John Lanchester - The Wall

He showed me around the mess hall, which was a bare concrete box with tables and chairs, the rec room, which was a bare concrete box with a huge television and badly battered sofas, the armoury, which was locked, and the infirmary, which was a bare concrete box with four steel-framed beds and no medical staff. Then he led me down two flights of stairs to the barracks, which is what Defenders called the room where everyone slept. It too was a bare concrete box. After standing in the entrance for about a minute, my eyes adapted enough to be able to make out the main details. There were thirty beds in the room, fifteen on each side, with plywood partitions separating them into cubicles. At the far end was the washroom. I was already familiar with the layout, because it was the same as in the barracks where I had done my training. One side had no external light source, the other had small square windows above head height. The beds along the right-hand wall were all empty, because that half of the company was on night duty. The beds along the left-hand wall were all occupied by sleeping bodies, except the ninth bed along, which had been empty and was now mine.

I put my bag down in the back of the cubicle. I took off my shoes and my outer layers of clothing and got into the bed. The sheets were rough but the two blankets were thick and I quickly warmed up. I could hear snores and muttering from my new squad companions. Being hungry makes me speedy; I realised I hadn’t eaten since setting out, and that my mind was whirring too fast to sleep. Tired, wakeful, apprehensive, I lay there and looked at the ceiling, and thought, I only have two years of this, 729 more nights, after I get through this one. That’s if I’m lucky and nothing goes wrong.

I must have slept, because I was woken up. Or maybe it was a new kind of sleep where you have none of the good part of being asleep but all of the bad part of being jolted awake. I heard an alarm and a few moments later felt the bed shake and opened my eyes to see a man’s face leaning down over me, close enough to smell his hot, faintly rank breath. The face was all beard, eyes and wool cap. On the upside, he was smiling.

‘New meat,’ he said. ‘I’m the Corporal. Also known as Yos. Five minutes to wash, fifteen to breakfast, then we assemble.’ He shook the bed one more time, as if for luck, then stood up and headed towards the washroom. He was another tall man, well over six feet. Around him other squad members were getting up, grumbling and scratching. I saw that most of them slept more or less fully clothed. The Corporal stopped a few metres away and turned to me.

‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said. ‘You know that thing they say, don’t worry, it might never happen? This is different. You’re on the Wall. It already has.’ He laughed and left me.

Thirty in a company, divided into two squads or shifts of fifteen. In addition, five-odd permanent staff at each guard station, cooks and cleaners. Companies rotate, two weeks on the Wall, two weeks off. One of those weeks is training and general maintenance and whatever, the other is leave. Squads only change members when people have finished their time on the Wall. That’s a rolling process, so there are always Defenders who are coming up to the end of their time, mixed in with others who’ve just started. Those are the two twitchiest groups, the ones who’ve only just begun and haven’t got a clue what they’re doing, and the ones at the end who feel they can reach out with their tongues and taste the freedom of life after the Wall, and who can think of only two subjects, how great it will be to get away and what a disaster it would be if anything went wrong in the last few days. The Defenders in the middle, some distance from both the beginning and the end, are more stoic.

In my squad I’d already met the Sergeant and the Corporal: they were always easy to tell apart, at whatever distance and however thickly swaddled in cold-weather clothing, because the Sergeant was heavy and the Corporal was tall. We called the Sergeant Sarge and we called the Corporal Yos. His hobby was whittling, and when we weren’t on the Wall he was usually working on a piece of wood with a wicked-looking curved knife. As for the other members of the squad, that first morning and for several days to come, telling people apart was an issue. It was the layers. So many layers! At breakfast, their heads down over porridge, silent, my new companions were difficult to distinguish even by gender. Everybody goes to the Wall and the balance overall is fifty–fifty, so by probability half of my squad should be women, but there was basically no way of knowing who was who except by asking, and it didn’t seem an ideal icebreaker.

After breakfast we went to the wardroom for a briefing from the Captain. The battered, unloved desks and chairs made it look like a school. There were two maps behind him, one a detailed 3D projection of our section of Wall and the other at a smaller scale showing the nearest fifty kilometres of coast. I was to learn that the briefing almost always had no relevant news, other than the temperature and the weather forecast – though that was very important information. Sometimes we would be told about a flotilla of Others who had been spotted and attacked from the air, just in case some of them had survived and might still be coming in our direction. Occasionally there would be some big-picture news about crops failing or countries breaking down or coordination between rich countries, or some other emerging detail of the new world we were occupying since the Change. Sometimes there would be news of an attack in which Others had used new or unexpected tactics, or attacked in surprising strength. If Others ever got through, we were told about it. The room would go very quiet. We’d hear when, where, how many.

There was no news like that on my first day. We sat shuffling and fidgeting and then the Captain came in. We stood up: not to attention, but we stood up. The Captain ran a tight company; there were lots of posts where nobody bothered to do that. He nodded and we sat down again and the room became still.

‘Nothing special today,’ he said. ‘No sightings of Others reported from the air or sea. No news of any relevance from the wider world. It’s two degrees now, high of five later, which will feel like about zero with the wind chill. Good news: we have a new Defender with us so we’re back up to strength. Kavanagh, stand up.’

I did. I looked around the room and all fourteen members of my squad looked back at me.

‘He’s starting his two years with us. Two years if he and you are lucky and we all do our jobs. Remember, the first few weeks, he’s still training. Also remember, this isn’t a drill. We could be attacked today and he and you need to be ready. OK, that’s it. I’ll see you during my rounds.’

We stood up again and started to make for the door. The Sergeant came over to me and pointed in turn at a grumpy-looking red-headed woman chewing gum sitting in the front row who’d been cleaning her fingers with a penknife during the briefing, the heavily bearded man who’d been sitting beside her, and a gender-indeterminate blob in a balaclava who’d been sitting behind me.

‘Put him in the middle of you lot,’ he said. ‘Posts eight to fourteen. Hifa on the big gun. I’ll come and see you there in thirty minutes.’

We went out onto the rampart that led to the Wall. The Sergeant looked around at us and then he gave the order, the one which was once famous as the most frightening command in the army, the scariest sentence you would ever hear, because it was the immediate precursor of close combat; words which meant, there is a good chance that you will kill or die today. In the new world, it was a sentence Defenders heard at the start of every single shift. He said: