‘Everyone finds the first day hard. The second is easier. The third easier still. Eventually you get the measure of it.’
He turned to me again.
‘This is my fourth tour on the Wall. No Other has ever got over the Wall on my duty. I’ve never lost a company member. I don’t intend those things to change.’ He looked at me again to make sure I got the point, then nodded and marched off towards Hifa at the end of our section of Wall.
I thought: he’s an impressive man, our Captain. He’s a leader. Four turns on the Wall: that meant he had done three supplementary tours of duty, each one of which earned perks and privileges for himself and his family. Better house, better food, better schools for his children. They say this is one of the ways people rise up and become members of the elite. So, a family man. A brave man, a family man, a leader, an athlete. A person with a sense of duty and responsibility. A good man to follow into battle. If you had asked me right then and there what was the least likely thing I could think of about the Captain, it would be that he was also, above and beyond any other thing, the biggest fucking liar I’ve ever met.
4
I took so long over my power bar and my chat with the Captain that the ninety minutes until lunch was actually only eighty minutes. I started to get the hang of the fact that looking at the time made it pass by more slowly. Another plane went past, heading in the other direction this time – more members of the elite, coming and going, talking their talk. Oh how wonderful it would be to be up in the air … The wind rose, not to gale force but to something a little stronger than a breeze, and the sea swell was both rolling and choppy. The sky cleared and I could now see four watchtowers: visibility twelve kilometres. I began to understand just how hard it could be to see what was in the water, even on a clear day, when the wind and waves and sun did not cooperate.
The drill at lunch varies from watchtower to watchtower. At Ilfracombe 4 the routine is that people are allowed to gather together for ten minutes with the two defenders in the nearest posts. The furthest anyone is from their post is two hundred metres; the biggest gap between a group having lunch is six hundred metres. Safe enough to have a gap of that size for ten minutes twice a day. You’d have thought. At three minutes to twelve, I saw Hifa at post 14 put down the grenade launcher and take something out of his or her rucksack, then pick up the weapon again and begin walking towards me. I turned and looked the other way and the red-haired woman from post 10 was heading towards me as well.
They arrived at the same time and both of them sat down on the bench without speaking. They put down their weapons and started opening their packed lunches. The woman pulled back the hood of her outer coat, and I could see some strands of red hair escaping from underneath her beanie. She looked less irritable than she had earlier in the day. Not a morning person. Hifa was still entirely wrapped up, and all I could see was the eyes and the tip of the nose. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have said it was impossible to eat a meal without taking off your balaclava, but that was clearly what was about to happen.
I got my food out too and sat down at the end of the bench.
‘So how’s it going, new meat?’ asked the woman.
‘Kavanagh,’ I said, sticking out my hand. Both of us still had gloves on. She gave it a quick firm shake.
‘Simpson,’ she said. ‘Or Shoona.’
‘Shoona. It’s OK. The Captain caught me staring at my power bar.’
‘Yeah, he does that. Catches people. That right, Hif?’
Hifa grunted, mouth full.
‘Wouldn’t you rather have lunch with …?’ I said, and gestured towards the man she’d been sitting next to at breakfast. He was in the next group of three, four hundred metres away. Shoona shrugged.
‘You know what they say. For better, for worse, but never for lunch.’
Hifa snorted a laugh.
‘You’re Breeders?’
This time both of them laughed.
‘No of course we’re not fucking Breeders. Do I look like a Breeder? Don’t answer that. Cooper and I are just having sex.’
‘You like him,’ said Hifa, at some point equidistant between a statement and a question and a tease. I was sorry to hear the question, because what I wanted to ask was something else: where did they have sex? There was no privacy on the Wall. Only Breeders (i.e. people trying to be Breeders) and officers got separate accommodation. The showers?
‘Well enough,’ said Shoona. ‘More than I like this sodding sandwich, anyway.’
It was hard to disagree with that. The sandwich bread was dry and what was supposed to be a layer of cream cheese was thin-to-invisible. The food on the Wall is pretty good, on the whole; they take trouble over it because they know how important it is in a Defender’s twelve-hour shift.
‘Chewy,’ I said. For some reason that was very very funny. Both of them bent over, cackling, thumping themselves first on the legs, then on each other’s backs.
‘True,’ said Shoona, when she got her breath back. She took a long pull from her bottle of water. ‘Well, Chewy, time to get back to it. This Wall’s not gonna guard itself.’
We put our lunch stuff away and picked up our weapons and Shoona and Hifa started trudging back to their posts. Hifa got about five metres away and then turned around and said, ‘See ya, Chewy.’
Once Hifa and Shoona had got back to their posts, I let a few minutes go past before I looked at my watch. I was starting to learn. It was now twelve thirty. The good news was I had got through five and a half hours. The bad news was that I had six and a half more to go. With the sun higher in the sky, it was easier to see now, meaning that this should be a time of less risk. The Others knew that too, which meant that you couldn’t rely on it. If everyone knows it’s a time of low risk, maybe that’s a good moment to try something. So low risk is high risk. But not vice versa.
Mornings on the Wall, dawn and dusk and night, were times for poetry. Skyconcretewaterwind. Afternoons were for prose. Ten thousand kilometres of Wall. A Defender for every two hundred metres: fifty thousand Defenders on duty at any time. Another fifty thousand on the other shift, so a hundred thousand on duty, day in day out. Plus it’s two weeks on, two weeks off. Half of the Defenders aren’t on the Wall, they’re on leave or on training or waiting for their two weeks’ turn of duty. So two hundred thousand active Defenders at any given moment. Add support and ancillary staff, officers and administrators, add the Coast Guard and the air force and the navy, people off sick, whatever, and it’s more than three hundred thousand people involved in defending the Wall. That’s why everybody goes to the Wall, no exceptions. That’s the rule.
Except for Breeders. It’s a paradox. Because the Wall needs so many people, we need people to Breed, so that there are enough people to man the Wall. It’s on a fine edge as things currently stand, and there’s talk of the tours having to be made longer, two and a half or three years, to make up a shortfall. But people don’t want to Breed, because the world is such a horrible place. So as an incentive to get people to leave the Wall, if you reproduce, you can leave. You Breed to leave the Wall. Some people say that this isn’t fair to the children, who are born into a world where they have to do time on the Wall in their turn. Maybe they won’t, though. Maybe all the Others will have died off by then and we won’t need the Wall. Who knows? And besides, the children can always Breed in their turn, and get off the Wall that way. Prolonging the life of our species too, as a side effect. Breed to Leave, that’s the slogan.
I should say that people don’t despise or look down on Breeders. They just think they’re a bit weird. It’s not so much, that’s wrong, it’s more, why would you? Why don’t people want to Breed? It’s an idea that caught on after the Change: that we shouldn’t want to bring children into the world. We broke the world and have no right to keep populating it. We can’t feed and look after all the humans there already are, here and now; the humans who are here and now, most of them, are starving and drowning, dying and desperate; so how dare we
make more of them? They aren’t starving and drowning here, in this country, but they are almost everywhere else; so how dare we make more humans to come into this world? There are lots of different answers to that. Nobody can predict the future; that’s one answer. God tells us to; that’s an answer which works for some. Maybe the best answer, though, or maybe I’m just talking about the one that makes the most sense to me, is just, because. Because; the best/worst answer to most human questions. Why are we here? Because.
Back to the prose. Most Defenders stand on the Wall because that’s where the manpower is needed, but the Wall isn’t the only form of border and coastal protection. The Flight scans the seas for Others, locates them, sometimes ‘takes them out’ then and there. It’s funny, only Defenders on the Wall talk about ‘killing’ Others: we’re the ones who do it face to face, and we’re the only ones who don’t use euphemisms for it. The Flight consists of some people in planes and many more people operating drones. Sometimes the Flight marks their location for the Guards, full name Coast Guards but everyone calls them Guards, who use ships of two main kinds, medium-range and short-range. They patrol the coast and the seas and their job is to sink the Others’ boats. The Defenders are there for the rest of the Others: the ones who get through, which is a significant number, because there is a lot of sky and sea to watch, and because ten thousand kilometres of coast is a lot of coast. They come in rowing boats and rubber dinghies, on inflatable tubes, in groups and in swarms and in couples, in threes, in singles; the smaller the number, often, the harder to detect. They are clever, they are desperate, they are ruthless, they are fighting for their lives, so all of those things had to be true for us as well. We had to be clever and desperate and ruthless and fight for our lives, only more so, or we would switch places. I didn’t want to die fighting on the Wall, but if it came to it, I would rather that than be put to sea. One in, one out: for every Other who got over the Wall, one Defender would be put to sea. A tribunal of our fellow Defenders would convene and decide who was most responsible, and those people, in that order of responsibility, would be put in a boat that same day. If five Others got over the Wall, five of us would be put to sea. It was easy to imagine being those people. Your old comrades pointing guns at you while you pushed your boat out into the water, the only feeling colder and lonelier and more final than being on the Wall.
Members of the Flight and the Guard don’t get put to sea, so people would rather do that than be on the Wall. As a result it’s much harder to get in. To get into the Flight you have to pass lots of biomechanical tests. (I wear glasses so I didn’t even bother applying. I learnt afterwards that was a mistake, because the Flight has lots of ground staff and support staff and I could have got a job there.) To get into the Guard it helps to have family connections with boats and the sea. I didn’t bother applying for that either, because I’ve hardly ever been on a boat and I was worried I’d get seasick. No, it was the Wall for me. It was always going to be the Wall.
That first afternoon went by slowly. Planes passed overhead a few times; once, about two o’clock, I saw a boat on the horizon, got excited and called it in, but I was shouted down by my fellow Defenders, who said it was a Guard ship. They said they could tell by the shape. After Yos finished calling me an idiot over the communicator, Sarge came on and told me I would soon be able to recognise Guard ships on sight and that it was better to call in something I didn’t know about than keep quiet and risk something worse. I felt better after that. At three, I had another power bar, this time made of savoury ingredients, chickpeas I think and maybe sesame and carrot. It wasn’t especially nice but I was glad of it, and more glad of Mary’s second visit on her bike with her flask of hot liquid, coffee this time.
‘Nearly there,’ she said, as she pedalled off. But that wasn’t true, and the last few hours went by just as heavily as the rest of the day. It began to get dark at around five. The day had clouded over. It was one of those evenings which seem not so much a transition from day to night as from light grey to thicker grey to darker grey to darker still, the light fading by increments, until dark wins. Lights came on automatically, a hundred metres apart on the Wall. The lamps threw a narrow patch of blazing illumination which only made the dark around more intense. Some sections of the Wall were said to disable their lights and use night-vision instead; I could see why. There was no moon. I suddenly realised just how hard it would be to see Others coming at night, if the weather and light conditions were at all difficult. I also realised why they always start you on the Wall on a day shift: so you’ve had a chance to get used to a twelve-hour stint of duty before you have to do one when it really matters, at night, when the Others come.
For the first time that day, I grew anxious, not about fatigue or cold or whether I would get through it, but about the Others. It was not difficult to imagine a black-clad figure hopping silently over the Wall, knife in its hand, murder in its eyes, nothing to lose. No warning; no mercy. I tried to look straight ahead and then move my head from side to side, using my peripheral vision, the way we had been trained to do. All I could think of was how easy it would be for the Others if they attacked now.
‘Different at night, isn’t it?’ said a voice into my ear. I looked across and could see Hifa looking towards me. I raised an arm in acknowledgement.
‘You get used to it,’ Hifa added. ‘Sort of.’
The wind dropped at dusk, and the swell settled down. I could hear a motorboat in the distance. One of ours, I assumed – no Others would mount an assault in something so noisy. It would be a Guard patrol going home after dark. I could hear a plane far overhead too; that would be the Flight, also on their way home. The wind and the waves were quieter now, but I was more aware of them, because they were less constant. I started to think I could hear patterns in the sound, whispering or singing or voices muttering not-quite-words. An image began to run through my mind, not quite a hallucination or a waking dream, but like a guided fantasy, like the kind of story you tell yourself in the liminal in-between consciousness just as you’re falling asleep or just after you’ve woken up. The noises, the near-voices, were being made by a choir, hooded and robed in black, chanting in a ritual, appeasing spirits or gods or demons or the ancestors. There were two rows of them and their faces were in shadow, and maybe they themselves didn’t know the meaning of what they were chanting. Maybe it was a dirge, a funeral dirge. They were monks or nuns or a mixture of the two. They were chanting because they wanted something to happen, or not to. The chanting was a lament or a prayer.
‘Here they come,’ said the Sergeant over the communicator. I was so woozy, so out of it, that my first thought was that the black-robed figures were coming, had leapt out of my imagination and were here on the Wall with us. The adrenaline helped me snap out of it: he meant, the night shift was coming. The next shift of our company had come out of the watchtower and were clumping down the ramparts towards us. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my mood flip so abruptly and completely. Relief broke over me like a great wave. Relief is maybe the purest form of happiness there is; in that moment, anyway, I’d have said so. I’d never been happier; I’d never been more purely and ecstatically in the present. Cold? What cold? Here comes the next shift! Slowly, admittedly, very slowly, heads down, trudging and grumbling, the same way we had twelve hours ago. Take your time, guys, I thought, take it as slow as you like, as long as you keep coming.
There was no ceremony and not much small talk at the moment of handover. The Defender I’d seen twelve hours before arrived at my post. He was chewing gum. He did not speak but instead flicked his head up at me in a combination of greeting and dismissal. I already had my pack on and my rifle slung over my shoulder. I flicked my head back at him and started the walk back to the watchtower and the barracks. I realised that I had stiffened up with the cold and immobility. My legs hurt from standing. The wind, which had got up again, was directly in my face. It felt like it didn’t matter. The shift was over. That was the only thing that counted.
‘You fell asleep,’ he said. ‘Daft bugger, you might have been here all night,’ his tone kinder than his words. The TV was on but the room was empty; it was a chat show with the sound turned right down. He laughed. ‘The first one is a long one. Bedtime.’
I followed him through to the barracks bedroom. There were different generations of design at different points along the Wall; some watchtowers had individual bedrooms. This design, with everyone in one big room, was from a period when the theory was that Defenders should share things, so that they understand they’re all in it together. My shift was in bed or getting ready for it, the other shift’s beds were empty. It was the same as when I’d arrived only the day before, though that fact – that it was only twenty-four hours since I had walked into this room – made no sense. It felt more like twenty-four years. I washed, stripped off my day clothes, then put on my night clothes, starting with a thermal inner layer. The lights went out.
The Wall Page 3
