Tunnel Walls

Chapter Two

“So this where you’ll be sleeping, Luca.” Artemis gestures to the rickety bed which stands against one of the walls. “Puck and I are just down the corridor, third door on the left. The others are always around somewhere.”

“Thanks,” I softy say, “Artie.” That name seemed appropriate for her and as she hears it she smiles at me approvingly. Artie. I like that. 

This room is in some ways like the one I had at home: small but not too small, quiet, modest, melancholic but not necessarily in a bad way. There is a boarded-up window at the top of the far wall, the glass replaced with sheets of cardboard that stop any natural light coming in. The box is instead lit by a number of bulbs hanging from the ceiling at various and seemingly random points. I lay my bag down on the floor which I notice has a thin covering of dust; I don’t think anyone’s been in here in a while. The bed is cold to the touch, particularly the shiny orange-brown frame which would, if it wasn’t covered in dust and dirt, reflect the yellowy light from the ceiling. There’s a quiet whirring sound which is probably coming from the lab which Artie had told me was next door. It’s comforting to not be in complete silence. 

The bed itself has a dark blue blanket draped over the kind of lumpy mattress, still, it looks comfortable enough. The threads of the blanket weave into each other and wrap themselves up, each tiny part woven together to form something bigger. It’s kind of like how people come together. 

The room Artie next shows me, the one she shares with Puck, is much like mine except the one bed is replaced by two and there is no window at the top. The floor in this room is also much cleaner and the stone feels cold even through my shoes. Is this really what home is now? On the left wall is a series of crevices, marks, cracks, whatever you want to call them. These indents seem to go a few inches into the plasterboard – the rest of the walls seem to be stone or tiled – and they are splattered in no particular pattern.

“Puck practices in here sometimes.” Her soft voice explains the marks although I’m not exactly sure what it is that Puck’s been practising to carve those lines into the walls. “Usually she uses one of the store rooms, I’ll show you that later.” This is a whole new world I am entering, it has different rules to those I’m used to. I notice that Artie’s staring at me again, she keeps doing that. I can’t decide whether it’s comforting or just totally unnerving. “You okay, Luca?”

“Y-yeah I’m fine.” The subtle stumble in my voice – always present when my stomach churns with panicked butterflies – alerts Artie to my slight fear.

“I know it’s pretty weird when you first get here, it’s different to what it’s like outside.”
“Have you been here long?” I sit down next to her on the bed as she gestured me to do so.

“Yeah.” And that’s all she says before moving on to a new sentence. “Anyway Luca, you should get some sleep. I’ll come and wake you up tomorrow morning. I promise you you’ll like it here.” She grins at me and she looks so genuinely happy that it shocks me; people at home don’t smile like that. She seems free. “We’ve got some plans to go out early tomorrow and do some graffiti around the city, stir up some more chaos.” She says the last word with the same smile as before, God she looks so intently happy. 

“Do you mainly do graffiti?” At the moment, that’s all I have seen of this group’s work.

“Yeah, so far we’ve mainly been doing the messages like the ones you saw but there have been incidents where force was used by both sides.” 

“Oh, right.” I say. Violence. I don’t know what else I was really expecting but the word hits me hard. Violence. It plays around my thoughts as I traipse back to my room, it feels strange to call it that already.

I’m colder than I thought I would be here and I cannot stop my thoughts from chasing each other around the inside of my skull. None of this seems real. For years I have been dreaming of getting out of my home and doing something, doing anything, more interesting and more meaningful. Here I am; I have left and now I am, admittedly, scared. I am scared. I mean, I am happy that I am here, with people that seem to accept me and that are fun and different but, I miss home and I’ve barely left. Maybe I’ve made a mistake but maybe not, it's too soon to tell. I think a part of me will always miss home because it’s where I grew up, in my room with the illegal books hidden around, the constant chatter of my sister. All of these things that seemed meaningless or unimportant at the time but now I wish that I had savoured all the moments before I realised what was really happening and that I can maybe help stop it. It was much easier before I knew all this. I haven’t always been this strongly against violence but the scarred skin which is stretched taut across my chest changed me in more ways than just my physical appearance. I can hardly bear to look it. 

I thought that maybe it could give me a reason to want to fight against something but really it has just made me hate the notion of fighting, of hurting. I want to be here. I really do want to be here but I don’t know whether, when or if it comes to it and I am standing in front of a man who is prepared to kill me and I am holding a weapon, I could do it. Whether I could hurt him. The conflict in my mind starts to unravel the few things I viewed to be stable and consistent in my opinions. I don’t know what I want except I want to be here. I know that I want to be here. But if violence is wrong, and it is wrong, I know that, then isn’t what these people are doing wrong? Does it make them bad people? Does it make me a bad person from leaving my family, abandoning my sister, to join their ranks as some sort of child solider? Right and wrong have always been clear in my mind, the line between the two defined and bold and consistent and clear. I wonder if I am going to have to watch the line blur; I wonder if I will end up hurting people. I don’t want to hurt people. I have been hurt enough times myself to know that hurting people is pointless. 

In all the times I have dreamt of the moment I could ‘escape’ from my home I never thought my mind would be carving trenches into my morality as it is now. I never thought that I would actually do it, never thought that I would be brave enough. What I’ve done is either incredibly brave – leaving everything and everyone I know in hope of, well, I guess it’s in hope of making a difference – or incredibly stupid. Either way, I made a choice and this is pretty much the first time I have been able to express any sort of ‘free-will’ and this was my decision, I chose this.