The Wall(27)

After dropping that, he leant back from the podium and let it sink in. ‘Yes. They take the side of the Others. The Others! They would rather be on the side of the Others than on the side of their own people. It is hard to imagine such wickedness. Hard to imagine being so wrong, so morally lost, so ethically destitute. I know that decent people will find it difficult to believe. But we must accept that these lost souls exist and that they are, there is no other way of putting this, on the side of the Others. And what is more, and this is the new information that we now have, they are taking steps to help the Others. There is intelligence that some of these, I would call them criminals except that most criminals are just citizens who have lost their direction in life, made some mistakes, gone awry – I will instead call them what they are, traitors. These traitors are working on ways of helping the Others. Of getting the Others away from us if they succeed in getting over the Wall. Of communicating with the Others, of suggesting places and times to attack, even, and this is the most concerning development of all, of helping them get chips, of helping them to disappear into our society if they succeed in breaching the Wall. Of helping to defeat the Wall, defeat the Defenders – that’s right, helping them to defeat you!’

You know what: looking around the room, I could tell that the feeling had shifted again. We weren’t that bothered. The news that more Others were coming, and coming imminently – that was an issue for us. That was real. We knew what that meant. The fact that Others were getting help from inside, that they might get away from the system once they were over the Wall, that wasn’t really our problem. I could tell that it was a huge issue for the baby politician and I could see why, but from a Defender’s point of view, if the Other gets over you’re dead anyway, so the fact of the Other getting a shiny microchip and successfully hiding from the state isn’t your worry. A big deal for the Others, obviously, and for the elite, but for Defenders, an Other who had got away was no longer our concern.

He talked for a bit more but there wasn’t any further new information. The take-away was, the Others were coming and they have assistance. When he finished, we packed our stuff and got in the lorry for the drive to our next shift on the Wall. About halfway there, my head started hurting and I began feeling sick: I had stopped being drunk and my hangover had kicked in. It was a long trip. When we got to our barracks, the previous watch was still on duty: we had some time to go before our shift started. I went to bed and slept for eighteen hours.





II





THE OTHERS





13




Back at the Wall, everything was the same. It always was, physically: the same sky, the same sea, the same wind, the same horizon. Same concretewaterwindsky. But the politician had been right too. Rumours were going around that there was increased activity by the Others. More boats on the horizon, more lights at night. There was also news of attacks, three in the last two weeks. (Detailed briefings on any attack were given to all Defenders. You never knew when you might learn something that would later save your life.) The attacks had been very poorly planned and inexpert, basically Others just coming up to the Wall in rowing boats, asking to be killed. Remember, though, on the Wall, low risk is high risk. The Captain brought us all together and gave us a lecture on exactly this topic.

‘So why is this bad news? Being under attack from untrained, unarmed Others who have exactly zero chance of getting through.’

I held up my hand.

‘Because it means they’re desperate. And if the clueless ones are desperate, the clever ones will be too.’

‘Point to Chewy,’ said the Captain. ‘Don’t let the thick ones make you lower your guard. They’re coming.’

Hughes held up his hand. ‘Sir, any evidence of that support from collaborators that we were warned about?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said the Captain. It was impressive how he could, just by standing still with no change of expression, call something bullshit without using the word.

So, they were coming. And yet, at any given time, on any given shift, they weren’t. Not yet anyway. Three attacks on ten thousand kilometres of wall wasn’t all that many attacks, when you averaged it out. The year was heading into early summer. The longer, marginally warmer days and shorter, marginally warmer nights made being on duty easier for both shifts. I had also, I realised, got through the first phase of being a Defender, the one where every shift was an assault on my sense of what was physically possible, and was now at the second stage, where you get used to it, where the rhythm of a shift is familiar, where you know that the twelve hours are going to go past, and the best thing to do is just let them: don’t fight the passing of time, ride on it, float on it. Better: let it go its own way. Don’t look at your watch. Think about something else. If anything happens, let your adrenaline and your training take care of it. Don’t live on the edge. Don’t be on edge. Time will pass, all you have to do is let it.

I spent many hours, that shift, thinking about the conversation I’d had with Hughes while we were camping. What did I want to be when I grew up? If I wasn’t going to be a member of the elite, what was I going to do instead? I might be comrades and friends with my fellow Defenders, might feel I had things in common with them, but that didn’t mean I liked or had things in common with my parents. I wasn’t going to go back home. Home no longer felt like home. I’d go to college and then what? Hughes wanted to spend his life among books. I didn’t. I quite liked the idea of going and living with some of my new friends, Hifa and Cooper and Shoona and Mary and Hughes, going off together and finding a new way of living, more communal, not family-based but where we would live together and look after each other and maybe other like-minded people would join us. We’d maybe live on a farm, we’d maybe have, you know, goats. The kind of thing farm people had.