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.
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 t
o 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.
The Wall Page 4
