And then my father entered, red-eyed but touching every hand that reached out to him as he made his way to his seat. The woodwork glowed, the white paint on the deck outside gleamed through the windows, the plates and cutlery shone. My father stood at his place and raised his hand, and into the ensuing silence he called, ‘The sun has risen on a new day.’
And so it had. From that day on, the new days just kept coming. The ship became a busy place, a bright place, a place where people smiled and talked and revelled in their safety and fullness. I watched the people as they went to meals, their cabins, the galleries. I explored my screen and found the library – hundreds, thousands of books. Books I had read with my mother, books I’d read on my own, but for the most part, books I’d never heard of. And for the first time since my mother’s death, I felt a flicker of excitement. I was given work in the laundry; I had a role. I saw Tom talking with other people and vowed to find the courage to speak to him again. And I saw a life begin to take shape. What had seemed impossible only days before became normal, and any questions I’d had became less and less important, until they no longer mattered and vanished, like frost at sunrise.
The scratched markings by my bunk increased in number and the people began to coalesce in groups. New activities started – for example, a net was cast out from the lower deck and some people began to swim inside it. There was a little white boat on the lower deck too, a relic from the ship’s former existence that my father had kept for its entertainment value. ‘A life boat, it was called,’ he said, faintly amused, as he watched the people lower it into the sea. It had a solar-powered motor and a small chamber below its tiny deck, where the children liked to hide. You could go all around the ship in it, although the novelty seemed to fade after the first couple of trips. Others got together and watched films, or went to Gerhard in the kitchen and learned to make cake. I couldn’t walk from my cabin to the ballroom, or the kitchen, or anywhere without passing two or three people deep in conversation. Another group of people put the same book on their screens and then met in the dining room to talk about it. Emily with the red hair took them biscuits while they were talking, then she and her team set up for the next meal and collected the empty plate. I still spent hours in the British Museum on my screen, but my mother had fallen silent, as though she was waiting, watching to see what would happen next.
‘You should join a group,’ Patience said when we were folding the ironed sheets. ‘Make friends.’ Patience was from Africa, and she was in charge of the laundry. When she smiled, her new white teeth flashed against the black skin of her face. My teeth had been passed by the dentist with an appreciative glance at my father, but many of the adults were in the process of having theirs repaired or, like Patience, replaced altogether.
‘Aren’t we friends?’ I asked.
‘I’m old. You are young. You cannot spend all your time working.’
‘I like working.’ And so I did – not so much for the lengths of fresh clean cotton sheeting, or the piles of laundered clothes ready to be delivered back to people’s cabins, or even for the feeling of having something to contribute, but for my conversations with Patience. My father had always been hurried, determined, his every action dictated by a horizon that held something bigger and greater than whatever was happening in front of his eyes. Once he’d established that I wasn’t going to jump into the sea, he was off again. My mother, too, had given everything to her part of the plan; I had simply been there, the reason for everything and the focus of nothing. But with Patience, on the ship, the horizon was a far off thing, a hazy line that meant and demanded nothing, and there was time.
‘How did my parents find you?’ I asked. ‘Were you still in Africa then?’
We had moved from sheets to clothes, and Patience’s iron moved like a thing alive through the creases. ‘I was. In Mombasa, when the boats were leaving the burning lands with the last of the people.’
‘Why didn’t you get on one?’
‘If you thought your mother would return, would you have left your cabin? You chose to live. And to live, you must leave behind.’ She paused. ‘I was waiting for my daughter.’
‘Did she come?’
‘Tola? No.’ Patience threw me the finished trousers, and began to work the iron’s point into the gathers of a flowered skirt. ‘She took a different way. The way of the young. The young never believe there is an end. For them, there is always a tomorrow, and another, and another. But I remembered Africa before the earth baked dry for good, and I knew it was the end.’
I checked the laundry mark on the trousers and began to fold them. ‘But you still waited for her?’
Patience added the finished skirt to the pile. I handed her a shirt and waited for her to speak.
She ironed the collar, the cuffs and the sleeves, then arranged the left front over her board. ‘Tola was angry,’ she said. ‘Her father put razor wire around our farm. He said it was for her, to keep safe the goats and chickens that fed us. She said he was a murderer, for the wire would kill anyone who tried to enter.’ I thought of the fences round Regent’s Park, and their twisted barbs, that my father said could cut to the bone.
Patience rested the iron upright and lifted the shirt from the board. Her eyes rested on the wall beyond and above me, and her voice dropped so I had to lean forwards to hear her.
‘One night,’ she said, ‘I looked out of the window. And in the moonlight, I saw the body of a young man, draped bleeding over the razor wire fence. I went out, but he was dead. So little blood, and so thin, I could lift him alone. I buried the body, glad to save my Tola this terrible sight. But Tola in the morning, she saw my cut arms. She said more people would come, and more, and were we to kill them all? Yes, said her father, if we must. And Tola left us. She was gone, and without her, her father moved around the farm like a forgotten spirit.’
Patience’s forearm caught on the iron. She flinched, and I ran to the sink and soaked a handkerchief in cold water. But when I took it to her, she waved it away, laughing quickly. ‘Michael warned us about looking back,’ she said, her voice suddenly light. ‘I look back, and see what happens? You are bad for me, Lalla. You and your questions. Join a group and bother some other person.’
She rearranged the shirt and began smoothing the right front, then the back.
‘But what happened?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Please, Patience. Tell me what happened in the end. Did Tola come back? Is that when my father found you?’
Patience’s smile fell away and she worked on that shirt as though it was the only thing that existed in the world.
‘Tola returned with fifty young people, all hungry, all wild. She told us we must feed them, with our goats, our cheese, our little bread. Her father fought them. But they were hungry, and they knew only to survive. They had clubs, and broken glass, and strength. Oh such strength.’
‘Did they kill him?’
‘Tola killed him. She would not let her father be killed by a stranger.’
‘And then?’
Patience took the shirt and folded it carefully. ‘I gave Tola the keys to the farm. I walked three hundred miles to Mombasa, to the ships, and there I cared for the departing people. For their children, their elderly. I soothed their fears and promised good things in their new lives.’
‘But you chose not to go?’
‘I had left all I had with Tola. And always, always, I hoped she might come.’
‘So you could punish her for killing her father?’
‘So I could tell her she was forgiven. What else was she to do?’
‘And my father? What about my father?’
‘The people on the ships spoke of me. They wrote of me on their screens. Michael heard my story, and he sent a message to the authorities.’ She smiled. ‘In the office of the harbour master, I talked with Michael on the screen and I knew then that I would come if he asked me. And I wanted him to ask me. More than anything, I wanted that.’
‘But you said you we
re waiting for Tola.’
‘And so I am. She will come to me here, on the ship. In Mombasa, I had only a dream of Tola, and only a burning death to meet when the evacuation was done. On the ship, I know I will see her.’
‘But I don’t understand. I don’t understand why Tola ran away.’
‘You cannot understand what you yourself did not choose to do.’
‘Should I have run away?’ I asked, perplexed. I saw Great Russell Street, unrolling diseased and dangerous before me, and the troops with their batons and their guns. ‘How could I have run away? Where would I have gone?’
‘Forgive me, Lalla. You are a child still. Tola was a woman.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Then? Thirteen. Now? Twenty-six. Maybe she is a mother herself, and her children will come with her.’
‘I’m sixteen.’
Patience held up the iron with warning in her eyes. ‘Tola’s was a different life. You had nothing to run from. But now – now, Lalla, you must become a woman too, and then maybe your mother will be holding Tola’s hand when they come, and we will be women of the ship together.’
The clothes were ironed, the piles made up. All there was now was the deliveries, and those were up to me.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll join a group.’
SEVEN
A busy life the last bulletin from land we destroy the mast
I was busy. For the first time in my life, I was busy. There were my conversations with Patience, my trips to the cinema, the meals. I learned to swim and swam in the net most days. A little boy called Gabriel was often there at the same time; I played with him in the water while his mother, Helen, who taught the small children, looked on. I could call lots of people by their names. Above all, there was my work, and I walked with pride as I carried clean clothes and bedding to the cabins.
My busy life was plentiful, too. I cleaned my teeth, and when the bristles around the edges of the toothbrush began to bend outwards, a new toothbrush appeared in my bathroom. If the soap dispenser began to spit when I pressed the pump, the next day it would be back to laying a fat slug of scented gel in the palm of my hand whenever I wanted one. Meals were regular and varied, and the people of the ship gathered around tables to talk and to compare and to laugh. My sheets were smooth and soft, my mind occupied, my body nourished and exercised. Everything had its place, its allotted portion of the sun’s journey over the ship and down the other side. There were even times when I looked up from the damp washing, or my screen, or Gabriel’s little face, and realised that I had not been thinking about my mother. The sun shone, and although there were storms from time to time, they were nothing more than a reason to gather together in the ballroom and marvel at the sheer quantity of water that could fall from the sky.
My father watched me and I watched him watching. If he was there when I was in the net, I laughed just a little more loudly; if he came upon me talking to someone, I would nod more vigorously, agree more heartily, then pretend I had only just noticed him. And when he passed me carrying the clean laundry, I would hold myself just a little taller. Are you happy? he would ask me at dinner, and I would grin and say, Yes, yes of course, of course, and carry on talking with even more energy. He smiled, and I saw that he was pleased.
And Tom sat next to me at breakfast one day, and I found out that he liked toast with chocolate spread, but never drank coffee. He told me that coffee was for old guys, and I pulled my long hair over my chin so it looked like a beard, and he laughed, and the next day I saw him looking for me across the dining hall, and my breath came quicker and I sat next to him again. After the rain, the sun dried out the water on the deck and Tom and the deck team cleaned the tide marks away. Life can be like this, I remember thinking. Happiness is possible. Is this what my parents meant when they bought the ship? Is this what they wanted?
And I felt that it was, but for one thing.
The news bulletins.
My father made the bulletins available in the ballroom every other evening, just before dinner. And every other evening, the people came into dinner diminished and grey, walking as though time had turned backwards. On bulletin nights there were leftovers on people’s plates and the goodnight meetings were subdued. I could see my father’s frustration in the deep breaths he took before he spoke, in the emphasis he placed on the words ‘here’ and ‘now’ in his goodnight speeches. The bulletins brought heaviness into the air, and made people less ready to enjoy the films, the book group, even work. And yet they went, bulletin after bulletin, pulled there by a longing that was never satisfied.
I went to the bulletins because Tom went, but I spent more time looking at him and blushing wildly when he looked at me than I did watching the news. I sighed when the others sighed, but I quickly realised that the news never changed, any more than it had when we were still living in London. Riots, shortages, market raids, more Sinkers going down, the same stories over and over again, recited over film footage that never seemed to vary. As far as I could see, the bulletins depressed everyone and told us nothing, and I knew my father thought so too from the way he met my eyes across the ballroom.
And then, one night, when the scratches by my bunk numbered twenty-two and I had learned to fold a sheet without any help, the news was different.
‘That’s the British Museum!’ I called out when the bulletin started. ‘We used to …’ My father caught my eye and put his finger to his lips. The British Museum meant my mother, and as I stared at the screen, searching for her, my loss burst afresh through the sheet-folding and the Tom-following and the swimming and everything I had carefully built around myself since her funeral. I knew, sharply and absolutely, that the reason – the only reason – the people kept coming was to scour the footage for those they had left behind. My heart battered against my ribcage and I watched in silence. My mother was dead. I knew it, and yet I had trouble remembering to breathe.
‘Today saw the commencement of the Heritage Restoration Act,’ the voiceover on the screen announced.
I don’t have answers, Lalla. Only questions. That’s how you learn.
Mother.
‘The Heritage Restoration Act restores citizens to the enjoyment of public buildings. When government cleansing is completed, citizens will once more enjoy unencumbered access.’
‘What’s happening?’ a voice beside me asked, and I turned to see that Tom had come in late and was sitting beside me. But I was inside the museum with my mother, my head spinning. I could not speak for remembering, and I forgot to blush.
For a moment, it seemed that nothing was going to happen.
They wanted to show how valuable the man’s life had been …
Then troops appeared on the roof of the museum. They stood for a moment, outlined against the sky, and then they abseiled down, like locusts swarming over the screen, slicing the building with dark ribbons. They stopped at the windows and produced great rolls of tape from nowhere. They ripped lengths of tape – the tearing sound was clear on the screen – and pressed them to the window frames.
‘What are they doing?’ I heard myself asking. Watch, Lalla. Look at what you can see, then think about what you can’t. Yet more troops arrived in trucks bearing huge reels of yellow hose. They unrolled reel after reel into the Great Court, forming a yellow carpet through the main doors. Then they exited the museum and closed the doors. More abseiling troops sealed the doors, then released their cables and joined the others, positioned around the museum with their guns and rifles.
All around me, I saw hands stealing into hands, bodies moving closer together, faces illuminated by the screen, open-mouthed. Tom’s hand lay next to mine; our little fingers were touching, and his skin was dry and hot. ‘I don’t know,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I don’t know what’s happening.’
For a few moments the only sound from the screen was the mechanical rhythm of the pumps starting up. The yellow hoses swelled, the carpet of hoses plumped into a mattress. The windows were dark and I briefly h
oped that the faces I had seen there had existed only in my imagination.
Mother, what is the most valuable thing in the museum? I asked her once.
Life, she said loudly. Life, and a woman looked out from under a layer of cardboard, longing for ours.
Those staring faces appeared again now, marked not by hatred but by despair. They pressed up against the windows, mouths stretched into dark caverns. A woman held up a baby; another dragged her away, then beat at the window with weakened hands. Hundreds of them, thousands, hammering at the windows, kicking at the doors. Lifting their children to the glass, hoping that someone, somewhere, might see them and care. Desperate hands clawing at the inside of their giant sarcophagi. There were no numbers. There were no names. The museum, the announcer told us, was empty, and yet when she drew breath, we heard distant screaming. The scrawled notice at the window – Mums 4 Community – fell away.
I thought of everyone I had ever met. The men and women who staffed the re-registration points. The people hiding in the museum. The waitress who, back when there were still restaurants, had brought me a plate of food, unable to hide the jealousy and hunger in her eyes. A man whose coat was now missing a button, and the woman who had sheltered with him. Commander Marius, who did not believe in suicide. I knew people now; I knew what it meant to look forward to seeing someone, to plan, to be glad that, when the sun rose, they would be there still. And I knew that, although the museum would have been dirty and crowded and full of fear, there would have been friendship there too, and care. And that through the empty display cases, a girl might have met a pair of eyes that made her heart beat faster, and that even in the squalor and deprivation, a mother would have lived and breathed for her child. Tom put his hand on mine, and I took it, shaking.
They would all have died one day. But not like that.
Life, my mother said. Life.
The museum windows emptied, the last reaching hands sinking below the sills. The troops donned gas masks. They ripped away the sealing tape and stood with their guns as the main doors were opened. Run, I pleaded as seven hollow figures staggered through the doors, fragile and dazed. Run. But they collapsed before the troops had had time to aim their weapons. No one else came out, and soon, the troops entered in groups. They wrapped the first bodies in sheets and carried them out on stretchers. But after the first half an hour, the bodies were just slung into handcarts and wheeled into the backs of the waiting vans. Body after body. The British Museum emptied of its treasure. Reclaimed for the nation, the announcer said triumphantly. No identity cards, no casualties.
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