The Wall

by William Sutcliffe

  Behind me I notice a rocky outcrop, as high as The Wall. I climb it, scampering up the hot, crumbly surface on all fours, in the hope that I might get a view of the other side. A cascade of tiny stones skitters down in my wake.

  From the top I can’t see much more than a jumbled tangle of rooftops, covered with those familiar water tanks, but from one vantage point, an angle through the gateway in The Wall gives me a glimpse of something I’ve never seen before – the approach to the other side of the checkpoint, an area shielded from the view of passing cars by a large ‘Welcome to Amarias’ hoarding.

  My view isn’t much more than a narrow slice, but it’s enough to make out a network of metal cages, like something for funnelling livestock. Each cage is as wide as one person, with thick metal bars left and right and above. A long snake of men, women and children fills each cage, shuffling slowly forwards in single file, held back by remotely operated turnstiles which seem to be allowing them through, one at a time. Above these cages are raised gantries, with soldiers pacing up and down, watching over the caged people, rifles clutched in both hands. I can make out a low bunker made of the thickest concrete I have ever seen, which looks as if it contains more soldiers, presumably the ones operating the turnstiles.

  The front of the queue leads into a building with a metal roof. I can’t see what happens in there, or guess how long people are stopped before being allowed through The Wall, but I can see that the queue is lengthy and slow-moving.

  Looking again at the faces of people hurrying out and making for their buses, I see something else, something I haven’t noticed before: an expression poised between patience and rage, weariness and defiance, pride and helplessness.

  I sit and watch, unobserved. I think again of the boy who spat on me, remembering the feel of his clammy saliva splatting into my cheek and eyelid – a memory still nauseating and repugnant, but now not quite so baffling.

  I’m not sure if this is what I expected to see. I haven’t particularly thought about the checkpoint before, about how people get from one side of The Wall to the other, so I don’t really have an alternative vision in mind that this could either confirm or contradict. But as I watch, I feel a curdling, clenching sensation in my stomach. It’s strange enough just to sit and observe, knowing how often I’ve driven through without the slightest hindrance. More bizarre is the knowledge that soon I won’t be just a spectator. It isn’t long before I’ll be a soldier, possibly one of those soldiers, sitting in a bomb-proof bunker and operating an electric turnstile, or walking that gantry with a rifle pointed down at a caged line of people. If you refuse, you’re sent to prison.

  I want to leave the outcrop, but feel paralysed by what I’m seeing, transfixed by the faces coming through the checkpoint. Only as the light begins to fade do I climb down and head home, walking fast yet mindlessly through the town, barely seeing the streets around me, the row after row of identical houses, the neat little buildings with their neat little windows and red-tiled roofs like something flown in from an American TV show and randomly plonked here, thousands of miles away, on a barren hilltop.

  Everything in Amarias is so new, so fresh, it’s almost as if a magic spell has conjured it up out of thin air. And no one seems to find this strange. No one seems to worry that there might be some other spell somewhere that could make the place disappear as quickly as it appeared.

  At the doorstep I delay putting in my key, and stand in a daze, staring at our tiny patch of grass. The sprinkler is spitting an arc of water across the lawn, whirring round and round, chk chk chk chk chk.

  I look at the car in the driveway, our little Japanese saloon, my eye drawn to the number plate. The yellow number plate. This was our key to The Wall. With a yellow number plate, you are not checked at a checkpoint, so The Wall isn’t really a wall. We can go where we want, on new roads specially built to take us to other new towns populated by other people with the same yellow number plates. With a white number plate, you are on a different map, subject to different rules.

  Wherever we chose to live, wherever we built our towns, people like me got these yellow checkpoint-opening plates. Everyone else, living all around us, could only get white ones. With this yellow rectangle on your car, the army was your friend and you could move freely. With a white one, The Wall, the barbed wire, the soldiers, the watchtowers, the guns had another meaning entirely.

  I turn away from the car, not wanting to look at it any longer, but confronted by my front door I freeze, like an actor with no lines in his head, scared to go on stage. I feel as if I have a part to play, a role I have been assigned, but I can no longer remember what it is.

  Mum opens the door.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I work my tongue around my mouth, looking for words. ‘I couldn’t find my key.’

  ‘It’s in your hand.’

  ‘I got it just now. It was in the wrong pocket.’

  She frowns, and I can see the next question forming on her lips, so I put my head down and walk in, heading straight for my room. I can hear her voice behind me, asking what happened to my face, bleating about sunburn, but the sound of it gets pleasingly quieter as I walk away, and is reduced to almost nothing when I close my door.

  I feel strange, later, as I sit down for dinner – as if I’m not quite myself, and the room around me isn’t the room I’m used to. I think of how the rows of identical houses seemed vaguely unreal after what I saw at the checkpoint, and now the inside of my own living room has a strange, glossy quality to it, like something up on a stage. It feels like a room pretending to be a room, with possessions placed in it to keep up the act. I look around at the bookcases, and the jaunty paintings on the red walls, the plump sofas, the mauve light fittings, the plasma TV, and not one thing I can see feels like it is mine.

  A man speaks, and it’s Liev – the man who pretends to be my father, sitting at the table that pretends to be a dining table in the house that pretends to be my house. He rushes through the blessing and carves our skeleton-like rack of lamb. Putting down the knife, he turns to me and examines my sunburn. It’s unusual for Liev to look at me like this – as if he’s really looking.

  ‘So what happened to your face?’ he says, smirking.

  ‘What happened to yours?’ is the obvious answer, but you can’t say things like that to Liev. He’d get so angry his head would explode. Pieces of beard would fly everywhere, a storm of hairy spiders. Instead of brain, millions of prayers would fly out on tiny bits of paper, like confetti. I can picture it. Cheeky comment – red nose – bulging eyes – pulsating veins – BOOM – flying spiders – prayer confetti.

  I just shrug.

  ‘You have to be more careful,’ says Mum. ‘Skin cancer’s not a joke.’

  ‘Knock knock,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who’s there? Skin cancer.’

  ‘Stop it!’ she snaps.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘It’s not a joke.’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ says Liev, to Mum.

  She shakes her head and cuts her meat.

  ‘So where did you go?’ says Liev. ‘Your mother says you were late again.’

  I chew and chew and chew, the lamb turning leathery and dry in my mouth. If you magnify a virus a hundred thousand times, you get a big fluffy ball that looks like a mouthful of chewed lamb. For a while, I think through the lies or excuses I could use, then decide not to bother. I feel weird – almost weightless – as I say, casually, ‘The checkpoint.’

  Liev’s knife clangs against his plate. ‘Is this another joke?’ he says.

  ‘What, like skin cancer?’

  ‘Such a smart guy! Always the smart guy!’

  I lever a hunk of lamb away from the bone, not looking at him. The fat stretches into transparent, stringy gunge before it snaps and gives way.

  ‘I just hope you’re joking,’ he says.

  ‘You didn’t!’ says Mum. ‘Why would you do that? It’s not safe!’

  ‘How
can it not be safe? It’s crawling with soldiers.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ says Liev. ‘He thinks he knows everything, and we’ll see where that gets him.’

  ‘Did you go there?’ says Mum.

  ‘He’s just trying to shock us,’ says Liev. ‘Don’t give him the oxygen.’

  ‘I’m warning you . . .’ says Mum. We lock eyes, and I can see that she doesn’t know what she’s warning me against, or what she’s threatening me with, or who I am or what I want. It’s as if we’re looking at each other through a pane of glass, like you see in prison movies, when your visitor’s right in front of you but you have to talk on the phone. For an instant I feel sorry for her, and I can see her reading my thought. I’m not sure which one of us is the prisoner, which one the visitor.

  I give her a little half-smile, and she half-smiles back, but there’s something so pleading and desperate in her expression that I have to look away and turn back to my food.

  Eventually I escape the table, having forced down half a plateful of main course and refused dessert. It’s only the excuse of a homework backlog that gets me away.

  All evening I stare at my schoolbooks, but the text swims incomprehensibly in front of my eyes. I can’t focus. My thoughts just slide, again and again, back to the checkpoint, to the cages and guns and razor wire, to the checkpoint and the girl.

  I have two homework deadlines the next day, but I can’t write a word. As the time reaches nine, then ten o’clock, and I realise I’m never going to finish, or even start, it occurs to me that tomorrow I will be punished. But this idea seems ridiculous. The word ‘punished’ feels like a joke.

  In bed with the light off, long into the night, the same thing, on and on. The checkpoint. The cages. The guns. The razor wire. The Wall. The lines of people and their clenched, bitter faces. The girl.

  Saturdays are quiet in Amarias. All the shops shut. Barely a car moves on the streets. Liev doesn’t even like me going outside with a ball, in case the neighbours, or God, are watching.

  Liev always turns his armchair, which usually faces the TV, towards the patio doors. He unlocks the glass-fronted cabinet which looms over the dining table, takes out one of his big leather-bound texts, and sits there for hours on end. The book stays open on that chair all day, and no one is allowed to touch it, even when Liev is doing something else. If someone visits, the chair still stays like that, facing away from the room, so people know they are interrupting.

  Liev knows I’m never going to be like him, and he gave up trying to fix me years ago. My job, on Saturday, is to catch up on my homework while trying to avoid expiring with boredom. As long as Liev doesn’t see me working, he doesn’t mind. And since his chair is always pointing outwards, he doesn’t see anything. Perhaps that’s the point. As long as I don’t touch the TV, he isn’t too bothered what I do.

  At the end of the day, the book goes back on the shelf, the cabinet doors are locked, the chair is turned back towards the room, and we eat.

  It’s the slowest day of the week, with every hour, every minute, dragging on as if someone’s filled all the clocks with treacle, but this Saturday seems to crawl past at its usual speed and also somehow vanish in a flash. I spend the whole day in my room, and at the end of it all, none of my homework has been finished. I don’t know what I’ve done or where the time went. I’ve drawn a perfect spiral on a page of maths paper just by colouring in the tiny squares; I’ve done an exhaustive study of which coins can stand on their edges for the longest times on a variety of surfaces; and I have peeled an invisible shiny layer off a history textbook without making a single tear, so it still looks the same, just not shiny any more. As for my actual work: nothing.

  We eat dinner in near silence, with a strange tension hovering over the table. Mum clears the meal, clucking disapprovingly at my half-full plate. She goes backwards and forwards from the kitchen, taking away the plates, glasses and cutlery, then the water jug, napkins, candlestick, and even the place mats. Each time, she returns from the kitchen empty-handed. Liev watches, not moving from his chair, breathing noisily through his nose. I hear the scrape and clatter of leftovers going into the bin, a splash as the water jug is emptied into the sink. Eventually, she returns and sits. There’s no dessert. The table is bare. She looks at me, looks at Liev, looks at her hands, leans forwards. Suddenly this feels less like a meal, more like a business meeting.

  There’s an awkward silence before she clears her throat and says, cheerily, ‘We’ve been looking into child psychologists. Not that you’re a child any more, but . . . there are some very good ones in the city.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We’d like to help you.’

  I stand, wanting to run away from the table, away from my mother and Liev, out of the house, out of Amarias. I see, like a minuscule dream as long as a blink, a vision of myself running through rocky scrubland, up a hill, with nothing around me.

  ‘You think I’m mad? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No! You just seem troubled, and you don’t want to talk to us about it, so I thought maybe we should find someone else.’

  I can think of no answer so I just stare at her, thrown by a sudden onrush of conflicting emotion, a queasy stew of fury and gratitude. I can’t tell if her suggestion is a dire insult or a lifeline.

  ‘Why don’t you have any friends?’ says Liev.

  ‘I’ve got friends!’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he continues.

  I turn to face my stepfather. ‘Everything’s wrong with me,’ I say, half sarcastic, half sincere.

  He gazes at me, baffled, then swats the air between us. ‘Ach!’ he says, directing an I-give-up shrug at Mum.

  ‘Maybe you should try it,’ she says, looking up at me, her face frozen into a ludicrously false attempt at encouragement and optimism.

  ‘Maybe you should try it. Maybe you’re the crazy one,’ I bark, my voice springing up to a little boy’s squeak then back down again.

  Liev stands, his chair legs screeching against the floor tiles. ‘Don’t you dare speak to your mother like that!’

  Mum gets up, too, and edges between us. ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘He’s just upset.’

  I stare at Liev, blinking but not looking away or stepping back. He’s still taller than me, but not by much, and not for much longer.

  ‘Why did you bring us here?’ I say.

  ‘Because it’s where we belong,’ says Liev. ‘Right here.’

  ‘Says who? God?’

  ‘I won’t have you talking like that in my house! Like these things are some kind of joke!’

  I tilt my head back and roll my eyes. Trying to look bored rather than afraid, I turn and walk to my bedroom, ignoring the sound of Liev yelling at me to come back, to learn some respect, to grow up.

  A while later, Mum knocks, opens my bedroom door a crack, pushes through a bowl of strawberries, and closes it again: a peace offering.

  I know how my mother works. Today it was a suggestion; next week it will be a demand; in time, she’ll force me. Unless I can find a way to appear normal and happy, they will send me to a shrink. I have no idea what those people do, but I can guess. If they are experts in anything, it’s wheedling out information people don’t want to give. It will be like an interrogation, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to hold in my secret.

  Much later, after the house has gone silent, I slip out of bed and reach behind my wardrobe. The scarf feels smooth and slippery against my skin, worn down to a perfect softness through years of use. I bundle it up and sniff. It smells not of the girl, but of her house. It smells of the other side – of spicy food and alien soap and cigarettes and foreign sweat. I take it to bed with me, inhaling the scents of these unknowable people, with their strange homes and mysteriously constricted lives, as if studying these smells might unravel the mystery.

  All the time I’ve lived here, I’ve been told s
tories about ‘the enemy’ and what they want to do to us, and how only our army can stop them. Everything about Amarias, about the way it’s built, where it’s built, The Wall, the soldiers, the checkpoints, springs from this story. If you doubt this, your whole world dissolves. In Amarias, if you don’t know who your enemy is, you don’t know anything at all.

  I twist the scarf around my hand, watching my fingers redden, then slowly go purple. The skin under the nails fades to a ghostly white, and my pulse begins to tingle in my fingertips. That girl – this girl – who saved my life using this scarf – was she the enemy? Was she my enemy?

  I release the twist on the scarf and feel the blood pressure in my hand equalise, my sausagey fingers quickly returning to normal. I think of my father, and how he wouldn’t allow me to see him in uniform. I never understood why, and I’m still not sure, but this memory seems like a droplet of sanity within a drenching storm of confusion. And as I think of him, heading off for his military service in his T-shirt and shorts, with his huge green army bag slung across his shoulders, it strikes me for the first time – a thought as crisp as the chime of a bell – that unless I do something, myself, to fight the shame and guilt that’s haunting me, I might be crushed by it.

  Like the sensation of blood flooding back into my whitened fingers, I feel some strangled, starved essence of myself refill and revive, as I realise what I have to do.

  My bag is packed and ready.

  1) Two bags of rice, two bags of pasta, one bag each of lentils, chickpeas, walnuts, hazelnuts and pine nuts. A packet of ginger biscuits, two bars of chocolate, three tins of soup, two each of chopped tomatoes, tuna and sardines. A jar of honey. One bag of flour, one of sugar.