The Wall

by John Lanchester

  ‘Let’s go over the hill and see if there’s somewhere better,’ said Cooper.

  ‘Oh come on,’ said Mary. ‘I’m knackered. I want my dinner.’

  ‘That pub is out there somewhere,’ Cooper said. ‘If we had our communicators …’

  ‘We all agreed,’ said Hifa and I together.

  ‘OK, fine, we agreed. And now we’re lost.’

  ‘We aren’t lost, we just aren’t sure where we are. There’s a difference,’ said Cooper.

  ‘I think I remember this place from when we were talking about it. I think it’s just up and over. It could be a kilometre, not much more,’ said Shoona. In that mysterious way of group dynamics, her opinion decided the matter. Maybe her words carried extra weight because she was more likely to argue with Cooper than to go along with him, so there was no sense of a couple ganging up or siding together. We finished our water, picked up our packs. The Help, who had been standing silently a few metres away, did the same thing.

  That was the other big, daring, innovative thing we had done for this trip: we had decided to bring Help. We had borrowed them from the ancillary services support section of the Defenders. Help is unaffordable for most ordinary people, but if you’re camping, there’s no extra food or shelter that the Help isn’t carrying for itself, so you basically get the Help for free. It was me who worked this out and me who suggested it and I won’t pretend not to be impressed by myself. This meant that instead of carrying exceptionally heavy, unwieldy rucksacks with all our food and gear in them, we were carrying much smaller, lighter, fun-sized holiday packs. We could do whatever we wanted in the day and our campsite would be shipshape when we got back, fire lit, dinner cooking, clothes washed. It would be a taste of what it’s like to be rich. I had thought it might be awkward for us, from the human point of view, getting used to Help when we weren’t the kind of people who had it in our private lives. But it was interesting how little adjustment it took. The Help were a man and a woman, a couple I think, from their familiarity with each other and the way they hardly spoke. I didn’t ask them their story and they didn’t offer to tell it, which was perfect too. He did the cooking and she did everything else.

  On the first day, Cooper’s navigation turned out to be correct. We carried on the track we’d been taking up the hill, the sunlight at our back so the whole landscape looked blessed, flooded with gold. When we got to the top, the view opened out again: a lake stretched out in front of us, with mountains surrounding it on all sides: right in the middle of the lake a paddle boat was puffing out steam. There was a moment like one of those nineteenth-century paintings of a Romantic dude having conquered a peak and surveying the world laid out beneath him, except the painting would have some additional details: six scruffy Defenders, two Help, and also the Defenders were all doing a little celebratory dance because they’d found the pub they were looking for. It was about half a kilometre down the other side of the hill, with a small, perfectly sited campground sharing the same view we’d had from the top.

  ‘Result,’ said Cooper, pleased with himself. We left our bags and went into the pub while the Help set up our camp. Yes, I thought – this must be what it’s like to be in the elite. To have things done for you. To be on the inside. The pub was an old-time fantasy of an English inn, with saloon and lounge and snug, wood panels, cosy: you could imagine arriving here on a winter night and immediately feeling safe and warm. The landlord was, we could tell after about ten seconds, a former Defender who gave special treatment to people doing their time on the Wall. The first set of pints was on the house. We had one more round, then went back out to our tents, where the Help had begun cooking over the campsite fire. It was now dark, but a deep blue moonlit dark, the kind Defenders like. Fire, woodsmoke, mutton: everything was perfect. The Wall felt a very long way off.

  The next morning I woke early, not long after first light. I got out of the tent to stretch the sleep out of me and look for coffee. I wasn’t wearing my glasses so things were blurry, and I had a sudden hallucination: a figure in white, backlit by the rising sun, slowly dancing, aflame with light. I thought: an archangel! I thought: I’m going mad! I thought: sweet baby Jesus, that’s Hughes doing tai chi. He didn’t stop or turn to look at me but kept at his practice. It was impressive and also ridiculous – impressive in part because he must have known it looked ridiculous, but that wasn’t stopping him or slowing him down. Was he good at it? I think maybe he was. It looked rhythmical enough and he didn’t fall over.

  The Help wasn’t up yet but Hughes had brewed up a pot of coffee on a stove and I took some. I sat on one of the camp stools and looked out at the view. I got on well with Hughes, and the odd thing, apart from the fact that we were physically a little alike, was that he had grown up near me, a town about fifteen miles away. It turned out we knew people who’d been to school with each other. At handover once, Sarge shouted at Hughes for being in the wrong place, then when he saw who it was apologised, or sort-of apologised. His exact words were ‘Sorry, got the wrong tall thin streak of piss.’

  By the time I finished a mug of coffee Hughes had finished doing his exercises.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I know it looks stupid.’

  ‘No …’ I started to say. Then I shrugged. ‘Just different. From, you know, fix bayonet, point automatic weapon, pull trigger.’

  ‘I can’t do it on the Wall, people would take the mickey. I’d never hear the end of it.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that.’

  ‘Also you’re supposed to do it outdoors and most of the time it’s too fucking cold.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that too.’

  ‘My teacher would say I should just ignore it. The cold and the teasing. I can’t, though.’

  ‘What is he, some ninety-year-old Chinese dude with whiskers, who’s been doing martial arts so long he can, like, fly?’

  ‘No, he’s called Graham, about thirty-five, from Wolverhampton. But he does know his tai chi.’

  ‘You planning to go back there?’

  ‘No. I’m going to go to college.’ He reached down into a bag and pulled out a book, a paperback copy of Wordsworth’s selected poems. ‘I want to study literature. I might stay on at uni and teach if I can make a go of it.’

  I looked at Hughes. The bulky, looming, whiskery figure I usually met trudging down the Wall in twilight, muttering curses under his breath and glaring at me and carrying an automatic weapon in his right hand rather than slung over his shoulder – that person was a skinny, gentle intellectual who did meditative martial arts and read Romantic poetry and wanted to be an academic.

  ‘You?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and found, to my surprise, that the thought was true. I used to have secret ideas about what I wanted to do: secret in the strong sense that I had never told anyone. I wanted to get away from home (that part was no secret), to get as much education as I could, to get a job where I made lots of money, and to become a member of the elite. All this was too vague to count as a plan. I didn’t know anyone who had done it; I didn’t know the detail of how to do it; but I knew that it could be done. Elites have to let in some outsiders, that is a basic rule of how they work. It’s how they renew themselves and how they spread just enough of the benefits around to stop disorder rising from below. Also: elites need new blood because it’s the newly arrived members of the elite who know how the rest of the population are thinking, right now. Not in general terms, but right in this specific historical moment. To find that stuff out, you have to let some of them in. Somebody like me, a bright ambitious provincial boy.

  This was secret, dark, private. I knew enough to know that this was not a good thing to want, and not a good way to be: that at the same time I was in the middle of my friends and peers and colleagues, my fellow Defenders, I was privately scheming to get away from them, to become somebody else. I was in effect saying that I was better than them – not saying it out loud, but doing something much worse, saying it in my heart. My deepest thought
was: I’m not like you. You don’t know me.

  And yet, to my surprise, I found that this secret idea of mine, about who I really was, seemed to be wearing off. The more time I spent with them, the more I realised I was more like the other Defenders than I was unlike them. At first I looked at those planes flying overhead and I longed, physically ached, to be up there looking down rather than down here looking up. To see the world spread out below, to be up there in the blue, to be so far up above you could no longer see people – that was it. To go up above people, to be away from ordinariness, to live in the pure inhuman element of height and air. I still felt the appeal of that, the thrill of it. To be up there rather than down here … but the problem was, that was the same as wishing to be above normal people, not one of them. To say, I’m more like those people up in the plane than I’m like Sarge and Yos and Mary and Cooper and Shoona and Hughes and Hifa and even my parents. To be one of them and not one of us. But I was realising that maybe I didn’t want to be one of them; maybe I liked us more than I liked them. Though those planes still looked very beautiful, and it must be amazing to be that far up, to be moving that quickly, to be able to look down as you fly …

  ‘Yeah, I don’t know. College. Then, I don’t know.’

  ‘No point pretending to know when you really don’t.’

  ‘No.’

  Mary was the next one up. She came out of the girls’ tent yawning and stretching, her curly hair seeming to stretch too, up and out. She came over and helped herself to coffee – she was one of those temperamentally cheerful people who are hilariously moody in the morning until they’ve had some caffeine. After she finished her cup she was ready to talk.

  ‘I wonder what they’re planning to cook tonight,’ she said. Although one of the reasons we had Help was so that we didn’t have to cook, cooking was Mary’s hobby and chief interest as well as her job: it was just her favourite thing to do. No need to ask her what her plans were for life after the Wall. It was her favourite topic of conversation, a running reverie about what she’d do once she had the money to open her own place. (That part, the bit where she put together the money, was a little vague. But she had faith.) When she could cook whatever she wanted, as long as it was in season. She loved to talk about it.

  ‘The produce you could get before the Change,’ she said. ‘Everything, all the time. Tomatoes and fruits, hams from you name it, meat whenever you liked, all of it all the year around. Oils, spices, herbs all year round, anything you wanted from anywhere at any time. I read those old books, I think, it must have been too easy, you know? You could just cook anything. Whenever. It just makes you think, how did people know what to want? I mean, if it’s anything you like, any time, it’s like science fiction, where they have a machine that just makes stuff. It does your head in. Press a button, and it’s roast beef, pheasant mole, chickpea fritters in yoghurt dressing, aioli, prawn curry, mango soufflé, duck blood stir fry, consommé, you know, where does it all end? I mean, the idea is amazing, everything all the time, I get it, and yet, it’s weird and wrong too. Now, there’s less, but maybe, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it’s better, that would be mad, obviously it’s not better, but you have to work with what you’ve got, you know, and even if it is, you know, turnips, turnips, fucking turnips yet again, at least you know you’re working with turnips because that’s what came out of the ground and that’s what you’ve got to cook and that’s what you’ve got to make interesting, because there’s no choice, you know? And then it’s cabbages or celeriac or swedes or beetroot or berries, it is whatever it is that comes out of the ground and that’s what’s amazing and beautiful about it, you know, that’s what’s interesting, not just going to the shops and being able to buy, you know, stuff that just got off a plane from who knows where.’

  She found it hard to leave the Help to get on with it, and spent the first few days hovering over the cook and making suggestions which, to judge from his body language, he didn’t entirely appreciate. A proud man, you could see that. And yet by the end of the week they were cooking together, despite Shoona telling her she was an idiot and the whole point of the holiday was not to be doing the very exact same thing she spent all her time doing when she was on the Wall. Mary’s reply: ‘But I want to.’ There’s never any answer to that.

  Another question pressed on me while we were on holiday. It was: when did Cooper and Shoona have sex? This was a mystery at barracks, and even more so here. We had asked them if they wanted a tent of their own – well, I say we, it was Hifa asking Shoona in private – and they had said no. Fine, but when and where did they do it? It must have involved sneaking off outdoors, or round the back of buildings, or something. They never made any public gestures of affection and were in no obvious sense a couple, except they were.

  My own plans in that direction came to nothing. I tried a couple of times to go off for walks with Hifa, but one of the problems with camping, it turned out, was that there was almost no privacy. Every time I made a sneaky suggestion – fancy a trip to the pub? fancy seeing what’s over that hill? fancy a walk down to the nearest village? fancy borrowing a couple of rods from the landlord and going to try some fishing? – she would either immediately ask the others if they wanted to come too, or they would see us heading off and join us without asking, as if everyone had automatic permission to join in anything anyone else was doing. I felt pathetic, as if I’d gone back to school and wasn’t all that far away from the stage of sexual development where boys’ way of showing girls that they like them is to go up to them and pull their hair and then run to the other end of the room.

  I still often think of that week. Maybe that’s in part because of what happened afterwards. But at least some of it is because it was a magical seven days. I can’t say it was the happiest time I spent on the Wall, because the whole point is that we weren’t on the Wall, we were on holiday; but it was the best time I ever spent with my new Wall family. We walked, talked, ate, read. Drank a fair bit but never so that we were too hungover to enjoy the day after. The landlord let us use the bathrooms of the pub; he even let us wash and shower there. We got to know each other differently. Being a Defender was a personality people put on when they went to the Wall. Their non-Wall self was closer to their real self, maybe. Or maybe not, I now think, maybe there isn’t a real self, just different versions of us we wear in different settings and with different people. The me who deals with my parents is not the me who talks to Hifa and that is not the me who takes orders from the Captain and that is not the me I am inside myself during a shift on the Wall, counting down the minutes to the end of the twelve hours.

  On the last evening I finally managed to get Hifa to go off on her own with me, by sidling up to her, raising my eyebrows and asking, ‘Walk?’ And just like that we set off down the hill from our camp. We walked down and around a col, then up to the top of a long valley and stood looking back down at the view. We were across the far side of the bowl of hills from where we were camping and we could just see the pub. There was a final-night feeling, that back-to-school, back-to-reality vibe which you always get in the moments before you set off home at the end of a successful holiday. I thought: this is my moment to say something. Or maybe, don’t say anything, just make my move? Hifa was panting slightly from the exertion of walking the last stretch uphill, her hair pulled back by her knitted cap, her skin flushed, her lips full and pink.

  ‘When I grow up I’m going to be rich enough to have Help,’ Hifa said, not forcefully but as if she was daydreaming. And just like that I felt my moment go. She had said something which I’d been thinking, but felt was too private to say. Wanting to have Help was on my secret wish list, or had been, and this experience did nothing to change that. If anything it made it seem more desirable. I had thought that Help was a status symbol, a technique for signalling that you’re rich. But the thing I learnt that week was how much nicer life could be if you had somebody else to do all the boring and difficult bits for you. Having Help was like having a life upg
rade. I also realised this was one of the differences between me and Hifa. Because she didn’t think she’d ever be rich enough to have Help, she felt free to talk about it, disguised as a joke. Because I thought I would one day be rich enough, because my whole sense of myself was that I was going to be the kind of person who was rich enough, I’d never make a joke about it. That would be giving away real information about who I was and what I wanted.

  ‘Time to go back, the sun’s about to go down,’ she said, turning from the view. I could lunge? No, too late, too desperate. I had missed my chance. I also thought, wow, it’s funny how I don’t really know anything about you.

  The last morning came: back to reality. We packed, and headed off to the train station to make the trip to the Wall. Our packs, which had felt light on the way to the holiday, were heavy as we set out on the return journey. We’d spent the whole week talking and arguing and joshing, but we were quiet on the train. I was still brooding on the issue of Help when we said goodbye at the big terminus in London. There was something I’d been thinking about that week. I’d never really thought about Help before, either having it or being it, and the linked question of what their lives had been like before and after the Change, and the journeys they had made to get here, and how they had got over the Wall, and what it had been like to be among the Others and now to be Help. I could just about imagine burning sand, a huge yellow sun close overhead, salt water stinging in cuts, the weak being left behind, the bitter tastes of exile and loss, the longing for safety, the incandescent desperation and grief driving you onwards … no, I couldn’t really imagine. And yet here they were.

  I don’t know why the thing I wanted to know felt like an awkward question, but it did, and I’d been storing up my nerve to ask. At the station, the Help were leaving us to go to their next assignment. As we Defenders had agreed, I took the cook aside for a moment to thank him and slip him an envelope with a tip for him and his partner – you aren’t supposed to do that, but we thought it was the right thing. He took it with an inclination of his head. The only time I’d seen him smile, or even change expression, was on the last couple of days of the holiday, when he was cooking with Mary. This was my last chance. The station was busy and crowded, which created a sense of intimacy around our talk: we couldn’t be overheard.