The War Zone (30 page)

‘What do you want?’ I think I know the answer, though I don’t want to admit it—because admitting it means I’ve thought about it too. I stare at her legs. If I grabbed her now and pulled her down, I think I could get rid of the knife without too much trouble. As always, she’s ahead of me. ‘You’ll see I do this better than you.’ And almost nonchalantly she swipes at me with the blade, cutting my cheek. I go for her, but she’s above me and she dodges to one side, bringing the knife down to trim a line through the shirt I’m wearing and across my back underneath, then tossing it into the water so fast and so decisively that I’m stunned. ‘There,’ she says, like the schoolgirl she once was, proving her point. ‘I can’t do it either. But I never wanted to.’ I’m on my feet, the cut on my back feeling cool and fresh and dampening a little. Her tongue comes into my mouth and I jerk my head back, frightened by the taste of her, her breath, the hint of rum in her saliva. But I’m lying to myself, because I do want it, the click of our teeth knocking together, the replay of Magda’s kiss running through my brain—as if we’re in competition: I’ve got to go deeper, get beyond anything that mindless Polish zombie could. I grip her, our mouths still locked, but hesitating, the part of me that wants to wrestling with a resistance to bending to her will, becoming her puppet once again. But that’s a lie, too—there is nothing here but weakness and selfishness on my part. I want her, there’s no excuse, no reason, and as I realize this and my mind enters a sort of limbo that’s always been there, on the border, an element of doubt creeps in. She is struggling, she is fighting to push me away. But suddenly I am super-powerful and it’s like traveling home: I span the sea, I’m in England one minute, here the next—what’s to stop me? Anyway, I’ve been through too much, she owes me. She owes me this one fucking thing. I force her down on the deck, keeping her away from the edge where we might both roll in. The skirt she’s wearing is fine and loose and it bunches in folds when I shove it up to free her legs from her bikini string. I drag myself half out of my shorts and hoist myself on to her, but then I hesitate again, hearing the water and seeing the candle’s suddenly blinding light. Like a shared thought, Jessie clamps her teeth down on the hand that’s been covering her mouth and directs it—with a shaking, determined grip—toward the candle’s tiny flame. I feel the bite and then the burn but stifle a cry, just as Jessie is silent, letting her hold my hand there a moment more. She lets go and I crash on to my elbow, my hand crumpling with the pain. There is pain everywhere: across my back, across my face, driving me on with the realization that if I stop now the pain will never ever stop, I’ll feel more appalled with myself than if I continue. She tries to slide out from under me, but I pull her back. ‘Oh God, Tom,’ she gasps, a hand clenching my Adam’s apple tight, throttling me to hold me off. ‘Do it right. This isn’t the first time.’ And that stops me. I try to think of a connection, my mind flailing, a familiar sick hole boring its way through my stomach. ‘It wasn’t Sonny,’ she says. ‘You’re not Sonny’s style.’ She is unbeatable. There is nothing other than her, though I’ve got to find something if I’m going to survive. She can live like this; I can’t. I stay where I am, smelling the frangipani in the air and I realize it’s Jessie that I smell—it’s a bit like I imagine death might smell. She is death for me. Whatever else I might do, finally I come back to this: the soft clasp of Jessie’s thighs and the furry mouth inbetween. ‘Do it right,’ she says, turning away. ‘I’ll be a terrible mother, I’ll let the kid just shit where it stands. But I want a baby. Do it right.’ She crawls onto all fours, rolling her skirt up. She is facing the island, a soft, velvety black land-mass in the starlight. It’s taken this long, but I love her.

The Opening Chapter of the US Edition

When
The War Zone
was first being prepared for publication in the United States (simultaneous with its British publication), my American editor at Doubleday in New York, David Gernert, suggested that perhaps I should think about changing the opening chapter of the book, because he thought the first sentence, “
Two pictures of England: I know which one I’d choose,
” might discourage some American readers from buying it.

His argument was that those readers might think it contained specifically English subject matter, whereas David—who was very excited by the novel, and whose remarkable enthusiasm not only excited me in turn but seemed to galvanize everyone at Doubleday to get behind it—told me that he believed it to be among “the four or five most important novels” he had ever published.

I chose to open this 20
^th
Anniversary edition of the book with the original British chapter, because I like the energy of it and I still remember the Friday afternoon in London when I wrote the words and knew that I had found the “voice” for the book.

But I thought it might be interesting to include the first chapter of the US edition for comparison—since it was a challenging exercise to try to find a new opening for the novel: one that did not dilute the power of what I hope the original British opening chapter achieved. Over the years, I have come to like both almost equally.

Alexander Stuart May 2009

A lie: the three of us together on the water, me and two people I’m tied to for life.

It’s a perfect day, if you trust perfection. We’re on the river, me, Dad and Jessica, piled into a canoe. We’ve had no sleep. Our new brother has been born this morning and it’s jolted me, it’s no small thing, it has taken me where I breathe and chucked me onto the rails of some thundering, life-fucking train I knew nothing about. Or maybe I did. Maybe it’s just confirmed that so much of what we’re told is important all the time is crap. We’re afraid of what’s real, what’s there, just under the surface. I know I am.

So we’re celebrating. We are having a good time. At least, I think that’s what we’re doing. I, for one, am so wired by the night and the incredible sunshine we’re having and by what happened to the car that the details tend to be a little blurry. Of course, it could be the wine. Dad brought a bottle of wine, so he had no option but to share it with us.
What did happen with the car? When we left it wherever we left it, its nose was all punched in, like a prizefighter down on his luck. Did that happen before the baby was born or after? I’m not sure. The last twenty-four hours seem to have got all twisted, so that today still feels like yesterday and the soccer match I watched on TV last night when we were all so restless might have been this morning, after the birth but before this drunken cavort on the river.

Actually, I’ve had very little of the wine. Dad and Jessie polished off most of the bottle. It always tastes like petrol to me, but I love the burn in the stomach, the buzz in the head.

We are drifting under a bridge now, using the paddle to avoid scraping against the moldy brickwork on one side. The air down here is dark and dank and cooler than in the sun. This is it, the English countryside, green and untouched—well, maybe just fingered a little by the bastards whose chemical plants pump out crap right into this water, or the other sort, the really desperate buggers who wait here in the gloom with the bats and water rats, hungry for a friend, waiting to pump something else out, hungry for their brief taste of life on the TV news or in the tabloids. At least Devon has some balls. It’s a little bit wild, not all afternoon tea and morons who actually believe what they hear on BBC radio. But it’s not the city.

As we emerge back into the light, a hail of small pebbles hits the water around the canoe, thrown by three kids, a little older than me, a little younger than Jessie. They whistle and shout at her, not bothered by Dad’s presence, asking if she isn’t too hot in her bikini. They seem very keen to draw her attention to something floating on the water, one of them curving a cigarette packet through the air to splash down close to the object in question. I stare at it, puzzled at first by what looks like an old surgical glove or a monkey’s bulbous arse at the zoo. Then I realize the truth: it’s a condom, swollen with water (and milk or something, I don’t want to know) and tied like a balloon. Jessica smiles darkly and looks back at the boys, insects all, waving and jeering. They haven’t a clue. They haven’t a clue what they would be tangling with if they tangled with my sister.

This isn’t my life, my life was something else. Days ago, that’s all, but already out of my reach.

North London. The Harrow Road. I’ve cycled up here from the poncy foreign calm of Bayswater. Two black kids have just tossed a woman’s shopping bag off a moving bus, then jumped after it. They don’t want what’s in it, they just don’t want anything to stand still. A plastic carton of eggs hits the pavement near the relics of a secondhand furniture shop. Squeeze-wrapped sausages vanish under a car tire. My bike scrunches across a box of cornflakes and one of the kids chucks a loaf of bread at my face. It’s amazing, the punch sliced white can carry.

‘Fuck off!’ I shout. ‘Fuck you, Maurice!’ the other one yells, making the name sound French and faggoty. A ketchup bottle buzzes past my ear and smashes in the road. ‘Maurice?’ I wonder. I pedal harder as both of them come after me, one on the pavement, the other dodging the traffic to try and catch hold of my rear mudguard. I turn two corners and wheel down a street pitted with ruts and potholes, then slide through a piss-smelling alley between dark houses and come out onto waste ground. The boys will find me if they want to, but I don’t think they’re that motivated. I take a breather and stare out over the view, my pulse racing. Through a wire fence and down an embankment, railway tracks stretch into the distance. A single line curls off at one point into a shed half buried by the shadow of the road bridge. Nearby, the gravel under the sleepers is stained with rust, a color you don’t see much of in Bayswater. I’m on high ground and the land dips away from me across the tracks, toward the poky back gardens of terraced houses. Their scraggly lawns and washing lines edge onto a dumping ground littered with rotting mattresses, a wrecked pushchair, black rubbish sacks, the scarred remains of a fire. Above all this hangs a big expanse of sky, blood red where it touches the backbone of the houses, spilling out overhead into a great, glowing fish tank of orange and blue. London is wonderful, I love it. It’s alive, spreading out before me, old and new, humming like the railway track, telling me everything’s great, I can do anything here—if only we weren’t moving next week.

This is my sentence, then, for a crime I’m guilty as hell of but can’t put my finger on just now, there are so many. Devon, tranquil Devon, the Devon we have moved to, maybe not as tranquil as it used to be, but too bloody tranquil for me. Rubbers in the river are nothing—I want the scum of London, turds in the doorways, the stench of telephone booths, the heat from a burning car. London looks beautiful with all that stuff. Everything’s falling apart, but still the city has splendor. The country, well the country doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. It doesn’t have a hope, it doesn’t know how to be healthy: the water we’re paddling through must be thick with invisible pollution, radioactive fallout, and yet…

And yet Jessica has just slipped out of the canoe to swim in that muck. It’s clear enough, even the green and slimy weed three feet down is visible, but it feels too warm to me. English water is never warm, not outside, not without the help of some factory somewhere, pissing out hot waste—or a minor cock-up at the nearest reactor. But there’s no time to think such thoughts. Something else is happening, something I’m a part of but can’t quite understand. Perhaps I’m just tired, confused, heat hazed?

We have turned a bend in the river and are well out of sight of the boys on the bridge. The trees here grow right by the water, their branches almost meeting overhead so that the sun shoots a web of light across us all. Jessie is swimming close to the canoe, her back flashing in the triangles of sun, her skin browner than I ever I manage to get. She kicks hard, reaching awkwardly behind her to untie her bikini top…

But wait a minute. None of this is going to mean anything unless I can make you understand how weird we all felt that afternoon, how watching a fresh little bastard come sliming into the world from the collective pool of your family blood makes you think about things you might otherwise not choose to consider. We felt close, all right, but it was a closeness that cut through the bullshit of family life and suspended the rules. I’m talking about honesty. And, you know, when you get down to it, honesty—life without the lies, the protective film of accepted behavior—is bloody dangerous.