The Wall(3)

In my squad I’d already met the Sergeant and the Corporal: they were always easy to tell apart, at whatever distance and however thickly swaddled in cold-weather clothing, because the Sergeant was heavy and the Corporal was tall. We called the Sergeant Sarge and we called the Corporal Yos. His hobby was whittling, and when we weren’t on the Wall he was usually working on a piece of wood with a wicked-looking curved knife. As for the other members of the squad, that first morning and for several days to come, telling people apart was an issue. It was the layers. So many layers! At breakfast, their heads down over porridge, silent, my new companions were difficult to distinguish even by gender. Everybody goes to the Wall and the balance overall is fifty–fifty, so by probability half of my squad should be women, but there was basically no way of knowing who was who except by asking, and it didn’t seem an ideal icebreaker.

After breakfast we went to the wardroom for a briefing from the Captain. The battered, unloved desks and chairs made it look like a school. There were two maps behind him, one a detailed 3D projection of our section of Wall and the other at a smaller scale showing the nearest fifty kilometres of coast. I was to learn that the briefing almost always had no relevant news, other than the temperature and the weather forecast – though that was very important information. Sometimes we would be told about a flotilla of Others who had been spotted and attacked from the air, just in case some of them had survived and might still be coming in our direction. Occasionally there would be some big-picture news about crops failing or countries breaking down or coordination between rich countries, or some other emerging detail of the new world we were occupying since the Change. Sometimes there would be news of an attack in which Others had used new or unexpected tactics, or attacked in surprising strength. If Others ever got through, we were told about it. The room would go very quiet. We’d hear when, where, how many.

There was no news like that on my first day. We sat shuffling and fidgeting and then the Captain came in. We stood up: not to attention, but we stood up. The Captain ran a tight company; there were lots of posts where nobody bothered to do that. He nodded and we sat down again and the room became still.

‘Nothing special today,’ he said. ‘No sightings of Others reported from the air or sea. No news of any relevance from the wider world. It’s two degrees now, high of five later, which will feel like about zero with the wind chill. Good news: we have a new Defender with us so we’re back up to strength. Kavanagh, stand up.’

I did. I looked around the room and all fourteen members of my squad looked back at me.

‘He’s starting his two years with us. Two years if he and you are lucky and we all do our jobs. Remember, the first few weeks, he’s still training. Also remember, this isn’t a drill. We could be attacked today and he and you need to be ready. OK, that’s it. I’ll see you during my rounds.’

We stood up again and started to make for the door. The Sergeant came over to me and pointed in turn at a grumpy-looking red-headed woman chewing gum sitting in the front row who’d been cleaning her fingers with a penknife during the briefing, the heavily bearded man who’d been sitting beside her, and a gender-indeterminate blob in a balaclava who’d been sitting behind me.

‘Put him in the middle of you lot,’ he said. ‘Posts eight to fourteen. Hifa on the big gun. I’ll come and see you there in thirty minutes.’

We went out onto the rampart that led to the Wall. The Sergeant looked around at us and then he gave the order, the one which was once famous as the most frightening command in the army, the scariest sentence you would ever hear, because it was the immediate precursor of close combat; words which meant, there is a good chance that you will kill or die today. In the new world, it was a sentence Defenders heard at the start of every single shift. He said:

‘Fix bayonets.’

And that’s how it began.





2




I think they used to call it concrete poetry, that thing where the words on the page look like a physical object, the object that the poem is trying to describe. You know, a poem about a tree in the shape of a tree, like this:

a

poem

about a

tree in the

shape of a tree,

in this case a Christ—

mas tree, not a very con-vincing tree and not a very good poem but it’s not trying to be a death-less masterpiece it’s just to show the idea yes?



A concrete poem. It feels an appropriate form for life on the Wall, because for a start life on the Wall is more like a poem than it is like a story. Days don’t vary much; there isn’t much a-to-b. There isn’t much narrative. You do have the constant prospect of action, the constant risk of sudden and total disaster – but that’s not the same as stuff actually happening. Most days, it doesn’t. The thing a typical day most resembles is the day before and the day after. It’s less like a form of time and more like a physical element. Time as a thing, an object. And then because the Wall is the dominant thing in your life and the life of everyone else around you, and your responsibilities and your day and your thoughts are all about the Wall, and your future life is determined by what happens on the Wall – you can, fairly easily, lose your life here, or lose the life you wanted to have – the two entities start to blur together, Time and the Wall, Time and the Wall, the Wall and your day and your life sliding past, minute by minute.