John Lanchester - The Wall

‘Told you,’ he said.

‘I was worried,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But look.’ He held out his hand and pointed at the horizon as if he owned it, still smiling, then slowly swung his extended arm from one side of the horizon to the other, and then kept turning and pointing, a single broad swipe, doing a full 360-degree tour of the sea and sky, as if he were revealing his handiwork, the world he had made. When he got to the seaward side of the boat, in the direction where the storm had gone, his face changed, and because I was looking at him and laughing, it was as if what happened began there, with his expression changing, looking, for the first time since I had known him, not just frightened but more than frightened, aghast, blanching, horrified. I turned to look too and I saw, coming in our direction into the weather and the wind, battering against the waves, a big ship, heading straight at us. A gust of wind and rain, the final one of that storm, came and went, and I stood there and got soaked while it passed, wishing that when the sky cleared, the impossible boat would have gone and we would laugh about the shared hallucination. My heart was beating so fast that my chest hurt. It was a ghost boat, something from a dream or nightmare, a phantasm of the rain and mist. We were seeing things. But the squall moved past us and when it did the ship was still there, still coming, still pointed towards us like a knife. It had lights on the mast and rigging; the same five lights in a triangular pattern that I had seen weeks before, at night on the open sea. This was the same ship.

My first thought was: maybe it’ll be OK. Maybe they’ll just want to join us … but that didn’t make sense. There could be any number of people on a ship that size, and at the fewest there wouldn’t be fewer than say fifteen or twenty, and fifteen adults was too many. Maybe they were coming in peace? But there was, even at first sight, a feeling that they weren’t coming in peace. If that ship had been a person they would have been staring at us as they approached, bristling with aggression, looking for any excuse to start a fight.

Kellan did not move and did not speak. He just kept looking at the ship. The rest of the community was now seeing what we were seeing. Everybody stopped what they were doing to stare. Even the children stopped what they were doing. There wasn’t a face that didn’t seem racked with apprehension. I had sometimes imagined that other arrivals might come to the rafts, but had pictured them arriving the same way we came in the lifeboat, desperate and barely surviving and grateful for any respite from the sea. We had been even more grateful when we found we could be useful and had skills and manpower to contribute. I could imagine a repeat of that. I hadn’t imagined this, though. What this ship looked like, more than anything else, was a warship.

The Captain came out from one of the shacks in the middle of the raft and took in what was happening. He went to the end of the community closest to the approaching ship. It was now about two kilometres away. Visibility had been poor during the storm. This ship could only have come across us by chance, just as it had only been by chance that our lifeboat had come to that place. Unless they had naval charts and were looking for the island; in which case they might be professionals, might even be Guards. Perhaps they were looking for us? Our case had been debated, somebody in authority had decided we had been treated unfairly, and the Guards had been sent to look for us and bring us home? This wild thought came to me from nowhere and I suddenly felt sick with hope. Guards sent to save us, Guards sent to save us, I told myself, my mouth dry with fear and longing. I wanted to tell Hifa but knew that I couldn’t because I was probably wrong and if I was I would have done a bad thing, given her the hope and then given her the despair. So I stood and stared, speechless, with the rest of them, my feelings strobing between fear and hope. We had no way of defending ourselves, there was nothing we could do.

The Captain was the only one of us who seemed to have a plan or any sense of what to do. He moved down the rafts. He was even more heavy-footed and off-balance than I was on the moving surface. He got to the very far end and stood with his hands on his hips. Hifa had come over to me and Kellan and she asked a question with her expression. I had no answer. We waited. The ship came closer, plunging up and down, the spray over its bows grey-green-white as it smacked into the waves. James and Hughes came over to us too and we all stood together. The squall which had hit us a minute or so before now hit the boat and again I had that childish wish that when it cleared, the ship would have vanished. A magic trick, here one second and gone the next. But when the rain and wind passed, there it still was.

‘Let’s go over to that end,’ said Hifa. So that’s what we did, picking our way over the rocking rafts, in between members of the community, towards the Captain. I can’t explain the instinct to go and stand with him, other than that it had been ingrained on the Wall, the idea that we were Defenders and that’s what Defenders do, you stand there and wait to see what comes. The community looked at us as we walked past. They were standing still and staring; nobody else had moved since they saw the ship. We got to the Captain when it was only a couple of hundred metres away. At closer range, it looked smaller: not a huge ocean-going ship but a practical working boat about the size of a fishing trawler. There were men on deck; fifteen or so. There was no flag or insignia or writing or identification of any kind. I felt something inside me curdle. My heart, already racing, sped up and was now beating as fast as I had ever known it. These were not Guards. These were not our people.

The ship slowed as it got closer to us and came to a halt, with engines running to hold it in place, no more than fifty metres away. At that range the deck loomed far above us and I could only see four men standing at the bow. Three of them had rifles slung over their shoulders. Even with the noise of the wind and waves and the engines, they were well within calling distance, but they didn’t say anything. The Captain, at the very end of the rafts, spread his arms to their full width. You could see that the gesture meant: we have no weapons. We are at your bidding. He held the pose for all of ten seconds.

One thing you learn in combat is that when people are shot in the head, they are there one moment, and then they cease to exist. They drop in a way that no living thing drops; they fall to earth like inanimate objects, because that is what they now are. The transition from life to death is instantaneous. That is what happened to the Captain. He seemed to fall before the noise of the shot. He had hit the deck of the raft before I understood what had happened. They had killed him just to make a point. Just like that – gone. I heard Hifa make a noise between a gasp and a cry and heard someone else swearing and realised that it was me.

The ship, what we now understood was a pirate ship, manoeuvred until it was sideways on to the rafts. There were the four men at the bow of the ship and about ten or a dozen armed men standing at the side, pointing weapons at us. They lowered their anchor and a ladder and an inflatable boat and eight of them got in it and crossed over to us. Hifa and I bent down to the Captain’s body, lying on the floor of the raft in one of the positions that only the dead adopt, his arms bent under him, his legs folded backwards under his hips, his head, what was left of it, bent down over his chest.

I say ‘his’ – was he a he any more? Probably not. But it is difficult to think of a dead body, a body so recently dead, as an ‘it’. For a few seconds I thought of all the things the Captain had been to me, the different selves he had incarnated, from my first minutes on the Wall through the weeks of duty to fighting together to his betrayal to the time at sea; and through all of that the side of his life I had never seen and did not know, the place he had come from, his family, his people, his overt treachery and secret loyalty and the terrible consistency of his courage and his betrayal. The bravest man I would ever know, and the most loyal, and the biggest traitor. He had at one point been the person I admired most; he had saved my life; he had done me more harm than anyone else; if he hadn’t directly murdered me, he had come very close. For a moment I felt the force of all those things he had been, ebbing out on the floor of a raft on the open sea. And then the pirates arrived. We were still crouched over him when the first of them got onto the raft and came over to us. He pointed his gun, a semi-automatic rifle, at us and wiggled it from side to side. The gesture clearly meant: step away. Hifa and I got up and moved back a couple of paces. The pirate raised his head and two of the other pirates came over. All three of them slung their guns over their shoulders and they stooped and picked up the Captain’s body and pushed it over the side of the raft. It floated for five seconds and then slowly sank.