The Wall(15)

We saw much more of the Captain at night. I know it doesn’t sound possible that the presence of one man can make a difference to a fear that’s as elemental and basic as the kind you get standing guard in the dark against the Others. It did, though. You knew that at some point in your twelve hours, he would be there, appearing either on foot, marching down the ramparts through the pools of illumination, or on a bicycle, which he never did by day, and which always looked slightly incongruous. He was a big man and the bike looked as if it was a size too small for him. Sometimes he would just appear, popping up beside a post without warning, because he had come along the track inside the Wall, the same trick he had used on the first day to catch me daydreaming. (I learned later he did it to everyone on their first day.) He never said much, just stood beside you and looked out at the sea. Then he would make some simple observation, something basic and elemental, about the kind of night it was, dark or less dark, cold or less cold, moonlit or starlit, windy or still, harder to see or less hard, nearly over or just begun. He never told you anything you didn’t already know, but it was always just enough to let you know that he had stood on the Wall many times, far more times than you ever would, and he knew it better than anyone, and he was here with you. Then he would nod a farewell, and go on to the next post. Often, in middle stretches on the Wall, halfway between one post and another, he would just stop and stare out at the sea. It was as if he was stretching out his senses, extending the reach of his hearing and vision, out into the dark.

‘What do you think the Captain is looking for, when he does that?’ I asked Hifa one night. At night we did the same thing we did by day, and met in groups of three for a mid-shift meal. I hadn’t realised that you stayed in your pattern of posts for the whole of your two years on the Wall, meaning you ate with the same three people every day, hundreds of times. If you didn’t get on with your crew, if they were bullies or idiots or silent or coldly hostile, or just if the chemistry was wrong, a twelve-hour shift which was already difficult became even more so.

‘Maybe he thinks his senses are sharper when there’s no one around,’ she said. ‘You know, the small noises people make. Distractions. Body language. Away from it all. Are you going to finish that?’ she asked Shoona, who was making slow progress with that night’s energy bar. It had something very sticky in it, maybe dates. In reply Shoona broke it in half and gave the bottom of the bar to Hifa. She took it without saying anything and started eating it. In any other context it would have seemed outlandishly rude, but on the Wall it was a kind of intimacy.

‘Four tours …’ said Hifa. ‘Imagine doing four tours. Eight years on the Wall.’

‘He was a sergeant by the end of his first tour,’ said Shoona. ‘He just has a knack for it.’

‘Yeah, well, imagine having a knack for it,’ said Hifa. ‘I mean, of all the things you could have a knack for.’

‘Juggling,’ I said.

‘Knitting,’ said Shoona.

‘Sex,’ said Hifa.

‘Sleep,’ I said.

We didn’t say much after that.

I finished my food and my hot drink and got up to go back to my post. At night, even the young and the fit stiffened up quickly, and I could feel how the cold had taken up residence in various parts of my body while I was sitting – my hips, my knees. Hifa and Shoona got up too and we split up. I went to the edge of the illuminated ground around my post, about fifty metres away, and jogged back and forwards to the far edge for a few minutes, getting out of breath and warming up but being careful to stop short of sweating. At one end of my circuit, looking out to sea, I thought I saw something. A glimmer of light, was my first thought, out to sea. It was unlikely to be one of ours: the Guard did go out at night, but when they did, they didn’t often use lights. I thought I must have been imagining it, but a few minutes later there was another glint, and then another.

‘I think I can see lights,’ I said over the communicator. I felt embarrassed and frightened at the same time – embarrassed in case I was imagining things, frightened in case it was Others. ‘Out to sea.’

‘How far out?’ asked the Captain. Having his voice loudly in my ear without preamble made me jump; normally he didn’t use the communicator.

‘It’s hard to tell, sir. I’m sorry. Not close but closer than the horizon. Maybe a kilometre or more.’

‘How many?’

‘Two or three. Winking on and off.’

‘OK. Good spot. Keep watching. Don’t worry, it happens sometimes.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Sir. What’s happening?’

‘We don’t know,’ said the Captain, not in his usual tone of command or rebuke, but as if he was asking the same question. ‘It’s just something they sometimes do.’

I didn’t need to ask who he meant by ‘they’. The lights were Others. That was my first encounter with them. Not a face-toface encounter, because that would involve either them or me dying. But an encounter nonetheless. The first time I saw them. I think that was also the first time I could imagine what it would be like to be an Other, floating in the dark, on some makeshift boat or raft or inflatable, staring at the shoreline, looking at the Wall, at the sprinkling of lights above and the steep black dark below. You would be bobbing up and down with the sea swell. You would hardly be able to remember the last time you were warm or dry or safe. We were cold but the Others were colder. We were bored and tired and uncomfortable and anxious, they were angry and frightened and exhausted and desperate. God, the Wall must look like a terrible thing from the sea, a flat malevolent line like a scar. So blank, so remorseless, so implacable. We were used to feeling frightened of them, hostile to them: if they came here, we would kill them. It was that simple. But – how we must seem to them! We must seem more like devils than human beings. Spirits, embodied essences, of pure malignity. If we would kill them on sight, what would they do to us, if they could?