The Wall

by John Lanchester

  I remember that I was thinking, it’s hard to know what’s going on out there, it’s like a white-out, except it’s pitch black, when the lights failed. It was a sensation so strange, and the disorientation was so total, that it took a few seconds to understand. There was lots of swearing and lamentation over the communicator.

  ‘This is silver command,’ said Sarge, meaning, everyone else shut up. ‘Hold your posts. The lights have failed all along our sector. Stand still and shut up. The backup will kick in any second.’

  In drills and training, the backup generator usually started within fifteen to thirty seconds. That didn’t happen. It was eerie, but I wasn’t worried, it was just one of those Wall cockups. The thirty seconds went past, no generator, no lights, no communication. Another thirty seconds. This was the longest period of dark I’d known on the Wall since the night in training when we had been playing at attack and had used a five-minute blackout to overrun the Defenders.

  The Wall lit up with gunfire. It was at the far end from my post, close to the watchtower. Several different sets of automatic weapons were firing and none of them sounded like the kind used by Defenders. Then there were three explosions, a big one, then a bigger one, then the biggest explosion I had ever seen or heard, so loud it had a shockwave that hit a second or so after the light and flame. It came from the barracks. The brief glimpse of illumination showed me nothing that I could understand, but it was clear that there was fighting on the Wall. A voice came on the communicator, saying, ‘Others, code red,’ which told me nothing that I didn’t already know. Our training was to check if our own post was clear and then either obey orders or, if there weren’t any, to assess whether to run towards the fight or stand at post. I stood up to the Wall but in the rain and wind and dark I couldn’t see what was on the other side. There could have been an Other five feet below me, there could have been none in the next thousand metres. ‘Sergeant, orders please,’ I said, joining the three or four Defenders who’d made the same request, but there was no answer, so I said, ‘Kavanagh post thirteen engaging,’ and left my post to run towards the fight. There were two kinds of shooting now, our rifles and the flatter sound of the Others’ weapons. Hifa said over the communicator that she was engaging too. I stopped to wait for her and thirty seconds later she was beside me, the grenade launcher at her shoulder, her eyes wild, the biggest I’d ever seen them. We just looked at each other. Then we moved off, more slowly, jogging rather than running, towards the gunfire, keeping as far away from each other as we could on opposite sides of the ramparts, to make a more difficult target.

  People’s eyes adapt to the dark at different speeds. Mine are pretty good. I think it took five minutes to get close to the fight and by then I could make out a group of Defenders with their backs to me, using the concrete benches as cover, and a group of Others beyond them, doing the same thing but also making darts across the Wall to cross the ramparts and get down on the inner side. When people say their blood ran cold, what they’re describing is the feeling of being flooded with adrenaline; it’s a sensation which hits all over the body, chest to guts to limbs to heart to head. In that moment I was soaked with cold. Others had got over the Wall and were getting away. The worst thing imaginable was happening on our watch. Some of us were going to be put to sea.

  When bullets come close, the noise they make as they go past changes from a zing to a crack. The bullets were starting to crack when Hifa and I got to the point where our people were fighting. Some of them were on the right of the Wall, behind a bench, and some were on the other side behind a concrete bulwark. Sarge and Yos were behind the bench. We took cover with them. Three of the new people in our squad were dead on the ramparts in front of us. Four other members of the shift were in cover behind the bulwark, taking turns to fire shots. The Others were about a hundred metres from us, in the direction of the barracks. There were two vehicles on the inner side of the Wall, people carriers. I assumed they were Defenders from nearby posts come to help us, but as Hifa and I arrived one of the cars drove away, fast. I realised that the Others had assistance; the rumours of support were true. Hence the blackout. Hence maybe the explosion in our barracks.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the company?’ I said to Sarge. He reached around the bench, fired off a few rounds, then turned to me.

  ‘The barracks were sabotaged. They’re dead or wounded. No help from there.’

  ‘How many have got away?’

  ‘Too many.’

  ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘Kill as many as we can. Hifa, when the next car starts, hit it with a grenade. We’ll give cover. That way we’ll get as many of them as have got over. Two cars have gone already.’

  Maybe eight per car. Sixteen Others. The worst breach anywhere in a long time.

  For the moment it was a standoff. We couldn’t get closer to them without coming out of cover and being easy to shoot. They couldn’t get across the ramparts without being shot at.

  ‘Where’s the Captain?’

  ‘Dead. He must be or he’d be here.’

  But Sarge was wrong about that. A few seconds after he spoke, I heard a scrabbling and scratching noise behind me and to the left, the side furthest away from the barracks and the Others. The Captain came running up the nearest set of steps on the inside of the Wall and dived into cover beside us. He was bleeding from a cut on his head.

  ‘Sir, we thought we’d lost you.’

  ‘I was caught at the far end when they attacked,’ he said, meaning he was past Hifa at the end of our section. I thought that I would have seen him go past but I took it on trust, since in a fight nothing much makes sense.

  ‘We’re going to wait here until the last of them have got over, then Hifa’s going to light up their vehicle,’ said Sarge. The Captain, panting, nodded.

  ‘Good plan,’ he said. He looked down for a moment. Then he stepped back and shot Sarge in the head, twice. He turned the gun towards the two Defenders who were standing nearest to the bench and shot them both with a burst, side to side. Yos dived to cover beside me. A hundred metres ahead of us I could see the Others all sprinting across the ramparts. They had been waiting for this moment. Hifa and I were on the far side of the bench, largely protected from the Captain, and that was what saved our lives, because he now turned to his left and started shooting at the Defenders who were under cover from the Others on the far side of the Wall, against the bulwark. I saw three of them go down and without thinking, without processing what I was doing – that training, when it kicks in, it really kicks in – I ran forwards and shoved my bayonet into his back. He staggered and fell and as he did I smashed him on the back of the head with the rifle. He went down and stayed down. Hifa stepped past the bench and took aim at the Others’ vehicle, which was accelerating hard on the inner peripheral road. Her first grenade missed, short, but the second one didn’t. The car exploded and swerved off the road in flames. It was burning hard. No one would survive that.

  I knelt down beside the Captain. Yos came over and joined me. We looked at each other but didn’t speak. The Captain was unconscious and bleeding heavily. Maybe he’d survive, maybe not. I got up and went over to Sarge. He had two bullet holes in the front of his face and the back of his head had gone. The two new people against the bench were both multiply wounded and were bleeding out. I went over to the Defenders next to the ramparts but as I was heading over I could hear engines and see lorries coming from both directions, from the next watchtowers to the east and to the west, and I knew that it was over. This part of it was over.

  17

  We were arrested. Nothing personal: when Others get over the Wall, that’s what happens next. The Defenders from the neighbouring unit were the ones who had to execute the order, and they didn’t seem happy about it, but the rules are what they are. We weren’t handcuffed or anything, but the surviving members of our unit, all seven of us, were put in a lorry and driven south for about four hours, and then locked up in a barracks room which was like a normal barr
acks room except instead of small high windows there were no windows at all, the doors couldn’t be opened from the inside, and we had to ask permission to go to the toilet. Yos wasn’t able to whittle, because he wasn’t allowed a knife, so he fidgeted non-stop.

  We spent a month in that room. I got to know it so well I could recognise every crack in the ceiling. When it rained heavily there were damp patches and I got to recognise them too, to watch the changing shapes they made as the water seeped in: map of small island, map of big island, map of continent; then back the other way when the rain stopped, shrinking, drying, gone. A parlour-game version of the Change. The barracks room was standard, built to house thirty people, and there were only seven of us. It was me and Hifa and Hughes and Yos and three new Defenders who I barely knew. We spent most of our time talking about what had happened in the attack and trying to work it out. I imagine we were being listened to, but we didn’t really care. It’s not like we were expecting a reprieve. We just wanted to try and make sense of it.

  What was obvious was that the Captain had been working with the Others. They must have had other help too – lots of it. The talk of a network of supporters was true. Someone had cut the power, someone had helped dynamite the barracks, someone had arranged the vehicles. Maybe somewhere else, somebody was getting them chipped, hacking into databases, faking IDs. It was hard to imagine how anybody could do that to us; but the truth was plain. While we Defenders were standing on the Wall, some of the people we were protecting were working to let Others over the Wall. It was like standing in front of a white-on-white painting and hearing the person next to you say that it was black-on-black. That’s the main thing we talked about, the sense of betrayal we all felt. Hifa kept telling me to let it go, that people just did what they did and there was no explaining it, but I couldn’t. I wanted to think about it, to try to understand it, but, at the same time, couldn’t bear to. Betrayal by the Captain, betrayal by whoever it was that the Captain had been working with to help the Others. I had never really thought about betrayal before; I knew the word but not the meaning. Now I knew. Betrayal was like tasting a liquid, the bitterest thing you’ve ever put in your mouth, and holding the taste just long enough to fully understand how repulsive it is, and then forcing yourself to drain the cup to the dregs.

  Out of thirty Defenders in our company, only we seven in this barracks room had survived. We spent quite a lot of time trying to work out how many Others had got over the Wall and got away. Two people carriers’ worth, was the general view. The third vehicle was fried by Hifa. Say eight to ten Others per vehicle. In the chaos and fighting, though, maybe the escape vehicles weren’t full. Maybe one of the drivers had panicked, driven away with the car empty. It was tempting to imagine … say, one car empty, only three people in the second car … that would mean only three of us had to be put to sea. Or if the Others had been lucky and we had been unlucky, both cars had been full and twenty of them might have got over the Wall, so we’d all be going to sea. No way of knowing. But my hunch was that those cars had been pretty full. A lot of Others had been seen running across the Wall.

  The extent of the conspiracy, the level of organisation, the planning and resources involved – it was hard to get my head around it. If the breach had happened to a different company I would have been fascinated by the details. But you know what they say: when it’s someone else, it’s theory; when it’s you, it’s practice – and practice is very different from theory. And at the same time, the unique circumstances of our breach, the scale of the planning and the scale of the treachery, gave me moments when I did something stupid: I entertained a tiny hope. We talked it over and nobody could remember a breach that had involved people working with Others. Nothing like this – the breach, the assistance from within, the Captain’s betrayal – had ever happened before. An extraordinary event would demand an extraordinary response. Mercy might be shown. Maybe. My head knew that this was very very unlikely, and that entertaining any hope would cost me dear when hope was taken away. But my heart couldn’t stop itself. I wanted to be with Hifa, decades in the future, old people, much older than our parents were now, looking back at this terrible crisis from a safe happy afterlife, the moment when we nearly lost everything but were forgiven and brought back under the big safe all-embracing blanket of life behind the Wall. I couldn’t resist the temptation of hope.

  Every day or two I would be taken for interrogation. It happened to all of us in turn. The routine varied: armed Defenders would come and ask for us by name, or we’d be called to the door over the loudspeaker, or people would just come in, set up at one end of the room and start asking questions. The same questions, over and over, about what had happened that night, about what we had seen and what we had done. There were also questions about what had happened before, and questions about the Captain – lots and lots and lots of questions about the Captain. What did he do that night, where was he that night, where was he on previous nights, what had we noticed about him, what did he say, what did he usually do, what did he do that tour that was different, what did we think about him, on and on and on. Did he ever talk about his life away from the Wall, did he have friends on the Wall, what else did we know about him?

  After four weeks we were put in a lorry again and driven to a town and put in cells – separate cells. There was a small high barred window and a toilet in the corner of the room with a washbasin next to it. I spent a day and a night there. Then two Defenders came and led me into a room with a long table at one end. Five senior Defenders sat behind it. I was marched to the front of the room opposite them and asked if there was anything I wanted to say before I heard the sentence. I already knew there would be no trial, that wasn’t the way it worked. That flicker of wishful thinking which I’d stupidly allowed myself did not survive standing in this room and looking at these pale solemn closed faces. Hope is a mistake.

  ‘Is there anything I can say that would make any difference?’ I asked. They didn’t seem to be expecting to be asked that and the officer in the middle, the senior one, looked from side to side and muttered something to his colleagues before turning his head back to me.

  ‘No,’ he said. I shrugged.

  ‘Then, no,’ I said, though I was tempted for a moment to say that I knew all the details of how the Others had done it, their secret network of supporters, just to see what would happen. I thought of something. ‘One thing, though: how many of them got over the Wall?’

  It was obviously irregular to ask questions, but the man in the middle thought it over for a few moments and decided to answer.

  ‘We aren’t sure but we think it was sixteen. Fifteen or sixteen.’

  That made it the worst breach in many years. It would be untrue to say this made me feel better, because it was still a death sentence, but it did make me take it less personally. It was a huge thing that had happened and we had been caught up in. I nodded to show that I was ready for what was coming.

  ‘Joseph Kavanagh, you failed in your duty as a Defender, and you will be put to sea. May God have mercy on you,’ said the senior Defender. ‘Take him back to the cells.’

  III

  THE SEA

  18

  The third night at sea, I saw some lights in the far distance as we bobbed up to the top of a swell. I wasn’t sure I could believe my own eyes, the first time I caught a glimpse of them; your mind sometimes plays tricks on you when you’re on the Wall, but on the open sea, it’s worse. You have no physical equilibrium in a small boat, and it can feel as if your mental equilibrium goes too. You can’t trust your senses, and you can trust your imagination even less. You try to pin your mind down to the specifics of the moment. But it’s hard. You hear things, you see things. The wind carried voices, fragments of song – not music in general, but specifically song, voices in chorus. I often thought I was hearing someone call my name. Clouds in the distance coalesced as land, as hills, before fading back into cloud. So my first thought when I saw the lights was, I’m probably imagining it.
I’m not used to a black this complete; on the Wall we had the lights along the guard posts. Here, until the moon comes up, it’s blind-black. So maybe my synapses were firing weirdly, unused to a dark so final. Then, seconds later, on the crest of another rise, I saw them again. And then, a minute or so later, a third time, more clearly and more definitely than before. Lights on the open sea.

  We had talked about this: what to do, what calculations to make, if we saw evidence of other boats. The plan had been to row towards them and look for signs of whether they were benign or not. By daylight that felt as if it made sense. At night, less so. We had no weapons and our only defence if we came under attack would be to try to get away as fast as possible. Given that we only had one set of oars, that wasn’t very fast. A boat with lights was either a Coast Guard boat or a boat of Others so confident that they weren’t worried about being seen. That meant that they were either stupid or well armed. Either was dangerous.

  The swell was two metres or so, not enough to be frightening, but more than enough to be uncomfortable. It was the swell which made it hard to be certain about the lights; they winked into view at the top of each wave and then disappeared again as we went down into the trough. Everyone else in the boat was asleep. It was a lifeboat, or it had been. A waterproof awning covered the back half of the boat, and that’s where the others were sleeping. It was also where our food supplies were stored. The water tanks and water catchment traps were in the front of the boat, with me.

  I wanted to wake someone up to talk about what we should do. Hifa would under normal circumstances have been the obvious choice, but she had been seasick for two days – not feeling-queasy seasick, but repeatedly vomiting in a way which would be genuinely dangerous if it kept on – and had only just gone to sleep. It would not be the right call to wake her up. I chose Hughes. He was the only other person I trusted and he had done a little sailing with an uncle in his childhood, so he wasn’t as ignorant about boats as I was. By which I mean: he knew almost nothing, but I knew nothing-nothing, so he won. It felt like a desperate thing to be doing, to rely on the tiny amount he knew about the sea, but there was no choice. I bent over double to get under the awning and into the back of the boat. You learnt the hard way to be careful when you did that, because if you brushed against the roof you were likely to get several litres of water decanted onto you. I shoved Hughes with my foot, then again, and he woke up. I held my fingers to my lips. He sat up and crawled out of the sleeping space. There was just enough starlight to see that he looked terrible, his lips cracking with salt and his face abraded red with the sea winds. I realised I must look like that too.