The Wall

by William Sutcliffe

  I know it by heart now, but that doesn’t mean I understand it. Some elements are obvious, others – small marks I didn’t even notice when he first handed it to me – are incomprehensible.

  The Wall, a thick line down the centre of the map, is the starting point, but even this is odd, not quite corresponding to reality. The checkpoint is the only way around The Wall, but on Leila’s father’s drawing, one road simply ghosts through the concrete. On my side, this ghost road is one of only two he has drawn. The far side is criss-crossed with a network that matches the map I downloaded from the net, but this route through The Wall is a fantasy.

  After looking at the map again and again, night after night, a theory occurs to me. Perhaps this layout is not an invention, but a memory. He’s made the streets of Amarias disappear not because he wants them to disappear, but because he’s never come here. Or, rather, he once came here often, before Amarias was built; but after the bulldozers moved in, and new streets and houses were constructed, and The Wall went up, he was never able to come again. He wouldn’t even know what was here. The map in his head was the pre-Amarias map. He was old; my town was new.

  His current route to the olive grove took him out to the checkpoint and around the edge of town. In the past, he, and his father, and his father’s father, would have walked in a straight line, along this map’s vanished road, wafting through the rows of houses they couldn’t have known would ever be built here, on the edge of their town, for people like me, from far away. Perhaps they walked right here, through this house, through my bedroom.

  I’m struck by the obvious but new thought that everything ever built was once not there. Every town was once a field, a forest, a desert, a nameless nowhere that grew into a named somewhere. Amarias was different, though. The not-thereness of Amarias was so recent, the thereness so sudden, that with this map in my hand the town seemed, for all its solidity, almost fantastical.

  Each hilltop on the map is indicated by a small circle, every one exactly in position if you line them up with The Wall. Other than these hills, the only things marked on my side of the barrier are the disappeared road through The Wall and the path up from the checkpoint to the olive grove. Between the junction of these two routes and the X, he has marked a series of complex squares, dots and squiggles. However much I stare, none of these makes any sense. The only way to understand them would be to go.

  Three weeks after my disastrous delivery of food to Leila, the grounding ends. My ankle joint still aches, giving me a slight limp, but I can’t wait any longer. I have a place to go, a job to do, a map to follow.

  At midday, in summertime, the streets are almost empty. Everyone is at home, the shops are shuttered up for the long lunch break, and even the dogs go quiet. The middle of the day here is like the middle of the night: if you venture out, you’ll probably see no one and no one will see you. That’s when I set off, my shadow like a bobbing football between my feet as I walk through the blazing crush of sunlight. The map remains in my pocket while I cross the centre of town, and I clutch a tennis racket in my hand, carried as an explanation for my mum, or anyone else who might see, as to what I’m doing. I often play tennis against The Wall. In some ways it’s the perfect tennis partner, except that it can’t serve and it never loses.

  I toss the racket from hand to hand, practising vertical spins and juggler-style rotations. I once saw a guy on TV pass his whole body through a stringless tennis racket. To do the last bit, he had to dislocate his own shoulders, then pop them back in again. It was disgusting, but impossible to look away.

  I falter at the edge of town. The perimeter has the same feel as on the checkpoint road, the same strange leap from suburbia to wilderness. It always seemed unremarkable viewed from a car window, but on foot the abruptness of the transition feels creepy. You can actually see the edge of the last lawn – see that it is just a few blades of grass, sitting on a skin of soil no deeper than my little finger, plonked on top of the grey-brown dusty earth that stretches out to the horizon. The sight of this edge makes the lawn, and all the other lawns, seem less like real grass, more like carpets that have been trucked in, rolled out and stamped down. It makes me imagine, fleetingly, the whole town as some kind of pop-up carpet that someone has unrolled on a hilltop for families like mine to live in.

  I’m not supposed go outside the town, but there’s nothing to stop me. It’s just assumed that no one will want to – least of all a boy, on his own, without so much as a handgun. No one can get through the checkpoint carrying a weapon, but even so, once they’ve crossed over it’s possible for them to head in this direction, and if someone was determined enough to harm a person who strayed out of his safe areas, there were plenty of ways to do it. Beyond the edge of Amarias, if you weren’t armed, you weren’t safe. That’s what we were always told.

  But I no longer believe what I’ve been told, and I have a job to do, a promise to keep. In the last three weeks, barely an hour has passed without my thoughts spinning back to Leila’s father, to that glimpse of the people crowded around his curled-up body, kicking him. I tell myself again and again that after I went down the tunnel, they must have stopped. It can’t have been much longer before they decided they’d punished him enough. What, after all, had he done to them? He’d just walked into their alley. You couldn’t get killed for that. He had to be all right. He had to be back home now, with his family. That, surely, was the only possible outcome.

  I don’t usually pray unless I have to, because I know there’s no point, I know there’s nobody listening, but now, every day, I find myself asking for help from I-don’t-know-who, begging no one in particular, muttering pointlessly into nothingness my plea for Leila’s father to be safe.

  I feel a faint breath of wind on my face. Inside town the air is cloyingly still, but out here, in the open, there’s just enough breeze to cool the skin. Fine, invisible dust seems to dissolve itself into the sweat which oozes from my forehead and slips grittily towards my neck.

  As my road joins up with the narrow route down to the checkpoint, I look back at Amarias, towards the newer parts of town where it has expanded outwards from the curved hilltop, like sauce oozing down a lump of ice cream. Our house was at the edge of town when we moved in; now there are hundreds of homes beyond it. The Wall is hidden from view behind the hillside. From here, the place looks almost normal.

  In the distance, I can see the new road from Amarias to the city, fenced on both sides, rising up to bridge the valley floor before disappearing into a circle bored through the hillside. You’d think it was an express railway. Where it passes under a cluster of low, rickety houses, a concrete overhang leans out over the tarmac to stop people throwing stones at the traffic. For this road, you need a yellow number plate.

  The tennis racket is sticky in my hand, heavier now than it seemed when I set off. I toss it into a gully. No one can see me now. I’ll be able to pick it up on my way home.

  My pulse accelerates as I draw the map from a back pocket and unfold it in the dazzling sunlight. The dusty sweat on my thumbs makes a brown smudge in each corner.

  At the point where the two roads meet, a squiggle has been drawn along one side of the junction. I look to my left, into a ditch dotted with scrubby pockets of vegetation. It’s dry now, but in rainy months this would be a stream. Straight away, the map’s first puzzle is solved. The squiggle is the stream.

  I walk on, the scuff of my trainers against the tarmac oddly loud amid this huge expanse of silence. Sidewinding snakes of dust skitter across the road in front of me, disappearing as soon as they’ve traversed the dark surface of the road. I’m thirsty now, wet from head to toe with sweat, my hair moist and flat against my scalp, but I brought no water.

  Whether or not I’m right to ignore all the other warnings and threats that hang over the land around the town, I know I’ve been stupid to overlook this one. In heat as intense as this, without water you get weak fast. The second I realise my omission, I know I ought to turn back. But looking at
the map, it seems as if I’m almost there. I have no idea if it’s to scale, but this is where the detail intensifies, and I feel close to the marked turn-off from the road. He said there was a spring at the olive grove. If the directions are right, I’ll get a drink sooner by carrying on than by returning.

  Of course, I might get lost. I might never find the olive grove or the spring. By the time that happened, and with extra distance to cover, the journey home would be risky.

  I should definitely turn round and head back, but I’ve waited three weeks for this chance, and there’ll be another week of school before I get an opportunity to come back. I’m so close, having got past everything that might get in the way of a next attempt, it seems crazy to give up. Liev could choose to ground me again, and there’s no way of predicting when and where security guards or soldiers might be stationed. Also, if anyone has seen me come this far, something will be done to stop me trying again. I simply can’t let myself get this near, only to turn back just for a drink of water.

  I look again at the map. The key intersection seems close. The road passes by a long rectangle, then runs alongside a short but emphatic zigzag. From there, a line diverges from the road, loops around the zigzag, and snakes between a series of circular scribbles before arriving at the X.

  I give the town one last backwards glance, trying to commit to memory my distance from home, as a yardstick to tell me if I’m straying too far, then I turn and walk on, blinking sweat from my eyes, licking salty droplets from my top lip. After a few minutes, a low wall rises up alongside the road, enclosing a field the size of a five-a-side football pitch. The wall is made of dry rocks, held together only by the perfection with which the stones tessellate into one another. Outside this wall, the ground is rocky and uneven; inside is flat, unbroken soil, what looks like carefully tended farmland, except there’s no crop, only thistles and patches of thorny, berry-laden weeds. The soil is packed down hard, and slatted with horizontal markings I recognise from the building site: bulldozer tracks, weathered down to faint grooves. One corner of the wall has been demolished, with piles of stones scattered across the ground, some pressed into the soil and squashed flush with the surface. The gap in the wall is roughly the width of a bulldozer. It is clear that the same thing happened to this field as to the house at the mouth of the tunnel.

  I step off the road and crouch alongside the wall, touching the hot, rough stone with my palm. Someone spent weeks clearing the field to make this wall, lifting and carrying hundreds of rocks, a long time ago. The person who built this wall once put his hand on this very rock, exactly where I’m touching it now, maybe twenty years ago, maybe a thousand. Everything around here seems to be either brand new or very, very old.

  I walk beside the wall, dragging my fingers against its uneven surface. At the furthest corner, near to the demolished section, is a heap of soil and rock, on top of which lies a single short coil of razor wire stretched between two iron rods. It looks like a bizarre attempt at a roadblock, pointless since there’s nothing to stop you walking around the obstruction. Behind this barrier is a narrow footpath, heading uphill, away from the road, winding through a scatter of bushes.

  My hand is trembling with excitement as I unfold the map once more. The rectangle, the zigzag, the line, the scribbles: the field, the razor wire, the footpath, the bushes. Unmistakable.

  Forgetting my thirst and tiredness, forgetting everything, I break into a run, leaving the road, skirting the mound of earth, and darting between the bushes along the dry, compacted soil of the path.

  Up ahead of me, standing out amid the dry, brown landscape, I can make out a patch of green. The sight of it wipes away all traces of tiredness and pushes me up the hill, as I sprint towards what I can now see is definitely an olive grove.

  There are four terraces cut into the hillside, enclosed in another ancient-looking dry stone wall. The path leads me straight there, curving round one last thorn bush to a doorway-sized break in the wall: the entrance to Leila’s family olive grove.

  I skid to a halt, then stagger forwards and fall, breathless, on to my back. Giddy with exhaustion, I look around me at the thick, gnarled trunks of the olive trees, which look as if they must be older than the grandparents of the oldest person I’ll ever meet. Despite the hugeness of the trunks, each tree has only a modest spread, with a canopy of narrow, dusty leaves casting dappled shade. The dazzling white sky shines through in shifting beams and flashes. I listen, with all the concentration you’d give a beautiful piece of music, to the only sound I can hear: the rustling of the not-quite-still air through the olive leaves.

  I can’t remember the last time I felt anything as good as this – the joy of being alone, quiet, in a secret place, surrounded by emptiness, with no one knowing where I am, and no possibility of being found or told what to do. I inhale a stream of hot air deep into my lungs, relishing its crisp, dry scent. This is the smell of freedom.

  Remembering my thirst, I sit up and look around me. A square of land is enclosed by a waist-high stone wall, and is planted with twenty or so trees, in four almost-straight rows. The ground between the trunks is bare and neat, with no rocks and only a few small weeds. Faint circles in the soil are just visible around the base of each tree, as if a while ago the soil has been thinly ploughed.

  At the back of this field is another stone wall, stronger-looking than the others, and higher. It’s constructed into the side of the hill, and forms the lower edge of the next terrace up, which is a crescent shape, following the curve of the land. The trees up there look different.

  A reflected beam of sunlight, one short flash, draws my attention to a thread of water at the edge of the field. I stand and walk towards it, finding a tiny crack in the rock, from which a trickle of water is steadily flowing. A series of grooves has been chiselled into the rocky hillside, channelling this water towards a man-made pool that has been dug out of the ground. From there, a thin stream of overflow runs out and spreads into a tiny delta of trickles that descend the hillside.

  The water looks almost black in this stone hollow, but when I cup my hands and lift out a handful, it comes up looking clear. I rinse my face and tip the rest over my head, the cold wetness in my hair sending a shiver of bliss down my spine. I raise a second scoop to my lips and sip. The water is sweet, cool and delicious, tasting of nothing and everything, better than any I have ever drunk. I gulp down handful after handful until my stomach feels bloated, sloshing audibly as I stand.

  I feel immediately stronger, and begin to explore the fields. The six trees on the second terrace up are smaller and straighter, dotted with tiny green fruit, no bigger than a marble. These must be lemon trees. Almost like some kind of clue, the waxy leaves are the shape of ripe lemon: oval with pointed ends. Above this are two further terraces, roughly the same size, also planted with six lemon trees, but it’s clear that Leila’s father is concentrating his energies on the lowest terrace. The trees on the top terrace are all dead and leafless, with the soil given up to the encroachment of thorn bushes. The middle terrace seems semi-abandoned, the trees limp and unhappy in cracked, weedy soil.

  Under a plastic tarpaulin I find a spade, a gardening fork, a few other tools I can’t identify, and a bucket. I take the bucket and set to work watering the lemon trees. I give one bucket to each tree on the lowest terrace, the parched soil sucking down the water like a hungry man would gobble a meal. By the time I’ve watered these first six trees, the pool is empty. The trickle from the spring is so feeble, it will take a long time – a day, possibly two or three – for the pool to be full again. This explains the state of the upper terraces. For each visit, it was only possible to water one terrace; with a limited number of visits, the higher trees had to go unwatered. It looks as if he gave up on the top terrace first.

  I walk up to the next terrace and examine it more closely. The weeds that have grown are thorny and well rooted. Though the trees haven’t declined as badly as the ones above, it looks as if they are struggling to survive. Perh
aps it’s only recently that his permits were reduced to once a month. Perhaps he’d been keeping this field going using more frequent visits, but had recently given up on it to save the trees below.

  I can’t remember what he told me about the upper levels. I’m not sure if he wants me to work on this terrace as well as the one below. I don’t know if the olive trees really need no water at all. Then it strikes me that it doesn’t matter what he’s asked me to do. It doesn’t even matter what I want to do. I suddenly understand that this grove, from top to bottom, has presented itself to me as a duty. If I can look after this land, my labour and sweat might perhaps atone for what I have done. However injured he may be, however often the soldiers turn him back at the checkpoint, however cut off he is from his fields, I can keep these trees alive. I have found one small thing that I can do.

  On Fridays, school is only a half-day. Friday afternoons are the time for sport and games and visiting friends, but not for me. Not any more. Every week, now, I hurry straight to the olive grove. After school on Monday or Tuesday I sometimes sneak out there, too, just to do an hour or so of work and put on a little extra water.

  From the bottom of the understairs cupboard, I have dug out and taken Liev’s winter gloves, which are made of brown leather. I’ve never actually seen him wear them, so it’s unlikely they’ll be missed. They feel big on my hands, with floppy ends at the tip of each finger, as if I need one more joint to fill them, but they’re perfect for pulling out weeds and taking on thorn bushes.

  Watering the trees of the lower and middle terraces is now just the start. It’s laborious and surprisingly tiring to fill and carry the heavy bucket so many times, but once I work out a good system, with half a bucket for each tree, I can get this done reasonably fast. After emptying the pool I don’t rest, but pull on my gloves and set to work at restoring the ground of the middle terrace to look as neat and clear as the one below.