The Wall

by John Lanchester

  ‘Oof,’ she said when she arrived, ‘hello darling, I swear I’m getting more unfit the longer I do this, that doesn’t make sense, does it, should be the other way round. Coffee and a biscuit, not in that order. Here, hold this.’ She reached into her shoulder bag and was holding out a packet of biscuits. I remember thinking: chocolate and orange jam, my favourite. I took them and put my rifle down on the bench, still within arm’s reach as per the rules, and unhooked my metal cup from the outside of my rucksack while she fiddled with the thermos flask. I was glad it was coffee rather than tea, because although the tea tasted better the coffee was more effective at keeping me awake. As she reached forwards to pour it I saw she had spilt it over herself, though spilt it in a strange place, along her throat and the front top of her waterproof, and I thought, that’s weird, I know she can be clumsy, but how did Mary manage to pour the coffee upwards, somehow to chuck it up over herself? She made a small noise, a bit like the ‘oof’ when she stopped her bike, but quieter, more involuntary; she sounded surprised. She dropped the thermos and looked down at herself and then all at once several things happened, simultaneously, but also slowly:

  The liquid was a strange colour. A strange texture too. Mary was backlit, a lamp behind her, so I couldn’t see properly, and I realised, yes, it was the texture that was wrong, not the colour: the way the wetness was thick but also moving too fast for a mere spill; it can’t be coffee, can she have spilt food on herself? but no it’s a liquid, but no it’s wrong for water, and it’s not spilling it’s pumping, it’s not been poured over her it’s coming out of her. There’s only one thing it can be, it’s blood.

  But how can it be blood? It’s not a nosebleed, she hasn’t thrown blood up on herself, my that would be a very serious illness, one that had you throwing blood up on yourself, anyway it’s not coming out of her mouth it’s coming from further down, it’s pumping out of her, it’s—

  I swear I can remember this whole train of thought, a line of argument running through my mind as if I was, I don’t know, defending a PhD thesis or something. It can only have taken a tiny fraction of a second, and then I understood: Mary had been hit by a bullet or a knife or something similar, it was a very bad wound that she probably wouldn’t survive. We were under attack. The Others had come.

  I went for my rifle and dived behind the bench, looking at the Wall. I don’t remember saying or doing anything to raise the alert, but afterwards during the debrief they played back recording of all communications that night, and the evidence is right there in the form of my voice, slightly raised but not, I’m proud to say, panicky: I sound the way you sound when you’re giving an order at the window of a drive-through fast-food place, and you speak louder than usual to make sure they get the order right. ‘Section twelve under attack, Others, code red’ – code red meaning this is not a drill, this is not a warning, they’re right here, right now. On the recording you can hear, about five seconds later, the full alert alarm go off: at this point the other shift would be waking up, running to the armoury, and then running for the Wall. I remember hearing gunfire off to my left, not far away, maybe only one post over (that would be Shoona) and I remember looking – and at this I was a little frantic, for sure – to see where the Others were, the Others who were near enough to have killed Mary but not yet in sight. I saw a glinting metal thing on top of the Wall and in that slowed-down, point-by-point analytic process, worked out what it must be. Metal object, not there before. Must belong to the Others. Don’t recognise it. Steel painted black. A claw shape, like a crab: a grapple. Others coming up Wall using grapple. I wonder, what should I do about that? I know, I’ll run to the Wall and shoot whoever is on the other side, because if I wait until they get to the top, they will shoot me instead. I heard gunfire, frantic uncontrolled gunfire, from further down the ramparts. Somebody was shooting on full automatic, not firing short bursts the way we’d been trained, but emptying the whole magazine in one go. I stepped towards the Wall and then just at the last moment, the very last moment, remembered my training, that if I suspected Others at a specific point I should go a few metres away and look from there, because they’d be waiting to see my head pop over the parapet exactly above the spot they were climbing, and would blow my head off.

  I ran five metres down the Wall, knelt, and popped my head over just enough to see, for the shortest fraction of a second. The far side of the Wall was in deep shadow and I couldn’t see well but there were shapes on the Wall, one of them near the top: three of them, I thought, though it could have been four if there were two together at the bottom. I had a few seconds before the first figure would get over the Wall. I ran ten metres back the other way, so I was five metres past my post, on the other side from where I’d taken the sighting: the idea being that if they’d seen me they’d expect me to pop up and start shooting from the same spot. I took a breath, stood, and emptied half the magazine into the first figure, then the other half into the Others who were below. I was sure I’d killed the first one because, although he made no sound that I could hear over the noise of my weapon, he let go his grip and fell back into the sea. I wasn’t sure if I’d hit the other two or three. I ducked back down the Wall and ran back to the first point I’d used to look over. I loaded a second magazine. As I stood to shoot, I felt a blow like a heavy punch on the upper right of my back, just below the shoulder. I turned, this was in Shoona’s direction, and saw three Others, one of them kneeling and aiming a weapon, the closer two running towards me.

  I tried to raise my rifle to shoot them but nothing happened. I was very aware of how time had slowed down, so the first thing I thought was that this was just an extreme version of the same phenomenon, that my brain had sent the command for my arm to lift, but the arm hadn’t responded yet. This thought seemed perfectly normal, as if I was in one of those video games where the protagonist can slow down time and the player has plenty of opportunity to aim, think, calibrate, during a moment which in real life would be mere hundredths of a second. My arm will be moving soon, I told myself, I’ve given the instruction, I’ve ordered it to move, so it will be raising the rifle to aiming position any moment now … and yet nothing happened, and I realised that time had not slowed down to the extent I thought it had, because the Others were still running towards me, and the one who had been kneeling to aim a weapon had now got up and was starting to run towards me too. I’d been wounded in my right arm and couldn’t raise it. I reached across to lift my rifle with my left hand, but even as I did so I was thinking, who am I kidding, these guns aren’t designed to be used one-handed, I can’t aim and shoot with one arm, it just isn’t possible, and that means I can’t defend myself and that means I’m going to die here, today, in this very minute that I’m living through right now, so this is the last night I’ll ever see, these are the last sounds I’ll ever hear, the last thing in front of my eyes in this lifetime is going to be this Other forty metres away who has stopped and steadied himself and is aiming a rifle at me, here we go, he’s aiming, I’m going to die right—

  The Other’s head disappeared. No other word for it. He was standing in silhouette, aiming, then he was still standing, except his body ended at the shoulders and neck. Time slowed again and he stood still for the longest time, a grotesque statue, but while he was standing still, or the thing which used to be him was standing still, everything else was noise and movement. A huge explosion came from just below my position on the Wall, and then as I was staggering and reeling from it, another. Earlier in the fight I had had some understanding of what was happening, but by now I had lost it, and had no idea what was going on: if I’d been more aware, less disoriented and (to be fair to myself) not bleeding heavily from the wound in my shoulder and back, I might have realised that was Hifa, ignoring the rules about grenade launcher use and shooting the Others who were climbing the Wall by my post. In front of me, where the first Other had lost his head, I saw the Captain, running up the inside steps onto the ramparts, swinging a huge knife, not a standard bayonet
but a giant thing, a machete, into the back of one of the two surviving Others. He had emptied his magazine into the head of the man who had been about to kill me and now his only weapon was this knife. The last Other turned towards him and started to raise his rifle. If he had been running with it in his hands, the Captain would have died; but that fraction of a second it took to raise-and-aim killed the Other. The Captain jumped towards him and swung his machete into the Other’s neck. It was not a clean cut, the huge knife stuck in the man’s throat and he staggered sideways, dropping his gun and raising his arms to his neck, apparently trying to pull the metal out of his body. I watched this with what felt like objectivity and detachment, thinking: if I were in his position, I too would attempt to remove the machete from my neck, so I understand this man’s reasoning, but I am not confident he will be able to achieve his goal. He staggered back across in the other direction, away from the Captain, and then fell forwards. He did not lie still; he writhed around on the ground. The Captain stepped over to the Other’s rifle, picked it up, moved to stand over him, and fired a short burst into him to kill him.

  It was quiet, or rather, the gunfire had stopped. I could hear voices, Defenders’ voices, from down the Wall. At some point in the fight my communicator earpiece had become detached and I was cut off from the general chatter, if there was any. At some other point I had sat down and leant with my back against the Wall. I saw that I had taken my glasses off and put them down beside me. I put them back on. The attack seemed to be over. I could tell because if it had still been continuing the Captain would have run in the direction of the fighting. Instead he came over to me and bent down. He was breathing heavily but otherwise seemed calm. He reached to touch my arm then stopped.

  ‘You’re wounded,’ he said. He stepped back and spoke into his communicator and it seemed mere seconds later that a military ambulance came alongside the inner ring road and two corpsmen jogged up the Wall. It wasn’t until this point that, like a switch being toggled, I was abruptly in pain. It started in my right shoulder and spread all down my right side. It was an anthology of pain types compressed together, at the same time dull and sharp and stabbing and throbbing and gripping.

  ‘Take good care of this one, he did well tonight,’ the Captain said to the medics. I didn’t know at the time, but that was to be the only compliment he ever paid me. They put me on the stretcher and carried me down to the ambulance and hooked me up to various tubes, and the pain began to subside.

  Time now began running at a completely different speed. During the fight each split second gave you time to think, to see what was coming, to consider alternatives and consequences in the moment between pulling a trigger and the bullet coming out of the barrel. Then there was a short passage of time when I was in the moment, during the moment, time passing at the right speed, which was roughly now, as I got into the ambulance. After that, the next few days went past in a blur of tubes and pills and tests and proddings and doctors, interrupted by passages when senior members of the Border Defence Force (too important to be mere Defenders) came and gravely, respectfully asked repetitive questions about what had happened that night.

  While they asked questions, they also answered mine, or some of them. That’s how I found out what happened. We had been attacked by twelve Others, who went after posts 8, 10 and 12, Cooper and Shoona and me. They had used inflatables to get within a few hundred metres of the Wall and had then swum the last bit. They used suction devices to attach to the Wall initially, then the same kit climbers use on rock faces. The fact that it was a noisy, windy night had been crucial: they had probably been waiting for that. They were trained and competent. They were from sub-Saharan Africa. It was quite likely that they had been professional soldiers in their previous lives. They had used crossbows as their first weapon, for the silence. Then they switched to guns. The guns had been taped and sealed to keep out the water. The plan had been to get as many of us as possible before they started making noise. A good plan. It was a crossbow bolt that had killed Mary and another one that had hit me. Shoona too had been wounded by a crossbow and then killed in the subsequent firefight. Cooper had been shot and was badly wounded and might not survive. Two other Defenders had died. All of the Others had been killed. So none of us would be put to sea.

  On the third morning, when I was still out of it, the Captain came around to visit, accompanied by the baby politician who had given the talk at training camp, and by a senior non-baby politician whose name I did not catch. ‘Well done,’ they said, with variations. They gave me a piece of paper which apparently was a form of official commendation. Not that it meant anything: the only prize worth having would have been remission from more time on the Wall, and that wasn’t on offer. It was a pretty short visit and I was feeling woozy all the way through.

  I woke up on the fourth morning with a clear head. Another toggled switch: pain subsided, brain fog gone. Hifa was sitting at the end of my bed, fiddling with her communicator. She was wearing a dressing gown. On the table beside her I could see that she had brought a box of chocolates, which she had opened and was now eating.

  ‘I’m guessing those were supposed to be for me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh hi,’ she said, looking up and blushing slightly. ‘No, they were for me actually. I’ve been in here too. Small wound but they kept me in for observation. Concussion. They’re letting me out today.’

  ‘You broke the rules on use of the grenade launcher.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’

  She took another chocolate.

  ‘It’s surprisingly nice in here,’ Hifa said. I hadn’t noticed this, but looking around, I could see that it was true. The bed and chairs were much better made than anything we got as standard on the Wall; there was a view of distant hills. Even having a single room was a luxury. The room had a bath and toilet. There was Help. You were brought three meals a day. You had your own television. It was certainly a pleasanter place to be than the barracks. ‘Almost worth it,’ Hifa added.

  ‘For concussion maybe, but some of us got shot.’

  ‘Well, by a crossbow – not sure that counts as being shot.’

  ‘Tell Mary that,’ I said, and realised as soon as the words were out of my mouth that it was the wrong thing to say, horribly wrong, not fair to Hifa and not fair to Mary, and if I thought about it for long enough, not fair to myself. Hifa’s face changed and I could see her feelings churning, the fear and loss and grief, and by seeing them in her I could suddenly locate them in myself too. Mary was dead, had died in her own blood standing three feet away from me, and Shoona had died too, in terror and in pain, and maybe Cooper was going too, to join all the others who died that night, and me so nearly among them, death so near in those moments I could stretch out and touch the hem of its coat. I hadn’t been having any feelings about what had happened – I suppose I just hadn’t been ready to. Now I felt terrified, of the night itself – frightened of what I had already been through, which makes no sense, but that is what I felt – and with it had a sick sense of apprehension of going back to the Wall and living through it all again.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, but although she had tears in her eyes, she just shook her head, apology not needed, she understood. It can happen, when you spend all your time with a group of people, that interaction between you gets stuck; there’s a particular register in which all your exchanges happen. With Defenders, there was stand-your-ground joshing, banter which could be aggressive and could be defensive but was never not there: a wall of its own. There were hardly any times when you were just plainly and defencelessly yourself with other people. That could make certain sorts of conversation difficult to have. Hughes talking about what he wanted to do after the Wall – that was an unusual thing. Now, in this moment with Hifa, I felt a physical barrier between me and whatever was supposed to happen next. I didn’t know what to say other than that I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. I hadn’t meant to hurt my own feelings, for that matter. I didn’t want to make
a joke about Mary, whose death had been the worst thing I had ever seen, the worst thing I ever hoped to see. Hifa had been trying to banter with me, I had been trying to do the same back, and we had both messed it up. I could see that she thought, felt, the same; see too that neither of us knew what to say next. We sat for a little while, alternating looking at each other and looking at the floor, both feeling pretty miserable.

  ‘I’m sick of the Wall,’ Hifa eventually said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘If we stay on the Wall, and the attacks keep happening, and the attacks are like that, we’ll eventually die.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  And then she said something which I have to admit I didn’t expect:

  ‘Do you want to Breed with me?’

  14

  You may know in general that the nation needs more babies, and you may know that it encourages people to Breed, but you don’t know the half of it until you actually set up in business as a Breeder yourself. Breeders, or people trying to Breed, get special quarters on the Wall. They get rooms to share. In addition to the room and the extra rations you also get some say in where you want to serve your time on the Wall, and the ability to change shifts. In other words you can move away from the place and the squad you were previously with – as far as I know, becoming a Breeder is the only way you get to have any say in that. A pretty sweet deal. If you could get used to the thought of bringing another person into the broken world. I can honestly say that the idea had never crossed my mind, before Hifa suggested it, and then as soon as she had, I knew I had no choice. It was the closeness of death – that was what did it. We could save ourselves from dying by bringing somebody new into the world. It suddenly seemed like the only thing to do.

  There were lots of good things about Breeding, or trying to. Some of them I won’t spell out here. I’ll just say Hifa and I turned out to be a good fit. Being wanted by someone who wants you, and then getting what you want … nothing in the world is quite like that. There was only one downside to the new turn in our relationship, which was that the other members of our squad thought it was hilarious, and wouldn’t stop teasing us about it. People were in a bad place, after the attack and the deaths, and me and Hifa hooking up was the only other thing to talk and think about apart from how distraught everyone was, so that’s all that they did: tease us and make jokes at us and ask us if the baby was on the way yet and if we were having fun trying and if we had tried doing it this way, that way, would we like someone else to try in my place, would we like the whole squad to watch to make helpful comments on technique and form, had we given any thought to what we would do if the baby was Chinese, etc., etc., et bloody cetera.