The War Zone by Alexander Stuart Page B

the sea starts. This can’t be England. This can’t be my life. Why can’t it just go on like this, why does the speed have to stop?
    Something alive darts across the road right in front of the bike and Nick almost jerks us off the road, but he steadies us, our necks craning back to see what it was. We continue our descent into town, the lights taking form, becoming houses and shops the way they do in music videos when a blur becomes a set. We’re moving through a network of one-way streets all leading to the sea, and it’s party night, a bunch of eighteen-year-olds are crisscrossing in and out of parked cars, gesturing back at us, moving hunkered down like insurgents, sliding past pub doorways in pursuit of some prey. We glide over the battlefield, glimpse a couple kissing or struggling by a bow-windowed shop, then Nick drives us straight at a curb, up on to the pavement, down a pedestrian alley and out onto the seafront where the others are waiting for us, John launching a beer bottle to smash in our path as we approach.
    ‘Don’t damage anything you can’t fix,’ Nick says quietly as we draw alongside them, his voice still carrying above the sound of his bike. He looks at Jessie, angled back behind John on John’s bike, and even in my ravaged state of mind I see that there’s something clear about Nick, something powerful in his intentions, which gives him the edge over John or anybody else. But I also get a flash that Jessie’s playing around, more than I thought. She’s teasing Nick, very quietly she’s flirting with John, and I’m not sure that I like that.
    ‘Where the fuck were you?’ Toe-rag quizzes Nick. He looks at me, the obvious cause of the hold-up. ‘You must have crawled here backwards.’
    But Nick isn’t listening. There’s some unspoken communication going on between him and Jessica, whereby he seems quite deliberately to shut her out of his mind. Picking up on this, but at her own pace, with no evident submission, she gets off John’s bike, comes over and stands by me, looking as if she might have something to say but might just as easily walk away. I am expected to move, there’s no doubt about that, and for a moment I’m tempted not to, but there doesn’t seem much option so I slide off and stand faced with the prospect of a ride on John’s bike or no ride at all.
    John is turning in tight circles in the middle of the road, waiting to go, waiting to move, frustrated by being here on the front and looking more out of place than usual with a backdrop of fake-elegant hotels, rats’ nests with Riviera pretensions, all palm fronds and colored lights, ready to be requisitioned by the government as proof that normal family holidays still take place. Couples walk along the sea front, robots, their kiddies in bed, their brains dead but perhaps troubled by basic motor responses to John’s manic circling, Toe-rag’s yodels and the general unease our little gathering seems to create.
    I’m ready for John’s bike and whatever ugly surprises he wants to spring on me now. Jessie is draped around Nick and everyone seems ready to go, so I walk right in front of John and force him to stop, which he does, not interested in me any more, watching two panda-faced policemen staring at us from the safety of their car, as they wonder, ‘Shall we have a bit of fun with those boyos? Is it worth the hassle? Are they going to give us a real run for our money?’
    I hop on behind John fast, hoping they haven’t had a chance to clock my young face, and as if by remote control the whole circus rolls out, Caz and Colin taking up the rear with what I presume to be the supplies of beer in an awkwardly clutched cardboard box.
    Then it’s twice down the front just for good measure, cranking the noise level up, racing the bikes, thrilling the little teenyboppers waiting on the sea wall for their lives to change. John’s Suzuki feels different from Nick’s Norton, or maybe it’s John—unpredictable, a bit