Before we sailed, we lived in England.
In England, my mother and father had lived and laughed and sheltered me.
Had my father loved her so little, that he could embrace this new life without her?
Fresh air came in through the partly opened door. My father was calling my name. I fought, but he was stronger, calling me on, on, into the ship and the world he had made.
‘I’m fetching the engineers,’ he shouted. ‘We’ll break this door down if we have to.’
‘Go away,’ I cried. ‘Go away,’ but the very act of speaking brought me back to myself, to my cabin, to the reality of my situation. ‘Go away,’ I said again, and as I heard his footsteps running away, I found myself reluctantly reborn, hungry and miserable, into the white order of his future.
I left my willingness to think behind, in the warm chaos where my mother had been killed. I moved towards the door like one already dead. I dislodged the desk and the chair and opened the door. The exhilaration was terrifying. I recoiled and stepped back, slamming the door shut, grateful to return to the warmth of spent, stale air that smelled of sweat and grief and the salt of tears. Of me and only of me. I regretted the familiar air I had allowed to escape and would never breathe again. But even as I sat on my bed, panting and shivering, I felt a tightly wound spring in my stomach suddenly come loose. I was desperately hungry. And my lungs, having snatched a breath of clean air, started complaining. I had stopped thinking, but I had not died, and my body started asserting itself. Air, said my lungs. Food, said my stomach, and I stood up, feeling dizzy. I opened the door once more, not out of disloyalty to my mother, but because I was not yet dead.
I almost tripped over a tray. Sandwiches. More biscuits, this time with raisins in them. A glass of clear water. As the fresh air brought warm blood to my cheeks, I realised that I had lived through a kind of death. I was alive. I would continue to live. But time and my mother were gone, and my life now would be defined, not by their absence, but by their absolute and irrevocable loss.
‘Are you all right?’ said a voice, a voice I recognised, a voice that belonged to a tall boy with green eyes who, once upon a time in London, had knocked upon my door. We had stood together on the deck rail, and he had taken my hand and we had smiled together. Tom, he had called himself, back in that different life, where my mother was still alive. He held a soft cloth; he was wiping the walls, but I had no energy to ask him why. My limbs were weak and I leaned on the deck rail for support. All around, the sea was grey and green and flat to the edges of the world.
‘Where’s my father?’ I asked.
He looked at me. I remember thinking, He is seeing me now for the first time, and wishing that I had brushed my hair. We stood there, facing each other, and I felt a tiny shard of light cut through the dark emptiness inside me, as though I had lifted a corner of the blind in my cabin.
‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said.
The air liquefied; the sun caught the green of his irises. I felt my heart beating again, and I stepped towards him. But he was not looking at me anymore, but past me, and I remembered that my mother was dead. I followed his gaze and saw my father approaching, with people running behind him.
‘Lalla,’ he called. He waved the others away and said, ‘Tom. Go and tell everyone to wait in the ballroom.’ Then he put his arms around me and crushed me against the crisp cotton of his shirt, which smelled of soap. His body beneath the shirt was warm. I looked down and saw he had exchanged his London shoes for dark blue canvas ones with white rubber soles. ‘My darling,’ he said. Then faintness and nausea took over and I slumped against him. My father reached for the tray and gave me tiny sips of water, and although I strained for more, he would not let me control the glass. ‘Little by little,’ he said gently, ‘too much at once and you’ll be sick.’
Tom came back and between them, he and my father supported me to the ballroom, where the people swam in and out of my vision as my father settled me onto a bench. He’s still called Tom, I thought, and my heart beat less reluctantly, for here was something that had not changed with my mother’s death. As I grew accustomed to the light and the space, and the little sips of water spread through my exhausted body and brought the room into focus, I saw that the people were sitting upright, alert, excited. I looked on the floor for the bloodstained cushion, but it wasn’t there anymore. This was a new, clean version of the ballroom and, I realised as he walked to the podium, a new, clean version of my father. His skin was glowing with certainty. He wore a white shirt, its collars and cuffs unmarked by any signs of wear or use. The people, too, were clean, their clothes bright. They’ve been updated, I thought, and for the first time in my life, I felt left behind and lost.
Then my father held out his arms to me from the podium. ‘My daughter,’ he called.
There was a heartbeat of silence. I looked down at my dress, saturated with the filth of the London air. My hair felt heavy, loaded with a build up of grease and grime. I wondered whether my father would tell me how I could wash it, and how it would feel to stand in the sparkling air of the sea and let it dry. And then the people began to cheer. They called my name, they shouted, they smiled and held out their arms to me as my father had done. They were cheering for me, and they would not stop.
‘People,’ he said, and his voice was deeper than I remembered it, and more resonant. ‘Lalla has come. Lalla has chosen.’ Chosen? What choice had I made? I just hadn’t been ready to die. But there was no chance for me to speak. ‘With Lalla beside me,’ he continued, ‘I can finally welcome you all. Here, together, we will create, not an existence, but a life. A life of like-minded people, joined together in love. A life, my friends, that may truly be called life. Remember work? Remember art, and music, and laughing over food in the company of friends? Remember conversation? Words exchanged, not in barter or pleas, but for nothing but the joy of sharing them with another human being?
‘We have brought words, but left arguments behind. We have brought tools, but left weapons behind. We have brought love, but left betrayal behind.
‘Together, Lalla and I give you safety. Not a temporary loan from a government that will take back as soon as it gives. An unconditional gift, given for nothing other than your happiness. We are a family now. People of the ship, we give you freedom.’
The noise of the people was such that I thought the sea had crashed its way into the ballroom. I saw the man with the grey beard murmuring with his eyes closed. Michael, he said, as his tears flowed. He was not the only one crying. Michael, my captain. My father’s name was taken up and whispered around the room. I read it on their lips, I heard the words Michael and Captain floating, bobbing up again and again above the soft wash of blended voices. They took my father from me and turned him into something new. Or something he had always been, that I had never seen before. He had grown and moved on, but I was simply me. Lalage. The babbling waters of a small stream, lost in an ocean of salt.
FIVE
The first meal pineapples I wash and change my clothes
From the ballroom we all moved to the dining room. There were no clocks on the walls or on our portals, but at the sound of the gong the people stood up and filed out. I was the only one unsure of where to go, and I simply followed my father. He led me to the seat beside him, at the head of the top table, and I thought, I am in my mother’s place, and that is why he is not broken. He told me that lunch and dinner were served every day, and breakfast was set out on the buffet tables for everyone to help themselves. Emily, the woman with red curly hair, was in charge of the dining room; I would meet Gerhard the chef later. Freedom and plenty. I was lightheaded with hunger and dizzy with the sensations of colour and sound.
Plates were brought to us, filled with something that smelled savoury and maddening; I could smell garlic and salt and my mouth filled with saliva. It looked like chicken. I swallowed, and swallowed again, and I put my hand out for my fork. A quick hand prevented me from picking it up. A man with skin like a
pickled walnut nodded towards my father. ‘Respect,’ the man said softly, his dark eyes shining. The chicken and garlic smell hung tantalisingly in the air. My father picked up his knife and fork; everyone in the dining hall did the same, and the moment was gone. I ate, and the sensation of taste drove every other thought from my mind. I remember roast chicken, I thought, and I was eleven again, and my mother was holding out a plate of drumsticks and warning me that they were too hot to hold, and it was my birthday, and she was running to shut the window so that the smell of the chicken would not attract the street people to our home.
‘Father,’ I said, because I wanted to see if he remembered it too, but the main course was over, and the kitchen team were bringing out rings of gold, set in squares of pliant cake and covered in sticky sweetness. A ripple of excitement spread across the room as the plates were placed on the tables.
‘Pineapple,’ my father said, smiling at my amazement. ‘A tropical fruit, with sharp leaves and prickly skin. A symbol of hospitality.’
‘Which part of this is the pineapple?’ I asked, prodding the cake with my fork.
‘The round, yellow part on the top.’
‘You said it had leaves and prickly skin.’
‘Yes, but they weren’t necessary. They were the parts we didn’t need. The parts that prevented the pineapple from being truly itself, the best that it could be. They’ve been done away with already. The work has been done by those who came before us, and we are reaping the benefits now. This is a pineapple,’ he concluded, pointing at my plate.
‘So a pineapple was not the same as an apple?’ I said as he sat back down.
‘No.’ He finished his cake and pushed his plate away.
‘Was a pineapple an apple that grew on a pine tree?’ I asked.
That’s good thinking, Lalla, I heard my mother say, but my father was talking to someone else, and just said, ‘If you like.’
The people began to get up and move around. I saw Tom hover at the doors and scan the room; my face burned and I stared at the table until he had gone.
‘Where are the people going?’ I asked.
‘Some are going to the gallery or the cinema,’ my father said, coming back to me as the room emptied. ‘Some will be going for a walk on the deck, or to listen to music, or simply gathering together to talk. But most of them—’ He paused, and I waited. He turned dark and stern, as he used to do when my mother disagreed with him. He sighed. ‘They’re going to watch the bulletin in the ballroom. We usually have it before dinner, but today there was you.’ He smiled at me, as though he had just remembered how.
‘The news bulletin? Like at home?’
He stroked my cheek. ‘The ship is our home now, darling,’ he said. ‘But yes, we have the news bulletin here as we did in London. We have everything we had in London, and a great deal more that we could never have had in London.’
And suddenly, I had had enough. The food sat heavily in my stomach; the effort of digesting after not eating for so long made me sleepy. The noise of conversations and the constant movement of so many people had left me bewildered. I wanted our flat, and the little fire, and the dancing flames of the oil-drum fires in the street, and cooled water from the stone jug. I wanted my mother. Have an apple, she used to say when I asked for the impossible. Because there were no apples anymore where we had come from. I wondered whether the same would be true of where we were going. A pineapple was not the same thing as an apple.
He looked at me sadly. ‘Stop looking back, Lalla. She’s gone. We’ll have the funeral tomorrow, and then we move on. You’ve got everything here, darling. Everything she ever wanted for you. But you won’t benefit from it until you let her go. Let her go, Lalla. Let her go.’ He wrapped his arms around me and pressed his new smooth face to mine; I felt damp on my cheeks, although I was not crying. ‘You have had the time to grieve,’ he said, wrapping himself around my shoulders far too tightly. ‘Be grateful for that.’ But I could not let her go. She was with me now; I had heard her voice. In life, her mind had always been on the next task, the next duty, the next thing that had to be done. In death, there was nothing to distract her. She was beside me, and I clung to her. My father let me go. I stumbled, and my dress caught on a corner of the table.
He stared at the dress as I unhooked it. ‘Do I remember that dress?’ he asked.
‘It was hers,’ I said. It had once been long and full with red and orange flowers all over it, so big that they were lost when my mother cut the dress down for me. Now, the dress was stiff with London dirt, with sweat and tears and loss and misery, flowers and flame puddled alike with grey. I held out the skirt to him, searching his face for a clue that he, too, was remembering her looking through her dresses for something to alter for me, the way she muttered Impractical, impractical, to the red silk, the golden gauze, the velvets she threw aside.
‘She was making it the day you asked her to make the bags,’ I said. ‘Five hundred bags, for the five hundred people you were going to bring with us.’
‘I remember she didn’t want to make the bags,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember you being there.’
That’s because I stood so still, I thought. That’s because I worried that if I moved, you’d remember I was there, and change the subject. ‘You said it would be symbolic,’ I told him. ‘A new start, the same opportunities for everyone.’
‘So it would have been. I could have got the material. I knew a man who had sailcloth. But it doesn’t matter anymore.’
He kept staring, and I wondered whether he, too, was remembering my mother draping the fabric round me, whether her voice was sounding in his head as clearly as it was in mine.
‘We’ve got bags,’ she’d said through a mouthful of pins. ‘We don’t need more bags.’
‘This is different.’
‘It always is. It always was. I thought we were trying to make sure that it won’t always be.’
‘It would be nice if the bags matched. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘Nice? Nice? Oh, for crying out loud. Have an apple, Michael.’ She looked up, and I saw dark circles under her eyes. She’s tired, I remember thinking in surprise. She’s really tired. ‘Shall we print them?’ my mother had asked suddenly, falsely bright. ‘If we’re going to use our precious resources to make bags we don’t need for a plan that may never come off, we might as well have them printed. I owe my life to Michael Paul. That would be good. That’s your vision, really, isn’t it, Michael? A symmetrical line of grateful clean people, with matching bags.’
‘They will owe their lives to me.’
‘You’ve got to forget that, Michael. Life can only be given as a free gift. If our people come on board carrying bags that say, Michael Paul Saved My Life, we’re sunk. They’re sunk.’
I had no way of knowing whether my father was thinking of that now. He only said, ‘You should go and change,’ and I watched him walk out of the dining room through an avenue of smiles.
I went to my clean and shining cabin and took off the dress. It had always seemed so easy – take a full, ornate dress and make it smaller and simpler. But now, as I buried my face in the fabric and tried to find her there, I saw the complexity of the task she had undertaken, the thousands of stitches all put in by her hands, the little darts and gathers that made the dress mine rather than hers. I realised then that I could never do what she had done. I could never ask the questions she asked, or tell the truth like she told it. She had resisted him, and through that resistance, she had disciplined his vision and given him strength. And that same resistance had given me my life. I had been born from it, nourished by it, educated by it. She had given me her life like she had once given me her clothes – carefully chosen, contrived from the best that was available, cut to fit. To fit me. Who was my father without her? Who was I? He was without boundaries now, and I half expected that the next time I saw the people, they would be sitting making five hundred matching bags from sailcloth, ready to be printed. I owe my life to Michael Paul.
<
br /> I realised that the dress smelled foul and I was embarrassed that I’d worn it to dinner. I opened the cupboards. Clothes hung there, fresh and smooth. A pile of white squares sat on a shelf; I shook one out and saw that it was a nightdress. I could not hang my London dress amidst all that crisp purity. I showered, watching the grey water dancing lightly to the drain; I washed my hair, letting the soap run into my eyes and revelling in the pain of it.
Mother, I whispered quietly. If this is what you wanted for me, I will do my best. I scratched a mark on the wall beside me, slipped into my bunk and slept. When I woke up, the orange dress was gone.
SIX
My mother’s funeral the broken button I find my place of work
On the morning of the funeral, as the sky in my porthole lightened, my father came and knocked at my cabin door. I let him in and climbed back into my bunk.
‘Lalla,’ he said, perching on the corner of my desk. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘There are other clothes, you know.’ I looked down my cotton nightdress and felt exposed. I had never given a thought to what I was wearing in front of him before. This was a strange new world, in which I did not feel comfortable sitting with my father in my nightdress. ‘If you wanted to wear something new for the funeral,’ he said, ‘I can show you where the clothes are.’
‘Do you want me to wear black?’ I asked.
‘This isn’t about what I want,’ he said. ‘Think about what would be fitting. Think of what would be the right thing by Anna.’
‘I don’t think she would have wanted to die in the first place.’
He frowned and his eyes darkened. ‘She chose what happened to her, Lalla. We all do.’
I opened my mouth to speak, and my cabin went dark. A vast trunk of grey and rust was blocking my porthole. I got down from my bunk and looked out, so surprised that I forgot what I was going to say.
The Ship Page 7