The Wall (10 page)

I want to tell her about the tunnel. For a moment it seems as if I have to tell her about the tunnel, as if what I’ve done and where I’ve been is a toxin, bottled up inside me, that will leak into my bloodstream and poison me if I don’t find a way to get it out.

With her sitting next to me on the bed, concerned and attentive, waiting for me to speak, I sense I might never get a better opportunity to explain what I did, where I went, how I escaped, and who saved me. I know I have to find a way to share the burden of the feeling which is throttling me, a sense that I owe my life to someone I have wronged.

I take a deep breath and look up, ahead of me, at the wardrobe. Behind which is hidden the scarf. Belonging to the girl. Who lives in that small, dark, cramped room. Impossibly distant, yet not far away at all. All she asked for was something to eat, but I gave her nothing and walked away, stealing her scarf and her brother’s footwear.

Why was she hungry? No one goes hungry on this side of The Wall. My portion of roast chicken, still warm, would now be in our kitchen bin, slowly cooling, slithering downwards amongst a mass of uneaten, discarded food.

I feel a hand on my back, rubbing from one shoulder blade to the other, across my spine. My mother’s soft, low voice rises up. ‘You can tell me. Whatever it is, you can tell me.’ Her top lip is red, her bottom lip pale.

Something yields in my chest, and I sense a reservoir of tears begin to fill, somewhere behind the bridge of my nose.

‘We can help you,’ she says.

We. Anything I say to her, she will pass on to Liev. If I tell her the truth, a chain of events will begin that will move immediately out of my control. Liev will tell the police, the police will tell the army, the army will go over The Wall and get to work. There will be an investigation, cross-examinations, imprisonments. An angry, vengeful machine is primed to leap into action, just as soon as I open my mouth. If I don’t want to start up that machine, I can’t say anything to anyone.

I sit up straight and breathe in sharply. ‘It’s nothing,’ I say.

She lowers her chin and gives me a jokey-angry stare, with an attempt at a comedy frown. She’s trying different tactics. Giving humour a go.

I stand up, turning away from her.

‘You’re sitting on my pyjamas,’ I say.

‘If you . . . if it’s something . . .’

‘What?’

She looks up at me, her hands folded neatly in her lap. ‘I just mean . . . I can keep a secret.’

‘From who?’ I want to hear her say it: from Liev.

‘From . . . anyone. Everyone.’

‘About what?’

‘I want to know what’s wrong. What’s happened to you.’

‘I’ve told you what’s wrong.’

‘When?’

‘Just now.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s that you’re sitting on my pyjamas. And I want to go to bed.’

She flinches. I concentrate on keeping my facial muscles as still as I can, while Mum stares at me. Her dark eyes look sadder and tireder and more disappointed them ever. She presses her hands into her knees, and raises herself heavily, then steps back and watches me retrieve the T-shirt I sleep in.

Without saying anything more, or looking back, she slips out of the room and closes the door.

I stop playing football
at lunchtime. Instead, I go to the library to do my homework, or, at least, to pretend to do my homework. That’s what I lay out in front of me, but I usually just sit there, thinking, daydreaming, drawing.

I never let myself draw the tunnel, in case anyone sees and asks awkward questions, but I do draw the buildings and people I saw on the other side. I want to help myself remember. Or forget. Or perhaps a mixture of the two. I don’t honestly know why I keep on drawing these things, but it’s what always seems to come out of my pen – the ragged streets, the puddles, the water tanks on every roof, the wires everywhere, a few faces. And that girl. Again and again. Her thin, serious features; her stick-like arms; her blazing eyes.

Just how thin was she? I draw and draw, but I can’t get it right. I’m not sure I remember her correctly. The more versions I produce, the less accurate they seem. The harder I struggle to grasp it, the more elusive her image becomes.

One day after school, I realise my feet aren’t walking me home. They are leading me in the other direction, out of town, along a road I’ve never before taken alone, and never on foot. I don’t know why it happens, but on a quite ordinary Wednesday afternoon, I find myself walking to the checkpoint.

The town stops abruptly. The last house, which is the same as mine, right down to the pale stone driveway spotted with engine oil and neat rectangle of lawn, sits next to an expanse of rocky emptiness. The road carries on as before, a wide stretch of smooth, fresh tarmac, with a crisply painted white line down the centre; just the same through the neat, polite little streets as now, beyond this invisible border into barren scrubland dotted with low, thorny bushes and the occasional cactus. A few plots are laid out alongside the road with string pulled taut across metal pegs, but no building work seems to have started. I can’t tell if these are just speculative markings, or if the land has been bought and a house is on the way. Buildings appear fast here. Nothing happens for long stretches of time, then you find yourself walking down a street of houses you’ve never seen before, filled with families you’ve never met.

I walk on, squinting in the harsh sunlight. There’s no shade anywhere, and my shirt is soon soaked with sweat. The sun seems to bounce up off the tarmac, attacking my face from above and below. The horizon bubbles in the heat haze, as if the land itself is close to boiling point.

A round concrete building, like a squat, armoured air traffic control tower, is the first part of the checkpoint to come into view. Of course I’ve seen it hundreds of times before, but only while passing through by car, never like this, on foot, with time to notice how tall it is, how forbidding. I can’t see any soldiers looking down, but the angle of the concrete parapet looks as if it would conceal whatever or whoever is up there.

Under the tower is a tangled thatch of razor wire, trailing over the whole area where The Wall expands out into a zone of warehouse-like corrugated-iron huts, metal fencing, steel gates, and dense, seemingly random scatterings of concrete roadblocks.

As I get closer, I see the road where cars from my side cross The Wall. One bored-looking soldier is waving everyone through unimpeded. Just the colour of your number plate is enough to get you through with only a brief pause. Everyone in Amarias has yellow number plates, and if you are yellow, you can get through any checkpoint or roadblock without being held up. Number plates of cars from the other side are white with green text, and those are pulled over and searched. I can see one family seated silently on a rock beside their car, whose doors, boot and bonnet are open, while a pair of soldiers – young-looking guys, eighteen or nineteen – examine the upholstery and the engine.

Through a separate gateway, I see the traffic moving in the other direction, a trickle of vehicles, mainly lorries and old cars, one at a time, like drops leaking from a tap. A fenced pedestrian pathway emerges next to this gate, carrying a steady stream of people. Most of them seem to have similar expressions on their faces – distant, weary – as they hurry out and walk towards a concourse where swarms of minibuses gather and leave, rapidly and efficiently sweeping people away from the looming wall. All the buses seem to start in this one place; none come through the checkpoint.

I know from maps how The Wall follows a looping, circuitous route that makes no apparent sense. I’d heard rumours that people from the other side often had to cross over just to get from place to place within their own territory. It certainly looks that way from the movements I see here, with everyone who comes through seeming immediately to set off elsewhere. No one walks up the road where I am standing, towards Amarias.

Behind me I notice a rocky outcrop, as high as The Wall. I climb it, scampering up the hot, crumbly surface on all fours, in the hope that I might get a view of the other side. A cascade of tiny stones skitters down in my wake.

From the top I can’t see much more than a jumbled tangle of rooftops, covered with those familiar water tanks, but from one vantage point, an angle through the gateway in The Wall gives me a glimpse of something I’ve never seen before – the approach to the other side of the checkpoint, an area shielded from the view of passing cars by a large ‘Welcome to Amarias’ hoarding.

My view isn’t much more than a narrow slice, but it’s enough to make out a network of metal cages, like something for funnelling livestock. Each cage is as wide as one person, with thick metal bars left and right and above. A long snake of men, women and children fills each cage, shuffling slowly forwards in single file, held back by remotely operated turnstiles which seem to be allowing them through, one at a time. Above these cages are raised gantries, with soldiers pacing up and down, watching over the caged people, rifles clutched in both hands. I can make out a low bunker made of the thickest concrete I have ever seen, which looks as if it contains more soldiers, presumably the ones operating the turnstiles.

The front of the queue leads into a building with a metal roof. I can’t see what happens in there, or guess how long people are stopped before being allowed through The Wall, but I can see that the queue is lengthy and slow-moving.

Looking again at the faces of people hurrying out and making for their buses, I see something else, something I haven’t noticed before: an expression poised between patience and rage, weariness and defiance, pride and helplessness.

I sit and watch, unobserved. I think again of the boy who spat on me, remembering the feel of his clammy saliva splatting into my cheek and eyelid – a memory still nauseating and repugnant, but now not quite so baffling.

I’m not sure if this is what I expected to see. I haven’t particularly thought about the checkpoint before, about how people get from one side of The Wall to the other, so I don’t really have an alternative vision in mind that this could either confirm or contradict. But as I watch, I feel a curdling, clenching sensation in my stomach. It’s strange enough just to sit and observe, knowing how often I’ve driven through without the slightest hindrance. More bizarre is the knowledge that soon I won’t be just a spectator. It isn’t long before I’ll be a soldier, possibly one of those soldiers, sitting in a bomb-proof bunker and operating an electric turnstile, or walking that gantry with a rifle pointed down at a caged line of people. If you refuse, you’re sent to prison.

I want to leave the outcrop, but feel paralysed by what I’m seeing, transfixed by the faces coming through the checkpoint. Only as the light begins to fade do I climb down and head home, walking fast yet mindlessly through the town, barely seeing the streets around me, the row after row of identical houses, the neat little buildings with their neat little windows and red-tiled roofs like something flown in from an American TV show and randomly plonked here, thousands of miles away, on a barren hilltop.

Everything in Amarias is so new, so fresh, it’s almost as if a magic spell has conjured it up out of thin air. And no one seems to find this strange. No one seems to worry that there might be some other spell somewhere that could make the place disappear as quickly as it appeared.

At the doorstep I delay putting in my key, and stand in a daze, staring at our tiny patch of grass. The sprinkler is spitting an arc of water across the lawn, whirring round and round, chk chk chk chk chk.

I look at the car in the driveway, our little Japanese saloon, my eye drawn to the number plate. The yellow number plate. This was our key to The Wall. With a yellow number plate, you are not checked at a checkpoint, so The Wall isn’t really a wall. We can go where we want, on new roads specially built to take us to other new towns populated by other people with the same yellow number plates. With a white number plate, you are on a different map, subject to different rules.

Wherever we chose to live, wherever we built our towns, people like me got these yellow checkpoint-opening plates. Everyone else, living all around us, could only get white ones. With this yellow rectangle on your car, the army was your friend and you could move freely. With a white one, The Wall, the barbed wire, the soldiers, the watchtowers, the guns had another meaning entirely.

I turn away from the car, not wanting to look at it any longer, but confronted by my front door I freeze, like an actor with no lines in his head, scared to go on stage. I feel as if I have a part to play, a role I have been assigned, but I can no longer remember what it is.

Mum opens the door.

‘What are you doing?’

I work my tongue around my mouth, looking for words. ‘I couldn’t find my key.’

‘It’s in your hand.’

‘I got it just now. It was in the wrong pocket.’

She frowns, and I can see the next question forming on her lips, so I put my head down and walk in, heading straight for my room. I can hear her voice behind me, asking what happened to my face, bleating about sunburn, but the sound of it gets pleasingly quieter as I walk away, and is reduced to almost nothing when I close my door.

I feel strange, later, as I sit down for dinner – as if I’m not quite myself, and the room around me isn’t the room I’m used to. I think of how the rows of identical houses seemed vaguely unreal after what I saw at the checkpoint, and now the inside of my own living room has a strange, glossy quality to it, like something up on a stage. It feels like a room pretending to be a room, with possessions placed in it to keep up the act. I look around at the bookcases, and the jaunty paintings on the red walls, the plump sofas, the mauve light fittings, the plasma TV, and not one thing I can see feels like it is mine.