John Lanchester - The Wall

‘We don’t want to be on the ladder in the dark,’ she said. ‘We don’t want the hermit to forget that we’re here.’

I was a little groggy and stiff and still felt weak from the earlier exertions. That’s why I made my mistake. I said, ‘Fine. You go first.’ She nodded, stretched, bent to give me a kiss on the cheek, and started up the ladder. I gradually stood, rolled my neck, looked around the empty horizon, yawned and looked up. Hifa had gone; she had climbed the ladder in record time and was nowhere to be seen.

‘Hello?’ I yelled up. She either was in the alcove at the top of the ladder and couldn’t hear me, or had gone inside.

I put my hands on the ladder and started up. At first I felt all right but quickly, within a few sets of ten rungs, realised I was in trouble. It didn’t feel like fear, not at first, just that my body would not do what my mind told it to. I was too weak. I could plant my feet on the rungs well enough, but the strength in my hands and arms simply wasn’t there. It was a little like the old days on the Wall, of type 1 and type 2 cold. This was type 2 fatigue. It wasn’t going to get better after a few minutes’ rest. It was getting worse, and I was getting weaker, and the ladder was seeming longer and steeper with every second I spent on it. I looked up and the platform was as distant as the sky. Hifa wasn’t there. I took the risk of looking down. That too was far, much too far to drop. If I tried to slip down the ladder and recover on the platform I would certainly fall. I was trapped.

On the Wall, the closest thing you ever got to loneliness was when you were standing at your post for a twelve-hour shift; but even then you could see the other Defenders, you could hear chatter on your communicator. On the sea I had never been on my own. I hadn’t spent a second entirely on my own for months. Now I felt completely alone and abandoned as I never had before. It was me and this ladder, alone in the universe. I was hyperventilating and failing fast. I realised, after everything I had gone through, that I could die here. I could slip and fall and be gone.

I pulled myself up one rung. It was the thought of dying which made me do it – my revulsion at the idea of dying here and now, after everything. Then one more rung. Then another. Not here, not now, I thought. I stopped counting in tens. I just allowed the sense of wrongness and injustice to drive me. Wrong, no, can’t die here, one rung. Unfair, unlucky, unjust, wrong, another step. No hope, no future, no chance, no luck, wrong, unfair. That’s how I drove myself upwards, after I had nothing else left.

I was at the platform. I pushed through the hole at the top of the ladder and lay on the metal floor. I was so weak and gasping so hard I didn’t even feel relief. I had never been so spent. I felt sick, then knew I was going to be sick, then was. I don’t know how long I lay there, half conscious. I felt movement and Hifa was standing there beside the doorway.

‘I don’t know how I made it,’ she said. ‘I threw up.’

I nodded. I couldn’t speak yet. She handed me a water bottle and sat down next to me. I swallowed a few mouthfuls, and immediately felt sweat blossom on my forehead. I was so exhausted that even drinking water made me feel a little out of breath. We sat there for a while longer. The sun was going down and the light was beginning to fade; it was around the same time of day we had arrived at the platform twenty-four hours ago.

‘We’re going to sleep on a mattress tonight,’ I said. Hifa’s face lit up.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in. If you’re ready.’

I made a gesture which meant, I’m ready to try. She unfolded herself to her feet and held out a hand. I waved it away and tried to get directly up but wasn’t strong enough. I reached for her hand again and with Hifa’s help was able to get to my feet. My legs were sore but functioning. It was the upper half of my body which felt useless.

‘I thought I wasn’t going to make it,’ I said. I’m not sure if it was clear whether I meant up the ladder or up onto my feet, but Hifa nodded as if she understood. She held the door open for me and we went through into the chaotic lower level of the tower. We picked our way through the debris. I shook my head at the wall of blank monitors, the control centre for activities which would never happen here again.

Another ladder, up to the hermit’s level. This one felt very different from the long ladder down to the sea. Hifa went up first and I followed. This room too was the same as it had been in the morning, the hermit in the same place, on the far side of the room, with his pieces of paper and his cardboard box. It seemed perfectly possible that he hadn’t moved all day. One difference was that this time he looked up as we came in, not a flinching or covert glance but a definite sustained look, then went back to his compulsive game. I walked across the room and stood over him for a moment. He didn’t look up and he kept shuffling his bits of paper around.

‘Thank you again,’ said Hifa. ‘We would have been lost without you.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you let us on?’ He looked up at me. I felt he was really seeing me, connecting with the reality of my presence in front of him, for the first time. Maybe he saw my exhaustion, and maybe also he saw in my face the trace of what I had been through that day, how close I had come to being defeated by the climb up the ladder. He very deliberately reached out and picked up all the pieces of paper on the floor of the cardboard box. He put them down next to him. Then he picked one of them back up, looked at it, looked at me and Hifa, and replaced the folded piece of paper in the middle of the box. He looked at us again. Then he put all the other pieces of paper back in the box, left them there for a moment, and removed them all so that the same piece, the first one, was the only one left. I suddenly saw what this was, what the box meant: he had created a version of theatre or television for himself and he moved the pieces around to tell stories. He was putting on a show. So what did this mean?

He went through the same sequence again: leaving the central piece in place, he filled the floor of the box, then emptied it. He looked through the cardboard box at the central piece in the middle of the table – in the centre of the stage, occupying the whole of the screen, in his mind. Then, slowly and deliberately, he looked up at me and Hifa.

‘He’s lonely,’ I said. And then to the man: ‘There used to be people here, but they all went away, and now you’re on your own, and you got tired of it.’

I saw something flare in his eyes: the first moment I’d really felt contact with what was in the mind of our hermit.

‘That must have been hard,’ said Hifa. He looked at her: yes. His expression did not change. He brought some more pieces of paper to the box and moved them around and watched them. Now that I knew he was trying to tell a story his actions made much more sense. I felt as if I understood: the pieces of paper were other people, other sea-going vessels, coming to the platform. He moved them in circles around the central piece, one by one, and then put them to one side. The central piece, the one representing our hermit himself, stayed where it was. Other boats had come to the platform but he had not lowered the ladder. He repeated this sequence six or seven times. I could tell they were separate actions because he didn’t reuse the pieces but put them to one side once he had finished with them. At one stage three different pieces of paper were brought to the platform and he moved them round it in circles, then put them down, then moved them around again.

Three ships had come to the platform and had stayed there for several days, looking for a way onto it. That must have been terrifying. If they had got onto the installation and found him and realised that he had been refusing to let them on, they would have killed him. I wondered if they had guessed that he was there, observing them? Like when you hide from a knock on the door, hoping that the person outside will go away, but then they ring the bell, and knock louder and louder, again and again, knocking and ringing together, and you know that they know that you’re there hiding, and they’re getting angrier and angrier, but you’re committed to hiding now so there’s nothing you can do except duck down, low and quiet, and wait and flinch and hide and long for them to stop and go away, except a secret part of you fears that they never ever will, that they can wait longer than you, outlast you, that it’s a contest to the death … and then they go away and you find you’ve been holding your breath and it’s all fine and you’re safe. For now.