The War Zone (19 page)
She catches me looking, hovering still at the top of the stairs, and scowls, spinning her eyes to Jessie then me then Jessie and back again.
‘Definitely related!’ she says with a slow laugh and some kind of wonderful mixed South London accent. She shows us into her room, which is stacked high with magazines and newspapers and dominated by a huge canvas, unmistakably the same style as the picture of Jessie, this one a six-paneled group scene of floating women’s and men’s torsos, the women all loaded with tits and the men’s dicks each bloating into a goldfish bowl. ‘Sit down, boys and girls,’ Sonny says, standing in the doorway where we’ve passed her, staring at us, staring at me, the door still open. Her eyes are liquid and yet I feel like I’m being medically examined, sliced up and peeled apart, searched for further evidence of closeness to Jessie. ‘How have you been?’ Jessie asks, sitting on a mattress in a corner of the room, picking up a monstrous bone-crushing glossy magazine and opening it. ‘I’m good.’ Sonny shuts the door and turns away from us, walking through into what looks like a tiny kitchen and loo combined. I sit on a chair and watch her legs while her back’s to us, feeling sick with myself just for being here, for getting excited like this, getting a hard-on. ‘I’ve just seen Jazz,’ she says, bending to open a midget fridge, my eyes following the line of her thighs to the two fingers of blue polkadotted bathing suit that meet where she meets under the frills. She turns and peers over her shoulder. ‘I’m getting a car, can you believe that? I’m going to be driving!’ She comes back into the room with a bottle of wine and a corkscrew. ‘Here,’ she says, giving them both to me. ‘You’re the man.’ And she laughs. ‘If the car is from Jazz,’ Jessie says, turning the pages of the magazine, her legs no doubt losing all feeling beneath its weight, totally ignoring me as I struggle with the bottle, ‘I wouldn’t count on doing too much driving.’
‘No, it’s great, I’ve seen it.’ Sonny flits back into the kitchen, a thick, flower-sweet perfume wafting from her. ‘It’s wheels, anyway. A car with no name. And no owner. Probably has different number plates front and back—’ ‘If it has them at all.’
‘—if it has them at all.’ Sonny emerges with two glasses and a paper cup. She puts them down in front of me and shoots me another fierce scowl as I struggle on with the cork. She retreats over to a small stereo system on a table by the window and turns on a CD. Something old comes on, music I know but can’t place—old American city music, conjuring up grainy black and white YouTube videos of summertime ghettoes, burning tenements, spouting water mains and beatings from visored cops. Sonny sits on the bed next to Jessie. ‘Martine’s been messing me about again,’ she says, leaning her arm and chin affectionately on Jessie’s shoulder, so that a thought I’ve been fighting since the first moment I saw them together returns with a vengeance—the physicality of their relationship, another part of her world that she’s kept me out of, another dimension to Jessie that seems to diminish rather than increase what truth I know about her. ‘She is so immature.’ Sonny pulls back and seems to study Jessie’s ear. ‘She has a real nigger attitude, you know what I mean?’ ‘She’s a cow.’ Jessie turns and I hardly recognize the look: jealousy, a kind of one-sided hostility that expects to bite more than get bitten. ‘I know you don’t like her…’ Sonny leans back and gets her cigarettes and a mirror and a paper sachet. ‘But she’s beautiful when she’s not coming on like some smug self-satisfied bitch.’ I finally manage, flushed and straining, to force the cork out of the bottle and pour with a shaking hand two glasses. I hand them over with a stupid terror: I am headed toward oblivion, yet here I am, desperate before a stunning black dyke whom I’d love to fuck but whose only interest in me is probably as some sort of cat toy for her and Jessica. ‘Do you have any beer?’ I ask. ‘Beer!’ she screams. ‘Look in the fridge.’ And without missing a beat, to Jessica: ‘You look great.’
‘So do you.’ I go to the fridge, which is almost empty, but there are two cans of beer there, so I take one and hold back a moment, drinking it and glancing at the toilet, the basin Sonny uses as a sink and the postcards covering the wall, dozens of them, some just straight-on shots of ugly hotels, others more touristy, exotic. There’s a couple of art cards and a bunch of pictures of Sonny and friends, and a picture I recognize of Jessie when she was about nine or ten, which freaks me out: it’s like seeing a part of my childhood pinned to a foreign wall in a dream. Then I see a shot of Sonny naked, bending over and peeking between her legs while a white girl who’s also naked except for a Fulham FC hat rests a long spirit-level on her arse. The two women together look somehow complete, like the Prick and Jessie, like the rest of the world, enjoying things I know nothing about. I stare at Sonny’s tiny ridge in the photograph and the black hair and her dark brown skin and the pinkish lips and feel she’s expecting me to look at this, or Jessie is—it’s all part of the game and I’m determined to break it, to not be a part of it.
I go back through. Sonny and Jessie are laughing at some private remark and doing coke, so I walk right over to them and say to Jessie, ‘This is boring, I’m leaving.’
And Sonny looks up at me, dabbing her tongue with the coke on her finger, and says, ‘No—wait. Have a toot. Relax.’ Then to Jessie, ‘Does he?’ And me again: ‘It gets better. I’ve got toys to play with.’
Her mouth is in my eyes as I look away—wide, smiling—and I know she resents my presence, whatever she pretends, but something about the curve of her accent as she says ‘toys’ sparks a dull electric charge in my gut and in my prick, and maybe the coke will numb it, will help me just to stop caring, so I crouch over the mirror and snort, feeling cold, wishing I could bash Jessie now—and Dad and Sonny—and crawl into that lifeless bath with her.
Sonny leans across to reach a small cupboard door with a key in the lock. Her thighs are virtually in my face now as I hover over the mirror and I can smell her skin, the focused finger-point of her perfume, but it’s Jessie she’s leaning on, Jessie her blue frills are crushed against, Jessie she wants to touch. The key is just out of reach and as she gets up to go to it, their eyes meet. ‘You think he’ll like them?’
‘Tom’s up for anything, aren’t you, Tom?’ Jessie says, rescuing the magazine that Sonny’s been sitting on, pushing it at me. ‘Have you seen this?’
I take it, hefting its weight, and sit on the floor and stare at the ad it’s open at. A large photograph of Sonny, the full height of the page, confronts me with what looks like Paris in the background, and the brand name of a high-end tequila.
‘Fueling the capitalist machine,’ Sonny says dismissively, glancing over as she turns the lock. ‘But fucking it too.’ She grins. ‘A dozen crates of that stuff and you could overturn an economy—shit!’ The door is jammed and she has to brace herself against the wall to pull it open.
My head is starting to feel sharp as Sonny unloads the cupboard, kneeling by it and removing weird solid shapeless white objects that I find I can focus on to the exclusion of everything else. I stare at them where they litter the floor around Sonny’s knees and feel a kind of ruthless certainty that I’m going to screw her, whatever she’s interested in. She struggles to lift a larger, heavier one, swinging it onto the floor closer to me, and suddenly it’s obvious—this last one has hips and thighs attached and rests on its arse, the legs reaching out into space then stopping where they’re cut off.
‘My pussy collection!’ Sonny confirms, and Jessie pisses herself laughing. ‘What do you think?’ ‘It’s brilliant,’ I tell her, not really sure what to say, but not caring either. I’m going to fuck her. ‘You do a lot of those?’ ‘They’re like beautiful sea creatures,’ Jessie says, picking one up and fingering it. ‘Where’s mine?’ ‘It’s here,’ Sonny says, finding it and passing it to her. She turns to me, her voice deepening and sounding grand as if she wants to convince me, though I know she’s taking the piss, too. ‘These are a national art treasure. To redress the balance. I take plaster casts of my friends—’ a glance at Jessie ‘– and one day when I’m ready, I’m going to dump them all on the Royal Academy.’
‘The Royal A-cunt-omy,’ Jessie corrects, handing me hers. ‘Right.’ I turn Jessie’s cast over in my hand and feel a chill. It’s all there, all the detail of her cunt and arse, Dad’s playground, like a relic that will be left when they’re dead. I feel her watching me and stare at Sonny, who seems to be enjoying this, sitting on her heels with the big sculptured torso between her legs, the white of the plaster a shock against the smooth brown of her thighs. She runs a finger down the tract in the middle, stroking the molding with a tiny circling motion performed deliberately for me. ‘This one’s mine,’ she says and I see Jessie watching me still, drinking her wine. ‘Show it to him,’ Jessie says, putting the glass down. ‘I am.’
‘No, I mean show it to him,’ Jessie repeats, getting up off the mattress and onto her knees. She looks at me and with total confidence puts her hand on Sonny’s groin, sliding the plaster torso aside and slipping her fingers under the tight blue polka-dotted gusset of Sonny’s outfit and pulling it back, stretching it taut to reveal—what? Black bristles, pinky-brown lips, a sort of affronted vertical gasp that opens and closes again as it adjusts to Jessica’s pressure on it. My eyes fly between Sonny’s cunt and her face, wanting to look but wanting to look away, too—Jessie is playing with both of us, but we’re letting her, we could stop her if we had the will. ‘Tom’s interested all right, aren’t you?’ she says, grinning at me and resting her other hand on Sonny’s shoulder, massaging her neck. ‘He likes to look.’
‘You ever seen one of these before?’ Sonny asks, and the flash of her eyes convinces me that I do hold some interest for her—as Jessie’s brother, as a sort of male extension of Jessie. ‘Chocolate fudge split.’ She draws the words out, accentuating them, and suddenly I realize I’m more embarrassed by her reference to her color than I am by staring between her legs. ‘I’ll take the fudge,’ Jessie says, rolling down a strap of Sonny’s suit and unpopping a tit which she immediately kisses. ‘And Tom can provide the cream.’
‘Oh God, Jessie,’ Sonny groans, dipping down to meet her face with her own and laughing. ‘You can get out of here right away. You know I’m not into that.’
‘But he’s my brother,’ Jessie croons in her ear. ‘Close your eyes and you won’t know the difference.’
I feel like a dumbo. I feel more excluded than ever—watching Jessie like this is almost worse than seeing her in the shelter, because this is her trick, her taunt, this is the absolute proof of her total control over me. I am not as strong as her, I have to take account of that—I should never have come along, I have to make her an abstract entity, something I can deal with at a distance, someone I can force through to a torturous death without entering into conversation.
‘I’m not your fucking puppet!’ I tell her, erupting out of my own thoughts into their snogging and pushing myself up, ready to kick them both where they are and get out of here.
‘Calm down,’ Jessie says sharply, pulling back from Sonny as if she can switch gear whenever she wants, we’re all just balls in her juggling act. ‘This is going to be worth it for you, I promise. You need to see, Tom, what your life is about. This is going to open your eyes totally.’ And she sounds for a moment like Mum wanting me to be there when the baby is born.
Sonny looks at her, one tit hanging out, the dark brown nipple wet where Jessie has been chewing on it, and then she grins and starts rocking and singing, ‘
It’s a fam’ly affair…’
I feel shock for a moment and wonder how much she knows, but decide she’s just thinking about this, now, Jessie, me—though why it shouldn’t be more, I don’t know—maybe she’s totally clued up about the Prick, maybe she and Jessie get together and act out an all-girl version of their scenes, what do I know?
Then Jessie takes Sonny’s hand and plants it on the fly of my jeans, jerking our strings some more, pushing Sonny’s fingers between the buttons, and I’m standing here—two good strides would take me out of the room—and I can’t leave: if I leave Jessie will think I’m scared. If I stay she’s won, but if I go she’s won too.
Sonny’s hands pull my fly open with no great excitement—this isn’t where her interest lies—so I shift my anger to her, my mind drumming ‘I’m going to fuck you, whatever you want,’ over and over, as she uncovers my dick and holds it like a wet fish flapping in her palm.
I grab her waist nervously, but I’m clumsy and knock her off balance, and she shoves me, angry for an instant, complaining, ‘Take it easy!’ But there’s a numbed simplicity to everything that must be the coke and I put my mouth to her tit where Jessie’s saliva is still damp, and see Jessie’s hands roll down the rest of Sonny’s bathing suit and linger in the space between her legs even as she warns me, ‘Treat Sonny gently, Tom—she’s got a fierce temper!’
And they both laugh and Sonny turns around, virtually kneeing me in the groin as she thrusts my jeans down with her leg. Then she steps out of the frills Jessie is holding and over to the stereo, which has been quiet for some time. Jessie crouches in front of me, the only one of us who’s still fully clothed, and tugs my jeans over my shoes, glancing at my prick as if it’s some kind of toy version of my father’s—a cheap, molded plastic imitation. ‘Just be patient,’ she whispers at me. ‘Don’t blow it.’
Sonny slips a new CD in and goes through to the kitchen-loo, swaying to the music, totally relaxed and happily naked because of Jessie, not me. I crouch on the floor, my dick dangling pathetically, and watch her as she opens a drawer, her arse bobbing to the beat, her breasts dancing on their own, the nipples drawing a line across my brain like a flesh-brown jet trail.
I feel condemned, the way I did in the tube, only different—dumped in a room—a music video set in a riot zone, only there’s no riot; another pathetic empty box where my life moves from A to B: this is where I experience sex, if you don’t count watching my father bugger my sister; this is where she looks on as I get my dick up some friend of hers whose cunt she no doubt knows better than I ever could.
Sonny comes back through, clutching a handful of black plastic rubbish sacks, humming a sort of counterpoint to the music in a rich, clear voice. I stare at the dark ridge of her cunt as she walks toward me and think about the photo in the kitchen and Lucy—I wish this was Lucy and I was alone with her now—but then I’m distracted by the bags and wonder what the hell they mean as Sonny tells Jessie, ‘Help me spread them on the floor.’