The War Zone (18 page)

‘They’re bankers,’ he says, ‘they’re fucking bankers and they don’t understand money.’

We check into a hotel. The Prick has meetings fixed for the morning to play big boys with the Koreans and their money. Jessie is seeing Sonny. I could go and see Luke except that I don’t want to spend any time with my old friends, there’s nothing to talk about, nothing I can talk about, and anyway Jessie says she’s set me up.

‘I’m not interested,’ I tell her, but I am, she knows that. I want to take back everything that she and the Prick have taken from me. I want to meet this person who can paint the greedy black hole that is Jessie. Sonny is part of the tunnel I’m in, I’m convinced of that—part of the pipeline, where time is counting down, where I don’t even have to follow my own reasoning, each moment is the last, nothing is repeatable.

‘Sonny’s brilliant,’ she says, and then with a laugh: ‘Golden showers!’ ‘I don’t need your help.’

Then it’s dinner. The weather changes abruptly, lightning flashing across the sky and rain tumbling down moments later. I think about the last time Dad and Jessie and me had dinner together in a London restaurant. Mum was there; this time she’s not and everything has been fucked in the meantime.

Jessie sits next to me. Some kind of weird thin black jacket is all she’s got on over her black stockings and she keeps nudging me with her leg, as if we’re sharing a joke or flirting or something or she just can’t keep herself still. It starts getting to me, really annoying me, because I’m thinking about Mum at home left out of all this, and Jessie and Dad are drinking wine and acting cool, he’s the proper parent and we’re the kids mucking around, he keeps us in line, he’s a wonderful father taking his two kids out like this, we’re a wonderful family, really close, really open with each other—he can talk about his problems and the need for a dynamic architectural language in Britain, and we can listen to his bullshit.

Until I turn and say, ‘Look, fucking cut it out, will you? You keep knocking my leg!’ And Jessie stares at me as if she genuinely didn’t know she was doing it, and the mood of the dinner changes somewhat.

We go back to the hotel, the rain crashing down on the Bentley and the sky flickering neon-white, only it’s weirder than neon, starker, lighting everything. Jessie rides in the back with me but hangs on Dad’s seat, so that he tells her to sit back because she’s obstructing his rear view. The traffic is chaotic because of the rain but he seems steady, as if he’s resolved something in himself about the Koreans tomorrow, his irritability only returning when Jessica suggests we go to a nightclub.

‘I’m not interested,’ he says. ‘Tom can’t go to a nightclub.’ Thanks,

Prick, for your sympathy and concern. ‘Yes,’ Jessie says, ‘yes you are,’ leaning forward, pretending I’m not there—or pretending she’s pretending. ‘A friend runs it. It’s only two nights a week. I can get you in and you can leer a lot and dance and make me sit up on the bar and protect me. It’ll be brilliant.’

‘I don’t want to go to a nightclub!’ my father snaps, turning around, flashing anger. ‘Shut up, Jessie, you’re drunk.’

At the hotel, Jessie and I share a room and she stands staring out the window for a long time, still in her jacket and stockings, watching the storm light up the river, looking like an image from one of her hip magazines. She doesn’t say anything to me and I don’t say anything to her, I just get into bed and lie there wondering if she’s waiting for me to go to sleep so she can creep into his room or whether she’s thinking about something else. I feel confused. If I’m going to do it, if I’m going to kill them both, I’m going to have to choose a moment and this would be as good as any. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I don’t seem able to plan it.

The storm moves away for a while, the thunder still close but not overhead. It comes back, circling around, and Jessie pulls a chair to the window and sits. I listen for her crying, because it feels as if she might be, but I don’t think she is. Then she wakes me, shaking my shoulder as I’m drifting off.

‘Have you still got that thing I gave you?’ ‘What thing?’ ‘In the car. The crystal?’ ‘I chucked it,’ I say, but I’m too tired to argue and she knows I’m

lying, so I tell her it’s in one of my pockets.

She finds it in the dark and takes it back to her chair. ‘Do you want some?’ she asks. ‘No.’ Outside, a burglar alarm goes off, followed by another. Jessie opens the vial and takes two quick snorts, one in each nostril. Thunder cracks overhead and I listen for sirens but there aren’t any. I get a headache and seem to fall in and out of sleep, but the storm is a separate force waking me and I glimpse Jessie in dramatic, broken flashes of white at the window and hear the alarms and hear her sobbing and feel confused and wonder where we are. When I wake in the morning, she’s gone, but she’s just in the bathroom and I don’t know whether she slept or not or if she spent part of the night with Dad.

The air in London is black, grainy, as if you can touch the carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or whatever it is that settles on everything, layering it with dust, running streaky

when it rains. We walk down the Embankment tube station steps, not really communicating but moving as a unit, brother and sister, through the bewildered foreigners and dossers and shoppers up for the day, clutching their maps and water bottles and asthma inhalers and stepping back as diseased mice dart out from wire-grilled no-go areas and dive under the rails, missing that middle one, the burner, the one with the charge.

The tiles in the station are new, shiny, characterless—a toilet that no one wants you to use, that’s been built just to prove that everything is clean, above board. The whole of the West End is constantly being renovated, laundered, shined-up, rewired, re-alarmed, so that you can see how thick the walls are and the color of what’s inside. They don’t hide the problems—they police them out, they keep them across the river, where we’re headed. It must be a lot like Nuremberg was. Or Dubai. Or Disney World.

I watch Jessie and me at the platform’s edge on a wall-mounted flatscreen as the train comes in. In the picture, we’re two-dimensional, lifeless, green. In the picture, I push or pull her, taking her with me. On this screen I could show my home movies, if I’d taken any. The shoppers and dossers and foreigners could watch as my father parted her bum and stuck his thing between.

The doors close, the walls move and we go under the river. The train stops for a long time and I feel the weight of water above us—if that’s where we are—and sit staring at the three other passengers in our carriage, condemned by their awfulness. An old man sits alone at the far end, his mouth propped open by some tube down his throat, gasping at the air and staring glass-eyed at nothing. A woman with spectacles and an evil, hating face looks up from her yellowed paperback and mentally sorts me out. I’m her son, she will beat me until I bleed and then go on for ever. A skinhead with a blotchy cherry birthmark and a knife scar down his neck sticks his boots up on the seat across from him and stares away from us, frightened by something in his head, moving his lips silently and clutching a brown leather sports bag to his chest, clinging to its scuffed, Union Jack-emblazoned bulk with a curled intensity that only a couple of well-placed kicks to his kidneys would push over into total despair. Jessie sits beside me, her shoes off, a faintly sweet smell rising from them to mix with the stale air of the carriage. She rubs her toes, massaging the digits through the filmy black net of her stockings.

‘I’m unhappy.’ My voice sounds strange in the closed environment of the carriage. I don’t know why I’m telling her. It won’t make any difference to either of us.

‘Oh?’ ‘I’ve never been this unhappy.’ She works her toes, poking her finger and thumb into the nylon,

forcing a channel to touch the tiny cunt between each one. ‘I can understand that.’ Can you? Thank you, sister. ‘Sonny will sort you out.’ The train moves again.

Clapham North. We come out of the tube and set off on foot, Jessie leading the way, looking oddly at home here—I didn’t know this was her territory. We cross the road from the station, running in the path of a huge articulated truck which deafens us with a slow wail of its horn, the narrowness of our escape showing me a picture of Jessie dead—by my hands not the truck.

I don’t know death, but it doesn’t seem so far away. The Prick’s mother died, but she was just someone from my childhood. She was a grandmother, a warm presence at Christmas, someone who hugged me, but she was old and smelt of oldness and old perfumes, she was a bit dead already.

Jessie walks in front of me now, the truck forgotten, wearing black stockings, a short tartan skirt and the jacket from last night and I think about her stiff, cold, still. Her body would look sad, dead—I would have to join it, to follow her; I think I’d float her in a bath and climb in beside, slopping water over the top, using her cocaine blade to slice little chunks off myself under the surface.

I know I want to kill them, but it worries me sometimes whether I can. Killing Dad will be a struggle—his surprise, his resistance, his refusal to bend to anyone else’s will. I’m smaller than both of them, though not much smaller than Jessie, but I’m expecting a superhuman strength. The thing that frightens me most is not being able to finish them off. I know I can start it, but can I keep it up—if I use a knife will I lose my nerve once it’s in, will I do one and not the other, or will I just fall back when they try to fight me off and collapse in a corner regretting my whole fucking life?

We walk to Brixton, my eyes on Jessie’s legs, the side of her head, the heat and the movement around us. An army tank rumbles down Railton Road, charging along, clearing everything in its path, an army goon standing up in the turret, imagining himself in Kabul, Mosul, Tehran—somewhere where he can open fire on the bastards.

A bunch of schoolkids watch him from a wall, turning up their boombox and jeering, sticking their heads into plastic bags and sucking the nitrous oxide in, or whatever it is, chucking the petrol bombs in their brains instead of on the streets. Three Muslim men walk toward us, a huge dog on a leash tugging at one of them, a woman walking beside him in full
chadur
. Her veiled eyes stare at Jessie as if she can’t decide, but then she does and turns away.

We cross and head up toward Herne Hill, the traffic at a standstill, the sky a chemical green, hot, threatening rain. A bus has broken down and a ripped seat has been stuck out on the road behind it. Fat women with prison faces wheel shopping trolleys in and out of the legs, the litter, the broken pavement slabs. A businessman walks in the street shouting obscenities at the thin air. Cracked toilet bowls and stained sinks are piled outside, offered for sale. An ancient poster of Bush with ‘World’s No.1 Terrorist’ in bold letters across it is plastered across a closed Post Office door.

Jessie leads me up a side street, past the razor-wire-topped fence of a dismal school playground, down the side of two houses and through a rickety back garden gate to a kitchen door. She knocks and we wait but no one answers. She tries it and it’s locked, but Jessie seems to be expecting this. She stands back and aims her foot at the bottom righthand panel and kicks. The first kick doesn’t do it, so she kicks again and then twists the handle and the door pushes inwards, jamming on a mat.

We go inside the kitchen, a pisshole of a place with cups and dishes stacked up alongside rusty housepaint pots and rags. The walls are peeling and damp and the floor is covered with grit and bits of rubble where something has recently been smashed. Jessie takes me through the house, up the stairs to a landing with three locked doors. She tries one, but this time when it doesn’t give she leaves it and takes me back down to the kitchen. So far we’ve hardly said a word since we left the tube. She starts digging in the cupboard under the sink and asks me something I don’t catch.

‘What?’ ‘I said, “Coffee?” ‘Yeah, OK.’ She finds some, and retrieves a kettle from behind a black plastic

rubbish sack. She fills it and puts it on to boil, tipping coffee from the jar into two of the cups and hunting around for something to stir it with. I watch her, thinking she’s a stranger, wishing she was, wishing she was just someone I’d met who’d brought me back here—then, even if she was meeting the Prick and I was going to watch, it wouldn’t be so bad, the betrayal would seem almost normal.

‘Will you tell me something?’ I say as she pours hot water on the coffee and stirs it with a discolored spoon. ‘No milk.’ She holds out a cup. ‘Did you fuck Dad last night?’ The cup burns my hand. I let it. Jessie leans against the sink and looks at me. She doesn’t say anything, but I think she wishes she could be rid of me, her eyes have that hard look. It’s not hard enough, though—she doesn’t want it enough to do anything about it. I’m just making her life more difficult. Then we hear the front door open. It slams shut and someone mounts the stairs. Jessie calls out ‘Sonny?’ and dumps the coffee down and vanishes into the hall. I tip mine into the sink, regretting coming, feeling that even by going along with Jessie this much I am weakening my drive, dragging out the inevitable, but I’m desperate to taste what it is that’s so all-powerful, that’s rammed the Prick into Jessie with no regard for anything—what sex is. I’d rather do it without Jessie’s interference, but there’s not time. I don’t care how it happens, how anything happens. I don’t care.

At the top of the stairs a door is open and in it stands a beautiful black girl who has one hand on Jessie’s neck. They are leaning back from each other, taking each other in, staring at each other in a way that doesn’t surprise me one bit, though it’s something I understand almost without understanding. She is stunning. My heart sinks at the thought that I’m the joker here again—she’s Jessie’s girlfriend, why bring me?—but Jessie must know something, she’s promised me this payment, this bribe.

Sonny is taller than both of us. Her legs—long, slender, shiny—disappear into a strange frilly outfit that’s like a 1950s bathing suit and I can’t take my eyes off them, their length, their color, their finely honed muscularity—like my mother rather than Jessie: Sonny is someone who works on her body.