The Wall

by John Lanchester

  During the next few weeks, it was as if I had two lives. One of them, the best and realest, was with Hifa. The two of us were excused training – my injury, plus our new aspiring-Breeder privileges – and we spent a whole week entirely together. We knew each other very well, had spent more time in each other’s company than a lot of couples who are just starting out; we had shared the most intense experience of our lives together. But from another perspective, we hardly knew each other at all. We had never had an argument. We had never seen each other naked. I didn’t know anything about her family other than that she was no keener on seeing them than I was on seeing mine. So we started to find out those things, to do those things, to get to know each other differently/deeper/better. I liked that, in fact I loved it.

  In parallel: the Wall. That life which had felt like the realest thing I would ever do now seemed like a backdrop for my other, realer, private life. Many things changed. For a start, we were moved off it for a four-week section of training and reserve duty. With four dead and three injured from one squad of fifteen, we needed to be restaffed and retrained: to settle in the new people and wait for me and Hifa to be ready for active duty. In the middle of that period I was, of all things, given a medal. It turned out that the certificate from the baby politician was a promissory note telling me that there was more to come.

  The whole company went in a lorry to a town about half an hour’s drive away from our temporary barracks. We stopped around the back of the town hall and were met by some Help who led us through a winding series of corridors to suddenly come out on stage in front of a few hundred seated civilians. There was bunting above the podium; there was a television camera pointed at us. The loudspeaker system played pop music from the recent past while we waited. Then there was a bustle, a movement among the functionaries running the event, and a person who was obviously important came through the door we had come through and went up to the podium. People cheered and clapped. I had no idea who he was, but the civilians obviously did. He must have been a member of the elite who was clever at being popular with ordinary people. He held up his hands and people went quiet and then he made a mesmerising speech about the Wall (he called it the National Coastal Defence Structure) and the Defenders and how important we are and what heroes we are and how Britain is a nation of heroes and how our heroism is in the finest tradition of British heroism and how heroic that is. I may be misremembering some of this: we all agreed it was a great speech though afterwards we found it hard to repeat anything he’d said. Basically, there was lots in it about heroism and how we were heroes. Our names were read out, and we went up in order and were given the medals. The politician pinned them onto our uniforms. I was third out of five up to the podium. The Captain got a more important medal, and Hifa and one other squad member who had killed Others got smaller medals. I’d never stood in front of a roomful of people applauding me before, and don’t ever expect to do it again. It’s embarrassing to admit (though why is it embarrassing?) but I really liked it.

  Then the ceremony was over and we were invited to a reception room upstairs and a selection of the audience came up too and there was Help serving everyone with drinks and small snacks, and being Defenders, we tried to get as many of the drinks down us as we could. There was one glass of wine each, only the second time I’ve ever had wine because it became rare and expensive after the Change, but there was plenty of beer and gin and whisky and most of us managed to get properly hammered in the thirty minutes we were there, the kind of abrupt, vertical-take-off drunkenness where you get so much alcohol on board so quickly you grow steadily drunker for the next couple of hours. A great night out. Hifa started feeling ill on the lorry home and when we got to barracks she went into our loo and I held her hair back while she was sick and I realised that I loved her and that I’d never felt so happy. I think that was the best day of my life.

  15

  ‘We’re going to Scotland,’ said the Captain. There was a rumbling and shifting in the briefing room. The entire company was there, in its new form, a mix of old Defenders and replacements. He let the news marinate for a few moments.

  ‘You may be wondering why,’ he went on. Speaking for myself, I wasn’t, not particularly; if you look for logic on the Wall you’re not far away from expecting the process to be fair, and if you expect it to be fair, you start to go mad. That’s my take on it anyway. So, no wondering why for me. ‘The reason is, this squad is considered to have done its fair share of the hard work of defending our frontiers. Here in the south is the first line of attack and the first line of defence.’ He meant, the first line of defence from the Others, but didn’t say so. I had noticed before that he used the word ‘Others’ as little as possible. It was the only sign he gave of sensitivity about his former life, his former self. ‘In the north, it is different. The reasons for this are simple. The people attempting to cross the Wall are coming from a southerly direction. The journey to the north is therefore longer and more dangerous. The north is also colder. That means that there are fewer attempts to penetrate our defences from that direction. That means that defending the Wall is, in practice, less difficult in the far north. Sergeant, what maxim am I about to quote?’

  Sarge had been cut on his face on the night of the attack, and the wound had not fully healed. It was spectacular, a double line of stitches down his right cheekbone, on either side of a livid scar. Half a centimetre higher and he would have lost his eye. As it was the scar made his expression look permanently contorted with disbelief: he looked like a stocky, angry, sceptical pirate.

  ‘Less risky is more risky,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. So bear that in mind. The idea that the north is harder to attack, easier to defend, may in itself be a factor which draws attacks. Still,’ he said, easing off the intensity a little, ‘we are being sent there for some respite, and it’s to be hoped that we’ll find it. As summer arrives the days are very long and the nights very short. We have a chance to get to know each other as a new company. We may well, after a period in the far north and further training, be transferred back to the south. My advice would be to make the most of it. We train, then we go north at the next deployment.’

  ‘He seemed almost cheerful,’ Hifa said later. We were putting away our kit to go on a week’s leave. The company had been on standby duty near our barracks. I wasn’t fit enough to fight but I was on administrative duties while I recovered: which meant, doing chores for the Captain, Sergeant and Corporal. It was uninteresting but not difficult. ‘I wonder what the secret bad news is.’

  ‘Cold?’ I said. ‘Remote?’ Hifa shrugged. She held out her hand to me and I took it. We were setting out to do something we had long discussed and Hifa had long dreaded.

  ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’ she said.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You can say if you aren’t.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I won’t hold it against you and bring it up later.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I have doubts of my own.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘It’s not guaranteed to go well.’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  ‘Not through any fault of yours – please don’t think that. It’s just, it could go wrong.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t want to have misled you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘To make it clear.’

  ‘OK, Hifa, I’ve got it, I really have, and if you think it’s a bad idea and don’t want me to do it that’s completely fine, we won’t.’

  ‘No need to be arsey.’

  ‘I don’t think I was.’

  ‘Well that’s a matter of opinion.’

  ‘Hifa, for fuck’s sake, we’re only talking about visiting your mother for a few days. She isn’t Hitler. At least if she was Hitler I assume you’d have said.’

  She exhaled, slow and long.

  ‘I just, I don’t want it to get in the way,’ she said, more subdued, les
s fighty.

  ‘It won’t,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  We took the usual journey at the end of that shift, lorry to train to London. We were leaving Ilfracombe 4 for ever. The company was the quietest and the soberest I’d ever seen it on a trip like this. The new people hadn’t really bedded in yet and the Defenders who’d been there for longer were all thinking about the people who weren’t with us. Absent friends. There was still no news about Cooper. It was odd, because if you had pumped me full of truth serum and asked me if there was anything about that section of the Wall I would miss – the section where we’d spent the winter months in the cold and dark, where I’d been the most frightened I’d ever been, and the most bored I’d ever been, and had the most intense experiences of my life, and nearly died – I’d have said no. But as we left it behind and it moved into the past, moved into the category of experiences which were over, I realised I felt a sense of loss. I’d probably never see it again: that particular stretch of concretewindwatersky, that exact patch of damp over my bed, those precise stretches of ramparts where puddles would accumulate in the gravel. The place where I met Hifa.

  At London we split up as usual, said muted goodbyes. Hifa and I crossed the city to catch a train to the eastern town where her mother lived. The transport dynamic was always the same: on the train from the coast, where we outnumbered the civilians, we were the dominant force, the top dogs, and people were wary, kept away and moved away. In the city, in small numbers and as individuals, we were objects of curiosity instead of fear: people snuck glances at us, observed us, would sometimes catch our eye. Nothing made you feel the gap between us and civilians more than being in the middle of them. They just weren’t thinking about the same things, didn’t have the same priorities, had no idea how lucky they were.

  You could tell pretty much without exception when the people checking you out had been Defenders: they were a certain age, within a decade or two of us, and they looked both more empathetic and more assessing. They were probably wondering how long we’d been on the Wall, how long we had to go. I still had my arm in a sling and I was wearing my medal and I could see them noticing both of those things. The look in their eyes had some pride in it, pride for you and a little bit for themselves, too; some sympathy (it was easy to see them thinking, thank God I don’t have to do that again, I wonder how long the poor sods have to go). Sometimes I thought I caught them thinking: when I was on the Wall, I used to tell myself I’d never forget how horrible it is to be cold and tired and frightened and have months more of the feeling to go, and I promise I’ll remember this moment, and if I ever get off the Wall and remember this moment I promise I’ll never again take for granted being comfortable and safe and somewhere other than here. I didn’t blame them for it, I’d had the same thought many times myself. I hoped more than anything to get to a point in my life when I was like them – when I had the luxury and privilege of having been away from the Wall for so long that I needed external prompts to be reminded of it. When the Wall would be in the past, not the present and the future.

  The train to the east was old and slow. I liked it, the creakiness and old-fashionedness of it; the kind of train where people were going home with shopping bags, but had brought their own packed snacks for the trip rather than buying anything expensive in the big city. Hifa and I didn’t talk much. I watched London go past out the window and then blur into suburb and exurb, those random tower blocks which spread on the outskirts of the city, and then fields and country. I’m a city boy and the country always seems so empty, so underpopulated; even now when we grow all our own food and there’s more said about farming and food than ever before, you never actually see any people working on the land. Drones and bots, yes, people, no.

  We arrived at the end of the main line and went to the station cafe to wait for the train to the coast. We drank heavily stewed tea and ate dry biscuits which were borderline inedible until you dunked them. I felt sad, suddenly and unexpectedly, and couldn’t tell why, then realised I was having a near-memory of Mary, bringing her hot drinks to us twice a shift. I didn’t want to say that to Hifa so I just sat there with the feelings for a moment, then looked over at her and could see she was doing something similar, sitting there staring down into her tea.

  The train to the coast was even racketier and smaller and older than the last one, no more than two carriages long. The fields were big and dominated by huge single crops, most of which I didn’t recognise, apart from the loud yellow of rapeseed. The light began to change as we got nearer the coast, and before long I could smell the sea. The train made frequent stops and was almost empty when it began to slow down and Hifa said, ‘We’re here.’ She swung her rucksack down off the space above her seat. Hifa was not looking at all like herself, as if she had shrunk slightly. I recognised the symptoms of familial dread.

  At the end of the platform, a woman with a turban wrapped complicatedly around her head and two different brightly coloured shawls was standing waiting for us, leaning on a stick. She had the same caramelly skin tone as Hifa but was taller and more operatic, both in how she dressed and how she acted: she projected drama. To the side of her and one pace behind was standing a woman instantly recognisable as Help.

  ‘Darling!’ she said as soon as she saw us. ‘Darling! Let me look at you.’ Hifa stood and submitted to this. Her mother reached out and touched her face and turned it slightly from side to side. She held her fingers over the place on the top of her head where Hifa had had stitches. She took a step backwards and looked at Hifa up and down. She tilted her own head.

  ‘As beautiful as ever,’ she said. She came over and stood in front of me. She held the cane out behind her and the Help took it. Then she held out both of her hands in front of her. I felt I had no choice except to do the same. She took my hands and held them. We still hadn’t spoken. She did the same up-anddown thing she had done with her daughter, then let go of my hands, and without touching me held her fingers over the place where I’d been wounded. Then she stepped back and turned to Hifa.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I understand.’ And to both of us: ‘Welcome!’

  Hifa’s mother lived in a cottage ten minutes’ walk from the train station. The little house stood in a row of similar properties just outside the coastal village. It was small and pretty on the outside, painted white, with a wooden gate, a trellis of flowers on the front wall and a small garden. The house would once have had a view of the sea, but that was now blocked by the Wall. The inside was decorated with African art and bright paintings by Hifa’s mother: she had been an art teacher but retired early and was now an artist. Her speciality was painting the spirit animals of her family and friends, and she said that she was looking forward to painting mine, once she had worked out what it was.

  Hifa’s mother’s big news was about her domestic arrangements.

  ‘I know it’s terrible to have Help,’ she said, once we had got to the cottage and she had sent the Help to the shops in search of missing dinner ingredients. ‘If you had said when I was younger that I would have Help, not that it existed in those days, but had explained to me what it is and that I would one day be making use of it, I would not have believed you. Another human being at one’s beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one’s personal property … though of course they are technically the property of the state, there are all sorts of monitorings and safeguards, it isn’t at all like such arrangements in the benighted past, it is a form of providing welfare and shelter and refuge to the wretched of the world – but no, still, I would not have believed you. It is a falling away, a lessening of one’s own humanity. A decline in one’s own standards. But what could I do? I had you coming, I am not getting any younger, please don’t say anything polite’ – this was addressed to me, though the truth is I hadn’t been going to say anything in the first place – ‘we both know it’s true. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, and if we’re being completely honest the spirit isn’t always willing
either. Age is a terrible thing, a terrible opponent. People of your time in life don’t understand this but you come to find it to be true, perhaps the only thing which is true for all humans everywhere, the terribleness of age. Our deepest piece of common humanity.’

  I suddenly got it. Hifa’s mother was one of those people who like life to be all about them. With the Change, that is a harder belief to sustain; it takes much more effort to think that life is about you when the whole of human life has turned upside down, when everything has been irrevocably changed for everyone. You can do it, of course you can, because people can do anything with their minds and their sense of themselves, but it takes work and only certain kinds of unusually self-centred people can do it. They want to be the focus of all the drama and pity and all the stories. I could tell that she didn’t like it that younger people are universally agreed to have had a worse deal than her generation. I understood Hifa’s dread and found myself reaching for her hand. Hifa took mine, limply, reluctantly. I was about to find out why.