The Wall(41)

We had talked about this: what to do, what calculations to make, if we saw evidence of other boats. The plan had been to row towards them and look for signs of whether they were benign or not. By daylight that felt as if it made sense. At night, less so. We had no weapons and our only defence if we came under attack would be to try to get away as fast as possible. Given that we only had one set of oars, that wasn’t very fast. A boat with lights was either a Coast Guard boat or a boat of Others so confident that they weren’t worried about being seen. That meant that they were either stupid or well armed. Either was dangerous.

The swell was two metres or so, not enough to be frightening, but more than enough to be uncomfortable. It was the swell which made it hard to be certain about the lights; they winked into view at the top of each wave and then disappeared again as we went down into the trough. Everyone else in the boat was asleep. It was a lifeboat, or it had been. A waterproof awning covered the back half of the boat, and that’s where the others were sleeping. It was also where our food supplies were stored. The water tanks and water catchment traps were in the front of the boat, with me.

I wanted to wake someone up to talk about what we should do. Hifa would under normal circumstances have been the obvious choice, but she had been seasick for two days – not feeling-queasy seasick, but repeatedly vomiting in a way which would be genuinely dangerous if it kept on – and had only just gone to sleep. It would not be the right call to wake her up. I chose Hughes. He was the only other person I trusted and he had done a little sailing with an uncle in his childhood, so he wasn’t as ignorant about boats as I was. By which I mean: he knew almost nothing, but I knew nothing-nothing, so he won. It felt like a desperate thing to be doing, to rely on the tiny amount he knew about the sea, but there was no choice. I bent over double to get under the awning and into the back of the boat. You learnt the hard way to be careful when you did that, because if you brushed against the roof you were likely to get several litres of water decanted onto you. I shoved Hughes with my foot, then again, and he woke up. I held my fingers to my lips. He sat up and crawled out of the sleeping space. There was just enough starlight to see that he looked terrible, his lips cracking with salt and his face abraded red with the sea winds. I realised I must look like that too.

‘This had better be good,’ he said. I handed him a water bottle and pointed into the middle distance as we swayed up and down. He saw the lights as we got to the top of the second set of swells. He said nothing and looked at them for a while as they came in and out of view. I noticed he too was taking some time before he felt sure he could trust his senses.

‘What I’m wondering is, if you think about who that might be, how many of the options are good for us?’ I said.

He nodded. We stood at the prow and looked into the distance while the boat bucked up and down on the swell and the lights winked on, winked off. Once I had had a few chances to study the lights I thought I could see they were arranged in a triangular pattern of five, one at the top and two lower down on each side.

‘Same. Guards probably aren’t out here at this time, but if they are and they see us, they’ll sink us straight away, no question. So we can’t go anywhere near them if they’re Guards. If they’re Others, how come they’re making such a spectacle?’

A boat full of Others who felt confident enough to be fully illuminated on the sea in the middle of the night – to be that unfrightened, they would have to be very frightening.

‘So we leave them be?’

He thought for a moment. It felt impossible that we would encounter the first sign of life out here, the first sign of company and possible salvation, and turn away from it. But when we thought about it, saw the risks, there was nothing else we could do.

‘Plus, I think they’re further away than they look. The horizon at sea level is about five K. The swell is coming from that direction. That’s a lot of rowing into a lot of waves.’

‘And only three of us to do the rowing.’

We looked at each other. We had been physically inactive for six weeks while we were waiting for sentence, and the rowing was hard. My hands were blistered and split and I was getting out of breath within minutes. Even if we wanted to row to the boat we might not be able to do it.

‘OK. Thanks. Go back to sleep,’ I said.

Hughes started to go back towards the covered part of the lifeboat. He stopped.

‘In a few days we may be so desperate we have no choice,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

——



So this was life at sea. After the sentences were passed, we were taken in another lorry to another barracks. This time we travelled in handcuffs. I imagine the authorities’ thinking was that we now had nothing to lose so were more likely to make a run for it. That lorry journey was the worst moment of my life so far, worse than the moment of sentencing, worse even than when I knew the breach had happened and the Others had got away. I knew what the rules of the Wall were – like everyone else, I had known them my whole life. I don’t remember having them explained to me because there was no time before the rules, before the facts of life: the sun comes up in the morning and goes down at night; if you throw something in the air, gravity makes it come back down; if the Others get over, you get put to sea. And yet, for all that, I felt sick with the injustice of it. Physically sick. I knew for certain that I, that we, had done nothing wrong. More: I had done everything I could to guard the Wall to the best of my capabilities. I had fought hard and watched my friends die. We all had. And this was our reward.