The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  It was good to have him back on diamonds. I think my mother thought so too, because she looked at the diamond in my hand and said, ‘Another rivet in the ship,’ just as she had done all those years ago, and once again I imagined a boat studded with sparkling rainbows, like something from a dream.

  ‘How was the trip?’ she asked, drying her eyes and settling onto the sofa with her sewing.

  ‘Fine. And I visited the holding centre. Roger told me that the people don’t believe in Lalla because I never take her with me.’ He laughed, but my mother didn’t even smile. He started to say more, then stopped and looked at me. ‘Kitten, is there any water? Could you fetch me some?’

  I went to the kitchen. The boiled water in the stone jug was mine; my mother knew I hated the taste of the water sterilising tablets we were given at every re-registration. But it was hard to boil water when power was so scarce; my father and mother always used the tablets. I looked about for them, but the tone of my father’s voice stopped me. ‘Anna, listen,’ he said quietly as soon as I was out of sight. ‘The troops are going to bomb St James’s Park. They’ve put the razor wire round it, and moved out the people who’ve got cards. It’s Regent’s Park all over again. We need to leave.’

  Regent’s Park. It had been one of the first places opened up for people who had nowhere to go. I was thirteen when the government bombed it. Hundreds, thousands of people eliminated in a series of explosions that had made the windows of the flat vibrate. ‘Be glad I didn’t let you meet them,’ my mother had said, taking away my screen so I couldn’t see anything more. ‘Then it would really hurt.’ My parents had shut themselves away for hours after that; I heard them through their bedroom door, talking about the ship, then and for weeks afterwards. The ship, the ship, the ship, but nothing happened. There had been more food available at the food drops after the bombing, and my mother said it was because things were turning a corner, as she’d always said they would. But it hadn’t lasted, and now my birthday dinner was coming out of a single tin. I stood in the kitchen doorway, holding my diamond in my hand, and watched as my father knelt in front of my mother and took the sewing from her limp hands.

  ‘You brought home a diamond,’ she said. ‘You haven’t done that for ages. Surely that means things are getting better?’

  ‘No. It means people have given up. I got that diamond for a tin of peaches.’

  ‘A tin of peaches?’ she said. I opened my hand and noticed for the first time how hard the diamond was, how cold. My stomach rumbled, and I wondered what would be inside the tin my mother had lighted on.

  ‘It was a kind of joke,’ my father said. ‘I was negotiating for the contents of a warehouse in Sussex. The guy said that diamonds were for those who believed in the future more than they cared about survival. I thought Lalla would like it, that’s all.’

  ‘What did he take, if he didn’t want diamonds?’

  ‘Munitions. He traded one warehouse for the means to protect the other, and pistols for his family. There is nothing left, Anna. Nothing. We have to leave. You won’t dissuade me this time.’

  My mother fastened her length of thread, shook out the material – it was a red velvet curtain that she was making into a skirt for me – and pointed the needle at my father.

  ‘You created this situation,’ she said. She unspooled a length of thread and bit it off, looking up at him sharply.

  ‘Me?’ He stared at her. ‘Me? The Dove saved this country. Saved it.’

  It hadn’t. You only had to look outside our window to see that. But my father no longer looked outside our window. His mind was made up, and his eyes were on places far beyond our London square. My mother picked a black button from her sewing box and said, ‘What about the people in the British Museum?’

  ‘They’re squatting,’ my father said quietly, sitting on the back of the sofa and stroking her hair. ‘It’s all very cooperative, but how can they build an alternative society when there’s nothing left to build it on? All the government can do – all it can do – is reduce the population in the hope of feeding what’s left. Bit by bit. The museum dwellers are idiots, corralling themselves so they can be eliminated. It’s time for us to leave.’ He frowned and jabbed at his screen. ‘It’s been time for a long time.’

  She bent her head over the button, and when she spoke her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her. ‘I’m not ready, Michael. However dreadful the process is, soon the population will be manageable, and all this will improve. The ship will be the last thing we do.’

  ‘The last thing?’ My father laughed, putting his screen down, swinging his legs over the back of the sofa and landing beside my mother with a bounce. ‘No, my darling, the ship is the start. Why do you cling to the end, when the beginning is waiting?’

  ‘I want to grow things.’

  He stopped bouncing and turned away. ‘Still?’ he said. ‘The Land Allocation Act’s a failure. People are coming back from the countryside as fast as they left. And if they don’t come back, it’s because they’re dead. I’ve seen it.’

  My mother put her sewing down. ‘What about the Lakes?’ she said. ‘They didn’t do industrial farming there. Or fracking. The soil might still be good.’

  ‘And you’d take that risk, even though we’ve never heard anything from any of the families who left? Remember the Freemans? The Kings? The Holloways? Think of the security we’d need just to get there. And the loneliness.’

  Freemans, Kings, Holloways – names from a time I could barely remember. A time of restaurants, a time when Regent’s Park was a place to take a picnic, a time when people smiled at each other and sometimes stopped to talk. A time when there were still a few private cars in the street; when electricity was constant. Nothing but myths now, lost in time. But at sixteen, I knew about loneliness. I was lonely, so lonely that my stomach clenched with it at night.

  ‘A life for Lalla,’ my father said. ‘Isn’t that worth everything we have? A place to be a family, among friends, where we can learn and share without fear? A place for Lalla to grow in safety? Isn’t that what we set out to create?’

  ‘A place without money,’ my mother said softly, putting her arms around him. ‘No gold or guns. Just everyone working hard and sharing in the plenty we’ve provided.’

  ‘No homelessness,’ he replied, ‘and no hunger.’ He turned in the circle of her arms and stroked the hair back from her face. ‘Tell me when, Anna. Please tell me when.’

  ‘It was an insurance policy. Just that. Insurance. And now you’re making it a life plan. I don’t want to spend my life clinging to a lifeboat.’

  ‘How much worse do you want things to get?’

  ‘If you loved me, you’d stop pushing.’

  ‘If you loved me, we’d have gone already.’

  ‘I love you, Michael. I just don’t think you’re right.’

  I stood in the doorway, forgetting I wasn’t meant to be listening. I clenched my fist and felt the diamond cutting into my palm. ‘I want to go,’ I said. ‘If the ship is real, I want to go on it.’

  They looked at me in surprise. My father looked for his glass of water and realised that I wasn’t holding one. My mother said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and took back her sewing, tucking her legs under her. ‘We’re going to Mughal India tomorrow.’ But I had spoken out at last, and I couldn’t stop now.

  ‘I’ve seen Mughal India,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen Ancient Egypt and the Aztecs and Babylon and Abyssinia and Mesopotamia. I’ve seen them all day, every day, for years and years and years.’

  ‘But you’ve learned nothing,’ she said, standing up and marching past me into the tiny kitchen. I heard the drawer open and shut and the rattle of the utensils in it. I heard the tin opener puncturing the lid, and the ratcheting as she turned the handle. ‘Seriously, Lalage,’ she called over the rattle of the spoon as she scraped out the contents of the tin. ‘What have you actually learned from the British Museum? From me? From your father?’ I drew breath, ready t
o tell her about hieroglyphics and lunar calendars, about crucifixes and fertility symbols and currency, about kings being buried with gold and sandwiches to see them safely to the underworld, but my father spoke before I could begin.

  ‘I don’t care what she’s still got to learn,’ he called into the kitchen. ‘I want her safe. I want both of you safe.’

  ‘I want to go on the ship,’ I said again, and it was as though someone else had taken over my body, someone who carried their own card and owned a diamond and said what they thought.

  ‘Lalla wants to go on the ship,’ my father said, and his eyes shone, and I felt the hairs on my arms prickle with electricity, because even though my mother had come back in the room, it was me he was looking at, my words that had brought that light to his eyes. I thought about the ship, and the promise of friends, and suddenly I needed to know, more than anything else in my limited, safe, grey world, that the ship was more than a theoretical hereafter for the hopeless, that it was not just one more of the many heavens I’d seen in the display cases at the British Museum.

  My father stood up. ‘Lalla is sixteen now,’ he said. ‘Maybe that will persuade you better than I can.’ He held out a hand to me, and I stood beside him, his arm around my shoulder. My mother looked at us and, for a fraction of a second, her eyes widened. ‘It’s over, Anna. You know it. That’s why we bought the ship in the first place.’ He lifted his arm and I slipped out from under it, dismissed. He went to my mother, the two of them framed by the kitchen doorway, and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘Darling,’ he began.

  I went to the window. It was quite dark now, and street people were gathering by the railings in the square opposite. One looked up at us, face stark white against his clothes. What did sixteen mean, when nothing ever changed? Behind me, my father and mother were kissing softly. Until recently, I’d just hidden behind the latest Dove-authorised game when they kissed, regardless of the power rationing. But now, I found myself staring, and wondering how it would feel to have my lips touched by someone else’s like that, and whether it would ever happen to me.

  ‘Come back into the room, kitten,’ my father said, and I did as I was told. I knelt down to see whether my mother had laid the fire. The wood came from a man my father knew. Everything we’d ever had came from a man my father knew.

  ‘Of course we’ll leave. When we have to,’ my mother said into the silence. ‘But, Michael, we need to stay for a little longer.’

  ‘What for? There’s nothing left to see in the museums anyway. The stuff gets traded on all the time. What do you think the museum dwellers are living on?’

  My mother’s voice began to rise. ‘They need people like us. If we don’t keep visiting the museum, then those people will be next on the government list.’

  ‘There are no more people like us.’ He gestured around the room, at the fire, the working screen, the spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce that my mother had emptied into three small bowls and put on the table in the corner. There were sausages hiding under the hoops, and I realised that my mother had known the contents of the tin all along and had saved it for my birthday. We went to the table. My mother didn’t like sausages; I ate them for her, and for a few moments nothing was said at all. I waited for the miracle that sometimes happened on my birthday – not a cake, but chocolate or sweets; even a tin of peaches. But when my mother finally spoke, it was as though my birthday wasn’t happening at all.

  ‘You wouldn’t want to leave the museum people if you’d actually talked to them,’ she said. ‘They’re organising themselves, working together. If we desert them, it’s over. We might as well kill them with our own hands.’

  ‘I talk to the people who matter. You, and Lalla, and our people in the holding centre.’

  ‘And people who give diamonds for tinned peaches.’

  ‘Yes,’ my father said flatly. ‘Face it, Anna. If we don’t walk past the people who need us, we’ll never save ourselves.’

  ‘I won’t walk past them,’ my mother whispered. I took the armchair, and thought about the people who had once lived in tents in Regent’s Park, their bodies blown apart and scattered across the ruins of their makeshift homes. Who had gathered them up? And my own death. What would that look like? In a tent, by a bomb? Lucky Lalla, lucky, lucky Lalla. In the warmth of the fire, I lost myself in thoughts about people so valued that their dead bodies were buried with gold and jade, and of others so hungry that they would steal stories to feed themselves. Where did the difference lie? Which was I?

  I sat up when my father said, ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘We’re ready. We’ve been planning this for years. What’s it all been for if we don’t go? It’s time. I’ve warned you, Anna. For Lalla, if not for you.’

  My mother put another piece of wood on the fire. It was prettily shaped; it must have been part of a chair once. Or a table.

  ‘Lalage,’ she said. ‘We named her Lalage.’ I waited for them to look at me, to bring me into focus, but they didn’t. My mother sat staring into the flames; my father sat watching her.

  ‘We had to find the right people,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve found them. The manifest is full. Five hundred pages. Five hundred people. They’re in the holding centre, waiting.’

  ‘But what if things get better?’ she asked, turning to him. The light of the fire shone in her hair. ‘How can they get better if we leave?’

  I could feel the press of people outside. Dark had long since fallen. There were firedrums lit on the street corners; I saw their burning orange on the white walls of the drawing room. I could feel the longing of the street people for what we had, pulling them towards us like gravity. I could feel the air, pressing change upon me, and a sensation in my belly that was new, gnawing at me like hunger, although we had only just eaten.

  ‘I can’t keep paying for the guards. For the holding centre. For all the food you and Lalla take to the museum dwellers. There’s enough petrol to get us to the quay, but no more. Do you understand, Anna? I can’t get any more.’

  ‘A little longer. Until the museum dwellers have a proper plan.’

  ‘What plan can they possibly have?’ my father asked, but the words were barely out of his mouth when there was a scream from the street.

  ‘Don’t,’ my father said as my mother started up from the sofa.

  My mother stood up. ‘Someone’s hurt.’

  ‘Stay away from the window.’ He took her arm and pulled her back.

  ‘I want to know what’s going on out there.’

  ‘You know,’ my father said, tightening his grip. ‘You just won’t see it. What do I have to do? What?’

  ‘What?’ I cried, suddenly panicked. ‘What is going on?’ But they weren’t looking at me. They were staring at each other, locked into a battle that was nothing to do with me.

  ‘Didn’t I see you and Lalla safely through the collapse? The establishment of military government? When have you ever been hungry, or in danger?’

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said through clenched teeth.

  ‘Tell me we’ll leave tomorrow. Tell me.’ He gripped her upper arms and held her against the wall. The screaming continued; more voices joined in, piercing and demented. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. There were tears in his eyes; he was shaking. ‘I mean it. We’ve waited too long already. Say it. Say it.’

  She shook him off and ran to the window. I went to follow her, but he grabbed me and held me back, and I was too taken aback to protest.

  The silence lasted for three heartbeats. Then the air was split by a sudden crack and the window fell away. The fire guttered in the wind and a sudden chill wrapped itself around me. My mother stood tall and beautiful, frozen in time, her eyes unnaturally wide and her lips parted in surprise. She folded in two and slumped backwards, and as she did so, the cord connecting me to the land snapped, fibre by fibre. There was blood, and as I ran to her, I knew that my sixteen years counted for nothing, and that nothing of this old l
ife was relevant anymore.

  ‘Close the curtains,’ my father said, and as I did so I saw a small black-clothed figure move away through the crowd and vanish into the dark.

  ‘Look,’ I said, but my father was kneeling beside her body, kissing her cheeks, her hair, her lips, holding her hand in both of his as though he would never let her go, sobbing, ‘Anna, Anna,’ over and over again. I fetched a towel and pressed it to her abdomen, where blood seeped wet and dark, and he looked at me through his tears.

  ‘I saw someone,’ I began, but he held a warning finger to his lips, and I stopped.

  ‘Lalla,’ he said. ‘Help me to take her to the ship.’

  ‘The ship?’

  He nodded, and even as I held on to my mother’s hand, I felt my heart beating faster.

  ‘Everything I have promised you is true, Lalla. Remember that.’

  Together, we laid my mother gently on the back seat of the last car in London. I remembered everything I had ever heard about the ship and sat with her head on my lap, whispering tales of doctors, of medicines, of healing. Every now and then, she tried to talk, but my father told her to save her strength. I watched her blood soaking the towel, but what I felt more than anything was the irrepressible beating of my own heart. It drowned out the engine starting, the protests of the street people as they moved out of the road, the cries of the children as we passed. It filled the silence of the empty streets beyond the city; it banished the fear of an ambush or a breakdown. On a smooth wide road in the middle of nowhere, two jeeps were waiting for us. ‘Our escort,’ my father said, and we drove on through the night flanked by guards and guns. It’s beginning, I thought. My life is about to start.