The War Zone (4 page)

‘Still does,’ says Jessie. We are approaching another road bridge. The banks here are steep and grassy, and there’s a smell of cow-shit from somewhere. Or horseshit—I wouldn’t know the difference, right? Jessie has taken the bottle out of the water and is rolling the wet glass over her skin. I know, because she tried it on mine. It’s not cold enough, that’s the problem. It’s not even cool—there is definitely something strange about this water. ‘I sort of wish Mum hadn’t wanted us there, last night,’ I say. ‘It’s going to make it harder being rotten to him.’

‘Dad…?’ Jessie asks. ‘Have you and Mum ever really had problems over us? Do we make it more difficult, if one of you wanted to leave?’ We’ve thought a lot about that, Jessie and I. Whenever serious bother has hit our household, we’ve nearly always been able to pin its cause down to one of us. Those nights when voices have been raised after we’ve gone to bed, when silence has seemed more threatening than a row, we’ve wondered: how does this measure on the scale of things? Most of our friends’ families are divorced or remarried or something; we’ve always felt like the odd ones. But you never know what’s coming. This move to Devon was long talked about, but no tempers were lost—except over me. ‘You want an honest answer?’ Dad says. We’re under the bridge now. There’s a smell of mould. ‘Yes.’ Dad pushes us off the brickwork with his paddle. ‘It depends on the time of day. It depends on how selfish you’re feeling.’

Then we’re out into the light, and pebbles are raining down on all sides. There’s a Durex in the water and some boys are taunting Jessie. I’m sure she enjoys it. A little further on, she slides out of the canoe and swims alongside, her turquoise bikini dazzling against the dull green fur of the riverbed.

The trees form a sort of cathedral around us. Sunlight plays on her skin, on her bruised shoulder (and my bruised head), as she unties her bikini top, then turns on to her back to let her tanned breasts bob out of the water. Her feet kick and she glides away, struggling to remove the other half of her bikini without touching the weed under her feet. Then she rolls over again and swims back toward us, evil intent in her eyes. She grabs hold of the canoe with one hand, hesitating only a moment before putting her full weight on it to tip us in.

‘You stupid bitch!’ I think, without malice, as I go under: I was just getting comfortable. But really it’s OK, the water feels good even if it is giving me cancer.

The canoe floats upside down. Jessie pisses herself laughing as Dad thrashes about, trying to locate the car keys (our other heap, not the Bentley, that’s definitely out of commission for a while) before remembering that they’re in the buttoned-down pocket of his shorts.

But then he’s laughing, too. And suddenly we’ve all got our shorts off, swimming bare-arsed in the middle of Devon on a Thursday afternoon, and it’s only me who’s feeling weird, who’s feeling as if there’s a party going on and I’m not invited.

Jessie and me are close. We talk a lot. We talk about everything. She’s a major source of information for me when it comes to the inner rumblings and eruptions that go through girls’ heads, and I want to know that stuff, especially the darker side, the really funky, creamy, fuck-the-feminists-and-fuck-all-men-this-is-really-what-I’mabout sort of thinking. I’m already developing my own style. I’ve found I don’t just want to fuck girls’ bodies—I want to get inside their minds. Because unless you get that mental bang, unless you listen and you probe and you challenge and you push (to the edge, if need be), sex is like pissing about with a chemistry set without reading the instructions. You’re missing the potential for real danger.

And it seems to work. I’m doing OK. I’ll be honest—I haven’t actually got there yet, not all the way. But it’s getting closer. And even the dumbest girls I’ve met have a kind of poetry about them, if you can get past all the teen magazine and cosmetic counter bullshit they get brainwashed with.

But how do you ask your sister, ‘Is something happening with you and Dad?’ It’s not easy.

Jump ahead a week, maybe two. I’m not sure when, but there’s more water, it’s raining—the kind of warm, hard, summer rain that gets you properly drenched, like standing under a shower with your clothes on.

It’s one of those summer holidays that makes you wonder if the rest of your life’s going to be like this: always waiting for something to happen, while the world turns somewhere else. I remember when we first went into Iraq, when Bush really screwed things up, these were weird distant shapeless events that seemed like a bad dream but terrified the hell out of me because they were happening—in fact we seemed to be rolling toward disaster all too fast, and no one had asked me! I remember the words ‘National Service’ or ‘Conscription’ suddenly coming back into the vocabulary, and I thought, fuck, if this thing develops, if this thing goes on for long enough, it could drag me down with it.

But nothing has any moral certainty anymore, thank God. The ‘War on Terror’ was a video-age gig: the will isn’t there, not among the country as a whole, not this country, anyway. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a major Western war like the Second World War again. Not now. Not with a population whose priorities are a flatscreen TV and a weekend in Dubai.

Anyway, it’s one of those days. My life feels like it’s stuck away from the action, which is hardly surprising in Devon. Clutching at straws, I’ve actually been shopping with my mother. The compulsion suddenly hit me that I had to have a particular DVD and have it now, so I struck a deal with Mum: I’d go with her and carry the food if she’d get me the DVD. Of course, I’d forgotten we were in the wilderness. Not only did the shop in Sidmouth not have what I wanted, but it was a real struggle finding something worth buying. I’m starting to dream of London megastores, I can almost taste them: the iron-clad plasticwrap around every new release, the weird anti-shoplifting tabs, the desperate film company displays. It’s all bullshit, but I’m getting to the point down here where I’d love to be exploited, I want them to take my money (or Mum’s) and fuck my mind.

We drive through the village and up to our cottage, which looks oddly deserted in the rain—or vulnerable, like a house in a horror movie, waiting for the maniac to call. What I like about the house is its oldness: there’s lichen and stuff in the cracks between the stones, tree roots poking up right outside the front door, which itself is so hard to open and close that it might be easier to climb in through a window, and the garden is overgrown with the sort of lushness you see in old country graveyards (what’s under that soil?). What I hate about the house is its oldness: I bang my head on a beam every time I go upstairs, those tree roots outside work hard at breaking your legs and at night the timber and plaster that just about hold the cottage together sound as if they’re wanking in unison.

‘Tom, you carry the bags in, will you? I thought I heard Jack.’ This is one of the first times Mum’s left the baby with Dad and Jessie. I’ve noticed that although Bratto is already clearly an independent being, she still has some kind of radar link with him. It must he hard for her, I suppose, letting go of something that’s your flesh, though Jake (he looks like a Jake to me, none of this Jack shit)—Jake, I’ve watched him, just regards her as dependable room service.

I grab the thin white plastic carrier bags, all set to split, and leave Mum to run through the rain to the front of the cottage while I perversely walk around the back, slipping and sliding along the grassy bank on which I’ve already twisted my ankle once since we’ve been here. This route takes me past the bathroom—and the bathroom takes me somewhere else.

It’s occupied. I know this even before I’m close, because I can hear water (more water, there’s enough out here) swilling about. No voices, just water. Something makes me stop and approach more warily, so that even though the window panes are frosted and rainstreaked, whoever’s in there won’t be able to see the shape of me and the white bags outside. I’m a natural spy, not just a nosy bastard but someone who prides himself on being able to enter a room, give it a thorough search and get out again without leaving a trace of my being there. This time I’m outside, but I’m totally frozen, silent, wet, looking in.

From where I’m standing, body pressed against the wall in best guerrilla fashion, legs angled against the treacherous bank, I can just see past the small top window, which is open. The bank gives me some height—the cottage windows are low to start with—and by straining I have a clear view of part of the bathroom mirror, opposite. This in turn lets me see who’s there.

I hear Mum shouldering open the front door, the scrape as it jams open on the hall floor and the double grind as she struggles to close it (I should have done it for her). The effect of these sounds on the steamy figures in the mirror (unless I’m misinterpreting, and I don’t think so) is powerful.

Jessie is in the bath, her face dripping, her short hair clinging wetly to her scalp as if she’s just ducked under the water, her tits like a burn in my brain, closer than the image in the mirror, so that I can feel the pulse beating beneath them, even while my own has stopped.

Dad is kneeling, facing her. His knees (I register this in a flash, like part of a puzzle) must be between hers. In the instant I witness, as the first scrape of the front door takes effect, Jessie’s hands are scooping water to pour over the part of him that bobs above the surface of the bath—a string-operated thing, his tackle, a horse’s prick, uglier and more fascinating and more threatening than I’ve ever seen it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my mind has just run off through the rain and what I’m seeing is a waking blast from a weird dream. But the bags are at my feet, crammed with cereal boxes, salad stuff, baked beans. The cheap white plastic stretched around these lumps and corners has rivulets of water running off it on to the tangle of dead and living grass on the bank. This much is real, sharp, hyper-real if you like. And in the mirror, my sister’s eyes lock with my dad’s as he lurches forward, struggling to support his hands as he clambers out of the bath, suddenly too big for it.

I’m frozen for a moment longer as Dad, grabbing a towel, vacates the bathroom with a guilty speed. Jessie is left alone, left with a backward glance from him that in one shot is so much the father I know and a person I don’t that I want to stick my fist through the glass to let him know I’m here.

Mum is with Jack, I can hear him crying now. I can imagine Dad walking into the bedroom, having toweled himself furiously, playing it cool: ‘Sorry, Jack was so quiet we left him. I needed a bath, it’s so fucking sticky. Jessie’s just gone in now.’

And there she is, flushed with the heat or something, soaping herself like some prim tart in a TV commercial. God, I’d like to know what goes through that head of hers, what makes her radiate rightness and ripeness. She’s so like me, so much my sister, my flesh, that the truth dangles in front of me, a carrot I can’t quite touch.

‘Fuck them both!’ my mind cries, as rain snakes unpleasantly down my back. I kick the carrier bags, which is a stupid thing to do, since it only makes me lose my footing and land hard on the unyielding rim of a tin. ‘I don’t want to know,’ I try to kid myself. ‘I don’t even care.’

There is a moment which is so beautiful it makes everything else worthwhile. You stand on the cliff above the village, early in the morning or late in the evening, and you gaze out at the sea—a

huge, changing wash of light and movement, bigger than any of us, a joker with a patience longer than any one life and an inconceivable strength that can snap your back against the rocks as easily as you might flick a fly off your nose.

I can feel how cold it is, even when it’s warm. Even when the water’s not skimmed with a purple film of oil, and the pebbles and seaweed are stewed in the sun, I can sense the ocean’s cold heart further out, out by the skyline. Jessie’s tried to paint it, but she can’t get close. Either the beauty is there or the darkness, but not both. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about art, but I’ve noticed that in British paintings the sea always looks sort of murky or angry or drab or just somehow different from the way it really is. Jessie’s pictures are nothing like that: she sees with a foreigner’s eyes. If my sister’s a reincarnation, I’d say she was African, via the slave route to Barbados, then on to Nicaragua or the like (and she probably fucked herself into some luxury and some whiteness along the way). But even she can’t get to the heart of the water, not with her powder blues and her baked-earth red.

It’s not just the color, it’s the color of light, it’s the mood of the sky and your own cross-wired soul. Down on the beach, it’s the druggy thunder-hiss of the surf dragging at thousands of pebbles, as if the sea’s in training for the greatest glue-sniffing contest on earth. Up here, with a view of the sheep and the cottages and the coastline, there’s just the image, no sound, and a faint tang of brine in the air, like a taunt or a memory.

It’s more than a moment. It’s repeatable, though it’s never the same twice. It’s where I go to stay sane down here, it’s where I go when I miss London, when I want to work out what the fuck I’m doing with my life.

I’d be there now, getting soaked, if I wasn’t so determined to speak to Jessica. If I can get her alone, there are a good few questions I’m going to ask, but it’s as if she senses this. She’s playing for time, Miss Florence Nightingale, helping Mum change the baby and scrub the vegetables for dinner. I’m in the doghouse, meanwhile, for dumping all the shopping in the rain.

I watch Dad. I watch everyone. Suddenly I feel like a spy. I’m the one who’s different, I’m the one with the knowledge—I wouldn’t trust me, if I was them.

What’s changed? My mind is working overtime, reassessing everything. But Dad seems the same, snapping open a beer as he dumps himself into one of the cottage’s chintzy armchairs to sort through a pile of unopened office mail.

‘How far would we have to go, do you think,’ he ponders aloud, screwing his face up into a mask of weariness and disgust, ‘to get away from all this crap?’