The Wall (22 page)

Liev chews at his tongue for a second, thrown momentarily off balance. Then the smile returns to his face. ‘There’s plenty more trees, Joshua. You going to stand in front of all of them? Mr hippy tree-lover. Which tree are you going to hug now?’

He turns and fires another bullet into the tree next to me. If he’d missed the trunk, the bullet would have hit Leila’s father, who is staring at us, motionless, his hoe gripped loosely in his hands. He flinches as the trunk in front of him shatters and splits, but he doesn’t move away.

At that moment, a new anger seems to lift me in the way air lifts an aeroplane. I feel strong and clear-headed as I step towards Liev, along the sight-line of his gun, and shout at him with an indignant fury that blows every last drop of fear out of my body. ‘ONE MORE BULLET!’ I say. ‘You shoot one more bullet, and I’m not going home. Just watch me. I’m going out there, up into those hills, right now. If I hear one gunshot, I’m not coming down. And whatever happens to me, you’ll have to explain to Mum.’

‘You stay up there, the jackals will get you. You couldn’t last one night.’

‘I know,’ I say.

I hold his gaze, not flinching from the rage that seems to be buzzing through his body like an electric current. For once, I square up to him and hold my ground. Before my courage fails me – before Liev can see I have the slightest doubt in my mind – I turn and run, not even stopping to collect my shoes, out of the grove and upwards. I glance quickly at Leila as I flee. Her eyes are glassy with tears, staring towards me expressionlessly, as if she doesn’t know who I am or what I’m doing.

I take Leila’s path, pushing myself through the thicket of branches, desperate to get up and away before Liev chases after me. Thorns tear at my skin and rocks jab into the soles of my feet, but I don’t let myself pause. Running with all my might over the loose, stony soil, I force myself upwards, heading for Leila’s secret plateau.

I can’t see Liev behind me, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t following, so when I see a slope rising up from Leila’s path with a good supply of jagged rocks, I decide to take it. It looks climbable, but steep enough to put off Liev. I speedily clamber up, my mind filled with nothing more than footholds and handholds as step by step I haul myself skywards. I feel no pain or tiredness, only a glowing hum of concentration as I work at the task of getting up the rock face.

It’s more of a surprise than a relief when suddenly there’s no further to climb. I find myself on a plateau of brown rock, the size of a couple of parking spaces, so smooth and clear it seems as if it has been swept. I must have bypassed Leila’s overhang and reached the peak. A powerful wind from the coast buffets and nudges my body, flapping the cuffs of my trouser legs.

I can see the whole of my town and Leila’s town. From up here it looks like a single place, surrounded by countryside but divided by a wall – one half neat, new, spacious; the other cramped, higgledy-piggledy, old.

It’s strange to see Amarias, which from the inside felt like a whole universe, shrunk to this: just a blotch of red-roofed buildings surrounded on all sides by land that goes on and on, fading into the heat haze. And like a thick grey scar, alongside the town, The Wall. Up close it’s the height that surprises you; from here, it’s the length. I’d never seen so much of it all at once, or taken in its superhuman scale and ambition, like a piece of concrete geology.

Leila’s grove, not far below, is out of sight from the hilltop. Liev can’t see me and I can’t see him. For a long time I hear his voice, piping weakly upwards towards the summit, calling my name, going through various cycles of tone: angry, pleading, threatening, reconciliatory, really angry, eye-poppingly livid. He tries them all.

I pick up a handful of stones and throw them in the general direction of his voice. I know they won’t hit him, but it’s satisfying to try – to be, for once, the one on the attack.

As my heart rate settles, the sting and throb from my gashed flesh begins to come through, quietly at first, then louder and louder. Thorns have ripped several cuts into my calves and thighs, slashing through my trousers and flesh. I sit and look at the soles of my feet. They are tougher now than they used to be, but are blotched with muddy patches of fresh blood. The skin is too caked with dust to see exactly what has happened, and since there’s nothing I can do, I decide not to investigate further. Up here, pain doesn’t feel quite so painful.

After a while the calling stops and the hillside goes quiet. I hear no more gunfire.

Tentatively, I shuffle to the ledge of the plateau and let my legs dangle out. A stone skitters downwards, sending up puffs of dust as it dances against the rock face, before coming to rest silently, far below.

Looking out at The Wall I think of my mother, of the scar across her front, and Liev’s accusation rings again in my ears. Since she married him, I’ve seen no more of her body than her face, arms and feet. Not for several years have I seen the scar.

A memory comes back to me, one of the few I still have from when I was small, living in the house by the sea. It is of me and her and my father, all crammed into the bath together, a jumble of limbs jostling for space, all of us laughing and squealing. The bath started as Dad’s, but I asked to get in with him, then Mum said it looked like fun and she climbed in, too, raising the water level almost to the brim. I remember asking about the scar, and her soft voice telling me that I got stuck during my birth, so the doctors cut through her tummy to get me out. She let me feel. I ran my index finger gently along the line of it from one end to the other. It was raised up a little from the rest of her skin in a little ridge, strangely hard under my fingertip, almost like plastic. She said I could touch it only once, because it felt strange for her, numb and ticklish at the same time.

The whole thing is clear in my head, including how the atmosphere changed after I mentioned the scar. In the silence after I touched it, I asked if it hurt when they cut her. She put a finger under my chin and looked me straight in the eye. She told me she was given medicine that got rid of all pain, so the only feeling she had was pure happiness. She said it as if she was trying to persuade me of something she didn’t expect me to believe. Dad was weirdly quiet and still.

Only very gradually, year by year, did it become apparent that, unlike my friends, I was never going to have a sibling. By the time I realised, I also understood that it was forbidden to ask why. There were secret hospital consultations; panicked, extended disappearances into the bathroom; and bedridden, teary days with no convincing explanation. I know things happened, but they all went wrong, and there was never a baby.

It hadn’t occurred to me that just by being born I could have harmed my mother, but a knife had slit her open to get me out. Someone had gouged into her and pushed a hand through her flesh to pull me into the world. While I was taking my first breaths, the doctors must have been crouched over her, stopping the bleeding, sewing her up, leaving a scar that never went away.

Was this the damage I’d caused, on the first day of my life, before my eyes even opened? Could something have gone wrong with the operation? Did this cut, which saved me, wipe out my brothers and sisters?

She never blamed me. She put a finger under my chin and looked me in the eye and told me in her most serious voice that the only thing she felt was happiness. I could see how much she wanted to convince me. But perhaps the real effort was to convince herself.

High up on the peak
, I feel as if I’m tingling with life at the same time as being almost half-asleep, detached from reality, in an elevated bubble that is mine and mine alone. Time seems to have both slowed down and speeded up, giving me the sensation that I can track the sun’s movement, minute by minute, as it reddens and slips towards the horizon.

Pools of darkness settle into the valley bottoms beneath me, as if night is something that leaks upwards from the earth. Pinpricks of electric light appear on the hilltops, glittering weakly as far as I can see in all directions. The wind slackens and the air cools, nipping at the bare skin of my arms. As the sky begins to take on a pink tint, I force myself on to my feet, rolling down my sleeves against the cold. It’s hard to part from the view of this just-starting sunset, but I know that to climb down in darkness would be crazy.

As soon as I lower myself from the plateau, the light changes. Just a short way below, it is far darker than at the summit. I have less time than I thought.

Finding footholds on the way up was easy – I could pick out crevices and ledges as I climbed past them – but going down, even simple parts of the climb become tricky and frightening. Again and again I have to clutch desperately at the rock, holding my weight on one trembling leg while I scrabble blindly with pointed toes in search of support. Twice, a rock gives way underfoot, jolting me into mid-air, leaving me dangling from my arms, kicking out to regain some grip on the rock face. All the way down, my heart thunders with fear. I climbed up with barely a worry crossing my mind; now I need all my self-control to force my mind away from the idea that one slip could break my legs.

I’m a long way from the nearest street lamp. When it gets dark here, it will get pitch dark. If I’m not on the road by the time that happens, I’ll be lost. It will just be me and the darkness and the jackals, all night. I have no idea where I’d go, or how I’d hide myself. Perhaps I’d have to fumble my way towards a corner of the olive grove, up against a wall so nothing could get me from behind. I wonder what it would be like to peer out into pitch darkness, waiting for a wild animal to leap out and get you – a wild animal with eyes that watch your every move even as you gaze out blindly into the night.

I don’t pause for long enough to feel even a moment of relief as I reach the bottom of the rock face, but turn and run through the grey half-light, skidding downwards over the dusty soil, swerving through the boulders and weeds. As my legs begin to weaken, my thigh muscles take on an alarming jellyish looseness. When I’m beginning to wonder how much further I can run, the olive grove comes into view ahead, visible against the grey-pink sky as a silhouette whose shape I recognise instantly.

Climbing up the hill in bare feet was painful enough, but going down is worse, particularly at speed. Every footstep is heavier, and it’s almost impossible now to guide my feet on to smooth or soft soil. With every footfall a spark of pain shoots up my leg, as stones jar against my lacerated skin. For each deliberate step, two or three after it are wild staggers to recover my balance. I know I’m taking it too fast, but the lower I get, the darker the air becomes. In the distance I hear a high canine wail. Or maybe it isn’t so distant. I can’t tell. On and on I run, stumbling over the loose soil, until the thicket near the entrance to the grove slows me to a walk. I drag myself as quickly as I can through the thorns, ignoring the needles scraping against my flesh, and stop at the olive grove wall.

I can make out a pattern of dim light interrupted by the vertical black lines of the tree trunks. I can’t see what damage has been done, and don’t have time to go and check, but I know the grove well enough to tell from one glimpse that nothing has been chopped down.

I remember exactly where I left my shoes, and kneel to retrieve them. They aren’t there.

I fumble around on all fours, searching both sides of the wall, but there’s nothing. My shoes have gone. Liev, I realise, has taken them. I stand again, feeling a bubble of loathing rise up and burst inside me, spreading a hot, poisonous glow across my chest.

My throat is still gulping down air in thin, wheezy gasps. I tap the olive grove wall with my hand, hoping it might transmit me good luck, and walk on, my scratched feet reluctantly placing themselves one in front of the other as I hurry down the path through the soupy darkness. I don’t dare slow down, but at this speed I end up veering and dodging in sudden, panicked lurches, as bushes and rocks loom up out of the black air barely an arm’s length in front of me. Not far ahead, invisible, directly in my path, is a coil of razor wire. Rushing blindly towards it feels like one of those nightmares where your legs carry you towards a cliff edge.

A sliver of moon is hanging in the sky somewhere above Amarias, too thin to give off any useful light. Sensing I’m close to the wire, imagining what the coil of blades will do to my flesh if I fall into it, I force myself to slow down.

A sudden softness underfoot alerts me to the mound blocking the path. I stop dead. Inches from my nose I can just make out, like some evil version of a bird’s nest, the tangle of sharpened steel.

Navigating more from memory than by the glimmer of moonlight, I pick out a route around the wire and on to the road. Turning my body to the right, I know I’m pointing towards home. I can make out the shape of the town, a cluster of orange spots flickering through the gloom like embers, but around me I can’t see as far as my own feet.

The jackals are calling louder now, more than one of them, closer than before. Perhaps they can smell me, and sense that I’m afraid. Maybe they’re watching me already, waiting for a moment of weakness, drooling into the thirsty soil.

I pick up a handful of stones to use as ammunition in case I hear any suspicious noises. I toss one ahead of me, just because it’s almost impossible to hold a stone and not throw it. There’s an eerie moment of silence, as if the stone has simply vanished, then I hear it land with a distant skitter. In this darkness, throwing a stone feels more like dropping one down a well.

The shimmer of Amarias street lamps tells me which direction to walk, but though the road is more or less straight, there’s nothing I can see to help keep me on it. There are ditches and gullies on either side I could fall into, and occasional signposts which, if I veer off course, would announce themselves to me with a smack in the face.