One day, Mum brings my coat. I’m going home. There’s nothing more the hospital can do for me. I have ‘stabilised’, which is a funny word to use for someone who can’t stand up.
Most ‘para’ words are exciting: parachute, paranormal, paratrooper. Paraplegic is different. It’s one of those words no one wants to say, or even hear. As I wheel myself out through the hospital, it’s visible on people’s faces that I have become this word, and people don’t want to see me while at the same time finding it impossible not to stare. I quickly learn the pattern I know is going to follow me for a long time: the glance, the double-take, the appalled gaze with an expression moving from horror to pity, followed by a belated realisation that the polite thing is to look away.
Paranoid is another ‘para’ word. Maybe I’m a paranoid paraplegic, but I don’t think so. The second I leave my ward and find myself among ordinary people, I realise that my life has crossed some invisible threshold to a new world, into a little bubble of disability that is going to envelop me for ever.
If I ever become a magician, I could bill myself as Joshua the Paranoid Paraplegic Prestidigitator.
Mum hardly talks to me as we drive back home, but not in a bad way. We’ve spent so much time together over the past few months, silence feels normal. It’s exciting to see people out on the street, doing things, to see the world carrying on as normal, to remember that a hospital ward is just a room, not a universe.
The hills, at first, are blurry. My eyes can’t adjust to anything far away. But I recognise Amarias when I see it, just the same, stretched from The Wall up to the hilltop, and down on the other side. The ‘Welcome to Amarias’ sign is still there, blocking the view of Leila’s town, but with a hole in one corner where it took a hit during the crackdown.
David is waiting for me outside my house. I show him a trick, while Mum unfolds the wheelchair. He tries to push me inside, but I tell him I’d rather do it myself.
I’d never even noticed there was a step up to the front door, but I do now, because a metal ramp has been bolted on top of it.
Mum shows me to my new bedroom, on the ground floor, where the spare room used to be. I wheel myself in, and my chair just fits with barely a centimetre to spare, which seems lucky until I notice a tiny gap in the tiling at the threshold, and catch a whiff of fresh paint from the doorframe. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to notice these adjustments to the house, whether I’ll upset Mum if I’m grateful, or if I’m not.
David chats to me as we go into my room. Everything I own seems to have been brought down and arranged as closely as possible to how things were upstairs. He leads me to a pile of presents from other kids in our class. People I know never even liked me have bought welcome-home gifts. We unwrap a few, all board games or video games. He tries to act as if he can hardly contain his delight at the amount of fun these presents are going to bring us, and it’s this – his attempt at optimism and excitement – that makes me want to cry, for the first time since I was shot.
I can see him sensing the atmosphere shift, and he’s relieved when I tell him I’m tired, and he should go.
It’s not just the doors and the bathroom and the light switches that have changed in my house. The biggest difference is Liev. Or, rather, Mum and Liev. He doesn’t talk as much as he used to, and when he does, Mum rarely appears to listen. She no longer seems on the alert, poised to do what he asks. She doesn’t wait on him, and she walks faster, stands more upright. I never see her pray, and I never hear her talk about her back.
Mostly, Liev and I ignore one another. Sometimes, out of curiosity, I’m slightly friendly to him, and he usually seems pleased. If I ask him to play cards with me, he always will.
I never hear them argue, I never hear Liev shout, but one morning Mum walks into my room with a strange look on her face, carrying a suitcase, and she begins packing my clothes. I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. I know immediately what this means, but I can’t bring myself to ask, to check that it’s really happening, in case I’ve got it wrong. I watch her every movement, the set of her jaw, the uncharacteristically hurried way she’s folding my clothes, feeling more and more hopeful that I might be right, that the thing I’ve craved ever since we moved here could at last be materialising. Only after she’s zipped the case shut does she look up.
‘We’re leaving,’ she says. ‘My bag is already in the car.’
She walks out with the luggage, then comes back for me. Liev stands in the living-room doorway, watching us go, but he doesn’t speak, and Mum gives him nothing more than a curt ‘goodbye’, as if we’re just popping out to the shops, but I know we aren’t. I know this is it.
As she’s stowing my wheelchair in the boot of the car he appears outside the house. He begins to shout at her that she’s making a huge mistake, that she’s betraying everything she really believes in, that she’s being short-sighted and selfish, but Mum acts as if she can’t even hear him. She climbs into her seat, shuts and locks the door, smiles at me, and we drive away.
She asks me if I want to say something to David, and at first I do, but as the car begins to slow outside his house, I realise that I have waited too long. I can’t slow down now. I’ll phone him. He can visit us. But right now, what I can’t do is stop.
‘Keep going,’ I say. ‘Just keep going.’
She understands – she understands exactly – and floors the accelerator, revving our sluggish, tinny engine. As we pass the ‘Welcome to Amarias’ sign, driving away for the last time, I roll down my window and whoop with all my might. Grinning, she rolls down hers and whoops along with me. Only when I feel as if my throat is giving way do I let my neck flop back against the headrest. A single tear is sitting, unwept, in the corner of her eye.
We let the wind buffet us as our car zooms along the road out of the Occupied Zone, towards the sea. Mum’s hair flaps everywhere, blowing over her face as she drives.
Her hair! Uncovered!
‘Can you see?’ I shout.
She smiles. ‘Mostly.’
‘How does it feel?’
She takes one hand off the wheel and leans her head right out of the window. Her hair streaks backwards in the onrushing wind. ‘WONDERFUL!’
I lean out, too, pulling myself up from the seat with my arms. The sun feels warm, high and generous, the air crisp with a gentle caress of spring. A grove of almond trees beside the road is shimmering with an explosion of pristine white blossom.
‘I’M PROUD OF YOU!’ she shouts.
We wind up our windows and fall back into our seats. That tear has broken free of her eye, and streaked backwards towards her ear.
‘I’m proud of you,’ she says again, switching her eyes from the road to me, for as long as it takes her to speak.
I’ve heard this so often, over every tiny increment of my recovery, that it has become meaningless, but this time she’s saying something different. I can hear it in her voice.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘I’ve been asleep for almost five years. You woke me up.’
‘What do you mean?’
I don’t know why I’m asking. I know exactly what she means, but I want to hear more.
‘You did a good thing,’ she says.
‘I tried.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘And that’s why I’m proud of you.’
‘It didn’t turn out very well.’
‘I’m not saying I’m pleased you did it. I’m not saying it wasn’t stupid.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I’m not saying I don’t wish you’d talked to me instead . . .’
‘I couldn’t!’
‘I know. And that’s why I’m to blame.’
‘You’re not. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘You don’t have to say that,’ she says. More tears are flowing, now. Vertical ones. The diagonal streak was a one-off. I don’t want her to cry, not today, not on the day of our escape. I want her to be happy.
‘I wonder what it would look like to cry upside down,�
�� I say.
She glances away from the road and looks at me for a moment, shocked and puzzled, then suddenly she’s laughing, with her head rocking backwards, laughing and crying at the same time. The sound of it is as delicious as the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.
‘Your father was crazy, too,’ she says. ‘I never knew what he was going to come up with, either.’
‘Shall we stop, and you can do a handstand. I’ll hold your ankles.’
I can picture it. The little saloon in a deserted, stony lay-by; the boy in a wheelchair, holding the legs of a middle-aged woman executing a handstand, weeping, tears dribbling through her eyebrows into her long black hair.
She laughs again, still crying, still driving, zooming us towards the sea.
This is where I come to think. It might seem weird to spend so much time in a car park, but I can wheel myself here, and it has the view I want, of nothing but water, like the one from the bay window in the house where I was a child. If I get my chair in the right spot, I can look out at a pure blue world.
Someone else lives in that house now, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. We’re in a similar town, a few miles up the coast, in a tiny flat with boxy rooms and no view other than the back of the neighbouring apartment block. Even though it’s half the size of our house in Amarias, it feels twice as big because there’s no Liev. I never realised how much space he took up. Not his body, but his presence. Liev’s demands and moods, or just the idea that he was always watching, squeezed me and Mum outwards to the fringes of that house, her into the kitchen, me into my bedroom. Here, all the space is ours, without any rooms you have to avoid because of the conversation you’ll be drawn into if you enter.
For a while, being here was perfect. To be away from Liev, from Amarias, from the Occupied Zone was like recovering from a disease – a disease you’ve had for so long you can’t even remember what it’s like to feel healthy. Perhaps that’s a strange thing to think for someone stuck in a wheelchair, but that’s how it felt: like a miraculous recovery.
Mum even managed to get me into a normal school, where all the kids were so helpful it made me feel extra paranoid. Everyone was friendly and polite and hurried to help me through doors and fetched anything I asked for, and they smiled and smiled and smiled, but I could feel their relief when I moved away.
I’m like a hero and an ogre, rolled into one. A Herogre: a semi-mythical legless creature who propels himself on giant wheels and will eat you alive if you are ever caught not smiling at him. The legend of the Herogre is that he was created by a magic bouncing bullet sent as a punishment into the spine of a boy who went where he was told not to go, and tried to help people he was told not to help.
As people got more used to me, the Herogre thing diminished, and life began to seem normal; normal in the way Amarias had seemed normal before I found the tunnel and saw what was on the other side of The Wall. Here, there’s no Wall, there are no soldiers – except off-duty ones visiting home – and this version of normal seems like how I imagine normality in other countries.
But when I come to this car park, and look out at the sea from this beautiful clifftop near the centre of my tranquil, prosperous town, I find myself thinking a shameful thought that I could never share with my mother. I begged and begged her to release us from Amarias, and finally she brought us here, and I can hardly even confess it to myself, but I don’t feel as if I have escaped at all. This place no longer seems how it was before we left for the Occupied Zone, because back then I barely even knew what The Zone was, and once you know something, you can never unknow it.
I have left Amarias, but I now realise Amarias will never leave me. I hated that place because it felt like a huge lie, but this place doesn’t feel so different. The Zone is less than an hour away. Leila and her family and millions like her are just as close. The off-duty soldiers, sitting around in cafés, sipping cappuccinos, will be going back there at the end of their leave, to man the checkpoints and police The Wall, and keep their tanks and planes in readiness for the next crackdown, but we are all supposed to behave as if The Zone is far away, in another world, out of sight beyond the horizon. The lie here is different, but more convincing, easier to fall for.
Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to this spot: partly because the view reminds me of how I felt when I was small; partly because I know that out there, over the sea, there are other countries beyond the reach of this lie, where perhaps I could forget what I want to forget. I’d go if I could. But, of course, there is another wall, a different kind of wall, around those places. With my passport I could visit, but I couldn’t stay.
It’s summer again now. It must be dry in Leila’s olive grove. I still have the seeds, which I will plant if we ever get a garden. Every tree, leaf and stone of that grove is fixed in my head. I can take myself on imaginary walks through the terraces whenever I want. The only way I can walk at all is like this, in my own head, so that’s where I always go. I do it again and again, keeping the place alive in my memory, making sure nothing fades. I touch the bark of every trunk; I lie down on the hot, dry soil; I water the thirsty trees and drink from the spring; I weed and prune in shifting sunlight which twinkles and flashes through the chattering leaves. I sit, awake in this car park, imagining myself sleeping there, in the olive grove. But I can never blot out the vision of that bulldozer trundling towards it. I know the walls might be down, the spring blocked, the trees gone.
I turn my chair away from the sea, and face back towards the hills. A gust of wind blasts from the cliff just as I take my brake off, nudging me into motion, and like a fleeting waft of a familiar smell, a vision comes to me of what is going to happen in the years ahead. For the first time since I was shot – for the first time in my life – I suddenly realise where I am going. I know what I will do. I understand, at last, that my goal should not be to forget, but to remember.
My arms feel strong as I wheel myself home, my body pulsing with a vigour I had almost forgotten it could contain. I don’t know when it will happen, or how it will happen, or what exactly I will do, but I feel driven by a new sense of purpose. I will work. I will focus everything on work, and I’ll learn whatever skills are needed to be of use, and I will go back to The Zone. When there is something I can do, I will return, not to Amarias, but to Leila’s town, perhaps even to look for Leila herself.
I tried to help and I failed, but I can try again, and I can keep trying, and if I fail again I can try once more. With this realisation, I immediately feel renewed, fortified, blessed, knowing that even if I spend my whole life failing, I will be failing at something I believe in; I will be fully alive and fully me. If the alternative is to do nothing, to forget, there is no alternative at all. How can I possibly forget when I sit, all day every day, in a wheeled reminder of the soldiers, and The Wall, and the people who are supposed to be invisible?
The wind is still at my back as I hurry home, and for a moment I almost twist round to check that it really is only the wind, but I know there’s nothing to see, so I don’t turn, hoping that by not looking I might hold on to the sensation for a few more seconds of someone behind me, a fatherly presence, helping me along.
Author’s Note
The town of Amarias is fictional. Although it draws on many elements of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, it should not be taken as an accurate representation of any specific place. The checkpoint outside Amarias is based on Qalandia checkpoint.
Readers seeking a non-fiction portrait of the West Bank, and of how the occupation and ‘security wall’ have changed the lives of the people who live there, should read Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh and Against the Wall, a collection of essays edited by Michael Sorkin, in particular ‘Hollow Land: The Barrier Archipelago and the Impossible Politics of Separation’ by Eyal Weizman.
A fascinating insight into life inside the settlements can be found in Forty Years in the Wilderness: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlements by Josh Freedman Berthoud and Seth Freedman.
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sp; When the Birds Stopped Singing by Raja Shehadeh and Sharon and My Mother-in-Law by Suad Amiry provide vivid and contrasting accounts of life in Ramallah under curfew.
I would like to thank all the above authors, whose work was extremely useful in researching this book.
Fifteen per cent of the author’s royalties from the English language edition of this book will be donated to Playgrounds for Palestine (www.playgroundsforpalestine.org), a charity which constructs playgrounds for children in Palestinian towns and refugee camps.
Acknowledgements
This novel owes a great debt to Alexandra Pringle, the consummate editor. It could not have been written without my participation in the Palestine Festival of Literature, for which I would like to thank Ahdaf Soueif and the Palfest Committee. My thanks also to: Felicity Rubinstein, Daniel Chalfen, Anna Steadman, Emily Sweet, Fred Schlomka, Yahav Zohar, Raja Shehadeh, the four families in the West Bank who offered me their hospitality during my research, Adam, John and Susan Sutcliffe, and, above all, more than ever, Maggie O’Farrell.
A Note on the Author
William Sutcliffe was born in London in 1971. He is the author of five previous novels: the international bestseller Are You Experienced; The Love Hexagon; New Boy; Bad Influence and, most recently, Whatever Makes You Happy. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Edinburgh.
By the Same Author
New Boy
Are You Experienced?
The Love Hexagon
Bad Influence
Whatever Makes You Happy
Bad Influence
‘Painfully funny, wonderfully vivid, truly menacing’ Daily Telegraph
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