The Wall(6)
After two hours, at nine o’clock, a member of the kitchen staff brings around a hot drink. Sometimes it’s tea, sometimes coffee, but really, who cares? It’s a hot drink, it’s a sign that you’ve done your first two hours. Somebody comes round on a bike, bringing a big heated flask. That first day, it was a woman, one of the cooks, who came along the Wall. I watched her stop for a minute or two at each post as she came. She was chatting with the Defenders. I felt my eyes fill with tears: the thought that someone was going to stop and talk to me suddenly seemed like the greatest act of compassion and empathy I had ever encountered. As she got to the post before mine, where the woman next to me was on guard, I could hear both of them laughing. The sound of laughter on the Wall – it felt like an intrusion from another world. And I’d only been there two hours.
‘Hello darling, I’m Mary,’ said the cook, as she stopped her bicycle next to me, her curly hair peeking out from under her cap. ‘Got your mug?’
I hadn’t. I put my rifle down on the bench and got the standard-issue tin mug out of my backpack. She poured hot brown liquid out of the flask.
‘First day, isn’t it? Poor thing. It always hits people hard. You get used to it though. And at least it’s not raining or blowing a gale or night-time so there’s always that.’
‘I’m Kavanagh,’ I said. The liquid was dark brown tea, stewed and bitter, with so much sugar in, it was as sweet as ice cream. I had never drunk anything so delicious.
‘I know you are, darling. Well, we’ll be seeing each other at least three more times today, so we mustn’t wear out all the chat now. Keep ’em peeled!’
And with that Mary was back on her bike, heading off towards Hifa, who had already put down the rocket launcher and turned to her in expectation. I kept watching while I drank my tea. It occurred to me that if the Others were able to work out a way of attacking during a tea break, their odds would be good. Mary got to Hifa and they gave each other a quick, very unmilitary hug. Mary got off her bike and leant it against the bench. Then she poured out Hifa’s tea and awarded herself a mug too and they settled down to talking. I was jealous. Mary didn’t seem to be worried about wearing out the chat when she was talking to Hifa, did she? They talked for about five minutes and then Mary got back on her bike and pedalled back down the top of the Wall, with a little wave for each one of us as she went past. It was three hours until lunch. I decided to break the time up into two sections of ninety minutes, with an energy bar in the middle.
‘They put something in the tea to stop you thinking about sex,’ somebody said on the communicator.
‘Yeah,’ said somebody else. ‘They put tea.’
The next ninety minutes went past slowly, but not as slowly as the first two hours had done. I said to myself: maybe I’m starting to get the hang of this Wall. Mistake. Having done some maths to make myself feel depressed the night before – two years on the Wall if I’m lucky – I now did some maths to cheer myself up. Two years = 730 days but it’s two weeks on, two weeks off, so that’s really only 365, and a day is really only a shift, since if the Others attack during somebody else’s shift it’s not your problem, so that’s 365 shifts of twelve hours each, which by another way of looking at it is 187.5 full days, which is only six months, so my two years on the Wall is really only six months on the Wall, which isn’t so bad.
After eighty-four minutes, I started counting down towards my power bar. 360 seconds, 359, 358 … all the way down to 1. I took the waxed paper oblong out of my upper left pocket and unwrapped it slowly, trying to take my time. The bars they give you on the Wall aren’t labelled so you don’t know what’s inside them. Lucky dip. This one was nutty and dense, with what seemed to be particles of red fruits, chewy and sweet and acidic, dotted through it. I don’t normally pay much attention to what I eat, but on the Wall, where for a lot of the time there isn’t much to think about, I became obsessed with food. This power bar, for instance, was unlike anything else I had ever eaten – more intense, more important. The nuts had a different texture from the fruit. The bar was chewy and dry but also soft. Objectively and soberly, you would have to say that it was fairly nasty. Maybe you could go so far as to say it was horrible. At the same time it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. I tried to eat slowly, chewing each bite for as long as I could, thirty chews, forty, fifty, the flavours changing as I chewed, the fruits taking over from the nuts. I was glad when there was still three quarters of the bar left, calm when there was only half left, starting to feel regretful when I’d got down to the last quarter, then the last eighth, then the last mouthful, no crumbs left in the wrapper because the bar was too densely constructed for that, even when I tipped it up into my mouth, chewing fifty times, fifty-one, fifty-two, see if I can get to sixty, nope, there’s nothing left, nothing in my mouth except saliva and a faint tang of dried raspberries.
When I looked up from the bar, the Captain was about a hundred metres away, walking towards me. I say ‘walking’: that was significant. Most of us trudged or shuffled along the Wall, and almost everyone, almost all the time, moved with their heads down. We all of us spent enough time looking out at the sea. You put off as long as you could the moment when you had to turn your attention outwards. Head down, eyes down. Nothing good to see if you look up.
The Captain wasn’t like that. He stood straight and looked around him when he walked – or at least most of the time he did. On this occasion he was looking directly at me. He was wearing his uniform outers, which were bright green, because the Defenders’ uniform is the opposite of camouflage: instead of trying to hide from an enemy, we’re trying to be as visible as possible, to the Others and to ourselves. The idea is that it will scare them and reassure us. The Captain for his part certainly did look scary enough, or reassuring enough, depending on your point of view.