The War Zone (6 page)

‘That’s a sick remark.’ Mum. ‘It’s a sick world. Why do we have to move?’ So Dad would come down to my level. ‘I don’t know why you’re so hooked on London. You want medical allusions? Well, London is brain dead, it’s on drips—it’s got aggression pumping in one arm and money in the other, and neither can make it work. It’s a lousy place for a baby. Anyway, it’s depressing as hell all winter.’

‘You think Devon will be better? The people in Devon probably forget how to speak English between the time the last tourist leaves and the first of the year arrives.’ And on like that.

So I set fire to the art department stockroom. I went into school one morning and my mate Luke and I torched the stacks of paper, each vertically arranged in neat compartments. It’s a bastard of a job, getting a good blaze going, but we managed it just as the rest of the school was going through the attendance registers. Couldn’t have been me, could it—I wasn’t there?

It wasn’t a real fire, I mean the school didn’t burn down or anything, but the art department didn’t look the same again. There’s something beautiful about what a lick of flame can do to wood, the charring effect, little bits of black carbon spiraling up to touch the ceiling—makes a place look lived-in. And oil paints have their own excitement when they blaze. This was performance art on a grand scale, but Luke and I didn’t get any points for it. In fact, we chickened out. I wanted everyone to know we’d done it deliberately, but maybe that would have been a bit heavy-duty, so we opted for the having-a-quick-smoke-ohdear-look-what-happened line. We got a bollocking, suspension and all that, the threat of expulsion, but it could have been worse. I mean that. Someone could have been hurt.

That did it for Dad, though. As far as Devon went, that took me out of the contest. I think he knew it was no accident. Schools don’t really know you, but parents have a good idea.

I knew he was angry, because his face changed, as if the tension was wrestling through a forest of muscles and veins in his forehead in an attempt to get out.

‘There’s a school nine miles from the village with a good record in math,’ he told me. ‘There’s a school bus. It takes about forty-five minutes each way. You just gave up your right to choose.’

I wanted to ask, ‘How far is the nearest fire station?’ but it was too easy.

The deal came later. I knew I’d get something. Dad suffers terrible guilt when he loses his temper, and he must have already been feeling bad about this one, because he did everything to

make the move bearable for me. It was Mum I had to watch. The little incident over the fire had severely dampened her faith in me, and while I could cope with Dad’s brief outburst of anger, Mum’s disappointment was harder to live with.

‘This is probably a big mistake.’ Dad’s voice comes to me with an undisguisable edge of love and concern, despite his determination still to sound pissed-off as he hands me the video camera. A moment accompanies the giving of a gift like this, it happens outside considerations of value or acquisition, beyond the emotional range of a TV commercial. There’s magic attached, we both know that: it can do things, this camera, it can steal little bits of life. This is a key fatherson experience (he wants it as much as I do, it’s higher resolution than anything he has and he’s a technology freak, that’s part of it—and Mum, too, with the baby due: home-video time), but it comes with a lecture.

‘This is no reward, buster, OK? Tell me something. When you started that fire, couldn’t you see how it would end up? Couldn’t you see the kind of trouble it would get you into?’

Nothing from me. What can I say? It’s our second day in Devon, and I’m playing it cool. Even with all the doors open, the cottage smells foreign, like someone else’s bed. Outside, the sun is blazing. Time for a spot of cricket and some fighting in the streets. But I’m not looking for aggravation, not today.

‘Well?’ ‘I suppose…’

‘I hope so. You’re not stupid, Tom, don’t try and pretend you are.

You’re very full of yourself and you like f lirting with danger. But think long-term for a moment. If you can’t persuade yourself out of such ideas now, what’s going to change? Are you going to be pissing about setting things on fire in ten years’ time?’

‘You’re going to be an older brother soon,’ Mum says, watching me, working on my conscience, convinced that I have one. ‘You may not want it, but that gives you a certain responsibility. I think you’re bright enough to know what you were doing. But I don’t know which is worse—the thought of you doing it with a degree of premeditation, or being so out of control, that you couldn’t stop yourself.’

‘I wasn’t out of control,’ I say quietly. ‘Right,’ says Dad. ‘And we’re not unaware of the way that the move’s tangled up in this. Maybe it’s a very selfish decision on our part, but it’s just for one year and sometimes…’ He searches for an acceptable argument. Mum finds it for him. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘either way you choose, someone loses.’

‘I know,’ I say. I feel awkward now, I want this to be over. ‘I like change,’ I say. Which is true. ‘What I want you to remember,’ Dad says, looking at the Japanesepackaged box in my hands, still unopened, ‘is that you’d better think long and hard about the kind of decisions you make in the future. Colorful is one thing, but stupid is just plain stupid, do you understand me?’

So I use the camera. It’s great. This really is the video age. Nothing is real unless it’s digitized and stuck on YouTube. I point the camera at the family and suddenly they have meaning, although search me for what it is.

They smile a bit at first, then they forget about that and try to pretend I’m not there, which doesn’t work, of course—then, when they realize that I’m not going to go away, they start to look irritated, you catch a moment in their eyes that says, ‘I want to get on with things, I’ve got things to do, but I don’t want you watching.’ Why are they so secretive? Why is it even the smallest acts expose us to ridicule? On video, everything’s the same. Watching someone drink a glass of water is as private as watching someone pee. It makes you realize that we don’t see each other most of the time. We look, but we shut out the important stuff.

I know why I got this camera, and the baby knows too. I think he knows everything. He doesn’t care about any of this shit, he’s watched all the time anyway, nothing is private for him and he hasn’t learned to care yet. But already he understands a gift. He understands transactions, that’s what it’s all about. Jessie and I haven’t been raised to respond to tips and bribes, and he won’t be either—we know all the moral complications inherent in gifts (you don’t thank someone for saving your life, you hate the bastard for making you owe him so much).

I got this camera not to buy my future good behavior—Mum and Dad wouldn’t do that, they know I wouldn’t go for a deal like that. No, I got this camera because, by burning the stockroom, I eased the pain of a decision they wanted to make but knew I’d never agree to willingly.

Nothing much happens. We’re in the garden, Mum, Jack and me. Dad and Jessie are somewhere else, in the car. This is before the bathroom window, when I still thought I was the

weirdest thing in my life. It’s another staggeringly hot day, this summer is sick, lurching between nuclear fission and bullet-hard rain. The weather is getting aggressive. I hate all that crap about global warming, but there have been three or four tornadoes spiraling over Europe this year and it snowed in Italy in July. The Italians probably love it; gives them a chance to get on with a bit of off-season football practice.

Mum is in the garden in her bikini. She looks different, now that Jake’s out here and not in her. Thinner, for a start, but also sharper, hipper if you like—more attuned to what’s going on, less of a heavyweight smiler.

She’s lying on the grass drinking Pimm’s and lemonade or something equally ridiculous, and reading an incredibly boring-looking book about social welfare. She takes all that stuff fairly seriously, being a lawyer, certainly a lot more seriously than Dad does. He’s a total cynic—but an optimist, too. Mum has her cynical side, she’s worked with too many hard-core villains and thugs not to, but she still holds on to a vain belief that the system is worth fighting for. I’d certainly want her on my side if I was stuck in a courtroom, but I’d like a bomb belt under my shirt as well. It’s all so fucking middle-class—I’m so fucking middleclass. There’s a conspiracy in this country. We all play our roles, even the yobbos in the streets just fulfill some middle-class nightmare, they don’t have any real ideas of their own. It takes an outsider to inspire genuine fear—someone whose skin is a slightly different color from ours, someone who doesn’t know the rules, even if he’s lived here a couple of generations; or maybe does know the rules and doesn’t give a toss. Then watch us. We’re wary as hell. I mean, these guys don’t know when to take their hats off. They could get serious, they might forget that some ponce in a wig referees the match, they might just go and whack him with a machete, and post it on the web.

Mum’s on the lawn, lying prone on a huge beach towel which follows the bumps and pockmarks in the ground. She’s covered in sun screen, I can smell her from here, and listening to some opera or other on her headset. Jake is lying murmuring in his sleep like a drunk on a binge, his lightweight wicker carrycot placed just inside the shade of the kitchen door. Every now and then, Mum looks up from her book, lifts an earphone from one ear and checks that he’s OK. He looks OK to me, he looks like he’s having wet dreams or maybe planning the baby-aspirin dealership that’s going to set him up. Jake looks like a survivor, but you never can tell. There are times when he looks small and helpless like any other baby, but I think he’s only faking.

Me, I’m so desperate for entertainment that I’m filming the little bugger. I could be down at the beach, getting tossed around by the waves they have down here. The beach is brilliant, I’ll say that for it—a great ridge of pebbles that drops like a shock down to the sea, throwing you off balance if you’re not ready for it, deliberately angled to send you careering into the water, unable to stop. Instead, I’m hanging around, hot as hell in my shorts, a little buzzy-headed from a glass of whatever Mum’s drinking, trying to kill time and look interested as I range my camera over sleeping Jake, the ants massing by the cracks in the step outside the kitchen door, the tangled grass beyond that, like ropey fruitand-veg stall matting, and Mum’s eyes scanning her book, darting up to look my way then ignoring me, her tits cupped in her untied bikini top, a trail of sweat running from the small of her back down a slight fold of her waist to the shadow between her stomach and the towel.

The truth is I’m waiting, and the righteous are rewarded, for as I scan the camera over the wooden trestle table by the far wall of the garden, I hear a sound behind me. There is movement in the heavy air, the waft of a body cutting through the stillness of the kitchen, a local voice cooling my neck.

‘Aren’t you bored, Tom, taking films of the baby? I didn’t think to find you here on a day like this.’ She can make me blush, Lucy can. It’s stupid, but everything she says to me makes me prickle with embarrassment. Does she know this? Am I ahead of her, London boy to Devon girl? Not a chance. ‘You look hot.’ I don’t know what else to say. Her face is shining, her hair damp at the edges with sweat. She’s not exactly beautiful—certainly not as pretty as Jessie—but she has a sense about her that’s quite unmissable. Whereas Jessie is totally aware of what she can do with her whole body, the power it gives her, Lucy looks as if she might fuck on the stairs while cleaning house for us without missing a beat. They’d each have their own importance for her, the screwing and the cleaning, she’d take them in the same matter of fact way she seems to take everything. But what do I know? I just wish she would. ‘I am hot,’ she says, as I lay the camera on the kitchen table, next to a pile of Jessie’s junk. Lucy has the fridge door open, kneeling as she drops ice cubes into the lime cordial she’s made. ‘I think I stepped on a wasp on the way over, but it was too tired in this heat to sting much.’ Her feet are bare. She turns and looks at me, straightening up. She lifts a foot to show me; the sole is black, but I can just make out a small red welt. ‘You should clean that,’ my mother shouts from the garden, all seeing when it comes to injuries and health. Lucy goes outside. I follow her, wishing she were six or seven years younger, my age. Mum puts aside the headset and the book and looks up. She has a smoothness, Mum, a healthy and refined sheen which makes Lucy look coarse. I think it’s the coarseness I like. ‘I’ll wash my feet in your bath, if that’s all right,’ Lucy says. She crouches for a moment, next to Mum, glass in hand, the light bleaching her off-white dress and shadowing the outline of her legs. I don’t know what to do with myself. I just want to stare, but I think Lucy suspects this, so I take myself off to the broken stone wall which edges two sides of our scraggly lawn and sit on it, arching my back to throw my face and chest up to the sun. Jack stirs and Lucy says, ‘I’ll get him,’ her voice sounding further away than it is, swimming with the sunspots inside my head. ‘What’s your problem?’ she says a moment later. ‘Too hot—or hungry?’ Then, to Mum: ‘How is he?’ ‘He’s fine. He’s in charge, why shouldn’t he be? But at least he sleeps at night. Apart from feeding, he doesn’t wake.’

‘He looks like you.’

‘I think he looks like himself. He’s his own person.’ I open my eyes as Mum slips a tit in his mouth. Lucy is standing over them, watching Jake suck furiously. Sensing the moment, I make a move for the house. ‘Already he’s got a strong will,’ Mum says, trying to shift Jack into a more comfortable position in the shade. I walk past, unnoticed, and dart into the house. ‘And a strong mouth,’ Lucy says, still with Mum. ‘Does that hurt?’ I hear Mum laugh. ‘He doesn’t care if it does.’

When Lucy comes in, I have the camera in my hand again, trying to look as if I’m doing something when all I want is to be inside while Lucy’s inside. She starts vacuuming and I shoot her, hoping she won’t know there’s barely enough light to see anything. I follow her as she pulls the lead out of the vacuum and finds a socket, then lugs the machine to the top of the stairs and starts working her way down. She always does the stairs before anything else, maybe because she wants to get them out of the way first, because they’re the most boring part of cleaning the house—although in terms of vacuuming, I can’t imagine that one thing is more boring than another. Lucy is too bright to be a housekeeper, and yet somehow I don’t think it matters much to her. God knows what she thinks life is about, but I don’t think cleaning enters into it. Then again, she has a curious respect for the oddest things. Maybe she knows something I don’t?