John Lanchester - The Wall

He stopped. We wanted something more and I could tell that he knew it. The silence went on – the human silence, because the wind and waves and creaking of the boat never stopped. It is never silent in a small boat in northern waters. Eventually it was Hifa who spoke. Her voice was hoarse from her hours of retching.

‘Aren’t you going to say you’re sorry?’

The Captain was stiff and still, leaning back rigidly, and I felt there was a strong reaction he wanted to give but wouldn’t. He thought for a long time.

‘The thing we most despise about you, you people, is your hypocrisy. You push children off a life raft and wish to feel good about yourselves for doing it. OK, fine, if that’s what you want to do, but you can’t expect the people you push off the side of the raft to think the same. To admire your virtue and principle while we drown. So, no, I’m not going to be like you. I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to be a hypocrite, and I’m not going to say I’m sorry.’

‘Not even for Sarge?’ said Hifa.

He blinked but said nothing. In that moment I did want to kill him. I looked over at Hifa, who mainly seemed as if she was going to be sick again, and at James, who was standing with his lips pursed shaking his head, looking like someone on a television debate panel trying to make it clear to the audience that he disagreed with an argument being made by a fellow panellist. Then I looked over at Hughes, and what I saw on his face was the look of a man who was in the middle of suffering a huge, all-encompassing disappointment. My anger subsided and began to turn into a sense of loss. I felt sad. Loss, loss, there was just so much loss, in what had happened to us, in what the Captain had done, in what we had done to the world, in what we had done to each other and in what was happening to us.

‘Let’s kill him,’ said James. If he had said that same thing five minutes before, and if I had had a gun or knife in my hand, I would probably have done it then and there. But a couple of minutes can have a big effect on how you see things, and the moment for revenge had, for me, passed. We were probably all going to die anyway, and in this boat. Sending the Captain on ahead of us didn’t seem like it was worth doing.

‘Yes, you could do that,’ the Captain said. ‘Or you could let me lead you to somewhere safe.’

Safe. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a single word to have such an impact. Safe. To think of being safe meant to have hope, and I knew, had learnt recently, how dangerous hope is. And yet, out here on the sea, we couldn’t live without it. The Captain’s plan was to head south. He said there were islands and stretches of coast where we could find somewhere to stay. He said we would never be able to get back over the Wall but there were other places to live. He said he was the only one among us to have made a long journey in a boat and he knew how to do it and he could do it again. He said because we came from an island we thought the whole world had a wall around it, but that wasn’t true and there were places, not many but some, where we could get to safety. More safety than we would have at sea, anyway. He said again that the important thing was to head south. He said that apart from anything else, the cold here in the north was dangerous and once we got thoroughly wet, as we would when there was bad weather or when the season changed, it would become more dangerous still.

‘If we get drenched, we may never dry out. If the boat floods, we die. If we capsize, we die. This is not the Wall. We can’t go back to barracks to dry out. We have to go south.’

Then he went and sat in the back of the boat while we sat at the front and discussed it. When he moved, especially when he got up or changed position, you could see the effect of his wound was still strongly present. The wind and waves were now getting stronger. Every deeper plunge brought a slap of salt spray into the boat.

‘South,’ said Hughes.

‘We have no reason to trust him,’ said James. ‘We have less reason to trust him than any human being alive.’

‘We have so little reason to trust him that we have no reason not to trust him,’ said Hughes. I thought that I knew what he meant: the Captain would know he had so little credibility with us that there was no incentive to lie. Also, the unspeakable truth was I still felt an instinct to trust him and be led by him. He just so obviously was a leader. At the same time I felt that instinct was craven and doglike. Follow master, follow, off the edge of the cliff, not once but twice.

‘South,’ said Hifa. It sounded like a tentative conclusion, a provisional verdict. What else, after all, was there to do? Rely on Hughes’s experience sailing with his uncle, mainly on a big pond near his house but twice in a river estuary on family holidays?

‘South,’ I said. So we had taken the Captain’s advice. There was a compass among the survival kit that we had been left by the Guards. And now here we were, bobbing up and down on a two-metre swell, hiding from lights in the dark. Hughes and I stood looking at them for a few minutes longer and then he patted me on the arm and went back towards the awning at the back of the boat.

I let Hughes duck under the cover and began pulling at the oars to move us in the opposite direction, away from the ship and its lights. We took rowing easy, because it was hard work, especially for the unfit, and because doing it too energetically made you perilously hungry. It was a trade-off, calories for movement. I was rowing backwards so, when the waves permitted, I could see the lights in the distance. The ship didn’t seem to be growing any further distant; then, slowly, it seemed that it was. I must have rowed for an hour, with frequent breaks at the start, and then with longer periods of rest than bursts of rowing. I was using the same technique we used to employ on the Wall, spacing out glances at my watch to try and make it a pleasant surprise when I gave in and looked at the time. When my four-hour shift was over I went to wake James for his turn. In the back of the boat, Hifa and the Captain and Hughes were all deeply asleep, and so was James until I shook him. I stood back to let him wake in his own time.

He got up slowly, rubbing not just his eyes but his whole face, making chewing movements with his mouth. Then he came out from under the awning.

‘I saw lights,’ I told him. ‘A few kilometres away. A ship. Hughes saw them too. We talked it over and decided to leave it. Too late to do anything about it now. I wanted you to know.’

He nodded, thinking about it. I didn’t trust him but he wasn’t stupid. I could see him running through the same calculations we had made.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’d have done the same.’ He nodded some more. It was beginning to be light, and I could see how tired he was, but how determined too. Fatigue and his blond stubble made him look ten years older than he had before we were banished. I went to climb into the back and take my turn sleeping, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. I looked a question at him and he held up a finger. Then he rummaged under his layers of clothing, the layers he never took off except when he had to lower his trousers to defecate over the side of the boat. He wriggled for a moment and then brought something out, as if it were a birthday present. It was an object about six inches high with a circumference about the same size. It took me a few seconds to believe my own eyes, though I knew very well what it was: a high-explosive grenade.

‘Jesus, James,’ I said. He was smiling.

‘The commander of the Guard ship gave it to me,’ he said. ‘In case we run into trouble or in case we, you know, decide we can’t go on any more. In case we want to choose fire over water.’