‘Mother?’ I was too scared to put my hands on her shoulders and shake her. My whole body was trembling as I waited for her chest to rise so that she could speak. ‘Mother?’
I heard pounding footsteps outside and the door burst open. My father grabbed my shoulders and pulled me away from the bed; the doctor reached for the valve on the bag of fluid.
‘What have you done, Lalla?’ my father shouted. ‘What have you done?’ The doctor stepped back, and the echoes of the screams and of my father’s shouting rang from the walls as we stared at the thin, grey body on the bed and its terrible wound.
‘She’s gone,’ the doctor said.
‘Gone?’ my father repeated. They stared at each other. I tried to take a step towards the bed but my legs were not working. I fell, and neither man helped me up. The doctor took a clean white sheet and wafted it over my mother’s body. It settled over the wound; he drew it gently over her face and I was glad, because the pain inscribed there made me feel so guilty I couldn’t move. The light of the infirmary streamed out into the night; my father’s shadow became a black path. The doctor looked at me, and his face was thin and sour. He did not like me, and I did not care. He passed before my father, through the open door and into the night, and if they exchanged words I did not hear what they were. But I saw my father’s hand on the doctor’s shoulder, and the way the doctor shook his head as he walked away.
My father turned towards me. I looked around; I saw the bed, the outline of the body beneath the sheet, the sink, the fluid in the plastic bag, dripping its contents once more. I did not dare turn it off again. My father and I stood alone.
‘I just wanted to talk to her,’ I said.
He was silent. He stood staring at my mother. The bloody sheet lay on the floor between us. I wondered if the world without my mother was so different that he would raise a hand and hit me. I wondered whether I would feel anything if he did. But he did not hit me. He did not even look at me. Slowly, he slumped to the floor, folded on the threshold of the infirmary. Here, too, was pain, except that my father was not dying. Through the open door, the sky was black.
I listened for his breathing and saw that he was shivering. I looked at my own arms and realised they were covered in goosebumps. Slowly, I crept towards him and sat beside him, so that our arms were touching. I thought he might push me away, but he lifted his arm and put it around me, and we stayed like that for a long time, staring at the shape on the bed that was my mother’s body.
What would my mother do? I asked myself, over and over again, but my anchor was gone. My father shivered, and I remembered seeing blankets on the infirmary shelf; I think I had an idea of shielding ourselves against the inevitable dawn, when the sun would rise without her. The shelf was behind the door, and as I was standing there, reaching for the blankets, feeling the blood fighting its way back into my legs, the doctor came back. He did not see me, hidden as I was, and I said nothing. There was someone with him – the woman with red curly hair. The electric lights of the infirmary shone through it and made it look like fire. Together they knelt down beside my father; one on either side of him, they lifted him gently. He gave a start and looked around as though he could not remember where he was. Then he saw the bed and the sheet, and he rushed over and pulled back the sheet, and kissed the stricken face again and again. She was his wife, I thought, shrinking behind the door. She was his wife before she was my mother. And for the first time, I caught a glimpse of a world beyond myself. The woman and the doctor stood quietly by, and when he fell back, they caught him and led him away, supporting him on either side. I longed to call out, to go with them. But my mother was dead; I had made her death a painful one. And so I hid, unable to move, unable to cry out to the doctor who thought I’d killed her, or to the father who had, however briefly, forgotten me.
I sat on a chair beside my mother’s body and felt under the sheet for her hand. I was so chilled that her hand did not feel cold in comparison. I’m sorry, I said, again and again. I thought you’d want to know I was here. Through the pain, I saw the face time would have given my mother, had she been allowed to grow old. I lay down beside her, undeterred by the blood, and stared through the door to the night sea beyond.
The doctor was right; I had never felt pain. I had never felt loss, or hunger, or genuine fear either. My parents protected me so well from what the world had become that I had no means to navigate it. They had surrounded me, made their plans to keep me safe, made sure that my only compass through life was my own experience of it. And it wasn’t enough. How could it have been? A lifetime ago, the sun had set in front of the infirmary door. Soon, it would rise on the other side of the ship. Already the sky was imperceptibly lighter, like a screen that has just been turned off. And as the light grew clearer and brighter, I realised that my parents had been wrong. That, far from being the pivot around which the world turned, I was smaller than a mote of dust, less significant than a gnat.
FOUR
The wind farms I choose to live the boy with the green eyes
I woke up in my father’s arms, being borne into a new, colder world.
‘Hush, Lalla,’ my father said, ‘you’re safe now.’
I looked around. The sun hung high in the sky, bathing the white painted metal walls and the lines of rivets in light. The textured surface of the steel walkway was set ringing by his London shoes.
‘Where is she?’ I asked.
‘She’s in good hands,’ he said. We reached a door and he used his elbow to open it, keeping his arms tightly round me. He set me down on a bunk and stroked my hair. I ducked away from his hand and looked around, sniffing for damp, expecting to see the crumbling bricks and decaying plaster of our London walls. But here was only polished wood and the smell of soap, and smooth cotton pillowing under my hands. He kissed me and I missed the scratching of the stubble on his chin.
‘Darling,’ he said softly. ‘It’s all right. Everything is all right. My darling.’ He had never called me darling. Always kitten, sweetheart, little one. Darling had been my mother.
My hands began to shake and I could not keep my voice steady. ‘Did I kill her?’ I asked.
‘No, Lalla. Oh, no.’
‘I wanted her to know I was there. I just wanted to say goodbye. And she screamed.’ I began to sob. ‘I thought I could save her, and instead I—’
‘Hush, darling, hush. All that pain – there are people here who will just smooth it away. When you see her again, she’ll be beautiful, like she was before.’ Before I killed her, I thought, but I couldn’t find the courage to say the words. ‘I’ve talked to the doctor, and to Emily. We’re going to give her body to the sea, and as we sail, she’ll be part of the seas that support us.’
Except that she’ll be dead.
I heard people walking the decks, learning the way around their new home, pulling their new-found safety about themselves. I overheard scraps of their conversations as they felt their way towards friendships, friendships that, only a few hours before, I had longed for. I lost my home in the floods. My parents died in the first pandemic. My child was killed for the bread in her hands. If there was any competition in their words, it was cancelled out by the undertow to every exchange: What right do I have to be here? Why was I chosen? What did I do to deserve this haven? What did you? And with every sentence that floated into my cabin, my father smiled slightly, and I saw my mother’s death slipping away from him. The lines that appeared on his forehead when he cried for her were still there, but his mind was drawn to the people and the gratitude and awe they were pouring into the air outside.
‘Where’s the stone jug?’ I asked suddenly.
‘What?’
‘The stone jug. Where is it?’
‘What stone jug?’
‘We had a stone jug. In London. Mother used to put the boiled water in it, so it could cool down.’
He looked confused. ‘You don’t have to boil the water on the ship. There’s cool water flowing from the taps. We didn’t bri
ng a stone jug.’
‘But I want it.’
‘Why?’
Why? Why did I want something so redundant, so heavy, so futile? Because she had touched it. Because she had seen the need for it, and got hold of it, and used it to make my life happier, even as she scolded me. I closed my eyes and tried to hear her voice, to hear what she wanted me to do, what she wanted me to learn from the emptiness inside me, from the terrible thing I had done to her, but she was silent. I set my mind running through the galleries of the British Museum, searching for a stone jug, but although I ran from the jade axe to the Portland Font to the Mildenhall Treasure, all I could see were empty cases, and cards that marked where the treasures had once stood. Object removed for rearrangement. Object removed for cleaning. Object removed for research purposes. I could not find a stone jug, and from the far galleries, the sounds of hunger and loss hunted me until I was too afraid to stay silent.
‘Come and have some breakfast,’ he said. But when I got to the door, I could not follow him. I could not step from my little cabin out into that bright white golden world of metal and rivets and endless sea. It seemed to me that if I were to take that step, I would become someone new, and I did not want to change. I wanted my mother, and my mother was dead.
‘I can’t,’ I said, and he put his arms around me.
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘Please come, Lalla. I want us to be together. That’s what all this was for.’
I tried. I went to the door, and the air was so fresh it frightened me. I clutched at the doorframe, dizzy and heartsick. My mother would have led me out, holding my hand, or she’d have sat beside me and stroked my hair, and whatever she did would have been right, because she was doing it. Without her, I had nothing to lean on, and I flopped, empty and useless, back onto my bunk. I couldn’t bring her back. Nothing I could do would bring her back, and so there was no point in doing anything. He held out his hands to pull me up, but I curled into a tighter ball. He put his hand on my head and I was grateful, although I didn’t say so, because my head felt floaty; I thought I might fall if I stood up. I noticed red-headed Emily hovering in the doorway; my father saw her too.
‘When did you last eat?’ he asked me. ‘Emily, was Lalla given anything to eat yesterday?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Emily said in consternation. ‘I didn’t know – I didn’t think – Oh, Michael, I’m so, so sorry. Our departure – the cards, and poor Anna, and … shall I fetch something?’ Her voice went quiet and soft. ‘Michael, I’m sorry. I’ll understand if you appoint someone else. Diana, perhaps. She seems very capable.’ Emily’s voice shook; I lifted my head and dropped it again, bewildered by the abject misery on her face.
‘It’s all right,’ my father said. ‘We’re learning. We’re all learning.’
Emily darted off, and my father said, ‘I have to go. They’re waiting for me. But I’ll be back, and Emily will bring you something to eat, and …’ He put his hand on my arm and said, ‘Lalla. You’re cold.’
I wasn’t cold. I was afraid. He was going to pull me out of the cabin, I knew, and force me into the terrible, unknowable world outside, without my mother to help me through it. How would I know where to go? What to do? How could I even put one foot in front of the other without her? She had walked alongside me for my entire life.
‘It’s going to be all right, Lalla.’ He was holding out a biscuit and a glass of water.
My hands felt too heavy to move; still, I picked up the biscuit, rested it on my bottom teeth and began to gnaw. But the crumbs were too dry inside my dry mouth. ‘Haven’t we got anything else?’ he asked the woman Emily, who was dancing about in the doorway holding a plate. ‘Something that might be easier for Lalla to eat? Some soup, maybe, or … ?’ His mind gave out. He had never planned our meals; that had been my mother’s job. ‘Just something better,’ he snapped, and Emily flinched at the anger in his voice. I was glad, and then hated myself.
I put the biscuit down; I felt that to eat any more would be like Persephone eating pomegranate seeds, fixing me for ever in this world without my mother. And the thought of Persephone brought my mother’s voice to life, and she was standing holding my hand in front of a little Greek bowl. ‘Which one is Persephone?’ she’d asked, and I remember the way that I had looked and looked, searching for the big important figure at the centre of the story. But the Persephone moulded into the bowl was small, so small, holding her hands out to her mother as Hades drove away with her to the underworld. Look, my mother had said, look, but I couldn’t see what she was trying to show me. I was overcome by the sudden conviction that all I had ever done was let my mother down, over and over again. I remembered the pain on her face, the terrible screams with which she had died. I hadn’t told her I loved her. I couldn’t even cry; instead I shrank, until I seemed to consist solely of a space in my chest made of compressed air that pushed outwards, against my ribs, squeezing my heart upwards to the base of my throat, where it beat painfully. I pulled my covers over my head. Everything was over. Everything.
‘Go away,’ I wailed, my voice made dead by the blankets. ‘Go away.’
‘Lalla,’ he said, putting his hand where he thought my head was. ‘Lalla. Come on, darling. You can’t stay in here for ever.’
I heard Emily’s soft, light voice suggesting I needed time, and my father asking her to go and tell the people he’d be there in a minute. Then something heavy landed just next to my feet, and for a wild, joyful moment it seemed that my mother had come to sit on my bed and tell me how stupid I was being, how selfish.
‘Here,’ my father said, ‘look,’ and something in the tenderness of his voice made me reach out a hand, and he slipped something into it, something heavy and flat and smooth.
‘It’s a screen,’ I said, astonished.
‘A screen,’ he said, ‘yes, but not the kind of screen you’re used to. This is a screen for the ship. See? It’s more like a portal. Let’s call it a portal. We’ve had enough of screens.’ He opened it, and I wondered how he would access it without a card. But there were no demands for registration numbers, no requirement to scan a card and wait for the dove’s wing to sweep the screen. There was not even a calendar or a clock. Just my father’s smiling face. He tapped it.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘there’s the library, and there’s the art collection – and here, Lalla, look.’ There, among the myriad of icons, was the British Museum. He tapped again. Every single gallery my mother and I had ever visited was listed. There was the Portland Font, its detail as clear on the display as it was in my memory. Lindow Man, just as I had left him behind the glass of his case. Even the little gold chariot with its gold horses was there. I called up object after object. ‘This was Anna’s idea,’ he said, but I hardly heard him. ‘She said that the only thing to be said for technology was that we’d be able to bring every museum and art gallery in the world with us.’
I took the screen – the portal – to my desk, and my father left, closing my door behind him very gently. I tapped and tapped, and in the darkness I felt that my mother had come, and that I had the chance to set things right. There, for example, was the Aztec mask. She had shown it to me so many times, but I always glowered and told her that human sacrifice was disgusting. Now, too late, the words I’d always known she wanted from me tumbled forth. It’s not bloodthirsty, Mother. They believed in human sacrifice, the honour of offering your own life for the continuation of the life force itself. I found the jade axe. It’s ceremonial, I said confidently, bathing in her smile. It’s to show people in the afterlife how respected the dead warrior was. In the darkness of my cabin, we wandered the museum, together again. But this time, I made up for my sulking and silence, my resentment of the museum dwellers who took her away from me for hours at a time.
Someone knocked; I jammed a chair under the door handle. ‘Lalla,’ came my father’s voice. ‘Lalla, let me in.’ But I didn’t want him. I didn’t want anyone except my mother, and she was in my cabin with me, and if I opened the door she
would escape and fly into the golden sky and I would never find her again. I scrolled through the vases and statues and friezes until they began to swim; I could still see them when I closed my eyes, still hear my mother’s voice. The banging at the door started again, but the door, and the person knocking on it, were both a long way away. I was looking at the Mildenhall Treasure – all the Roman silver had disappeared from the display cases long before we sailed, but I remembered the decoration, the size, the sheer beauty of it all, and I lost myself in wondering where it was now. I held the screen to my chest, put my head on the desk and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stay rooted. I floated, and when the voice outside the door came back and shouted that I would kill myself if I went on like this, it made perfect sense. To die would be to be with her always, to feel her hands, to walk with her, to drink cool water from the stone jug. I dragged my desk to the door, pushed it against the chair and took the screen under the covers of my bed, where I breathed and rebreathed the same warm air, resolved to stay shut up until I had used up all the oxygen and suffocated, or starved. I held my mother’s hand, and together we carried tins of apple to the museum dwellers, only to drop them in the Great Court and see them bouncing up the staircase in defiance of the law of gravity, thumping and banging while people shouted. Bright spots danced across my vision regardless of whether my eyes were open or closed, and as the door moved and the desk scraped across the floor, the chair slipped and wedged against my bunk. Outside, my father swore and shouted, and I realised with delight that he would never get in unless I let him in.
I sank back on my pillow and my mother’s hands weighed dry and warm against my cheek and sweetness spread over my tongue and I nestled under my quilt and searched for a word to describe the feeling, and then came to with a jerk and realised that I had been happy.
The Ship Page 6