The Wall

by John Lanchester

  We went up the ladder to the next and last storey of the tower. Here again the windows were even bigger, so there was gradually more light as you went further up inside the tower. It was full morning now and blazingly bright. The layout on this floor was different. These had been, it seemed, the living quarters, divided into rooms off a central corridor, with huge windows at each end, so it was as if you were looking straight out into the sky. It was noticeably warm, not just sunlight-warm but central-heated warm – the first time I had felt external heat since we had been put to sea. I hadn’t really expected to feel warm ever again. Hifa and I turned to each other. Her eyes were huge.

  We went into the first room. It seemed to be where the tower’s sole occupant lived. There was a mattress on the floor and a chair with some bedding folded over it. On the bedding there was a thick paperback book with a torn cover. I picked it up to find the title page. It was the complete works of Shakespeare. When I put it back, the chair moved, and I could see what was sitting on the floor behind it – the best thing of all, the best possible thing, an oil lamp. My heart jumped. But maybe it was a defunct object, part of the detritus and debris that were everywhere in the tower? Surely there couldn’t be … I sniffed: I thought I could smell something I knew well but hadn’t come across for what felt like a very long time. I sniffed again: I was sure: oil. I heard a sound which might have been Hifa catching her breath or could easily have been me catching mine.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Hifa. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘However much there is, it’s a finite supply, it can’t last forever,’ I said.

  ‘Yes but it’s oil,’ said Hifa, which was true. It was oil. I wanted to shout, oil, oil, oil! Light and heat. In that moment I realised something. I had internalised the idea that I would never again have light and heat – would never have control of them, would never be able to make it bright or make it warm, just by deciding that’s what I wanted. An ordinary miracle, a thing we had done dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day all our lives before the sea, and which had then gone away for ever, and had now come back. I felt something strange on my face and touched it and found that I was crying. So was Hifa: not contortedly or in grief, but with tears running openly down her cheeks. I reached out and touched them and she did the same to me.

  ‘I never thought …’ I said.

  ‘Nor did I.’

  Hifa couldn’t say anything more, she just shook her head in a way that meant yes, oh my God. We checked the other rooms. One was fitted out as a kitchen. The cooker and fridge and other appliances were useless because there was no electricity, but we could see that the man in the tower opened his tins and ate his food here, and cleaned up after himself. There would probably be a way of cooking hot food – where you can make light, you can make heat – but he had chosen not to. The other rooms on the top storey had mattresses on the floor but were otherwise derelict. It was evident that people had lived here. The rooms were big, with space for at least four people; say twelve in total at the platform. They had sailed off, or died in accidents or gone to some other fate. I felt an abstract curiosity and an abstract empathy, and also, at the same time, I didn’t really care. Hifa and I were here and they were somewhere else. We decided to take the room with the view towards the west, to avoid being woken early by the sun. We shifted mattresses around, got a table and chairs, and giddily, unbelievingly, set up our bedroom as if we were children playing House.

  25

  Hifa and I simultaneously realised that we were starving. We helped ourselves to two of the tins that were sitting in the kitchen – one of beef stew, one of chicken curry. These were flavours we had got very used to in our time on the Wall. Cold, and straight out of the tin, they tasted better than they ever had. We swapped tins halfway though. Hifa had eaten slightly more than her share of the curry, but I forgave her.

  ‘What do you think his deal is?’ I said to Hifa. ‘Whoever was here went away or died but he stayed because why – he thought it was safer? He wanted to look after the installation, or thought it was his responsibility? Or he just wanted to hide from the world?’

  She played with a spoon in the bottom of her empty tin.

  ‘My guess is the last one. Maybe he’s just a hermit. Who took pity on us.’

  ‘Well, here’s to the hermit,’ I said, raising my tin. ‘Our hermit.’

  ‘Our hermit,’ said Hifa, clinking her tin against mine.

  We went downstairs to the second level of the tower.

  ‘We’re going to go and get the stuff from our boat,’ Hifa told the hermit. He was still at his box, moving his bits of paper around. ‘We have food and supplies. We think they will be safer in the tower. But there’s quite a lot of it so it will take a long time. I hope that’s OK.’

  He gave no sign of having heard.

  Hifa and I looked at each other. His lack of response, indeed everything about him, was eerie, but there was nothing we could do to make it less so. He had taken us in; he had opened the door; that was all we could ask for. We went down to the lowest floor of the tower, and then opened the metal door out onto the platform. I looked down at the ladder, and further down at the sea far below, and felt sick with vertigo. After all we had gone through, all we had seen and done, it felt pathetic that I was still afraid of heights. And yet there was no denying: I was still afraid of heights. The drop to sea level was more than two hundred feet: say, two hundred and thirty feet, the height of a twenty-three-storey building, accessible only by that vertical metal ladder. I knew that the more frightened I was, the more likely I was to panic halfway, to tense up on the ladder and be unable to move. I also knew that there was no alternative, no plan B, nobody to carry me or shove me back up: if I froze, I’d be stuck until and unless I either unfroze or fell. I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate.

  I sat down on the platform and took my glasses off and put them in my pocket and tried to slow my breathing. It didn’t work, and then after a while it did. Sometimes you can take strength from the thought that you have no choice. I got up and without delaying any further, started down the ladder. I stared straight ahead and counted the rungs in tens and tried to go not too fast and not too slow. Hifa waited at the top, probably because she thought I might freak out and start climbing back up and she didn’t want to be in the way. I counted ten rungs, then another ten, and ten more, and lost count of how many sets I had done, and suddenly I was at the halfway resting stage. The sea was much closer from here. I knew I would be able to do it. Hifa came down the ladder much more quickly than I had and gave me a hug.

  ‘It’s going to be OK from here,’ she said. And it was, at first – though it was very hard physical work, as hard as any I had ever done. We decided to empty the storage compartment of the lifeboat. There was a security-blanket feeling to keeping our secret supplies of food and water, but we couldn’t guarantee that somebody wouldn’t come and take our boat. If they came to the installation, which somebody at some stage was likely to do, and couldn’t get up it, which was also likely – in fact was certain, since we knew from experience that the only way up was up the ladder, and the only way up the ladder was if the occupants chose to let you use it – then the only thing for them to take would be our lifeboat and its contents.

  The decision was simple, but the work of carrying everything up to the platform was not. The tinned food was in boxes and we couldn’t think of any way to get those up the ladder. The only possible course of action was to take everything out of the boxes and carry it up in our pockets and in a single small heavy-duty bag which would go over the shoulders and leave our arms free. It would be three trips each to take care of the food, and another five each to move the water. We decided to do it in stages, first carrying our load to the halfway resting point. The formula was, drag self up the ladder, dump what we were hefting, collapse onto the platform and wait until our arms had stopped burning, then go back down the ladder, rest again for a few moments, repeat. As the day went on the rests grew gradually longer and less ef
fective. By the time we had each taken eight trips, the halfway platform was full of boxes and cans and bottles and my whole body was burning and shaking.

  I was lying on the floor of the halfway platform when Hifa came up, threw the last contents of the lifeboat beside me and dropped to the metal deck, gasping with effort. By now we had each climbed nearly a thousand feet of vertical ladder and the sun was low in the afternoon sky. We must have lain there without speaking for the best part of half an hour. I didn’t feel much better for the rest.

  ‘This isn’t going to happen,’ I said. ‘Not today.’

  ‘No,’ said Hifa, still lying on her back.

  ‘I don’t even know how I’m going to make it up from here.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘Let alone carry everything.’

  We lay there for a little while longer. It was oddly peaceful. The resting stage had a low metal ledge around the outside, and when we were lying down, we were below the lip, so we were sheltered from the wind but could still feel the effect of the sun. I felt no impulse to move or be anywhere else.

  ‘We have to go down one more time, to check the ropes. And then we’re done,’ said Hifa.

  ‘OK. But not today.’

  ‘No, not today.’

  She took two power bars out of a trouser pocket and slid one over to me. I unwrapped it and started eating. It was mainly nuts, pleasantly complicated in flavour but very drying in the mouth. I raided the supply of water, took several swigs, then passed the flagon to Hifa. She had already finished her bar.

  ‘We leave all this stuff here tonight,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we finish. Then we can retract the ladder, and we’re safe.’

  ‘Safe.’ I could feel myself tearing up at the word, my eyes swimming; a sign of how exhausted I was. Safe. We lay there on the platform, barely moving or speaking, for a long time. The sun had lost its warmth, and was starting to head for the horizon, when Hifa sat up and said that it was time for us to get going.

  ‘We don’t want to be on the ladder in the dark,’ she said. ‘We don’t want the hermit to forget that we’re here.’

  I was a little groggy and stiff and still felt weak from the earlier exertions. That’s why I made my mistake. I said, ‘Fine. You go first.’ She nodded, stretched, bent to give me a kiss on the cheek, and started up the ladder. I gradually stood, rolled my neck, looked around the empty horizon, yawned and looked up. Hifa had gone; she had climbed the ladder in record time and was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Hello?’ I yelled up. She either was in the alcove at the top of the ladder and couldn’t hear me, or had gone inside.

  I put my hands on the ladder and started up. At first I felt all right but quickly, within a few sets of ten rungs, realised I was in trouble. It didn’t feel like fear, not at first, just that my body would not do what my mind told it to. I was too weak. I could plant my feet on the rungs well enough, but the strength in my hands and arms simply wasn’t there. It was a little like the old days on the Wall, of type 1 and type 2 cold. This was type 2 fatigue. It wasn’t going to get better after a few minutes’ rest. It was getting worse, and I was getting weaker, and the ladder was seeming longer and steeper with every second I spent on it. I looked up and the platform was as distant as the sky. Hifa wasn’t there. I took the risk of looking down. That too was far, much too far to drop. If I tried to slip down the ladder and recover on the platform I would certainly fall. I was trapped.

  On the Wall, the closest thing you ever got to loneliness was when you were standing at your post for a twelve-hour shift; but even then you could see the other Defenders, you could hear chatter on your communicator. On the sea I had never been on my own. I hadn’t spent a second entirely on my own for months. Now I felt completely alone and abandoned as I never had before. It was me and this ladder, alone in the universe. I was hyperventilating and failing fast. I realised, after everything I had gone through, that I could die here. I could slip and fall and be gone.

  I pulled myself up one rung. It was the thought of dying which made me do it – my revulsion at the idea of dying here and now, after everything. Then one more rung. Then another. Not here, not now, I thought. I stopped counting in tens. I just allowed the sense of wrongness and injustice to drive me. Wrong, no, can’t die here, one rung. Unfair, unlucky, unjust, wrong, another step. No hope, no future, no chance, no luck, wrong, unfair. That’s how I drove myself upwards, after I had nothing else left.

  I was at the platform. I pushed through the hole at the top of the ladder and lay on the metal floor. I was so weak and gasping so hard I didn’t even feel relief. I had never been so spent. I felt sick, then knew I was going to be sick, then was. I don’t know how long I lay there, half conscious. I felt movement and Hifa was standing there beside the doorway.

  ‘I don’t know how I made it,’ she said. ‘I threw up.’

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak yet. She handed me a water bottle and sat down next to me. I swallowed a few mouthfuls, and immediately felt sweat blossom on my forehead. I was so exhausted that even drinking water made me feel a little out of breath. We sat there for a while longer. The sun was going down and the light was beginning to fade; it was around the same time of day we had arrived at the platform twenty-four hours ago.

  ‘We’re going to sleep on a mattress tonight,’ I said. Hifa’s face lit up.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in. If you’re ready.’

  I made a gesture which meant, I’m ready to try. She unfolded herself to her feet and held out a hand. I waved it away and tried to get directly up but wasn’t strong enough. I reached for her hand again and with Hifa’s help was able to get to my feet. My legs were sore but functioning. It was the upper half of my body which felt useless.

  ‘I thought I wasn’t going to make it,’ I said. I’m not sure if it was clear whether I meant up the ladder or up onto my feet, but Hifa nodded as if she understood. She held the door open for me and we went through into the chaotic lower level of the tower. We picked our way through the debris. I shook my head at the wall of blank monitors, the control centre for activities which would never happen here again.

  Another ladder, up to the hermit’s level. This one felt very different from the long ladder down to the sea. Hifa went up first and I followed. This room too was the same as it had been in the morning, the hermit in the same place, on the far side of the room, with his pieces of paper and his cardboard box. It seemed perfectly possible that he hadn’t moved all day. One difference was that this time he looked up as we came in, not a flinching or covert glance but a definite sustained look, then went back to his compulsive game. I walked across the room and stood over him for a moment. He didn’t look up and he kept shuffling his bits of paper around.

  ‘Thank you again,’ said Hifa. ‘We would have been lost without you.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you let us on?’ He looked up at me. I felt he was really seeing me, connecting with the reality of my presence in front of him, for the first time. Maybe he saw my exhaustion, and maybe also he saw in my face the trace of what I had been through that day, how close I had come to being defeated by the climb up the ladder. He very deliberately reached out and picked up all the pieces of paper on the floor of the cardboard box. He put them down next to him. Then he picked one of them back up, looked at it, looked at me and Hifa, and replaced the folded piece of paper in the middle of the box. He looked at us again. Then he put all the other pieces of paper back in the box, left them there for a moment, and removed them all so that the same piece, the first one, was the only one left. I suddenly saw what this was, what the box meant: he had created a version of theatre or television for himself and he moved the pieces around to tell stories. He was putting on a show. So what did this mean?

  He went through the same sequence again: leaving the central piece in place, he filled the floor of the box, then emptied it. He looked through the cardboard box at the central piece in the middle of the table – in the centre of the stage, occupying
the whole of the screen, in his mind. Then, slowly and deliberately, he looked up at me and Hifa.

  ‘He’s lonely,’ I said. And then to the man: ‘There used to be people here, but they all went away, and now you’re on your own, and you got tired of it.’

  I saw something flare in his eyes: the first moment I’d really felt contact with what was in the mind of our hermit.

  ‘That must have been hard,’ said Hifa. He looked at her: yes. His expression did not change. He brought some more pieces of paper to the box and moved them around and watched them. Now that I knew he was trying to tell a story his actions made much more sense. I felt as if I understood: the pieces of paper were other people, other sea-going vessels, coming to the platform. He moved them in circles around the central piece, one by one, and then put them to one side. The central piece, the one representing our hermit himself, stayed where it was. Other boats had come to the platform but he had not lowered the ladder. He repeated this sequence six or seven times. I could tell they were separate actions because he didn’t reuse the pieces but put them to one side once he had finished with them. At one stage three different pieces of paper were brought to the platform and he moved them round it in circles, then put them down, then moved them around again.

  Three ships had come to the platform and had stayed there for several days, looking for a way onto it. That must have been terrifying. If they had got onto the installation and found him and realised that he had been refusing to let them on, they would have killed him. I wondered if they had guessed that he was there, observing them? Like when you hide from a knock on the door, hoping that the person outside will go away, but then they ring the bell, and knock louder and louder, again and again, knocking and ringing together, and you know that they know that you’re there hiding, and they’re getting angrier and angrier, but you’re committed to hiding now so there’s nothing you can do except duck down, low and quiet, and wait and flinch and hide and long for them to stop and go away, except a secret part of you fears that they never ever will, that they can wait longer than you, outlast you, that it’s a contest to the death … and then they go away and you find you’ve been holding your breath and it’s all fine and you’re safe. For now.