The War Zone Read Online Free PDF Page B

Devon on a Thursday afternoon, and it’s only me who’s feeling weird, who’s feeling as if there’s a party going on and I’m not invited.

4
    Jessie and me are close. We talk a lot. We talk about everything. She’s a major source of information for me when it comes to the inner rumblings and eruptions that go through girls’ heads, and I want to know that stuff, especially the darker side, the really funky, creamy, fuck-the-feminists-and-fuck-all-men-this-is-really-what-I’mabout sort of thinking. I’m already developing my own style. I’ve found I don’t just want to fuck girls’ bodies—I want to get inside their minds. Because unless you get that mental bang, unless you listen and you probe and you challenge and you push (to the edge, if need be), sex is like pissing about with a chemistry set without reading the instructions. You’re missing the potential for real danger.
    And it seems to work. I’m doing OK. I’ll be honest—I haven’t actually got there yet, not all the way. But it’s getting closer. And even the dumbest girls I’ve met have a kind of poetry about them, if you can get past all the teen magazine and cosmetic counter bullshit they get brainwashed with.
    But how do you ask your sister, ‘Is something happening with you and Dad?’ It’s not easy.
    Jump ahead a week, maybe two. I’m not sure when, but there’s more water, it’s raining—the kind of warm, hard, summer rain that gets you properly drenched, like standing under a shower with your clothes on.
    It’s one of those summer holidays that makes you wonder if the rest of your life’s going to be like this: always waiting for something to happen, while the world turns somewhere else. I remember when we first went into Iraq, when Bush really screwed things up, these were weird distant shapeless events that seemed like a bad dream but terrified the hell out of me because they were happening—in fact we seemed to be rolling toward disaster all too fast, and no one had asked me! I remember the words ‘National Service’ or ‘Conscription’ suddenly coming back into the vocabulary, and I thought, fuck, if this thing develops, if this thing goes on for long enough, it could drag me down with it.
    But nothing has any moral certainty anymore, thank God. The ‘War on Terror’ was a video-age gig: the will isn’t there, not among the country as a whole, not this country, anyway. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a major Western war like the Second World War again. Not now. Not with a population whose priorities are a flatscreen TV and a weekend in Dubai.
    Anyway, it’s one of those days. My life feels like it’s stuck away from the action, which is hardly surprising in Devon. Clutching at straws, I’ve actually been shopping with my mother. The compulsion suddenly hit me that I had to have a particular DVD and have it now, so I struck a deal with Mum: I’d go with her and carry the food if she’d get me the DVD. Of course, I’d forgotten we were in the wilderness. Not only did the shop in Sidmouth not have what I wanted, but it was a real struggle finding something worth buying. I’m starting to dream of London megastores, I can almost taste them: the iron-clad plasticwrap around every new release, the weird anti-shoplifting tabs, the desperate film company displays. It’s all bullshit, but I’m getting to the point down here where I’d love to be exploited, I want them to take my money (or Mum’s) and fuck my mind.
    We drive through the village and up to our cottage, which looks oddly deserted in the rain—or vulnerable, like a house in a horror movie, waiting for the maniac to call. What I like about the house is its oldness: there’s lichen and stuff in the cracks between the stones, tree roots poking up right outside the front door, which itself is so hard to open and close that it might be easier to climb in through a window, and the garden is overgrown with the sort of lushness you see in old