The Wall(11)

One day the Sergeant properly yelled at me, when he made an impromptu inspection and found that I didn’t have my spare ammunition rigged correctly. He was right: there was a particular manner in which we were supposed to do it, magazines folded back over each other in a set sequence, which made it quicker to load the ammo in combat, but it was laborious and boring to do, and so I sometimes skipped it.

There was nothing particularly unusual about being shouted at, so that wasn’t the main point of interest. The thing which made me focus was what Sarge said when he’d calmed down a little.

‘You’re lucky it was me,’ he said. ‘The Captain sees that, you get extra days on the Wall. That thing you did right there, that’s an extra two weeks on the watch. You want that?’

It didn’t seem to be a rhetorical question. I had to admit that no, I did not want that.

‘I didn’t think so,’ said Sarge. ‘Most people, their bark is worse than their bite. For pretty much everybody, that’s true. Their bark is their bite. Yelling or bollocking or calling you names is the worst they’ll ever do. Not him. His bite is worse than his bark. You don’t have to worry about him giving you a bollocking. You have to worry about him doing you real damage. Bite, not bark. Do you get it?’

I said that I thought I did. That didn’t seem good enough, and Sarge came closer, confidentially close, as if we were in a crowded pub and he was whispering a secret, not as if we were on the Wall, in the middle of nowhere, two hundred metres from the nearest human ears.

‘I’ll tell you something about the Captain. It’s not a secret, but it’s something he prefers to tell people for himself. When he does tell you, do me a favour and act like it’s a surprise.’ He looked around, as if he was worried about eavesdroppers, and he lowered his voice so that I could barely hear him over the wind. ‘The Captain was an Other. He got here ten years ago, before the laws changed. That’s why he’s so hardcore. That’s why he’s so strict. He knows what it’s like out there. He knows he’s not going back. He’s done four turns on the Wall because he’s obsessed with keeping them out and proving he is worth being allowed to stay.’ He let it sink in then hissed: ‘The Captain was an Other!’

It was one of those things you’re told which make no sense and at the same time you immediately know, right down in your cells, are true. The Captain was an Other! Of course he was. Until about ten years ago, Others who showed they had valuable skills could stay, at the cost of exchanging places with the Defenders who had failed to keep them out. The law was changed because this fact became known to Others and started to act as a ‘pull factor’, a reason they came here. Now, today, Others who get over the Wall have to choose between being euthanised, becoming Help or being put back to sea. There’s no escape and no alternative, now that everybody in the country has a chip: without one, you’d last about ten minutes. So even if they get over the Wall and then get away, they’re always caught and offered the standard choice. Almost all of them choose to be Help. The attraction is that if they have children, the children are raised as citizens. That’s after being taken away from their parents, of course. Others tend to be Breeders. You see the kids all around the place, often with older parents, or parents who are a visibly different ethnicity from their children. The Captain must have been one of the last to get through before the new laws. No wonder he was a fanatic. No wonder his bite was worse than his bark. His scars were tribal scars, and yet he had left behind his tribe and was now a Defender, one of us.

‘I get it,’ I said to Sarge. ‘I get it.’ I refolded the magazines of ammunition, the way I had been taught to do it, while he watched. The Captain used to be an Other … of course, of course, it made complete sense. There was something abnormal about his implacability. It was easier to understand once you started to think about the things he must have seen, the things he must have done. That day was the last time I cheated or took a short cut or cut a corner or did anything not one hundred per cent by the book. I became Mr Rules. I realised that even though I was on the Wall, a part of me had been assuming there were still small human margins here and there, room for interpretation, space for forgiveness or acceptance or, less nobly, the chance to talk yourself out of any trouble you might have got yourself into. I now saw that that was wrong. No leeway, no space, nothing but black and white, the rulebook or anarchy, nothing but the Wall and the Others and the always waiting, always expectant, entirely unforgiving sea.





6




After that first two-week shift on the Wall I went home. The trip was the reverse of the one I’d made to the Wall: lorry, train, second train, bus, walk. It might sound similar but it couldn’t have been more different, and the main difference was that the whole company was travelling back with me. A company of thirty-plus, heading off together after two weeks of what amounted to hard labour and semi-incarceration. We were a little, I think the word would be, rowdy. No alcohol is allowed on the Wall, a strict rule strictly enforced: if you’re caught you and anyone else involved, or thought to be involved, automatically get extra days to serve. Somehow, though, as soon as we were on the lorry, two-litre bottles of spirits magically appeared. We passed them around, swigging happily, and again I felt the pure joy you sometimes got on the Wall, the joy of relief, when something horrible is over. One of life’s great pleasures, deeply loved by all Defenders: the moment when you get to say: I hated that, but now it’s finished.