John Lanchester - The Wall

We went to the safe deposit office and picked up the precious cargo we’d left there before heading north: our communicators. Hifa kissed hers before turning it on and said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

I wanted to look at my communicator in private. I put it in my pocket and waited until the others had started off for our train back to the Wall. The station was still frantic, mainly with commuters rushing home: it was one of those moments when you remember just how much life there is away from yours, away from being a Defender. All these people had homes, pay packets, families, hobbies, taxes to pay, things on their mind, TV series to catch up with, heating bills, gardens to plant. I had none of those things; maybe one day I would. At the moment I didn’t particularly want them. It was odd: I wanted to get off the Wall, I wanted this time to be over, yet when I tried to think hard about what would be next, there was a blank.

I switched on my communicator. There were lots of messages but before I looked at them I went onto the net to look something up: coo-ee-shee-a. I didn’t get it right first time because I spelt it wrong, but on the third attempt I found what I was looking for. Kuishia is a Swahili word. It means ‘the ending’.

When we went back to the Wall it wasn’t strictly ‘back’ but to a new location on the east coast. Remember, two weeks on the Wall, two weeks off, of which the first week is holiday and the second week is (usually) training. This was a training section. Defenders looked forward to these. Basic training was generally felt to be hell – that was the whole point of it, to toughen you up, get you used to all the new norms of the Wall, break you down and build you up again as a Defender. Once you were on the Wall, though, training weeks were, relatively speaking, fun. For a start, every week you spent training was one less week on the Wall. You were in a new place, not your usual watchtower. Also, training meant you were doing new things – no point training at the stuff you can already do.

We were sent to an early section of the Wall on a river estuary. Most of the old riverscapes have gone since the Change – it’s another thing we see only in pictures. Here, though, accidents of topography mean it still looks more or less the same as it does in old photos. There are sloping riverbanks, trees overhanging the water, a gentle curve of slow-moving water and greenery. This was one of the very first bits of the Wall to be built, and it was never used. The reason: as the Change progressed, engineers realised that the Wall needed to start further out, so the river mouth was concreted over and the direction of the Wall had been reshaped. The result was a section of the Wall built to the usual specs, but not in active use. A perfect spot for training. Also, because this wasn’t the Wall proper, there was Help. Kit-cleaning and barracks maintenance was done by them. Chores and shitwork? Not on this watch! Now that right there was a little holiday in itself. Mary and the rest of her crew were especially jolly, because they had nothing to do: the Help did most of the cooking. They just sat around all day watching TV and playing games on their communicators. It would have been more annoying if they hadn’t been so openly gleeful about it that they were hard to resent.

‘This is a defend–attack exercise,’ said the Captain, the morning after we got to the watchtower. We were sitting in the barracks main room, which was the same as our own main room, except here you could see trees through the window – which made it feel very different. ‘We have a five-kilometre section of Wall to defend for three days and three nights. Note that that’s two K more than our usual distance. We’ll be stretched. Each Defender will be guarding three hundred and thirty metres of Wall, not two hundred. Trust me: it’s harder. Much harder. The other squad will be attacking at some point over the next three days. Maybe more than once. I don’t know anything about them, who they are or where they’re from or what their numbers are. I’m guessing they’re the same size unit as us, but I don’t know that and we can’t act on that assumption. We have to treat them exactly the same way we would treat Others. Except,’ he gave one of his rare, startling smiles, ‘with blanks instead of live ammo. You have a detector on your jacket. If it flashes, you’re wounded but can keep fighting, if the light turns solid, you’re dead. There are assessors to watch the fight. White armbands. If they tell you you’re dead, you’re dead. Don’t mess with them, they have the power to give you extra time on the Wall. They film the fight with static and head cams too, and the ruling about who’s dead and who’s got through is made by combining what the assessors say with what they see on the footage. Any questions?’

We shuffled about a bit. Sarge eventually said, ‘Tell them about the fun part, sir.’

The Captain actually laughed. It was clear he loved this kind of training – loved being active and doing things, as opposed to waiting for something to happen and being permanently on guard. He was still smiling.

‘Yes – the fun part. After our three days we have a day to swap locations with the other squad, and then to make our own plans. Then, we’re the attackers.’ I noticed he didn’t say, we’re the Others. I was glad of it. The words would have seemed wrong; would have triggered a superstitious twinge. Nonetheless, it’s what he meant, and was obviously what he was most looking forward to. The Captain, who had been an Other, loved the idea of playing at being an Other again, and play-acting at doing the thing he had once done for real.

‘We’re going to make their lives hell, for three days, and some of us are going to get over the Wall. I’ve done this exercise a number of times and I’ve never failed to get some of my squad over, and this time will be no exception. Think about it when you’re on duty and we’ll discuss and make plans on the turnover day. We’re going to get over the Wall. You can all contribute ideas about how to do that. And I,’ he smiled again, ‘I’ve got some ideas too.’

The session then became a general briefing about our section of the Wall, the peculiarities of its geography and topography. The headline news was that the riverbanks around here had been high and had descended to the river almost like cliffs, but cliffs which went up in stages, say five metres straight, then a small flat section, then another five metres. The steep banks were why the engineers had at one point thought the Wall could run here without much difficulty. They had turned out to be wrong, but only after they built the Wall. The result was that there was a ledge of riverbank left at the bottom of the Wall, not exactly like one of the old world’s beaches, but wide enough to stand and walk on. This made the old cut-off section of the Wall a very useful place for attackers, since there was somewhere they could perch. It was going to be an interesting week.

I don’t think I ever saw our company in a better mood than during those seven days training. It really was like a holiday, or a holiday camp, because there was a structure, the unforgiving structure of shifts, but also the change of location, the extra freedom of having Help, and, crucially, new faces. The Defenders who’d been there longer than I had knew their opposite numbers, their shift twins, but I only really knew Hughes. The rest of the other shift I’d met solely on those drunk, civilian-frightening train journeys at the end of our deployments. It was entertaining to see how closely they paralleled us, with a new one (like me), a funny one, a grumpy one, one who needed to be told everything three times. They even had one whose hobby was whittling, just like Yos.