The War Zone (17 page)
We’re in the Bentley. We’re safe—I mean even though it’s a heap, it has the power and lines that fuel this country’s divide, it can drive right over your child without stopping,
it can part the way through police on horseback with visors over their faces at a football match. You can do anything in a car like this, you can fuck your daughter, you can knobble a judge or an MP, you can shoot up and you won’t get caught. It’s not loud, that’s the secret. It’s not even clean. This car knows what it’s about.
It has taken us up through Devon to skirt around Bristol and follow endless feed roads on to the M4. It all looks the same. At this speed only the trees look alive and not all of them. At this speed there’s only signs and barriers and hard shoulders and the lines diving under the bonnet, and it all looks flat. The trees that are there don’t fit and won’t be there for long, this is inbetween land, no reason for it, this is dead time. If there was a way of getting from nowhere to somewhere—to London—without traveling, this land would not even exist.
The Prick is driving, wearing a suit and setting himself up for what’s ahead, confrontation time, he’s grim-mouthed but he’s looking forward to this. He talks to us from time to time, but we’re not there, he wants to get to the site and say his piece, and maybe if he shouts loud enough and gets worked up and shoots the Koreans down he can have his daughter for dessert on a nice cozy hotel bed, they’ll get shit stains on the sheets.
And she is next to me, a world away, listening to her iPod, going through her bag, glancing at Dad in the mirror, but coolly, as though he’s an encumbrance at this moment, she’s in a different mood and he’s not part of it. I stare at the meaningless stream of traffic, bored with the silence in the car, it’s a phony silence, they could talk but they can’t with me here. A container lorry drags past, going backwards from my point of view, then two cars and a coach. A child’s face peers down at us from the lap of his hawk-faced grand-mother. He has a gun.
We stop at a motorway service station. I need a piss and Jessie wants a magazine so she goes in the shop. The whole thing is perfect for the Inbetween Land, for my state of mind. You could die here and not even know it. The bogs are awash with blue disinfectant yet still they stink, as if it’s just colored blue, it doesn’t do anything, it just tints the diseases. The food shop—the Pantry!—has the same kind of bluish-green tinge as the disinfectant, they probably flavor the forcegrown fruit and chemical pastry with it. And in the gift shop, where I go to look for Jessie, it’s Christmas all year round, shiny paper and tinsel over everything, toys and tourist tricks that you wouldn’t give to charity.
She’s there, with him, with the Prick, at the till, hanging on his arm just the wrong way, like a tart, like a fuck, like something he’s picked up on the road. They’re playing a game: maybe they look like father and daughter, maybe they don’t; maybe he’s the freako businessman—menopausal-punk hair, soft, weathered face, suit—and she’s the antidote to his life, she lets him feel human or dirty or whatever men like that need to feel, she can give him a thrill just out of buying magazines and chocolates and crap key rings.
Except he doesn’t look too happy about it. He looks more than a little uncomfortable, the Prick, testy, as if she’s trying his patience. He wants to push her off his arm, but Jessie’s clinging tight, I see her fingers buried in his sleeve as I approach past the plastic-wrapped funeral wreaths.
They both react when I appear, Jessie holding tight but altering her expression in some subtle way which makes her look the affectionate daughter, flirty but not unnaturally so—a hungry schoolgirl proud of Daddy. The Prick, for his part, frowns and prizes her arm off his, being the adult, being the responsible one, and looks straight at me, his eyes telling me what to think, warning me off, saying, ‘Tom, do you want anything?’
So I stare right back and don’t even look at the counter or the bored, mindfucked girl on the register (‘Where do you work?’ ‘I work on the M4.’) or the travelers who clearly buy their clothes and eat their food and make their lives at these places, and I say, ‘Why? It’s all shit,’ and then walk out to the car.
We move on. I listen to Jessie’s iPod because I haven’t brought my own. She sits glancing at her magazines, full of packaged artiness, hip-wank pictures and hip-wank writing. Dad drives, moving from lane to lane just to break the tedium, letting the weight of the Bentley barrel through the formations, the retired minds in the slow lane, the serious movers in the fast, none of them equal to his determination to maintain speed without actually arriving, his need not to get to the next moment.
No one speaks. We each inhabit our space in the Bentley, plotting our sex and our murders and our own destruction until, as the suburbs of London begin and the pattern of the motorway changes—more signs, more slip roads, the necks and heads of streetlights and streets and houses in the afternoon quiet—Dad says, ‘Fuck it, I didn’t have to bring you two! This is a boring enough trip as it is without this conspiracy of silence. I can get depressed without your help!’
So something’s working. Something’s getting through. I almost smile. ‘I didn’t have to come,’ I say. ‘It was Jessie’s idea.’
‘Tom needed glue or paint thinner or whatever it is he sniffs,’ Jessie says in a bored voice. Her hand finds mine on the car seat and presses something small and hard into it. I finger it for a moment before looking down. It’s a bottle, a little glass vial of crystal. I try to give it back—I hate the stuff, it gives me headaches, and I don’t want any of Jessie’s bribes—but she pushes it into my pocket. ‘Tom doesn’t need anything to get high,’ the Prick says, as if I’m not there, as if he feels safe, he’s got me sussed. ‘His mind is strange enough to start with.’ And I lick my finger and write ‘Fuck you’ on the seat, meaning him but meaning Jessie too. She sees it and stares at me, really stares, longer than I can bear. It’s not an angry stare or a disdainful one or anything I can adjust to, it’s just bored and unbeatable, as if she’s got the time, she can wait me out, she can fuck me over in ways I can’t even imagine. We go through the center, past the airport, past the warehouses and odd light industrial factory unit, past the hotels and the billboards, up the ramp and into the heart of my world: chaos, fumy and bright at the same time; short-fused snarl-mouthed achievers bullying past spacey dong-faced tourists; tatty high street secretaries, magazine gloss career women and the others, the boys and girls like me, street fucks and street fighters, all adrift on a set of poncy old buildings and banks and shops-with-no-name; trendy, hip, faceless. Sometimes when I dream at night, when I can, when it’s not blocked by my twisted emotional musings, I see it all burning—like the Great Fire, only better. It’s not the people I want to burn, not especially, but the city would look brilliant all ablaze. I’d love it. The Prick likes it too, that’s why we go this way, why we don’t skirt around it. It torments him. He loves to sound off about it, to pinpoint its madness, the crap that’s preserved, the total shit that’s been built in his lifetime, the detritus that’s going up now. ‘We have political and aesthetic masters,’ he says, sliding the gearstick like it’s some part of Jessie, ‘whose idea of taste is anaglyptic wallpaper in a nice house on a mock-Tudor estate. What can you expect?’ And we’re into the City, the nation’s hard-on, although it’s been a little bit limp lately, flailing around and fucking up, a little bit like I hope The Prick feels sometimes when he can’t get it up. I hope that lies in his future, what future he’s got: a lot of really depressing, really embarrassing, sad-sack limpness. From the car, I see them, I see all the little semen squirreling about trying to find an egg to crack, or maybe just trying to find a job. Not many, it’s not chucking-out time yet, they’re still at their screens, on their phones, in the toilets with their rolled-up notes shoved up their nostrils or each other’s arses—but there’s a few around, holding hands and talking, trading the world.
Then a hiccup. The old London, like the old New York, like the old quarter in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Right next to those slabs of money, just down the street from those monuments to greed, are the tiny shops and slumholes of the Proles. God, they let them get close. It must have been a mistake. Or maybe they knew they were no threat, they could be contained easily enough.
Beaten old farts sit in the scummy windows of an establishment which offers—get this—reconditioned toasters, electric razors and irons. Wire grilles front a shop selling historic knives and guns and implements of torture—the only one doing well, the only one with anything to steal. I should tell the Prick to stop here; I could use his cash to buy the instrument of his death. Wooden boards, reinforced at diagonals to make them stronger, patch the broken door of a makeshift mosque. It looks disused but I hope it’s not; I hope all kinds of insurrection go on in there, I hope they stick pipe bombs up the City’s arse.
The Docks next—no longer a part of the old world, but too desperate in their longing to be a part of the new. The Prick drives the Bentley over polished cobblestones, past tower blocks so tall you could see New York if you shut your eyes and imagined a bridge built entirely of money held together with shit. Then on around the few remaining hulks of gargantuan Victorian warehouses, beautiful in their ugliness but most already gone—cleaned up and renovated, turned into f lash global power-bases, media fiefdoms, multi-million-pound apartments. The Prick’s wharf is one of the last to be developed. Across the water the shell of a part-demolished warehouse looks like something you might see at the Tate Modern: a great bite chewed out of its massive floors, twisted metal and rubble and gaping holes where windows or loading bays must once have been, leading the way to a pillared chasm, dark, totally empty—the sort of place you could take your father and your sister and beat the shit out of them, then slide them down the old tobacco chutes to nowhere. But the Prick’s little toy is growing, not crumbling. The pyramid is going up, sticking its nose onto the skyline, dwarfing everything around it with its newness and its meanness. Even covered in scaffolding it makes me wonder what the fuck Dad thinks he is doing here. This is his statement, this is his finger raised at everything that’s ever been built here. But it’s the same, it’s no different. It’s another fucking ego trip, another pile of emptiness erected with a huge concentration of effort and no real fucking reason. This is what Dad does. He builds things. Why? Because he has to put food on our plates—and because maybe the charge he gets out of designing something other people have to live with, have to confront daily, something that attracts attention in all those self-obsessed architectural journals and even the tabloid press, maybe it all gives him a feeling of specialness, a feeling of righteousness, a sense that, ‘Yes, I shape people’s environments, I define their lives. I am different, I am special, I can fuck my daughter and keep it quiet from my family. I can keep my wife and baby on hold, and my son where he belongs—outside, in the cold.’ When Dad is gone, when Dad is cold and in the ground, one day this will follow—this monkey-puzzle of steel and glass, this cage. There’ll be another pile of rubble and another son staring.
Jessie gets out of the car first, attracting whistles and cat calls from shirtless construction men high on girders. The site foreman, Bernie, comes to meet us, issuing hard hats and riding the storm as Dad ploughs into him before we even reach the site office.
‘What’s the story, Bernie?’ Dad slaps his hand on Bernie’s shoulder in a determinedly unmatey way. ‘A fucking holiday all around?’ But Bernie can take it, Bernie can take most things. He’s a hardnosed bastard, a thug in a suit with a hare lip and a lisp and the eyes of an ex-boxer, smooth as shit when he wants to be, which isn’t now. ‘They want to get paid for what they do,’ he says. ‘That’s all.’
‘You’d better wait out here,’ Dad says to Jessie and me as we reach the office, which is a joke having come this far but he seems decided. He opens the door of the transportable shack and goes inside, followed by Bernie, who winks at Jessie, breathing through his mouth as though he’s going to tell her something but doesn’t. So we stand in the sunshine, not wanting to talk, not really wanting to be with each other at this moment. The water at the edge of the wharf is dark and deep and freaky, not like the sea, lacking that size, that scope, and one of the boys tells us—tells Jessie—that a crane operator died in it the week before, just came off his lunch break, sober, took a dive off the crane and never came up. They never found the body. It makes me feel like I’m wasting time; it makes me feel like I’m losing the edge: hanging on to Jessie and Dad, not looking for an opportunity to do it but rather an excuse not to. Time passes. One of the security guards, Jason, shows us the cosh he carries—‘Just in case things get serious.’ He got it in Shanghai, it’s spring-loaded and telescopes out to become a terrifying weapon. I could use one of those. Dad’s voice is audible even outside the shack. He shouts, then it goes quiet for a few minutes; it’s like a piece of music. Finally he opens the door and comes out, and I glimpse two Korean men in expensive, carefully tailored suits, and a Korean girl in a skirt so short it’s not there, on her knees on the floor picking up the pieces of a scale model of Dad’s gleaming pyramid. A wire-faced ginger-bearded Irishman in sunglasses stares at her arse. Neville, Dad’s job architect, runs after him and catches his arm. Dad turns, like something spring-loaded himself, like Jason’s cosh, and explodes. ‘Never,’ he pauses, riding the moment, enjoying it to its full, ‘give them the whole fucking picture. Am I clear?’
We drive back, past a billboard which says Docklands is London’s Venice, and I think about how my father would have fitted into Renaissance Italy just fine: they all fucked their daughters and each other in the line of business.
He doesn’t say much in the car, just drives aggressively, stopping punchily at lights and then gunning away. Black spray from the road hits the windscreen and he leans into it, driving faster toward the red lights of a lorry in front.
