The War Zone (5 page)

‘Not much further,’ Mum offers from the kitchen. ‘Another phone call like yesterday’s, and they’ll probably take you at your word.’ There’s a long pause in which Dad seems to be replaying yesterday’s phone call, enjoying the recollection of what was obviously a choice exchange. ‘They love it,’ he says. ‘Panics the accountants. They won’t know what they’ve got unless they’re made to sweat blood for it.’ When it comes to work, Dad likes a bit of passion to enter into things. I don’t think he’s happy unless emotions are aroused, and certainly where his current scam is concerned—a bloody great steel and glass pyramid for a Korean bank in Docklands—he’s played devil’s advocate from day one. Bad enough that he has to work for these wankers, he says—no reason to make it easy for them. But I think it’s a bluff. I think his work is what drives him, and coming down here to Devon has nothing to do with getting away from it all, it’s just another way of giving them the finger. Dad peers in the direction of the kitchen, stuffing the torn envelopes he’s been opening into one of the big manila ones. ‘Why?’ he asks Mum. I stare at his eyes, his mouth, my dad, my chum, and see him pointing his dick at Jessie. ‘Does it bother you?’ ‘What?’ Mum is slicing carrots or something, chop, chop, on the wooden board. Jessie darts through the room and goes upstairs, trying to avoid my eye but not quite succeeding. ‘The phone call. Would you care if I just said forget it?’ Mum appears in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, and lets him have her shrewdest gaze. ‘The only way you’d forget it would be if you could take it away from them, and even then you’d want to twist the knife an extra turn. We could be in Peru and you’d still find a way to fight them longdistance.’ This seems to satisfy Dad, which is no doubt what it’s designed to do. Mum’s great strength is that she’s a master bullshit-detector; she keeps us all on course, and how do we repay her? ‘You’re right,’ Dad says, suddenly restless in his chair. What’s he thinking now, is it the way Mum’s holding the knife? A thought knocks through my mind—it’s chaos in there. ‘Peru wouldn’t solve a thing.’

Jessie is upstairs, doing whatever it is sisters do in their rooms by themselves. I burst in. She’s got one shoe off, one bare ankle on the bed, the other decorating the floor, her back to me, her leg twisted sideways out from under her, an incredibly awkward position which seems to have her deep in thought rather than involved in any change of footwear.

She turns as I come in, guilty, lost, absolutely aware of the power she has over me. ‘Are you happy?’ she asks. ‘Why, don’t I look happy?’ ‘Don’t know.’ She brings her foot down to the floor, kicks the other shoe off. ‘How do you look when you’re happy?’ ‘I’ll let you know. Jessie, I want to talk.’

‘Right.’ She’s marvelous. Her guilt—if that’s what it is—is instantly banished. ‘I’m looking for something. You can help or keep out of my way.’ She dives into a large cardboard box crammed with the stuff she wouldn’t let the removal men touch when we came down here. I don’t know how to start. I stand staring at a postcard tucked into her mirror, a Rodin sketch of a woman contorted into a far more uncomfortable position than Jessie’s when I entered, her muscles all pushing against her penciled flesh like life trying to get out. ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask her, trying to edge into this and wondering why I don’t just go on the attack—‘Fuck it, I saw you! What were you doing?’ But I don’t. Instead, brother-sister conundrum number four thousand and forty-eight: ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask, ‘which are your real feelings—the ones you use as cover or the ones you never use?’ She turns, looks up over the seat of her jeans which faces me. ‘You’ve been reading comics again, haven’t you?’ ‘Well?’ ‘I’m trying to find something.’

‘Jessie…’ I’m not feeling patient. She bobs back inside the box, retrieves a tattered brown envelope which rips as she picks it up, scattering scraps of paper, letters, drawings, what looks like an old napkin smudged with crayon. ‘Shit!’ She straightens up, arches her back, shoots me a bottomless glance. ‘How do you use a feeling, tell me.’ I sit on the bed. Somehow or other, I’m going to get through this. ‘OK.’ Jessie moves to the mirror, touches the Rodin postcard, as if I had willed her to do it. She picks up a scent spray, feels its weight, pulls the front of the black camisole-thing she is wearing above her jeans and belts a jet of lighter fuel down her tits. Well, it smells like lighter fuel and it’s designed to have much the same effect. She knows I hate that stuff. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘you don’t like it down here, do you? You don’t like Devon. But there’s not much you can do about it, is there, except complain? But the more you complain, the worse you feel—unless you get a buzz off complaining, which you probably do. What don’t you like? It’s all instinct or emotion or something. If you wanted to like it, if you wanted to find things to like, you could. At least you could make it better than it is…’ I’m barely listening. This is not what I’ve come here for. ‘What’s real about any of that? Is there something wrong with Devon or with you? Of course, if you ask me—’ ‘Jessie,’ I blurt, ‘I didn’t drop the shopping in the rain.’

‘It got wet.’ And I’m off and running again, a mad, tangential babble: ‘Do you remember that time I was meant to be marking them in as they came back from the cross-country run? I was pissing about with Steve down by the stream and I fell in? I got soaked, everything. I had to say I fell in a puddle.’ She knows what it is now. I can see it in her eyes. ‘What’s this about?’ ‘You.’ And I start to cry. I can’t believe this, but I’m sitting on the bed blabbing. Her arm goes around me. ‘Christ, Tom, shush, what is it?’ I feel her warmth, her closeness as she hugs me. This is why I love her—she’s my sister. But she’s also someone I don’t know nearly as well as I think, she’s a body—a very pliant body—into which all kinds of men I’ll never meet will be sticking more than just a casual finger. And then there’s my dad. ‘I saw you.’ I stop sobbing, feeling sick, heaving for air. I pull away, my face burning. I get up and swing the bedroom door shut, this is private, whatever happened this is between Jessie and me. ‘In the bath. With Dad.’ I’m still gulping air, the fear wrapped tight around my throat. ‘Yes?’ ‘What does it mean?’ Any hint of knowledge in her eyes has been banished. I am faced with such young, clear-faced honesty that I doubt myself. I want to doubt myself. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’ It’s not enough. I want more. I’m up on that cliff above the village. The truth is bigger than anything else, it doesn’t care about the rules. You make the rules, then you find yourself in the middle of that cold ocean anyway. She goes on: ‘We had a bath. I got in, he got out.’

‘That’s not what I saw.’

‘Well, that’s all there was.’ She draws back. A certain petulant set to her mouth makes me doubt her now, not me. ‘Christ, where were you? What do you think you saw?’ ‘Don’t give me a hard time! I don’t want to talk about this, it’s scaring the shit out of me, it makes me feel like throwing up. I feel sick, Jessie. I’m not being melodramatic, but I feel like I want to die. This is real.’ I break through for a moment, then it’s gone. ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ ‘Yeah, now I’ve thought about it. And I have thought about it.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘I’m just telling you you’re wrong.’ I want to grab her, shake her, hurt her in some way, but I just take hold of her wrist. ‘Please don’t lie to me.’ I grip tight. ‘I’d rather know. We don’t bullshit each other—we don’t, do we?’ Jessie lets me hold her, as if this gives her the edge. I’ve lost and she knows it. I know what I believe, but I’m going to let her tell it her way because I don’t want to be shut out. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘you saw me in the bath with Dad, right? I don’t know what you saw, but you know what I’m like, I like physicality. God, we touch each other enough—’ She looks at my hand, grasping her wrist—‘but it doesn’t mean anything earth-shattering. I tell you everything. I’d tell you.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’ I feel my fingers dig in, pressing hard on to the bone. I want to bruise her, I want her to remember this. Then I let go. ‘You couldn’t.’

‘What is it? Are you all right?’ Her expression has changed. She looks at me, concerned, as a thought strikes me like a wave of pain, washing over me, blanking everything else out. She touches my face. Contact. She needs contact, constantly. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘I haven’t screamed and told you to fuck off or anything, which I probably should have.’ Yes. Why not? ‘It’s a pretty weird thing you’re suggesting. I’m not saying I’m not pretty weird, but really it’s something on a level I’ve never thought about.’ She stares at me, trying to measure whether she’s getting through. ‘Not seriously.’ But I’m falling, groundless. It has only just occurred to me that I never for a moment thought that Dad might be the instigator here. His prick looms large in my skull like some kind of medieval puppet, but I don’t see Jessie at threat. Somehow I felt she must be in control, she always seems in control to me—would I even know if she was in trouble? So much for the protective brother. She touches my arm, smiles encouragingly. ‘Are you all right now?’ I don’t know. Am I?

I did a deal with Dad for coming down here—before, when he was just my dad. Now I don’t know what he is. I look around me and I see other selves warring with the ones we thought we knew, the ones we felt safe with.

I got a video camera out of it, but I also got Devon. I was wrong. This is the Dead Zone. Devon may have some balls, but the people down here don’t know they’re alive. They don’t know what’s happening. They think everything’s still the same, they think we’re OK, it’ll work out, Radio Four will still broadcast shipping forecasts and agricultural reports. They don’t know what’s going on. They haven’t seen the politicians pissing in doorways, the football thugs jumping up and down on the roofs of cars until they crease like cardboard, the snouts of police dogs slobbering over the surfaces of restaurant kitchens. It’s all right for Jessie, she’s got art college to go to, this is just a break for her before she aims herself back at London, back to all that. There’s no addiction to chaos here, no love of the fire. Maybe I can’t read them, maybe they go home at night, switch off the TVs and radios and tear at each other, mentally and physically. I stand in the pub with Mum and Dad sometimes and wonder: there’s an open-faced bluster, a beer-bolstered glow, that you don’t see in London, that maybe is what good health used to look like. Mum’s healthy, she looks fresh and happy and shiny, like an apple, firm, somehow recharged by having a baby—but she works out, my mother, she’s a leotard childbearer, city-fit. Anyway, I did a deal. I saw it coming, I saw the inevitability of it, this was no whim, this was going to happen. I could sense a new will in the air, as if my little embryonic brother was dictating his terms from the darkness of the womb. They were already committed to Devon, Mum and Dad, even while they were going through the motions of discussing it with us. Jessie was no problem, she could shack up in London with her friend Kate (and who knows who else?) under the supposedly watchful eye of Kate’s parents. Which makes me think—when did it start? If Dad and Jessie are really going at one another, when did it start? Dad wanted to move down here, yet he knew Jessie would be going back to London to art school. Was that a factor? Did he want her alone up there, or did he even think about that? Is this Jessie’s madness? I don’t know anything any more. Nothing is simple, nothing is ever what it seems. It’s like the level of life we all think we live on only scratches the surface. We’re blind to the rest, except when violence or anguish or some other kind of pain or beauty makes us break through, forces us to glimpse a larger world. The nightmare is that I can’t see any connection between that larger world and our little one that isn’t a lie. I could fight Devon, I realized when it all started, the talk of the move, but I’d already blown my best argument—my education—by battling through three schools in two years. I don’t hate school, it’s not worth the effort, it just seems such a sham, so very far away from anything to do with real life, that the only sensible response is to pit your will against theirs and see who breaks first. In the first two cases, they did—and I left. The jury’s still out on the last one. I had a Math teacher there who saw that I got a sort of buzz off the patterns numbers make and who not only pushed me but protected me when I fucked up elsewhere. I got into trouble and he got me out of it—mostly—I think because he respected my spirit, he thought the system was shit himself. It taught me something useful, really useful, not just how to fake effort or skim successfully. It taught me that natural allegiances come in handy, don’t waste them, they can buy you a lot of space. Anyway, it came down to schooling, my love of London and my friends. Those were my three arguments against Devon, and I’d as good as blown the first one because even while my Math teacher was calming the waters, I was pissing on them again. My complaints about school were like a religious dirge over the breakfast table at home each morning, so that when the prospect of Devon was raised, my father would offer various alternatives: ‘We could move further, to Cornwall. They’ve still got tin mines down there. Perhaps you could leave school altogether and they could reinstitute child labor?’ ‘Couldn’t be worse.’

‘There must be religious seminaries in the area. Maybe you’d like to be beaten by monks, daily?’ ‘Jessie would go for that.’ A kick under the table from her. So then I’d come back: ‘Why don’t I just board somewhere up here? It’s London I’m going to miss.’

‘I’d give him three days,’ Mum would remark. ‘I’d give him three hours,’ from Dad. ‘I wouldn’t give him anything.’ Jessie. And my mother would look at me, knowing my answer as well as I did: ‘Do you want to?’ ‘What?’ ‘Board.’

‘Not a chance. Forget it.’ So I’d wail on. ‘I’m going to lose all my friends. I’m never going to see them.’

‘These are the kids you referred to as “mindless scum’’ only a few days ago.’ A sharp look from Dad. ‘Yeah, well they are. But at least they’re the mindless scum I know. The kids in Devon all have giant foreheads and fingers sprouting from their shoulders. They’re all Thalidomide kids down there. They lack social graces.’