The War Zone: 20th Anniversary Edition by Alexander Stuart

Author:Alexander Stuart [Stuart, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Family & Relationships, Biography & Autobiography, Military
ISBN: 9781438991177
Google: Z6VBQd0jEJsC
Amazon: 1438991177
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2009-07-27T07:00:00+00:00

23

The air in London is black, grainy, as if you can touch the carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide or whatever it is that settles on everything, layering it with dust, running streaky

when it rains. We walk down the Embankment tube station steps, not really communicating but moving as a unit, brother and sister, through the bewildered foreigners and dossers and shoppers up for the day, clutching their maps and water bottles and asthma inhalers and stepping back as diseased mice dart out from wire-grilled no-go areas and dive under the rails, missing that middle one, the burner, the one with the charge.

The tiles in the station are new, shiny, characterless – a toilet that no one wants you to use, that’s been built just to prove that everything is clean, above board. The whole of the West End is constantly being renovated, laundered, shined-up, rewired, re-alarmed, so that you can see how thick the walls are and the color of what’s inside. They don’t hide the problems – they police them out, they keep them across the river, where we’re headed. It must be a lot like Nuremberg was. Or Dubai. Or Disney World.

I watch Jessie and me at the platform’s edge on a wall-mounted flatscreen as the train comes in. In the picture, we’re two-dimensional, lifeless, green. In the picture, I push or pull her, taking her with me. On this screen I could show my home movies, if I’d taken any. The shoppers and dossers and foreigners could watch as my father parted her bum and stuck his thing between.

The doors close, the walls move and we go under the river. The train stops for a long time and I feel the weight of water above us – if that’s where we are – and sit staring at the three other passengers in our carriage, condemned by their awfulness. An old man sits alone at the far end, his mouth propped open by some tube down his throat, gasping at the air and staring glass-eyed at nothing. A woman with spectacles and an evil, hating face looks up from her yellowed paperback and mentally sorts me out. I’m her son, she will beat me until I bleed and then go on for ever. A skinhead with a blotchy cherry birthmark and a knife scar down his neck sticks his boots up on the seat across from him and stares away from us, frightened by something in his head, moving his lips silently and clutching a brown leather sports bag to his chest, clinging to its scuffed, Union Jack-emblazoned bulk with a curled intensity that only a couple of well-placed kicks to his kidneys would push over into total despair. Jessie sits beside me, her shoes off, a faintly sweet smell rising from them to mix with the stale air of the carriage. She rubs her toes, massaging the digits through the filmy black net of her stockings.

‘I’m unhappy.’ My voice sounds strange in the closed environment of the carriage. I don’t know why I’m telling her.

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