wasn’t much of a party,’ I add, seeing the next question forming on my parents’ lips. ‘We built a bonfire. And went swimming.’

‘Moron,’ Jessie whispers, crushing my burnt toes with her shoe. ‘Swimming?’ my mother echoes, a new look of horror transfiguring her face. ‘Do you have any idea how dangerous it is swimming off the shore here at night? What if one of you had got caught up in the current? Or swept against the rocks! What would you have done then? You couldn’t even see each other.’

‘There was a moon,’ Jessie offers, but she knows we’re just riding this one out. And we’re still standing in the hall, no one’s moved, the light hasn’t been switched on, we’re locked in this tableau of recrimination, but the gears are changing, the initial anger is running down, we’re bumping toward a new area of judgment and penalty. It’s Jake who breaks the spell that holds us all fixed to the spot by crying out with his eerie ‘I’m hungry’ call, the ghost of a cat’s wail, a sound which always leaves me feeling uneasy when I’m lying in bed at night. Mum turns and runs up the stairs to see to him and Dad, who isn’t nearly as ready as Mum to let go of his rage, ushers us into the kitchen, his silent, watchful gaze ominous as far as our getting off this lightly is concerned. He indicates two chairs where we should sit. This is the courtroom, we are the accused, but where’s our lawyer—Mum’s still upstairs? His back to us, he puts the kettle on. Jessie arches her eyebrows at me across the table, a look of superiority to everything, me, him, the situation. Dad’s hair, from behind, is sticking up on one side at a weird angle, like one of his architectural drawings gone wrong, as if he’s snatched an hour’s sleep in a chair at some point and it’s traumatized his hair, ironed it stiff in the wrong direction. ‘I called the police,’ he says, and my heart sinks. I can see this is going to take a great deal more explaining than either of us thought, we’re going to have to deal with the filth’s patronizing reprimands as well. ‘But I thought better of it.’ Dad still has his back to us, as if it’s more than he can do to look at us at the moment. He rinses the cups. ‘I thought, why bother them at this time of the night? If my children are stupid enough to go off with a bunch of paleolithic bikers—and I’m stupid enough to let them—’ He turns and looks at us now—‘then why waste the time of the authorities?’ I have this strange wish suddenly—strange isn’t a strong enough word—that this could be a schoolday, that we could get through whatever lecturing we’re going to be forced to endure, eat a token breakfast (I don’t feel hungry, I think I’m hungover) and then take off for school and a day of dozing through lessons and dropping subtly misleading hints about the night’s activities to whoever will listen. Except that I don’t have a school right now; I’m stateless, I’ve got the horror-prospect of starting a new one in September on top of everything else. Dad finishes with the cups and stands watching us. He says nothing for a moment, lets the intensity of his examination pin us to our chairs, a needle-like ray that is all the more powerful because we know in the more boring, rational parts of ourselves that he’s right, we were stupid, anything could have happened to us—and in Jessie’s case, did. This is what I fix on suddenly, that he’s not so much angry with both of us as furious with Jessie for taking off with a reject Hell’s Angel. ‘You ought to have more sense, Jessica,’ he says at last. ‘Even if you think you’re old enough to stay out all night flirting with the local rat pack, you should have thought about Tom. One o’clock, I could have taken. Half past one, even. But you’ve pushed it too far. There’s no point in us treating you as an adult if you’re not prepared to behave like one.’

‘Time just ran away with us,’ I say, in an effort to see how much this is simply between Dad and Jessie. ‘You’ve both got watches,’ he responds, his tone no less testy with me than with her. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like,’ Jessie says, offering her first real defense, although she seems anything but defensive, more like the roles are reversed and she’s explaining life to him. ‘You can’t constantly look at your watch. Either you’re having a good time or you’re not. If you didn’t want me to take Tom, you should have said so.’

‘Jessie,’ Dad says, his voice harder. ‘Don’t try me.’

‘We were in good company,’ Jessie goes on. ‘It could have been a lot worse. Nick’s great. He doesn’t smell and he’s got a job. I would have thought you might have liked him.’

‘If he’s who I think he is,’ Dad says, conceding nothing, ‘he looks ten years too late for life. Did he give you that?’ ‘What?’ ‘That cut on your face. That didn’t get there by chance. Is that his idea of a good time?’ Jessie looks at me and I look back, a dread building up in me not that she’s going to say anything about what we said but that what I’m witnessing here is somehow more fundamental than what I saw in the bathroom. Whatever Jessie thinks this is about, this is about possession. Dad thinks he possesses her, not just in the normal way that parents delude themselves that they possess their children, especially daughters—it’s more complicated than that now because of what has happened. He’s frightened, I can see that and it’s not something you want to see in your dad. He’s frightened he’s going to lose her. Or maybe he’s just shit-scared about the whole thing. But he’s also enjoying it, he’s like her, he’s high on the danger. And where am I in all this? Do I count? What does he feel about the rest of us now—are we still a family? I don’t even know if I want us to be. The kettle boils and cuts out. Jessie has taken a long time to answer. ‘Oh, that,’ she says. ‘I got a branch in my face on the way down to the beach. It’s nothing.’ Mum comes back down, Jack hanging on one tit, less bothered than any of us that the night is on its head—it’s bright outside but we’re all totally knackered. Dad puts tea in the pot and milk in the cups, a kind of ugly hard edge detailing every sound, even the closing of the fridge door. ‘You didn’t get that from a branch,’ Mum says, standing by Dad, supporting Jack in one arm, solidarity against the wrongdoers. She glances at me, searching for the truth, but I stare at the table trying to find the stack of torn envelopes and postcards and the cup-rings on the old wood interesting. ‘Can I have a glass of water?’ I ask, suddenly conscious of how foul my mouth tastes and wanting anything that will distract from the matter at hand. ‘There’s a glass on the drainer,’ Mum says, shifting to one side to let me up. I fill the glass, turning the tap too far and spraying a fierce jet of water over the sink, the wall, me. Dad pours three cups of weak tea, too impatient to wait for it to stand, and looks inquisitorially at me as I sit back down and he hovers over a fourth. ‘Do you want one?’ he asks. I shake my head without meeting his eye. Mum sits down, maneuvering Jack into a comfortable position on her lap while watching us like a border guard trying to decide whether to shoot us now or later, when our backs are turned. ‘I think we should all drink our tea and get to bed,’ she advises, a trace of our grandmother’s, her mother’s, Polish accent slipping through as it does sometimes when she is tired or pissed off. ‘Not before we’ve discussed precisely how we are going to resolve this,’ Dad says, allowing no room for argument. ‘You may think this is just bad news, coming home like this, and that it will pass. Well—’ He looks at Jessie first, then at me. He knows how our minds work, how much we’re anticipating the short, sharp shock—no funds, no TV, how bad can it get? He goes on, ‘This time you’re going to have to pay.’ Yeah? Well, bollocks to that! I’ve been through these before and so has Jessie. I can’t really see what the big deal is here. Compared to setting fire to the school, this is nothing. It wasn’t even a good time. But Dad is enjoying it. Even in my current fallen state, I can recognize a crap line when I hear one and this is an act. Dad knows we know we’re guilty; we’re not stupid. Mum’s right, we should go to bed and they can keep the screws tightened for a while when we get up. But this is what I thought: this is between Dad and Jessica, and I’m just caught in the crossfire. ‘You’re both housebound for a week,’ he announces. ‘No exceptions. No trips out, no shopping, no visits from friends, no phone calls, no email and no drinking.’ A frown in my direction, but I’m incidental. ‘And Jessie—no Nick. I know you’re going to be able to do what you like in a few weeks’ time, but that is then and this is now.’ A glance at both of us. ‘Is that clear?’ A moment’s pause. It sounds fucking terrible to me, but I’m not going to give him any satisfaction. So we’re dead for a week—so what? I scowl across at Jessica, trying to look unmoved. Her expression surprises me. She is staring at him with what at first might be hatred—instant hatred, the kind you can whip up pretty quickly when you need it. But it goes deeper than that; it’s a kind of interest, I can’t put my finger on it but it’s a kind of excitement. Mum, Jack and me are the fools. We might as well not be here. I don’t know if Mum suspects anything—maybe not, because there’s nothing obvious and it’s the last thing she would suspect. I’m sure it’s never even crossed her mind. But I’m stuck with it. I’m stuck with the knowledge and it turns everything to shit. I can’t even get angry with him in the normal way. I can’t even resent this punishment. Nothing’s normal any more. Dad puts his hand on Mum’s shoulder, breaking the spell with Jessie, resisting the impulse thank God to ruffle Jake’s minimal hair. Mum looks tired and tense. She is usually the one who mediates in these situations, giving shape to Dad’s anger, which is erratic and shortlived. But she’s feeding Jack and she looks ready to accept anything that will cut this drama short. Then Dad makes his mistake. And mine. ‘Have either of you got anything to say?’ he asks. Another silence. I hear myself breathing from a long way away. Saliva forms in the bottom of my mouth. My tongue prods against my teeth. My lips peel apart. The kitchen divides into irregularly shaped pieces: the pots and plates on the old enamel drainer, the dead flies in the lightbowl, the cups on the table, the ponderous drip of the cold tap, the cracks in the flagstone floor, my family’s faces, the ivy at the window. The fragments split and dance in space, jostling with swimming purple flecks of light. ‘Yes.’ The whole kitchen explodes. ‘Go fuck yourself.’

Sometimes it’s worse when they don’t get angry. You provoke a response, you demand attention, emotion, balls. You have to give a little bit of your life to get angry with someone. When

you cross the edge and nothing happens there’s something wrong. You don’t want permission to piss around.