The Wall

by John Lanchester

  ‘I have something I wanted to ask,’ I said. The Help was a thin man, economical in movement, and whenever you spoke to him he stayed impassive, his hands by his sides. ‘What happened to the world, we here have a name for it, we call it the Change. But what I’ve been wondering is what other people call it, if there’s a word for the same thing, or if it’s just something that happened. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but is there a word for the Change, what we call the Change, in your language?’

  ‘Coo-ee-shee-a,’ I thought he said. I didn’t know if I’d heard that correctly and had no idea what it meant, but there was something in his eyes that stopped me from asking more. He picked up his bag and he walked off with his partner, not saying goodbye and not looking back.

  We went to the safe deposit office and picked up the precious cargo we’d left there before heading north: our communicators. Hifa kissed hers before turning it on and said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

  I wanted to look at my communicator in private. I put it in my pocket and waited until the others had started off for our train back to the Wall. The station was still frantic, mainly with commuters rushing home: it was one of those moments when you remember just how much life there is away from yours, away from being a Defender. All these people had homes, pay packets, families, hobbies, taxes to pay, things on their mind, TV series to catch up with, heating bills, gardens to plant. I had none of those things; maybe one day I would. At the moment I didn’t particularly want them. It was odd: I wanted to get off the Wall, I wanted this time to be over, yet when I tried to think hard about what would be next, there was a blank.

  I switched on my communicator. There were lots of messages but before I looked at them I went onto the net to look something up: coo-ee-shee-a. I didn’t get it right first time because I spelt it wrong, but on the third attempt I found what I was looking for. Kuishia is a Swahili word. It means ‘the ending’.

  10

  When we went back to the Wall it wasn’t strictly ‘back’ but to a new location on the east coast. Remember, two weeks on the Wall, two weeks off, of which the first week is holiday and the second week is (usually) training. This was a training section. Defenders looked forward to these. Basic training was generally felt to be hell – that was the whole point of it, to toughen you up, get you used to all the new norms of the Wall, break you down and build you up again as a Defender. Once you were on the Wall, though, training weeks were, relatively speaking, fun. For a start, every week you spent training was one less week on the Wall. You were in a new place, not your usual watchtower. Also, training meant you were doing new things – no point training at the stuff you can already do.

  We were sent to an early section of the Wall on a river estuary. Most of the old riverscapes have gone since the Change – it’s another thing we see only in pictures. Here, though, accidents of topography mean it still looks more or less the same as it does in old photos. There are sloping riverbanks, trees overhanging the water, a gentle curve of slow-moving water and greenery. This was one of the very first bits of the Wall to be built, and it was never used. The reason: as the Change progressed, engineers realised that the Wall needed to start further out, so the river mouth was concreted over and the direction of the Wall had been reshaped. The result was a section of the Wall built to the usual specs, but not in active use. A perfect spot for training. Also, because this wasn’t the Wall proper, there was Help. Kit-cleaning and barracks maintenance was done by them. Chores and shitwork? Not on this watch! Now that right there was a little holiday in itself. Mary and the rest of her crew were especially jolly, because they had nothing to do: the Help did most of the cooking. They just sat around all day watching TV and playing games on their communicators. It would have been more annoying if they hadn’t been so openly gleeful about it that they were hard to resent.

  ‘This is a defend–attack exercise,’ said the Captain, the morning after we got to the watchtower. We were sitting in the barracks main room, which was the same as our own main room, except here you could see trees through the window – which made it feel very different. ‘We have a five-kilometre section of Wall to defend for three days and three nights. Note that that’s two K more than our usual distance. We’ll be stretched. Each Defender will be guarding three hundred and thirty metres of Wall, not two hundred. Trust me: it’s harder. Much harder. The other squad will be attacking at some point over the next three days. Maybe more than once. I don’t know anything about them, who they are or where they’re from or what their numbers are. I’m guessing they’re the same size unit as us, but I don’t know that and we can’t act on that assumption. We have to treat them exactly the same way we would treat Others. Except,’ he gave one of his rare, startling smiles, ‘with blanks instead of live ammo. You have a detector on your jacket. If it flashes, you’re wounded but can keep fighting, if the light turns solid, you’re dead. There are assessors to watch the fight. White armbands. If they tell you you’re dead, you’re dead. Don’t mess with them, they have the power to give you extra time on the Wall. They film the fight with static and head cams too, and the ruling about who’s dead and who’s got through is made by combining what the assessors say with what they see on the footage. Any questions?’

  We shuffled about a bit. Sarge eventually said, ‘Tell them about the fun part, sir.’

  The Captain actually laughed. It was clear he loved this kind of training – loved being active and doing things, as opposed to waiting for something to happen and being permanently on guard. He was still smiling.

  ‘Yes – the fun part. After our three days we have a day to swap locations with the other squad, and then to make our own plans. Then, we’re the attackers.’ I noticed he didn’t say, we’re the Others. I was glad of it. The words would have seemed wrong; would have triggered a superstitious twinge. Nonetheless, it’s what he meant, and was obviously what he was most looking forward to. The Captain, who had been an Other, loved the idea of playing at being an Other again, and play-acting at doing the thing he had once done for real.

  ‘We’re going to make their lives hell, for three days, and some of us are going to get over the Wall. I’ve done this exercise a number of times and I’ve never failed to get some of my squad over, and this time will be no exception. Think about it when you’re on duty and we’ll discuss and make plans on the turnover day. We’re going to get over the Wall. You can all contribute ideas about how to do that. And I,’ he smiled again, ‘I’ve got some ideas too.’

  The session then became a general briefing about our section of the Wall, the peculiarities of its geography and topography. The headline news was that the riverbanks around here had been high and had descended to the river almost like cliffs, but cliffs which went up in stages, say five metres straight, then a small flat section, then another five metres. The steep banks were why the engineers had at one point thought the Wall could run here without much difficulty. They had turned out to be wrong, but only after they built the Wall. The result was that there was a ledge of riverbank left at the bottom of the Wall, not exactly like one of the old world’s beaches, but wide enough to stand and walk on. This made the old cut-off section of the Wall a very useful place for attackers, since there was somewhere they could perch. It was going to be an interesting week.

  I don’t think I ever saw our company in a better mood than during those seven days training. It really was like a holiday, or a holiday camp, because there was a structure, the unforgiving structure of shifts, but also the change of location, the extra freedom of having Help, and, crucially, new faces. The Defenders who’d been there longer than I had knew their opposite numbers, their shift twins, but I only really knew Hughes. The rest of the other shift I’d met solely on those drunk, civilian-frightening train journeys at the end of our deployments. It was entertaining to see how closely they paralleled us, with a new one (like me), a funny one, a grumpy one, one who needed to be told everything three times. They even had one whose hobby was whittling, just like Yo
s.

  I was nervous when I started my first turn on the training section of Wall, or fake-Wall. To mix things up we would do three days of nights and three of days with a complicated mixed swing-shift in the middle. Our section started on nights, which was both good and bad, since it meant we were getting the hardest part over straight away, but on the other hand was more of a jolt, given that we’d just had a week off. The fact that we were on a not quite real version of the Wall felt strange: I was nervous, while also knowing that deep down there wasn’t much reason to be nervous, not really, since this wasn’t like really being a Defender and so if I failed to do my job I wasn’t going to, you know, die. Also the scenery here was much more interesting, basically because there was some, as opposed to none at all except concreteskywaterwind. Here there was also river, a section of Wall curling round a far bend of river, even trees! Just visible on a clear day beyond the far section of Wall was a low range of green hills. By moonlight on that first night the landscape looked like an exotic work of composition, something a person had put together to show what you could do with blacks and whites and whatever those other moonlit colours are, not greys, but not normal colours and not black/whites either. Dawn is when you can tell a white thread from a black thread, it says in the Quran. But there are still shadow-colour differences before dawn, when there’s moonlight. Also, it wasn’t as cold as our section of Wall. I don’t know if we were lucky with the weather or if it was something to do with there being less wind in this direction, or some other trick of microclimate. For whatever reason, it was several degrees milder. Add it all together and it was much less hard. Which made it tempting not to be as vigilant as we were supposed to be.

  ‘This is the life,’ someone said over the communicator, that first night. I laughed, then after I had, wondered why it was funny. Eventually I realised: because the idea that standing for twelve hours in the dark and bitter cold with an automatic weapon, waiting for someone to attack you, with certain death the price of failure, marks you in such a way that standing for twelve hours in the dark and slightly less cold waiting for someone to pretend to attack you, by comparison, feels like fun.

  The first attack came that night, at four in the morning. It was good tactics on the part of the other squad – a bright moonlit night like this would normally be the last you’d choose for an assault. Also, we thought they’d take at least a day to look at the maps, work out the topography, make a plan. What they did, more simply and more effectively, was to cheat. They didn’t approach the Wall over the estuary: they just were suddenly there, pouring over it at well-spaced intervals, silently, like ghosts. I had about five seconds of warning – in the form of weapons fire from a kilometre away, where the middle end of our section was overrun. I looked over, just had time to think, Oh shit, and a strange kind of electric shock, not a thought but a physical sensation, like the one you get when you’re watching a horror film and something terrible starts to happen – you feel it in your back, your spine, your belly, but it’s a sensation rather than an idea.

  But it’s true what Defenders say. The expression we use is that ‘your training kicks in’. You find you have these new instincts baked into you. I clicked the safety off my A/R and looked back to my own section to scan. About a hundred metres away I saw two of them half over the Wall: one of them had made it but the other had got stuck and the first man was reaching down to pull his partner over. I lit them up, short bursts, the way I’d been trained. The first man looked over to me, then finished pulling his partner over the Wall, then turned to me with his hands in the air. I’d got them both. While I was congratulating myself on that, though, I heard a cracking sound from behind me and the red light on my chest started flashing. Again, training kicked in. I dived to the ground and rolled right towards the concrete bench at my post. Another two attackers had climbed the Wall in the other direction and were coming towards me. With part of my brain I realised that if this was going on all along our section of Wall, it must mean we were in the middle of a full-company attack, and we were outnumbered two to one: their whole company was attacking our half-company squad. With the rest of my brain I was trying to steady myself enough to aim. I got a long burst off, longer than we were supposed to fire in one go. If you shoot too many rounds at once, the muzzle of your gun travels, and you veer off the target.

  I was – partly by luck and partly by training – in a good position with decent cover, mostly hidden by the bench, while both the attackers were out in the open. They should have split up and rushed me. Maybe they froze, maybe they thought they’d got me when they came up on me from behind. Mistake. After I got off a long clip one of them raised his hands to put his gun down. The other, whose red light was blinking, jumped up and began running towards me, jinking from side to side. He was about forty metres away and closing rapidly. I was out of ammo and had to change the magazine, and was grateful for the time Sarge had caught me and bollocked me about taping them together the right way, because I had the new clip in before the attacker got to me and was raising the gun to shoot when the light on my chest went red just as I heard shots from behind me. I couldn’t believe it – but no doubt that’s what it’s like, in a real fight. When you get shot your first thought is that you can’t believe it. Ooh I’ve been shot. Ooh so this is what it’s like to be shot. Ooh this is what it’s like to be dying, dying, dead …

  Some philosopher said that death is not an event in life. Maybe. It doesn’t feel like that in a fight. It feels very much the opposite: that death, yours or your opponent’s, is not just an event in life, but the entire point of life. The culmination and meaning of the journey.

  I turned. Two of the attackers had come up behind me. A white-armband assessor was with them. I was officially dead. An eerie feeling, or mixture of feelings. I was annoyed, in the way you’re annoyed when you’re playing a game, and think you’re winning, but suddenly lose; I was a little proud, because I’d ‘killed’ three of them and it had taken six of them to ‘kill’ me, though it was that irritating kind of pride that you can’t express without sounding as if you’re boasting, and I knew without having to think about it that boasting about an event which had ended with me being ‘killed’ would quickly lead to teasing and to a new nickname like, I don’t know, Dead Boy; I was a tiny bit relieved, because the fight was over, the tiring bit of the shift was over, the worst had happened, I was done for the night.

  The two attackers who had snuck up behind me now put their heads together with the one I’d been shooting at, and began debating what to do next: declare that they had got over the Wall and stop, or run to the next section, several hundred metres away, and join in the ongoing fight there. There was gunfire, but it was sporadic; it was hard to tell what was going on. I went over to the three ‘dead’ attackers, who were standing together. It was a rule of these exercises that the ‘dead’ couldn’t talk to the living, but there was no rule to say we couldn’t talk to each other.

  ‘Hi,’ said one. He broke a piece of chocolate off a bar and gave it to me. Chocolate was a real Defenders’ luxury, very hard to get if you were off the Wall, so this was an insider’s gesture, a peace offering.

  ‘Thanks. Didn’t see that one coming. You were hiding, yeah?’

  I’d worked it out: the only way they could have done what they had done was if they’d been concealed on the ledge below the Wall and were waiting for us when we came on shift. Cheating, in other words, since they could never have made it to that spot any other way on a clear moonlit night. My section of the Wall had been swarmed: I found out later that thirty of them, arranged in five groups of six, had attacked five sections of Wall, and mine was one of them.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Well, if the assessors let you do it, it’s legit.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what our Captain said.’

  ‘Done this before?’

  ‘Attack–defend? No. You?’

  ‘No. More fun than being on the Wall, I reckon.’

  ‘No shit.’


  The two heroes who had shot me in the back had ended their colloquy and decided to go ‘over the Wall’, so the fight was officially over. The assessor told the wounded man he wasn’t fit enough to go with them, so he started jogging down the ramparts towards the fight in the near distance. The assessor went with him. The attackers and I turned and went off in the other direction, back towards the watchtower and the barracks. One of the men stepped forwards to shake my hand. I returned the gesture to the other, who turned out to be a woman. We all seemed somehow to be chums.

  ‘Where are you lot staying?’ I asked.

  ‘Two barracks along. Just round the river bend so you lot can’t see us.’

  ‘How are you getting back?’

  ‘Lorry. At the end of the exercise. Should be there any minute now.’

  They gave me another piece of chocolate. About halfway back to the watchtower, I saw Hughes coming towards me. Of course: the Wall never goes unguarded. This exercise was meant to be realistic, so if the Wall had been breached, the new watch would have to come on. As he came closer it was clear that he was too tired to be angry about being woken in the middle of the night.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ I said as we passed each other.

  ‘Got any food? We were sent straight out, no time.’

  I emptied my pockets. Hughes took what I had. The assessors would have said this was against the rules, but there were no assessors there, so what the hell.

  ‘You kill all this lot?’ he asked.