The War Zone Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the back. ‘You mean you get confused because you can’t tell the difference between a flower and a tree.’
    ‘Nothing’s real,’ Dad says, ‘that’s part of the problem. I heard some Ministry of Defense wanker the other night, talking about how defense contractors had to learn what it was like in the real world. Everyone thinks that some other part of life is more real than their own, or that theirs is the only real world. They’re both equally dangerous points of view.’
    ‘What’s real to you?’ I ask him. He thinks about that. This is an afternoon that makes you challenge ideas of reality. School’s out, everybody’s holidaying. Is anyone working today? Well, those hospital Nazis looking after Mother—all crisp linen and fluorescent faces. But they enjoy their work, stoking the boilers with anaesthetized patients. Dad answers me. He sounds like a chum, not my father. I think we could get on well, if we could ever get rid of these family ties between us. ‘The fact that life goes on,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t stop going on—well, it might, but I wouldn’t want it to. And you two. No escaping you two.’
    ‘You wouldn’t last a minute without us,’ Jessica tells him. ‘And Mum.’
    ‘Oh, yeah?’ I can hear him smile.
    We pass through a village, marvelously deserted on this weekday afternoon—but not in a cozy way, more as if the entire population had been wiped out and the buildings left standing. Radio One drifts hollowly from open windows and open doors of cream-grey Devon cottages and ugly new houses, full of themselves, full of premeditated, parceled country charm. A Ford estate car stands silent outside the confectioners-and-sub-post-office. A new bike is upturned against a wall, awaiting a puncture repair. The sun beats down, accentuating any cracks in the road visible from the river.
    Then someone appears to spoil the illusion: an old woman, older than we allow them to live in London, wearing a cardigan—in this weather—over her faded summer dress. She calls across the street.
    ‘There’s fluoride in that water. They put it in for the teeth, none of us want it, but they put it in anyway.’
    ‘Not in the river, surely?’ Dad shouts. She makes no move toward us, just stands in front of the shop next to the sub-post office, its windows empty save for a small yellow notice taped up inside. ‘The sheep drink it,’ she says. ‘They make sure we get it, one way or another. The sheep drink it, or we do.’ We stop paddling as we approach the village ford, where the water is barely deep enough to let us pass. The canoe scrapes the concreted bottom, but we push it on with our hands and float under a road bridge and away from the centre of town. ‘Why’d you only bring one bottle of wine?’ Jessie asks Dad, as we pass a dingy white shed, its paint peeling, a pile of abandoned oil drums outside. ‘I feel like getting smashed.’
    ‘That’s why.’
    ‘It’s not enough.’ She shifts her weight behind me, rocking the canoe. I turn to make a face. She is holding the empty wine bottle in the river, enjoying the push of the water against it. ‘You could,’ I point out, half complaining, ‘always try paddling.’ But she shakes her head, studying the bottle’s neck in her hand. She looks far away, like Mum does sometimes. Then she looks around at Dad. Neither of us is paddling now. He is sitting, head back, cocked toward the sky, eyes closed. ‘Do you feel older… ?’ She pauses, trying to pin down a thought in her mind. ‘He looks it,’ I offer, to help wake him up. He does and he doesn’t. He hasn’t shaved, so the slight sag of his jaw is usefully hidden by stubble. His hair is as wiry and uncontrollable as ever, but the skin around his eyes looks tired, dark and folded like a wary old lizard. ‘… or different?’ Jessie goes on. ‘Having a new son? I mean, it’s been a while.’ Opening his eyes to an impending collision, Dad quickly cuts water with his paddle to