The War Zone by Alexander Stuart

Author:Alexander Stuart [Alexander Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General Fiction
ISBN: 9780241123423
Google: Z6VBQd0jEJsC
Amazon: 1438991177
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1989-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

22

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.

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