The War Zone (11 page)

So Dad must really be off course not to rise to that. If Jessie had said it at this particular moment, I think he would have slapped her, which is not something I can remember him doing in a long time, but the rules have changed, they look like they want damage, those two, they’re locked into something like two fighters circling each other jabbing for first blood.

But I said it, and Dad’s self-control is the last thing I want. He stands there, waiting, letting me reflect on my words, watching Mum to see if she’s going to comment but she’s less excited by language than action. ‘You’re tired,’ he tells me finally. ‘And it’s our fault. Go to bed.’

And in the bathroom, trying to clean the shit out of my mouth, Mum makes a point of hugging me—sternly, to let me know that this has been a hard night all around, but a hug just the same. ‘Why do you always make things worse for yourself?’ she asks, the voice of my childhood when I used to drive them both wild ripping up papers, drawings, court documents.

I almost want to cry and I swallow some toothpaste trying not to. It would be so easy just to sink into her arms instead of resisting the cuddle, maintaining my stance, the struggle, my independence. How can I tell her that nothing is all right, it’s all bad and getting worse? Would she believe me anyway? Do I want her to know? She ought to—I need her to, I need her help. I don’t know how much more I can handle on my own, but the weird thing is I don’t want it to stop. Not now, not at the moment. I’m tired and my eyes are stinging and the toothpaste has burned my throat, but when I’m not tired, when I’m fresh and awake and reasonably conscious, what I have, to fight the feeling of my life slipping away and the summer holidays sinking toward term-time and hell, is Dad and Jessie.

Mum has stopped holding me. She’s standing watching me in the mirror, loving me, she never stops loving me. But she can’t stop the system that grinds us all down and maybe Dad and Jessie can, they should be able to fuck the machinery if anyone can. I don’t know what I’m thinking any more, except that I think I need the idea of Dad and Jessie in my mind like I need London. While it’s only me who knows, in a way I control it.

The birds are singing outside. Mum’s in the mirror and so is the bath, but this is a different angle and Dad’s still in the kitchen and Jessie’s upstairs and it’s not raining and she’s not sloshing water over his peeled-back foreskin.

I could tell her now, but I don’t.

Sometimes when the cells in my body are really buzzing and the blood’s pumping and I’m feeling truly insane, I know that the weather is just another part of my dream. I create everything—you,

me, my parents, day, night, this shitty cottage, the mosquito spattered on the bedroom wall, the ugly old woman from the village who walks past our scrawny front garden at least three times every day and squints in with eyes diseased with resentment and age and a life which has either turned her into an aching sour cunt or was something she never understood, never grasped, in the first place. Is this suffering all my doing? I must have tumors warping my brain. I want to start again, clean. Scrub this out, dig the pen in deep as I scribble over and over and over again, eradicating it, removing the pain.

So the weather’s my fault too. And it’s weird, it’s like me, up and down, changing every minute, blowing hot, cold, grey, black. I lie on my bed trying to listen to my iPod or read a comic book or squeeze my eyes shut and make myself stoned, and the weather keeps getting in the way. Sunlight flashes in through the window like photographic arc lamps, blazing hot for a moment then dimming as the sky darkens and a wind shoves dishwater clouds across the sky. Minutes pass and it’s bright again and I can feel the heat nudging me, edging into the room. Then thunder, great intestinal cracks from the sky, and it pisses down, torrents of rain beating against the earth, smashing the grass down, pummeling everything in its reach, wanting—and I understand this—to hurt.

Lucy comes, soaked to the skin, and rattles on to Mum for hours about her aunt in France and then starts vacuuming, and I wish I could control her, my creation, better. I’ve been shut inside for three days, allowed out only within a short radius of the cottage like a dog on an extending but finite leash, and the flashes of light have just been false holes in the prison sky, impossible to get to grips with, insufficient to recharge my failed batteries.

Her hair smells when she comes into my room and she seems to have grown larger, firmer, as if she’s been exercising, toning up for more vacuuming or whatever else it is that she does with her time.

I don’t shift from the bed. If Lucy is my invention, her damp and wrinkled clothes will simply cease to exist, her jaw will lose the bored, slightly clenched set it has to it and she’ll vacuum me with her mouth, the cord tying us together in an unmanageable, flailing heap. But she goes on and I lie there listening to noises coming through my headphones, music starting and stopping and starting again, jerking forward and backward like my life, words drumming in my head meaning nothing. You can’t tell me what it’s like to be black in England, I think, as I listen to a singer using New York beats to describe Notting Hill. Because you’ve got a fucking MySpace page and you wear a baseball cap with your band’s name on it.

‘What?’ I hear my own voice, muffled, a surprise. I don’t know what I’m saying. Her mouth moves again. Sadly, not on me. She shouts, ‘Feeling sorry for yourself then?’ ‘Not very.’ She doesn’t switch off the vacuum cleaner. I don’t turn off the music. ‘I hear you had yourselves a party.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ ‘You didn’t invite me.’ She stands, arching her neck to get rid of an ache, eyes tired, no longer looking at me. I keep the headset off my ears for a moment, but she says nothing else, sticks the vacuum head under the bed, knocking the dulled metal side quite aggressively, breathing over me a dry waft of stale cigarettes, her eyes meeting mine only once, no message I can discern. If she’s my invention, she doesn’t know it.

And where’s Jessie in all of this? How does she take to her incarceration? Like a bat to water, like salvation to a crime. She switches into a different mode, using the time available to even things up with Mum, sticking and unsticking an endless flow of disposable nappies, singing to Jack to knock him out, generally being more companionable than she has been of late, though not so much that it’s obvious.

I watch her with Dad, to see if it’s a cover, to see if they’re just faking this punishment—she’s taking it too well, there must be more to it. But they keep their distance, not showing any particular resentment or interest, no sustained, message-laden eye contact that I can catch, no sudden flare-ups, not even much body contact, which in itself is unusual for Jessie. She seems suddenly domesticated, teenage mum time again, like one of those awful ex-punk blonds (not that Jessie could ever be blond) who discover family life. Jessie has a side to her that could almost settle for a Chelsea existence, married to a stockbroker or some other wimp criminal from the City, except that I think she’d chain him to the bathtaps after three weeks and go mad after four. The domesticity is a pose and it’s one I can find only two motives for.

‘You’re either feeling guilty or you’re groveling and it’s a sickening sight,’ I tell her in one of my more foul-tempered moments locked inside the cottage’s storm-blackened gloom.

But Jessie is unreachable. ‘You’re not handling this well,’ she says. ‘It’s like pain. Go with it. Enjoy the punishment. You have to want denial. Otherwise it’s boring.’

The ultimate sin. Nothing is boring for Jessie, she won’t allow it. I don’t even know if she cares about not seeing Nick or if pretending she doesn’t is a way of double-thinking Dad, making him feel more uneasy than if she were fretting over the situation. If Dad is what’s important to her, she’s not showing it—unless she is by not showing it. Maybe she’s sucking up to Mum to freak him out? I don’t know. I just know she is not my invention. Lucy, I might have managed, but Jessie, no way. I couldn’t invent her. She cannot be another part of me because I haven’t got it, I don’t have her cool, it’s all head-on confrontation for me—but Jessie, life bends to meet Jessie’s will, life is something she strokes until it comes.

Day five of the life sentence. Late afternoon. It’s rained all day but suddenly the sun has come out and it’s hot, so Jessie and I have set ourselves up outside. She’s got her ghetto blaster

playing endless bloody reggae and I’ve erected three deckchairs because Mum is going to join us, we all want reconciliation now. Dad is inside, intermittently screaming down the telephone at his London office, barricaded inside the living room against what is apparently a real crisis, as opposed to the crises which occur once a month. He still loves it, fuck him. He loves the attention, even if it comes as trouble.

Jack is wailing upstairs and Jessie has gone to sort him out, all part of the war effort. Mum flaps down the kitchen step, having failed to find the other wooden sandal she’s been searching for, and sits next to me, impressed to find me reading.

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about death. Drilling holes in your head.’ Actually it’s about cricket, but even that seems like a form of death right now. ‘Why don’t you read the books I buy you?’ Mum sips the drink she has brought out with her. I know there is nothing I could read that would shock her. I bought
The Story of O
when I was ten, but her only reaction was that I’d find it too intellectual. ‘Because you buy me books I don’t want to read.’ Jessie appears with Jack’s carrycot and hovers over us, supporting it awkwardly with one hand underneath, the other holding the straps. ‘Do you think if we put a towel underneath it, it would be dry enough?’ she asks, dragging the grass with her bare feet and finding it wet despite the sun. ‘Wait a minute,’ says Mum and she goes off to get a bath towel, which I could have done only I’m not into Jessie’s play-ball-with-thescrews number. ‘You know Jack’s secret?’ Jessie asks as Mum returns, spreading our ropiest towel on the ground in the shade of one of the chairs. ‘He wants to be at the center of everything all the time. He was screaming because he was upstairs on his own. The best place for him would be in with Dad, listening to the bullshit.’ She sits down. Mum is fussing over Jack, who throws an ugly glance in my direction. Jessie pouts at him, pulling her T-shirt over her head to point her brown tits at the sun. ‘He’s totally sweet.’

‘He’s part of the same disease that we are,’ I say, staring at Jessie’s skin which is dark, foreign, usable—not like my prissy English anemia. But Mum and Jessie ignore me, Jessie turning up the Rasta music she uses like a drug so that Mum can’t even hear me. Mum sits down again, stretching her legs out and reaching for her glass. There’s a dead fly floating where the ice cubes have melted but she doesn’t seem to care. ‘You drink too much,’ I shout above the noise, looking for an argument, conversation, anything. ‘You and Dad. You’re always drinking.’ She smiles, puts the glass down beside her. ‘Are you surprised? It’s parenthood. You try it.’

‘Jessie’ll get there first at the rate she’s going,’ I say, suddenly struck by the horror of the thought—I wasn’t thinking specifically of Dad, but what if his sperm made a baby inside her? No, Jessie takes micro-estrogen or something. Does she? I’m not sure. Anyway, no one listens. I stare at the book in my lap. I’ve got my swim shorts on and there’s a boil on my thigh just where the corner of the book is touching it, headless, the muck spread out under the skin in a welt, impossible to squeeze. Jessie talks to Mum over the grinding reggae, every track the same, and I tie a line between the rotting cells in my leg and the tree by the collapsing stone wall at the end of the garden. It had leaves less than a week ago and now it’s dead. The few that are left are grey and yellow at the edges, their texture turned to paper. We’re not halfway through August and something’s wrong, not just with my life but with all the systems, natural, man-made, whatever. Or is it me, am I the only one, is everyone else having a ball? ‘Penelope’s brother is selling his car,’ my sister informs my mother as Jamaican poverty thumps out of Chinese plastic on a Devon lawn. ‘It’s a brilliant soft-top Morris, lime green, you saw it when she came to pick me up that day. Do you think there’s any chance—?’ ‘Yes?’ My mother sounds only half interested. She has her eyes closed; she looks beautiful like that, vulnerable. I sit musing over how Jessie came by that particular piece of information about Penelope’s brother since we’re banned from using the phone and she hasn’t been checking her email as far as I know. But Jessie always has ways. She scratches one armpit, then on down to a rubbery nipple. She looks at me. I look away. ‘Well, Dad said that when I can drive next year, you’d get me a car. I know it’s a bit early, but it’s the only one like it, I used to see it all over London, you could spot it everywhere, I don’t think they can clamp it. It’s perfect.’ She waits. Mum doesn’t open her eyes, but she tilts her head in Jessie’s direction. ‘I wouldn’t mention it at the moment if I were you,’ she says. ‘Not quite yet.’ And Jessica bites a finger, running her teeth thoughtfully up and down it in the absence of anything else, timing this conversation perfectly, helped by the insistent distraction of a driven black voice intoning a song which seems to consist entirely of listing the chapters and verse of the Old Testament. It doesn’t ring true. She doesn’t. It’s as if she’s trying to react as she normally would in this situation, trying to reassure Mum that she’s got the same preoccupations as any girl her age—any spoilt middle-class brat, as we both are. ‘Do you think Dad means it about Nick?’ she goes on, closing her eyes now, screwing them up as she faces the sun. I move my legs, impatient with her, and knock my book on the grass, tipping Mum’s drink over. ‘You know your father as well as I do,’ Mum says, watching me right her glass and not offer to get more. The music rocks on, music to praise Haile Selassie to, music to start a riot to. ‘You haven’t mentioned Nick before, have you? What’s he like?’ Jessie frowns, eyes still closed, the toes of one foot clenching and unclenching on the ground, wearing away at the grass, digging a hole with her big toe. I get up. ‘He wasn’t interesting before,’ she says