The Wall by William Sutcliffe Read Free Book Online

and on without end.
    Perhaps I’m not going to get home, after all. Perhaps I’m now in a maze of tunnels, trapped, stuck here until I die and am eaten by rats. Or would the rats start on me before I’m even dead?
    Maybe the only thing to do is to lie here a little longer until I have more strength. A little rest might do me good. I’m so tired and afraid that for a moment it seems as if, whatever I decide, an irresistible wave of sleep is going to wash over me. But if I sleep, will the rats crawl on me? Will they take experimental nibbles at me to see if I’m done for? Are they looking at me right now, assessing whether or not it’s time to move in?
    I decide to allow myself just a minute more to gather my strength. I close my eyes and think of my old house, by the sea, and as an image of it comes into my head, the shudders in my body begin to recede. I picture its smooth concrete walls, white as a new tooth, crisp against a blue sky. I imagine myself looking out of our wide bay window, which was like the prow of a ship. If you stood in the middle with your nose pressed to the glass, you could see nothing but water.
    This window formed one end of the big open space that more or less made up the whole house. It was mostly empty, furnished with not much more than a cracked leather sofa, a round wooden dining table, and a bright red kitchen in the corner. They were three separate rooms when we moved in, but Dad bought a sledgehammer and took all the walls out. My earliest memory is me clinging to Mum, listening to a thumping wall, scared but excited, then the plaster cracks and shatters, cascading to the floor, and, as the air clears, Dad appears in the hole with white dust all over his face and a huge grin, looking like a happy ghost.
    Sometimes I’d lie on my back and look at the scribbles of sea-bounced light that jiggled on the ceiling. In the afternoons, the room was cool and shady. We had curtains, but only the seagulls could see in, so we never drew them except on the very hottest days, when the thin white cotton would flutter and dance in front of the open windows.
    I was tiny when we first moved there, and my favourite toy was an orange wooden trike. When I see the house, I usually picture myself in that huge, bright room, wheeling this way and that through a scattering of toys, bumping into the furniture, dismounting and remounting, lost in elaborate fantasy tasks and journeys.
    That was about ten years ago, so I don’t know if I remember it from my memory, or from the home videos I’ve watched. We’ve got one DVD made up of short, shaky little snatches of our old life. There are only a few glimpses of Dad, because he was usually doing the filming. In one, he’s pretending that he wants to pick me up, but he can’t because I’m too heavy. I’m no taller than his knee, but he grunts and groans with the effort, bulging his cheeks and making the tendons in his neck stick out, then he goes into spasms and acts like he’s having a heart attack. I laugh so much that I fall over, and the picture shakes crazily as Mum runs to stop me banging my head. I went through a phase of watching this DVD every day, until the time Liev burst in and ejected the disc, accusing me of selfishness and cruelty. He ended up telling me it was ‘time to move on’, then walked out with the DVD.
    I’ve looked everywhere in the house, right up to the attic, but without any luck. I don’t think Mum would have let him throw it away, but I can’t be sure.
    In that house by the sea nobody ever prayed, except for on the morning we all dreaded, which came once a year, when Dad had to go off on his army reservist duty. Last thing before he left, he always took an old leather-bound book from a high shelf, and stood there for a minute or so, mumbling something to himself. Then he turned and went.
    Once, after he’d gone, I asked Mum to get the book down for me. She showed me my grandfather’s name written in curly old-fashioned