She dives into a large cardboard box crammed with the stuff she wouldn’t let the removal men touch when we came down here. I don’t know how to start. I stand staring at a postcard tucked into her mirror, a Rodin sketch of a woman contorted into a far more uncomfortable position than Jessie’s when I entered, her muscles all pushing against her penciled flesh like life trying to get out.
‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask her, trying to edge into this and wondering why I don’t just go on the attack – ‘Fuck it, I saw you! What were you doing?’ But I don’t. Instead, brother-sister conundrum number four thousand and forty-eight: ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask, ‘which are your real feelings – the ones you use as cover or the ones you never use?’
She turns, looks up over the seat of her jeans which faces me. ‘You’ve been reading comics again, haven’t you?’
‘Well?’
‘I’m trying to find something.’
‘Jessie…’ I’m not feeling patient.
She bobs back inside the box, retrieves a tattered brown envelope which rips as she picks it up, scattering scraps of paper, letters, drawings, what looks like an old napkin smudged with crayon. ‘Shit!’ She straightens up, arches her back, shoots me a bottomless glance. ‘How do you use a feeling, tell me.’
I sit on the bed. Somehow or other, I’m going to get through this.
‘OK.’ Jessie moves to the mirror, touches the Rodin postcard, as if I had willed her to do it. She picks up a scent spray, feels its weight, pulls the front of the black camisole-thing she is wearing above her jeans and belts a jet of lighter fuel down her tits. Well, it smells like lighter fuel and it’s designed to have much the same effect. She knows I hate that stuff.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘you don’t like it down here, do you? You don’t like Devon. But there’s not much you can do about it, is there, except complain? But the more you complain, the worse you feel – unless you get a buzz off complaining, which you probably do. What don’t you like? It’s all instinct or emotion or something. If you wanted to like it, if you wanted to find things to like, you could. At least you could make it better than it is…’ I’m barely listening. This is not what I’ve come here for. ‘What’s real about any of that? Is there something wrong with Devon or with you? Of course, if you ask me—’
‘Jessie,’ I blurt, ‘I didn’t drop the shopping in the rain.’
‘It got wet.’
And I’m off and running again, a mad, tangential babble: ‘Do you remember that time I was meant to be marking them in as they came back from the cross-country run? I was pissing about with Steve down by the stream and I fell in? I got soaked, everything. I had to say I fell in a puddle.’
She knows what it is now. I can see it in her eyes.
‘What’s this about?’
‘You.’
And I start to cry. I can’t believe this, but I’m sitting on the bed blabbing. Her arm goes around me. ‘Christ, Tom, shush, what is it?’ I feel her warmth, her closeness as she hugs me. This is why I love her – she’s my sister. But she’s also someone I don’t know nearly as well as I think, she’s a body – a very pliant body – into which all kinds of men I’ll never meet will be sticking more than just a casual finger. And then there’s my dad.
‘I saw you.’ I stop sobbing, feeling sick, heaving for air. I pull away, my face burning. I get up and swing the bedroom door shut, this is private, whatever happened this is between Jessie and me. ‘In the bath. With Dad.’ I’m still gulping air, the fear wrapped tight around my throat.
‘Yes?’
‘What does it mean?’
Any hint of knowledge in her eyes has been banished. I am faced with such young, clear-faced honesty that I doubt myself. I want to doubt myself.
‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
It’s not enough. I want more. I’m up on that cliff above the village. The truth is bigger than anything else, it doesn’t care about the rules. You make the rules, then you find yourself in the middle of that cold ocean anyway.
She goes on: ‘We had a bath. I got in, he got out.’
‘That’s not what I saw.’
‘Well, that’s all there was.’ She draws back. A certain petulant set to her mouth makes me doubt her now, not me. ‘Christ, where were you? What do you think you saw?’
‘Don’t give me a hard time! I don’t want to talk about this, it’s scaring the shit out of me, it makes me feel like throwing up. I feel sick, Jessie. I’m not being melodramatic, but I feel like I want to die. This is real.’
I break through for a moment, then it’s gone.
‘Do you know what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah, now I’ve thought about it. And I have thought about it.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘I’m just telling you you’re wrong.’
I want to grab her, shake her, hurt her in some way, but I just take hold of her wrist. ‘Please don’t lie to me.’
I grip tight. ‘I’d rather know. We don’t bullshit each other – we don’t, do we?’
Jessie lets me hold her, as if this gives her the edge. I’ve lost and she knows it. I know what I believe, but I’m going to let her tell it her way because I don’t want to be shut out.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘you saw me in the bath with Dad, right? I don’t know what you saw, but you know what I’m like, I like physicality. God, we touch each other enough—’ She looks at my hand, grasping her wrist – ‘but it doesn’t mean anything earth-shattering. I tell you everything. I’d tell you.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’ I feel my fingers dig in, pressing hard on to the bone. I want to bruise her, I want her to remember this. Then I let go. ‘You couldn’t.’
‘What is it? Are you all right?’ Her expression has changed. She looks at me, concerned, as a thought strikes me like a wave of pain, washing over me, blanking everything else out.
She touches my face. Contact. She needs contact, constantly.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘I haven’t screamed and told you to fuck off or anything, which I probably should have.’ Yes. Why not? ‘It’s a pretty weird thing you’re suggesting. I’m not saying I’m not pretty weird, but really it’s something on a level I’ve never thought about.’ She stares at me, trying to measure whether she’s getting through. ‘Not seriously.’
But I’m falling, groundless. It has only just occurred to me that I never for a moment thought that Dad might be the instigator here. His prick looms large in my skull like some kind of medieval puppet, but I don’t see Jessie at threat. Somehow I felt she must be in control, she always seems in control to me – would I even know if she was in trouble? So much for the protective brother.
She touches my arm, smiles encouragingly. ‘Are you all right now?’
I don’t know. Am I?
6
I did a deal with Dad for coming down here – before, when he was just my dad. Now I don’t know what he is. I look around me and I see other selves warring with the ones we thought we knew, the ones we felt safe with.
I got a video camera out of it, but I also got Devon. I was wrong.
This is the Dead Zone. Devon may have some balls, but the people down here don’t know they’re alive. They don’t know what’s happening. They think everything’s still the same, they think we’re OK, it’ll work out, Radio Four will still broadcast shipping forecasts and agricultural reports. They don’t know what’s going on. They haven’t seen the politicians pissing in doorways, the football thugs jumping up and down on the roofs of cars until they crease like cardboard, the snouts of police dogs slobbering over the surfaces of restaurant kitchens. It’s all right for Jessie, she’s got art college to go to, this is just a break for her before she aims herself back at London, back to all that.