The Wall Read Free Page A

another man who was standing on another man. Depending on how tall they were, you might need one more. This opportunity has not yet arisen.
    The Wall was put up to stop the people who live on the other side setting off bombs, and everyone says it has done an excellent job. Most of the people who work on the building sites in Amarias are from the other side, and if you drive to the city you see lots of people who look like they come from those towns, but other than that, even though they’re living right next door, it feels like they aren’t really there. Actually, that’s not right. You know they’re there, because The Wall and the checkpoints and the soldiers who are all over the place are a constant reminder, but it’s as if they are almost invisible.
    I thought I’d never see into a town beyond The Wall until my military service, but now, looking down this column of musty air, I realise that within five minutes I could be poking my head up, seeing what’s there. The alternative is to wait five more years, until my conscription.
    People say hysterical things about what’s on the other side, but adults can’t help exaggerating. They’re always trying to make you believe that one cigarette will kill you, that crossing the road is as lethal as juggling with knives, that cycling without a helmet is bordering on suicide, and none of it ever turns out to be true. How dangerous could it really be just to pop through and take a quick look? And how frustrated will I feel tomorrow if I just climb back out now and go home?
    It sounds crazy, but I’m not even scared when I decide to go for it. Frankly, it’s the only logical course of action. If you have the chance to uncover a secret and you walk away without looking, there’s something wrong with you.
    The torch lights a few metres of tunnel ahead of me, but no more. I look upwards one last time and see, as if through a telescope, a disc of blue sky with one tiny puff of cloud drifting across it.
    I crouch on to my hands and knees, waving the torch in front of me, trying to get used to the way it produces only a narrow beam of visibility enclosed on all sides by dense, velvety blackness. At first, it seems almost like a magic trick, the way objects disappear the instant you move the torch away from them. Then I think how odd it is, when you live in a town, that you can get through your whole life without ever seeing real darkness. Amarias is constantly illuminated, with orange streetlights that stay on all night, and floodlights at the checkpoint.
    One last worry pops into my head. I take the phone from my pocket and squeeze it to light up the screen. Down in my hole, there’s only one bar of signal. I put the torch down and write a quick text to my mum: ‘Playing football with David. Back later.’
    Clutching the torch in my right fist, with my other hand flat on the damp earth, I begin to edge forwards. The sound in the tunnel is both oddly loud and unsettlingly quiet. I can’t hear any outside noises at all, but every movement I make seems to bounce back at me off the walls, as if amplified. The scrape of my hand and the torch against the soil; the drag of my shoes behind me; the panting of my own breath; all these seem to boom around me like a static echo which only quietens when I stop moving. Even then, I feel as if I can hear myself swallow and blink.
    Fear seems to seep out of the soil, into my body, like coffee soaking through a sugar lump. As tension closes round my heart and squeezes my lungs, I try to imagine that the real me is somewhere else, up above in the daylight, safe and calm. I pretend there are two versions of me, one in the tunnel, another one encouraging me on from above. The more I think of this, the easier it becomes to picture, like a cross-section through the earth: me on my knees going through a horizontal tunnel, then above that a layer of soil, then above that another me, matching my