The Wall

by John Lanchester

‘Ah – love. The love of a partner. The sweetest thing in life, to have it, to be possessed of it. The greatest of sadnesses to look back on, in later life, in adversity, the cruel twist that your greatest happinesses become your greatest pain.’ Then she leant forwards – the cottage rooms were small, so our sofa and her chair were close to each other, catty-corner – and took my and Hifa’s clasped hands in hers. ‘Enjoy it!’ she said. She got up and left the room to get her communicator to ask the Help where she was and why she was being so slow.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ I whispered to Hifa.

  ‘You get it now.’

  ‘Absolutely. Want me to do something? I can call Hughes, get him to call back, fake an emergency. Sudden summons back to the Wall. We can, I don’t know, go and stay in a B & B.’

  ‘Or we could just kill ourselves, that would work too,’ said Hifa. Then she squeezed my hand and let go. ‘This too shall pass. She’ll ease off from now, it’s worse when she’s nervous.’

  That proved true. The Help came back from the shops and served an absolutely delicious cream tea, an old-school treat that I’d heard of but never had, with fresh scones (Hifa’s mother: ‘made under my direction’) and fresh clotted cream, and jam made by Hifa’s mother the previous autumn. I made the mistake of asking for the recipe, out of nothing but politeness, which gave her the opportunity to say: ‘The balance of sugar and sharpness has to be just right, as sweet as love, as bitter as loss.’ There would be these moments when Hifa’s mother suddenly went off on one. The rest of the time she was OK, and she could be very funny, especially about her neighbours. Also, as always, it was good to be away from the Wall and especially so to be with Hifa. We went for a walk down to what had been the seafront and was now a strange marooned parade of shops in the lee of the Wall, their facades oriented towards a promenade and a view which were no longer there. We did a lot of walking that weekend, as a device for getting out of the house.

  ‘How come she can afford Help?’

  ‘I haven’t asked but I can guess. Dad sends her money. He felt guilty about going off and leaving her – leaving us. He had to pay child support, but even when he didn’t have to any more, he still sent cheques.’

  ‘She told you that?’

  Hifa gave me a look.

  ‘Of course not. He did.’

  ‘I thought you never saw him?’

  ‘I don’t. Hardly. Anyway, she’s canny with money, always has been. When she was working she saved.’

  ‘I feel a bit sorry for the Help. More sorry than usual, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah – I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she decided to swim for it.’

  I laughed. Being with Hifa’s mother made me think about my parents; about the difference between me and them, so different from Hifa and her mother, and yet maybe not, at the same time. Who broke the world? They wouldn’t say that they did. And yet it broke on their watch.

  Hifa was right, though: it did get easier. Her mother dialled it down a bit. That gave Hifa the chance to relax a little and as she did she told me about her childhood, the dad who was great when he was there but was prone to go away without warning, until one day he never came back; the charismatic, flaky, loving, difficult mother. The small-life country childhood which makes you need to get away so badly you can feel it in the roots of your hair. We wandered all over the town and the countryside around it. The paradox was that you couldn’t see the sea when you were close to it, because of the Wall, but if you went for a walk inland, and climbed up a bit, you could. So you went inland to see the sea. I was at that point of recovery when you feel annoyed by your own weakness; when you are bored, as a prelude to getting better. Bored with my physical condition, I mean. In other respects I was feeling better than ever. I was imagining a future off the Wall, once we were pregnant. We’d find work, take turns looking after the baby, maybe take turns going to college, and it would be onwards and upwards. There would be a new life, and we would be living a new life. It felt like too much to hope for, but not in a bad way, more the kind of thing you stop yourself thinking about for superstitious reasons, because if you let yourself imagine all the details, it’s less likely to happen. Breeders got good accommodation, so I wouldn’t have to go back to live with my parents and Hifa wouldn’t have to go back to live with hers.

  By the fourth day of that week, my arm was out of its sling, and my shoulder, though it still hurt, hurt in a specific numb way which was unlike the access-all-areas pain I’d had when I was wounded. Unexpectedly catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror – there were lots of mirrors in the cottage – I thought, who’s that good-looking dude, then realised it was me, looking rested and well.

  At the end of the week, Hifa’s mother walked us to the train station. By now we were on nodding terms with the neighbours, who waved or nodded back as we walked past. She stood on the single platform and waited until the two-carriage train came in. She held our hands together and looked at us for a long time.

  ‘Courage,’ she said, tears in her eyes. ‘Courage, my brave, brave darlings. I feel for you. Courage!’

  She squeezed hard and then let go.

  ‘I cannot watch you go away. I will leave you now,’ she said. And she marched out of the station with her cane, a handkerchief in her right hand, dabbing it to her face as she disappeared back into the town. Hifa and I got into the train.

  ‘Well, she found a way of making it about her,’ I said, and then saw that Hifa was affected too, looking sad; I’d misread the moment. We found seats, sat heavily down, and off we were yet again on that train-train-lorry journey. We pulled away from the sea and set off towards the other sea, where we’d be standing watch.

  She didn’t get around to painting me, but she did manage to work out my spirit animal. Apparently I’m a goat. ‘A very resourceful animal – they can live on scraps.’ She said she’d paint it next time. There never was a next time, but of course I didn’t know that then.

  16

  Defenders have a saying, ‘The Wall has no accent.’ It means when you’re standing looking at the water, standing watching for Others, it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s all concretewaterwindsky:

  concrete

  water

  wind

  sky:

  it’s basically always the same.

  Like most sayings about most things, this is partly true, partly not. Yes, the Wall is the Wall and the Others are the Others and a twelve-hour shift is a twelve-hour shift. You don’t have any interaction with the locals, wherever you are. The days tick down at the same rate. But the light and wind and water are subtly different, and you get to know them so well that while you could say that the Wall has no accent you could equally say the opposite: along the ten thousand kilometres of Wall, no two posts are identical.

  That was especially true in the far north. It just felt different. Longer days, slanting light, different scents on the wind. It was the best time of the year to be up north, no question, and I didn’t love the thought of what it would be like in winter, but then if we’d been briefed correctly, we might not be there in winter, we’d be posted back down to the busy areas, once we were fully trained and ready. My view was: whatever. Hifa would be pregnant soon, and we’d be out of there. We’d be living the Breeder life in our special state-donated Breeder accommodation.

  I was glad of the change for all sorts of reasons. Hughes had been switched to our shift, to give us another experienced Defender in place of the people we’d lost; that was good. He was the person I liked talking to best, after Hifa, and the quality of chat on the communicator increased exponentially. But I missed Shoona. I missed Cooper, who was still very sick and might recover, might not. I especially missed Mary. The new cook, Alan, was good at his job, in the sense that his food tasted good and there was plenty of it, but he was taciturn and made no secret of the fact that he liked cycling along the ramparts in the middle of the night to bring us hot drinks no more than we liked standing on the Wall. Our squad had several new members, so the grou
p dynamics were very different and I was, I found, now one of the elders, wounded and decorated, a veteran of action, a potential Breeder, a senior figure. That was weird. I was the one dispensing advice to the new arrivals about how to get through a shift, I was the one giving warnings about type 2 cold, I was the one telling people to watch out for the Captain’s small-hours inspections, and take special care how you tape your ammo cartridges together. One morning I caught Hifa in the mirror smiling at me as I was brushing my teeth before shift.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You’re taller,’ she said.

  ‘Piss off,’ I said, but what she said was true: I felt taller. I could tell that I held myself differently. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when I arrived at the Wall.

  A few days into that first tour up north, who should come for a visit but our old friend the blond baby politician, dispenser of intelligence briefings, platitudes and medals. He arrived on an afternoon of clammy, close-clinging mist, a very unpleasant day to be on the Wall. It was lucky that the north was quieter, because this was good weather for Others. Our shift gathered in the briefing room, which was the same as every other briefing room, except the maps were different. I found, sitting in front of him as he stood at the podium, that my instinctive dislike had subsided a little. That might be because he had been involved in giving me a medal, which was pretty pathetic, really; but there we were. Also, maybe, I was getting a glimpse of how a person made it into the elite, and starting to see that it was possible – not easy, but possible. A very good record on the Wall, followed by a record of proven success at college, a Breeder, a young person on an upward trajectory; that was the kind of man for whom elites would budge up and make room. The kind of outsider/insider they needed. I was taking more of an interest in him and seeing him more as an object of study than of simple loathing.

  ‘Hello and welcome,’ he started, as if he were our gracious host, the man in charge of the far north. ‘We know each other of old, some of us, and some of us are new colleagues. Welcome. Well done! You are all members of the best defence force in the world, the best trained and the best staffed and the best prepared!’

  I realised it was his standard speech and tuned out. He would have to give it twice, since this was a normal tour on the Wall, not a training camp; once for us, once for the other shift. What must it be like, to go around the country talking to Defenders and the public, to not be part of their lives but talking to them about their lives, to be up there in the plane? A metaphorical plane in the case of this man, but still. To give orders while you were pretending just to be chatting, to boss people about by asking them if they would kindly do something for you … Help, of course, there would be lots and lots of Help, cooking Help and cleaning Help and Help to look after the children if you had them, and driving Help and gardening Help for your big house with its self-sufficient food supply (just in case), repair and maintenance Help and odd-job Help, electrical Help and painting and decorating Help …

  Now the speech had turned and he was repeating the warnings he had given at training – which, to be fair, had turned out to be true – about how there were more Others coming and they were more desperate. He also repeated the warnings about how the Others were suspected to have secret networks of support, secret sympathisers, hidden in the general population. They were thought to have new ways of getting away from the coast, maybe even new ways of getting chipped. He went on for a bit more and then stopped his general briefing and invited me and the Captain and Hifa up on stage and talked for a bit about how we had been decorated in action and how lucky this squad was to have three such resolute, able Defenders, and how we were the best defence force in the world, the best trained and the best staffed and the best prepared.

  We got down off the stage, and the baby politician stopped me for a word.

  ‘Joseph,’ he said to me in greeting – which was odd in itself, since nobody on the Wall called me by my given name, it was either Kavanagh or Chewy. Even Hifa called me Chewy (as well as some other things). ‘Please – call me James.’

  ‘Er, hi James.’

  ‘How are you?’ he said with the intensity dialled up. ‘How are you?’ He had put on a concerned face.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Wound better?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Change of landscape welcome?’

  ‘So, there’s a thing Defenders say, the Wall has no accent. Meaning, it’s sort of the same everywhere.’

  ‘Do they? Do they say that? That’s good, that’s really good. No accent – yes.’ He nodded two or three times. ‘Well, it’s good to catch up with old friends. Good to stay in touch. Let me just give you this, just in case.’

  He took a card out of his top jacket pocket and handed it to me: a name and an email address. He reached out to give my arm a parting squeeze, then I saw him remembering that I had been wounded, and he wasn’t clear for a fraction of a second what to do, then he either remembered it had been my right shoulder and he was aiming for my left arm, or he remembered that he had just asked me if I had recovered, so if my arm was too sore to squeeze it was in a sense my responsibility not his, and went on with the gesture. I took the card, put it in my pocket, said goodbye. It was a small thing but I took it as a sign, meaning that he saw in me some of the same stuff I saw, or wanted to see, in myself. He could smell the ambition, the get-me-out-of-here scent, all over me.

  I was pleased. I also felt that I needed to have a shower. Sarge took a moment to talk to me as we were going through to lunch. The rest of the squad had already gone ahead and sat down and were getting stuck in.

  ‘You know what that plonker said. We’re lucky to have you?’

  I got my modest face ready and said that I did.

  ‘Reckon if we really were lucky, we’d not have been attacked.’

  Fair enough.

  ——

  Two tours went past without anything much happening. It was just past the top of high summer; short nights, with amazing northern sky colours I’d never seen before, shades of blue and purple shading into deep-blue-grey-purple and purple-off-black and deep black. Once or twice, during nights when we weren’t on shift, Hifa and I even went for a walk inland to get away from the light pollution of the Wall, so we could see the stars. There were so many lights in the sky that night seemed not so much a thing of darkness as an experiment in a different form of illumination, an invitation to navigate by star.

  ‘It’s beautiful up here,’ Hifa said.

  ‘In the summer.’

  ‘It smells different.’

  That was true – it did smell different. The sea smelt different. It must be that the sea flora were different, the kelp and seaweed species were more pungent, vegetal and cabbagey, but not unpleasantly so. Greener, basically, it smelt greener. Of living things. It was hard not to imagine what life would be like after the Wall, when you could go on a walk whenever you felt like it and goof off whenever you felt like it and also work hard at clawing your way up in life and becoming a member of the elite and taking over the world. Also, a baby or babies plural. I liked those walks and that sky.

  On our third far-northern tour, I didn’t see the sky much, because I was on nights and the lights spoiled the view. It was the least difficult night guarding I’ve ever done, because the dark was so short and the nightfall and sunrise so long and so spectacular, a protracted set-piece natural show. The danger and difficulty of the tour down south seemed a long distance off. The only person who didn’t appear to like being where we were was the Captain, who was the closest he ever got to being edgy; as if the sense of quietness and peace and distance bothered him. He made his rounds more regularly than ever and had less than ever to say.

  ‘Maybe it’s a post-traumatic thing,’ Hughes speculated one morning in the mess, after a night when the Captain had come round no fewer than five times. ‘He killed two people with a sodding machete. Practically cut them in half. People who maybe were not so unlike he once was. It
’s going to take a bit of processing.’

  ‘He’s not the type,’ I said.

  ‘Everyone’s the type sooner or later,’ said Hifa. We gently bickered for a while, without reaching a conclusion. The Captain was off, though, everyone agreed.

  Eight days into that tour came the first really difficult weather we had seen up north. There had been days which were damp and still, and the air was so full of moisture it was like living inside a cloud that had sunk to earth, but from the Defenders’ point of view, the great virtue of that weather was that in the super-humid silence, you could hear a cough or a metal clank from hundreds of metres away. You could talk to the Defender at the next post without raising your voice. There were other days with abrupt squally showers, gusts of wind and horizontal rain that you could see coming across the water towards you, which hit hard and overwhelmingly, and were gone in minutes. After the first one of these, you never forgot your waterproofs again. But that night was different, a hard rain and wind combined with a hard close fog; a sudden premonition of what it would be like up here when winter came.

  ‘It’s beautiful up here,’ I said over the communicator.

  ‘Oh shut up,’ said Hifa.

  ‘Get a room,’ said Hughes.

  ‘Keep it hygienic,’ said Sarge, meaning, keep off the communicator unless it’s to do with business. It was a sensible thing to say on a night when it was so hard to hear, but we had got a little casual up north. I don’t think any of us really believed in the possibility of an attack. Sarge added: ‘He hasn’t been around yet, which means he’ll be here any minute.’ In other words, the Captain, uncharacteristically absent from his prowling so far that night, was coming soon.

  I had long since given up checking the time when I was on guard, but it was some way in between ‘lunch’ (the midnight version of the main meal, that is) and the second cup of tea. Dawn was about an hour or more away. The weather was filthier than ever. It was hard to see. Specifically, it was hard to see straight in front of you, in the direction from which the wind and waves were coming, straight at the Wall. When you looked sideways towards the guard posts next to you, all you could see was flooding, streaming, torrential rain sheeting through the Wall lights.