‘Then they’re state assets.’
‘State assets?’
‘The Nazareth Act promised provision for all registered citizens. But it works both ways. You’re stealing. From the state. And that’s a death penalty.’ I heard a man whisper, ‘What isn’t, these days?’ but nobody replied. So many laws had just slipped in quietly, without fuss, like a stone held to the surface of the water before you let it fall in.
The commander stepped onto the podium and hefted a black armoured case onto my father’s desk; the brass handles on the desk drawer rattled as it thudded down, and the red-headed woman flinched. He took out a screen; his bodyguards trained their guns on the crowd. A man in dirty checked trousers felt for his card, and he set off a ripple of similar movements along the benches. It was a market raid, except that no one was trying to escape. The very act of producing the cards seemed to galvanise my father.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Check our identities by all means. But you can’t stop us from sailing.’
‘I can,’ the man said. ‘If nothing else, we’re armed. You’re not.’
‘They are,’ my father said, pointing at his guards on the quay.
‘Fine,’ the commander said. ‘My men shoot your men, your men shoot mine, and then we’ll carry on. Have you got a gun on you now?’
My father hesitated, then shook his head. No guns on the ship, I remember my mother saying to my father. Let the guards keep them. God knows they’ll have earned them.
But …
Not on the ship, Michael. Do you know how many times I would have killed you if I’d had the chance? I don’t want to have that chance. They smiled, the way they did when a serious point was wrapped in a joke and offered as a present, and the conversation ended in laughter and tinned peaches. But the truth is that my father did not want guns on the ship, either. When he went on his trips, he told me, he carried only his toothbrush and his wit. The episode in the flat, before my mother was shot, was as violent as I had ever seen him. He armed the guards because he had to, but words were what he liked. Words, arguments, debates. He liked to win. But for as long as I can remember, winning meant convincing you, drawing you into his vision so completely that you would defend it with your last breath.
Not your last breath, Mother, I whispered. Not your last.
‘You should have a gun,’ the commander said. ‘Look.’ He gestured at the horizon. I looked in the direction he was pointing, past the quay and the car, down the road. The darkness I had noticed earlier had become a rolling cloud of smoke. My father left the desk and walked towards us. The commander lifted his gun, but my father pushed its barrel to the floor as he passed and the two men walked to the window together. In the silence I heard a noise that I thought was the whisper of conversation, but no one in the ballroom was talking. Then I realised that the noise was coming from outside the ship and that it was getting louder. The sound rose, at first like the rhythmic swish of the waves, then more insistent, harsher, like the noise the mighty ropes would make when they were let loose and sent crashing into the water. The black smoke in the distance was solidifying into a mass, like water made thick with detritus, oozing down the road we had travelled. The commander looked towards the approaching darkness. I saw fear in the way his hands would not stay still, in the way his head kept twitching as though he could not decide where his priorities lay. The people began to nudge each other, to exchange worried glances and to look, again and again, towards my father.
The commander turned to his bodyguards and said, ‘You’d better go down. Don’t let them storm the ship. Yet.’ The bodyguards hesitated and the commander snapped, ‘He’s not going to shoot me. He hasn’t even got a gun,’ and the two men tramped down the gangway, guns raised, leaving my father and the commander facing each other.
‘Are you going to shoot us?’ my father asked.
‘You’re committing a crime.’
‘I’m saving the human race.’
‘No, Mr Paul. I am saving the human race.’
‘By killing off the surplus population?’
The commander shrugged, the crags in his face deepened and for the first time I saw a person behind the uniform. Here was a man; maybe he had a wife, a daughter. ‘This is not a democracy,’ he said. ‘This is government for survival. What else do you suggest?’
‘It’s over, you know,’ my father said gently. They leant on the sill; in another time, another place, they could have been friends contemplating a stroll on deck.
‘I can’t let you go,’ the commander said. ‘You’ve got food and medicine on board. Tools, equipment …’
‘No more than we need,’ my father said hastily. ‘There’s no law against holding the food you require for survival.’
‘Even so. Essential rations for five hundred – that’s significant. We could create a few more citizens, get some people off the Sinkers … You’ve got all five hundred on board, I take it?’
‘All except one.’
‘Your wife?’
‘She’s in the infirmary. She’s going to be fine. No, a young man. He died last night.’
‘Then you’re over-stocked. That’s a criminal offence.’
‘I’ll surrender his share. Just let us go.’
The approaching mass became distinct; these were men and women, with voices raised in anger. Individual voices jutted from the cacophony – stop them, get them, take them, bring them down. Inside, the people of the ship, afraid and silent. On the quay, my father’s guards and the government troops, armed and awaiting orders.
‘You knew they’d come,’ the commander said.
‘Of course.’ My father shrugged. ‘I had hoped to leave before they arrived, but they don’t change anything.’
The mob were surrounding the car now, and for a moment they were distracted, jumping on it, pulling at the door handles, kicking the doors, tearing at the seats. My father’s guards and the government troops stood together, defending the gangway.
The commander looked directly at my father. ‘I have seen what hungry men will do for food,’ he said. ‘And if I were you, I would be afraid. I would be on my knees, begging me to let you raise the gangway and sail before they notice you standing here.’
‘Why?’ my father said. ‘Why would I beg? You can shoot us all, one by one, and throw our bodies into the sea. You can de-register us and put us in tents and bomb us later. You can hold us up here until those desperate men and women swarm on board and destroy us all. Or you can let us go.’
The commander looked from the mob on the quay to my father, from his black-clothed colleagues to the stricken faces in the ballroom. My heart was racing. We had to release the gangway and cast off the ropes. Part of me was waiting for my father to produce a weapon from some hidden store, for an army of his own to leap fully formed from the ballroom panelling and blast the commander and the mob and the quay into oblivion. But it didn’t happen. Instead, the commander levelled his gun at my father and the horizon contracted so that the descending crowd and the road and the car and the quayside became one. Fear makes men blind, my mother said, and at that moment I understood what she meant. There was life, and there was death, and the fragile divide between them, held in the hands of a stranger. Metallic clangs echoed around the room, vying with the deeper, distant pulsing of engines ready for the off. I wondered how long it would take the crowd to break through the barrier of armed guards and storm the ship.
I needed my mother. My father’s eyes kept straying to the internal door; he needed her too. He was restless, biting his lips and rubbing his thumb in the palm of his hand.
‘I offered you a government post when you sold us the Dove,’ Commander Marius said. ‘You should have taken it. You’d have had food, security, privilege. But no. You wanted freedom. Look where your freedom’s got you. I am arresting you, Michael Paul. If you resist, I shall have no alternative but to shoot you.’
My father looked around at the people, his lips pale. ‘I …’ he began, but his voice cracked and he said no more.
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‘We’ll take you all off the ship and empty the hold. And if you’re lucky, we’ll shoot you quietly.’
‘Please …’
‘And if you’re not lucky,’ the commander continued, ‘then I’ll tell my troops to stand aside and let the mob deal with you.’
My father had failed. I saw the people being marched off the ship at gunpoint and sent away from the quay. I saw a chain of people in black uniforms passing boxes from one to another. I saw everything my father had worked to amass evaporating over the starving city. And in that one short moment, as my father crumpled on the window sill, his head in his hands, dwarfed by the commander’s black case and the weapon at his side, I found myself growing angry. My mother would die. We would never sail; my father’s vision would become dust, the ship would go back to being a myth and we too would starve, just to bring the commander a moment of glory on the bulletin.
And where I had felt fear and guilt, I now felt anger. I was angry with the commander, the troops, the government they worked for that my father had been too principled to join. I was angry at the stupidity of the generations before mine that had brought us to this place. And I was angry with the people – my father’s chosen people – quietly shuffling into a queue before the commander’s screen, cards in hand, as though this was just another registration. My father was shrunken and motionless. My anger spread through me, like a virus eating away the information on a screen. It destroyed all the questions, the doubt, the distance. It brought me on board. To untie the massive ropes that held the ship to the shore, to let the grinding engines leap into life – above all, to be gone and be with my mother, became my overriding mission.
‘If he takes me, you execute him for stealing from the state?’ I asked the commander. The crags in his face shifted as he raised his eyebrows and nodded. ‘What will happen to me? To all of us?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You don’t prosecute the bread for being stolen.’ He smiled sadly, and I remember thinking that, however sharp his uniform, his teeth would not last much longer. He addressed the people as a whole. ‘Leave now, and you will all retain your registration. My men will protect you, and you will be given food from the stocks we reclaim from the ship. For as long as you have your cards, you are citizens still.’
A whisper of relief escaped the people. They were going to give in, I thought. They were going to walk down the gangway as quietly as they had walked up it. For a moment, I hated them all. For years, my parents had talked about them, planned for them, argued about them. Ignored me for them. And they were here, in this room. Not a bland mass, but individuals, each unique, all gathered in my father’s name. The people. Men. Women. Even a scattering of children. My parents had chosen these people to be my world. If I did nothing, I would never know them. Already I knew that I couldn’t go back. I had breathed salt air and spoken to a stranger. I couldn’t go back.
I undid the zip in my pocket and took my identity card from its belt. I pulled open the door to the deck. The noise of the mob on the quay hit me like a blow to the face. The commander followed me; the people followed him. Why aren’t they more afraid? I asked myself, looking at their empty faces. If they had been marched back down the gangway and left to find a life, their expressions would not have changed. It was always too good to be true, they would say, just as my mother did every time a food drop turned out to be no more than a rumour. But the ship was not a rumour or a false promise. It was here, solid and white, the giant engines throbbing under our feet, ready to take us away. I climbed up onto the deck rail and braced myself against a vertical bar. I held my card aloft. I didn’t know what the ship was, but I knew I wanted it. My blood coursed wildly through my veins; I was alive; I was going to act. The latest biometric re-registration had only been a couple of days ago; my card would be valid for a week or two yet.
‘Look,’ I shouted. My father joined the people on deck, staring at me until I met his eyes. His eyes grew bright, his shoulders squared, and I loved him. On the quay, a woman in a pink dress saw me and stopped still, pointing; the stillness rippled from her until the mob and the troops and the guards were all staring up at me, as silent as the people of the ship crowded onto the deck.
‘This is my card,’ I called. ‘Without it, I am no one. Without it, I have no state, no rights, no claims. Without it, I have no screen access. I’ll be a non-person, and no one will know when I die.’
‘Don’t,’ came a voice from the deck. ‘He’ll shoot.’ I looked towards the sound, and the eyes that met mine were green.
The commander raised his gun to his eye. Like mother, like daughter, I thought, except that she had not known the shot was coming. I heard the click as he prepared to fire.
‘Shoot me,’ I said, and as I let go of my card, he lowered his gun with incredulous eyes. My card turned over and over as it fell to the quay. It hit ropes that held the ship and rebounded into the water. I saw it floating, a speck of white on a grey-brown strip of sea.
The mob began to jostle at the water’s edge. The woman in the pink dress lay down, stretching her hands to the water, but the water level was too low. A man held her ankles and she grabbed, but my card floated out of reach. Others joined in; a soldier bent down and used his gun to try and sweep the card towards him; yet others shouted advice.
‘We must release the gangway,’ my father said quietly to the woman with red curly hair, who was standing beside him. ‘Now, while the people on the quay are distracted.’
‘What about the commander?’ the woman said, moving to the bolts that held the gangway to the ship. She tried to draw them back, but they were heavy, and she looked about for help.
My father hesitated. ‘We’ve got a space, haven’t we?’
I was too scared to ask what he meant. Now, I urged him silently. Now. The bodies on the streets had been ghastly; the government bombings had been horrific; the battles at the food points had been violent and bloody, but none of them had had anything to do with me. Now my card had gone, and with it any chance I had of survival in the old world. Like my mother, I had given myself wholly and completely to my father, or to death. We had to sail.
Then, as my father drew breath, the woman looked up from the gangway bolts.
‘I’ve waited five years for this,’ she called out over the deck rail. ‘You can have mine, too.’ The crowd looked up, and she threw her card onto the quay. A group of people hurled themselves at it. My father watched, intent.
‘And mine,’ shouted the man who had led the people on board. His card caught the sunlight as it fell into a mass of outstretched hands.
‘And mine,’ called the green-eyed boy, climbing up onto the deck rail to join me. He swayed dangerously and I caught his arm, and for a moment we stood clasped together, high above everyone else, and I felt something glorious in the air around me, as though the ship really was studded with rainbows from the diamonds that had paid for it. And suddenly the air below us became full of white plastic rectangles with gold chips glinting, spinning and turning as they flew. The snarling mass separated into pairs of dancing arms. And the green-eyed boy and I climbed down and looked at each other, laughing, and for a moment we did not let each other go.
‘I’m Tom. Tom Mandel,’ he said, but before I could answer, someone called out behind me.
‘Be me,’ they said, and we separated to let others reach the deck rail, and my arms felt cold where he had let me go.
The commander looked down as the laughing crowd caught at the confetti of cards. My father, who had come to stand next to me, was laughing too, his body brimful of energy, his eyes alight. ‘Will you?’ he asked the commander, pulling out his own identity card and holding it aloft. ‘We lost one of our number last night. You can have his place.’
‘It’s suicide,’ the commander said quietly. ‘You’ll never be able to come back.’
‘We don’t want to. We know where we’re going.’
Commander Marius looked thoughtful. He looked from my father’s card to his face,
from the cards still raining onto the quay to his colleagues, as eager as the homeless to catch them. My mother’s voice in my head said, Michael, you can never know what depths people may have until the waters have a chance to settle. What lay behind the commander’s lined face, his yellowing eyes? He took his card from a pocket and studied it, turning it over and over in his hands.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked at last.
‘Join my people,’ my father said. ‘Find out.’
‘People?’ the commander said wearily, putting his card away. ‘You know the Nazareth Act. No card, no presence. There aren’t any people on this ship now.’ He put his gun into its holster. ‘The people are all down on the quay. I’ll take my screen down to them while those cards are still valid. Then at least they’ll be able to get to the next food drop.’
My father held out his hand. ‘Why stay?’ he asked.
‘I have to do what I can. I don’t have a choice.’
‘I’m giving you a choice, right now. Throw down your card.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the commander said quietly. ‘I had a daughter once.’ He looked at me and took my father’s hand without taking his eyes from my face. I’m sorry, I thought, although I did not know why, and before I could say anything he turned and walked along the deck and down the gangway. His ringing footsteps grew fainter. The gangway gate groaned, and as the commander stepped onto the quay, my father threw his own card. It paused in the air, a flash of gold, before the commander caught it. The people on the ship cheered. My father’s guards ran to the ropes; others crowded around to help, making so much noise that no one heard my father’s panicked shout. ‘Not yet,’ he screamed, running to the gangway bolts, but the ropes fell into the sea before the cheers had subsided. The engines kicked in with a deep roar, and the ship began to drift.
There was a screech of tortured metal. The gangway was still bolted to the ship.
‘It’ll slam into us,’ my father said desperately, struggling to slide the mechanism free. Others joined him. But the movement of the ship had tightened the bolts against their casings, and they would not give. As the ship moved slowly, inexorably out to sea, it dragged the gangplank across the quay. I shouted, but I was too late. Three women lay on the quay, still trying to reach the cards that had fallen into the water. They had no time to stand. The gangway swept them away with industrial efficiency; they barely had time to scream. The resistance of their bodies momentarily slackened the bolts; the bolts gave and the gangway fell into the sea with an incredible splash.
The Ship Page 4