The Wall(60)

The other half of the room was as chaotic as it had been downstairs: an obstacle course of boxes and crates and huge circular cans. Hifa and I moved over to check what was in them, giving frequent looks back at the man, who didn’t seem at all bothered by what we were doing – he had gone back to shuffling his bits of paper around inside the cardboard box. Some of the crates I recognised as food crates, of the same type that we had on the lifeboat. I tapped the sides of them as I passed; about half were empty, about a quarter were part full, about a quarter were completely full. I felt a surge of hope, of joy. One of the full crates had a partially open lid; I lifted it and looked inside. There was a lot of food here, really a lot. It didn’t matter how old the tins inside were, this stuff lasted forever. As for the big storage cans, they might be water or they might be oil, but it was hard to think of anything else they could be, and whether they were water or oil, it was the best imaginable news. Hifa and I looked a question at each other and decided that we would wait a little before we opened them to find out. We didn’t want to seem as if we were launching a hostile takeover. We had just got here and who knew what our host might be thinking.

We went up the ladder to the next and last storey of the tower. Here again the windows were even bigger, so there was gradually more light as you went further up inside the tower. It was full morning now and blazingly bright. The layout on this floor was different. These had been, it seemed, the living quarters, divided into rooms off a central corridor, with huge windows at each end, so it was as if you were looking straight out into the sky. It was noticeably warm, not just sunlight-warm but central-heated warm – the first time I had felt external heat since we had been put to sea. I hadn’t really expected to feel warm ever again. Hifa and I turned to each other. Her eyes were huge.

We went into the first room. It seemed to be where the tower’s sole occupant lived. There was a mattress on the floor and a chair with some bedding folded over it. On the bedding there was a thick paperback book with a torn cover. I picked it up to find the title page. It was the complete works of Shakespeare. When I put it back, the chair moved, and I could see what was sitting on the floor behind it – the best thing of all, the best possible thing, an oil lamp. My heart jumped. But maybe it was a defunct object, part of the detritus and debris that were everywhere in the tower? Surely there couldn’t be … I sniffed: I thought I could smell something I knew well but hadn’t come across for what felt like a very long time. I sniffed again: I was sure: oil. I heard a sound which might have been Hifa catching her breath or could easily have been me catching mine.

‘Oh my God,’ said Hifa. ‘Oh my God.’

‘However much there is, it’s a finite supply, it can’t last forever,’ I said.

‘Yes but it’s oil,’ said Hifa, which was true. It was oil. I wanted to shout, oil, oil, oil! Light and heat. In that moment I realised something. I had internalised the idea that I would never again have light and heat – would never have control of them, would never be able to make it bright or make it warm, just by deciding that’s what I wanted. An ordinary miracle, a thing we had done dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day all our lives before the sea, and which had then gone away for ever, and had now come back. I felt something strange on my face and touched it and found that I was crying. So was Hifa: not contortedly or in grief, but with tears running openly down her cheeks. I reached out and touched them and she did the same to me.

‘I never thought …’ I said.

‘Nor did I.’

Hifa couldn’t say anything more, she just shook her head in a way that meant yes, oh my God. We checked the other rooms. One was fitted out as a kitchen. The cooker and fridge and other appliances were useless because there was no electricity, but we could see that the man in the tower opened his tins and ate his food here, and cleaned up after himself. There would probably be a way of cooking hot food – where you can make light, you can make heat – but he had chosen not to. The other rooms on the top storey had mattresses on the floor but were otherwise derelict. It was evident that people had lived here. The rooms were big, with space for at least four people; say twelve in total at the platform. They had sailed off, or died in accidents or gone to some other fate. I felt an abstract curiosity and an abstract empathy, and also, at the same time, I didn’t really care. Hifa and I were here and they were somewhere else. We decided to take the room with the view towards the west, to avoid being woken early by the sun. We shifted mattresses around, got a table and chairs, and giddily, unbelievingly, set up our bedroom as if we were children playing House.





25




Hifa and I simultaneously realised that we were starving. We helped ourselves to two of the tins that were sitting in the kitchen – one of beef stew, one of chicken curry. These were flavours we had got very used to in our time on the Wall. Cold, and straight out of the tin, they tasted better than they ever had. We swapped tins halfway though. Hifa had eaten slightly more than her share of the curry, but I forgave her.

‘What do you think his deal is?’ I said to Hifa. ‘Whoever was here went away or died but he stayed because why – he thought it was safer? He wanted to look after the installation, or thought it was his responsibility? Or he just wanted to hide from the world?’

She played with a spoon in the bottom of her empty tin.

‘My guess is the last one. Maybe he’s just a hermit. Who took pity on us.’