John Lanchester - The Wall

‘Yup.’

‘Well, if the assessors let you do it, it’s legit.’

‘Yeah, that’s what our Captain said.’

‘Done this before?’

‘Attack–defend? No. You?’

‘No. More fun than being on the Wall, I reckon.’

‘No shit.’

The two heroes who had shot me in the back had ended their colloquy and decided to go ‘over the Wall’, so the fight was officially over. The assessor told the wounded man he wasn’t fit enough to go with them, so he started jogging down the ramparts towards the fight in the near distance. The assessor went with him. The attackers and I turned and went off in the other direction, back towards the watchtower and the barracks. One of the men stepped forwards to shake my hand. I returned the gesture to the other, who turned out to be a woman. We all seemed somehow to be chums.

‘Where are you lot staying?’ I asked.

‘Two barracks along. Just round the river bend so you lot can’t see us.’

‘How are you getting back?’

‘Lorry. At the end of the exercise. Should be there any minute now.’

They gave me another piece of chocolate. About halfway back to the watchtower, I saw Hughes coming towards me. Of course: the Wall never goes unguarded. This exercise was meant to be realistic, so if the Wall had been breached, the new watch would have to come on. As he came closer it was clear that he was too tired to be angry about being woken in the middle of the night.

‘Sorry mate,’ I said as we passed each other.

‘Got any food? We were sent straight out, no time.’

I emptied my pockets. Hughes took what I had. The assessors would have said this was against the rules, but there were no assessors there, so what the hell.

‘You kill all this lot?’ he asked.

‘Three of them. The other two got me.’

‘No hard feelings,’ said one of the men I’d ‘killed’, smiling, his voice claggy from the chocolate he was eating. We carried on back to the watchtower. Their lorry was waiting, and we all shook hands again. ‘See you later,’ I said, which got a laugh, because if I did, it would likely be with me having swarmed over the Wall, and them lying in wait for me, another fight to the ‘death’. No hard feelings, the living and the dead, more in common than you might think; a tiny bit of luck here and there dividing them; taking turns to live, taking turns to die; all in the same boat. All the same really. Others, Defenders – what’s the difference? I couldn’t decide if this was the opposite of what it would be like to fight to the death, or a good preparation for it.

At the debriefing, I thought the Captain would give us a giant bollocking, but that didn’t happen. It turned out he’d been in on it all along. That explained why he hadn’t been there the night before, which I have to admit I had been wondering about. The two Captains had discussed this sneak attack and ours had agreed to allow the set-up. It was a way of testing our combat skills: not how well we’d catch Others sneaking up on the Wall, but how well we’d do in an all-out fight with a big group who’d got over and ambushed us.

‘Not fair? You’re probably thinking that. No, not fair. That’s the point of the exercise. We train hard to fight easy. This may save your life one day. If you are overrun, you won’t be wondering how or why it happened. You’ll be fighting for your life. Lessons learned today may save you. Any questions?’

Hifa put her hand up. I was surprised: in groups she was usually quiet. ‘Yes. Do we get to do it to them?’

The Captain smiled slowly. ‘Oh yeah.’

‘Good.’

Thirty of them had attacked. The whole squad, as I’d thought. Eighteen of them had been killed, and seven wounded sufficiently seriously that, according to the assessors, they wouldn’t have been able to get away. Five of them had got over the Wall and ‘escaped’. In real life, if they really were Others, they wouldn’t get far, of course: they didn’t have chips. They’d last a few days at best. After being rounded up they’d presumably decide to be Help.

Seven of us had been ‘killed’, all five of the Defenders on the sections which were swarmed, and two others who went to help them. Five wounded. Out of fifteen on our shift, only three of us were ‘unharmed’. In real life, if a breach like that had happened, everyone responsible would be put to sea. A Defenders’ court would determine how many people that was. For a breach of this scale that could be the entire squad. If the other squad, the day shift, were found to have been slow in reacting, and that had contributed to the breach, some of them would be put to sea too. The Captain went into detail about the attack and our response to it, what had gone right, what had gone wrong. The take-away was clear: if Others get onto the Wall in numbers, and you aren’t waiting for them, you’re screwed.

Hifa had been one of those ‘killed’. Her section of the Wall had been swarmed. Whereas I was, I found, pretty chill about being killed – as the Captain said, it was a set-up, the whole point of exercises was that you went through experiences like this – Hifa didn’t feel like that. Being riddled with blank automatic bullets had got to her. She was silent and had gone into herself. After the debrief we went and sat in the mess and Help brought us a cup of tea.

‘It’s fake,’ I said to her afterwards. ‘It’s children playing let’s pretend. Think of it as being like a video game.’

‘I don’t play video games,’ she said, which was true. We sat there for a bit. ‘Let’s pretend …’ she said. ‘I used to like that. Let’s pretend … Grown-ups don’t do enough let’s pretend.’

‘You’re a grown-up?’

She chucked a peppermint at me. That meant she was feeling better.

‘Anyway, this was a nasty version of let’s pretend. We’re never going to get thirty Others hiding at the bottom of the Wall waiting when we come on shift. It’s as much let’s pretend as building a blanket fort and saying it’s a castle.’

‘What kind of castle?’

‘One with pointy turrets.’

‘Who lives in the castle?’

‘A happy ogre.’

‘Oh! On his own?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘A lot of space. Even for an ogre.’

‘He needs space.’

‘He has commitment issues.’

‘And his breath is toxic. Literally – it poisons people. Even other ogres.’

‘Sounds a bit like Yos.’

‘Now that’s harsh,’ I said.

‘I bet the ogre whittles.’

‘He can’t, his hands are too big, he wants to whittle but he just busts things.’

‘Poor ogre.’

‘Then he takes the broken pieces of wood and assembles them into sculptures which he sells for enormous amounts of money to collectors. That’s how he can afford the castle. But he would trade it all for being able to whittle.’

‘I feel sorry for the ogre now.’

‘I think you’re right to.’

‘What does he eat?’

I thought for a moment.

‘Children.’

Hifa had a very appealing laugh, half an octave deeper than her speaking voice.

Sarge appeared at the far end of the barracks. ‘Oi! You’re back on shift in thirty minutes.’ The attack had meant that all the shifts were muddled, and we had swapped with the day watch. I sighed, Hifa sighed, we both began to get up and get ready. Sarge was in a good mood because he was one of the people who’d survived the attack (mainly by accident of place, if you ask me, though I wouldn’t say that to his face).

We got through the rest of our defensive turn on the pretend-Wall, five more days, without being breached again. That’s not the same as saying it was uneventful, because the longest spell between attacks was eighteen hours. Respect to that other company, they really gave it a go. But none of them got over the Wall. To be honest, none of them even got particularly close. A sequence of moonlit nights helped. The estuary landscape meant you didn’t have the distant blurred horizons of sky–sea which at dawn and dusk could make the light so difficult. Also, the waves were small to non-existent, river waves, and there was nothing like the chop and roll which would make it so hard at our usual post. So there were factors which helped. Despite that, it was reassuring, after the trauma of that first night, that well-trained attackers coming at you under normal conditions were relatively easy to track and kill. We would see them a few hundred metres off and light them up. The assessors claimed that a few of us were shot by people sniping from boats, but we all thought that was bullshit. Others with snipers using automatic weapons from boats? Sure, and they also ride in seven abreast on trained narwhals, blaring Wagner over loudspeakers. Their best attack was on the penultimate night. I slept through it. They swam in a kilometre and tried to climb the Wall solo. The crew on duty let them get close, then picked them off one at a time.