The Wall(14)

So a week at home is as you’d expect. My mother manages to make the task of running the household and feeding three adults seem like the world’s most demanding job. We aren’t rich enough to have Help – Help is free but you have to feed and clothe and house it so the costs still add up. It’s fair enough that there is a lot of work, though we have a washbot and a cleanbot so it maybe isn’t quite as much work as all that. Maybe not as much as my mother makes it seem, when I’m at home. Basically, she acts like she’s the bravest, keenest, most willing slave in the salt mine. We hardly ever speak, except for her to ask whether I liked it, if there’s anything special I’d like for [next meal], do I want to see any of my friends [to which the answer is, why is that any concern of hers?], can she get me anything? Would I like a cup of tea in the morning? It’s like staying in a well-run but emotionally suffocating B&B.

I’d be lying if I said this brought out the best in me.

As for my father, he’s at work in the day at his office, and then home in the evening to eat whatever my mother has cooked and then watch television/movies/whatever. We don’t talk much and both prefer it that way.

All of this was completely as usual; in the words of the song, same as it ever was. I tend to go out to see old mates. But there are fewer of them around than usual, because people my age are all off on the Wall and some of them are still on shift, or on training, or at home. The main topic of conversation: being on the Wall. People compare complaints. Our company sounds like one of the strictest there is – some of them only have ten people on watch at a time, so you get one day or night in three off! That’s against the rules and if the Others come you’re finished, but the thinking is that if the Others come you’re finished anyway.

Let’s just say, that’s not how the Captain sees it. I bitched about my company for a bit and everyone said I was unlucky to be somewhere so hardcore. I agreed and joined in the moaning, but I was, secretly, proud to be going through such a strict version of Defending. I was a real Defender. If you had one day in three off, that made you less of a Defender. Two thirds of one. Not that other people could see this distinction between real Defenders (i.e. me) and the others – all they could see was a group of Defenders in the pub, getting drunk. They steered well clear. Even the ones, maybe especially the ones, young enough to have done stints as Defenders themselves were careful to keep a distance. They knew that we knew how little we had to lose. What would anybody do – send us to the Wall? Besides, the courts are notoriously lenient on Defenders. We get in fights, we bust places up, and nothing much happens. Quite bloody right.

Talking to my old mates, I came to realise that life was going to be divided into two, before the Wall and after the Wall. It was as if this thing we had in common was coming between us; the Wall was the same for everybody, but it was different for everybody too. Maybe we’d go back to having our lives in common in two years’ time (or rather in ninety-eight weeks’ time, I’d gone fully over to the Defenders’ habit of counting time not by the calendar but by the number of weeks you’ve put in), but for now, we were friends because of things in the past, not the present. The main lesson I took from my week at home: my Wall company was what I had in my life now, instead of family and friends.

When I left on the return journey, walk bus train another train lorry, I said goodbye to my mother and father at the front door. A shy hug from my mother, and a handshake from my dad. I could see in his eyes that he wanted to say something, dispense some advice, and he could see in mine that I wasn’t having it. I picked up my rucksack and started out but when the door closed, I stopped and waited at the window for a few minutes. It was dark out and they couldn’t see me. The light in the hallway went off, then the light in the sitting room went on, then the television went on, then they started watching the programme they’d clearly been waiting a whole week to watch. I don’t know whether it was a documentary or a film, I didn’t wait to see, but the opening shots showed sand and blue sky and deeper blue water, and small figures climbing up onto boards and riding waves and falling off into the water. My parents had waited for me to leave and then turned on a programme about surfing.





8




Then it was back to the Wall. The second cycle was harder because our squad switched over and were on the night shift. I had thought the twelve hours of day watch was difficult, but the nights were worse. The dark makes it harder, obviously. The type 2 cold, which is much more likely to come at night, makes it harder too – the cold which is like glue, like mud, which makes it so hard to move it’s as if the Wall’s concrete is still wet. But the real difficulty is because it’s easier to be apprehensive at night. That deep, black part of the brain which by day secretly wonders what it would be like if the Others came, and wonders if it would really be so bad, by night is given over to fear.

At night, on the Wall, imagination is not your friend. The distracting thoughts which help you get through the day – about being somewhere else, about what you’ll do when you get off the Wall, about food, about sex – don’t work as well. You see things and hear things that aren’t there. You know this, and you train for this, but at the same time you know that sometimes, those things are there, and that many times the following has happened: a Defender who thought for a moment he saw something which looked like moonlight gleaming off metal, and dismissed it, or thought he heard something like metal scratching on concrete, and dismissed it, died coughing up blood with an Other’s knife in his guts. You don’t get through a twelve-hour shift without having your adrenaline triggered at least once. You tell yourself to calm down, then you tell yourself that there’s maybe something there after all. Up down up, like taking pills. You never get used to it, and the best you can hope for is that you get used to not getting used to it.