The Wall (6 page)

That was about ten years ago, so I don’t know if I remember it from my memory, or from the home videos I’ve watched. We’ve got one DVD made up of short, shaky little snatches of our old life. There are only a few glimpses of Dad, because he was usually doing the filming. In one, he’s pretending that he wants to pick me up, but he can’t because I’m too heavy. I’m no taller than his knee, but he grunts and groans with the effort, bulging his cheeks and making the tendons in his neck stick out, then he goes into spasms and acts like he’s having a heart attack. I laugh so much that I fall over, and the picture shakes crazily as Mum runs to stop me banging my head. I went through a phase of watching this DVD every day, until the time Liev burst in and ejected the disc, accusing me of selfishness and cruelty. He ended up telling me it was ‘time to move on’, then walked out with the DVD.

I’ve looked everywhere in the house, right up to the attic, but without any luck. I don’t think Mum would have let him throw it away, but I can’t be sure.

In that house by the sea nobody ever prayed, except for on the morning we all dreaded, which came once a year, when Dad had to go off on his army reservist duty. Last thing before he left, he always took an old leather-bound book from a high shelf, and stood there for a minute or so, mumbling something to himself. Then he turned and went.

Once, after he’d gone, I asked Mum to get the book down for me. She showed me my grandfather’s name written in curly old-fashioned handwriting on the title page, then flicked it to the bookmarked page, the prayer for travellers.

I can’t remember the exact wording of the prayer, but I remember the point of it. I remember that you ask God to help you reach your destination in peace. I remember that you ask Him to save you from any enemies you might encounter. I remember that you ask for kindness and mercy, from God and from anyone you meet on your travels. And I remember how it ends: ‘Blessed are you, Eternal One, who responds to prayer.’

None of those things happened. My father wasn’t saved from his enemies. Five years ago he said goodbye, walked out of the house, and never came back. I’ve been told it was a sniper, but not where, or how, or why. I’m not sure if Mum knows any more, or wants to know more, or would tell me if she did.

I can see it, just like with the home videos, always the same, a scrap of looped footage stored in my brain that I can’t delete or change. I never see the moment he is hit, just him lying there in his uniform, bleeding into the street, surrounded by people shouting and shooting, but silently. There’s never any sound. I can see the noise, but I can’t hear it.

It’s the only image I have of him in uniform, and I know I’ve made it up. He let me touch the rough green cotton pressed and folded in his kit bag, but he never allowed me to see him wear it. Even on the day he went, he always left the house in T-shirt and flip-flops. Before reporting for duty, he must have stopped on the way and changed. He didn’t want to fight, but he had to, and they killed him.

Liev thinks he’s become my father, but he hasn’t.

Lying here in the dark, parts of that prayer come back to me, short phrases asking God to lead me safely home. If Dad was still alive I might say them aloud, but I know for a fact it doesn’t work. It didn’t work for him, so it won’t work for me. There is no one up there who will ever help you. Liev prays and prays and prays, but I know he’s just talking to himself. If I want to get home, I have to do it on my own.

I force myself back up on to my hands and knees and begin to crawl. This time I’ll count upwards. If I get past a hundred I’ll think again, but until then I’ll just crawl and count, crawl and count.

Hand knee hand knee. 42.

Hand knee hand knee. 43.

Hand knee hand knee. 44.

Then a gentle bump – a tickle, almost – against the crown of my head sends my hands scrambling ahead of me to feel the obstruction. The first touch makes me leap backwards in horror. It’s something hairy, and it twitches when I touch it.

I fall on my back and wait for the sensation of teeth sinking into my flesh. There’s nowhere to run or hide. I lie frozen, with my legs and arms sticking up into the air, but the teeth never come, and silence fills the tunnel. I roll over, reach out and feel once more.

It’s the rope. I look up and see what looks like a triangle – just the shape, a triangle – hanging there in the fathomless darkness. My eyelids flutter up and down, trying to blink meaning into this strange sight, but I can’t make any sense out of it. All I see is a grey, abstract shape, floating in space, impossible to compute as something small or large, close or far away, until the distances and dimensions snap into place, and I realise it is a patch of evening sky. I didn’t close the cover at this end. This is the gap I came through on the way in.

I grip the rope as hard as I can, and for a moment it seems as if I don’t have enough strength in my arms to haul me upwards, but I push on, refusing to allow my muscles to give up on me, and at the moment when my fingers begin to feel like locked, burning claws over which I no longer have any control, a breeze ruffles my hair, and I find myself rolling up and out into the dust of the building site.

A little light is spilling in from the street lamps, and this shadowy landscape of dust, gravel, stone and shattered furniture at that instant looks like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Just to see again at all – to have the use of my eyes back – feels exquisite. I flop on to my back and look upwards, relishing the sensation of vision, awestruck by the magnificence of the vast, star-speckled sky.

Slowly, strength trickles back into my limbs. I’m safe, but I’m still not home. I have to get home.

I stand, raising myself on weak, juddery legs, and notice something round and white by my feet. The football. It looks like some distant relic you might see in a museum, from a time long ago – the time when I kicked it happily through the streets with David.

I pick it up, not because I really want it, more as a souvenir of something, of the person I was a few hours ago, who I feel might no longer exist.

I walk to the place where I entered the building site and toss the ball over, listening to it bounce, roll and settle on the other side. The climb out looks splintery and difficult, but I know I can do it. Now I’m through the tunnel, back on my side of The Wall, nothing will stop me getting home.

As I reach up to begin the climb, a knot at my throat slips loose. Something slides from my shoulders and flutters downwards. At first I can’t think what it might be, but as its cool softness brushes my hand, I realise with a stomach-wrenching plunge of guilt what I have done. It is the scarf. The scarf lent by the girl who saved me, and even though she asked for the simplest thing in return, I gave her nothing. Worse than that, I now see I have stolen from her, both her father’s scarf and her brother’s flip-flops, which I am also still wearing.

In an apartment as stark and bare as hers, these items will be missed. She’ll have to think of an explanation. The truth, I sense, won’t do.

I knot the scarf across my chest and begin to climb.

When I appear at the door
, Mum’s hands go up to her cheeks and her mouth opens as if she’s letting rip with an almighty howl, but only a strangulated rasp comes out: half scream, half sigh. Her eyes, which are red and wide, gape at me as if I’m returning from the dead. Before I’ve even stepped into the house, she reaches out and pulls me towards her, clutching so tightly I can barely breathe.

‘I thought you were gone,’ she says, whisper-singing into my ear, her lips hot against my skin. ‘I thought you were gone. I thought you were gone.’

Again and again she says it, squeezing me into her and rocking us to and fro as if we are clasped in some joint prayer. I squeeze back, breathing in the smell of her – a unique mingling of her sweet fruity perfume, with a hint of washing powder and the faintest waft of body, of pure her. I inhale as much of her as I can take in, snuffling myself into her without shame or embarrassment. I am home. I’m safe. I’m not gone.

Enfolded in the powerful clench of her arms, snuggled into the intimate cloud of her scent, I wonder if it was almost worth going through the tunnel, experiencing that terror, to get this reaction from my mother. I can hardly remember the last time she touched me. This woman, wrapped around me, embracing me with this fierce affection, feels like my old mother, my real mother, a person who slipped away when Dad died, walled herself in with her grief, then hid deeper still, behind Liev.

‘I thought
you
were gone,’ I almost say, but I wouldn’t be able to explain, so I just pull her tighter towards me, feeling her body convulse with waves of sobs. I’m crying, too, happy-sad tears, not just with relief to be home, but triggered by everything else that seems to be in the air around my mother; something to do with this moment taking us back to the day we never discuss, when our old life ended. That day is with us, inside our hug. I can feel it.

She usually pretends he is forgotten, but in this instant I feel for the first time as if she understands what I understand: that you cannot, after all, bury the dead. Even if you run away, and look in the other direction, and never talk about it, a person – a dead person – will not disappear. An absence can be as vivid as a presence, and to me, Dad’s absence is almost like a pair of glasses I never take off – it is something I look through, rather than at, changing everything I see, always visible yet invisible.

Eventually we let one another go, and she pulls me into the house.

‘Where were you? What happened?’ she gasps.

I have my story ready. I tell her a football went into the building site, but having climbed in and jumped down to retrieve the ball, I realised I couldn’t climb out again. I tell her I shouted for help, but no one heard me, and I only escaped by using my bare hands to build a platform out of bricks and junk.

‘Why did you climb in there?’

‘To get my ball,’ I say.

‘But . . . you can’t do that! You mustn’t do things like that!’ She’s trying to be severe, but her voice is still filled with hugs, and one hand is stroking my neck.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, smiling up at her. A strand of hair is stuck to her left cheek, glued into place by tears. I push it free with my index finger and tuck it behind her ear. I can’t remember the last time I touched her hair, which is so dark that is shines. When Dad was alive and we lived by the sea, her hair was short and spiky. Or sometimes it was. Every time she got it cut, she came back with something different. Now it’s long, and she never seems to go to a hairdresser, and whenever we leave the house she covers it up.

‘It’s just a football,’ she says. ‘We’d get you another one. I was so worried. You scared me!’

‘I won’t do it again.’ Her fingers are tickling me now, and I step back.

‘Well, just wait till Liev gets home,’ she snaps, but there’s still more honey than venom in her voice, and we both know it’s a weak threat.

I smile at her, sort of kissing her with my eyes. She smiles back, then a thought seems to stop her. She puts a hand on each of my shoulders and shakes me, a jolt of tender aggression. ‘This isn’t an ordinary town,’ she says, with a pointed and direct stare. ‘Things happen here. We have lots of protection, but no amount is enough. There are people living very, very close who want to get us. They want us out.’ She’s holding me at arm’s length now, her forehead clenched into a frown. For the first time, she looks plausibly angry. She pokes me in the chest with her index finger. ‘If I worry when you disappear, it’s not because I’m some stupid, anxious mother; it’s because you hear stories all the time about people who find themselves in the wrong place, without anyone to defend them, and they never come back.’

The jab of her finger and the sudden coldness in her voice jolt me upright, as if she’s dropped a sliver of ice down my back. My father-mother has slipped away again. She has disappeared in front of my eyes, and I don’t know when I’ll see her again. This is my Liev-mother, my Amarias mother, back again until some other crisis briefly pushes her aside.

‘Who? Which people?’ I say, stepping beyond the range of her poke.

I can see her jaw muscles twitch as she clenches her mouth. ‘Don’t be smart with me.’

‘You said you hear stories all the time.’

‘Don’t talk back!’

She has her poking finger ready again, but I’m poised to dodge away. ‘If it’s so awful here, why don’t we go back home. If it’s not safe, let’s go.’

‘This is home. I’m not getting sucked into that conversation.’ She turns and walks towards the kitchen.

‘I hate it here!’

In the doorway she stops, swivels and stares at me, her head cocked on one side, as if she’s trying to decide how angry to be. ‘Well, we’re here,’ she says eventually. ‘And if you stop trying to hate it, you might discover it’s not half as bad as you make out. Do you think we could afford a comfy house like this anywhere else?’

‘Oh, it’s about money now, is it? Is that why we’re here?’

‘I’m not having this conversation.’

‘Is it God or money? You keep changing your mind.’

‘What happened to your trainers?’ she snaps, pointing at the filthy flip-flops I’m still wearing.

I prepared a story for this, too, but it isn’t a good one. The girl’s scarf is hidden in my bag, but there’s nothing I could do about my missing shoes. ‘It was some boys at school. They played a trick on me.’