The Wall(62)

‘Safe.’ I could feel myself tearing up at the word, my eyes swimming; a sign of how exhausted I was. Safe. We lay there on the platform, barely moving or speaking, for a long time. The sun had lost its warmth, and was starting to head for the horizon, when Hifa sat up and said that it was time for us to get going.

‘We don’t want to be on the ladder in the dark,’ she said. ‘We don’t want the hermit to forget that we’re here.’

I was a little groggy and stiff and still felt weak from the earlier exertions. That’s why I made my mistake. I said, ‘Fine. You go first.’ She nodded, stretched, bent to give me a kiss on the cheek, and started up the ladder. I gradually stood, rolled my neck, looked around the empty horizon, yawned and looked up. Hifa had gone; she had climbed the ladder in record time and was nowhere to be seen.

‘Hello?’ I yelled up. She either was in the alcove at the top of the ladder and couldn’t hear me, or had gone inside.

I put my hands on the ladder and started up. At first I felt all right but quickly, within a few sets of ten rungs, realised I was in trouble. It didn’t feel like fear, not at first, just that my body would not do what my mind told it to. I was too weak. I could plant my feet on the rungs well enough, but the strength in my hands and arms simply wasn’t there. It was a little like the old days on the Wall, of type 1 and type 2 cold. This was type 2 fatigue. It wasn’t going to get better after a few minutes’ rest. It was getting worse, and I was getting weaker, and the ladder was seeming longer and steeper with every second I spent on it. I looked up and the platform was as distant as the sky. Hifa wasn’t there. I took the risk of looking down. That too was far, much too far to drop. If I tried to slip down the ladder and recover on the platform I would certainly fall. I was trapped.

On the Wall, the closest thing you ever got to loneliness was when you were standing at your post for a twelve-hour shift; but even then you could see the other Defenders, you could hear chatter on your communicator. On the sea I had never been on my own. I hadn’t spent a second entirely on my own for months. Now I felt completely alone and abandoned as I never had before. It was me and this ladder, alone in the universe. I was hyperventilating and failing fast. I realised, after everything I had gone through, that I could die here. I could slip and fall and be gone.

I pulled myself up one rung. It was the thought of dying which made me do it – my revulsion at the idea of dying here and now, after everything. Then one more rung. Then another. Not here, not now, I thought. I stopped counting in tens. I just allowed the sense of wrongness and injustice to drive me. Wrong, no, can’t die here, one rung. Unfair, unlucky, unjust, wrong, another step. No hope, no future, no chance, no luck, wrong, unfair. That’s how I drove myself upwards, after I had nothing else left.

I was at the platform. I pushed through the hole at the top of the ladder and lay on the metal floor. I was so weak and gasping so hard I didn’t even feel relief. I had never been so spent. I felt sick, then knew I was going to be sick, then was. I don’t know how long I lay there, half conscious. I felt movement and Hifa was standing there beside the doorway.

‘I don’t know how I made it,’ she said. ‘I threw up.’

I nodded. I couldn’t speak yet. She handed me a water bottle and sat down next to me. I swallowed a few mouthfuls, and immediately felt sweat blossom on my forehead. I was so exhausted that even drinking water made me feel a little out of breath. We sat there for a while longer. The sun was going down and the light was beginning to fade; it was around the same time of day we had arrived at the platform twenty-four hours ago.

‘We’re going to sleep on a mattress tonight,’ I said. Hifa’s face lit up.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in. If you’re ready.’

I made a gesture which meant, I’m ready to try. She unfolded herself to her feet and held out a hand. I waved it away and tried to get directly up but wasn’t strong enough. I reached for her hand again and with Hifa’s help was able to get to my feet. My legs were sore but functioning. It was the upper half of my body which felt useless.

‘I thought I wasn’t going to make it,’ I said. I’m not sure if it was clear whether I meant up the ladder or up onto my feet, but Hifa nodded as if she understood. She held the door open for me and we went through into the chaotic lower level of the tower. We picked our way through the debris. I shook my head at the wall of blank monitors, the control centre for activities which would never happen here again.

Another ladder, up to the hermit’s level. This one felt very different from the long ladder down to the sea. Hifa went up first and I followed. This room too was the same as it had been in the morning, the hermit in the same place, on the far side of the room, with his pieces of paper and his cardboard box. It seemed perfectly possible that he hadn’t moved all day. One difference was that this time he looked up as we came in, not a flinching or covert glance but a definite sustained look, then went back to his compulsive game. I walked across the room and stood over him for a moment. He didn’t look up and he kept shuffling his bits of paper around.

‘Thank you again,’ said Hifa. ‘We would have been lost without you.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you let us on?’ He looked up at me. I felt he was really seeing me, connecting with the reality of my presence in front of him, for the first time. Maybe he saw my exhaustion, and maybe also he saw in my face the trace of what I had been through that day, how close I had come to being defeated by the climb up the ladder. He very deliberately reached out and picked up all the pieces of paper on the floor of the cardboard box. He put them down next to him. Then he picked one of them back up, looked at it, looked at me and Hifa, and replaced the folded piece of paper in the middle of the box. He looked at us again. Then he put all the other pieces of paper back in the box, left them there for a moment, and removed them all so that the same piece, the first one, was the only one left. I suddenly saw what this was, what the box meant: he had created a version of theatre or television for himself and he moved the pieces around to tell stories. He was putting on a show. So what did this mean?