John Lanchester - The Wall

‘It’s some sort of installation, there must be ways on and off it,’ I said, sounding, to my own ears anyway, a lot more confident than I felt. The platform was close now, so I rowed and kept rowing, but the currents here were adverse, and it was harder work than I had thought possible to close the last few hundred metres. At this range you couldn’t see how it worked. It was an oil or gas rig; I couldn’t tell, and wouldn’t have known how to tell, the difference. The main deck was high, seventy metres or so above the water. There was a tower on the main deck. The whole structure was supported on four legs, which as we got closer could be seen to each have one thick main pillar and another smaller one attached to it.

Since the attack on the Wall, I had learnt to expect the worst. That was proving to be a useful habit. We came to the structure and manoeuvred alongside the nearest leg so that the currents would press us against it and it would take less work at the oars to hold us in place. There was no ladder there, but I didn’t panic. There were four main legs, each with an inner leg, so there were eight places where we might find a ladder. Eight chances. One down, seven to go. Hifa held the lifeboat in place with small movements of the oars, while I took a break to recover some strength. My arms were shaking and weak from the rowing. Once we moved from that spot, we would need enough muscular strength to row back to the structure against the currents. I took fifteen minutes to rest, then braced myself for the next thing. I guessed that we had half an hour of light left at the most and I had by now convinced myself that this was our last chance; if we didn’t find a ladder now it would be too dark and we would be too weak, and we wouldn’t be able to hold ourselves in place all night. We pushed off and I rowed while Hifa looked. It didn’t take long to check the inside legs. Then we took a turn around the outside, fighting hard not to drift too far from the platform and then fighting harder to row back to it.

No luck. There was no ladder, no handhold, no dangling ropes, nothing. No hope. Hifa didn’t say anything and nor did I. I rowed back to our starting position, panting, my arms burning, the taste of blood in the back of my throat. At that point, it might have made as much sense to let the current pull us away from the platform, to give up on the hope of it and let it go, but the sea was so big and we were so alone that it was impossible to leave a site where people had been, where human activity had made its mark, even if it offered nothing for us. The light was starting to fade now. I thought we might have enough rope to loop around one of the inner legs of the platform and tie us in place until the morning. Then we could decide what to do next.

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Hifa. She pointed across the platform to one of the inner legs on the far side. ‘I don’t remember that being there ten minutes ago.’

I looked. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. A ladder was clearly visible. For a moment I doubted what I was seeing, then realised that it must be a retractable ladder and that somebody had extended it for us. That meant two things, two very important things, two things so important and so wonderful that I could hardly believe them: that we were not alone, and that somebody was making us welcome.

I was suddenly feeling a lot less tired. I pushed off and rowed across underneath the platform and we tied ourselves up to the ladder and then looked at each other to see who should go up first. Hifa nodded and took off her cap and shook out her hair, and set off. There was a small stage halfway up and I let her get to it before following her. I’m not great with heights and that thirty-five metres of ladder felt like a hell of a lot of ladder. My arms were jelly when I got to her.

‘I don’t know what to wish for,’ she said.

‘I know. Best just to wait and see.’

Hifa set off up the next stretch of ladder. This went all the way to the main deck. She passed through a circular hole at the top and I started up after her. I should have been boiling with thoughts about what was up there and what would happen next, but all I could think about was how I hated being so high up with nothing but a ladder to cling to. I told myself not to look down, but told myself so insistently that it turned into a mantra, (don’t) look down look down look down. I got to the top and pulled myself through and lay on the metal main deck, trembling all over and gasping for breath. I don’t think I could have pulled myself up a single further rung of the ladder. But I didn’t have to. We had made it.

We were in a small alcove or entrance hallway at the top of the ladder. Hifa was sitting ten feet away, cross-legged, waiting for me. One third of the platform was open to the elements. At the edge, you could look down and see the sea. From where I collapsed on the floor, all I could see was cloud and the gathering dark. The other two thirds of the platform were taken up by the tower, with this alcove as the only entrance. The sides of the walls facing us were lined with sheet metal. The only way through the alcove into the tower was via a metal door.

When I got my breath back, I said, ‘No reception committee?’

She shook her head. ‘Just me. But we can’t go further. We’re locked out.’ I walked over to the door and tried the handle. It didn’t move. I tried to rattle the frame, but it stayed as still as concrete. The door wasn’t just locked but bolted. It had the solidity of an industrial piece of architecture; not the kind of door you can kick in, and from the outside, there was no lock to pick. There was no way through unless someone allowed us through. But it wasn’t all bad news. On the floor of the platform, next to the immovable door, were a plastic jug of water and a small paper bag. I opened the bag and did a double take at the contents: six power bars of the kind we had been given when we were on the Wall. I looked at Hifa, and she shrugged back at me.

‘Somebody making us welcome,’ she said. ‘Or sort-of-welcome. We’re being watched.’

‘You’d have thought so. Not sure who by, though.’

‘So now what?’

‘Let’s just sit here for a bit.’

So we did. It wasn’t as if we had much choice, that evening, after the day we had had. We sat on the platform and waited to get our strength back. The sun was right on the horizon now and the sky had cleared for dusk. The grey metal platform was flooded by incongruously beautiful evening light. It was good to feel that this night at least we would be dry and safe. When I stopped shaking, Hifa and I ate the power bars, slowly and deliberately. The very first bite was of dried red fruits, the same as the first one I had had on my first morning on the Wall. It gave me an overwhelming flashback: I was suddenly back there between Hifa and Shoona, aching with longing for the twelve hours to go past. It felt as if that was ten minutes ago; it felt as if that was two lifetimes ago.

When we had finished the power bars, it was dark. In the alcove next to the locked door, we were sheltered from the wind, and it wasn’t cold. We lay back against the corner of the metal walls. Hifa snuggled against me and we settled down for the night.

‘This is weird,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, and I was so tired I could hear myself slurring. ‘But good weird. Tomorrow we’ll find out.’ I didn’t say what we’d find out, because I didn’t know. But I felt sure we’d find something out. I fell asleep with Hifa’s head on my shoulder.

The next time I opened my eyes, we were lying the other way around, with my head on her shoulder, and it was bright day. The night had passed in a state more like unconsciousness than sleep. We must have been out cold for at least eight hours. Hifa was still out; I was so stiff I felt as if my bones would crack before my muscles would bend. My neck was cricked, my arms were both heavy and stinging, my right leg was cramping and my left leg had gone dead. Despite all that, I felt good. We were up here rather than out there. My intuition told me that we were safe; at a minimum, safer than we had been, and maybe much better than that. As slowly as I could, trying not to wake Hifa, I leant over and started to stretch and as I did so, turning my head, I saw something which made me feel even better: a fresh jug of water had been left out and, better still, in fact the best news ever, the door that had been bolted shut the night before was now ajar.