The Wall (18 page)

He smiles at me, a look so strange and unfamiliar it somehow makes me step back and sit. I can almost see the effort in his straining cheek muscles.

‘I didn’t get you in here to argue,’ he says. ‘I just want to talk to you about your mother.’

‘Mum?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s a brave woman. You understand what she’s been through, don’t you?’

I shrug.

‘You understand what grief does to a person, and how her faith has helped her through?’

‘I know about grief,’ I snap. ‘I know about that.’

‘Of course you do. Of course. In many ways you are a very mature young man. But in other ways . . . I think you need to consider her feelings. I think you need to understand what you are doing to her.’

‘What
I’m
doing to her?’

‘You’re hurting her very much.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I understand exactly what you’re going through, Joshua . . .’

‘No you don’t . . .’

‘. . . how at your age the body goes through a lot of changes, and a man begins to feel differently towards his mother . . .’ I’m beginning to think it’s lucky we’re in the bathroom, because any minute now I might puke. ‘. . . but I think it’s time you considered taking her feelings into account.’

‘What feelings? This is really sick. I have to get dressed.’

I stand again, but Liev gets up quicker than me and blocks my path to the doorway. We are suddenly too close, locked in this room, him fully clothed, me almost naked. The fan clicks itself off and the room fills with an eerie silence.

‘You know exactly what I’m talking about,’ he says. ‘You want to be a grown-up? Great. Be a grown-up. Face up to what you’re doing.’

‘I’m not doing anything!’

‘Do you need me to spell it out?

‘Spell what out?’

‘The secrecy, the lying, the sneaking off, the shutting her out, the disrespect. Treating this house like a hotel, and her as your servant. Is that clear enough for you?’

‘Oh, it’s me that treats her like a servant?’

‘I’m not here to argue, Joshua. I’ve said my piece.’ He swivels and sidesteps away from the door.

I know I ought to fight back, tell him what I really think of him, tell him all the ways he’s crushed my mother and sucked the life out of our family, but there’s something about him that makes it impossible to say the truth. If I had my clothes on maybe I’d give it a try, but like this, wearing only a towel, I can’t face up to him.

I unlock the door and walk away.

We eat dinner in near silence, Liev and Mum alternating between falsely chirpy attempts to draw me into conversation and equally strained efforts to talk to one another as if I’m not there. I wear a long-sleeved top, so Mum doesn’t see the scratches. I could have a leg missing and Liev wouldn’t notice. He makes a couple of barbed compliments about how fast I’m growing up, which are his version of a nudge in the back, a reminder to act on what he said to me, but I don’t even look at him.

Later, I lie rigidly awake in bed, trying to think my way towards a dream of that aeroplane, sitting there next to my dad, but the dream never comes and the clarity of the vision dissolves.

For a week, I think I’ve given up on the olive grove. For a week, I try to banish the place and the people who own it from my thoughts. But then it’s Friday again, and school ends, and there’s only one place I want to go.

As I walk out of Amarias, I notice that my pace is faster than usual. I’m in a hurry. I can see the top terrace in my mind’s eye, exactly as I left it: the axe not even returned to the tarpaulin, the shards of wood everywhere, the gloves tossed down any old how.

The first thing will be to clear up. Get all the mess out of the grove. I’ll then need the axe again to dig out the stump. When I’ve done that, I’ll start on the next bush. Then, when I’ve done the bushes, I’ll fix the collapsed wall. I’ll work even harder than before, and I’ll go there every Friday, and eventually he’ll come. In time, he’ll recover and he’ll come. He’ll come and he’ll see my work, and his heart will lift with joy and surprise, and something between us that appears utterly unfixable will, in that moment, seem a little less broken.

I can’t bring the trees back to life, but I can repair the terrace. I can get it looking how it would have looked before The Wall cut the grove off from its owner. Maybe I could even plant new trees. It was supposed to be possible to take cuttings from plants to grow new ones – I knew that – and if I did enough research, maybe I’d be able to find out how to take a branch from one of the lower trees and grow it on the top terrace. Or, better still, since there wasn’t enough water for lemons, perhaps I could take a cutting from one of the olive trees. Even if it took years to produce a crop, even if its chances of survival were small, that didn’t mean the effort was pointless. Those big old trees had been planted by someone, once. Planting a tree was never futile. To grow a tree was a gesture of belief on a timescale longer than a human lifespan, but that was how Leila’s dad talked about the grove. He said the land was his father’s and his father’s father’s and he was looking after it for his sons. If I planted a new tree, there might be no olives for him, but he’d know it was for his son, and his son’s son. Or maybe even for Leila and her children. It was worth trying just for that, to show that I understood what he said, understood what this land meant to him, and wanted, in some minuscule way, to resist the theft of it.

Just as his olive trees predated The Wall by perhaps hundreds of years, one day in the future The Wall might be demolished, but a tree I planted could still be there, tended by a descendant of Leila’s father, someone who’d have no idea who had put the tree into the soil, someone who might not know there was ever a time when this land was walled off. This unborn person would pick my olives, taste them on his tongue. He’d share them with his family; cook with the oil; perhaps take a cutting and grow another tree.

I wouldn’t give up. I would clear the top terrace, and in the straggly shade of the dead trees, I would plant. However long it took, one day Leila’s father, or her brother, or Leila herself would come, and they’d see, and they’d understand.

I start going
to the olive grove almost every day after school, and it takes me three weeks to clear the top field of thorn bushes. Hacking down the branches proves to be the easy bit. Every one has a dense clump of roots that grip the hard, dry soil with amazing tenacity. Pulling at the stump is pointless; levering with the axe loosens it but does nothing to get the thing out of the ground. The only way is to dig a hole all the way round and go under where the roots are thin enough to split with a spade, hacking at the thicker ones with the axe. Each bush leaves behind a trench big enough to bury a dog.

If I only wanted the field to look good I could just cut off the stumps at ground level, but I know that to replant the terrace it’s important to get out all the roots. When I refill the holes there’s never enough soil, and I’m left with strange indentations, but I use the tarpaulin to drag in extra soil from outside the grove and flatten out the ground. I search carefully to source the best soil, but away from the spring the ground is so rocky it isn’t easy to find anything at all.

I Google olive-tree planting, and the results are disheartening. It is possible to grow a tree from a cutting, but the procedure is technical and complicated. A cutting will only grow roots if it’s dipped in a hormone powder or some kind of special acid. You then have to plant it in something called rooting media, monitor the temperature, and keep the leaves wet with a misting machine. Even then it takes more than two months for enough roots to grow to let you plant it outdoors. There’s no way I’d be able to do that. The time wasn’t a problem, but it would be impossible to get hold of that equipment, and even if I could, there was nowhere to grow the cuttings without Mum and Liev noticing.

But one sentence on the same web page catches my eye. Apparently you can’t grow a tree from the pip of an olive you get in a jar, because the brine kills the seed, and even without the brine very few seeds grow. But over long periods of time, a mature tree drops olives which rot down and produce seedlings. The page has a picture of one of these seedlings.

I blow up the image until this small picture fills the whole screen. I stare and stare at it, committing the exact look of the plant to memory. Young trees, it turns out, need frequent irrigation, but that’s not a problem. I can do it. If I can find just one of these seedlings, anywhere at the grove, I can plant an olive tree.

After uprooting the thorn bushes and before dealing with the other weeds, I crawl over every centimetre of the olive grove looking for one of these seedlings. I spend an entire afternoon inching back and forth on my hands and knees, hunting for a baby tree.

When I’ve looked over the whole field with no success, I do it again, more carefully. Still nothing. I’m disappointed, but not surprised. The field has been weeded and ploughed by Leila’s father, and over the last weeks I’ve kept up the weeding myself, zapping anything that might take water from the trees.

I search the perimeter, right up to the cracks in the wall, hunting for any tiny plant that might have been overlooked, but there’s nothing. My plan, already, seems to have failed. Then, as I lean on the wall, looking out over the dry ground, a flash of green catches my eye. Where the overspill from the irrigation pool drains out, a tiny delta of greenery is clinging to the hillside.

I leap over the wall, my heart pounding. I throw myself on to the ground and begin to search meticulously through the leaves, stalks and stubbly little walnuts of grass. When, in a rocky crack, my eye lights on a stem no thicker than a worm, topped by two minuscule leaves, I can barely believe what I am seeing.

For a few moments I stare at it in silence, mentally flicking from this seedling in front of me to the picture I memorised, then my screams can hold themselves in no longer. I leap into the air, toss my head backwards, and yell for sheer joy, dancing around the plant, flailing my arms and legs, whooping and shouting and screaming until my throat gives up on me. I have found one! I can dig it up, transplant it, water it, care for it, grow it! My work clearing the field has not been for nothing. And when Leila’s father eventually comes, I’ll guide him through the perfectly tended olive grove and the lower two terraces of watered lemon trees, then, just when he’s beginning to get over his surprise, I’ll be able to take him up to the top field and show him my sapling – our sapling.

With trembling hands I run for the spade, but falter as I pick it up. All that crawling around looking for the seedling has warped my sense of scale. The spade in my hands feels implausibly vast. This is not the right tool for digging something tiny and fragile out of a rocky crevice, and there’s no room for error.

I have to wait. The seedling has survived this long, it isn’t going to die overnight. I have to come back with a trowel. I can take the one Mum uses for the front garden. I’ll be able to return it before she notices. Or maybe even that might be too large and clumsy. I decide I’ll also bring a spoon and a knife. This job isn’t farming, it’s surgery.

I prepare the hole first
: no bigger than my fist, dug into the loose soil where I removed a bush, central on the top terrace, with some shade from above. I pre-water it, and leave a full bottle by the side of the hole alongside a small heap of dark, composty earth taken from our front garden and brought out in a plastic bag hidden in my pocket.

The seedling has a slightly bent stalk, from growing sideways out of the slope then upwards towards the light. It is rooted right up against one edge of a crack in the rock, so the whole thing can’t be dug out in a complete ball of soil.

I take the knife – one of Liev’s steak knives – and cut along the surface of the rock, prising away the soil. I then saw a circle not much bigger than a tennis ball and lever in the trowel as deep as it will go. Pinching my fingers around the tiny stem to hold it in its soil, I press downwards and, with a twist, free it from the rock. It comes loose at the first attempt, and I slowly stand, holding my precious cargo with both hands.

I don’t want to risk clambering over the wall, so I walk the long way round to the entrance and carefully climb the steps, one by one, taking care not to slip or stumble.

Kneeling at the fresh, neat hole, I edge the olive seedling into its new home, pushing a few crumbs of soil underneath to raise it to the correct height. Bit by bit, I gently press soil around it with my fingertips.

With a bottle full to the brim, I can’t get the nozzle low enough to the ground without risking a gush that might harm the plant, so I pour single handfuls into my left hand and tip them at the base of the stem, watching each one puddle and disappear before adding more.

When I’ve finished I just stare at it, in the way a new parent might gaze at their sleeping baby. Nothing I’ve achieved in life has ever made me as happy as this two-leaved stalk. It’s not quite vertical, but that doesn’t matter. It will straighten up in time, and even if it remains crooked, I don’t care. To me, as long as it stays alive, it will always be perfect.

‘I’m going to look after you,’ I say. ‘I promise.’

The words just come out. I know it’s stupid to talk to plants, but I don’t care. This is my place. No one can see me or hear me. I can do what I want. If I feel like talking to my tree, I’ll talk to my tree.