The Wall(18)
‘Yeah, I don’t know. College. Then, I don’t know.’
‘No point pretending to know when you really don’t.’
‘No.’
Mary was the next one up. She came out of the girls’ tent yawning and stretching, her curly hair seeming to stretch too, up and out. She came over and helped herself to coffee – she was one of those temperamentally cheerful people who are hilariously moody in the morning until they’ve had some caffeine. After she finished her cup she was ready to talk.
‘I wonder what they’re planning to cook tonight,’ she said. Although one of the reasons we had Help was so that we didn’t have to cook, cooking was Mary’s hobby and chief interest as well as her job: it was just her favourite thing to do. No need to ask her what her plans were for life after the Wall. It was her favourite topic of conversation, a running reverie about what she’d do once she had the money to open her own place. (That part, the bit where she put together the money, was a little vague. But she had faith.) When she could cook whatever she wanted, as long as it was in season. She loved to talk about it.
‘The produce you could get before the Change,’ she said. ‘Everything, all the time. Tomatoes and fruits, hams from you name it, meat whenever you liked, all of it all the year around. Oils, spices, herbs all year round, anything you wanted from anywhere at any time. I read those old books, I think, it must have been too easy, you know? You could just cook anything. Whenever. It just makes you think, how did people know what to want? I mean, if it’s anything you like, any time, it’s like science fiction, where they have a machine that just makes stuff. It does your head in. Press a button, and it’s roast beef, pheasant mole, chickpea fritters in yoghurt dressing, aioli, prawn curry, mango soufflé, duck blood stir fry, consommé, you know, where does it all end? I mean, the idea is amazing, everything all the time, I get it, and yet, it’s weird and wrong too. Now, there’s less, but maybe, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say it’s better, that would be mad, obviously it’s not better, but you have to work with what you’ve got, you know, and even if it is, you know, turnips, turnips, fucking turnips yet again, at least you know you’re working with turnips because that’s what came out of the ground and that’s what you’ve got to cook and that’s what you’ve got to make interesting, because there’s no choice, you know? And then it’s cabbages or celeriac or swedes or beetroot or berries, it is whatever it is that comes out of the ground and that’s what’s amazing and beautiful about it, you know, that’s what’s interesting, not just going to the shops and being able to buy, you know, stuff that just got off a plane from who knows where.’
She found it hard to leave the Help to get on with it, and spent the first few days hovering over the cook and making suggestions which, to judge from his body language, he didn’t entirely appreciate. A proud man, you could see that. And yet by the end of the week they were cooking together, despite Shoona telling her she was an idiot and the whole point of the holiday was not to be doing the very exact same thing she spent all her time doing when she was on the Wall. Mary’s reply: ‘But I want to.’ There’s never any answer to that.
Another question pressed on me while we were on holiday. It was: when did Cooper and Shoona have sex? This was a mystery at barracks, and even more so here. We had asked them if they wanted a tent of their own – well, I say we, it was Hifa asking Shoona in private – and they had said no. Fine, but when and where did they do it? It must have involved sneaking off outdoors, or round the back of buildings, or something. They never made any public gestures of affection and were in no obvious sense a couple, except they were.
My own plans in that direction came to nothing. I tried a couple of times to go off for walks with Hifa, but one of the problems with camping, it turned out, was that there was almost no privacy. Every time I made a sneaky suggestion – fancy a trip to the pub? fancy seeing what’s over that hill? fancy a walk down to the nearest village? fancy borrowing a couple of rods from the landlord and going to try some fishing? – she would either immediately ask the others if they wanted to come too, or they would see us heading off and join us without asking, as if everyone had automatic permission to join in anything anyone else was doing. I felt pathetic, as if I’d gone back to school and wasn’t all that far away from the stage of sexual development where boys’ way of showing girls that they like them is to go up to them and pull their hair and then run to the other end of the room.
I still often think of that week. Maybe that’s in part because of what happened afterwards. But at least some of it is because it was a magical seven days. I can’t say it was the happiest time I spent on the Wall, because the whole point is that we weren’t on the Wall, we were on holiday; but it was the best time I ever spent with my new Wall family. We walked, talked, ate, read. Drank a fair bit but never so that we were too hungover to enjoy the day after. The landlord let us use the bathrooms of the pub; he even let us wash and shower there. We got to know each other differently. Being a Defender was a personality people put on when they went to the Wall. Their non-Wall self was closer to their real self, maybe. Or maybe not, I now think, maybe there isn’t a real self, just different versions of us we wear in different settings and with different people. The me who deals with my parents is not the me who talks to Hifa and that is not the me who takes orders from the Captain and that is not the me I am inside myself during a shift on the Wall, counting down the minutes to the end of the twelve hours.