The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a wind turbine,’ my father said. ‘We’re going through the wind farms.’ He got off the desk and stood beside me. ‘We were going to save the world with offshore wind farms.’ I stared at the peeling flakes of metal, the coastlines of rust, spread before my eyes as though my porthole were a magnifying glass.

  ‘Look to the horizon,’ my father said, and as the ship sailed past the trunk, it moved aside to reveal a leafless forest stretching as far as I could see. On the horizon, I saw the motionless blades reaching uselessly to the sky, to the sea. I had only ever seen the wind farms on my screen before – now here they were, larger in life than I had ever imagined. It seemed a beautiful thing to me, to take the movement of the winds and turn it into power for humanity.

  ‘Why don’t they work?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re disconnected,’ he said.

  ‘But why? Why can’t we connect them again, get the power going?’

  ‘Look at them, Lalla. They’re rusting away. Useless great hulks. Nothing lasts if it’s not cared for. If no one could pay for the power, where was the money to come from to maintain the turbines? Or the oil derricks, for that matter? Who would create power only to give it away?’

  I thought of the ship, of what it must have cost. ‘You could have done it,’ I said. ‘Instead of this.’

  ‘For Marius and his politicians to get fat on?’ Anger flared in his eyes; I saw him control himself, and I did not dare to say more. Then he said, ‘Labour, and the fruits of labour. When those things were connected, the world turned. When the disconnect became absolute, it stopped. Politicians looking out for themselves. And all those street people in London, sitting around waiting for food drops. What were they doing, Lalla? Why weren’t they working?’

  ‘There wasn’t any work.’

  ‘There’s always work. Easier to sit around and complain than find it, though.’

  We passed another turbine and in the dark, I appealed to my mother, Tell me what to think. Tell me what to ask. It didn’t seem to me that the street people had had an awful lot of choice.

  ‘When we’ve passed the wind farms, we’ll be on our way,’ my father said at last. ‘That’s all the wind farms are now, a staging post on our journey.’

  ‘What’s a staging post?’

  ‘Somewhere they used to change horses. Before cars and trains and aeroplanes. So they could get where they were going more quickly.’ Horses. Aeroplanes. Words so impossibly exotic that they made little sense to me.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  My father smiled and went to the door. ‘You’ll know when we get there,’ he said. ‘We all will.’ He looked at me and inclined his head. ‘We might not all arrive at the same time, that’s all.’

  ‘But we’re all on the same ship.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, we are. We are all on the same ship.’ He repeated my words as though they pleased him.

  There was a gentle knock on my cabin door. My father called, ‘Come in,’ and the woman with red curly hair opened the door and looked in, smiling at me with pity in her eyes before turning to my father. Emily.

  ‘We’re ready for you,’ she said. He nodded and she withdrew, keeping her eyes fixed on him until the moment the door closed behind her.

  He went to the door. ‘Shall we?’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘Why are you so angry with her?’ I asked suddenly.

  ‘With Emily?’

  ‘No. With my mother.’

  ‘Angry?’ He looked warily at me, and I remembered the way he had looked at Commander Marius when he mentioned the Exodus Act. As though he might have been found out.

  ‘You said she chose what happened to her.’

  ‘She did.’

  The nightdress smelled of soap, not of London. ‘She didn’t,’ I said. ‘She didn’t, and neither did I.’

  I expected him to come over and put his arms around me as he had done before. I expected him to say that, although I had lost my mother, I would never, ever lose my father, and that he loved me, and that everything he had done in setting up the ship and this life was for me. That, at least, would be familiar, and by burying my face in his shoulder, I could maybe find a link back to her.

  But he didn’t. He just said, ‘Grow up, Lalla,’ and I felt as though a blanket had been ripped from me. ‘We could have left long before we did. Before the gangs began to gather. Before the Land Allocation Act, even. We didn’t have to wait to see blood being spilt on the streets. We could have gathered you up years ago, Lalla, and brought you here.’

  ‘You could have forced her,’ I muttered sullenly.

  ‘Anna would have kept finding excuses until London rotted and the people in the holding centre were all dead. I was terrified that something terrible would have to happen before she would agree to come away. That one of you would be hurt. I am only grateful that it was not you.’

  ‘Why did we have to come away at all?’

  ‘Because of you.’ He smiled, and a terrible thought that had come into my mind popped like a bubble of soap. I was back at the centre of the universe, where I was comfortable because it was where I had always been.

  ‘Me?’ I asked. I felt warm again.

  ‘You. I wanted you to have a chance to live with higher thoughts than where to find food. I wanted you to experience all the wonders of being human, without worrying that some starving, terrified soul was going to kill you. I wanted to give my daughter herself, so that she could find out who she is. When you were born, you gave me the strength and inspiration to reach for something higher, for everyone. And this is that place. Your mother will always be a part of you, so what need have I to weep when you are with me?’

  At first I clung to him as I wept. I saw my mother walking down Great Russell Street, holding the hand of a little girl who looked a bit like me. Except that little girl was smiling, and I knew that I would never smile again. I wept for the water she had cooled for me in the stone jug, and for the dress she had died in, that would never be cut down for me. I wept because my days had been so empty, and because I had wasted so much time thinking that I was letting her down, when all she had wanted to do was to love me. My chest hurt; I could not bear that, if I stopped crying, it might stop hurting. And I wept in gratitude for my father’s words, which had given me permission to cry.

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ my father said, putting a velvet jewellery box on the desk.

  I stopped crying. Was I to be given another diamond? But I didn’t want one. In death, I had drawn my mother closer. She had yearned for flowers, not for diamonds.

  ‘Open it,’ he said.

  I did so, and the world around me shifted.

  One day, on the way back from the British Museum, I saw a couple standing on the corner of the street. I must have been ten or eleven, I suppose – after restaurants and shops, but before the museum dwellers became entrenched. I let my mother walk ahead and I watched, and I saw the man place his hands around her face and kiss the woman. It was a bitterly cold day, and he pulled his coat around the two of them so that they looked like only one person, and as he did so, a button fell from his coat and rolled to my feet. I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone, so I picked up the button, and when we got home, I put it into an empty jewellery box and gave it to my mother.

  ‘That’s a story, little one,’ she said. ‘We’ll put it in our museum, shall we? With a label saying, This button shows us that there was still love amongst twenty-first century man.’

  ‘It’s just a broken button, Anna,’ my father said. ‘It’s not worth anything. It’s hardly a diamond.’

  ‘Diamonds are just diamonds,’ she said quietly, her skin shining soft in the pale daylight. ‘They’re too hard. Nothing marks them. This button – look, those are the scratches where it rolled along the road. The pattern’s worn away on one side. That must have been where the man used to push the button through the buttonhole. Think how long he must have been d
oing that for, to mark the button in this way. And think what it meant to him, to share his coat, maybe his only shelter, with someone else.’ She turned it over in her hand. ‘See?’ she said, holding it out to both of us, although I was the only one who leaned forward. ‘The shank’s worn so thin that it snapped.’ She turned to my father. ‘Don’t you see, Michael? Don’t you see that this button is more valuable than your diamonds?’

  ‘What good’s that button going to be when you get hungry?’

  ‘So we’re to eat diamonds, King Midas?’ She pushed me towards him. ‘Go on, Michael, touch her and see if she turns to gold.’

  He held me, but I never did turn to gold. And yet, my father had taken the trouble to bring the button in its little box on board the ship. What could it mean, except that, in his own way, he loved me, just as my mother had in hers? Would he have to die, too, before I began to understand him? It was time to make of this life what I could.

  The grey sea swelled around the ship. ‘It’s you and me now, Lalla,’ my father said quietly. ‘Shall we go?’ He gave me his arm, as though we were wearing the long, old-fashioned clothes I had seen on my screen and were about to dance.

  And so the first funeral took place. My father hopped around, alternately exultant and subdued, disappearing after breakfast and coming back with artificial flowers, which he dumped in the ballroom before disappearing again and bringing a black dress from somewhere and giving it to me. Food was put out in the dining room and people snatched their lunch when they could, in between the dusting and the polishing and the dressing of tables. And at last, as the sun began to give up its gold to the sky and the wind farms disappeared behind us, we all came onto the lower deck. I wore the black dress, full-skirted and held at the waist by a thin belt with a gold buckle. All around me, people held handkerchiefs and looked sad. The children stood in a small group holding the flowers, and theirs were the only feet and hands that moved.

  My father spoke over my mother’s body. She wore the blue and green silk dress, cleaned and mended. She looked younger, as though at any moment she might open her eyes and jump off the board she was resting on and offer to play a game. My father was right; there was no trace of her suffering or her violent death upon her face, and I realised that this would make it easier for me to say goodbye. Someone had put her hair up. She looked as though she was going to a party in the time before the time before the ship.

  ‘So lovely,’ someone whispered, and someone else said, ‘Such a terrible shame,’ and soft shimmery whispers moved around the gathering. Beside me, a woman wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. I saw her stare in wonder at the handkerchief, so clean and so new, and was not surprised that she found it more fascinating than death, which even I had seen every day until we sailed. Then my father stood beside the body and faced us, and there was silence.

  ‘We have come to let Anna go,’ he said. ‘We are here to say goodbye. We will commit her to the sea, which is our support now, and she will become part of it, bearing us up in death as she always did in life.’ I thought of the piece of paper he had patted in his pocket the night my mother died, upon which he had written his welcoming speech. He held no paper now. Where had he learned to speak like this? How much further from me was he going to travel?

  ‘Love Lalla,’ he said to the people. A wind blew from the sea and I shivered. ‘Enfold her. Teach her the universality of goodness; show her your love for mankind, the love for which you were brought on board. Anna is dead. You lost her before you came to know her. But the very fact that you are here is testimony to Anna’s vision, her love, her faith in you. You will find Anna in each other. Her death will draw you closer together, because during her life, she created this life for you. But Lalla – Lalla is just a child who has lost her mother. Can you bear that for her? Can you enfold Lalla in yourselves, as surely as the sea will enfold Anna and take her to itself?’

  A child? Was I still a child? I felt that I had aged a hundred years since we boarded the ship. I imagined all the people coming towards me, holding out their arms, and I panicked and had to fight for my breath. A hand touched my arm but I pulled away. I did not need pity. I needed to be held. I needed to be held as my parents had held each other, as though each was only complete when the other was there. The people were alive, and my mother was dead, and I hoped they felt as guilty as I did. I stood and glared, my arm cold where the touch had been withdrawn, and the people shrank from me.

  My father tilted the board on which my mother’s body lay and she slipped into the sea with a small splash.

  But the waters did not cover my mother’s body. It floated without direction, without control, the blue green dress tracing its ebb and flow. As her dress took up the water, it clung across her body, outlining the wound on her stomach. The hair that had been arranged so carefully pulled loose with the water’s weight and washed across her face in dark shadows. Each wave sloughed a layer of paint from her face, so that the peace and loveliness that had been created there melted away. She was no longer sleeping until we met again, the honoured guest of the sea; she was white and damaged and soiled and dead, and the pain I had forced on her was written all over her face.

  I felt my father stiffen beside me. His fists were clenched. He did not move, but all around us, people began to look at each other. He continued to watch, his eyes fixed on the body as though he could draw the waters over it by the force of his gaze. I felt unease seeping into the atmosphere. People began to shift their weight from foot to foot; the children looked up ready to ask questions and were shushed; my father’s lips thinned and his eyes became fixed and shone blue. He was Michael, their captain; food appeared on tables; stories were told, people gathered together, fresh water flowed, all at his command. And yet he could not push my mother’s body beneath the waves.

  And I understood that the next death would be different. At the next death, he would weight the body down with something, and the sea would rise to welcome the dead at my father’s bidding. The next death would be perfect. But this time, my father stood white and unmoving, deaf to the rustle and shifting of the people around him. Slowly, they left the deck. Those with children went first, shoulders hunched apologetically over their fidgeting offspring still clutching their flowers. Others followed, throwing glances of concern at my father’s granite back as they left.

  He remained, staring at the body.

  ‘He’s grieving,’ I heard one departing mourner say to another, as the last of the people left the deck and the sun dipped slowly into the sea in front of us, glinting in the cabin portholes.

  But my mother still refused to sink. Night came on, and her body became a stain on dark water. I grew cold, then colder. My arms and legs began to hurt; my fingers burned as I chafed them out of numbness. My father had not moved. I strained my eyes but the black water was unrelieved now. There was no moon, and I knew from the ancient calendars in the British Museum that this was because the earth was standing in the way of the light of the sun. The moon is still there, I told myself, even though I cannot see it.

  Night time was new to me. In London, going out in the dark would have been akin to plunging a hand into boiling water or eating from the pavement. Although I had seen the night from our flat, there had always been some light out there – from the oil drums, from street fires, from screens. Here there was nothing. I could not even see whether my father was still there. I stepped carefully towards the sound of his breathing, feeling for the deck rail and gasping with the cold of it. Then I felt my father’s hand, and I placed mine over it. He opened his coat and wrapped me inside it.

  ‘Shall we jump?’ he said quietly. ‘Now, before the sun rises. Before they come to start breakfast. Do you want to jump, Lalla? I’ll come with you if you do.’

  To jump and to be with her. To jump, and join her in the sea.

  ‘What about the ship?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, his arms tightly around me. ‘This was all for you. Only for you. Anna is gone. I can’t change
that. But if her death means there’s nothing left for you, then I will jump, whether you do or not.’

  I burrowed into his chest. I imagined jumping, my body flying weightless through the air, my misery and loneliness left on the ship. Yes. Yes, I would jump, for the sake of that brief moment before the water hit. And when it did, the coldness of it, and the struggle for breath, and the fighting that would come before the peace would be worth it, because I would be with my mother.

  The sun began to rise. I searched the horizon, but my mother was gone at last, taken by the receding darkness.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I said.

  ‘Eat. Smile at me. Be happy.’

  I felt the deck beneath my feet. I saw how far it was down to the water; I saw the layers of cabins and rooms above us. I smelled the breakfast being prepared in the dining room; I felt my hunger and realised that my father was the reason it would be sated before I’d really realised it was there. And there was Tom, too. If I were to jump, I would never know him. What if I were to change my mind mid-air? My father stared out at the empty sea, waiting for my response.

  ‘I don’t want to jump,’ I said.

  ‘But will you live? Really live?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Promise me. Promise!’

  I promised. In the half light, I slipped out of his coat and found my way to my cabin. No one took him from me this time; it was I who left. I took off the black dress and the belt with the gold buckle and pushed them into the laundry chute. I scratched another line upon my tally of the days. I put on clean clothes and made my way to breakfast. And I wondered whether these mechanical things could, actually, make a life. Whether, if I stopped thinking so much, I might find that my father was right, and that life without my mother was possible. After all, he was managing it. The rising sun warmed the air. People arrived in the dining room and smiled through me at each other, looking for the one person that was missing.