The Wall(4)

Add in the fact that so much of the time, what you’re mainly looking at is concrete. You stand on it, you sleep in it, your home and office and the place you eat and the place you shit and the place that gets in your dreams – concrete. Concrete … there it is again. You could talk about the Wall in prose, or you could talk about it in poetry, but either way concrete would be prominent.

In prose it’s a question of sheer scale. The Wall is ten thousand kilometres long, more or less. (This country has a lot of coast.) It is three metres wide at the top, every centimetre of the way. On the sea side it is usually about five metres high; on the land side the height varies according to the terrain. There is a watch house every three kilometres: three thousand-plus of them. There are ramparts, stairs, barracks, exit points for boats, helipads, storage facilities, water towers, access structures, you name it. All of them made of concrete. If you had the stats and the time and were sufficiently bored you could calculate just how much, but suffice it to say, that’s a lot of concrete. Millions of tons of it. That’s prose.

Prose is misleading, though, when it comes to saying what it feels and seems like. The days are the same, with variations in the weather, and the view is the same, with variations in the visibility, and the people either side of you are the same, so it’s static; it’s not a story, it’s an image which is fixed-with-variations. It’s a poem and as I already said, it’s a concrete poem with a few repeating elements. One would be concrete itself:

concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete concrete



But then there’s also water, sky, wind, cold. Always water, sky, wind, cold, and of course concrete, so it’s sometimes concretewaterskywindcold, when they all hit you as one thing, as a single entity, combined, like a punch, concretewaterskywindcold. Except it isn’t always like that and you sometimes are affected by them distinctly, as separate things, and in a different order, so it might be

cold:::concrete:::wind:::sky:::water

or sometimes it’s slower than that, they take time to sink in, so it might be a freak clear calm day (they happen, not often, but they happen), in which case it’s like an even shorter haiku

sky!

cold

water

concrete

wind

and then sometimes your perceptions slow, especially when it’s cold, deep cold, and you’re already tired, and it’s towards the end of a watch, and then it’s more like



Ah yes, the cold. The physical feeling of being on the Wall varies all the time, but varies within a narrow framework. It’s always cold, but there is more than one type of cold, you soon learn, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 cold is the kind that’s always there. It begins when you wake up in the barracks, as I did on that first day, and it’s already cold, and it stays cold while you wash and use the toilet and put on your day clothes, layering up from thermal underclothes, inner layers, outer layers, all your indoor gear, you go and eat, always porridge and sometimes protein and a warm drink, and you grab as many energy bars as you can face the thought of eating during the day before you go to the wardroom for a briefing, which sometimes has information about new threats but more usually tells you that today will be the same as yesterday, you go to the armoury and get your weapons, then get your outer layer of clothes on, windproofs and waterproofs and hat and gloves, everyone using a different rig so by this point you look like the most disorganised army in the world, which in a way you are. Then you go out on the Wall and immediately you’re hit by type 1 cold, the cold which is always already there, which you know so well and hate so much it’s like being in one of those bands where they’ve been playing together for years and spent so much time together that they know each other so intimately that they can’t bear to be in each other’s company for a second longer, they can identify each other blindfold by the smell of each other’s farts, and yet they have no choice because this, after all, is what they do and who they are. Then you walk to your post for the day (or the night if you’re on night shift, which is exactly the same except twelve hours further on) and relieve the lucky sod who is now off duty while you’ve become the poor sod who is on duty in their place. And by the time you’ve walked to your post, which can be a kilometre and a half away, you’re generating some body heat and you’ve started to fight back against the cold and you realise that as long as you keep moving you’re going to be just warm enough. That’s type 1 cold.

Type 2 cold starts the same, except that as you move through it, it gets colder. After walking to your post for twenty minutes, you’re colder than you were at the start. The cold gets through to you deeply and intimately. It feels dangerous because it is dangerous. People have died of hypothermia on the Wall. You have no choice with type 2 cold except to keep moving as much as you can and, mainly, to try to find out in advance if it’s going to be a type 2 day and plan accordingly. That means double layers of everything, double porridge, double warm drinks. Sometimes someone will run back to the barracks and bring more clothes, a big flask of warm liquid, anything. I’ve even heard of units where they make fires and gather round them on the coldest nights, but the Captain would never let us get away with that. Type 1 cold can come to seem familiar, almost friendly, because you get to know it so well – the rest of your life, any time you feel cold, it will remind you of the Wall, and of this kind of cold, and because you’re now remembering being miserable at a time when you’re less miserable (by definition, you’re less miserable, since you’re no longer on the Wall), it will be not exactly a happy memory, but a memory with a happy effect: hooray, I’m no longer on the Wall! Somebody said there was no greater misery than recalling a time of happiness when you’re in a time of despair, and that’s true, but let’s focus on the positive and remember that the opposite is also true. When you remember the bad place, and you’re no longer in the bad place, it feels good, like waking from a nightmare.