John Lanchester - The Wall

Home: it didn’t just seem as if home was a long way away, or a long time ago, it actually felt as if the whole concept of home was strange, a thing you used to believe in, an ideology you’d once been passionate about but had now abandoned. Home: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. Somebody had said that. But once you had spent time on the Wall, you stop believing in the idea that anybody, ever, has no choice but to take you in. Nobody has to take you in. They can choose to, or not.

None of us can talk to our parents. By ‘us’ I mean my generation, people born after the Change. You know that thing where you break up with someone and say, It’s not you, it’s me? This is the opposite. It’s not us, it’s them. Everyone knows what the problem is. The diagnosis isn’t hard – the diagnosis isn’t even controversial. It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably fucked up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everybody knows it.

To make things worse, the olds didn’t do time on the Wall, because there was no Wall, because there had been no Change so the Wall wasn’t needed. This means that the single most important and formative experience in the lives of my generation – the big thing we all have in common – is something about which they have exactly no clue. The life advice, the knowing-better, the back-in-our-day wisdom which, according to books and films, was a big part of the whole deal between parents and children, just doesn’t work. Want to put me straight about what I’m doing wrong in my life, Grandad? No thanks. Why don’t you travel back in time and unfuckup the world and then travel back here and maybe then we can talk.

There are admittedly some people my age who are curious about what things were like before, who like to hear about it, who love the stories and the amazing facts. Put it like this: there are some people my age who have a thing about beaches. They watch movies and TV programmes about beaches, they look at pictures of beaches, they ask the olds what it was like to go to a beach, what it felt like to lie on sand all day, and what was it like to build a sandcastle and watch the water come in and see the sandcastle fight off the water and then succumb to it, a castle which once looked so big and invulnerable, just melting away, so that when the tide goes out you can’t see that there was ever anything there, and what was it like to have a picnic on the beach, didn’t sand get in the food, and what was surfing like, what was it like to be carried towards a beach on a wave, with people standing on the beach watching you, and was it really true the water was sometimes warm, even here, even this far north? There are people who love all that shit. Not me. Show me an actual beach, and I’ll express some interest in beaches. But you know what? The level of my interest exactly corresponds to the number of existing beaches. And there isn’t a single beach left, anywhere in the world.

Not everyone agrees with me on this. Maybe most people don’t. Lots of people like to watch old movies where everyone is on the beach all the time. My view? Stupid.

My mother is hard going. She just feels guilty all the time; her expression in repose, whenever I’m in the room, resembles a grieving sheep. Just below the surface she’s furious too, obviously, because feeling guilty all the time makes people angry, but she channels it into martyrdom and being saintlike and doing everything and never saying a harsh word no matter how badly I screw up and never being angry, just sometimes (and never explicitly) the teensiest bit, you know … disappointed. The time I took their car without permission, got drunk, overrode the autopilot, slid off the road and hit a tree and trashed the battery, which wasn’t covered by the insurance because of the whole drunk + underage thing? Not angry, not at all, I’ll just go and clean the kitchen and put out your school uniform for tomorrow, I know you didn’t mean to let us down darling and I’m sorry I can’t help it if I feel a little bit … sad.

My father is worse than my mother. The thing about Dad is he still has the emotional reflexes of a parent. He wants to be in charge, to know better, to put me straight, to tell me about back in the day, to start sentences with the words ‘When I was …’ He used to do this when I was little, at school, helping me with homework or showing me how to do small practical things. Shoelaces at five, wiring plugs at fourteen, that sort of thing. To be fair, he was pretty good at it. In a different world he’d have been a good father. But it stopped working once I became a teenager and it started to sink in that the world hadn’t always been like this and that the people responsible for it ending up like this were our parents – them and their generation. I don’t want to know their advice or to know what they think about anything, ever.

So a week at home is as you’d expect. My mother manages to make the task of running the household and feeding three adults seem like the world’s most demanding job. We aren’t rich enough to have Help – Help is free but you have to feed and clothe and house it so the costs still add up. It’s fair enough that there is a lot of work, though we have a washbot and a cleanbot so it maybe isn’t quite as much work as all that. Maybe not as much as my mother makes it seem, when I’m at home. Basically, she acts like she’s the bravest, keenest, most willing slave in the salt mine. We hardly ever speak, except for her to ask whether I liked it, if there’s anything special I’d like for [next meal], do I want to see any of my friends [to which the answer is, why is that any concern of hers?], can she get me anything? Would I like a cup of tea in the morning? It’s like staying in a well-run but emotionally suffocating B&B.

I’d be lying if I said this brought out the best in me.

As for my father, he’s at work in the day at his office, and then home in the evening to eat whatever my mother has cooked and then watch television/movies/whatever. We don’t talk much and both prefer it that way.

All of this was completely as usual; in the words of the song, same as it ever was. I tend to go out to see old mates. But there are fewer of them around than usual, because people my age are all off on the Wall and some of them are still on shift, or on training, or at home. The main topic of conversation: being on the Wall. People compare complaints. Our company sounds like one of the strictest there is – some of them only have ten people on watch at a time, so you get one day or night in three off! That’s against the rules and if the Others come you’re finished, but the thinking is that if the Others come you’re finished anyway.

Let’s just say, that’s not how the Captain sees it. I bitched about my company for a bit and everyone said I was unlucky to be somewhere so hardcore. I agreed and joined in the moaning, but I was, secretly, proud to be going through such a strict version of Defending. I was a real Defender. If you had one day in three off, that made you less of a Defender. Two thirds of one. Not that other people could see this distinction between real Defenders (i.e. me) and the others – all they could see was a group of Defenders in the pub, getting drunk. They steered well clear. Even the ones, maybe especially the ones, young enough to have done stints as Defenders themselves were careful to keep a distance. They knew that we knew how little we had to lose. What would anybody do – send us to the Wall? Besides, the courts are notoriously lenient on Defenders. We get in fights, we bust places up, and nothing much happens. Quite bloody right.