John Lanchester - The Wall

I got my food out too and sat down at the end of the bench.

‘So how’s it going, new meat?’ asked the woman.

‘Kavanagh,’ I said, sticking out my hand. Both of us still had gloves on. She gave it a quick firm shake.

‘Simpson,’ she said. ‘Or Shoona.’

‘Shoona. It’s OK. The Captain caught me staring at my power bar.’

‘Yeah, he does that. Catches people. That right, Hif?’

Hifa grunted, mouth full.

‘Wouldn’t you rather have lunch with …?’ I said, and gestured towards the man she’d been sitting next to at breakfast. He was in the next group of three, four hundred metres away. Shoona shrugged.

‘You know what they say. For better, for worse, but never for lunch.’

Hifa snorted a laugh.

‘You’re Breeders?’

This time both of them laughed.

‘No of course we’re not fucking Breeders. Do I look like a Breeder? Don’t answer that. Cooper and I are just having sex.’

‘You like him,’ said Hifa, at some point equidistant between a statement and a question and a tease. I was sorry to hear the question, because what I wanted to ask was something else: where did they have sex? There was no privacy on the Wall. Only Breeders (i.e. people trying to be Breeders) and officers got separate accommodation. The showers?

‘Well enough,’ said Shoona. ‘More than I like this sodding sandwich, anyway.’

It was hard to disagree with that. The sandwich bread was dry and what was supposed to be a layer of cream cheese was thin-to-invisible. The food on the Wall is pretty good, on the whole; they take trouble over it because they know how important it is in a Defender’s twelve-hour shift.

‘Chewy,’ I said. For some reason that was very very funny. Both of them bent over, cackling, thumping themselves first on the legs, then on each other’s backs.

‘True,’ said Shoona, when she got her breath back. She took a long pull from her bottle of water. ‘Well, Chewy, time to get back to it. This Wall’s not gonna guard itself.’

We put our lunch stuff away and picked up our weapons and Shoona and Hifa started trudging back to their posts. Hifa got about five metres away and then turned around and said, ‘See ya, Chewy.’

Once Hifa and Shoona had got back to their posts, I let a few minutes go past before I looked at my watch. I was starting to learn. It was now twelve thirty. The good news was I had got through five and a half hours. The bad news was that I had six and a half more to go. With the sun higher in the sky, it was easier to see now, meaning that this should be a time of less risk. The Others knew that too, which meant that you couldn’t rely on it. If everyone knows it’s a time of low risk, maybe that’s a good moment to try something. So low risk is high risk. But not vice versa.

Mornings on the Wall, dawn and dusk and night, were times for poetry. Skyconcretewaterwind. Afternoons were for prose. Ten thousand kilometres of Wall. A Defender for every two hundred metres: fifty thousand Defenders on duty at any time. Another fifty thousand on the other shift, so a hundred thousand on duty, day in day out. Plus it’s two weeks on, two weeks off. Half of the Defenders aren’t on the Wall, they’re on leave or on training or waiting for their two weeks’ turn of duty. So two hundred thousand active Defenders at any given moment. Add support and ancillary staff, officers and administrators, add the Coast Guard and the air force and the navy, people off sick, whatever, and it’s more than three hundred thousand people involved in defending the Wall. That’s why everybody goes to the Wall, no exceptions. That’s the rule.

Except for Breeders. It’s a paradox. Because the Wall needs so many people, we need people to Breed, so that there are enough people to man the Wall. It’s on a fine edge as things currently stand, and there’s talk of the tours having to be made longer, two and a half or three years, to make up a shortfall. But people don’t want to Breed, because the world is such a horrible place. So as an incentive to get people to leave the Wall, if you reproduce, you can leave. You Breed to leave the Wall. Some people say that this isn’t fair to the children, who are born into a world where they have to do time on the Wall in their turn. Maybe they won’t, though. Maybe all the Others will have died off by then and we won’t need the Wall. Who knows? And besides, the children can always Breed in their turn, and get off the Wall that way. Prolonging the life of our species too, as a side effect. Breed to Leave, that’s the slogan.

I should say that people don’t despise or look down on Breeders. They just think they’re a bit weird. It’s not so much, that’s wrong, it’s more, why would you? Why don’t people want to Breed? It’s an idea that caught on after the Change: that we shouldn’t want to bring children into the world. We broke the world and have no right to keep populating it. We can’t feed and look after all the humans there already are, here and now; the humans who are here and now, most of them, are starving and drowning, dying and desperate; so how dare we make more of them? They aren’t starving and drowning here, in this country, but they are almost everywhere else; so how dare we make more humans to come into this world? There are lots of different answers to that. Nobody can predict the future; that’s one answer. God tells us to; that’s an answer which works for some. Maybe the best answer, though, or maybe I’m just talking about the one that makes the most sense to me, is just, because. Because; the best/worst answer to most human questions. Why are we here? Because.

Back to the prose. Most Defenders stand on the Wall because that’s where the manpower is needed, but the Wall isn’t the only form of border and coastal protection. The Flight scans the seas for Others, locates them, sometimes ‘takes them out’ then and there. It’s funny, only Defenders on the Wall talk about ‘killing’ Others: we’re the ones who do it face to face, and we’re the only ones who don’t use euphemisms for it. The Flight consists of some people in planes and many more people operating drones. Sometimes the Flight marks their location for the Guards, full name Coast Guards but everyone calls them Guards, who use ships of two main kinds, medium-range and short-range. They patrol the coast and the seas and their job is to sink the Others’ boats. The Defenders are there for the rest of the Others: the ones who get through, which is a significant number, because there is a lot of sky and sea to watch, and because ten thousand kilometres of coast is a lot of coast. They come in rowing boats and rubber dinghies, on inflatable tubes, in groups and in swarms and in couples, in threes, in singles; the smaller the number, often, the harder to detect. They are clever, they are desperate, they are ruthless, they are fighting for their lives, so all of those things had to be true for us as well. We had to be clever and desperate and ruthless and fight for our lives, only more so, or we would switch places. I didn’t want to die fighting on the Wall, but if it came to it, I would rather that than be put to sea. One in, one out: for every Other who got over the Wall, one Defender would be put to sea. A tribunal of our fellow Defenders would convene and decide who was most responsible, and those people, in that order of responsibility, would be put in a boat that same day. If five Others got over the Wall, five of us would be put to sea. It was easy to imagine being those people. Your old comrades pointing guns at you while you pushed your boat out into the water, the only feeling colder and lonelier and more final than being on the Wall.

Members of the Flight and the Guard don’t get put to sea, so people would rather do that than be on the Wall. As a result it’s much harder to get in. To get into the Flight you have to pass lots of biomechanical tests. (I wear glasses so I didn’t even bother applying. I learnt afterwards that was a mistake, because the Flight has lots of ground staff and support staff and I could have got a job there.) To get into the Guard it helps to have family connections with boats and the sea. I didn’t bother applying for that either, because I’ve hardly ever been on a boat and I was worried I’d get seasick. No, it was the Wall for me. It was always going to be the Wall.