John Lanchester - The Wall

I felt Hifa shake her head in the dark.

‘He never talks about the past, or the Wall, or anything. Just nets and rope and fish.’

We lay there listening to the creaking and slapping of the rafts and the water, the faint high note of the wind which, in the lee of the island, we could hear but not feel. You had to take the good moments where you found them, and since memories were painful, and hopes were elusive and tormenting – what if we could sail to here, what if there were no Wall there, what if what if what if – you tried to make the most of the good moments you could find in the present tense. We had some, there in the back of the lifeboat, floating, amniotic, in the fuggy air under the awning. When I fell asleep, I always had the same dream, of fire: of looking at a fire in a grate, or a cooking fire, or a bonfire; watching the flames flicker and change shape and feeling their warmth and their glow and thinking, that was funny, it was such a long time since I saw fire that I’d forgotten what it was like, I really missed fire, I’m so glad it’s back in my life, I must never take it for granted again, there’s really nothing in the world as lovely as a fire, as giving and generous, as sure to make you feel safe, I’m so glad about the fire. When I woke from that dream there were always a few moments when I felt as if the fire were still real, as if I could still feel its glow, still see the flicker, still feel warm and secure, and those moments were the best times I had on the sea.

The prevailing wind towards and around the island was very consistent, and came from the south-west with variations in intensity but not much change in terms of direction. It was this which gave us safety in the lee shore and made it possible for the floating community to exist. That’s not to say the wind was always completely identical. From the south-west, broadly speaking, yes, but there were many small shifts of a few degrees here, a few degrees there, like someone changing position in their sleep, and they all had a different effect on the rafts, changing the sway and shift of the planking. Some of the rhythms were gentle and regular and easy to get used to, but some of them were jarring and dissonant, making the rafts buck and move out of sync with each other. The members of the community all seemed to have got used to this a long time ago, but I found there were times when I could hardly stand, let alone move, let alone do anything difficult or fiddlesome. I hadn’t ever felt sick on the boat, but there were moments on the rafts when I was queasy; it was the chaotic nature of the motion that did it. Hifa noticed but she could tell that I was trying to keep it to myself and she was sympathetic. She had been seasick on the lifeboat but was fine on the rafts.

I stopped counting the days but I think it was a few weeks after we joined the community that the weather took its first proper turn for the worse. There had been bursts of rain, just enough to give a feel for what the winter might be like, but nothing really bad. The night before the storm was completely still and clear. According to Kellan that was a warning sign of bad weather ahead. In the morning we saw thick banked black clouds at the horizon, moving not in the usual direction, straight towards us from the south-west, where we would be protected by the island, but at an angle, directly from the south. That was bad news, because it meant the weather would be coming at us more laterally than it ever had before. We started to prepare by pulling in lines and ropes and nets, fastening down the tops of the water containers so they wouldn’t spill or be contaminated by salt spray. People worked quickly and knew what they were doing; this wasn’t their first time. The girls went round the rafts picking up any loose objects and putting them away. I went to the far end of the rafts where Kellan was looking at the sky. Above us the clouds were slate grey, then a little further they were dark grey, then black. He saw my expression and put his hand on my arm.

‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. I wanted to believe him but the fact that he’d felt the need to say it meant that I didn’t. My worry, the obvious worry, was that the weather’s change in direction, combined with the strength of the winds and waves, would be so strong that the rafts were torn from their anchorage and broken apart. Realistically, that was likely to happen one day, so why not today? I stood and watched for a while. The storm came closer and the swell began to move differently. The rafts started to float and dance. The teenagers looked like I felt, apprehensive, but the younger children thought it was fun and funny; they giggled and ran about and flicked bits of water at each other, and ignored the adults who tried to grab them and get them to calm down. They only stopped messing around when the bad weather hit, which it did suddenly and frighteningly. The storm began with a sheet of wind and rain racing sideways at us, visible from at least a kilometre away. The slanted stinging rain drenched us at a forty-five-degree angle, and the ocean hit the rafts with a giant rolling punch from below. The rafts soared and buckled and were pulled apart from each other, but held. I was still standing next to Kellan. He was calm but intent, looking in the direction from where the weather was coming, squinting a little against the rain and wind.

That first impact made me think we could not survive the storm – that the community would be ripped apart. I walked as fast as I could over the kicking, plunging rafts back to our lifeboat. I climbed aboard and got in under the awning in the back of the boat, where Hifa and Hughes were already sitting. I wondered for a moment where James and the Captain were riding out the storm. I did not think it would sink us, sink the lifeboat, but I did think it would mean we couldn’t stay together as a collective; the rafts and boats would be scattered over the seas and we would have to look for each other or for a different place of temporary safety. The sensation of despair, which I had been holding at bay ever since we had been put to sea – I suppose because we had been so busy with the work of survival – came back in full force. I was sure the rafts would be forced apart.

I was wrong. The storm never built from that first great thrash. The wind and rain came again and again, but did not grow in intensity and was never more than a series of frightening but brief squalls. We braced ourselves for the weather to build to a crisis, but it didn’t happen. The squalls came at irregular intervals, sometimes no more than two minutes apart, sometimes with lulls of fifteen or twenty minutes, followed by a longer and more violent but still manageable gust. I think the island deflected just enough of the storm’s force, changed its nature just enough, to save us. I felt sick but didn’t actually throw up and was helped (I’m not proud of this) by the fact that Hifa began to look a little green too.

Three small squalls came together, each a little longer than the last, the waves rocking us so little now that no new water was being splashed in. There was a pause of more than twenty minutes and then the shortest, smallest burst of wind and rain so far. The storm was passing. We had survived. The rafts would not be torn apart. The community would keep going. I could have cried with relief. Hifa was still looking green but I reached out and squeezed her arm and got up and left the awning and then left the lifeboat to go and look around.

Kellan was still standing on the side of the rafts closest to the island, closest to the storm. He couldn’t have been there the whole time, I thought, that would be superhuman; he must have kept coming in and out as the squalls moved on. Elsewhere on the rafts people were coming out of shelters, stretching, beginning to tidy up and straighten up. In the distance the skies moved from a much lighter grey than before to, at the horizon, a paint-roller swipe of bright blue. He turned to me and smiled.