The War Zone (26 page)

There’s a dead bird on the road and I run over it with my bike, little globs of it sticking to my front tire then working their way off as I come into Exeter. My mother is here in the hospital and the bird gives me a mental picture of Jack’s stomach, though I hope he’s in better shape than that. It should be my father’s guts I see but it’s not and I’m here only because I’ve got to be somewhere. I head for the station, not the hospital, staggered by how long everything takes to do—the time it takes to cycle the length of a street, the dreamlike whir of a milk van moving in front of me, my almost stationary poise as I wait at lights, feet off the ground, swaying slowly as gravity enters my mind and pulls me sideways.

I abandon the bike and buy a ticket, puzzled by the money in my pocket—almost eighty pounds, although I don’t remember putting it there or where it came from. Dad gives me money. Mum gives me money. I used to steal it from them, too, but they never noticed so I stopped. I walk onto the platform, making a deliberate effort to move like everyone else. I am surrounded by faces I would not want to see at my trial, anyone’s trial: they know they’re right, this is the time for them, they’ve got their lives organized—even though they’re fucked, they’re making sure someone else is fucked worse than them.

The train journey has a reality of its own, woven in and out of my attempts to stay awake. If I could feel it, the speed would help. But only when another First Great Western express flashes past in the opposite direction on a parallel track does any real sense of the danger penetrate the carriage. The possibility of swinging a door open as one approaches and diving out into its path occurs to me, but if I did that I’d want to take one or two of my turd-faced fellow passengers with me and it might get complicated. As it is, I want to remain anonymous, drinking a foul cup of coffee and dozing in my sweaty T-shirt and piss-stained jeans among these clean livers. If Dad is dead, I may face problems in London—that’s why I bought a ticket, rather than risk a charge through the gate at Paddington. If Dad is dead (and if he is, I should be traveling under the train, my spine coupling the carriages), I don’t see how Jessie can avoid involving the law. If he isn’t, he won’t go out of his way to look for trouble.

I want darkness again, and it’s a long wait until then. Paddington seems vast and echoing when I arrive, a huge distortion of sound and movement. I pick my way through the crowd, the fast food smells, stumbling into a knot of German tourists in Union Jack bowler hats, twisting my leg on a plastic bag as I move to get out of the way of an electric mail cart driving right at me and towing its own train of crap, watching as two uniformed guards manhandle a dosser through a door marked ‘
PRIVATE
’.

I am clumsy and hungry but the burger I buy becomes a lump in my throat which even a flat, syrupy Coke can’t dislodge and I wind up in the gents, my stomach feeling like a bag of wet sand that has to be dropped, my dead brain calculating that if I make it to tonight I will have been up for almost sixty hours without more than three or four of sleep.

I head off into the underground, refusing to make it easy on myself by taking the Docklands line, which is too clean, too bright, too much like something the Prick would create. I stare at the tube map, my eyes adding colors to it and failing to follow the same line for any distance. Finally I trace a route to Wapping, using my finger and moving my lips as I think, then lose myself in an unending circle of escalators and platforms until I smash my knee on a wall and sort myself out.

Twice I miss Whitechapel, where I’m supposed to change lines—once on the way there, then again when I switch trains and come back. A woman, a young mother not much older than Jessie, stands over me at one point in the empty carriage, a sick-faced leering toddler at her feet, and says in a really aggressive voice—as if she’s prepared to back up her words with a fight—‘Have you got any money? I saw you counting your change just now. All my kid’s had since yesterday breakfast is a bag of crisps and some Orangina
.
’ I must look abusable, beatable—at Earl’s Court I had a man stick his clammy hand on the seat of my jeans.

The sun is out at Wapping and the river is so bright it just flashes on my brain, leaving shrinking purple images. I try to work out which way to walk by following it, but have trouble remembering which side of my body to keep it on. There’s a lot of new building going on here, like my father’s wharf but not so poncy, less full of itself, its reconstitutedneo-Victoriana-crappiness. In fact, it’s ugly, that’s what it is, it’s fucking awful. It’s hard to choose between the new functional ugliness and the old functional ugliness, so why not nuke it all? The people around here wouldn’t mind—not the ones who’ve been here a lifetime. They’re used to being blitzed. Hitler’s dead; the IRA’s history; now we’ve got homegrown jokers willing to blow it all up—it doesn’t make much difference to the locals. Because outside the electric gates and barbed-wire fences, not a lot’s happening.

There’s a whole stretch I walk through where even the newly remodeled tenement houses are boarded-up, windows broken, colored paint peeling off the doors. With a suddenness that really frightens me, I remember being high up on a roof with the Prick when I was little. We were standing on top of an office block that was waiting to be demolished, I think, and gazing at the view; he had his hands tight on my shoulders, probably convinced that I was going to go running off across the flat, unwalled roof. There was a high-rise of grim flats some distance away, close enough to see the layers of weather- stained, wood-clad balconies where people kept their window boxes, the junk they couldn’t fit inside their flats, maybe even a rabbit or pigeons. Out of the lot of them—I don’t know, maybe fifty or sixty—one had had its creosoted brown wood painted orange and my father drew my attention to it.

‘Look at that,’ he said, and his voice was almost bitter or defeated or something. ‘One desperate attempt at individuality.’ It didn’t mean anything to me—I was six, maybe, or seven—but I think the extent of his own silence that followed worried him. Now, stepping along, seeing the wreckage around me, thinking about what I’m going to do, I think I can understand what it was—the fact that nothing he could build could be anything those people would care about, anything less than his own huge wank, his own shot at imperialism. He should thank me.

I sleep on the grass in a tiny park by the water, but I’m troubled by the look on Dad’s face as I stuck him, the sight of Jessie’s stomach as she bent to help him.

Then there’s a terrible moment when I hear bird sounds and trucks moving and I stir, thinking the crane operator who drowned off Dad’s wharf has come out of the river and is standing over me, sludge dripping off him, his face horribly mutilated by the action of a ship’s propeller—but there’s no one here, only an old man on the path, talking to his dog and staring up at a grim statue against an orange sky.

I relent and find a working phone outside a petrol station, feeling worse for the sleep, surprised at how near to evening it is. I don’t have a plan; I don’t need one—just minimal preparation and luck. The sun is cooler now, and I find my confidence draining with the warmth as the phone rings and rings. I begin to panic and try to calm down, forcing myself to put the phone back and walk out onto the petrol station forecourt. If he’s dead, what would have happened? Surely there’d be someone there? They could just be out, seeing Mum—telling her what, how would he explain this? Or of course he could be in hospital himself—was the wound deep? It felt like nothing, less resistance than sticking a knife in fruit.

I can’t do this all in one go. I realize now it’s not going to be easy. Two cans of petrol are the most I can manage, and I don’t even have the cans. So I walk into the forecourt shop, in my jeans, sneakers and T-shirt, trying to look casual, trying not to look as young as I am, and I pick up two five-liter cans of oil, surprised by how expensive they are—I’m not going to be able to afford to fill them both with petrol, maybe I should just buy one? But like an arrow that points forward, I see a stack of large plastic containers of bottled water for sale, two for less than half the price of one can of oil, and I put the oil down and pick the water up, and the woman behind the register doesn’t give a shit what I do as long as I get out of her life now, so I push it—with a tired, shrill voice I tell her my dad’s run out of petrol and I’m going to empty the water out and fill them both at the pump, is that all right?

She looks at me with a sort of bitten lip and small, hard eyes that she’s probably got doing this job, and I gild the lily, I tell her it’s a Bentley, a real old wreck, one of these plastic bottles isn’t even going to get it sparking. And she knows I’m lying, and she knows I know it, but she doesn’t want the aggravation so she says, ‘Give me the money for the petrol first’, and stares with relief over my head as another customer comes in, a pompous little git in a suit impatient for a token for the car wash. She takes my money and gives me the change and I tell her it’s wrong; then she gets nasty, but we sort it out, and I feel her small, hard eyes on me as I fill the containers at the pump, the rich stench of the petrol settling on my lungs, and I wonder if a match now would make her happy.

I don’t hang around to try the phone again but walk on, carrying the petrol for a mile or so, getting lost and getting stuck in dead ends a couple of times. My head is sharper now, but in a disjointed way that makes it difficult to hold a thought for more than a moment. Part of me is looking for another phone; part of me is trying to keep moving toward the docks. I reach some traffic lights which seem familiar, but have to duck out of sight of an approaching police car, and try then to keep to the back streets, losing any real sense—without the river—of where I am.

In one narrow residential street there’s a parade of three shops—two boarded-up, one a Chinese off-license—and I realize I’ve hardly drunk anything all day, apart from the Coke and some water from an ancient, grimy drinking fountain in the park. I walk on and stash the petrol against the corrugated-iron doorway of a blackened, burned-out house that someone’s already done a job on, then double-back to the shop and walk inside.

It’s as much a food shop as an off-license—there’s even a stand of unidentifiable withered vegetables in front of the register—but I settle for just two small bags of peanuts, fix in my mind the location of the fastest-reached beer by the door, pay for the nuts and grab a four-pack on the way out, running like hell holding the awkward, hard-rimmed mass of cans to my stomach, one of them splaying out and dropping from its plastic loop to bounce on the pavement as I go.

The old Chinese man who served me doesn’t follow me on to the street, but seconds later as I look back a young kid not much older than me—his son? grandson?—comes sprinting out, fast enough to worry me, and I leg it around a corner, down another dark, narrow street and through a brick passageway into a gloomy, forbidding courtyard at the back of a Victorian office building. I decide to fight, if that’s what he wants; I’ve never fought anyone Chinese, but he hardly looked like a killer, spindly arms caught inside a black, numbered baseball jacket, and I’d win because I’ve got to—I’ve got other business tonight.

But he doesn’t appear, and I open a beer waiting for him, keen to get out of the courtyard, which seems filled with death, and keener still to get my petrol back. The first gulp of beer does it for me instantly—I’m so tired and freaked out anyway, it’s like a sane hand on my shoulder—and I drink the rest down, chuck the can into a basement hole, and walk out onto the street, clutching the other two cans and getting a weird sense of
déjà vu
as I try to connect last night with now and go back for the petrol.

I know where I am. I’m in a phonebox, one of the old-style thick-paned red ones. It stinks of piss, which is no surprise, but the phone works, which is.

My hand hurts. I cut it open again opening the second can of beer—let the ring-pull slice right into the dead flap of one of the fingers I cut last night switching hands with the knife in my tussle with Dad. I’ve kept the can as a souvenir, but not the ring-pull.

I am on the Isle of Dogs. I know exactly where I am. Not much of an island, is it? How do you get a dog to bark? Pour petrol over it, set it on fire and it goes woof. Well, I’ve got the petrol. The phone is ringing—the other end, not here. Still nobody home. Let it ring.

The entrance to my father’s construction site is four streets from here. I’ve been there once already since it’s got dark, walked right under the shadow of the bloody great pyramid and back again. Nobody stopped me. But no phones in there, not ones I can use anyway. It’s still ringing.

Click.
‘Hello?’ Jessie’s voice. Silence. London-to-Devon static. I wish I could touch her. ‘Hello?’ ‘Jessie—’ ‘Tom, are you OK?’ Cool; not entirely interested in my condition. ‘I’m fucking brilliant. How’s Dad? Is he hurt bad?’ ‘Where are you?’ ‘Just tell me, will you? Is he all right?’ ‘He’s not dead. You really are a—’ But I’ve cut us off.

I’m alive for about two minutes of it. The rest is like watching a video I’ve seen over and over; I’ve done this in my head so many times already tonight.

The first is out over the water, after I’ve tossed the beer cans (one empty, one full) and petrol over the fence, ready for me, and waited for the dogs to bark, the lights to blaze—but nothing. Stillness.

It’s dark out here. The pyramid is lit up, maybe forty or fifty feet away, but softly from below, like a part-built aviary or tomb or something, sheathed in scaffolding and plastic sheeting which ripples as it breathes the dank dockside air. Weird shapes inhabit the night here, the ghosts of huge Victorian cranes, old chimneys pointing up to nowhere, exposed bellies of warehouses thick with the sweat and greed and cheap pain that drove everything on.

I climb along a railing that carries the fence a few feet out over the water from the wharf. It’s the only way in, short of walking up to the gate and blagging it with the guards—maybe Jason’s on, with his cosh? The rust on the bars in the dark is like ground glass, savaging my cut hand and engraving itself on the other. There’s virtually no toe-hold—the railing has been wired over to block the gaps inbetween, where my feet might have wedged—but I drive my sneakers in against the wire anyway and use the crazy strength I’ve got now to drag myself along, inches above the black gaping mouth of the dock.