The Wall

In every walk of life, every job and vocation, there is an experience which distinguishes actually doing the thing from the training and preparation, however extensive. You don’t know what boxing is until somebody punches you, you don’t know what doing a shift in a factory feels like until the bell has gone at the end of the day, you don’t know what a day’s march with a full backpack is until you’ve done one, and you don’t know what the Wall means until you’ve stood a twelve hour watch.

I suddenly got it. Hifa’s mother was one of those people who like life to be all about them. With the Change, that is a harder belief to sustain; it takes much more effort to think that life is about you when the whole of human life has turned down, when everything has been irrevocably changed for everyone. You can do it, of course you can, because people can do anything with their minds and their sense of themselves, but it takes work and only certain kinds of unusually self-centred people can do it. They want to be the focus of all the drama and pity and all the stories. I could tell that she didn’t like it that younger people are universally agreed to have had a worse deal than her generation. I understood Hifa’s dread and found myself reaching for her hand.

That is another thing a story is, something somebody wants to hear, but my mind was blank and all I could think was, she wants me to tell her a story, a story where something turns out all right. I said this to myself over and over again, that’s what a story is, something that turns out all right, and then it came to me, and what I said out loud began like this: ‘It’s cold on the Wall.’