The War Zone (25 page)

‘Stop it!’

And I open the door. I don’t even knock. ‘Hello,’ I say, feeling quite perky, thinking about John’s head popping into the kitchen—was that this evening? It seems only moments ago. I wish I’d had a drink downstairs, though, a beer or something from the fridge; there’s a dead spot in my stomach like cancer, I need a burn there, a buzz. I grip the red handle—I can see it now, the light over Dad’s bed is on. He’s sitting on the far edge, the duvet pulled up around him, the side of his neck and shoulder closest to me uncovered except for various wads of gauze taped clumsily onto him over a battleground of bruised and battered flesh
.
He turns, and my eyes move to Jessie. I was wrong, she’s not naked. She’s not wearing her shades. What she’s got on is Mum’s bathrobe, and she looks strangely uncomfortable in it—it’s wrapped too tight or something, as if she’s suddenly turned frigid and decided to batten down the hatches. She is standing over Dad’s side of the bed, sandwiched between it and Jack’s cot, her body moving back and up as I enter, as if she’s been leaning her hands on the mattress or on him. Her face is odd when she looks at me—her mouth smudged with make-up, her eyes saddened with colors I’m sure weren’t there earlier, in the kitchen. Just for a moment, until I focus on her bare legs and bare feet, she reminds me of two nights ago in the hotel, sitting at the window in her jacket and stockings, staring out at the storm lighting up the river and crying, although I couldn’t be sure that she was—only there’s no sense of utter loneliness now, just the stale reek of our parents’ bed, the Prick’s spirity dressings, her pharmacist-blended oil. ‘Tom, what’s the matter? Are you all right?’ Dad says this even as he registers the knife in my hands. His face is wearied by the sight of it rather than shocked or scared—as if this is another regrettable mistake, further evidence of my stupidity, my inability to behave like a sane human being. My mind is blank, but I manage ‘Don’t!’ as he tries to slide his naked trunk off the bed and stand, the effort obviously stirring some temporarily banished pain in his back. He grimaces. Jessie stands, making no attempt to help him, her expression hardening in response to me, him, both. I push the door shut behind me and lean against it, holding the knife in my hand, blade up, in what seems to me a perfectly serious manner. ‘Stay there,’ I say, analyzing the relationship between their body sizes and mine. I need that super-human strength now if I’m to do this. I should have pushed my hand in the socket outside. ‘Tom, you never could handle a carving knife,’ Jessie says, trying that sister crap on me, although I think she is genuinely not frightened. But she knows my state of mind well enough to understand that this is more than a joke. ‘I think I can do all right with this one.’ And I hold out my left arm, the one that’s not carrying the knife, turn my palm up and draw the tip of the metal down the underside, from elbow to wrist, avoiding the artery, cutting not enough to weaken the arm, just enough to give me the extra degree of commitment I need. Even after the tram lines on the kitchen table, the blade is sharp. It doesn’t need any pressure. It doesn’t drag at all, just slices neatly down, parting the skin like plastic, not even hurting for a second or two, then stinging as the blood comes. My demonstration seems to impress everyone. ‘Tom, put the knife down,’ my father suggests, his brow cragging with the realization that I might just be unsettled enough to do something. I try to smile, but it doesn’t quite work. ‘Everything you think, you’re right in.’ This is his serious voice, his man-to-man voice, the one he uses when he wants to bare his soul, or whatever it is he has. It’s warm in here. This is a warm room. ‘You have every right to–’ ‘SHUT UP!’ I didn’t need to shout. I think my voice broke as I said it. My back presses against the door. It’s been stripped, this one, and left unvarnished. It feels grainy and satisfying to the touch. I let my left hand rest there, the arm aching a little from the cut, which is bleeding a little now. There aren’t any pictures of me and Jessie in Mum and Dad’s bedroom—not even of Jack. I hate that in other kids’ parents’ bedrooms: the smiling-faced family groups propped up in frames all over the furniture. Our smiling-faced pictures are downstairs in the hall, where you can barely see them even in daylight. ‘Who are you going to do first, Tom? Me or Dad?’ Jessie tries to sound the way she does sometimes—like my sister. ‘You’ll chicken out.’ But she touches her shoulder through the robe where I burned her, and I see or think I see something like approval in her eyes. ‘Watch me!’ I say, staring at the belt tied around her waist, the soft rainbow colors of the toweling. Her tan underneath is like a Greek girl’s skin or an Arab’s. I feel momentarily confused—disoriented—as if I’m somewhere else. This cottage is somewhere else to me, it has no bearings, it floats on the sewage of my brain. My father sees my state and seizes on it, trying to lever himself up off the bed with one arm. I point the knife and jerk it at him, kicking the door with my foot in a sort of reflex action. ‘If either of you gets too close,’ I warn them, no conscious thought involved in the words, ‘I’ll use this on me. I don’t care about you.’ He eases himself back down on the edge of the mattress, watching me, better placed for movement than before—but I’m watching him, too. ‘I know you must find this hard to believe,’ he says, and I do, whatever is coming, ‘but I still love you all.’ He is a slimy reptile. No! Reptiles aren’t slimy. I think he means it, I think he has a place inside for loving me—and Mum and Jack. Somewhere just above his bowels. He could almost be a human being if it wasn’t for the fact that he was never one to start with. I stare at him, trying to reach what it is that will make it happen. I speak slowly, thinking out loud: ‘I want to hear you say, “
Otherwise, you’re fine
.”’ Time drags. My armpits are wet: I can smell them on my T-shirt. ‘What?’ He looks totally mystified. ‘Say, “
Otherwise, you’re fine
.”’ ‘Tom, this is nonsense—’ ‘Say it!’ He is having a hard night. The dressing to the side of his right shoulder blade has darkened since he moved. There is sweat clogging his chest hair. He keeps the duvet balled protectively over his tool, but I’ve seen it—grey and shriveled, swinging like one of the poncy curtain tassels every time he tries to stand up. His voice is flat and resentful, as if I’m just trying to embarrass him, and that in itself is enough. ‘
Otherwise
—’ He searches my face for some sort of explanation. ‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’

‘SAY IT!’ He’s like a robot—it means nothing to him: ‘…
you’re fine
.’ Nothing. I look at Jessie, try to imagine him banging into her, but instead think of Sonny peeing all over my face. What does it take? My hand with the knife is steady, but it’s going to shake soon. My other arm aches. I’m against the door and they are waiting there, on the bed, by the cot. I’m not as strong as they are—my dad is going to count on that in a moment—and still I’m pissing about. Jessie speaks quietly. I think she wants to help. ‘Give me the knife. I’ll do it. I’ll kill him quite happily.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Dad says, and he laughs, his patience for sane argument exhausted, sick of the both of us. I believe her. I rock slightly, gripping the red handle tight, my other fist clenched, and look at her properly for the first time since I came into the room. She is in a fine state, wrapped in Mum’s robe, her hair all tight and damp-looking the way it was that day in the bath, in the mirror, her smudged mouth set with a kind of manic determination that I think certain girls’ schools—I’ve seen it on her friends’ faces, though never like this—must teach. ‘I’ve been trying to find out at what point it changes,’ she says, and Dad leans back hard against the wall, banging his head in a sort of gesture of defeat, and pressing one hand down onto the pillow for support. ‘At what point do you give it all up—your daring, the link between how you live and how you dream? Dad’s got us–’ she turns on him with the kind of contempt I thought she only reserved for me, ‘– but we’re not what he wanted, we’re about two per cent of what he thought he was capable of.’

‘Right!’ says Dad, looking for a fight now, straightening his back as if he doesn’t fucking care how much it hurts anymore. ‘Is it just fear?’ Jessie’s hand reaches behind her, searching for something—the cot, a reference point. ‘Are you just afraid that what’s in you isn’t so very special? Or do you just bury it? You work and you fuck and you load it with trinkets, property, children. You half remember it and something happens, you get extra-daring one day, really charged with your own—’ she searches for the word, watching him, watching him listen to this and try to deny it in his head, ‘– essence, and you fuck me, but then you lose it again, you suffocate it, it’s dead, it’s worse than before.’ All through this her other hand has been toying with the belt, twisting the half-knot, untying and retying it, letting the robe slacken a little, then pulling it tight. ‘God, you’re fucked up!’ she says. ‘You’ll do this —’ And she turns and hitches the bathrobe up, sticking her bum out at us so we can see where she’s smeared it with lipstick or something, right down the crack, a violent, raging red. ‘You’ll stick your cock up my bum, but you won’t give me what I want. You won’t give me a baby!’ I feel winded. She’s knocked all the fight out of me. I stare at them both with a strange kind of concentration, watching under water, watching him move as she turns back to us, opening the robe and shaking it down from her shoulders to show something quite obscene and wrinkled on her belly. He grabs for her, but his movement is impeded by one hand sinking into the mattress for support, so that he has to reach out twice. I start toward him with the knife, but Jessie is still talking, her eyes locked on mine, confusing me with my own guilt: this isn’t something I should see, we’ve run into each other in the middle of a dream, in a school corridor or in Sonny’s bathroom or on some weird sea wall with the water thrashing, and I’ve been watching her play with herself. I step outside myself even as I lunge forward and see how guilty I am: I’m at fault here; I keep having these dirty thoughts. ‘I want him to make me pregnant, Tom,’ she says, ‘but that’s the one thing Daddy won’t do.’

‘
Jessie!
’ he screams, catching hold of the robe which is hanging from her elbows now, and tugging her to him. But I slash with the knife, throwing myself on the bed and getting close but not close enough, burying it deep in the duvet, the mattress, and dragging it back. He lets go of Jessie and pushes me off, his hand ramming into my skull with a blinding pain, so that I stumble back off the bed but manage to stay on my feet with the knife still in my hand. He comes for me now and I move for his arm, his right bicep, not certain how much I want to achieve, but buggered anyway from anything more than a surface gash by his other hand swinging around to force my wrist up behind my neck, his strength—even though I’ve allowed for it—surprising me, it’s so long since we’ve tangled with each other. The knife knocks against the door and he bellows, ‘
Drop it!
’’ and I could laugh because Jessie is yelling ‘
Don’t!
’’—and I don’t know whether she means don’t drop it or don’t fight. I try to floor him with a knee to his exposed groin, but he anticipates this and smashes my leg with his own, jarring me with the pain. ‘Stop this fucking nonsense!’ he says, trying to push my hand with the knife back, but I grab the handle with my other hand, cutting the soft pulpy bits of my fingers in the process, but bringing it down fast enough to stick him below the ribs with the blade. And I feel sick. Suddenly everything looks different. I get the full belt of his breath in my face as he wheezes out, and I realize that I don’t want to hurt him like this. Some other way—but not like this. His stomach is wet with blood, though I didn’t think I cut him that deep, and Jessie looks stunned, bending to support him, Mum’s robe still half off her, that thing on her stomach smudging up against him as she stares at me and says nothing more useful than ‘
Fuck!
’

I have an impulse to take my father and hug him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I feel freaky, more wired up and frightened than ever, not sure what I’ve done. I want to stay but I want to run more and I pull open the door and look back at Jessie who has got Dad on the bed—there’s an awful lot of blood—and hear her say, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t go now!’ but I’m down the stairs and the front door opens with the third tug and outside the day is starting. I chuck the knife back behind me, taking in the wrecked barbecue and the smashed table on the lawn like a still life in some crisp arty photograph, and race around the gate to where my bike is against the wall and run with it, hearing the chain spin and catch, feeling terrified and empty and realizing with a totally misplaced sense of shame that I’ve emptied my bladder in my jeans.

I keep moving, but there’s nothing behind me. Even before I am out of the village, the day seems disconnected from the night. The sun comes up and it’s like something artificial—the sky on a dimmer

switch. The rush of birdsong sounds electronic, an extension of the sea’s interference noise, another track on the ambient CD to create the total effect. A farm harvester (or whatever it is) crawls uphill in front of me, blocking the road, moving even slower than I can pedal, its heavy machinery like sculpture: weird forms caked in a dried mud and dust that have nothing to do with the experience of my life.

I am back on the road to Exeter—three times in less than twenty-four hours, but the slog is druglike, I can deaden my mind through the sweat on my body, the ache in my injured arm and fingers as I grip the handlebars, pushing the pedals down/around/up, identifiable twisted bits of tree and broken bush approaching then vanishing behind me.

I pass the space where the oak was that caused us to crash the night Jack was born, but farther on there’s another space—another clearing in the hedgerow, another pit in the ground—and the fact that I don’t really know which one it is seems to drag the shock of stabbing Dad back into some past and no longer reachable place in my brain.

I am not complete. I don’t think I killed him, but if I did, it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like I wanted it to. I want more—but not more of the same. If I’ve killed him, he won’t suffer. I don’t want him to be dead, I want him to suffer. I think he will. But what I’m looking for now is personal satisfaction. The suffering is up to him.