‘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.’
‘What kind of trick?’
I’m cornered. I’ve run out of excuses. It’s time to go on the attack. ‘Why are you hassling me? I thought you’d be pleased I’m safe!’
‘I am pl–’
‘Well leave me alone, then!’
‘Do you know how much those shoes cost? Are you going to get them back?’
I run upstairs, dodge into my room and slam the door. For a long time I stand there, waiting for her to burst in, turning over possibilities in my head for how I might have lost the shoes. I could say some boys were picking on me. I could say they threw my trainers over The Wall. If she makes me say who did it, there are plenty of names to choose from. But the door doesn’t move, and after a while I flop on to my bed.
Liev can say whatever he likes when he gets back, I don’t care. He’s not my father. He’s my anti-father.
By the time Liev arrives home, I’ve washed and changed, and I’m curled up on the sofa in a nest of cushions, watching a cartoon. It’s about a dog who keeps on trying to leave his house to get the bone he’s left outside, but whenever he does he’s smacked in the face with a plank by another, bigger dog, who hides in wait for him. The smaller dog never gives up, and keeps on looking for new routes to his bone, but every time he gets close, the bigger dog appears with his plank and whacks him over the head. It’s quite funny.
Liev does what he usually does when he walks in. He goes to the kitchen. Mum is there, cooking, and I can tell by the tense gabble of her voice that she’s telling Liev what I’ve done – or what she thinks I’ve done – and is asking him to tell me off. From the suck and slap of the fridge door, I can hear that Liev is snacking as she talks.
I feel him appear in the doorway, but don’t look up.
‘Your mother tells me you did something stupid today,’ he says.
I shrug, contemplating my options. I could ignore him, putting off the conflict, but that would just make him angrier. I could be sarcastic, calling Mum ‘your wife’ to match
his ‘your mother’, which might be briefly satisfying, but would ultimately make everything worse. It’s never worth getting Liev angry. Most conversations I have with him, I’m thinking ahead like a chess player, figuring out my best moves to give away as little ground as possible without pushing him into one of his rages.
I glance up and see that although he’s facing towards me, his neck is turned, and his eyes are on the cartoon. This is a good sign. If he was in the mood for an argument he’d have switched the TV off before speaking, to get my attention. He would have positioned himself in front of me, with his hot breath on my face. Having other people’s attention is a big thing for Liev. Few things make him crosser than the idea that you might not be listening to him.
The way he’s standing and his weary tone of voice give the impression he’s ticking me off only to satisfy my mother. She clearly hasn’t succeeded in communicating the level of her panic. Everything looks calm now. No one is missing; no one has been harmed. It seems as if he just doesn’t believe anything bad really happened. He’s going through the disciplinary motions as a domestic chore. I just have to play along.
‘I lost a ball in the building site. It wasn’t even me that kicked it there.’
‘You gave your mother a terrible fright.’
‘I know. I said sorry.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ he says. ‘But if you ever . . .’ His voice tails away, distracted. The small dog is climbing up the chimney, but the big one has seen what he’s doing through the window, and is hiding behind a chimney pot with his plank. The small dog’s head appears. He looks around and smiles, thinking the coast is clear. He jumps out and is all ready to leap down from the roof, when the big dog stands up with his plank and swings it like a baseball bat. WHACK! With the sound of a long, descending whistle, the small dog flies into the far distance while the bigger dog runs around the four corners of the roof like he’s scored a home run, acknowledging the cheers of an imaginary crowd. Liev gives a tiny, comma-sized smile, and turns back to me. ‘If you . . . ever . . . you know, lose something in there again, you have to promise me you won’t go in.’
‘OK,’ I say.
That seems to be it. Easy. If he knew what I’d really done . . . where I’d been . . .
He’s already on his way out when curiosity gets the better of me. ‘Why?’ I say.
He stops and turns, his face now blank and puzzled, as if he’s already forgotten what we were talking about. ‘What?’ he says.
‘What’s in there that’s so forbidden?’
‘Nothing. It’s just private property.’
‘Whose is it?’
‘Well . . . it’s private, but I suppose it belongs to all of us.’
‘So it’s public?’
‘It’s . . . disputed.’
‘By who?’
‘The people who used to live there.’
‘Who used to live there?’
‘No one.’
‘No one? So who’s disputing what?’
‘You know what I mean, smart guy,’ he says, with a sneer. ‘They abandon their houses then they act like it’s our fault.’
‘I saw it. I was in there,’ I say. ‘I saw the house.’
He stares at me, not blinking, a cold, level gaze.
‘Have you seen it, too?’ I ask.
He shrugs. ‘They’re bad people. They build without permits. They don’t listen to the government, they don’t listen to the army, they only understand violence.’
‘What happened to the people who lived there? Where are they now?’
‘Gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Somewhere they belong. Why are you asking all these stupid questions?’
‘I just . . . it was weird. The house. It’s smashed up, but everything is still there, as if they didn’t even pack – as if something just fell out of the sky in the middle of an ordinary day and crushed the place. It felt spooky.’
‘You don’t have to worry. Nothing fell out of the sky. It can’t happen to us.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I felt something bad.’
‘You felt something?’
‘Did anyone die?’
I sense him begin to lose his patience. ‘When these things happen every care is taken to save lives, but some people don’t want to be saved. And people die everywhere all the time. It’s normal. What’s crazy is that we have to fight so hard for every square inch of land we want to live on. What’s crazy is that there are traitors who help those people fight for land that ought to be ours. What’s crazy is that some people won’t stay where they are put, and just go on and on and on trying to stop us living normal, peaceful lives. And if you’re having feelings and worrying about things that don’t concern you, then I suggest you concentrate a bit harder on your studies, and spend less time speculating about things you can’t possibly understand. Do you hear me?’
He’s now looming over me, and above his beard I can see his face is flushed, with tiny deltas of purple veins lit up around the rims of his nostrils. I shrug and turn back to the TV. The big dog is now hammering the smaller dog into the ground like a fence post.
Liev stands over me a short while longer, slightly out of breath from his rant, then slips away, back to the kitchen.
I don’t want to risk talking to him again before dinner so I flick off the TV and retreat to my bedroom, picking up my schoolbag as I go. I have to find a hiding place for that scarf.
In the middle of the night, the red digits of my bedside clock seem bright enough to illuminate the whole room. It is 3:31. The numbers are solid, but the colon between them flashes once a second. I don’t know what woke me, it might have been a dream, but now I’m wide awake, watching the two flashing dots.
However hard you stare, however much you promise yourself you’re not going to look away for even an instant, it’s almost impossible to catch the numbers changing. They somehow do it without you seeing the moment it happens. There’s something pleasing about 3:33, and I decide it will be a special achievement if I see it come up.
I manage to catch 3:31 turning into 3:32, which is like a neat little dance step – the bottom half of the 1 skips to the left, exactly as all three horizontal lines fill in – but 3:33 seems to take ages and ages to arrive, and next thing I know it’s there and I missed it. Different minutes are different lengths. I know that’s not actually true, but that’s how it feels.
I flick on my bedside light, sit on the edge of the mattress for a while, then lift up the frilly cotton skirt that hides the space under my bed. I’ve had the same thing under there for years, and no one ever sees it except me. If David found it, I’d die.
I pull it out. I haven’t looked under there for months, and the whole thing is covered in a film of dust. I can’t really explain what it is, or why anyone of my age would be interested in it, except to say that when you’re an only child you spend a lot of time on your own, and the best way to avoid boredom is to make things up. When you spend long enough on the same made-up thing, it sometimes ends up being impossible to explain to anyone else.
To the untrained eye, it’s a wooden board roughly half the size of the bed, with houses and people on it. That’s all. The houses are made of Lego, cardboard, plastic and wood, assembled from all sorts of different places according to some scheme I can no longer remember. None of the buildings match, and half of them are totally the wrong scale. There’s also a random mish-mash of figurines from various board games and model kits and wherever else plastic people turn up. A couple of dogs and cats are in there somewhere, but no other animals and certainly no dinosaurs or anything stupid like that.
It’s hard to explain what I do with it, but an hour or two can easily slip by on my hands and knees, moving the people around, making up stories. When I know no one is watching, I can lose myself in this fantasy town as if I’m somehow all of the people who live in it at once. It’s like being God, except that God doesn’t exist and I do. None of the people in the town correspond t
o real people, but if one of them was Liev, and he was praying to me, and I was God, I’d totally ignore him. In fact, I’d do the opposite of everything he asked for.
When I’ve finished I always shove it right under the bed, hidden where it can’t be seen by anyone who visits my room.
I stand over the fantasy town, gazing down at it. Along one edge is a wall, the same height as the tallest house. It’s made from a cut-up cereal box, taped to itself and to the board it is built on. I remember the afternoon I added in the wall, years ago, taking hours over getting it to the right height and making it solid. There’s even a watchtower in one corner, made from the inner tube of a toilet roll topped with a yoghurt pot which is usually filled with soldiers. Now, for the first time, it strikes me as strange that I put this wall at the edge, with nothing on the other side of it.
I stare and stare, motionless. In the middle of the night, time feels different. During the day it’s a river, always flowing. Now it’s like a pond, just sitting there, and I’m floating in it, suspended, looking down at this child’s game which suddenly feels infinitely familiar and totally alien, like everything I am and everything I’m not, all at once.
It’s not a stamp, and I don’t feel angry or destructive as I’m doing it, but slowly and deliberately, I lift a leg and step on to a cardboard house at the heart of the town. With the sole of my foot, I feel the tiny structure resist for a fraction of a second, before it crumples under my weight. One by one, I calmly crush all the others that are made of cardboard. Two are made of balsa wood. Those I pluck from where they’re glued into place, and squeeze in my hands until they shatter. The feeble wood pops and snaps easily in my grasp. I carefully flatten the wall, then pick out and dismantle the Lego houses, brick by brick. There’s also a police station, taken from something for much younger kids, which is just one moulded piece of plastic. At first it doesn’t want to come apart, but with the help of a chair leg I manage to prise the roof off, and once I’ve done that, the rest of it comes apart quickly. Then there’s the school and the park and the shops to think about.
The Wall Page 5
