John Lanchester - The Wall

‘They put something in the tea to stop you thinking about sex,’ somebody said on the communicator.

‘Yeah,’ said somebody else. ‘They put tea.’

The next ninety minutes went past slowly, but not as slowly as the first two hours had done. I said to myself: maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this Wall. Mistake. Having done some maths to make myself feel depressed the night before – two years on the Wall if I’m lucky – I now did some maths to cheer myself up. Two years = 730 days but it’s two weeks on, two weeks off, so that’s really only 365, and a day is really only a shift, since if the Others attack during somebody else’s shift it’s not your problem, so that’s 365 shifts of twelve hours each, which by another way of looking at it is 187.5 full days, which is only six months, so my two years on the Wall is really only six months on the Wall, which isn’t so bad.

After eighty-four minutes, I started counting down towards my power bar. 360 seconds, 359, 358 … all the way down to 1. I took the waxed paper oblong out of my upper left pocket and unwrapped it slowly, trying to take my time. The bars they give you on the Wall aren’t labelled so you don’t know what’s inside them. Lucky dip. This one was nutty and dense, with what seemed to be particles of red fruits, chewy and sweet and acidic, dotted through it. I don’t normally pay much attention to what I eat, but on the Wall, where for a lot of the time there isn’t much to think about, I became obsessed with food. This power bar, for instance, was unlike anything else I had ever eaten – more intense, more important. The nuts had a different texture from the fruit. The bar was chewy and dry but also soft. Objectively and soberly, you would have to say that it was fairly nasty. Maybe you could go so far as to say it was horrible. At the same time it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. I tried to eat slowly, chewing each bite for as long as I could, thirty chews, forty, fifty, the flavours changing as I chewed, the fruits taking over from the nuts. I was glad when there was still three quarters of the bar left, calm when there was only half left, starting to feel regretful when I’d got down to the last quarter, then the last eighth, then the last mouthful, no crumbs left in the wrapper because the bar was too densely constructed for that, even when I tipped it up into my mouth, chewing fifty times, fifty-one, fifty-two, see if I can get to sixty, nope, there’s nothing left, nothing in my mouth except saliva and a faint tang of dried raspberries.

When I looked up from the bar, the Captain was about a hundred metres away, walking towards me. I say ‘walking’: that was significant. Most of us trudged or shuffled along the Wall, and almost everyone, almost all the time, moved with their heads down. We all of us spent enough time looking out at the sea. You put off as long as you could the moment when you had to turn your attention outwards. Head down, eyes down. Nothing good to see if you look up.

The Captain wasn’t like that. He stood straight and looked around him when he walked – or at least most of the time he did. On this occasion he was looking directly at me. He was wearing his uniform outers, which were bright green, because the Defenders’ uniform is the opposite of camouflage: instead of trying to hide from an enemy, we’re trying to be as visible as possible, to the Others and to ourselves. The idea is that it will scare them and reassure us. The Captain for his part certainly did look scary enough, or reassuring enough, depending on your point of view.

I took my eyes off him and pretended to scan the horizon. Nothing to see. I wouldn’t have minded a boatload of Others, just to break the suspense.

‘Kavanagh,’ he said when he arrived. His voice was deep and naturally severe – he was one of those men whose default mode sounds like an order or a rebuke.

‘Sir.’

‘We’re here to look out at the sea,’ he said. I took that to mean he had seen my long absorption in my midmorning snack. The Wall is not a place where people blush, but I felt myself flush red.

‘Sorry sir.’

He stopped staring at me and turned to look at the water. Concrete sky wind water. A few moments passed. Directly above us I could see the contrails of a plane. Energy is plentiful, thanks to nuclear power, but fuel isn’t, especially not aviation fuel, so now only very few people get to go on planes. That would be members of the elite, flying off to talk to other members of the elite about the Change and the Others and what to do about them. At least that’s what they say they do. I felt the familiar longing to be up there, one of them, instead of down here, one of us. The Captain and I both watched the plane move into the distance. If he had been a different kind of person, he would have spat.

‘Everyone finds the first day hard. The second is easier. The third easier still. Eventually you get the measure of it.’

He turned to me again.

‘This is my fourth tour on the Wall. No Other has ever got over the Wall on my duty. I’ve never lost a company member. I don’t intend those things to change.’ He looked at me again to make sure I got the point, then nodded and marched off towards Hifa at the end of our section of Wall.

I thought: he’s an impressive man, our Captain. He’s a leader. Four turns on the Wall: that meant he had done three supplementary tours of duty, each one of which earned perks and privileges for himself and his family. Better house, better food, better schools for his children. They say this is one of the ways people rise up and become members of the elite. So, a family man. A brave man, a family man, a leader, an athlete. A person with a sense of duty and responsibility. A good man to follow into battle. If you had asked me right then and there what was the least likely thing I could think of about the Captain, it would be that he was also, above and beyond any other thing, the biggest fucking liar I’ve ever met.

I took so long over my power bar and my chat with the Captain that the ninety minutes until lunch was actually only eighty minutes. I started to get the hang of the fact that looking at the time made it pass by more slowly. Another plane went past, heading in the other direction this time – more members of the elite, coming and going, talking their talk. Oh how wonderful it would be to be up in the air … The wind rose, not to gale force but to something a little stronger than a breeze, and the sea swell was both rolling and choppy. The sky cleared and I could now see four watchtowers: visibility twelve kilometres. I began to understand just how hard it could be to see what was in the water, even on a clear day, when the wind and waves and sun did not cooperate.

The drill at lunch varies from watchtower to watchtower. At Ilfracombe 4 the routine is that people are allowed to gather together for ten minutes with the two defenders in the nearest posts. The furthest anyone is from their post is two hundred metres; the biggest gap between a group having lunch is six hundred metres. Safe enough to have a gap of that size for ten minutes twice a day. You’d have thought. At three minutes to twelve, I saw Hifa at post 14 put down the grenade launcher and take something out of his or her rucksack, then pick up the weapon again and begin walking towards me. I turned and looked the other way and the red-haired woman from post 10 was heading towards me as well.

They arrived at the same time and both of them sat down on the bench without speaking. They put down their weapons and started opening their packed lunches. The woman pulled back the hood of her outer coat, and I could see some strands of red hair escaping from underneath her beanie. She looked less irritable than she had earlier in the day. Not a morning person. Hifa was still entirely wrapped up, and all I could see was the eyes and the tip of the nose. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said it was impossible to eat a meal without taking off your balaclava, but that was clearly what was about to happen.