John Lanchester - The Wall

In memory of Peggie Geraghty

It’s cold on the Wall. That’s the first thing everybody tells you, and the first thing you notice when you’re sent there, and it’s the thing you think about all the time you’re on it, and it’s the thing you remember when you’re not there any more. It’s cold on the Wall.

You look for metaphors. It’s cold as slate, as diamond, as the moon. Cold as charity – that’s a good one. But you soon realise that the thing about the cold is that it isn’t a metaphor. It isn’t like anything else. It’s nothing but a physical fact. This kind of cold, anyway. Cold is cold is cold.

So that’s the first thing that hits you. It isn’t like other cold. This is a cold that is all about the place, like a permanent physical attribute of the location. The cold is one of its fundamental properties; it’s intrinsic. So it hits you as a package, the first time you go to the Wall, on the first day of your tour. You know that you are there for two years. You know that it’s basically the same everywhere, as far as the geography goes, but that everything depends on what the people you will be serving with are like. You know that there’s nothing you can do about that. It is frightening but also in its way a little bit freeing. No choice – everything about the Wall means you have no choice.

You get a little training but not much. Six weeks. Mainly it’s about how to hold, clean, look after and fire your weapon. In that order. Some fitness training, but not much; a lot of training in midnight awakening, sleep disruption, sudden panics, sudden changes of order, small-hours tests of discipline. They drum that into you: discipline trumps courage. In a fight, the people who win are the ones who do what they’re told. It’s not like it is in films. Don’t be brave, just do what you’re told. That’s pretty much it. The rest of the training happens on the Wall. You get it from the Defenders who’ve been there longer than you. Then in your turn you give it to the Defenders who come after. So that’s what you arrive able to do: get up in the middle of the night, and look after your weapon.

You usually arrive after dark. I don’t know why but that’s just how they do it. Already you had a long day to get there: walk, bus, train, second train, lorry. The lorry drops you off. You and your rucksack are left standing there in the cold and the blackness. There is the Wall in front of you, a long low concrete monster. It stretches into the distance. Although the Wall is completely vertical, when you stand underneath it, it feels as if it overhangs. As if it could topple over onto you. You feel leant on.

The air is full of moisture, even when it isn’t actually wet, which it often is, either with rain or with sea-spray splashing over the top. It isn’t usually windy, immediately behind the Wall, but it sometimes is. In the dark and the damp, the Wall looks black. The only path or sign or hint for what you should do or where you should go is a flight of concrete steps – they always drop you near the steps. There’s a small light at the top, in the guard house, but you don’t yet know that’s what you’re looking at. Instead what you mainly think is that the Wall is taller than you expected. Of course you’ve seen it before, in real life, and in pictures, maybe even in your dreams. (That’s one of the things you learn on the Wall: that lots of people dream about it, long before they’re sent there.) But when you’re standing at the bottom looking up, and you know you’re going to be there for two years, and that the best thing that can happen to you in those two years is that you survive and get off the Wall and never have to spend another day of your life anywhere near it – then it looks different. It looks very tall and very straight and very dark. (It is.) The exposed concrete stairs look steep and slippery. (They are.) It looks like a cold, hard, unforgiving, desperate place. (It is.) You feel trapped. (You are.) You are longing for this to be over; longing to be somewhere else; you would give anything not to be here. Maybe, even if you’re not religious, you say a prayer, out loud or under your breath, it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t change anything, because your prayer says, please please please let me get off the Wall, and yet there you are, on the Wall. You start up the steps. You’ve begun your life on the Wall.

I was shaking as I went up the stairs; I’d like to think it was from the cold but it was probably half that and half fear. There was no guard rail and the concrete was more and more damp as I climbed. I’ve never been good with heights, even quite low ones. It crossed my mind that I might slip and fall off and that thought grew as I got higher up. I’m going to fall off and split my head open and die, and my time on the Wall will be over before it’s even begun, I thought. I’ll be a punchline. Remember that idiot who …? But if that happens, at least I’ll be off the Wall.

At the top I got to the guard house. Light was coming through a frosted window. I couldn’t see in. I didn’t know where to go or what to do, but there were no other options, so I knocked. There was no reply. I knocked again and heard a noise and took that as a sign to go in.

I stepped in and a wave of warmth flooded over me. My glasses immediately fogged up so I couldn’t see. I heard somebody laugh and somebody else say something under their breath. I took my glasses off and squinted around. The room was an undecorated concrete box. The walls were covered in maps. Two people sat in the opposite corners, one of them an imposing black man with scarred cheeks wearing an olive-green cabled uniform sweater. This was the Captain, though I didn’t know that yet. He was the only person on the Wall I ever saw wearing uniform. For the rest of us it simply wasn’t warm enough. He looked at me unsmiling. Behind him there were three computer monitors with a green-screen radar display.

‘A Defender who can’t see,’ he said. ‘Great.’

The other person snorted. This was a heavy-set white man wearing a red knitted cap: the Sergeant, though I didn’t know that yet either.

‘I’m Kavanagh,’ I eventually said. ‘I’m new.’ It seems idiotic now and it seemed idiotic then, but I had no idea what else to say. The two of them didn’t even laugh. They just looked at me. The man in uniform got up and walked over to me and looked me up and down. He was tall, at least half a head taller than me.

‘I’m the Captain,’ he said. ‘This is the Sergeant. Do everything we tell you to without questioning why. It takes about four months before you know what you’re doing. I have complete power to extend your stay here, without appeal. I don’t have to give a reason. The only way you get off the Wall is that two years go past, and I decide to let you go. If they didn’t make that clear in training, I’m making it clear now. Is it clear?’

It was. I said so.

‘Take him to the barracks,’ he said to the Sergeant. ‘I’m going out on the Wall.’

He left. The Sergeant’s demeanour changed a little when he was on his own.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘There are two sergeants, one for each shift. I’m yours. The other one is on the Wall. I should be in bed but I stayed up to meet you because I’m a fucking saint. Ask anyone. You’ll meet the rest of your shift in the morning. I’ll give you a quick version of the tour. The rest you can fill in tomorrow. Like the Captain said, it takes a while for it all to sink in, and the best way is through repetition. You can ask questions at the beginning but everyone gets sick of that pretty quickly, so I’d advise you to think if there’s an obvious answer to whatever it is you’re asking before you open your gob.’