The Wall(26)

‘We can truly say, this country has never been better Defended. And it is thanks to women and men such as you. I think you deserve a round of applause!’

He began to clap. I think the idea was that we would join in and start applauding ourselves too – yeah! go us! – but he had severely misread the room. We sat there waiting for the point of this, assuming it had a point. It was hard to imagine he’d done this often before. He was a baby politician, an infant member of the elite. He still had his training wheels. I may have been sleep-deprived, I might possibly still have been a bit drunk, but I fell for a moment into a reverie, a kind of guided dream, in which I imagined baby members of the elite being born from chrysalises, already wearing their shiny suits, their ties pre-knotted, their first clichés already on their lips, being wiped down of cocoon matter and pushed towards a podium, ready to make their first speech, spout their first platitude, lose their virginity at lying. They’d be made to do that before they were given any food or drink or comfort, just to make sure it was the thing they knew first and best, the thing which came most naturally. They tell us that everyone goes to the Wall, no exceptions. Somehow, though, when I saw the politician, I knew for the first time that that couldn’t be true. This man had clearly never been on the Wall. He had never been a Defender. You could smell it on him. It was sometimes said that rich people rigged ID chips so that Help went to the Wall instead of them. You heard rumours about medical exemptions, exemptions for extra education. No one ever admitted to not going on the Wall, but we all suspected that there were rich and powerful people who got out of it.

He stopped clapping. You could tell that he could tell that this was going badly, and also that he knew he mustn’t show that he knew it. His manner changed and became more brisk. He let some of his sense of his own power show.

‘Unfortunately, being a Defender isn’t all a matter of praise and compliments. However deserved they might be! And we have some new intelligence. Information with a direct bearing on your –’ and it was very interesting the way he said this next word, because you caught a glimpse of something cold and dark in him, just for that tiny moment, a small window into what he really thought of us, and the distance between his life and ours – ‘duties.’ Our duties. Yes, OK, our duties, our long nights in the cold and dark, twelve hours at a time spent both bored shitless and in fear of our lives. That was what, in his eyes, we were for. That was our use, our purpose.

‘As you all know, the Change was not a single solitary event. We speak of it in that manner because here we experienced one particular shift, of sea level and weather, over a period of years it is true, but it felt then and when we look back on it today still feels like an incident that happened, a defined moment in time with a before and an after. There was our parents’ world, and now there is our world.’

That was sly of him. He was close to us in age, close enough to know how sensitive and how universal this feeling was, about the gulf between us and the generation before. The energy in the room changed. He might be every bad thing we knew him to be but he also knew some truths.

‘The Change – before and after. Elsewhere, though, it was not like that. The Change was not an event but a process, a process that in some places, some unlucky places, has not stopped. In many of the hotter places of the world, in particular, the Change is still continuing, still reshaping landscapes, still impacting people’s lives. Men and women fled from it, fled from its consequences, tried to make new lives for themselves, to scramble for new shelter, to climb to higher ground, to find a ledge, a cave, a well, an oasis, a place where they could find safety for them and their families. But,’ he said, his tone changing again, and now he really did sound like a member of the elite, a man used to giving orders and breaking bad news, ‘the Change did not stop. The shelter blew away, the waters rose to the higher ground, the ground baked, the crops died, the ledge crumbled, the well dried up. The safety was an illusion. So the unfortunates must flee again, and they have begun, again, in numbers, like the numbers from many years ago when the Change first struck. Big numbers, dangerous numbers. So that is the first thing I am here to tell you. The Others are coming. We have had years of relative peace and calm, but that time is now over. You will be busy. The things for which you have been training: you are likely, more likely than for some years, to do them for real.’

Now this really did count as news. I suddenly felt a lot less drunk. Hifa was sitting up straight staring at the man. The rest of the squads were too. Whatever we had thought we were going to hear, it wasn’t this.

‘The Flight and our friends abroad have confirmed this. Others are on their way. That is my first piece of information for you. But,’ he smiled, ‘the Wall has been here for years, and your training is, as I’ve already said, the best in the world. You are the best in the world. This country is the best in the world. We have prevailed, we do prevail, we will prevail. This we know to be true. However,’ his tone sad now, regretful, more-in-sorrow-than, ‘there are those among us who do not see things the same way. There are those who see our desire for security, for safety, for peace’ – he stretched out his arms in a gesture people often made when they were talking about the Wall, as if the Wall was like a giant pair of outspread arms – ‘as a selfish desire. A selfish, self-interested turning away from the world. A refusal of our responsibilities. A – well, there’s no point going on. You can’t argue with people who want you to drown, to be overrun, to be washed away. You can’t argue! There’s nothing you can tell them to make them change their mind. And yet, they are there, and we have information that some of them, some of these deluded people, are doing something almost impossible to believe. They are taking the side, not of the ordinary decent people of this country, the people you Defenders guard and protect, the people for whom you spend your long nights and days on the Wall, the people whose security is the meaning and purpose of what you do – no, they don’t take their side.’ He was getting into it now. He dropped his voice to a loud, histrionic whisper. ‘They take the side of the Others!’