I first learned about the art of walls when I was studying for my foundation degree in boundary. We were taught by Professor Professor, whose actual name was Prokofiev or Provesovich or something Russian-sounding that nobody could remember. He was a wild-haired institution of a man who punctuated his lectures with expressive hand motions which only slightly alleviated his tics. Thinking back, I’m not sure why he ended up stuck there. In another world he’d have been a TV mathematician or a thespian; but boundary is a vocational field rather than an academic one, so instead of oak-walled lecture halls he taught us in a flimsy conference room in the basement of the Poly with The Shining-esque carpets which smelled of cleaning fluid.
I slept through a lot of those lectures (no shade on Professor Professor, understand, I just had other things to do with my time) but I did stay awake long enough to pass the end-of-year assessment, and his voice – booming out, occasionally demarcated by stammer-pauses – is rooted in my mind as the voice of intellectual authority. And when I imagine him now all the words that come tumbling out of his mouth are about walls.
“There is no such thing as a wall! You see, it is a fiction. We humans think we are very smart, because we build walls. Walls to keep things out, walls to keep things in. But really walls are an invention not of engineering, but of the mind. We have invented this concept of a ‘wall’ which has no parallel in nature whatsoever. Is abhorred by nature. Rivers, mountain ranges, thickets; all of these are boundaries but not walls. They delineate but they do not isolate. They are permeable. Even this phrase – a ‘cell wall’! Yes! You know it. It separates the inside of the cell from the outside. But its more fundamental purpose is to allow things through! Your amino acids, your tasty tasty proteins. The blood-brain barrier, too – we like to think it is a wall but if you treated it like your brick walls then – pfft. You are dead. You have no oxygen in your brain. You die. Quantum mechanics teaches us this also. At the most fundamental level of reality it is impossible to build a wall. No matter how high, the particle will permeate through. We call this quantum tunnelling. Its mechanism underlies the practice of boundary. And so, our practice is not one of walls. It is very important you know a boundary is not a wall. Walls we make ourselves. Any wall you see, a person put it there. So you must ask, who, and why?”
I arrived on the site on a day white with rain, my cab pulling off the main road in a haze of spray and slowing to a halt by the border fence whose fluorescent hi-vis markings loomed out of the grey at us like deep-sea fish.
The cabbie said, “Here you are, love.”
“What, here? Can’t you take me up to the office?” I said.
“Sign says I’m not allowed past the gate, hun. Gotta drop you off here. Sorry.”
Muttering under my breath, I gathered up my things and opened the cab door. It was freezing. I aimed my borrowed umbrella away from me like a shield and stepped out into the rain. I didn’t dress properly for this – I’d been expecting a quiet day in the office, until Louis tapped me on the shoulder and muttered, “Got a job for you”. Now here I was on a building site in the crummiest part of town, in what was virtually a hailstorm wearing a thin pencil skirt and low heels.
The gate, as it turned out, wasn’t a gate at all, just a sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESSPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. No barrier, no guard – just an invisible force field that seemed to have repelled the cabbie like a magic hex. He’d already done a three-pointer and was accelerating back towards the road, rear lights fading into the mist.
My umbrella turned itself inside out.
I swore cheerfully, wrestled it back the right way around and set off inwards.
The storm meant no work could take place, so nobody was about; just several idle JCBs parked haphazardly and the bones of half-made buildings looming above. In the low cloud I couldn’t tell how high they went, but I’d seen the prints: twelve storeys, extending up to fifteen in places. The council had insisted upon a maximum elevation for the site, one of the very few limitations they’d placed on the developers, who were on record as saying they were doing the council a favour by taking on such a crap site and turning it into something magnificent. Well, it wasn’t magnificent yet. One building was getting close, the windows already in place, still studded all over with protective stickers; but most were just carcasses, concrete struts reaching for the sky, Duplo bricks propped atop each other. What would one day be the train station was already covered in a decorative coating which was slightly reflective and shaped into big round orbs, making it look like a mirrored serpent, or more accurately some fat lizard.
The site office was poorly signed but I eventually found it – a huddle of portacabins by a newly baptised artificial pond. Nobody was outside. The rain was sheeting down now, and apart from the cars the place could’ve been abandoned for a decade.
I folded up my umbrella – fat lot of good it was doing anyway – and knocked.
The man who opened it had the biggest nose I’ve ever seen.
“What’s it?”
I smiled sweetly. “Hello. I’m the boundarian.”
He blinked at me a few times. Then someone behind him said, “Oh, she’s the boundarian!” and that was enough to get me in.
Both men introduced themselves, and their names immediately fell out of my brain. (I have a real problem with names. I’ve heard it makes me look like a psychopath, or a genius, or both.) There was a tea point on the side, and I desperately hoped someone was going to offer me a cuppa, but nobody did.
Mr Bald said, “It’s on the new site. You’ll need a hard hat.” No rest for the wicked, I thought.
To their credit, when we got to the gash, it was one of the biggest I’ve ever seen.
Big Nose and Mr Bald stood back warily as I went up close to it. We were in the basement level of what was going to be a huge residential complex. Maybe one day it was going to be a car park, or a squash court, or a sex dungeon. Right now, though we were mercifully sheltered from the rain, the site was a sorry sight; stacks of girders lying around the place, tubing rolling around on the floor, a cement mixer covered in a plastic tarp which flapped about noisily in the wind. The way Louis had described it, when someone tripped the gash, everyone else had just gone “nope” and downed tools and run off there and then. I couldn’t see any chisels lying around on the floor, though, so I reckoned he had been exaggerating.
The gash was fully twenty metres wide and almost three metres high, and shimmered like a heat mirage. Compared to the tiddly desktop ones we used to make back in college, it was an absolute beast. Between the edges it was crammed with densely packed clay soil, crumbs of which had broken off and fallen into a pile below the gash, making it look like someone had dropped a pot plant. I guessed it came out somewhere else on site, maybe beneath the very road I’d come in on.
Mr Bald said, “Can you fix it?”
I nosed around the gash. From the other direction it was hardly visible at all, apart from a slight distortion of the light. “How long has it been open for?”
The two men looked at each other. “Yesterday, eleven o’ clock,” said Mr Bald. “Someone was moving in a stack of pipes for the water main and all of a sudden hit this thing in the air. Then there was this big tearing sound.”
“Like a firework,” added Big Nose.
“Yeah, and all our ears popped. Can you fix it?”
That explained the abandoned tubing, I thought. It was a miracle nobody had been injured. Gashes form when a boundary is placed under substantial stress, and anything can set them off. Like a sudden change in air pressure, or a knock from an object in just the right place at just the right angle. Sometimes you don’t even notice at first, like when a glass has cracked but the two edges are still right next to each other so close that it’s invisible.
I said, “I can’t fix it.”
Mr Bald wasn’t happy with that. “You – what? What do you mean you can’t fix it? We’re just supposed to work around it, is that it?”
I sighed. “I mean, if I close this gash, you’ll just get another open somewhere else. More violently, too. Someone might be hurt.”
I sorted through my bag as I talked and fished out my parallometer and its tripod, started extending out the legs. “If you want rid of it for good, I need to find out what is placing all this pressure on the boundary, and deal with that first.”
Mr Bald wandered off to make a phone call. I could hear him over the wind, sounding angry. Big Nose just sat on a girder and watched me work, not with malice, more out of curiosity.
I’d gotten halfway through a set of measurements when he said, “This is to do with the Shaggle, is it?”
I paused. “The what?”
He looked sheepish. “Oh, never mind.”
“No, really, what is it?”
He waved a hand vaguely over towards what I reckoned was north. “You know, the Shaggle. Over the railway line. Full of those types.”
I’d seen it from the cab on the way in, a big sprawling housing estate. I didn’t ask what types “those types” were. What I asked instead was, “Why would that have anything to do with the gash?”
Big Nose shuffled uncomfortably. “I just assumed, you know, with the boundary people coming in, you knew about it.” And he refused to say any more.
I called Louis.
“Louis, what the hell is the Shaggle?”
I could almost hear him pursing his lips down the phone. “Look, you’re supposed to be our gash specialist, ok? Can’t you just fix their gash and leave the rest to me?”
I wanted to scream. “Louis, you told me this was a gash. You didn’t say anything about already having a project open here. For goodness’ sake. I can’t do my job unless you let me do my job.”
“Crikey, cool it. I don’t need the lecture.” He was whining now. I really hate Louis. “Ok, so, this is for your ears only, understand? The developers hired us quietly to do a bit of reconf work a few quarters ago. They wanted a bespoke spatial obliviation because they said it’d increase the value of the site.”
“How big?” I said, between my teeth.
“Big. Pretty big. Ok. They wanted access to the main road to the west, and to the residential streets over to the east. But the reconfiguration was to the north and south. They said the railway line was ‘undesirable’, that you’d get the noise. And the estate was obviously a no-go. So we stripped those two avenues out.”
I closed my eyes. “Jesus wept, Louis. Are you telling me we put a boundary around this entire site?”
I didn’t really need to ask. I already knew the answer.
A boundary reconfiguration has the effect of making the relationships between spaces different. In a hyperbolic reconfiguration – like what Louis and his oh-so-smart friends in Reconf had gotten up to – the site remains approachable from the east and west. But if you try to approach from the north or the south, it’s just not there at all. You’d pass straight from the Shaggle through to the railway line. It’d be as though the entire complex wasn’t there at all.
From within the boundary, space would simply wrap. You’d head out the north side of the complex, and find yourself back at the south.
But a reconfiguration on this scale was going to cause irreparable damage to the surrounding space.
I told Louis as much. I might’ve used a few choice profanities while I did so.
“Yeah, ok, ok, but, here’s the thing, right – you got to see it from their perspective? Imagine wanting to build a huge amazing community with – what – shops, and places to live, and work, and leisure centres – whatever, I don’t know. But you can’t do that when there’s just this absolute dump right next door, can you? And it’s not like the people who live in the Shaggle won’t benefit from the complex. Something this big, it’ll trickle down to the local communities eventually. It’s just the way the world is going at the moment. So what if they get another gash later on. We can fix that too. They’re paying us good rates. All we need to do is keep on the path we’re already on. So?”