The top of the wall was just about thick enough to walk along. There were cigarette packets and food packets strewn along it, so heavily rained-on that the cardboard had unfolded into its blue print, melted into the grain of the concrete. A little drone of some sort, broken, like a toy without batteries. A helmet too, left out like a bowl. It seemed like no one had been there for a while.

The watchtowers were every hundred metres or so. Like the rest of the wall, they looked like they’d been made somewhere else. Thrown up quickly here. The screws that had held the sheets of metal together had come loose. Further on, a couple of the towers were tipping off. We walked along to the next one. The remnants of a fire on the floor. Wet ash and chewed meat bones.

‘Who do you think they were, the people here?’ I said.

‘Here up here, or here down there?’

‘Both.’

‘Just normal people,’ he said.

Swifty wouldn’t stop following us. She was walking alongside the wall at the same pace, but the water was getting higher now. High over her belly, her tail in it. She was starting to get unsettled.

‘Go!’ Davey said. He even made the sound of a whip, tongue against teeth. ‘Please.’ But still she stood there, like she wouldn’t leave without him. I could see him sucking his top lip into his mouth. He had tears in his eyes again.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘You wanna take that?’ I pointed down to the crowbar and the rope.

‘No. Fuck this wall. Fuck all these shitty made-up things.’ He said he wanted to leave it for someone else to find it. Someone who needed it. Someone like us.

‘What if there are more of them?’

‘Walls? We’ll find a way. Don’t you think? Spidergirl. Didn’t we always say that?’

He reached out and offered his hand to me, and in his hand I saw the whole story. Our tiny-boned bodies when we met at the Pearl, our naked chests as we ran through the darkness. All the other hands we had reached for, all the other hands that had reached for us.

‘We’re gonna mash our ankles doing this,’ he said. He looked down at the ground. His eyebrows moved in that way they did when we were kids. His pupils in the sunlight looked almost purple.

Strange creatures. Davey in his welding suit, me in a stolen red coat. I looked out for the first time at the way ahead. Open, broken fields. You, Blue.

‘Davey?’ Fear came back. Fear like a flash of black. ‘What if there’s nothing? What if it’s worse than that?’

But he didn’t say a word. The tattoos on our hands, the nearly-nothing that was left of them, were touching. We stood tall on the breaking point between two worlds.

And then we jumped.