John Lanchester - The Wall

There were lots of good things about Breeding, or trying to. Some of them I won’t spell out here. I’ll just say Hifa and I turned out to be a good fit. Being wanted by someone who wants you, and then getting what you want … nothing in the world is quite like that. There was only one downside to the new turn in our relationship, which was that the other members of our squad thought it was hilarious, and wouldn’t stop teasing us about it. People were in a bad place, after the attack and the deaths, and me and Hifa hooking up was the only other thing to talk and think about apart from how distraught everyone was, so that’s all that they did: tease us and make jokes at us and ask us if the baby was on the way yet and if we were having fun trying and if we had tried doing it this way, that way, would we like someone else to try in my place, would we like the whole squad to watch to make helpful comments on technique and form, had we given any thought to what we would do if the baby was Chinese, etc., etc., et bloody cetera.

During the next few weeks, it was as if I had two lives. One of them, the best and realest, was with Hifa. The two of us were excused training – my injury, plus our new aspiring-Breeder privileges – and we spent a whole week entirely together. We knew each other very well, had spent more time in each other’s company than a lot of couples who are just starting out; we had shared the most intense experience of our lives together. But from another perspective, we hardly knew each other at all. We had never had an argument. We had never seen each other naked. I didn’t know anything about her family other than that she was no keener on seeing them than I was on seeing mine. So we started to find out those things, to do those things, to get to know each other differently/deeper/better. I liked that, in fact I loved it.

In parallel: the Wall. That life which had felt like the realest thing I would ever do now seemed like a backdrop for my other, realer, private life. Many things changed. For a start, we were moved off it for a four-week section of training and reserve duty. With four dead and three injured from one squad of fifteen, we needed to be restaffed and retrained: to settle in the new people and wait for me and Hifa to be ready for active duty. In the middle of that period I was, of all things, given a medal. It turned out that the certificate from the baby politician was a promissory note telling me that there was more to come.

The whole company went in a lorry to a town about half an hour’s drive away from our temporary barracks. We stopped around the back of the town hall and were met by some Help who led us through a winding series of corridors to suddenly come out on stage in front of a few hundred seated civilians. There was bunting above the podium; there was a television camera pointed at us. The loudspeaker system played pop music from the recent past while we waited. Then there was a bustle, a movement among the functionaries running the event, and a person who was obviously important came through the door we had come through and went up to the podium. People cheered and clapped. I had no idea who he was, but the civilians obviously did. He must have been a member of the elite who was clever at being popular with ordinary people. He held up his hands and people went quiet and then he made a mesmerising speech about the Wall (he called it the National Coastal Defence Structure) and the Defenders and how important we are and what heroes we are and how Britain is a nation of heroes and how our heroism is in the finest tradition of British heroism and how heroic that is. I may be misremembering some of this: we all agreed it was a great speech though afterwards we found it hard to repeat anything he’d said. Basically, there was lots in it about heroism and how we were heroes. Our names were read out, and we went up in order and were given the medals. The politician pinned them onto our uniforms. I was third out of five up to the podium. The Captain got a more important medal, and Hifa and one other squad member who had killed Others got smaller medals. I’d never stood in front of a roomful of people applauding me before, and don’t ever expect to do it again. It’s embarrassing to admit (though why is it embarrassing?) but I really liked it.

Then the ceremony was over and we were invited to a reception room upstairs and a selection of the audience came up too and there was Help serving everyone with drinks and small snacks, and being Defenders, we tried to get as many of the drinks down us as we could. There was one glass of wine each, only the second time I’ve ever had wine because it became rare and expensive after the Change, but there was plenty of beer and gin and whisky and most of us managed to get properly hammered in the thirty minutes we were there, the kind of abrupt, vertical-take-off drunkenness where you get so much alcohol on board so quickly you grow steadily drunker for the next couple of hours. A great night out. Hifa started feeling ill on the lorry home and when we got to barracks she went into our loo and I held her hair back while she was sick and I realised that I loved her and that I’d never felt so happy. I think that was the best day of my life.

‘We’re going to Scotland,’ said the Captain. There was a rumbling and shifting in the briefing room. The entire company was there, in its new form, a mix of old Defenders and replacements. He let the news marinate for a few moments.

‘You may be wondering why,’ he went on. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t, not particularly; if you look for logic on the Wall you’re not far away from expecting the process to be fair, and if you expect it to be fair, you start to go mad. That’s my take on it anyway. So, no wondering why for me. ‘The reason is, this squad is considered to have done its fair share of the hard work of defending our frontiers. Here in the south is the first line of attack and the first line of defence.’ He meant, the first line of defence from the Others, but didn’t say so. I had noticed before that he used the word ‘Others’ as little as possible. It was the only sign he gave of sensitivity about his former life, his former self. ‘In the north, it is different. The reasons for this are simple. The people attempting to cross the Wall are coming from a southerly direction. The journey to the north is therefore longer and more dangerous. The north is also colder. That means that there are fewer attempts to penetrate our defences from that direction. That means that defending the Wall is, in practice, less difficult in the far north. Sergeant, what maxim am I about to quote?’

Sarge had been cut on his face on the night of the attack, and the wound had not fully healed. It was spectacular, a double line of stitches down his right cheekbone, on either side of a livid scar. Half a centimetre higher and he would have lost his eye. As it was the scar made his expression look permanently contorted with disbelief: he looked like a stocky, angry, sceptical pirate.

‘Less risky is more risky,’ he said.

‘Yes. So bear that in mind. The idea that the north is harder to attack, easier to defend, may in itself be a factor which draws attacks. Still,’ he said, easing off the intensity a little, ‘we are being sent there for some respite, and it’s to be hoped that we’ll find it. As summer arrives the days are very long and the nights very short. We have a chance to get to know each other as a new company. We may well, after a period in the far north and further training, be transferred back to the south. My advice would be to make the most of it. We train, then we go north at the next deployment.’

‘He seemed almost cheerful,’ Hifa said later. We were putting away our kit to go on a week’s leave. The company had been on standby duty near our barracks. I wasn’t fit enough to fight but I was on administrative duties while I recovered: which meant, doing chores for the Captain, Sergeant and Corporal. It was uninteresting but not difficult. ‘I wonder what the secret bad news is.’