The Wall

by William Sutcliffe

  I decide I’ll make one attempt at the delivery, tonight, then I’ll run away to the place where I was born. I can hide out at the grove for the rest of the day, then around the time the school bell goes, I’ll head home like a good boy, eat a family meal without looking at Liev or letting him anger me, then go obediently to bed. I’ll seem chastened and placid. I’ll do my homework. Everything will be perfectly ordinary, apart from a chime in my head, reminding me each passing second that everything I do, I’m doing for the last time.

  Before leaving the grove, I touch every tree, silently willing each one to survive and grow. After putting on my shoes, I walk back for a final look and pluck twenty olives, one from each tree on the lowest terrace. I slip them into my trouser pocket, turn, and hurry away, not looking back.

  I nestle my fingertips among the clutch of olives as I walk down the path, around the razor wire, and on to the road.

  At the fork, I glance down towards my tennis racket and decide to leave it there. I no longer feel it’s mine. The boy who used to own it – who used to play tennis against The Wall without even wondering what was on the other side – no longer exists. Besides, I can’t take it with me. I can’t take anything with me.

  Approaching Amarias, I begin to hear the roar and crunch of the anti-tunnel operation. A couple of muffled explosions reverberate in the air, but it’s impossible to identify them as near by or far away, underground or overground, this side or the other side of The Wall. A clattering roar, quiet at first, grows in volume as I get close to the edge of town, but only when the source of the noise comes into view do I realise it’s moving towards me. It pulls out suddenly between the last two houses, as wide as the entire road, crunching and squeaking against the tarmac: a vast, armoured bulldozer.

  The enormous machine bears down on me, shuddering the earth under my feet. Moments later we are directly in front of one another, me heading into Amarias, it driving out, towards the olive grove.

  I stop walking, but don’t step aside. I can’t be certain where the bulldozer is going, but I can guess. A useless, helpless rage fizzes inside me, obliterating rational thought, freezing me to the spot as the towering vehicle, with a scornful mechanical sigh, brakes.

  A soldier with a cigarette drooping from his mouth opens his fortified cabin and shouts at me to get out of the way. I look up at him, ignoring his order, not moving.

  He shouts again, twice more, making threats I can barely hear, then with a casual swat of his hand he closes his door and revs the engine. The rumble of the diesel pistons seems impossibly loud yet strangely distant. For a moment, I seem to float free from myself, as if I’m not in the road, looking up at the bulldozer, but watching from one side, seeing myself block the path of this colossal machine, wondering what I’ll do next.

  The bulldozer inches towards me at the speed of an idle stroll, until the scoop touches the bones of my shin. I snap to attention and step back, then back again. The bulldozer accelerates steadily.

  Now I’m walking backwards as fast as I can, and the bulldozer is still increasing its speed. If I keep going, sooner or later I’ll slip and fall under the tracks.

  I jump aside.

  The bulldozer gives a gloating roar, exhales a black belch into the air, and accelerates away. I stare for a while, following its squeaky progress across the valley, then realise I can’t watch. I don’t want to see; I don’t want to know. If I leave immediately I’ll be able to cling to the hope that the bulldozer went elsewhere. The only image I’ll have in my head will be of the olive grove as it is now, as it was for Leila and her father, and his father, and his father before that. I don’t ever want to see it any other way. And whatever that machine does, in my pocket I have twenty olives, twenty seeds.

  I turn and run home, for the last time.

  The only part of the evening when I can’t avoid Liev is dinner time. I come to the table at the last possible moment. It’s roast chicken, Mum’s idea of my favourite meal. This cooked dead bird, sitting on the table in a puddle of its own melted skin, is the closest I’m going to get to an apology.

  I know how I’m supposed to react. I can see the scene in Mum’s head: nothing said, no mention of what Liev did to me, just smiles and nods and hearty appetites showing that the nastiness is behind us, over, forgotten. My little rebellion has been dealt with; the tunnel has been sealed; the town is safe again.

  I don’t look at her, and ask for breast even though I prefer leg. I know they were talking about the tunnel before I appeared – I could hear them as I came down the stairs – but now I’m in the room, nobody seems to know what to say or where to look. I catch them both snatching furtive glances at the marks on my neck, but neither of them asks if it is still sore, or refers to what happened.

  The first words to come out of anyone’s mouth are Liev complimenting Mum on the meal and asking her for seconds. She hasn’t even half finished her own food, but she gets up and serves him another portion.

  ‘Why don’t you just give him twice as much in the first place?’ I say. It’s the last time I’ll ever eat with him, so I figure this is my chance to say what I’ve been thinking for years.

  ‘What?’ says Mum.

  ‘He eats two platefuls every time, so why don’t you just heap it all on at the start? Just give him one massive mound of food so we can see how much he eats.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Forget it.’ I put my head down and cut a mouthful of meat.

  Mum looks at Liev, her mouth half open. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him give her a small shake of the head. Even for him, it seems like the fight we had in the morning is enough for one day.

  Nobody says another word until dessert. It’s chocolate cake, another of Mum’s treats, the same recipe she’s used for every one of my birthdays, as long as I can remember. She’s not particularly good at baking, and it isn’t much of a cake, but I savour every mouthful, knowing I’ll never eat it again, knowing my next birthday will be the first one without it.

  I try to lock away a precise record of the flavour, so wherever I end up, whenever I need it, I’ll be able to serve myself a fantasy slice. When I look up from my empty plate, Mum’s staring at me, smiling a pleased-with-herself smile. I didn’t notice her watching me eat, but from the look of contented relief on her face I can tell she thinks the cake has done the trick. As usual, she doesn’t notice what’s right in front of her. Show her black, and if she wants to see white, she’ll see white.

  I stand up from the table, thank her for the meal and walk away, not even glancing back for a last look at Liev.

  Lying in bed, I think through my plan again and again, examining it for flaws, rehearsing every element in advance. One of my worries had been that I might fall asleep, but as the clock nudges towards midnight I feel as if I’ve never been more alert, or more alive.

  It feels strange to be the only person awake in the house. The dark seems darker, the quiet quieter. I get up and begin to pack, gently tipping out my schoolbag on to the floor: textbooks, pens, half-filled exercise books, a calculator, all now redundant. In among the pile are eleven packs of aspirin. I fish them out and return them to the backpack, along with my identity papers, one change of clothes and a toothbrush. I need to be light on my feet, and nothing else is essential.

  I hoist the bag on to my shoulders and look around the room, which I realise I’ll never see again. Knowing I’m leaving, I find myself looking at it through fresh eyes, as if this were the bedroom of a stranger. It’s a surprise to realise, setting off almost empty-handed, how little there is here that I expect to miss. A ceiling-high shelving unit is crammed with games, toys, magazines, books and gadgets, most of which have been untouched for months or even years. Piles and piles of stuff – my precious possessions – and now I’m walking away from every last thing, realising that none of it, in fact, is precious at all. I spot three swimming medals clumped into a dusty, forgotten heap, won for some tiny achievement so many years ago I can’t even rem
ember it. When I look along the shelves at each individual object, almost everything seems to belong to a person who no longer exists.

  The wall above my bed, apart from a rectangle of space where Rafael Nadal used to hang, is covered with pictures of footballers and tennis players, fists clenched and teeth bared in moments of triumph, crisply frozen against ranks of blurred faces, smudges of awe and adulation. The glow of purpose in their eyes, the focus and determination, is what I need to find inside myself. The task I’m about to undertake is my own private Grand Slam final, the prize nothing more than getting away from Liev, out of Amarias.

  I take a last look around the room in search of one thing I might miss. My eye falls on the bedsheet, its pattern of red-and-white lines so familiar it has become almost invisible. I have no idea where my next bed will be. What will it look like? How will it feel to be in a room with no personal objects, no history, everything institutional and unfamiliar?

  My stomach lurches at the thought of Mum entering in the morning and finding my bed empty. Until now, I haven’t visualised this moment, imagined her terror and grief.

  To disappear without a note, without the slightest warning or explanation, seems too cruel. There isn’t time now to compose anything careful, so I grab a piece of paper and scrawl.

  Mum

  I can’t live in a house with Liev any longer. I can’t live in Amarias. I have decided to go. I love you.

  J

  xxx

  I read it three times. Seeing those bald words in ink, my departure seems shockingly definitive and brutal. It strikes me, for the first time, how they’ll interpret my escape. To them, it will look like vengeance.

  I try to think of something I can add to the letter, explaining that I’m only trying to save myself, not to attack them, but no words come to mind. Nothing I can say will lessen the wound I’m inflicting on my mother.

  I’ve tried everything to persuade her to leave, with no success. She insists on remaining in a place that I despise, and I can’t live there any longer, purely to spare her. I’m not dying, I’m only leaving. If she wants to come and find me, she can. She doesn’t have to live without me, she just has to choose: me or Liev. This doesn’t need to be written down. She’ll understand.

  With trembling hands I put the note on my pillow, pulling the sheet into place and flattening out the creases. From the doorway I look back at the bed, at what my mother will see in the morning. The sight of it reminds me of my father’s grave.

  I turn away and creep through the house. My footsteps seem louder than normal, the stairs creaky where they’ve never creaked before. The latch on the front door clicks like a snapped stick as I release the lock, but none of this seems to rouse Liev or my mother. Glancing back towards the living room, listening out for footsteps, all I can hear is the slow rasp of Liev’s snoring.

  Sparks of fear, relief and excitement tingle in my veins as I slip out of the house and down the street. I walk on, feeling conspicuous even though there’s no one around to see me. The drag and skid of my trainers on the paving stones is the only sound. Darkness seems to press in against the streetlight, squashing it onto orange pools around the base of each lamp-post. A bat darts past me through the cool night air, quiet as a falling leaf.

  I know the route to the checkpoint well. It’s only a twenty-minute walk. My plan is to climb the outcrop overlooking the gateway, which should give me a view of where the tanks and personnel carriers assemble before crossing over to enforce the night curfew. I’m hoping to spot a pattern in the movement of each type of vehicle.

  As I clamber up the rock face to my observation point, I think again of the bat that flitted past me outside my house. Never before have I seen one so close, or glimpsed that distinctive silhouette which flashed before me as it flew in front of the street lamp. For a moment this seems like a sinister omen, then I decide it has the opposite meaning. This is how I have to move: silent, quick, invisible.

  On the other side of The Wall, I know the soldiers only step out of their trucks and tanks if they have to. Here, at their last stop before they cross, things are different. They are safe here, and their guard is down. They stand around chatting and smoking, with that cocky calm that seems to come over people when they are off duty but carrying a gun.

  I watch closely to get a sense of how the operation works: where the soldiers go before they cross; how they move from vehicle to vehicle; where they congregate when they’re relaxing.

  My goal is to get on top of one of the personnel carriers when no one is watching. Using the high wheels and thick metal bars across the outside of the truck, it will be easy enough to climb up. The challenge is to do it without being seen.

  Despite the apparent calm of the soldiers, I know this is no game. Those guns are real guns, loaded with live ammunition, and if they see anything suspicious they won’t hesitate to shoot. For one of the people from the other side it would be suicidal even to try, but if the soldiers see me, they’ll know I’m one of them, and I feel pretty certain they won’t pull the trigger. They’ll think I’m just a kid pulling some prank. I have a cover story ready about how I’m so desperate to be a soldier I can’t wait for my military service, and am climbing on a truck to find out for myself what really happens on patrol.

  At worst I could be arrested, or even imprisoned, but they wouldn’t fire at one of their own. Whatever they catch me doing, I surely won’t be shot by a soldier from my own army. I know I’m taking a risk, a risk it’s impossible to calculate, but I have to do it. I can’t run off to the coast without attempting to deliver Leila’s father his medicine. If I simply flee I’ll never find out if he survives, and I sense that I might spend the rest of my life worrying that I had a hand in his death.

  The military assembly point is lit up by four floodlights which illuminate a square of land with an intense white glow. Each convoy seems to pause here on the way in and on the way out. I focus my attention on the last personnel carrier at the back of the line waiting to cross. It’s just outside the lit area, and as it’s the final vehicle in the convoy there’ll be no one behind it to see me. If I keep low as the truck crosses the checkpoint, after that I’ll be more or less hidden from view.

  From what I’ve seen, I guess that the soldiers will spend a few more minutes chatting, gathered around their supply area, then they’ll be heading back to their vehicles and starting the next patrol. The right kind of truck is in the right place, out of the light, unobserved. This is my moment.

  I scamper down the escarpment, taking care not to dislodge any loose stones, and scurry towards the personnel carrier, moving in a wide arc, as far out of the light as I can manage. I roll my foot from heel to toe with each step, trying to walk as quickly and as soundlessly as I can. My backpack seems to rustle and thump as I move, until I reach behind and squash it into my shoulder blades with a bent arm.

  A windowless storage hut gives me temporary cover, a chance to pause and catch my breath before making one final dash for the truck. I peep around the side, watching the soldiers’ casual banter. A couple of them stub out their cigarettes, crushing them with a heel into the dust. This means their break is coming to an end. I have to hurry.

  Only twenty or thirty metres remain between me and the truck, but there’s nothing more to hide behind, and it seems much lighter down here than it appeared from above. The longer I wait, the higher the risk, but for a while my legs won’t move. The signal telling them to run seems to fade away before getting to my muscles. Then I’m off, my heartbeat booming in my ears as I race at top speed towards the truck.

  I don’t turn to see if I’m being watched, I just run with my head down, skidding to a halt on the darker side of the personnel carrier, hidden from view behind a tyre. I squat on all fours and look under the truck, towards the cluster of soldiers. I can see only their legs. No one is yet walking towards the convoy.

  Standing upright, I pull myself swiftly on to the wheel arch then clamber upwards until I’m on top of the truck. As soo
n as I’m up there I flatten myself against the cool, dusty metal of the roof. I’ve worked out that in this position I won’t be visible from ground level. The roof of these trucks is too high, or at least I always thought it was too high, but now I’m in position, the ground feels closer than I was expecting. I try to reassure myself that no one will look upwards, but as my confidence in my invisibility wanes, so too does my certainty that if they find me they won’t hurt me. If they hear a noise, or see some movement near their vehicle, how closely will they really look before they reach for their guns, how many fractions of a second will they wait before pulling the trigger?

  I squash myself down as low as possible and lie there, my lungs filling and emptying as if I’m running a sprint, my breath refusing to settle. Pressed against the metal roof, with a chilly night wind blowing across my back, I begin to shiver, whether from cold or fear I don’t know. I thought the soldiers were on their way, but it now seems a long wait, with no sounds of movement, no revving of engines, no audible issuing of orders, just a low murmur of chat with an occasional burst of laughter, and as I lie there, I feel as if I’m deflating – as if all hope is seeping out of me. I am on top of an army vehicle, surrounded by armed men who are trained to kill, stuck inside a plan that now seems little more than a child’s fantasy.

  I begin to thrash my head from side to side, looking for an escape route, wondering if I can jump down and run for it before it’s too late, before I’m through to the other side of The Wall, but the soldiers’ voices are getting louder. With one eye, I see a group of bobbing army helmets move in my direction. There’s no way out now.

  As they approach, their words become more distinct. One of the soldiers is being pushed around and mocked by the others – something about a girl, and what he either has or hasn’t done with her. One of them lets out a high, squeaky laugh. The doors of the truck clang shut, but through the thin roof of the vehicle I still hear the rise and fall of the jokey conversation, without any longer being able to make out the words. The engine starts, juddering my head, chest, arms and thighs, rumbling through my body like a seismic tremor.