The Wall(2)

‘A Defender who can’t see,’ he said. ‘Great.’

The other person snorted. This was a heavy-set white man wearing a red knitted cap: the Sergeant, though I didn’t know that yet either.

‘I’m Kavanagh,’ I eventually said. ‘I’m new.’ It seems idiotic now and it seemed idiotic then, but I had no idea what else to say. The two of them didn’t even laugh. They just looked at me. The man in uniform got up and walked over to me and looked me up and down. He was tall, at least half a head taller than me.

‘I’m the Captain,’ he said. ‘This is the Sergeant. Do everything we tell you to without questioning why. It takes about four months before you know what you’re doing. I have complete power to extend your stay here, without appeal. I don’t have to give a reason. The only way you get off the Wall is that two years go past, and I decide to let you go. If they didn’t make that clear in training, I’m making it clear now. Is it clear?’

It was. I said so.

‘Take him to the barracks,’ he said to the Sergeant. ‘I’m going out on the Wall.’

He left. The Sergeant’s demeanour changed a little when he was on his own.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘There are two sergeants, one for each shift. I’m yours. The other one is on the Wall. I should be in bed but I stayed up to meet you because I’m a fucking saint. Ask anyone. You’ll meet the rest of your shift in the morning. I’ll give you a quick version of the tour. The rest you can fill in tomorrow. Like the Captain said, it takes a while for it all to sink in, and the best way is through repetition. You can ask questions at the beginning but everyone gets sick of that pretty quickly, so I’d advise you to think if there’s an obvious answer to whatever it is you’re asking before you open your gob.’

He showed me around the mess hall, which was a bare concrete box with tables and chairs, the rec room, which was a bare concrete box with a huge television and badly battered sofas, the armoury, which was locked, and the infirmary, which was a bare concrete box with four steel-framed beds and no medical staff. Then he led me down two flights of stairs to the barracks, which is what Defenders called the room where everyone slept. It too was a bare concrete box. After standing in the entrance for about a minute, my eyes adapted enough to be able to make out the main details. There were thirty beds in the room, fifteen on each side, with plywood partitions separating them into cubicles. At the far end was the washroom. I was already familiar with the layout, because it was the same as in the barracks where I had done my training. One side had no external light source, the other had small square windows above head height. The beds along the right-hand wall were all empty, because that half of the company was on night duty. The beds along the left-hand wall were all occupied by sleeping bodies, except the ninth bed along, which had been empty and was now mine.

I put my bag down in the back of the cubicle. I took off my shoes and my outer layers of clothing and got into the bed. The sheets were rough but the two blankets were thick and I quickly warmed up. I could hear snores and muttering from my new squad companions. Being hungry makes me speedy; I realised I hadn’t eaten since setting out, and that my mind was whirring too fast to sleep. Tired, wakeful, apprehensive, I lay there and looked at the ceiling, and thought, I only have two years of this, 729 more nights, after I get through this one. That’s if I’m lucky and nothing goes wrong.

I must have slept, because I was woken up. Or maybe it was a new kind of sleep where you have none of the good part of being asleep but all of the bad part of being jolted awake. I heard an alarm and a few moments later felt the bed shake and opened my eyes to see a man’s face leaning down over me, close enough to smell his hot, faintly rank breath. The face was all beard, eyes and wool cap. On the upside, he was smiling.

‘New meat,’ he said. ‘I’m the Corporal. Also known as Yos. Five minutes to wash, fifteen to breakfast, then we assemble.’ He shook the bed one more time, as if for luck, then stood up and headed towards the washroom. He was another tall man, well over six feet. Around him other squad members were getting up, grumbling and scratching. I saw that most of them slept more or less fully clothed. The Corporal stopped a few metres away and turned to me.

‘Don’t look so worried,’ he said. ‘You know that thing they say, don’t worry, it might never happen? This is different. You’re on the Wall. It already has.’ He laughed and left me.

——



Thirty in a company, divided into two squads or shifts of fifteen. In addition, five-odd permanent staff at each guard station, cooks and cleaners. Companies rotate, two weeks on the Wall, two weeks off. One of those weeks is training and general maintenance and whatever, the other is leave. Squads only change members when people have finished their time on the Wall. That’s a rolling process, so there are always Defenders who are coming up to the end of their time, mixed in with others who’ve just started. Those are the two twitchiest groups, the ones who’ve only just begun and haven’t got a clue what they’re doing, and the ones at the end who feel they can reach out with their tongues and taste the freedom of life after the Wall, and who can think of only two subjects, how great it will be to get away and what a disaster it would be if anything went wrong in the last few days. The Defenders in the middle, some distance from both the beginning and the end, are more stoic.