The Wall

by William Sutcliffe

  The weed that has the firmest hold is a bush with thorns as long as matchsticks. It’s impossible to touch them without gloves, and even with them you have to grip carefully, laying the thorns flat to avoid drawing blood. The tallest bushes reach my thigh and take hours to hack out of the dense, dry soil.

  Today, Friday 2 June, I’m almost skipping with excitement as I hurry towards the grove. It’s the first Friday of the month, the day Leila’s father gets his pass. This is only my fifth visit to the grove, but I’ve already transformed the middle terrace, restoring it to something approaching the condition of the one below, spending more time there in three weeks than Leila’s father would be allowed in several months. And today, he’ll see for the first time what I’ve done.

  As soon as I’m outside Amarias I toss aside the tennis racket I carry as a cover story and hurry on, wondering if Leila’s father has been expecting me to keep my word, wondering if he’s on his way at this moment, perhaps in line at the checkpoint, anticipating thirsty trees and cracked, dry soil. Or perhaps he could be there already, staring open-mouthed at his watered, weeded terraces.

  It seems unlikely that he’d have much faith in me or my promise. Even in his most optimistic moments, he surely never hoped for anything like what he’ll find today, when he arrives and sees all the work I’ve done on his fields. My heart twinkles and aches with pride as I try to imagine his reaction.

  A darker, mirroring pleasure glows inside me at the thought that Liev will never know, and how angry he’d be if he did. It gives me an extra thrill that I’ve done the work wearing his gloves, as if an enemy ghoul has taken possession of his hands and used them to perform the work of his most hated foe.

  The first thing I do on arrival at the grove is always the same. I pause at the entrance, touch the wall with each hand, then cross the bottom field and kneel in front of the cistern. I cup my palms together and tip the first handful of water over my head, letting it drip wherever it wants to go, staying as still as I can, with my eyes shut, as it spills over my face, down my neck, and trickles to my torso and back. The second handful I drink, drawing the cool sweetness deep into my body, feeling it relieve the hot clench of the sun, which on the journey out often feels like a fist around a sponge, squeezing moisture from my body. No drink was ever better than this first handful from Leila’s family spring.

  I sometimes think of all the people who might have drunk here. For the last few months it was perhaps only me and Leila’s father, but a hundred years, a thousand years, five thousand years, is the blink of an eye to a leaky rock. Drinking from this spring I feel myself joining a thread of people, linked together through unimaginable chasms of time, who have all knelt here, drunk here, tasted this taste, enjoyed it, been kept alive by it. If the bulldozers ever get here, that will be it. The rock will shift, the trickle will stop, the thread will snap.

  I water the bottom terrace, then sit under a tree and wait, listening to the sounds of the leaves and insects. I watch a lizard squat on the side of the wall, dead still yet also tensed with life like a coiled spring. With a silent twitch, it disappears in an instant through a crack in the rocks no thicker than a key.

  After a while, I walk up to examine the middle terrace. The bushes have all gone, but there’s still a dense scattering of weeds. I amble among the trees, gently touching each trunk, enjoying the roughness of the bark against the soft pads of my fingertips. This terrace looks good, but there’s still more work to do, though today I’m too excited about the arrival of Leila’s father to get on with the weeding. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, and before I can carry on, I need a little encouragement, or at least acknowledgement. I need to know I’m on the right track.

  As the hours dribble slowly by, and it becomes clear that Leila’s father isn’t coming, my excitement curdles and sours. All the worst thoughts I’ve been keeping at bay over the last few weeks come creeping back.

  Perhaps he’s been stopped at the checkpoint. I cling to the hope that this is the reason for his absence, but I can no longer ignore what I saw in the alley. His curled-up body. The kicks landing in frenzied pounds on his back and head. I’ve tried to make myself believe the attack ended when my view of it ended, when I jumped down into the tunnel, but I know that if it had continued, he would have come to serious harm.

  This was the day of his pass, and he hasn’t come. Either the soldiers refused him at the checkpoint, or he was unable to attempt the journey. I can’t pretend to myself any more. I can no longer shut out the idea that he is still, three weeks later, too injured to come, too weak to tend his land, perhaps even still in hospital, or dead.

  The acid prick of tears stings my eyeballs, but I fight them back. I will not cry. Not today. I run down to the bottom field and yank at the tarpaulin. Wedged under the handle of the spade are Liev’s gloves. I pull them on and clench my fists, feeling the dry, hot leather crackle under my joints. At my feet lies a spade and a heavy, rusted pickaxe. I haul the axe on to my shoulder and climb to the top terrace.

  I haven’t been up here since my exploration on the first day. It’s narrower than the lower terraces, without any shade. Six straggly trunks sprout from the soil like tombstones, the branches blackening from the tips. A landslip has pushed out part of the perimeter wall, and the ground is strewn with stones and well-established thorn bushes. The largest one is a shoulder-high ball of dry, brown spikes, dotted with dark berries. I step towards it, swinging the axe, launching blindly into it with all my might. My first swing makes only a glancing contact with the main branch, and a clump of thorns tears a gash in my forearm, but I swing again, just as wild and hard. I slash and slash, not so much digging up the bush as smashing it to pieces. All sense of place and time, all sense of who I am and what I’m doing evaporates as I attack the bush, destroying every branch, fighting it, killing it.

  Only when I find myself standing over a cracked stump, surrounded by shards of wood and thorns, do I come to my senses.

  I drop the axe, toss my gloves aside and fall to the ground, flopping on to my back, looking up through the leafless branches of the dead trees at the rich blue sky, criss-crossed by two not-quite-parallel vapour trails. With the warm soil pressing into my wet back and thorny wood chips pricking at my skin, I try to imagine myself on one of those planes, flying away, shooting through the borderless sky. I imagine looking down from the aeroplane window at this faraway patch of land, seeing a boy on his back, next to a smashed-up bush, alongside a dropped axe and a pair of gloves. I imagine turning away from the window, towards a man in the next seat. He’s sipping from a heavy glass. He smiles at me. It’s my father.

  Much later, I stand and look at the mess around me. I have to get home. I’m hungry, tired and in despair. I’ll clear up on my next visit.

  I climb straight into the shower before anyone can see the scratches on my arms. The steaming water drumming against my aching shoulders is hypnotically pleasurable. As the hot jets pummel my skin, I feel as if I can sense my muscles digesting the wild bout of axe-swinging, recovering and building up, readying themselves for the next test.

  I stand dripping on the bathmat and examine my arms. With the dried blood washed away, the scratches aren’t too visible. I run a finger along the small, raised wounds, then give my forearm a squeeze, clenching my fist. It feels hard, and ripples under my touch as I wriggle my fingers. My hands, too, look different: wider, with a bulge at the base of my thumb and rough fingertips. In the steamed-up mirror I look at my hazy outline, still skinny, but less so – as if my hands, arms and shoulders are leading me towards a new shape.

  When I come out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, Liev’s standing there in the corridor, as if he’s waiting for me.

  ‘I need to talk to you. Man to man,’ he says. I try not to roll my eyes, but I think my eyeballs do it anyway, on their own.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think of you as a man now, do you realise that?’

  ‘I need to get dressed.’

 
; ‘Come in here. I have something important to say.’

  Liev grips my arm and leads me back into the bathroom. He locks the door, puts the toilet lid down, and sits. With an open palm, he indicates that he wants me to take a seat on the edge of the bath.

  The room is still steamy from the shower and I’m almost naked and this is possibly the strangest thing Liev has ever done. I stand there, looking down at him, and wonder if he’s finally lost it. I almost tell him that if he needs the toilet we can talk later, somewhere else, but I get the feeling he’d take it the wrong way. I sit, tucking the towel firmly around myself.

  ‘I think you know what this is about,’ he says.

  The sound of the whirring fan fills the room. I have no idea what to say, but Liev doesn’t wait for a response. ‘In a word,’ he continues, ‘responsibility.’

  ‘OK. One word. That was easy.’ I stand and take a step to the door.

  ‘Sitsitsit,’ says Liev, not shouting, not even cross. ‘Please.’

  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 r
oots. 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.