The Wall (5 page)

‘What do you mean?'

‘Have you never seen a checkpoint?'

‘Of course I have.'

‘Have you never been through one?'

‘Of course. They just wave us through.'

‘Well, not on this side.'

‘But they'll see who I am. Where I'm from.'

‘They won't. They won't see you and you won't see them. When it's shut, it's shut. Just barbed wire and fences. There's no one to speak to, and if you think you can just walk up to one of their bunkers on foot then you really are crazy.'

I almost ask her what would happen, but I realise I don't have to. Then, in a flash, I remember something. ‘The tunnel! It's near a bakery with a picture of a flying slice of cake.'

‘I know where you mean. It's close. You must have run in a circle.'

‘If you can find me the bakery, I can get to the tunnel.'

‘OK. Let's go.'

In an instant, she's out of the door. I struggle to catch up and match her fast but unhurried stride.

‘Behind me,' she snaps. ‘We're not together.'

I let myself fall back, and trail her from a few steps behind, tracking her movements out of the corner of my eye so I don't seem to be following her. Partially concealed by the scarf, and without anyone chasing me, I realise it's actually quite easy to walk along these streets without anyone giving me a second glance. I look a little different, but not too much, and it seems that even if people can tell I'm from the other side of The Wall, nobody is particularly interested. A couple of people throw me a second glance, registering faint surprise to see someone like me, wrapped in a scarf, walking these streets where I don't belong, but no one speaks to me or tries to get in my way.

After a couple of turns from the girl's house, we find ourselves on a busy street, jostling our way down a crowded pavement. The shops are all lit up now, mostly with bare bulbs hanging from naked electrical flex, and there is a bustling atmosphere of people heading home from work, buying things for the evening meal: women squeezing and sniffing vegetables, haggling over prices, gossiping with friends and shopkeepers. It all feels strangely normal yet exotic, and odd to think this place has always been here, so busy and alive; so close, but invisible. I'm struck again by the buzz in the air here, a hum of activity that you never find on the quiet, spacious streets my side of The Wall.

The girl stops walking and points across the street. I follow her finger towards the sign of the flying cake.

‘You know where to go?' she asks.

I look opposite the bakery, and there is the alleyway where I stood, looking out at this street, only a short while ago.

I nod. ‘Thank you,' I say. ‘I . . . I think you saved my life.'

She nods back, holding me with a brief but forceful stare, as if there's something she's on the brink of saying, then she turns on her heel to walk away. Without thinking, I reach out and grab her arm. I can't let her disappear so suddenly.

‘Wait,' I say. ‘I want to give you something. I owe you.'

She gazes at me with her mesmeric, glistening eyes, a stare that fizzes into me with such force it's hard not to look away. For a long time, she seems poised to speak, but still no words come out of her mouth. She twists her arm free of my grip.

‘What? What is it?' I say.

She looks as if she's battling against an idea, then her eyes drop to the ground. ‘Do you have food?' she says, not looking at me.

The way she says it makes me look at her more closely, and I notice for the first time how thin she is, registering with a jolt how, when I took her arm, I felt my fingers looping around the bone.

I can't think what to say. As my shoulders lift into a helpless shrug, her eyes dart past me, as if she's seen something, or someone, that has alarmed her. Before I've even thought to ask her for an address, before I've had time to check my pockets for money, she has spun away and rushed off in the direction we came. I watch her skinny form dodge left and right through the crowds, then slip out of sight.

The sounds of the street
recede as I hurry down the alley. Every few steps I turn to check behind me, but no one is following. I squeeze between the bins and run for the tunnel.

After pushing the trapdoor aside, I reach into my back pocket for the torch. It’s empty. I hurriedly check all my clothes, but the torch is gone. At some point in the chase it must have fallen out.

A sour waft rises up from the black void below me. The sight of that dark, chilly hole fills me with dread, but as I stand there, hesitating, I remember the gang of boys who chased me. Two of them didn’t follow, and are probably still close by. They could be watching right now. Every second I stay there, looking down into the hole, wishing I had a torch, is a second I could be spotted. It’s a terrifying idea to go down that tunnel alone, in the pitch dark, but being chased down it would be unimaginably worse. If someone did catch me down there, someone who wanted to hurt me, under the ground they’d be able to do whatever they liked with no one to see and no one to stop them. And no one to find the evidence afterwards.

With my clenched stomach sending acid squirts into my throat, I lower myself down. While I can still reach, I pull the trapdoor closed behind me, in case anyone comes past and sees that it is out of place.

As it booms shut, I find myself plunged into a darkness more intense than any I have ever experienced. It doesn’t seem like just an absence of light, but is a powerful, sinister presence that crawls over me, smothering my face with something thick and heavy.

The thin, high gasps ratcheting through my mouth are the only sound. My hands, gripping the rope right in front of my nose, are invisible. They feel like faraway objects over which I could easily lose control. I’m no longer sure I can trust them to lower me down.

I hang there, clinging to the moist, hairy rope, trying to get used to the dark, dangling in this vertical shaft of cold, velvety blackness. The mouldy smell of the tunnel creeps into my nostrils as the dank air slips under my clothes and across my skin. I stay there so long the muscles in my legs begin to tremble. I force my hands to listen to me, sending nervous-system screams towards my fingers, mentally prising them loose from the rope and compelling them to take me down to the tunnel floor.

I blink and blink, until I realise there’s no question of getting accustomed to this level of light, because there simply is no light. There’s nothing to see. Down here, my eyes are useless.

Crouched on all fours, I stretch an arm ahead of me, then circle it up, right, down and left to feel the ceiling, walls and floor of the tunnel. In this way I get a sense of where I am, and which direction I have to crawl.

The tunnel, which felt so quiet as I travelled in the other direction, now seems inhabited by eerie sounds. I can make out a low thrum, which rises and falls; possibly the sound of a street above, possibly something else mysterious and unknowable. There is a quiet clicking sound that might be the sound of drops hitting soil, or not. I also notice, for the first time, an acrid, sulphurous smell in the air – an odour of rot, or poison, or, perhaps, explosives. I wonder momentarily if this is definitely just a tunnel, or also some kind of underground storage facility.

I begin to crawl. Hand knee hand knee. Hand knee hand knee. I don’t need light, and I can’t get lost. I’m in a tunnel. I just have to close off all the voices in my head that are telling me to be afraid and concentrate on this simple task: hand knee hand knee. If I can do this straightforward thing, I can get home.

I have no idea how long the tunnel is, or how far a single crawl takes me, but I decide to set myself a target of 250 crawls. I’ll count down. I’ll parcel the distance up into these clear units and count down, backwards, filling my head with numbers, blotting out all other thoughts.

Hand knee hand knee. 249.

Hand knee hand knee. 248.

Hand knee hand knee. 247.

I’m somewhere in the 150s when I feel something slippery under my hand. A thin squeal fills the air. I freeze, and hear a scamper of tiny feet running away ahead of me.

A rat. I have put my hand on its back. I look at my hand to see if anything has come off the rodent on to me, and to examine myself for a bite, but of course I can see nothing. I can feel nothing, either, other than a faint greasy smear, so I can’t have been bitten. If you are bitten by something, you know, but in this darkness, it seems hard to know anything for sure. The messages arriving in my brain from outposts of my own body seem jumbled, confusing, and not entirely trustworthy. I feel strange about my hand, now, as if I don’t want to touch it, but you can’t not touch your own hand. It’s your hand.

That rat, I realise, is still up ahead of me. And where there is one, there might be hundreds. I don’t know much about rats, but I know they don’t live alone.

I stop and think, listening to my fast, shallow breaths bouncing back at me off the tunnel walls, trying to figure out what I can do about the rats, but soon I realise I’m not actually thinking anything. There is nothing to think, no alternative plan to search for. I just have to carry on.

Hand knee hand knee. 150.

Hand knee hand knee. 149.

Hand knee hand knee. 148.

I decide to stop every five to listen out for rats. With each stop, I shout and clap three times, trying to scare away any rats that might be near, trying to make myself sound and feel big.

Hand knee hand knee. 103.

Hand knee hand knee. 102.

Hand knee hand knee. 101.

Hand knee hand knee. 100.

I stop, shout, clap. One hundred more to go. I’m more than halfway. I’m going to make it. I will get home.

Hand knee hand knee. 5.

Hand knee hand knee. 4.

Hand knee hand knee. 3.

Hand knee hand knee. 2.

Hand knee hand knee. 1.

Hand knee hand knee. 0.

I stop again. I reach out in front of me. Nothing. I should be at the end! I’ve got to zero, but there’s only emptiness ahead of me. Where’s the end of the tunnel? Could there have been a fork I didn’t notice? Have I taken a wrong turn? Might I now be heading down another tunnel of unknowable length, perhaps miles of it, leading me who knows where – perhaps even back to the other side of The Wall? Should I turn round and check that I’m heading the right way?

A judder surges through my body, rattling me from the inside, taking over my limbs and torso. I slump forwards and lie on the cold soil, trying to quieten the barrage of panicked questions racing through my mind. I tell myself to concentrate on slowing my breathing, to calm myself, to stop shaking. I remind myself that I chose the number 250 at random. There is no reason to be more frightened now than one minute earlier, when I was still moving forwards through the darkness. I don’t know how long the tunnel is. I was only guessing.

I’ve been down it once already, though, and I feel certain I got through much faster in the other direction. I wasn’t hurrying when I had the torch; now I’m going as fast as I can, but the tunnel seems to go on and on without end.

Perhaps I’m not going to get home, after all. Perhaps I’m now in a maze of tunnels, trapped, stuck here until I die and am eaten by rats. Or would the rats start on me before I’m even dead?

Maybe the only thing to do is to lie here a little longer until I have more strength. A little rest might do me good. I’m so tired and afraid that for a moment it seems as if, whatever I decide, an irresistible wave of sleep is going to wash over me. But if I sleep, will the rats crawl on me? Will they take experimental nibbles at me to see if I’m done for? Are they looking at me right now, assessing whether or not it’s time to move in?

I decide to allow myself just a minute more to gather my strength. I close my eyes and think of my old house, by the sea, and as an image of it comes into my head, the shudders in my body begin to recede. I picture its smooth concrete walls, white as a new tooth, crisp against a blue sky. I imagine myself looking out of our wide bay window, which was like the prow of a ship. If you stood in the middle with your nose pressed to the glass, you could see nothing but water.

This window formed one end of the big open space that more or less made up the whole house. It was mostly empty, furnished with not much more than a cracked leather sofa, a round wooden dining table, and a bright red kitchen in the corner. They were three separate rooms when we moved in, but Dad bought a sledgehammer and took all the walls out. My earliest memory is me clinging to Mum, listening to a thumping wall, scared but excited, then the plaster cracks and shatters, cascading to the floor, and, as the air clears, Dad appears in the hole with white dust all over his face and a huge grin, looking like a happy ghost.

Sometimes I’d lie on my back and look at the scribbles of sea-bounced light that jiggled on the ceiling. In the afternoons, the room was cool and shady. We had curtains, but only the seagulls could see in, so we never drew them except on the very hottest days, when the thin white cotton would flutter and dance in front of the open windows.

I was tiny when we first moved there, and my favourite toy was an orange wooden trike. When I see the house, I usually picture myself in that huge, bright room, wheeling this way and that through a scattering of toys, bumping into the furniture, dismounting and remounting, lost in elaborate fantasy tasks and journeys.