The Wall
Page 9
‘Well done!’ he said, brightly. They always start by praising you. ‘The world’s best home defence force, participating in the world’s best training programme!’
Both parts of that were news to us, but whatever.
‘I’ve been hearing from your commanding officers. Remarkable!’
I looked across at Hifa, who was sitting next to me. At this close range I could see she was very slightly swaying. Her eyes weren’t closed, but on the other hand they weren’t fully open either. I gave her a nudge, which was a mistake, because she turned towards me and exhaled. Not only could I smell the alcohol, I could actually tell that she’d been drinking spiced rum. Her eyes were bloodshot, which didn’t stop her rolling them at the politician.
‘We can truly say, this country has never been better Defended. And it is thanks to women and men such as you. I think you deserve a round of applause!’
He began to clap. I think the idea was that we would join in and start applauding ourselves too – yeah! go us! – but he had severely misread the room. We sat there waiting for the point of this, assuming it had a point. It was hard to imagine he’d done this often before. He was a baby politician, an infant member of the elite. He still had his training wheels. I may have been sleep-deprived, I might possibly still have been a bit drunk, but I fell for a moment into a reverie, a kind of guided dream, in which I imagined baby members of the elite being born from chrysalises, already wearing their shiny suits, their ties pre-knotted, their first clichés already on their lips, being wiped down of cocoon matter and pushed towards a podium, ready to make their first speech, spout their first platitude, lose their virginity at lying. They’d be made to do that before they were given any food or drink or comfort, just to make sure it was the thing they knew first and best, the thing which came most naturally. They tell us that everyone goes to the Wall, no exceptions. Somehow, though, when I saw the politician, I knew for the first time that that couldn’t be true. This man had clearly never been on the Wall. He had never been a Defender. You could smell it on him. It was sometimes said that rich people rigged ID chips so that Help went to the Wall instead of them. You heard rumours about medical exemptions, exemptions for extra education. No one ever admitted to not going on the Wall, but we all suspected that there were rich and powerful people who got out of it.
He stopped clapping. You could tell that he could tell that this was going badly, and also that he knew he mustn’t show that he knew it. His manner changed and became more brisk. He let some of his sense of his own power show.
‘Unfortunately, being a Defender isn’t all a matter of praise and compliments. However deserved they might be! And we have some new intelligence. Information with a direct bearing on your –’ and it was very interesting the way he said this next word, because you caught a glimpse of something cold and dark in him, just for that tiny moment, a small window into what he really thought of us, and the distance between his life and ours – ‘duties.’ Our duties. Yes, OK, our duties, our long nights in the cold and dark, twelve hours at a time spent both bored shitless and in fear of our lives. That was what, in his eyes, we were for. That was our use, our purpose.
‘As you all know, the Change was not a single solitary event. We speak of it in that manner because here we experienced one particular shift, of sea level and weather, over a period of years it is true, but it felt then and when we look back on it today still feels like an incident that happened, a defined moment in time with a before and an after. There was our parents’ world, and now there is our world.’
That was sly of him. He was close to us in age, close enough to know how sensitive and how universal this feeling was, about the gulf between us and the generation before. The energy in the room changed. He might be every bad thing we knew him to be but he also knew some truths.
‘The Change – before and after. Elsewhere, though, it was not like that. The Change was not an event but a process, a process that in some places, some unlucky places, has not stopped. In many of the hotter places of the world, in particular, the Change is still continuing, still reshaping landscapes, still impacting people’s lives. Men and women fled from it, fled from its consequences, tried to make new lives for themselves, to scramble for new shelter, to climb to higher ground, to find a ledge, a cave, a well, an oasis, a place where they could find safety for them and their families. But,’ he said, his tone changing again, and now he really did sound like a member of the elite, a man used to giving orders and breaking bad news, ‘the Change did not stop. The shelter blew away, the waters rose to the higher ground, the ground baked, the crops died, the ledge crumbled, the well dried up. The safety was an illusion. So the unfortunates must flee again, and they have begun, again, in numbers, like the numbers from many years ago when the Change first struck. Big numbers, dangerous numbers. So that is the first thing I am here to tell you. The Others are coming. We have had years of relative peace and calm, but that time is now over. You will be busy. The things for which you have been training: you are likely, more likely than for some years, to do them for real.’
Now this really did count as news. I suddenly felt a lot less drunk. Hifa was sitting up straight staring at the man. The rest of the squads were too. Whatever we had thought we were going to hear, it wasn’t this.
‘The Flight and our friends abroad have confirmed this. Others are on their way. That is my first piece of information for you. But,’ he smiled, ‘the Wall has been here for years, and your training is, as I’ve already said, the best in the world. You are the best in the world. This country is the best in the world. We have prevailed, we do prevail, we will prevail. This we know to be true. However,’ his tone sad now, regretful, more-in-sorrow-than, ‘there are those among us who do not see things the same way. There are those who see our desire for security, for safety, for peace’ – he stretched out his arms in a gesture people often made when they were talking about the Wall, as if the Wall was like a giant pair of outspread arms – ‘as a selfish desire. A selfish, self-interested turning away from the world. A refusal of our responsibilities. A – well, there’s no point going on. You can’t argue with people who want you to drown, to be overrun, to be washed away. You can’t argue! There’s nothing you can tell them to make them change their mind. And yet, they are there, and we have information that some of them, some of these deluded people, are doing something almost impossible to believe. They are taking the side, not of the ordinary decent people of this country, the people you Defenders guard and protect, the people for whom you spend your long nights and days on the Wall, the people whose security is the meaning and purpose of what you do – no, they don’t take their side.’ He was getting into it now. He dropped his voice to a loud, histrionic whisper. ‘They take the side of the Others!’
After dropping that, he leant back from the podium and let it sink in. ‘Yes. They take the side of the Others. The Others! They would rather be on the side of the Others than on the side of their own people. It is hard to imagine such wickedness. Hard to imagine being so wrong, so morally lost, so ethically destitute. I know that decent people will find it difficult to believe. But we must accept that these lost souls exist and that they are, there is no other way of putting this, on the side of the Others. And what is more, and this is the new information that we now have, they are taking steps to help the Others. There is intelligence that some of these, I would call them criminals except that most criminals are just citizens who have lost their direction in life, made some mistakes, gone awry – I will instead call them what they are, traitors. These traitors are working on ways of helping the Others. Of getting the Others away from us if they succeed in getting over the Wall. Of communicating with the Others, of suggesting places and times to attack, even, and this is the most concerning development of all, of helping them get chips, of helping them to disappear into our society if they succeed in breaching the Wall. Of helping to defeat the Wall, defeat the Defenders – that’s right, helping them to defeat you!’
He talked for a bit more but there wasn’t any further new information. The take-away was, the Others were coming and they have assistance. When he finished, we packed our stuff and got in the lorry for the drive to our next shift on the Wall. About halfway there, my head started hurting and I began feeling sick: I had stopped being drunk and my hangover had kicked in. It was a long trip. When we got to our barracks, the previous watch was still on duty: we had some time to go before our shift started. I went to bed and slept for eighteen hours.
II
THE OTHERS
13
Back at the Wall, everything was the same. It always was, physically: the same sky, the same sea, the same wind, the same horizon. Same concretewaterwindsky. But the politician had been right too. Rumours were going around that there was increased activity by the Others. More boats on the horizon, more lights at night. There was also news of attacks, three in the last two weeks. (Detailed briefings on any attack were given to all Defenders. You never knew when you might learn something that would later save your life.) The attacks had been very poorly planned and inexpert, basically Others just coming up to the Wall in rowing boats, asking to be killed. Remember, though, on the Wall, low risk is high risk. The Captain brought us all together and gave us a lecture on exactly this topic.
‘So why is this bad news? Being under attack from untrained, unarmed Others who have exactly zero chance of getting through.’
I held up my hand.
‘Because it means they’re desperate. And if the clueless ones are desperate, the clever ones will be too.’
‘Point to Chewy,’ said the Captain. ‘Don’t let the thick ones make you lower your guard. They’re coming.’
Hughes held up his hand. ‘Sir, any evidence of that support from collaborators that we were warned about?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said the Captain. It was impressive how he could, just by standing still with no change of expression, call something bullshit without using the word.
So, they were coming. And yet, at any given time, on any given shift, they weren’t. Not yet anyway. Three attacks on ten thousand kilometres of wall wasn’t all that many attacks, when you averaged it out. The year was heading into early summer. The longer, marginally warmer days and shorter, marginally warmer nights made being on duty easier for both shifts. I had also, I realised, got through the first phase of being a Defender, the one where every shift was an assault on my sense of what was physically possible, and was now at the second stage, where you get used to it, where the rhythm of a shift is familiar, where you know that the twelve hours are going to go past, and the best thing to do is just let them: don’t fight the passing of time, ride on it, float on it. Better: let it go its own way. Don’t look at your watch. Think about something else. If anything happens, let your adrenaline and your training take care of it. Don’t live on the edge. Don’t be on edge. Time will pass, all you have to do is let it.
I spent many hours, that shift, thinking about the conversation I’d had with Hughes while we were camping. What did I want to be when I grew up? If I wasn’t going to be a member of the elite, what was I going to do instead? I might be comrades and friends with my fellow Defenders, might feel I had things in common with them, but that didn’t mean I liked or had things in common with my parents. I wasn’t going to go back home. Home no longer felt like home. I’d go to college and then what? Hughes wanted to spend his life among books. I didn’t. I quite liked the idea of going and living with some of my new friends, Hifa and Cooper and Shoona and Mary and Hughes, going off together and finding a new way of living, more communal, not family-based but where we would live together and look after each other and maybe other like-minded people would join us. We’d maybe live on a farm, we’d maybe have, you know, goats. The kind of thing farm people had.
I had to admit that I knew nothing about farming. I just liked the idea of trying something else. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a suburban hutch doing work I didn’t even have the emotional energy to hate. Like my parents. When you’re on the Wall, you’re desperate to get off the Wall. It’s all you think about: getting through your turn of duty, getting off the Wall. But then you start to think, why? What do I want to get off the Wall for? What’s waiting for me?
I could just – this was the terrible, unsayable thing, the thing I would have sworn an oath was impossible, just weeks before – I could just start to see why people sometimes signed up for more than one shift on the Wall. People like Sarge and the Corporal, who were on their second turn; people like the Captain, who had done three and was now on his fourth. I’m not saying that I was starting actively to think about it. I’m just saying that I could see why people did. See that they liked the combination of long dull uneventful days with a strong sense of purpose looming overall; the mix of aimless time, structured days and meaningful work. A bit like human life in general, you could say, the terrible regularity with which nothing happens, the genuine terror when something does. Hurry up and wait. That’s the motto which governs most lives. It’s the motto which governs the Wall, for sure. The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.
Or maybe I’d do a bit of both, or all three: I’d do another shift on the Wall, which would be horrible, as horrible as this one, except perhaps it would be a bit less so because I would understand what I was doing and I would be doing it not because I had to, not because I had no choice, but precisely because I did have a choice, because it was up to me, because it was in my control, and I knew what I’d be gaining by doing it. I’d be gaining a route up and out, a chance to become someone else, a chance to win privileges, like the Captain – maybe I’d be offered a chance to train as an officer, then go to college, then fight my way into the elite and zoom around on planes for a bit, go to … do whatever it is members of the elite do, conferences or talks or meetings, big discussions about the Change, then go and start a commune and live with Hifa and the others and find a new style of living, a new balance. New things to want, new ways to be. Yes, that was a good idea, that was now my new policy, my plan: I would do a little bit of everything.
That was how my mind would wander during those nights, nights which seemed to be appreciably shorter with every shift that went past. After ten days, the ‘night’ shift was starting in full daylight and ending in full daylight. The first coffee/snack break, Mary coming down the Wall on her bicycle cart, was just as night fell; the last visit from her, with her last coffee of the shift, was just before dawn. Right from my first day I had liked Mary’s visits – there was nothing original about that, everyone loved Mary. It’s hard not to like the person who comes bringing chat and laughter and company and a warm drink in the middle of a long lonely watch, but even so, her personality was perfectly adapted to the job. She was the kind of person who leaves most people smiling, most of the time. Even the look of her could make you smile, her round pretty pink face and curly near-ginger hair which always seemed to be trying to escape from whatever she was wearing to control and contain it – a kerchief when she was in the kitchen, a hood or a beanie or a cap when she was out, depending on the warmth and the wetness. Those long stretches of time made people cranky, and it was easy to have sharp swings in mood, passages of time when you felt sure
you weren’t going to get through it. Mary never had that: her job was a relatively privileged one, by comparison, and she knew it, and made it part of her job to make everyone else feel better.
The tenth night of that shift, Mary did her second set of rounds with dawn minutes away. I watched her on her usual routine, her bike stopping in each Defender’s pool of light as she came along the ramparts, cup of warm drink and a few words for everyone. That night a gale was blowing. The waves and the wind were so loud that it was hard to hear even the communicator earpiece. A roar, the sea as loud as I had ever heard it. The Captain had already been around twice that night, not saying anything much, just checking in. It was clear that he had taken the warnings from the baby politician seriously. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, probably just counting down to the end of the shift: four more nights, meaning it was nearly over, and then two weeks away and then two weeks of days, concretewaterwindsky, and then I’d be almost halfway through my first year on the Wall. It wasn’t quite time to begin celebrating that the end was in sight, but I could at least know that I knew how to get through the time, that it would go past and then it would be over and I’d be off the Wall.
Mary stopped for a longer than usual chat with Shoona. There was a faint line at the horizon, dawn imminent, though the wind hadn’t yet dipped as it often does at daybreak. She got back on her bike – or rather put her feet back on the pedals, she had been straddling it during her rounds, as always – and came over to me. I took a scan of the Wall and the water and prepared to give her my full attention for the next couple of minutes.