The Wall (30 page)

A line of people snakes out across the dry, empty land, held back from the checkpoint by a solitary soldier. Some of them have umbrellas against the fierce sun, others rely on scarves and hats. There’s no shade.

The crossing is obviously closed. I don’t know why, or when it will open. I haven’t thought about what I should do from here: join the queue and hope no one notices who I am, or walk towards the soldiers and tell them I belong on the other side?

After the previous night, I feel scared of the army in a way I’ve never been afraid of them before, but I remind myself that it’s no longer dark, and there’s no curfew. Once I take my scarf off, they’ll see who I am. If they’re close enough to shoot, they’re also close enough to see I’m not from this side. Their job is to protect people like me. If I walk towards them, they surely won’t open fire.

I decide that approaching the soldiers is a safer option than taking my chances in the cramped, hot line, especially with the stone-throwing boys loitering close at hand. They remind me of the ones who chased me, and I don’t want to risk being spotted as an outsider, as the enemy.

Skirting the edge of the cleared land, with my face wrapped in the scarf and my head turned away from the boys, I edge towards the checkpoint, attempting what I hope looks like a casual stroll. If I can reach the empty space between the waiting crowd and The Wall, I feel I might be safe.

The closer I get, the more I accelerate, but I’m still cutting across the stony land when a heart-stopping bang rings out, and a spot of soil in front of me spits up a spray of earth and stones. I stop, take off the headscarf, and raise my arms.

‘IT’S ME!’ I shout. ‘I’M NOT FROM HERE! I’M FROM THE OTHER SIDE!’

No one at the checkpoint responds. I don’t move.

Eventually I hear a shout, telling me to put my hands on my head. I do as I’m told and take one more step forwards. Immediately, another gunshot pierces the air. The bullet fizzes into a rock, and something flies up from the ground, whacking me in the chest. A yielding, melting sensation bursts hotly inside me. My legs begin to give way, but I don’t dare stagger forwards in case this draws more fire from the checkpoint. Then I feel a sudden sharp pain in my back, as if I’ve been punched, or hit with a hammer, which for a moment is completely inexplicable. I don’t know whether to stand or fall or run, or which direction I’d be able to go, even if my legs were capable of it. Then a stone flies over my shoulder, narrowly missing my head, and lands in front of me, soon followed by another one. I slump downwards and cower on the ground, realising that I’m being shot at from in front and stoned from behind.

The hail of stones continues. One hits me on the shoulder, and as I flinch, another crashes into my ear. A long, high note, like metal scraping against metal, fills my head, only to be drowned out by a new round of firing, this time from more than one gun: a fast, purposeful volley of shots. I press myself into the ground, flattening myself against the soil, but only when I hear a scream of pain some distance away do I notice that none of the bullets are striking near me. I raise my eyes and see a group of soldiers running out from the checkpoint, their guns wedged into their shoulders, firing towards the wasteland. The stone-throwing boys are now fleeing for cover, but before I can see if they’re getting away, or who has been shot, my vision darkens and shrinks to two discs of light, like looking through binoculars. Slowly, these discs contract to nothing more than pinpricks of whiteness, as if I’m at the bottom of a hole which seems to be getting deeper and deeper, further and further from the light, just as the metallic shrieking fades, and the gunfire quietens to muffled pops, and the pain in my head and chest magically dwindles to nothing. The feeling is almost like dozing off, yet somehow more so. Every muscle in my body loosens and fails, disconnected by a wave of paralysis which plunges from my neck to my feet, as if a giant hand is wiping over me, erasing all sensation with a single sweep.

I flop on to my back, the tiniest of falls, but one which feels like a plummet into nothingness. For an instant my vision returns, showing me a flash of dazzling sky, a pristine dome of unbroken blue, before darkness floods in and the world slips away.

Part Five

Squares of white ceiling tiles
stippled with black flecks, divided by a grey metal grid. Two tubes of light encased in a grooved plastic oblong. A low hum, like a computer or a fridge, and intermittent high beeps. White sheets, white walls and a white door with a circular window. Tubes, bottles, wires, needles. Stuff dripping into me, stuff dripping out. My hands, puffy and absent, far away at the end of my arms. My mother, half-asleep next to the bed. Then, in an instant, she’s up on her feet, shouting something, almost screaming. I can see how loud it is by the veins popping out on her neck, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. It’s as if I’m lying at the bottom of a swimming pool, looking up at her above the surface shouting inaudibly downwards into the water.

A fizz skids down my spine, something sucks and pops in my ears, and I hear her calling to me, calling for nurses and doctors, shouting that I’ve woken up. She repeats my name again and again and again, her eyes wild and fierce. After a while, I realise it’s a question. She’s asking if I can hear her.

I open my mouth but no sound comes out. My tongue and lips feel dry and numb, like tools I no longer know how to use. My head is wrapped in gauze that presses tightly against my chin.

I nod, two minuscule jerks of the head, blinking at her to show I understand. Tears gush from her swollen, bloodshot eyes. I can see she wants to hold me, pull me towards her, smother me, but with all the tubes and bandages there’s no way in. She presses her face into my hand, or what looks like my hand, but I feel nothing. With my eyes, I trace the path of my arm from my wrist up to my shoulder, in the way you might check a gadget is plugged in. It is definitely my hand, and it isn’t. She’s squeezing my fingers, pressing her wet skin against my palm, but if I were looking the other way I’d have no idea it was even happening.

‘You’re back!’ she keeps saying. ‘You’re back. You’re safe. Don’t ever leave us again. I won’t let you leave us again.’

I look at her and wonder if I ought to be crying, too. I can’t stop thinking about my hand. The thing at the end of my arm doesn’t seem to be part of me any longer. I try to clench it. I try to clench the other one. Nothing happens.

A flurry of white-coated medical staff appear in the room, walking so fast they are almost running. They brush my mother aside and get to work on me. She steps to the foot of the bed, and there is Liev, waiting, his arms crossed over his chest. He reaches out and pulls her towards him, one hand spreading across her back, the other folding her head gently down into his neck. Her body shakes with sobs, and over her shoulder Liev looks at me, his lips curled into an expression that could be a smile, or could be something else entirely.

A week or so later
, my hand gives a twitch. Within minutes, people I don’t even recognise start arriving with elated expressions on their faces to congratulate me and prod me. One nurse even cries and nuzzles her soggy cheek against my arm, as if I’m some long-lost friend returned from the dead.

Mum’s there every day, even though the hospital is miles from home, outside The Zone. It ought to be annoying, having her in my room all the time, but actually it’s OK. She reads to me, changes the channel on the TV, keeps me company, and never tells me what to do. But maybe that’s because I can’t do anything.

After the twitch, a new nurse is assigned to me, some kind of physical therapist, who gives me exercises and monitors my progress, which everyone always tells me is ‘wonderful’, as if I’m somehow responsible for it. She brings a diagram of my body, which she marks with lines, ticks and crosses, showing me how I’m improving. Bit by bit, sensation creeps up my arms. After a while – I don’t know how long – it’s impossible to keep track of time in a hospital – I can sit up. Eventually, I’m given a wheelchair, which I learn to steer and propel.

Everyone acts optimistic and excited, as if this gradual, partial creeping back to how I was before is some astonishing superhuman flowering. It’s like I’m the captain of an underdog World Cup team, from a tiny island no one’s ever heard of, and I just keep on winning games, triumphing against all the odds, and getting closer and closer to the final. That’s how everyone behaves, and I try my best to go along with it, even though I know – and everyone else knows – I’m just a paralysed kid slowly getting a little bit better.

No one ever gives me any bad news, but after a while it dawns on me that the therapist has stopped showing me her chart, and the bubble of excitement around me has deflated. Despite endless pummelling and stretching, my legs remain limp and useless.

Visitors now arrive in coats, so I know it must be winter. They walk into the room swathed in a tiny cloud of outsideness which takes a minute or two to dissipate in the hot, dead air of my room.

Liev comes once a week, on Friday afternoons, but I can see he doesn’t want to be there. He spends the first five minutes trying to make conversation. I don’t ignore him, but I don’t exactly answer him, either. Around the five-minute mark, he gives a ‘that’s the best I can do’ look to Mum, then he sits, and stays seated, not reading, not even looking out of the window, for fifty-five more minutes. Then he leaves. Each time he comes, he looks somehow smaller than the last time I saw him.

David also comes every week. At first he’s even more reluctant and uncomfortable than Liev, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to talk about, but he starts bringing cards, and we just play, and he gives me a book so I can teach him new card games, and in the end I think it’s David’s visits that keep me going. Mum always hugs him when he leaves, which I don’t think he likes.

Mum gets me a book of card skills, and my own pack, and pretty soon I’m a demon shuffler and magician. People love it when I do tricks. It gives them an excuse to be impressed by me, like when a toddler successfully uses a potty, and gets told they’re a genius just for taking a piss.

One day, Mum brings my coat. I’m going home. There’s nothing more the hospital can do for me. I have ‘stabilised’, which is a funny word to use for someone who can’t stand up.

Most ‘para’ words are exciting: parachute, paranormal, paratrooper. Paraplegic is different. It’s one of those words no one wants to say, or even hear. As I wheel myself out through the hospital, it’s visible on people’s faces that I have become this word, and people don’t want to see me while at the same time finding it impossible not to stare. I quickly learn the pattern I know is going to follow me for a long time: the glance, the double-take, the appalled gaze with an expression moving from horror to pity, followed by a belated realisation that the polite thing is to look away.

Paranoid is another ‘para’ word. Maybe I’m a paranoid paraplegic, but I don’t think so. The second I leave my ward and find myself among ordinary people, I realise that my life has crossed some invisible threshold to a new world, into a little bubble of disability that is going to envelop me for ever.

If I ever become a magician, I could bill myself as Joshua the Paranoid Paraplegic Prestidigitator.

Mum hardly talks to me as we drive back home, but not in a bad way. We’ve spent so much time together over the past few months, silence feels normal. It’s exciting to see people out on the street, doing things, to see the world carrying on as normal, to remember that a hospital ward is just a room, not a universe.

The hills, at first, are blurry. My eyes can’t adjust to anything far away. But I recognise Amarias when I see it, just the same, stretched from The Wall up to the hilltop, and down on the other side. The ‘Welcome to Amarias’ sign is still there, blocking the view of Leila’s town, but with a hole in one corner where it took a hit during the crackdown.

David is waiting for me outside my house. I show him a trick, while Mum unfolds the wheelchair. He tries to push me inside, but I tell him I’d rather do it myself.

I’d never even noticed there was a step up to the front door, but I do now, because a metal ramp has been bolted on top of it.

Mum shows me to my new bedroom, on the ground floor, where the spare room used to be. I wheel myself in, and my chair just fits with barely a centimetre to spare, which seems lucky until I notice a tiny gap in the tiling at the threshold, and catch a whiff of fresh paint from the doorframe. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to notice these adjustments to the house, whether I’ll upset Mum if I’m grateful, or if I’m not.

David chats to me as we go into my room. Everything I own seems to have been brought down and arranged as closely as possible to how things were upstairs. He leads me to a pile of presents from other kids in our class. People I know never even liked me have bought welcome-home gifts. We unwrap a few, all board games or video games. He tries to act as if he can hardly contain his delight at the amount of fun these presents are going to bring us, and it’s this – his attempt at optimism and excitement – that makes me want to cry, for the first time since I was shot.

I can see him sensing the atmosphere shift, and he’s relieved when I tell him I’m tired, and he should go.

It's not just the doors
and the bathroom and the light switches that have changed in my house. The biggest difference is Liev. Or, rather, Mum and Liev. He doesn't talk as much as he used to, and when he does, Mum rarely appears to listen. She no longer seems on the alert, poised to do what he asks. She doesn't wait on him, and she walks faster, stands more upright. I never see her pray, and I never hear her talk about her back.