Finally, the cottage. I hate it. I hate every drab, weathered stone in its walls. I hate the ground it stands on, its gloomy roof, its oldness. It’s evil, but it’s a shapeless evil, it can wreck your life but it can’t scare you, just depress you. I want to weep. Suddenly I know the difference between crying and weeping, like I know the difference between London and this death trap. In London, I would know what to do, I would know how to cope. In London the rest of my life would not look so unutterably hopeless; I could escape somehow, somehow this wouldn’t be a blank wall.
The back door is open. I pass through the kitchen, empty, into the hall, a dull, dark tunnel at the edge of my vision. Mum is on the floor of the living room, her back to me, sponging up a pool of something Jake has brought up. She has tiny flowers on her dress. Her arse sticks up at me like a part of the furniture, a f lowery cushion, not like Jessie’s at all. I want to cry when I see her, but I don’t want to look at her face, look into her eyes, speak.
She hears me. The light in the living room is fading, thick, a shadowy mist. Everything is gloomy, compressed. She turns. I’m on the stairs before she calls out my name.
Upstairs, I ram the door of the bedroom shut with my bed. She must hear the shunting noise as I shift it across the floor, but I don’t care. No one else cares. I’d always imagined I might persuade Lucy one day to do this with me; put the bed against the door and screw on it. But now I don’t think I’ll ever do that myself. Dad and Jessie have done all the fucking for me. ‘Otherwise, you’re fine.’ His voice creeps into my head, like he was appraising cattle or something, gripping her rump on a monthly or weekly basis or whatever it is and grading the meat. He has had Jessie where she craps and I don’t think there will ever be anything as disgusting in my life again.
I do not cause a scene. I just need time. I just need a hostage and a gun and I could be happy.
They come back—singly, Jessie first, then Dad—but not before Mum has asked me what’s wrong. She knocks on the door but knows better than to try and open it. ‘Leave me alone,’ I tell her. ‘I want to think.’ She persists for a few minutes, but gives up and goes back to her baby. I can’t protect her.
I am going to kill them. I don’t know what happens after that, but until then every road leads to that door, until then I can face anything because I have a purpose, I have a reason for still being here.
Next day. I am the same person. I let the milk soak into my Shredded Wheat. I step into my underpants wondering whose legs these are receiving messages from my brain, my foot going through the hole with remarkable precision then holding my weight as I repeat the exercise with the other.
Breakfast is a bit dead. No one speaks much, or is it me who thinks that, is breakfast always a bit dead because we’re all a bit dead first thing in the mornings? We ate last night too and no one said much then, but Dad claimed he was tired by his run and Jessie said she’d eaten at Caz’s but I know she’d done coke, she tried so hard to be relaxed about everything when in fact she sounded flat, lifeless. I hardly looked at her. If I think about her too long, if I get too close to her, I will lose my resolve. I try to concentrate on her hole clenched tight around Dad’s pole. His penis is the foot of a chair leg in my mind, I cannot explain, it is just a chair leg digging into the ground. The thought of them both in the ground frightens me but I’m going to do it. Mum, I’m sorry. I’m sorry we’re all failing you at once. I don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this but either there is something you’re responsible for, or life makes no sense, it really is just shit and only other people escape the pain.
‘I want to talk to you.’ Jessie is on the stairs, going up. I’ve filled the deadness in my stomach. I want to get out of the cottage. Even to me, my voice is an absolute, it cannot be denied.
‘Yes?’ ‘Not here. Outside. I’m going up the hill. Follow me in a minute.’ I open the front door and walk out. It opens easily, which it doesn’t
usually. It’s bright outside so that I have to squint at first. I walk in the road waiting for the sudden impact of a car’s bonnet from behind. The world seems spread out before me. There is the cottage, here is the village, my cut-out family is behind the cardboard walls, school lurks at the edge of the cereal packet base, the full meaning of which will be revealed if and when I go there in a week and a half’s time and burn it or break it or just shovel earth over the headmaster’s dog.
I walk alone in the sun, almost enjoying its heat. The sheep look beautiful. Strands of barbed wire link wooden stakes, but no blood—this is not Iraq or Afghanistan, just part of a pattern of the country that I’m not a part of myself. Tranquil Devon: gin and tonics, Range Rovers and sheepdogs. And then you die.
Jessie might not follow me, but I think she will. I know what certainty is this morning, I am drawing things on, but not in any way I have ever wanted. I wait at a gate two or three fields down from the shelter, turn away from it, unable to see it anyway behind the hedgerows but sensing its presence, watching the village roads below me, the car park, the beach.
Eventually she comes. She climbs the path with no particular excitement, a bored look on her face, a bit pissed off with me for making her walk up here, but also wary—bringing her here must make her more than wonder.
‘You lied to me.’ I don’t give her time to say anything.
She stops a few feet away, a mound of dead brown grass between us. She frowns, licking a little saliva from the corner of her lip, out of breath from the climb. Her mouth looks weak today, as if someone’s broken it somehow and put it back together wrong, but it also looks as if it could get strong very quickly if it had to, she looks ready to twist my words, turn hard, shut me up.
‘You fucking lied to me.’ She looks away, older sister time, only she’s not so sure. ‘Boring.’
‘I don’t know what boring is. Everything seems the same to me.
Have you been to the toilet this morning? Does it hurt? I bet it does.’ This gets her. She turns and confronts me, angry fast, guilty. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, hearing how bitter my voice sounds for the first time. ‘Cancer? AIDS? The fact that I’ve got a sister who lets her father have her right up her arse?’ I stare at her, not giving her any help, making her react, waiting for her to look away before I do, and I feel like everything changes in that moment, I can do it, I can hate her to her face. She shifts her eyes to the sea for a moment, looking troubled, looking more troubled than I can remember her looking, so that I start to feel sick with love and guilt and want to touch her, until she looks back and her mouth changes, protecting herself, not allowing herself to hug me and be my sister and cry because we’re all fucked up, lost, but instead pretending it can go on, she can deal with me. ‘I saw everything.’ She stares at me. She can hate me too. ‘I watched you.’
‘You filthy little creep.’
‘Look who’s talking. You love it.’
‘You’re weird, Tom. You get off on all of this, don’t you?’ She’s desperate. She’s nasty, she has a really deadly edge to her. ‘Come and look! Come here!’ I grab her arm and pull her. She could fight but she comes with me, not caring, just thinking her own thoughts, working out where this leaves her, whether anything’s really changed, how far I will go. I take her up to the shelter. I’m not even sure myself what’s in my mind. I’m not going to kill her like this, I want them both. I want them to feel what I feel, I want her to be outside this shithole and imagine how it was for me. She’s not short of imagination, Jessie. The sea is there below us as I push her out along the ledge, above the matchbox beach huts. It looks unreal. It looks massive, flat, cold, sparkling. If we could leap across it to the horizon, maybe we could escape. If life worked like that, if we had that power, that size, we could just go on, blank out the past, harden ourselves. But we can’t and I shove her face up against the stone slit, her short hair bristling under my hand, her head compliant, weak, no will of its own. ‘Look!’ I tell her. ‘Can you smell it? Can you smell the sickness in there? I watched you, Jessie. I watched you go down on your knees like a fucking animal and like it. Both of you, you both want it.’ I’m blubbing, but I don’t give a shit, I just swallow the tears and let my face burn and feel twitchy, wired, scared. I could do it now. One push, we could go together. ‘Are you sure?’ ‘What?’ She’s got a different face looking at me. Humiliation, sadness, different steps in her eyes down to a cellar, I don’t know what it is. ‘Are you sure we both want it?’ She leans away from the stone wall, pushes a branch out of her face. I feel uncertain. My body’s light, shaking, no weight in my legs, no certainty in my brain—already I’ve lost the clarity. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. She’s telling me what I want to hear, I know that. ‘I—’ ‘Yes?’ I’m careful. I know her. ‘Do you need help, is that it?’ Those eyes. She is totally alive. She can take it all, she wants it all. ‘Is that what you wanted? I thought maybe you were scared, you wanted it to stop but you couldn’t say it, that’s why you showed me this place with Nick.’ She looks at me with a long laugh. This is a good one. Her eyes are sparkling, like the sea, it’s mask time, where’s Dad? I stare at her mouth. She likes taking the piss out of me—but gently, she’s my sister, she’s just breaking me in for the kind of superior cunts I’m never going to meet. ‘You’re mad.’ There’s nothing to say. She’s playing games with me. I’m back to square one, zero option. ‘Look,’ she says, getting serious. ‘You shouldn’t have got involved with this. I love you, we’ve always been close, but this is different. This is fucking dangerous and it’s not something you should even be thinking about.’ I screw my eyes up, wanting to scream, digging my fingernails into my palms, trying to hold on, trying to wait, this isn’t the moment. ‘What do you expect me to do?’ I ask, beg. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘You can’t do anything. Anything you do will damage us all. You don’t want that. Talk to Dad and you’ll freak him out completely, he doesn’t know you know anything. Talk to Mum and you destroy us. What do you want to do?’ We’re still on the ledge. I’m between her and the hillside but there’s no point in threatening her, threats don’t work, only action and this isn’t the moment, not for me; if my whole existence amounts to ending theirs, I’m going to get it right. ‘I’d like to fucking kill you!’ People who say that don’t do it. Let her feel safe. Another face. Close, like when we used to share everything—or when she used to, I didn’t have much to share, I think she got a kick out of telling me things, exciting me. She takes my hand, clasps it on to her arm and drags it so that my fingers scratch her. White tracks appear then red but no blood, so she does it again, harder. This time the skin breaks in a couple of places. ‘Hurt me,’ she says. ‘Try it, I want you to. You’ll feel better.’ I’m tempted. But I want to go all the way. I really would like to hurt her, even killing her isn’t going to hurt her the way I’d like to—I don’t know the way. I take my hand back. A layer of her skin is wedged under my nails. Red droplets materialize on her arm, wet, finding each other. She holds her arm in front of me for a moment, staring, then shifts past me along the ledge as if we’ve had a chat and now it’s over, everything sorted out. ‘Wait!’ I scramble after her, grabbing her arm again, spinning her around. ‘I do want to hurt you. You’re right.’ She looks surprised for a moment, not very much, but surprised, I’ve actually managed to surprise her. She stands, waiting for what’s coming, still confident, watching me as I take a box of matches out of my pocket. Those surprise her a little more, but she still doesn’t flinch, Jessie is totally cool, she’s even smiling. ‘Sit down,’ I tell her. She sits on the grass. I kneel next to her, taking her arm, not the one she made me scratch, the other one. She’s got some kind of a Spanish shirt on with short, puffy sleeves. I make her roll the sleeve up on to her shoulder. ‘You’re sure about this, are you?’ I ask, not really caring what she says. ‘Do it.’ She looks at me, ready, not smiling any more but keeping her face still, waiting to feel something. I light a match. It takes three before I can keep one going. With cupped hands I slowly move the tiny flame toward the top part of her arm, the softest part, just where the hair she doesn’t shave peeks out. I feel weird. We’re on the grass, on the hill, in bright sunlight, and as I watch and think about what I’m doing I hold the burning match to my sister’s skin, keeping my hands around it to stop it from blowing out, and let it burn a small blister there while she jerks back for a second or two before tensing her arm and holding it still for me to finish. From the side of my vision I glimpse her teeth and the wetness of her mouth as she gasps and bites her lip, but my attention is focused on her arm, on the redness, the skin wrinkling and raw. I press the match against the burn to stub it out. Jessie lets out one small cry, but otherwise says nothing, watching me, watching my eyes, gazing at her arm, her shoulder, then away and back to me. I throw the match on the grass and stare at her. ‘You’re stupid, Jessie, really stupid. I can’t believe you’re really like that.’
‘No?’ ‘No. You’re fucking yourself up. Why are you doing that?’ I don’t feel any different, just disappointed with myself that I couldn’t wait, that I had to do something now—and something so small. ‘You’re pretty fucked up yourself, aren’t you?’ She looks at the burn on her arm, fascinated for a moment, her mouth twisting with the effort of straining her neck around. She pulls the sleeve down over it and stares at me, right into my eyes, there’s a hint of concern in hers. ‘Well, I suppose you would be.’ And she leans across, hand on the grass, and does the last thing I expect. She kisses me. A sisterly kiss, brief, warm, touching. But it comes with a price: ‘Don’t try to stop us, Tom. Please. We’ve only just started. I want it to go on for the moment.’ I know that if my resolve should fail, she will give it back to me. She is perfect. Even in being fucked up, she is perfect—she is perfectly fucked up. I can’t stop them. I can’t blackmail them or threaten them or expose them. Whatever I do, they’ll find a way. There’s always a way. The corner I’m in is the only one, made to fit. There’s only this moment. I want to think about what her arse looks like to Dad when it’s red and sore, whether she’s lying again, whether he did this to her when she was a little girl, when we used to have baths together and the world always felt strange, like a collision course someone else had set up for you to run through. I want to think about what it would be like to hit them both with a cricket bat or something else hard, swinging it down on them as they dog-fuck each other except dogs don’t do it that way, dogs aren’t nearly as fucked up as they are. But there’s only this moment. All I can see is Jessica sitting on the grass in front of me, the sun is sharp, the sea is wide behind her. I am going to do it. Some other time. Soon. Together. ‘Did you really?’ I ask her, schoolboy in the playground disbelieving someone else’s boast. ‘Did you really just start? I think you’ve been doing it for a long time. I think you’ve been doing it all my life.’ She half gets up, crouching with her arms resting on bended knees. She looks like she’s going to tell me something, then her face clouds again and she smiles that nasty smile, games-playing, we’ve used up our free exchange. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Who gives a shit?’ I stare at her, she can’t control me any more, I can fight her and keep on fighting. She stands up. ‘Look, just let it run its course. Things end. This will.’ Yes, it will. Her eyes seem to be searching mine, honest again, looking for an opening. ‘Do you want me to get you something? Something from London?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ I know, but I want to see what she says. She can’t really believe she can buy me off. I get up too. ‘You know what I’m talking about. What do you want—do you want to come to London? We’re going tomorrow.’ This is news to me. ‘Who is?’ ‘Dad and me. He has to go. I’m going to see Sonny. Do you want to come?’ ‘I can go to London myself if I want to.’ I press her. ‘What can you get me—cocaine, dope, money, crank, sweeties? What’s on offer here?’ She is looking at the shelter. I catch her, but she goes on looking anyway. We start walking down the hill. ‘Come on, what can you get me?’ She reaches over and lifts the hinged lid off my head. I’m a robot for her, she thinks she knows me so well. ‘I can get you laid.’