The Wall(34)

The train to the east was old and slow. I liked it, the creakiness and old-fashionedness of it; the kind of train where people were going home with shopping bags, but had brought their own packed snacks for the trip rather than buying anything expensive in the big city. Hifa and I didn’t talk much. I watched London go past out the window and then blur into suburb and exurb, those random tower blocks which spread on the outskirts of the city, and then fields and country. I’m a city boy and the country always seems so empty, so underpopulated; even now when we grow all our own food and there’s more said about farming and food than ever before, you never actually see any people working on the land. Drones and bots, yes, people, no.

We arrived at the end of the main line and went to the station cafe to wait for the train to the coast. We drank heavily stewed tea and ate dry biscuits which were borderline inedible until you dunked them. I felt sad, suddenly and unexpectedly, and couldn’t tell why, then realised I was having a near-memory of Mary, bringing her hot drinks to us twice a shift. I didn’t want to say that to Hifa so I just sat there with the feelings for a moment, then looked over at her and could see she was doing something similar, sitting there staring down into her tea.

The train to the coast was even racketier and smaller and older than the last one, no more than two carriages long. The fields were big and dominated by huge single crops, most of which I didn’t recognise, apart from the loud yellow of rapeseed. The light began to change as we got nearer the coast, and before long I could smell the sea. The train made frequent stops and was almost empty when it began to slow down and Hifa said, ‘We’re here.’ She swung her rucksack down off the space above her seat. Hifa was not looking at all like herself, as if she had shrunk slightly. I recognised the symptoms of familial dread.

At the end of the platform, a woman with a turban wrapped complicatedly around her head and two different brightly coloured shawls was standing waiting for us, leaning on a stick. She had the same caramelly skin tone as Hifa but was taller and more operatic, both in how she dressed and how she acted: she projected drama. To the side of her and one pace behind was standing a woman instantly recognisable as Help.

‘Darling!’ she said as soon as she saw us. ‘Darling! Let me look at you.’ Hifa stood and submitted to this. Her mother reached out and touched her face and turned it slightly from side to side. She held her fingers over the place on the top of her head where Hifa had had stitches. She took a step backwards and looked at Hifa up and down. She tilted her own head.

‘As beautiful as ever,’ she said. She came over and stood in front of me. She held the cane out behind her and the Help took it. Then she held out both of her hands in front of her. I felt I had no choice except to do the same. She took my hands and held them. We still hadn’t spoken. She did the same up-anddown thing she had done with her daughter, then let go of my hands, and without touching me held her fingers over the place where I’d been wounded. Then she stepped back and turned to Hifa.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ And to both of us: ‘Welcome!’

Hifa’s mother lived in a cottage ten minutes’ walk from the train station. The little house stood in a row of similar properties just outside the coastal village. It was small and pretty on the outside, painted white, with a wooden gate, a trellis of flowers on the front wall and a small garden. The house would once have had a view of the sea, but that was now blocked by the Wall. The inside was decorated with African art and bright paintings by Hifa’s mother: she had been an art teacher but retired early and was now an artist. Her speciality was painting the spirit animals of her family and friends, and she said that she was looking forward to painting mine, once she had worked out what it was.

Hifa’s mother’s big news was about her domestic arrangements.

‘I know it’s terrible to have Help,’ she said, once we had got to the cottage and she had sent the Help to the shops in search of missing dinner ingredients. ‘If you had said when I was younger that I would have Help, not that it existed in those days, but had explained to me what it is and that I would one day be making use of it, I would not have believed you. Another human being at one’s beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one’s personal property … though of course they are technically the property of the state, there are all sorts of monitorings and safeguards, it isn’t at all like such arrangements in the benighted past, it is a form of providing welfare and shelter and refuge to the wretched of the world – but no, still, I would not have believed you. It is a falling away, a lessening of one’s own humanity. A decline in one’s own standards. But what could I do? I had you coming, I am not getting any younger, please don’t say anything polite’ – this was addressed to me, though the truth is I hadn’t been going to say anything in the first place – ‘we both know it’s true. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, and if we’re being completely honest the spirit isn’t always willing either. Age is a terrible thing, a terrible opponent. People of your time in life don’t understand this but you come to find it to be true, perhaps the only thing which is true for all humans everywhere, the terribleness of age. Our deepest piece of common humanity.’

I suddenly got it. Hifa’s mother was one of those people who like life to be all about them. With the Change, that is a harder belief to sustain; it takes much more effort to think that life is about you when the whole of human life has turned upside down, when everything has been irrevocably changed for everyone. You can do it, of course you can, because people can do anything with their minds and their sense of themselves, but it takes work and only certain kinds of unusually self-centred people can do it. They want to be the focus of all the drama and pity and all the stories. I could tell that she didn’t like it that younger people are universally agreed to have had a worse deal than her generation. I understood Hifa’s dread and found myself reaching for her hand. Hifa took mine, limply, reluctantly. I was about to find out why.