The Wall

by John Lanchester

  ‘Let’s kill him,’ said James. If he had said that same thing five minutes before, and if I had had a gun or knife in my hand, I would probably have done it then and there. But a couple of minutes can have a big effect on how you see things, and the moment for revenge had, for me, passed. We were probably all going to die anyway, and in this boat. Sending the Captain on ahead of us didn’t seem like it was worth doing.

  ‘Yes, you could do that,’ the Captain said. ‘Or you could let me lead you to somewhere safe.’

  Safe. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for a single word to have such an impact. Safe. To think of being safe meant to have hope, and I knew, had learnt recently, how dangerous hope is. And yet, out here on the sea, we couldn’t live without it. The Captain’s plan was to head south. He said there were islands and stretches of coast where we could find somewhere to stay. He said we would never be able to get back over the Wall but there were other places to live. He said he was the only one among us to have made a long journey in a boat and he knew how to do it and he could do it again. He said because we came from an island we thought the whole world had a wall around it, but that wasn’t true and there were places, not many but some, where we could get to safety. More safety than we would have at sea, anyway. He said again that the important thing was to head south. He said that apart from anything else, the cold here in the north was dangerous and once we got thoroughly wet, as we would when there was bad weather or when the season changed, it would become more dangerous still.

  ‘If we get drenched, we may never dry out. If the boat floods, we die. If we capsize, we die. This is not the Wall. We can’t go back to barracks to dry out. We have to go south.’

  Then he went and sat in the back of the boat while we sat at the front and discussed it. When he moved, especially when he got up or changed position, you could see the effect of his wound was still strongly present. The wind and waves were now getting stronger. Every deeper plunge brought a slap of salt spray into the boat.

  ‘South,’ said Hughes.

  ‘We have no reason to trust him,’ said James. ‘We have less reason to trust him than any human being alive.’

  ‘We have so little reason to trust him that we have no reason not to trust him,’ said Hughes. I thought that I knew what he meant: the Captain would know he had so little credibility with us that there was no incentive to lie. Also, the unspeakable truth was I still felt an instinct to trust him and be led by him. He just so obviously was a leader. At the same time I felt that instinct was craven and doglike. Follow master, follow, off the edge of the cliff, not once but twice.

  ‘South,’ said Hifa. It sounded like a tentative conclusion, a provisional verdict. What else, after all, was there to do? Rely on Hughes’s experience sailing with his uncle, mainly on a big pond near his house but twice in a river estuary on family holidays?

  ‘South,’ I said. So we had taken the Captain’s advice. There was a compass among the survival kit that we had been left by the Guards. And now here we were, bobbing up and down on a two-metre swell, hiding from lights in the dark. Hughes and I stood looking at them for a few minutes longer and then he patted me on the arm and went back towards the awning at the back of the boat.

  I let Hughes duck under the cover and began pulling at the oars to move us in the opposite direction, away from the ship and its lights. We took rowing easy, because it was hard work, especially for the unfit, and because doing it too energetically made you perilously hungry. It was a trade-off, calories for movement. I was rowing backwards so, when the waves permitted, I could see the lights in the distance. The ship didn’t seem to be growing any further distant; then, slowly, it seemed that it was. I must have rowed for an hour, with frequent breaks at the start, and then with longer periods of rest than bursts of rowing. I was using the same technique we used to employ on the Wall, spacing out glances at my watch to try and make it a pleasant surprise when I gave in and looked at the time. When my four-hour shift was over I went to wake James for his turn. In the back of the boat, Hifa and the Captain and Hughes were all deeply asleep, and so was James until I shook him. I stood back to let him wake in his own time.

  He got up slowly, rubbing not just his eyes but his whole face, making chewing movements with his mouth. Then he came out from under the awning.

  ‘I saw lights,’ I told him. ‘A few kilometres away. A ship. Hughes saw them too. We talked it over and decided to leave it. Too late to do anything about it now. I wanted you to know.’

  He nodded, thinking about it. I didn’t trust him but he wasn’t stupid. I could see him running through the same calculations we had made.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’d have done the same.’ He nodded some more. It was beginning to be light, and I could see how tired he was, but how determined too. Fatigue and his blond stubble made him look ten years older than he had before we were banished. I went to climb into the back and take my turn sleeping, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm. I looked a question at him and he held up a finger. Then he rummaged under his layers of clothing, the layers he never took off except when he had to lower his trousers to defecate over the side of the boat. He wriggled for a moment and then brought something out, as if it were a birthday present. It was an object about six inches high with a circumference about the same size. It took me a few seconds to believe my own eyes, though I knew very well what it was: a high-explosive grenade.

  ‘Jesus, James,’ I said. He was smiling.

  ‘The commander of the Guard ship gave it to me,’ he said. ‘In case we run into trouble or in case we, you know, decide we can’t go on any more. In case we want to choose fire over water.’

  I looked at him hard and saw something I had never seen before, never even suspected, which was the glint of madness. I said:

  ‘You can’t possibly be—’ but he cut me off.

  ‘I’m not, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I just wanted you to know.’ He began putting the grenade back under his clothes. I wasn’t worried about it going off by accident, that was impossible with the design of those grenades; in fact it was hard enough getting them to detonate when you wanted them to. What I was worried about, though, was his state of mind. I decided I would tell Hifa and Hughes about the grenade – the next time I could be with them privately.

  I went and lay down and replayed what had happened, not with James, but earlier, with the lights in the distance. Through the next days, through all that happened, I found myself often thinking of those lights; wondering who they were, what boat they had been on, Guards or Others, or Defenders put to sea, even, perhaps, sea ships going about their business, carrying precious cargo or passengers who knew where. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. All kinds of alternative futures bloomed into being when I thought about that boat, who had been on it, where they might have taken us. Friendly brigands, who would have made us part of their crew. Pitying Guards, with the convenient ability to issue us with new chips and fake IDs. Or, more likely, merciless pirates who would have robbed and killed us on sight. I’d never know. In my old life, if I had wanted to find something out sufficiently badly, I could. I would put my mind to it, devote resources to it, find an answer. That was no longer true. There were now many things that I would never know and never be able to find out.

  On the fourth day we had our first piece of luck. (Always bearing in mind Sarge’s maxim that if we had truly been lucky we would never have been there in the first place.) Hifa’s seasickness had ended, thank God, as abruptly as it had begun, on the third day. She was washed out and her cheekbones were sharper and her nose pointy under her cap. She looked, if I had to put it in one word, purposeful.

  It was mid-morning and she was on watch. I was sitting in the front of the boat because the air in the back would sometimes get stuffy. When the weather was dry and the pitching of the boat not too severe, it could actually be quite pleasant to sit in front, in the intervals when you weren’t consumed with anxiety and apprehension and plain terror. Hifa was standing at the till
er looking forwards and Hughes was rowing, slowly, taking long pauses between strokes. Hifa was looking very fixedly at the horizon.

  ‘Can you come and hold this for a minute?’ she said to me. I took the tiller. Hifa came right to the front of the boat and stood staring into the distance.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’m sure. There is land in front of us and about fifteen degrees to the left. At first I thought I was imagining it but I’m definitely not. It’s an island.’

  Hughes stopped rowing, I let go of the tiller and we both joined Hifa at the front of the boat. My first thought was: she’s wrong. There was a short smudgy line on the horizon but the thing it most looked like was a bank of cloud. One of those mirages, those imagined solid shapes which were so tormenting at sea. I stood and looked a bit more. I took off my glasses, thought about wiping them, thought better of it and put them back on. Actually, maybe …

  ‘It’s land,’ said Hughes, and hugged Hifa. They did a clumsy little jig. I still wasn’t sure. My desperate wish to believe them made me reluctant to believe them. I kept looking. The line did not move or wave or blur as clouds tended to. I kept looking. Almost with reluctance, I gave in to hope and admitted to myself: yes, it was land. Land!

  Hughes and I went back to the oars and took one each. We started to row in the direction of the land. There was no immediate way of guessing its distance, since high ground would be visible from much further away than low; it could be thirty kilometres, it could be as little as three to five. My guess was that it was low land and not too far. My reasoning was that high ground might accumulate its own weather, wisps of cloud above the highest point.

  The wind was from the side and the boat rocked and bumped as we headed towards the miracle of land. Sometimes the oars would catch too deep, sometimes they would miss altogether. It made rowing even harder work than usual. Since we were put to sea blisters had formed on my hands, then burst, and the raw skin underneath was acutely painful. We took the oars for half an hour at a time, Hifa and James joining in. The Captain came out of the back of the boat to watch.

  All I could think of was how easy it would have been to miss the island altogether. It was pure luck. In the night we would have gone straight by without the merest inkling of its presence. So much of our new life was about luck.

  We rowed for a couple of hours and the island was close now, a few hundred metres away. The next problem became clear to all of us at the same time. I looked at Hifa and Hughes and James and they looked back at me. The Captain was standing right at the front of the lifeboat.

  ‘No no no,’ said Hughes.

  It was easy to see what he meant. There was nowhere to land. The island – beachless, like every coastline in the world after the Change – rose vertically out of the sea. All that was left of the low island it had formerly been was the upper part of its main hill. Or rather, hills, three of them, a triple-peaked mass. The three slopes were bare rock. The wind and waves smashed into them and if we went in too close, we would be smashed against them too. Even on a sunny, calm day, with a powerful ship able to hold its own against the winds and currents, it didn’t look as if it would be possible to get a foothold, not on this side of the island. In our boat and with our resources we would have no chance.

  The Captain turned around.

  ‘This isn’t the only possible angle of approach,’ he said. That made sense. We would pull back, give it some space, take a tour around the island and see if there was anywhere we could land. Hifa turned the boat to the side and I stepped away from the oars to let James go solo. There was no rush now; we’d take as long as we needed. This might be our best chance of medium-term survival and we didn’t want to skip past it in any hurry. At the same time, I felt a deep, almost nauseous sense of dread. My gut was telling me that there would be nothing to look at. The island was too steep, too rocky, a cliff in the middle of the ocean; I desperately wanted there to be a landing point, but I couldn’t imagine what it would look like. The rowing was hard, even harder than it had been before, and as we turned to manoeuvre around the island the waves came from all points of the compass so that the boat bucked and rocked more wildly than ever. This is impossible, I thought, we will never be able to land here.

  I was half right. As we went around it became clear that the island was variations on a theme: vertical stone. It wasn’t just unsafe to land, it was unsafe to get too close. A shipwreckers’ dream of an island. And yet I was half wrong too, because as we came round into the lee of the island, hidden from the wind, in the sudden still and quiet, I saw the first good thing I had seen since we were put to sea: a flotilla of boats, floating together in the unexpected calm.

  20

  The strangest thing about the next few days was how quickly we got used to our new life. I tried to keep a low profile and set myself the task of finding out what this all was, what it meant – who these people were and how they had got here. The floating community had sixteen members, before we arrived. They had eight sea-going vessels tied together and a couple of floating structures which were not seaworthy, not in any kind of weather, but were float-worthy. The community had not been a plan, more a series of accidents and coincidences. The first three boats had arrived in the lee of the island before the last winter began and had taken shelter, and then had found that the supply of protein (fish) and water (rain) could sustain them, and had stayed. The other boats – the other Others – had arrived piecemeal and over time. Their crews were from nowhere and anywhere. I’d been brought up not to think about the Others in terms of where they came from or who they were, to ignore all that – they were just Others. But maybe, now that I was one of them, they weren’t Others any more? If I was an Other and they were Others perhaps none of us were Others but instead we were a new Us. It was confusing.

  Members of the floating community couldn’t go ashore, but they, we, were safe in the calm. It was nobody’s idea of an ideal life but it was a life that could be lived. Traps, catchments and lines were all over the floating craft, in their hundreds: for food, I saw to my amazement, they were quite well supplied. The big lack was in fuel: there were only tiny quantities of wood, which was too precious to burn, and an equally tiny quantity of diesel fuel brought by one of the boats. It wasn’t clear what to do with that so it was being kept for emergencies.

  The second day after our arrival, I was walking around the rafts trying to understand how it all worked and I came to the side of the community furthest from the sunken island. This was the biggest of all the rafts. A woman with wild black and grey hair was squatting as she wrestled with something I couldn’t see clearly but which was still alive and fighting.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend that looks good,’ I said. The woman laughed. The sea life made it difficult to tell how old people were but she was maybe in her mid-forties, strong-looking and intent on her work. I now had a better view of what she was doing. She had trapped a seagull in a net; she broke its neck with a single expert wring. You could see she had done this many times before. The bird went limp and the woman’s shoulders dropped with relief. She gestured at me to sit so I did.

  ‘What’s the worst thing you ever ate in your life?’ she said, half smiling, as she started to pull feathers off the bird. She spoke good English with a lilt, an accent from somewhere far away and a rhythm which had something not-English underneath it.

  ‘You mean, before I got here?’

  She laughed at that too.

  ‘I don’t really remember,’ I said. On the Wall, thinking about food had been a means of escape, a technique for casting your imagination into the future, into a time when you weren’t on the Wall any more. At sea, thinking about food had become a form of nostalgia, of time travel back to a safer place. On the Wall, thinking about food made you feel better. Out here, it made you feel worse. ‘To be honest, looking back, it all seems pretty good now. I had some stews and things I thought were impossible to eat but I’d give anything to have them today.’

  ‘Whatever it was, gull
is nastier. Believe it. A rank taste and a bitter taste. As bad as you can imagine. Game bird and fish. At the same time. Tough too. Juice runs when you sink your teeth in. Blood, salt, duck, fish oil. Hard to swallow. And that’s if you cook it. We can’t use fire so we have to eat it raw. That’s so much worse. Trick is to leave it to dry. It’s still hard to chew but the flavour changes. You can get it down without gagging. Like jerky or pemmican. Fish-duck jerky. We store it for when we’re low on protein. No choice.’

  No choice. That made sense. It was true for most things on the sea. Her boat – it seemed to be hers, though the sense of ownership might be a function of her strength of personality rather than anything more formal – was a large improvised raft made of wood. There were nets strung in the air all around the boat to catch birds, and lines hanging off it all around in the water to catch fish. Rainwater catchment vessels were dotted all over the vessel. Including me, there were six or seven people on this raft, two of them solemn children who had been given, or had given themselves, the job of finishing off any birds or fish brought into the boat: they carried clublike sticks with a thickened metal piece on the end. The children took sidelong glances at me when they thought I wouldn’t notice. It was as if I too was a form of non-human life which might at any moment need to be whacked on the head. Killed and eaten too, maybe. Did children have thoughts like that? Or was imaginative darkness of that sort an adult thing? I didn’t know enough about them to know. The next time I caught the boy peeking at me I smiled and winked back. He quickly looked away.