The Wall(59)

When we had finished the power bars, it was dark. In the alcove next to the locked door, we were sheltered from the wind, and it wasn’t cold. We lay back against the corner of the metal walls. Hifa snuggled against me and we settled down for the night.

‘This is weird,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, and I was so tired I could hear myself slurring. ‘But good weird. Tomorrow we’ll find out.’ I didn’t say what we’d find out, because I didn’t know. But I felt sure we’d find something out. I fell asleep with Hifa’s head on my shoulder.

The next time I opened my eyes, we were lying the other way around, with my head on her shoulder, and it was bright day. The night had passed in a state more like unconsciousness than sleep. We must have been out cold for at least eight hours. Hifa was still out; I was so stiff I felt as if my bones would crack before my muscles would bend. My neck was cricked, my arms were both heavy and stinging, my right leg was cramping and my left leg had gone dead. Despite all that, I felt good. We were up here rather than out there. My intuition told me that we were safe; at a minimum, safer than we had been, and maybe much better than that. As slowly as I could, trying not to wake Hifa, I leant over and started to stretch and as I did so, turning my head, I saw something which made me feel even better: a fresh jug of water had been left out and, better still, in fact the best news ever, the door that had been bolted shut the night before was now ajar.

I got up and went to the edge of the ladder and looked down. I could see the end of our lifeboat, which meant it was still there tied up; good. For a few minutes I looked around the horizon. It was a clear day with little cloud and not much wind, and I could see a very long way; blue sky and blue-green sea and not a sign of boats or planes anywhere. Good. I shook Hifa awake, gently at first, and then more firmly.

She blinked, opened her eyes, took a moment to focus. I could see her putting together what had happened, where we were.

‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘Wow. What?’

I pointed at the door. Hifa jumped up, going from groggy and just-woken to fully alert in a split second. Then she exhaled and slowed herself down for a moment, and we looked at each other. And then we went through the alcove door into the tower.

The inside of the tower was, at first sight, hard to take in. The only light came in through slit-like windows high in the walls and, as we entered from the bright outdoors, it was initially difficult to see anything at all. I gradually took in an impression of what seemed to be complete chaos. The floor was covered in pipes and cables and metal boxes and wooden crates, many of them partly smashed. On the side of the room closest to the door, where we were standing, the debris was piled so high it was almost impassable. I didn’t trust myself to clamber over the obstacle course until I could see properly, so we stood there for a few minutes and tried to understand what we were seeing. Then we began pushing through the mess. We stepped over and between pipes and cables and metal boxes as we went. This, the ground floor of the installation’s tower, had evidently been some kind of control centre. The far side of the room had seven or eight computer monitors, all of them black and silent. There were stacks of computer equipment on the floor of the room’s far half. The sense of mess and abandon was absolute.

There was a metal ladder in the corner of the room, the same kind that we’d used to get up onto the platform, passing through a circular hole in the floor above. We slowly and carefully climbed up it, Hifa going first. On this upper floor, the second of the tower’s three storeys, the windows were bigger and it was much easier to see. And that is where we met our host. A pale, very thin man, wearing nothing but black drawstring trousers, was squatting in the far corner of the room. He was just this side of emaciated; you could see his ribs, which were heaving in and out; he was panting with what must have been excitement or fear. His face was covered in thick dark beard and the only part of it easily visible was his eyes, which were wide and startled. He could have been any age from thirty to sixty. He was sitting next to one of the windows. Beside him, resting with the end down on the floor, was a metre-long telescope. That was clearly how he had spotted us and monitored our approach. In front of him was a cardboard box. The box was resting on a small low table, like a footstool. The bottom of the box had been removed and it had been placed on its side so the cardboard looked like a proscenium arch. On the floor also were small torn fragments of paper, folded over so they could stand up.

‘Hello,’ said Hifa. She walked across to him and squatted down so that she was at the same level as he was. I followed her and did the same. ‘My name is Hifa and this is Kavanagh. Thank you very much for lowering the ladder for us. You saved our lives.’

The man said nothing but moved some of the pieces of paper around while looking at them through the box. My first thought: he’s lost his mind, he doesn’t know who he is or where he is or what he’s doing. But there was something about the game he was playing which seemed orderly and full of intent. The pieces of paper were just that, pieces of paper in different colours, but they had been carefully folded, and he now took all of them out of the box apart from one tall piece and a small flatter piece. He moved them around and then he picked other pieces of paper up and put them in the box and moved them around too. I watched him for a little while but there was no evident pattern to what he was doing. Hifa and I gave each other a quick look.

‘Do you mind if we take a little tour?’ said Hifa. The man made no reply but his head twitched. It might have been an involuntary movement but we decided to take it as a yes. We straightened up from our squatting and, like the pirates on the floating community, set out to take an inventory. As on the lower floor, the whole of this level was one big room. It was divided into two halves; our new friend was in the tidier section, where there were a number of chairs and a table covered in papers, as well as his cardboard box and telescope.