The Wall(37)

Now the speech had turned and he was repeating the warnings he had given at training – which, to be fair, had turned out to be true – about how there were more Others coming and they were more desperate. He also repeated the warnings about how the Others were suspected to have secret networks of support, secret sympathisers, hidden in the general population. They were thought to have new ways of getting away from the coast, maybe even new ways of getting chipped. He went on for a bit more and then stopped his general briefing and invited me and the Captain and Hifa up on stage and talked for a bit about how we had been decorated in action and how lucky this squad was to have three such resolute, able Defenders, and how we were the best defence force in the world, the best trained and the best staffed and the best prepared.

We got down off the stage, and the baby politician stopped me for a word.

‘Joseph,’ he said to me in greeting – which was odd in itself, since nobody on the Wall called me by my given name, it was either Kavanagh or Chewy. Even Hifa called me Chewy (as well as some other things). ‘Please – call me James.’

‘Er, hi James.’

‘How are you?’ he said with the intensity dialled up. ‘How are you?’ He had put on a concerned face.

‘I’m fine, thanks.’

‘Wound better?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Change of landscape welcome?’

‘So, there’s a thing Defenders say, the Wall has no accent. Meaning, it’s sort of the same everywhere.’

‘Do they? Do they say that? That’s good, that’s really good. No accent – yes.’ He nodded two or three times. ‘Well, it’s good to catch up with old friends. Good to stay in touch. Let me just give you this, just in case.’

He took a card out of his top jacket pocket and handed it to me: a name and an email address. He reached out to give my arm a parting squeeze, then I saw him remembering that I had been wounded, and he wasn’t clear for a fraction of a second what to do, then he either remembered it had been my right shoulder and he was aiming for my left arm, or he remembered that he had just asked me if I had recovered, so if my arm was too sore to squeeze it was in a sense my responsibility not his, and went on with the gesture. I took the card, put it in my pocket, said goodbye. It was a small thing but I took it as a sign, meaning that he saw in me some of the same stuff I saw, or wanted to see, in myself. He could smell the ambition, the get-me-out-of-here scent, all over me.

I was pleased. I also felt that I needed to have a shower. Sarge took a moment to talk to me as we were going through to lunch. The rest of the squad had already gone ahead and sat down and were getting stuck in.

‘You know what that plonker said. We’re lucky to have you?’

I got my modest face ready and said that I did.

‘Reckon if we really were lucky, we’d not have been attacked.’

Fair enough.

——



Two tours went past without anything much happening. It was just past the top of high summer; short nights, with amazing northern sky colours I’d never seen before, shades of blue and purple shading into deep-blue-grey-purple and purple-off-black and deep black. Once or twice, during nights when we weren’t on shift, Hifa and I even went for a walk inland to get away from the light pollution of the Wall, so we could see the stars. There were so many lights in the sky that night seemed not so much a thing of darkness as an experiment in a different form of illumination, an invitation to navigate by star.

‘It’s beautiful up here,’ Hifa said.

‘In the summer.’

‘It smells different.’

That was true – it did smell different. The sea smelt different. It must be that the sea flora were different, the kelp and seaweed species were more pungent, vegetal and cabbagey, but not unpleasantly so. Greener, basically, it smelt greener. Of living things. It was hard not to imagine what life would be like after the Wall, when you could go on a walk whenever you felt like it and goof off whenever you felt like it and also work hard at clawing your way up in life and becoming a member of the elite and taking over the world. Also, a baby or babies plural. I liked those walks and that sky.

On our third far-northern tour, I didn’t see the sky much, because I was on nights and the lights spoiled the view. It was the least difficult night guarding I’ve ever done, because the dark was so short and the nightfall and sunrise so long and so spectacular, a protracted set-piece natural show. The danger and difficulty of the tour down south seemed a long distance off. The only person who didn’t appear to like being where we were was the Captain, who was the closest he ever got to being edgy; as if the sense of quietness and peace and distance bothered him. He made his rounds more regularly than ever and had less than ever to say.

‘Maybe it’s a post-traumatic thing,’ Hughes speculated one morning in the mess, after a night when the Captain had come round no fewer than five times. ‘He killed two people with a sodding machete. Practically cut them in half. People who maybe were not so unlike he once was. It’s going to take a bit of processing.’

‘He’s not the type,’ I said.

‘Everyone’s the type sooner or later,’ said Hifa. We gently bickered for a while, without reaching a conclusion. The Captain was off, though, everyone agreed.

Eight days into that tour came the first really difficult weather we had seen up north. There had been days which were damp and still, and the air was so full of moisture it was like living inside a cloud that had sunk to earth, but from the Defenders’ point of view, the great virtue of that weather was that in the super-humid silence, you could hear a cough or a metal clank from hundreds of metres away. You could talk to the Defender at the next post without raising your voice. There were other days with abrupt squally showers, gusts of wind and horizontal rain that you could see coming across the water towards you, which hit hard and overwhelmingly, and were gone in minutes. After the first one of these, you never forgot your waterproofs again. But that night was different, a hard rain and wind combined with a hard close fog; a sudden premonition of what it would be like up here when winter came.