John Lanchester - The Wall

At the end of the week, Hifa’s mother walked us to the train station. By now we were on nodding terms with the neighbours, who waved or nodded back as we walked past. She stood on the single platform and waited until the two-carriage train came in. She held our hands together and looked at us for a long time.

‘Courage,’ she said, tears in her eyes. ‘Courage, my brave, brave darlings. I feel for you. Courage!’

She squeezed hard and then let go.

‘I cannot watch you go away. I will leave you now,’ she said. And she marched out of the station with her cane, a handkerchief in her right hand, dabbing it to her face as she disappeared back into the town. Hifa and I got into the train.

‘Well, she found a way of making it about her,’ I said, and then saw that Hifa was affected too, looking sad; I’d misread the moment. We found seats, sat heavily down, and off we were yet again on that train-train-lorry journey. We pulled away from the sea and set off towards the other sea, where we’d be standing watch.

She didn’t get around to painting me, but she did manage to work out my spirit animal. Apparently I’m a goat. ‘A very resourceful animal – they can live on scraps.’ She said she’d paint it next time. There never was a next time, but of course I didn’t know that then.

Defenders have a saying, ‘The Wall has no accent.’ It means when you’re standing looking at the water, standing watching for Others, it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s all concretewaterwindsky:

concrete

water

wind

sky:

it’s basically always the same.

Like most sayings about most things, this is partly true, partly not. Yes, the Wall is the Wall and the Others are the Others and a twelve-hour shift is a twelve-hour shift. You don’t have any interaction with the locals, wherever you are. The days tick down at the same rate. But the light and wind and water are subtly different, and you get to know them so well that while you could say that the Wall has no accent you could equally say the opposite: along the ten thousand kilometres of Wall, no two posts are identical.

That was especially true in the far north. It just felt different. Longer days, slanting light, different scents on the wind. It was the best time of the year to be up north, no question, and I didn’t love the thought of what it would be like in winter, but then if we’d been briefed correctly, we might not be there in winter, we’d be posted back down to the busy areas, once we were fully trained and ready. My view was: whatever. Hifa would be pregnant soon, and we’d be out of there. We’d be living the Breeder life in our special state-donated Breeder accommodation.

I was glad of the change for all sorts of reasons. Hughes had been switched to our shift, to give us another experienced Defender in place of the people we’d lost; that was good. He was the person I liked talking to best, after Hifa, and the quality of chat on the communicator increased exponentially. But I missed Shoona. I missed Cooper, who was still very sick and might recover, might not. I especially missed Mary. The new cook, Alan, was good at his job, in the sense that his food tasted good and there was plenty of it, but he was taciturn and made no secret of the fact that he liked cycling along the ramparts in the middle of the night to bring us hot drinks no more than we liked standing on the Wall. Our squad had several new members, so the group dynamics were very different and I was, I found, now one of the elders, wounded and decorated, a veteran of action, a potential Breeder, a senior figure. That was weird. I was the one dispensing advice to the new arrivals about how to get through a shift, I was the one giving warnings about type 2 cold, I was the one telling people to watch out for the Captain’s small-hours inspections, and take special care how you tape your ammo cartridges together. One morning I caught Hifa in the mirror smiling at me as I was brushing my teeth before shift.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You’re taller,’ she said.

‘Piss off,’ I said, but what she said was true: I felt taller. I could tell that I held myself differently. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when I arrived at the Wall.

A few days into that first tour up north, who should come for a visit but our old friend the blond baby politician, dispenser of intelligence briefings, platitudes and medals. He arrived on an afternoon of clammy, close-clinging mist, a very unpleasant day to be on the Wall. It was lucky that the north was quieter, because this was good weather for Others. Our shift gathered in the briefing room, which was the same as every other briefing room, except the maps were different. I found, sitting in front of him as he stood at the podium, that my instinctive dislike had subsided a little. That might be because he had been involved in giving me a medal, which was pretty pathetic, really; but there we were. Also, maybe, I was getting a glimpse of how a person made it into the elite, and starting to see that it was possible – not easy, but possible. A very good record on the Wall, followed by a record of proven success at college, a Breeder, a young person on an upward trajectory; that was the kind of man for whom elites would budge up and make room. The kind of outsider/insider they needed. I was taking more of an interest in him and seeing him more as an object of study than of simple loathing.

‘Hello and welcome,’ he started, as if he were our gracious host, the man in charge of the far north. ‘We know each other of old, some of us, and some of us are new colleagues. Welcome. Well done! You are all members of the best defence force in the world, the best trained and the best staffed and the best prepared!’

I realised it was his standard speech and tuned out. He would have to give it twice, since this was a normal tour on the Wall, not a training camp; once for us, once for the other shift. What must it be like, to go around the country talking to Defenders and the public, to not be part of their lives but talking to them about their lives, to be up there in the plane? A metaphorical plane in the case of this man, but still. To give orders while you were pretending just to be chatting, to boss people about by asking them if they would kindly do something for you … Help, of course, there would be lots and lots of Help, cooking Help and cleaning Help and Help to look after the children if you had them, and driving Help and gardening Help for your big house with its self-sufficient food supply (just in case), repair and maintenance Help and odd-job Help, electrical Help and painting and decorating Help …

Now the speech had turned and he was repeating the warnings he had given at training – which, to be fair, had turned out to be true – about how there were more Others coming and they were more desperate. He also repeated the warnings about how the Others were suspected to have secret networks of support, secret sympathisers, hidden in the general population. They were thought to have new ways of getting away from the coast, maybe even new ways of getting chipped. He went on for a bit more and then stopped his general briefing and invited me and the Captain and Hifa up on stage and talked for a bit about how we had been decorated in action and how lucky this squad was to have three such resolute, able Defenders, and how we were the best defence force in the world, the best trained and the best staffed and the best prepared.

We got down off the stage, and the baby politician stopped me for a word.

‘Joseph,’ he said to me in greeting – which was odd in itself, since nobody on the Wall called me by my given name, it was either Kavanagh or Chewy. Even Hifa called me Chewy (as well as some other things). ‘Please – call me James.’