The Wall

by John Lanchester

  There are admittedly some people my age who are curious about what things were like before, who like to hear about it, who love the stories and the amazing facts. Put it like this: there are some people my age who have a thing about beaches. They watch movies and TV programmes about beaches, they look at pictures of beaches, they ask the olds what it was like to go to a beach, what it felt like to lie on sand all day, and what was it like to build a sandcastle and watch the water come in and see the sandcastle fight off the water and then succumb to it, a castle which once looked so big and invulnerable, just melting away, so that when the tide goes out you can’t see that there was ever anything there, and what was it like to have a picnic on the beach, didn’t sand get in the food, and what was surfing like, what was it like to be carried towards a beach on a wave, with people standing on the beach watching you, and was it really true the water was sometimes warm, even here, even this far north? There are people who love all that shit. Not me. Show me an actual beach, and I’ll express some interest in beaches. But you know what? The level of my interest exactly corresponds to the number of existing beaches. And there isn’t a single beach left, anywhere in the world.

  Not everyone agrees with me on this. Maybe most people don’t. Lots of people like to watch old movies where everyone is on the beach all the time. My view? Stupid.

  My mother is hard going. She just feels guilty all the time; her expression in repose, whenever I’m in the room, resembles a grieving sheep. Just below the surface she’s furious too, obviously, because feeling guilty all the time makes people angry, but she channels it into martyrdom and being saintlike and doing everything and never saying a harsh word no matter how badly I screw up and never being angry, just sometimes (and never explicitly) the teensiest bit, you know … disappointed. The time I took their car without permission, got drunk, overrode the autopilot, slid off the road and hit a tree and trashed the battery, which wasn’t covered by the insurance because of the whole drunk + underage thing? Not angry, not at all, I’ll just go and clean the kitchen and put out your school uniform for tomorrow, I know you didn’t mean to let us down darling and I’m sorry I can’t help it if I feel a little bit … sad.

  My father is worse than my mother. The thing about Dad is he still has the emotional reflexes of a parent. He wants to be in charge, to know better, to put me straight, to tell me about back in the day, to start sentences with the words ‘When I was …’ He used to do this when I was little, at school, helping me with homework or showing me how to do small practical things. Shoelaces at five, wiring plugs at fourteen, that sort of thing. To be fair, he was pretty good at it. In a different world he’d have been a good father. But it stopped working once I became a teenager and it started to sink in that the world hadn’t always been like this and that the people responsible for it ending up like this were our parents – them and their generation. I don’t want to know their advice or to know what they think about anything, ever.

  So a week at home is as you’d expect. My mother manages to make the task of running the household and feeding three adults seem like the world’s most demanding job. We aren’t rich enough to have Help – Help is free but you have to feed and clothe and house it so the costs still add up. It’s fair enough that there is a lot of work, though we have a washbot and a cleanbot so it maybe isn’t quite as much work as all that. Maybe not as much as my mother makes it seem, when I’m at home. Basically, she acts like she’s the bravest, keenest, most willing slave in the salt mine. We hardly ever speak, except for her to ask whether I liked it, if there’s anything special I’d like for [next meal], do I want to see any of my friends [to which the answer is, why is that any concern of hers?], can she get me anything? Would I like a cup of tea in the morning? It’s like staying in a well-run but emotionally suffocating B&B.

  I’d be lying if I said this brought out the best in me.

  As for my father, he’s at work in the day at his office, and then home in the evening to eat whatever my mother has cooked and then watch television/movies/whatever. We don’t talk much and both prefer it that way.

  All of this was completely as usual; in the words of the song, same as it ever was. I tend to go out to see old mates. But there are fewer of them around than usual, because people my age are all off on the Wall and some of them are still on shift, or on training, or at home. The main topic of conversation: being on the Wall. People compare complaints. Our company sounds like one of the strictest there is – some of them only have ten people on watch at a time, so you get one day or night in three off! That’s against the rules and if the Others come you’re finished, but the thinking is that if the Others come you’re finished anyway.

  Let’s just say, that’s not how the Captain sees it. I bitched about my company for a bit and everyone said I was unlucky to be somewhere so hardcore. I agreed and joined in the moaning, but I was, secretly, proud to be going through such a strict version of Defending. I was a real Defender. If you had one day in three off, that made you less of a Defender. Two thirds of one. Not that other people could see this distinction between real Defenders (i.e. me) and the others – all they could see was a group of Defenders in the pub, getting drunk. They steered well clear. Even the ones, maybe especially the ones, young enough to have done stints as Defenders themselves were careful to keep a distance. They knew that we knew how little we had to lose. What would anybody do – send us to the Wall? Besides, the courts are notoriously lenient on Defenders. We get in fights, we bust places up, and nothing much happens. Quite bloody right.

  Talking to my old mates, I came to realise that life was going to be divided into two, before the Wall and after the Wall. It was as if this thing we had in common was coming between us; the Wall was the same for everybody, but it was different for everybody too. Maybe we’d go back to having our lives in common in two years’ time (or rather in ninety-eight weeks’ time, I’d gone fully over to the Defenders’ habit of counting time not by the calendar but by the number of weeks you’ve put in), but for now, we were friends because of things in the past, not the present. The main lesson I took from my week at home: my Wall company was what I had in my life now, instead of family and friends.

  When I left on the return journey, walk bus train another train lorry, I said goodbye to my mother and father at the front door. A shy hug from my mother, and a handshake from my dad. I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something, dispense some advice, and he could see in mine that I wasn’t having it. I picked up my rucksack and started out but when the door closed, I stopped and waited at the window for a few minutes. It was dark out and they couldn’t see me. The light in the hallway went off, then the light in the sitting room went on, then the television went on, then they started watching the programme they’d clearly been waiting a whole week to watch. I don’t know whether it was a documentary or a film, I didn’t wait to see, but the opening shots showed sand and blue sky and deeper blue water, and small figures climbing up onto boards and riding waves and falling off into the water. My parents had waited for me to leave and then turned on a programme about surfing.

  8

  Then it was back to the Wall. The second cycle was harder because our squad switched over and were on the night shift. I had thought the twelve hours of day watch was difficult, but the nights were worse. The dark makes it harder, obviously. The type 2 cold, which is much more likely to come at night, makes it harder too – the cold which is like glue, like mud, which makes it so hard to move it’s as if the Wall’s concrete is still wet. But the real difficulty is because it’s easier to be apprehensive at night. That deep, black part of the brain which by day secretly wonders what it would be like if the Others came, and wonders if it would really be so bad, by night is given over to fear.

  At night, on the Wall, imagination is not your friend. The distracting thoughts which help you get through the day – about being somewhere else, about what you’ll do when you get off the Wall, about food, about sex – don’t work as well.
You see things and hear things that aren’t there. You know this, and you train for this, but at the same time you know that sometimes, those things are there, and that many times the following has happened: a Defender who thought for a moment he saw something which looked like moonlight gleaming off metal, and dismissed it, or thought he heard something like metal scratching on concrete, and dismissed it, died coughing up blood with an Other’s knife in his guts. You don’t get through a twelve-hour shift without having your adrenaline triggered at least once. You tell yourself to calm down, then you tell yourself that there’s maybe something there after all. Up down up, like taking pills. You never get used to it, and the best you can hope for is that you get used to not getting used to it.

  We saw much more of the Captain at night. I know it doesn’t sound possible that the presence of one man can make a difference to a fear that’s as elemental and basic as the kind you get standing guard in the dark against the Others. It did, though. You knew that at some point in your twelve hours, he would be there, appearing either on foot, marching down the ramparts through the pools of illumination, or on a bicycle, which he never did by day, and which always looked slightly incongruous. He was a big man and the bike looked as if it was a size too small for him. Sometimes he would just appear, popping up beside a post without warning, because he had come along the track inside the Wall, the same trick he had used on the first day to catch me daydreaming. (I learned later he did it to everyone on their first day.) He never said much, just stood beside you and looked out at the sea. Then he would make some simple observation, something basic and elemental, about the kind of night it was, dark or less dark, cold or less cold, moonlit or starlit, windy or still, harder to see or less hard, nearly over or just begun. He never told you anything you didn’t already know, but it was always just enough to let you know that he had stood on the Wall many times, far more times than you ever would, and he knew it better than anyone, and he was here with you. Then he would nod a farewell, and go on to the next post. Often, in middle stretches on the Wall, halfway between one post and another, he would just stop and stare out at the sea. It was as if he was stretching out his senses, extending the reach of his hearing and vision, out into the dark.

  ‘What do you think the Captain is looking for, when he does that?’ I asked Hifa one night. At night we did the same thing we did by day, and met in groups of three for a mid-shift meal. I hadn’t realised that you stayed in your pattern of posts for the whole of your two years on the Wall, meaning you ate with the same three people every day, hundreds of times. If you didn’t get on with your crew, if they were bullies or idiots or silent or coldly hostile, or just if the chemistry was wrong, a twelve-hour shift which was already difficult became even more so.

  ‘Maybe he thinks his senses are sharper when there’s no one around,’ she said. ‘You know, the small noises people make. Distractions. Body language. Away from it all. Are you going to finish that?’ she asked Shoona, who was making slow progress with that night’s energy bar. It had something very sticky in it, maybe dates. In reply Shoona broke it in half and gave the bottom of the bar to Hifa. She took it without saying anything and started eating it. In any other context it would have seemed outlandishly rude, but on the Wall it was a kind of intimacy.

  ‘Four tours …’ said Hifa. ‘Imagine doing four tours. Eight years on the Wall.’

  ‘He was a sergeant by the end of his first tour,’ said Shoona. ‘He just has a knack for it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, imagine having a knack for it,’ said Hifa. ‘I mean, of all the things you could have a knack for.’

  ‘Juggling,’ I said.

  ‘Knitting,’ said Shoona.

  ‘Sex,’ said Hifa.

  ‘Sleep,’ I said.

  We didn’t say much after that.

  I finished my food and my hot drink and got up to go back to my post. At night, even the young and the fit stiffened up quickly, and I could feel how the cold had taken up residence in various parts of my body while I was sitting – my hips, my knees. Hifa and Shoona got up too and we split up. I went to the edge of the illuminated ground around my post, about fifty metres away, and jogged back and forwards to the far edge for a few minutes, getting out of breath and warming up but being careful to stop short of sweating. At one end of my circuit, looking out to sea, I thought I saw something. A glimmer of light, was my first thought, out to sea. It was unlikely to be one of ours: the Guard did go out at night, but when they did, they didn’t often use lights. I thought I must have been imagining it, but a few minutes later there was another glint, and then another.

  ‘I think I can see lights,’ I said over the communicator. I felt embarrassed and frightened at the same time – embarrassed in case I was imagining things, frightened in case it was Others. ‘Out to sea.’

  ‘How far out?’ asked the Captain. Having his voice loudly in my ear without preamble made me jump; normally he didn’t use the communicator.

  ‘It’s hard to tell, sir. I’m sorry. Not close but closer than the horizon. Maybe a kilometre or more.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Two or three. Winking on and off.’

  ‘OK. Good spot. Keep watching. Don’t worry, it happens sometimes.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Sir. What’s happening?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said the Captain, not in his usual tone of command or rebuke, but as if he was asking the same question. ‘It’s just something they sometimes do.’

  I didn’t need to ask who he meant by ‘they’. The lights were Others. That was my first encounter with them. Not a face-toface encounter, because that would involve either them or me dying. But an encounter nonetheless. The first time I saw them. I think that was also the first time I could imagine what it would be like to be an Other, floating in the dark, on some makeshift boat or raft or inflatable, staring at the shoreline, looking at the Wall, at the sprinkling of lights above and the steep black dark below. You would be bobbing up and down with the sea swell. You would hardly be able to remember the last time you were warm or dry or safe. We were cold but the Others were colder. We were bored and tired and uncomfortable and anxious, they were angry and frightened and exhausted and desperate. God, the Wall must look like a terrible thing from the sea, a flat malevolent line like a scar. So blank, so remorseless, so implacable. We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here, we would kill them. It was that simple. But – how we must seem to them! We must seem more like devils than human beings. Spirits, embodied essences, of pure malignity. If we would kill them on sight, what would they do to us, if they could?

  I remember thinking: we don’t owe them anything. I’m glad I’m one of us and not one of them. Twenty-six hours later, my second shift ended.

  9

  It was late afternoon and we were standing near the top of a valley in the Lake District. Our rucksacks sat on the ground next to us. The early part of the day had been cloudy, but the sky cleared and the day was now close to perfect: not too warm when we were walking, not too cold when we were still. The light was almost yellow, not fading yet but beginning to think about it, in that ideal moment when it’s like an invisible coating of butter, making everything richer, deeper, more intimate. The hills seemed friendly. I took a drink of water and looked around the mountains and felt glad to be there.

  Our next few turns on the Wall had been uneventful. We guarded the Wall, the Captain prowled and scowled, Sarge and Yos kept us in order. The days were longer, the nights shorter. The weather warmed up a little. The type 2 cold had largely passed – though when it did come, it was more dangerous than ever, because you could be taken by surprise. One member of our squad, a quiet tall woman who had done a year at college and was about to go back, came to the end of her tour and we gave a party for her. Because we were still on the Wall, it was a sober party, but it was a happy occasion for all that, and it did make me think that time was going past. I was getting through my shifts. Every day that went past, every hou
r, was bringing me closer to getting away, getting off the Wall, starting the rest of my life. Between those two-week cycles we went ‘home’ to our families and then did a week on standby duty, which was physically much easier than either Wall shifts or training, but was so uneventful it brought other challenges. The next holiday, a group of us decided, we would spend together. So that is what this was: a holiday week with my new friends. I wouldn’t have done it if Hifa hadn’t been going, but once she had mentioned it, I latched on to the idea.

  None of us had any money, so we thought we’d go camping. We wanted to go somewhere with no view of the sea; with attractive landscape; with nice pubs; with good walking but not too strenuous, or only strenuous for those of us who felt like it. Three men and three women: me and Cooper and Hughes, Hifa and Shoona and Mary. Two tents borrowed from the quartermaster. We agreed to leave our communicators behind – a radical move, actually, the first time we’d tried anything of the kind. I hadn’t spent a week away from my phone since I first got one at the age of ten. Nature! That was the idea. I’m not saying it was a good idea, just that it was the idea.

  Cooper researched the ideal camping spot, just along the hillside from a locally famous pub, but this was our first day, and it wasn’t where he had thought it would be. The result was that we were standing here as the day gave signs of ending, no tents pitched. This was a beautiful spot but not necessarily a great campsite.