The Wall by William Sutcliffe Read Free Book Online Page B

instant looks like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Just to see again at all – to have the use of my eyes back – feels exquisite. I flop on to my back and look upwards, relishing the sensation of vision, awestruck by the magnificence of the vast, star-speckled sky.
    Slowly, strength trickles back into my limbs. I’m safe, but I’m still not home. I have to get home.
    I stand, raising myself on weak, juddery legs, and notice something round and white by my feet. The football. It looks like some distant relic you might see in a museum, from a time long ago – the time when I kicked it happily through the streets with David.
    I pick it up, not because I really want it, more as a souvenir of something, of the person I was a few hours ago, who I feel might no longer exist.
    I walk to the place where I entered the building site and toss the ball over, listening to it bounce, roll and settle on the other side. The climb out looks splintery and difficult, but I know I can do it. Now I’m through the tunnel, back on my side of The Wall, nothing will stop me getting home.
    As I reach up to begin the climb, a knot at my throat slips loose. Something slides from my shoulders and flutters downwards. At first I can’t think what it might be, but as its cool softness brushes my hand, I realise with a stomach-wrenching plunge of guilt what I have done. It is the scarf. The scarf lent by the girl who saved me, and even though she asked for the simplest thing in return, I gave her nothing. Worse than that, I now see I have stolen from her, both her father’s scarf and her brother’s flip-flops, which I am also still wearing.
    In an apartment as stark and bare as hers, these items will be missed. She’ll have to think of an explanation. The truth, I sense, won’t do.
    I knot the scarf across my chest and begin to climb.

When I appear at the door , Mum’s hands go up to her cheeks and her mouth opens as if she’s letting rip with an almighty howl, but only a strangulated rasp comes out: half scream, half sigh. Her eyes, which are red and wide, gape at me as if I’m returning from the dead. Before I’ve even stepped into the house, she reaches out and pulls me towards her, clutching so tightly I can barely breathe.
    ‘I thought you were gone,’ she says, whisper-singing into my ear, her lips hot against my skin. ‘I thought you were gone. I thought you were gone.’
    Again and again she says it, squeezing me into her and rocking us to and fro as if we are clasped in some joint prayer. I squeeze back, breathing in the smell of her – a unique mingling of her sweet fruity perfume, with a hint of washing powder and the faintest waft of body, of pure her. I inhale as much of her as I can take in, snuffling myself into her without shame or embarrassment. I am home. I’m safe. I’m not gone.
    Enfolded in the powerful clench of her arms, snuggled into the intimate cloud of her scent, I wonder if it was almost worth going through the tunnel, experiencing that terror, to get this reaction from my mother. I can hardly remember the last time she touched me. This woman, wrapped around me, embracing me with this fierce affection, feels like my old mother, my real mother, a person who slipped away when Dad died, walled herself in with her grief, then hid deeper still, behind Liev.
    ‘I thought you were gone,’ I almost say, but I wouldn’t be able to explain, so I just pull her tighter towards me, feeling her body convulse with waves of sobs. I’m crying, too, happy-sad tears, not just with relief to be home, but triggered by everything else that seems to be in the air around my mother; something to do with this moment taking us back to the day we never discuss, when our old life ended. That day is with us, inside our hug. I can feel it.
    She usually pretends he is forgotten, but in this instant I feel for the first time as if she understands what I understand: that you cannot, after all, bury the dead. Even if you run