John Lanchester - The Wall

‘It’s hard to tell, sir. I’m sorry. Not close but closer than the horizon. Maybe a kilometre or more.’

‘How many?’

‘Two or three. Winking on and off.’

‘OK. Good spot. Keep watching. Don’t worry, it happens sometimes.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Sir. What’s happening?’

‘We don’t know,’ said the Captain, not in his usual tone of command or rebuke, but as if he was asking the same question. ‘It’s just something they sometimes do.’

I didn’t need to ask who he meant by ‘they’. The lights were Others. That was my first encounter with them. Not a face-toface encounter, because that would involve either them or me dying. But an encounter nonetheless. The first time I saw them. I think that was also the first time I could imagine what it would be like to be an Other, floating in the dark, on some makeshift boat or raft or inflatable, staring at the shoreline, looking at the Wall, at the sprinkling of lights above and the steep black dark below. You would be bobbing up and down with the sea swell. You would hardly be able to remember the last time you were warm or dry or safe. We were cold but the Others were colder. We were bored and tired and uncomfortable and anxious, they were angry and frightened and exhausted and desperate. God, the Wall must look like a terrible thing from the sea, a flat malevolent line like a scar. So blank, so remorseless, so implacable. We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here, we would kill them. It was that simple. But – how we must seem to them! We must seem more like devils than human beings. Spirits, embodied essences, of pure malignity. If we would kill them on sight, what would they do to us, if they could?

I remember thinking: we don’t owe them anything. I’m glad I’m one of us and not one of them. Twenty-six hours later, my second shift ended.

It was late afternoon and we were standing near the top of a valley in the Lake District. Our rucksacks sat on the ground next to us. The early part of the day had been cloudy, but the sky cleared and the day was now close to perfect: not too warm when we were walking, not too cold when we were still. The light was almost yellow, not fading yet but beginning to think about it, in that ideal moment when it’s like an invisible coating of butter, making everything richer, deeper, more intimate. The hills seemed friendly. I took a drink of water and looked around the mountains and felt glad to be there.

Our next few turns on the Wall had been uneventful. We guarded the Wall, the Captain prowled and scowled, Sarge and Yos kept us in order. The days were longer, the nights shorter. The weather warmed up a little. The type 2 cold had largely passed – though when it did come, it was more dangerous than ever, because you could be taken by surprise. One member of our squad, a quiet tall woman who had done a year at college and was about to go back, came to the end of her tour and we gave a party for her. Because we were still on the Wall, it was a sober party, but it was a happy occasion for all that, and it did make me think that time was going past. I was getting through my shifts. Every day that went past, every hour, was bringing me closer to getting away, getting off the Wall, starting the rest of my life. Between those two-week cycles we went ‘home’ to our families and then did a week on standby duty, which was physically much easier than either Wall shifts or training, but was so uneventful it brought other challenges. The next holiday, a group of us decided, we would spend together. So that is what this was: a holiday week with my new friends. I wouldn’t have done it if Hifa hadn’t been going, but once she had mentioned it, I latched on to the idea.

None of us had any money, so we thought we’d go camping. We wanted to go somewhere with no view of the sea; with attractive landscape; with nice pubs; with good walking but not too strenuous, or only strenuous for those of us who felt like it. Three men and three women: me and Cooper and Hughes, Hifa and Shoona and Mary. Two tents borrowed from the quartermaster. We agreed to leave our communicators behind – a radical move, actually, the first time we’d tried anything of the kind. I hadn’t spent a week away from my phone since I first got one at the age of ten. Nature! That was the idea. I’m not saying it was a good idea, just that it was the idea.

Cooper researched the ideal camping spot, just along the hillside from a locally famous pub, but this was our first day, and it wasn’t where he had thought it would be. The result was that we were standing here as the day gave signs of ending, no tents pitched. This was a beautiful spot but not necessarily a great campsite.

‘Let’s go over the hill and see if there’s somewhere better,’ said Cooper.

‘Oh come on,’ said Mary. ‘I’m knackered. I want my dinner.’

‘That pub is out there somewhere,’ Cooper said. ‘If we had our communicators …’

‘We all agreed,’ said Hifa and I together.

‘OK, fine, we agreed. And now we’re lost.’

‘We aren’t lost, we just aren’t sure where we are. There’s a difference,’ said Cooper.

‘I think I remember this place from when we were talking about it. I think it’s just up and over. It could be a kilometre, not much more,’ said Shoona. In that mysterious way of group dynamics, her opinion decided the matter. Maybe her words carried extra weight because she was more likely to argue with Cooper than to go along with him, so there was no sense of a couple ganging up or siding together. We finished our water, picked up our packs. The Help, who had been standing silently a few metres away, did the same thing.

That was the other big, daring, innovative thing we had done for this trip: we had decided to bring Help. We had borrowed them from the ancillary services support section of the Defenders. Help is unaffordable for most ordinary people, but if you’re camping, there’s no extra food or shelter that the Help isn’t carrying for itself, so you basically get the Help for free. It was me who worked this out and me who suggested it and I won’t pretend not to be impressed by myself. This meant that instead of carrying exceptionally heavy, unwieldy rucksacks with all our food and gear in them, we were carrying much smaller, lighter, fun-sized holiday packs. We could do whatever we wanted in the day and our campsite would be shipshape when we got back, fire lit, dinner cooking, clothes washed. It would be a taste of what it’s like to be rich. I had thought it might be awkward for us, from the human point of view, getting used to Help when we weren’t the kind of people who had it in our private lives. But it was interesting how little adjustment it took. The Help were a man and a woman, a couple I think, from their familiarity with each other and the way they hardly spoke. I didn’t ask them their story and they didn’t offer to tell it, which was perfect too. He did the cooking and she did everything else.

On the first day, Cooper’s navigation turned out to be correct. We carried on the track we’d been taking up the hill, the sunlight at our back so the whole landscape looked blessed, flooded with gold. When we got to the top, the view opened out again: a lake stretched out in front of us, with mountains surrounding it on all sides: right in the middle of the lake a paddle boat was puffing out steam. There was a moment like one of those nineteenth-century paintings of a Romantic dude having conquered a peak and surveying the world laid out beneath him, except the painting would have some additional details: six scruffy Defenders, two Help, and also the Defenders were all doing a little celebratory dance because they’d found the pub they were looking for. It was about half a kilometre down the other side of the hill, with a small, perfectly sited campground sharing the same view we’d had from the top.