The Wall
Page 2
Prose is misleading, though, when it comes to saying what it feels and seems like. The days are the same, with variations in the weather, and the view is the same, with variations in the visibility, and the people either side of you are the same, so it’s static; it’s not a story, it’s an image which is fixed-with-variations. It’s a poem and as I already said, it’s a concrete poem with a few repeating elements. One would be concrete itself:
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete
But then there’s also water, sky, wind, cold. Always water, sky, wind, cold, and of course concrete, so it’s sometimes concretewaterskywindcold, when they all hit you as one thing, as a single entity, combined, like a punch, concretewaterskywindcold. Except it isn’t always like that and you sometimes are affected by them distinctly, as separate things, and in a different order, so it might be
cold:::concrete:::wind:::sky:::water
or sometimes it’s slower than that, they take time to sink in, so it might be a freak clear calm day (they happen, not often, but they happen), in which case it’s like an even shorter haiku
sky!
cold
water
concrete
wind
and then sometimes your perceptions slow, especially when it’s cold, deep cold, and you’re already tired, and it’s towards the end of a watch, and then it’s more like
Ah yes, the cold. The physical feeling of being on the Wall varies all the time, but varies within a narrow framework. It’s always cold, but there is more than one type of cold, you soon learn, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 cold is the kind that’s always there. It begins when you wake up in the barracks, as I did on that first day, and it’s already cold, and it stays cold while you wash and use the toilet and put on your day clothes, layering up from thermal underclothes, inner layers, outer layers, all your indoor gear, you go and eat, always porridge and sometimes protein and a warm drink, and you grab as many energy bars as you can face the thought of eating during the day before you go to the wardroom for a briefing, which sometimes has information about new threats but more usually tells you that today will be the same as yesterday, you go to the armoury and get your weapons, then get your outer layer of clothes on, windproofs and waterproofs and hat and gloves, everyone using a different rig so by this point you look like the most disorganised army in the world, which in a way you are. Then you go out on the Wall and immediately you’re hit by type 1 cold, the cold which is always already there, which you know so well and hate so much it’s like being in one of those bands where they’ve been playing together for years and spent so much time together that they know each other so intimately that they can’t bear to be in each other’s company for a second longer, they can identify each other blindfold by the smell of each other’s farts, and yet they have no choice because this, after all, is what they do and who they are. Then you walk to your post for the day (or the night if you’re on night shift, which is exactly the same except twelve hours further on) and relieve the lucky sod who is now off duty while you’ve become the poor sod who is on duty in their place. And by the time you’ve walked to your post, which can be a kilometre and a half away, you’re generating some body heat and you’ve started to fight back against the cold and you realise that as long as you keep moving you’re going to be just warm enough. That’s type 1 cold.
Type 2 cold starts the same, except that as you move through it, it gets colder. After walking to your post for twenty minutes, you’re colder than you were at the start. The cold gets through to you deeply and intimately. It feels dangerous because it is dangerous. People have died of hypothermia on the Wall. You have no choice with type 2 cold except to keep moving as much as you can and, mainly, to try to find out in advance if it’s going to be a type 2 day and plan accordingly. That means double layers of everything, double porridge, double warm drinks. Sometimes someone will run back to the barracks and bring more clothes, a big flask of warm liquid, anything. I’ve even heard of units where they make fires and gather round them on the coldest nights, but the Captain would never let us get away with that. Type 1 cold can come to seem familiar, almost friendly, because you get to know it so well – the rest of your life, any time you feel cold, it will remind you of the Wall, and of this kind of cold, and because you’re now remembering being miserable at a time when you’re less miserable (by definition, you’re less miserable, since you’re no longer on the Wall), it will be not exactly a happy memory, but a memory with a happy effect: hooray, I’m no longer on the Wall! Somebody said there was no greater misery than recalling a time of happiness when you’re in a time of despair, and that’s true, but let’s focus on the positive and remember that the opposite is also true. When you remember the bad place, and you’re no longer in the bad place, it feels good, like waking from a nightmare.
There are no positive thoughts about type 2. It cuts and slices and seeps into you. The other cold feels like something outside you that you have to cope with and overcome; type 2 feels internal. It gets inside your body, inside your head. It displaces part of you; it makes you feel as if there’s less of you. Type 1 you can fight by moving, you can fight by thinking about something else. Type 2, there is nothing else. At times there’s not even you. Type 1 people complain about. Type 2 makes them go silent, even afterwards. Type 2 is a premonition of death.
That first day was a type 1 day. We climbed out on the ramp and started down the Wall towards our posts. Cold, horribly cold, but not dangerously so. Cold and medium clear. You can always tell the visibility on the Wall by how many watchtowers you can see. That day I could see the next two but not the third: they’re three K apart so that meant six kilometres but not nine. Call it seven. Medium visibility. It’s the first thing you check because it tells you how far off you’ll be able to spot Others. Clear days are better, unless you are looking into the sun at sunrise or sunset, in which case they’re neither better nor worse. Attacks often come at that time and from that angle – which would give the Others better odds, except we know that that is a time they’re likely to be coming and so tend to be prepared. At least that’s what you’d think. Of the attacks which succeed, though, about half happen at dawn or dusk.
My fellow Defenders grumbled and muttered and bitched as we walked. The Wall has gravel on the top, along some sections anyway, to help with grip in the wet. This was one of those sections. We crunched as we trudged. Every two hundred metres, somebody stopped at their post, peeling off from the shrinking group and taking up position beside whoever had been on guard from the other squad. There were sometimes a few words of abuse or relief, a mixture of Thank God and About Fucking Time; all of the Defenders leaving their posts looked grey with exhaustion. They walked heavily. One or two of the guards at the furthest posts were already walking back towards us, notwithstanding the fact that we hadn’t got to them yet and their stations were technically unmanned in the interval. They wouldn’t have done that if the Captain had been there, and if he had seen them he would have automatically added a day to their time on the Wall.
It was already light. The sun was low but, thanks to the layer of cloud, not dazzling.
The posts were numbered in faded white paint at hundred-metre intervals. Each post had a concrete bench, big enough for two people, facing the sea. The bearded man stopped at 8, the woman he’d been sitting next to – maybe they were in a relationship, there was something about their unspeaking ease with each other – took 10. At 12, Hifa, the blob in the balaclava, pointed at me and said, ‘Here,’ and kept walking on towards the next station, 14, the last one attached to our watch house. The Defender who’d been at my post, a bulky man of about my height, picked up his rucksack and slung his rifle over his should
er and walked away without a word or gesture.
I took off my backpack and put it against the rampart. I stood and looked out at the sea. Twelve hours here felt like it was going to be a very very long time. Some companies divide their time into two shifts of six, but our Captain was one of the old-school ones who were more binary about it: you’re on or you’re off. That seemed like the worst idea in the world right now, but I knew that in eleven hours and fifty-five minutes I’d be all in favour.
Although everybody always calls the Wall the Wall, that isn’t its official name. Officially it is the National Coastal Defence Structure. On official documents it’s abbreviated to NCDS. Guard towers have a name and a number. This tower was Ilfracombe 4. We were on the outermost stretch of a long coastal curve. Straight in front, and for the ninety degrees to each side, there was nothing to see except the ocean. If straight in front was twelve o’clock, it was nothing but water from nine o’clock to three o’clock. Turn a further ten degrees to either side – turn to eight o’clock or four o’clock – and you could see the Wall undulating into the distance. The engineers who built it tried to keep it as straight as possible, because straighter = shorter, but there were many places where the natural shape of what used to be the coastline meant that it was more economical, in time and effort and concrete, to use the existing shape of the coast as the guideline for the Wall. This must be one of them. My new home.
3
In every walk of life, every job and vocation, there is an experience which distinguishes actually doing the thing from the training and preparation, however extensive. You don’t know what boxing is until somebody punches you, you don’t know what doing a shift in a factory feels like until the bell has gone at the end of the day, you don’t know what a day’s march with a full backpack is until you’ve done one, and you don’t know what the Wall means until you’ve stood a twelve-hour watch.
Time has never passed as slowly as it did that day. Time on the Wall is treacle. Eventually, after you have put in enough hours on the Wall, you learn to cope with time. You train yourself not to look at the time, because it is never, never, ever, as late as you think and hope and long for it to be. You learn to float. You become completely passive; you let the day pass through you, you stop trying to pass through it. But it takes months before you can do that. In the first weeks, and especially on your first day, you look at the time every few minutes. It’s like there is a special slow time on the Wall; you can’t believe it; you check and check again and that only makes it worse.
After two hours, at nine o’clock, a member of the kitchen staff brings around a hot drink. Sometimes it’s tea, sometimes coffee, but really, who cares? It’s a hot drink, it’s a sign that you’ve done your first two hours. Somebody comes round on a bike, bringing a big heated flask. That first day, it was a woman, one of the cooks, who came along the Wall. I watched her stop for a minute or two at each post as she came. She was chatting with the Defenders. I felt my eyes fill with tears: the thought that someone was going to stop and talk to me suddenly seemed like the greatest act of compassion and empathy I had ever encountered. As she got to the post before mine, where the woman next to me was on guard, I could hear both of them laughing. The sound of laughter on the Wall – it felt like an intrusion from another world. And I’d only been there two hours.
‘Hello darling, I’m Mary,’ said the cook, as she stopped her bicycle next to me, her curly hair peeking out from under her cap. ‘Got your mug?’
I hadn’t. I put my rifle down on the bench and got the standard-issue tin mug out of my backpack. She poured hot brown liquid out of the flask.
‘First day, isn’t it? Poor thing. It always hits people hard. You get used to it though. And at least it’s not raining or blowing a gale or night-time so there’s always that.’
‘I’m Kavanagh,’ I said. The liquid was dark brown tea, stewed and bitter, with so much sugar in, it was as sweet as ice cream. I had never drunk anything so delicious.
‘I know you are, darling. Well, we’ll be seeing each other at least three more times today, so we mustn’t wear out all the chat now. Keep ’em peeled!’
And with that Mary was back on her bike, heading off towards Hifa, who had already put down the rocket launcher and turned to her in expectation. I kept watching while I drank my tea. It occurred to me that if the Others were able to work out a way of attacking during a tea break, their odds would be good. Mary got to Hifa and they gave each other a quick, very unmilitary hug. Mary got off her bike and leant it against the bench. Then she poured out Hifa’s tea and awarded herself a mug too and they settled down to talking. I was jealous. Mary didn’t seem to be worried about wearing out the chat when she was talking to Hifa, did she? They talked for about five minutes and then Mary got back on her bike and pedalled back down the top of the Wall, with a little wave for each one of us as she went past. It was three hours until lunch. I decided to break the time up into two sections of ninety minutes, with an energy bar in the middle.
‘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 we
re 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.