Read Online The War Zone by Alexander Stuart - Free Book Online Page B

it means she might leave at some point, but because it reduces everything to normalcy, to the quiet pattern of everyday life. ‘Why don’t you work in London? Wouldn’t you get more money there?’ ‘London’s full of people like you,’ she says, squeezing my shoulders hard, sending a bolt of pain through them that stuns me. ‘Out to make trouble.’ I look around again. She stares at me—a look which makes me feel as if I’ve just leapt through about ten years. ‘I’ve got to get on,’ she says, getting up, leaving me sitting on the bed with the most incredible erection I’ve ever had, aching to do something yet literally in shock, unable to move. She taps my belly with the knuckles of one hand just above my hard-on, just where my stomach is wrinkled over my tightened shorts. ‘You’re getting fat.’ She smiles, recapping the aftersun cream ‘Too much sitting around. You don’t want a paunch, do you?’ She walks out and two rival waves of emotion slap into me. The first sends the details of my Devon room—the few I’m aware of to start with—spiraling into outer space. I might as well be in Kabul, the smallpaned windows seem so foreign. My bed could be an old mattress in a shelled doorway; the razor wire begins just over there, right by that bombed shopfront and that gloomy old chest of drawers. I’d rather be in an Afghan street right now, waiting for the bullet or the bomb blast, the flying glass, nothing. Sitting here, sitting in safety, in the bizarre heat of an English summer day, it all seems meaningless, the choices don’t matter—even if it isn’t you who make them. The second wave is my normal response, my hearty, ‘Fuck this!’ attitude that I know I can rely on. I bounce off the bed and go to the door. Lucy is in Jessie’s room, the lead of her vacuum snaking around Jessie’s door from the point on the landing. My door is half closed. I take a chance. Hidden behind it, I toss off—awkwardly, hurriedly, energetically—into a wad of Kleenex. Halfway through, I freeze when I hear Lucy pulling the plug out. I look around the door, debating whether to cram my hard-on back inside my shorts. I don’t. I want her to see me, but she doesn’t and my hand just works harder with her in sight, retreating down the stairs. I finish and shove the balled tissue under my bed, reminding myself that I must remember it later. Dad’s voice downstairs makes me jump—I didn’t know he was back. He is talking to Lucy when I go down, showing her the bag of barbecue charcoal he has bought, as if she could possibly be interested. Jessie is carrying in a box of food topped with sausages and steaks. For the briefest moment, she looks like a teenage housewife—one of the saddest sights known to man. It’s only the gaping square hole cut out of the seat of her jeans, revealing pale blue boxer shorts underneath, that gives the lie to this vision of Jessie and Dad as an oddly matched but small-horizoned provincial couple. I don’t give it a second thought. Maybe I should.

9
    A nuclear summer’s evening and we are in a foreign land—well, it’s familiar enough to us by now, but we’re the foreigners, Jessie and me, we don’t fit in, we’re not entirely trusted yet
    and why should we be?
    Voices swim in the hazy golden air, laughter mixing with car exhaust and cigarette smoke and the richer, sicklier smells of dried sweat, worn leather and the grasping flowering plants which snake up and around the old stone walls of the alcove we’re crammed into. We’re with the hard boys, the local yobbos, Jessie’s crowd, admirers all, working their nuts off to make sure she notices them. There’s a couple of village girls with us, too, drinking and joking, somehow recognizing that they can’t fight Jessica, she’s got to win, so they might as well learn from her.
    Half the populace seems gathered here outside the local watering hole, beer-bellied phantoms flitting past my range of vision, alcohol slopping from