The Wall(28)

I had to admit that I knew nothing about farming. I just liked the idea of trying something else. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a suburban hutch doing work I didn’t even have the emotional energy to hate. Like my parents. When you’re on the Wall, you’re desperate to get off the Wall. It’s all you think about: getting through your turn of duty, getting off the Wall. But then you start to think, why? What do I want to get off the Wall for? What’s waiting for me?

I could just – this was the terrible, unsayable thing, the thing I would have sworn an oath was impossible, just weeks before – I could just start to see why people sometimes signed up for more than one shift on the Wall. People like Sarge and the Corporal, who were on their second turn; people like the Captain, who had done three and was now on his fourth. I’m not saying that I was starting actively to think about it. I’m just saying that I could see why people did. See that they liked the combination of long dull uneventful days with a strong sense of purpose looming overall; the mix of aimless time, structured days and meaningful work. A bit like human life in general, you could say, the terrible regularity with which nothing happens, the genuine terror when something does. Hurry up and wait. That’s the motto which governs most lives. It’s the motto which governs the Wall, for sure. The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.

Or maybe I’d do a bit of both, or all three: I’d do another shift on the Wall, which would be horrible, as horrible as this one, except perhaps it would be a bit less so because I would understand what I was doing and I would be doing it not because I had to, not because I had no choice, but precisely because I did have a choice, because it was up to me, because it was in my control, and I knew what I’d be gaining by doing it. I’d be gaining a route up and out, a chance to become someone else, a chance to win privileges, like the Captain – maybe I’d be offered a chance to train as an officer, then go to college, then fight my way into the elite and zoom around on planes for a bit, go to … do whatever it is members of the elite do, conferences or talks or meetings, big discussions about the Change, then go and start a commune and live with Hifa and the others and find a new style of living, a new balance. New things to want, new ways to be. Yes, that was a good idea, that was now my new policy, my plan: I would do a little bit of everything.

That was how my mind would wander during those nights, nights which seemed to be appreciably shorter with every shift that went past. After ten days, the ‘night’ shift was starting in full daylight and ending in full daylight. The first coffee/snack break, Mary coming down the Wall on her bicycle cart, was just as night fell; the last visit from her, with her last coffee of the shift, was just before dawn. Right from my first day I had liked Mary’s visits – there was nothing original about that, everyone loved Mary. It’s hard not to like the person who comes bringing chat and laughter and company and a warm drink in the middle of a long lonely watch, but even so, her personality was perfectly adapted to the job. She was the kind of person who leaves most people smiling, most of the time. Even the look of her could make you smile, her round pretty pink face and curly near-ginger hair which always seemed to be trying to escape from whatever she was wearing to control and contain it – a kerchief when she was in the kitchen, a hood or a beanie or a cap when she was out, depending on the warmth and the wetness. Those long stretches of time made people cranky, and it was easy to have sharp swings in mood, passages of time when you felt sure you weren’t going to get through it. Mary never had that: her job was a relatively privileged one, by comparison, and she knew it, and made it part of her job to make everyone else feel better.

The tenth night of that shift, Mary did her second set of rounds with dawn minutes away. I watched her on her usual routine, her bike stopping in each Defender’s pool of light as she came along the ramparts, cup of warm drink and a few words for everyone. That night a gale was blowing. The waves and the wind were so loud that it was hard to hear even the communicator earpiece. A roar, the sea as loud as I had ever heard it. The Captain had already been around twice that night, not saying anything much, just checking in. It was clear that he had taken the warnings from the baby politician seriously. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking, probably just counting down to the end of the shift: four more nights, meaning it was nearly over, and then two weeks away and then two weeks of days, concretewaterwindsky, and then I’d be almost halfway through my first year on the Wall. It wasn’t quite time to begin celebrating that the end was in sight, but I could at least know that I knew how to get through the time, that it would go past and then it would be over and I’d be off the Wall.

Mary stopped for a longer than usual chat with Shoona. There was a faint line at the horizon, dawn imminent, though the wind hadn’t yet dipped as it often does at daybreak. She got back on her bike – or rather put her feet back on the pedals, she had been straddling it during her rounds, as always – and came over to me. I took a scan of the Wall and the water and prepared to give her my full attention for the next couple of minutes.

‘Oof,’ she said when she arrived, ‘hello darling, I swear I’m getting more unfit the longer I do this, that doesn’t make sense, does it, should be the other way round. Coffee and a biscuit, not in that order. Here, hold this.’ She reached into her shoulder bag and was holding out a packet of biscuits. I remember thinking: chocolate and orange jam, my favourite. I took them and put my rifle down on the bench, still within arm’s reach as per the rules, and unhooked my metal cup from the outside of my rucksack while she fiddled with the thermos flask. I was glad it was coffee rather than tea, because although the tea tasted better the coffee was more effective at keeping me awake. As she reached forwards to pour it I saw she had spilt it over herself, though spilt it in a strange place, along her throat and the front top of her waterproof, and I thought, that’s weird, I know she can be clumsy, but how did Mary manage to pour the coffee upwards, somehow to chuck it up over herself? She made a small noise, a bit like the ‘oof’ when she stopped her bike, but quieter, more involuntary; she sounded surprised. She dropped the thermos and looked down at herself and then all at once several things happened, simultaneously, but also slowly: