The Wall by William Sutcliffe Read Free Book Online Page A

handwriting on the title page, then flicked it to the bookmarked page, the prayer for travellers.
    I can’t remember the exact wording of the prayer, but I remember the point of it. I remember that you ask God to help you reach your destination in peace. I remember that you ask Him to save you from any enemies you might encounter. I remember that you ask for kindness and mercy, from God and from anyone you meet on your travels. And I remember how it ends: ‘Blessed are you, Eternal One, who responds to prayer.’
    None of those things happened. My father wasn’t saved from his enemies. Five years ago he said goodbye, walked out of the house, and never came back. I’ve been told it was a sniper, but not where, or how, or why. I’m not sure if Mum knows any more, or wants to know more, or would tell me if she did.
    I can see it, just like with the home videos, always the same, a scrap of looped footage stored in my brain that I can’t delete or change. I never see the moment he is hit, just him lying there in his uniform, bleeding into the street, surrounded by people shouting and shooting, but silently. There’s never any sound. I can see the noise, but I can’t hear it.
    It’s the only image I have of him in uniform, and I know I’ve made it up. He let me touch the rough green cotton pressed and folded in his kit bag, but he never allowed me to see him wear it. Even on the day he went, he always left the house in T-shirt and flip-flops. Before reporting for duty, he must have stopped on the way and changed. He didn’t want to fight, but he had to, and they killed him.
    Liev thinks he’s become my father, but he hasn’t.
    Lying here in the dark, parts of that prayer come back to me, short phrases asking God to lead me safely home. If Dad was still alive I might say them aloud, but I know for a fact it doesn’t work. It didn’t work for him, so it won’t work for me. There is no one up there who will ever help you. Liev prays and prays and prays, but I know he’s just talking to himself. If I want to get home, I have to do it on my own.
    I force myself back up on to my hands and knees and begin to crawl. This time I’ll count upwards. If I get past a hundred I’ll think again, but until then I’ll just crawl and count, crawl and count.

Hand knee hand knee. 42.
    Hand knee hand knee. 43.
    Hand knee hand knee. 44.
    Then a gentle bump – a tickle, almost – against the crown of my head sends my hands scrambling ahead of me to feel the obstruction. The first touch makes me leap backwards in horror. It’s something hairy, and it twitches when I touch it.
    I fall on my back and wait for the sensation of teeth sinking into my flesh. There’s nowhere to run or hide. I lie frozen, with my legs and arms sticking up into the air, but the teeth never come, and silence fills the tunnel. I roll over, reach out and feel once more.
    It’s the rope. I look up and see what looks like a triangle – just the shape, a triangle – hanging there in the fathomless darkness. My eyelids flutter up and down, trying to blink meaning into this strange sight, but I can’t make any sense out of it. All I see is a grey, abstract shape, floating in space, impossible to compute as something small or large, close or far away, until the distances and dimensions snap into place, and I realise it is a patch of evening sky. I didn’t close the cover at this end. This is the gap I came through on the way in.
    I grip the rope as hard as I can, and for a moment it seems as if I don’t have enough strength in my arms to haul me upwards, but I push on, refusing to allow my muscles to give up on me, and at the moment when my fingers begin to feel like locked, burning claws over which I no longer have any control, a breeze ruffles my hair, and I find myself rolling up and out into the dust of the building site.
    A little light is spilling in from the street lamps, and this shadowy landscape of dust, gravel, stone and shattered furniture at that