The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  A woman with long dark hair began to cry first. ‘It could have been me,’ she said between sobs. I knew that my own dreams would be haunted by the thought of those people, whose eyes I had once felt burning into me as my mother explained what I was looking at.

  Look carefully, darling. We can tell what these people thought about life by looking at how they treated their dead.

  And what they think about death by the way that they treat their living.

  The gong rang for dinner, but nobody moved.

  ‘They’ve gassed the British Museum,’ Tom said, his voice a stunned monotone. Our hands were still woven together; bones and heat. ‘They ran pipes into it, and they’ve carried out hundreds of bodies.’

  ‘Thousands.’

  ‘There were faces at the windows …’

  ‘They were trying to break out …’

  ‘We have to go back,’ I said, and I felt my mother’s arms around my shoulders, squeezing me tight as she did when I had given the right answer. I looked for my father, expecting to see his face stunned and overwhelmed, like those around him, but his face was fixed and stern. I spoke again, more loudly this time. ‘We have to go back,’ I said. Tom let go of my hand and I stood up. I waited for everyone else to jump up and join their voices to mine. It was our departure all over again, when throwing my card to the crowd on the quay had been the only thing to do.

  ‘Turn the ship around,’ I told my father. ‘We need to be in London. We need to help. We’ve got to stop them before they gas the National Gallery too, and St Paul’s, and …’ Beside me, a pair of green eyes moved gently left to right as their owner shook his head and I shrank from him in disbelief. My hand was still warm where he had held it.

  My father stood, and the people were silent. He looked around the ballroom. Savoury smells floated in from the dining room. The gong rang again. Still no one moved. Only the occasional lowering of a head here, eyes closed in pain there, said that these people were alive. I hated myself for thinking about food amidst such horror. But I could not stop the growling of my stomach, and wondered how long the horror was going to keep us all in the ballroom. We had witnessed a terrible thing. We knew what we had to do. We would eat, and we would go back.

  My father looked at me.

  ‘What good has it done you, to watch this?’ he asked me.

  ‘It’s shown us what to do next,’ I said eagerly, watching for his approval and pride, certain that, somewhere, my mother was listening. ‘We must go, now. There are people sheltering in all the public buildings. Dr Spencer can treat them, and we can open our stores and give them food. And clothes.’ I thought of my orange dress and of the piles of clean clothes in my cabin. I did not need so many. ‘If they were stronger, they’d be able to do something. Resist the troops. I don’t know.’ I searched the room for help. But no one would meet my eyes. My father remained unmoved.

  ‘What good has it done you, to watch this?’ he asked the ballroom as a whole.

  The only sound was the clinking of plates in the dining room, and concerned voices wondering whether the gong had been heard.

  ‘Are you surprised?’ he asked, and his voice was deeper, his tone more certain than I had ever heard it. ‘Have we not seen it before, again and again? The consequences of criminal decisions squeezed downwards until the ones at the bottom pay the price?’

  He looked around the ballroom. ‘I ask you again, what good has this bulletin done you?’

  Helen stood up, her dark hair blending into the shadows. ‘Michael,’ she said, and I winced, because she was looking at him as though he was the only person in the world, and I still wanted him for myself.

  ‘Yes, Helen?’

  ‘While the bulletins are there, I must watch them. I might see Simon.’

  Across the ballroom, heads nodded in agreement and names were muttered. Tola. Paul. Grace. Nisha. Salvator. Mark. A gentle litany, murmured for the lost.

  ‘Where’s Gabriel?’ my father asked Helen.

  ‘I didn’t bring him, Michael. He’s still so young. He’s helping Emily in the dining room, with the other children.’

  ‘In the dining room? Where your dinner is, even now, getting cold, while you weep here for something you cannot change?’

  Helen looked at her feet.

  ‘I did not bring you on board the ship for a ringside seat at the end of the world. I brought you that you might have life, and have it in abundance. We’ve left all that behind – the state murders, the mourning, the misery.’ Frustration broke through his voice. ‘I brought you here to be happy.’ He swallowed, and pulled himself up tall. ‘The past is over,’ he declared. ‘There is nothing now except what is here, on the ship, with us. We are the world. We are the entire universe. The old world is turning in on itself. We are no longer a part of it. In a few short weeks, they will have fallen apart. Will we fall with them?’

  ‘I’m not watching another bulletin,’ someone said, and agreement spread through the room like a tide.

  ‘No more bulletins!’ came the cry. ‘No more news.’

  ‘No,’ I shouted over the cries of agreement. ‘We need to know what’s happening.’ I thought of all the bulletins I’d ignored in London, back when I had been free to watch as many as I liked. Could I have changed things then? Is that what my mother had been waiting for?

  ‘I don’t want the bulletins,’ Helen said, turning on me. ‘While they’re there, I’ll watch them. Michael’s right. We can’t help those people.’

  ‘But we have to try,’ I cried, looking around the room, but it was too late. They had made up their minds.

  ‘Lalla,’ my father said softly. ‘If we go back, we’ll never reach our destination. Everything on this ship is necessary to get us there, and to support us when we arrive. Trust me.’ There was silence now.

  ‘But people in London are going to be gassed. Or drowned. Or shot.’

  ‘So you want to return so that you can be gassed, or drowned, or shot? How is that going to help them? Or anyone?’

  One of the engineers shouted out, ‘We’re helping them by not being there.’ There was a murmur of agreement.

  Then Tom stood up. He looked around and turned red, and then he coughed. For a moment I thought he was going to tell them all that I was right, and insist we should go back. I remembered standing on the deck rail with him as we threw our cards, and I clasped my hands together.

  He said, ‘I think we should take the mast down.’

  ‘What?’ I stood up too and looked around, waiting for the people to react. My father looked from Tom to me, from me to Tom, and said nothing.

  ‘The thing is,’ Tom said, ‘if we don’t want to see the bulletins, what’s the point in having the mast?’

  ‘So soon?’ my father said. To anyone who didn’t know him, his expression would have looked uncertain. But I knew that look. It was the look he used to give my mother and me when he had made up his mind about something and was waiting for us to catch up. And I knew, as surely as if it had already happened, that he would stand still and say nothing, and that the people would fall over themselves to do what he had wanted them to do all along.

  ‘The bulletins rule my life,’ Patience said. ‘I wait all day for the next one, and when it comes, it is the same as the last, and the last, and the last. Tola will not come to me on a bulletin.’

  Tom turned to me. ‘If we could help those people, it would be different.’

  ‘But we can.’

  ‘No, we can’t.’

  ‘They’re already dead.’

  I couldn’t keep track of who was speaking. Voices tripped over one another, and they were all saying the same thing. Get rid of it. What good is it to us now? We don’t want the mast where we’re going.

  ‘Destroy the mast,’ they cried. ‘Destroy the connection.’

  And they did. My father sent the engineers off, and their dinners went cold as they untangled the wires that connected the mast to the ship. After our meat pie and vegetable bake we left our place
s to watch them drag it down to the small deck. Tom had not come to sit beside me, but I saw him cheering with the rest, standing with a group, clapping each other on the back. The engineers heaved the mast into the sea after my mother. It sank immediately, the water closing over it as though it had never existed.

  I watched my father’s face as the mast went down. His hand was on Tom’s shoulder, and for the first time, I wondered how he had known to stock the ship with my mother’s funeral flowers.

  EIGHT

  We remember our missing the stores an apple

  When we came back from sinking the mast, everyone helped each other to pudding, hot from the kitchen. I put the first forkful into my mouth mechanically, but I was no longer hungry. I could see Tom, far away on the other side of the dining room, accepting the praise of his neighbours. He used his arms to mime the falling of the mast, and they laughed. The whole room pulsed with energy as though a great weight had been lifted from it. The woman to my right was talking energetically about what she was going to do with the extra time she would have spent watching the bulletin. The air was bright. But to me it felt brittle, as though the laughter was coming from people’s throats rather than their hearts. Tom was talking away as though he had never held my hand, and I pushed my plate away.

  ‘Is your meal not to your liking?’ the man with the pickled walnut skin asked politely, but I didn’t know how to answer him. He glanced at my father and back at my plate, then quickly swapped my full plate for his empty one and dispatched the crumble and custard efficiently into his own system.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked, taken aback more by the appropriation of my plate than by his appetite.

  ‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘no, my dear. Not hungry. How could I be?’ My father was standing now, waiting for everyone to notice and fall silent so that he could speak. ‘But Michael will not like to look out and see that his provision is not being enjoyed. Not tonight. Tonight of all nights. Tonight we have done a great thing.’

  ‘A great thing?’ I queried, but at that moment my father drew breath, leaving my words ringing round the dining room like lost children.

  ‘I am proud of you,’ my father said without preamble. ‘Your actions tonight have proved your worth. Had you not taken the decision you did, you would not be the people I thought you were. You would not be the people I brought onto the ship. Tonight, we say goodbye to the dead and the dying, and then we live. Live!’

  I looked around the ballroom, expecting a cheer, but saw only thoughtful faces gazing at my father. He lifted his water glass.

  ‘I offer myself as a father to your children, as a brother where a brother is needed, and a companion to anyone who has been left alone. I drink to the people we would have given our lives to find and I thank them for the love they bore you. And I bid them farewell.’

  Across the dining room, Helen stood up. She, too, held up her glass, and in a voice that was quiet yet firm, said, ‘I drink to Simon, my husband, who left to claim a plot in the Land Allocation Act and never came back. Gabriel will find a new father in you, Michael.’

  Then Patience. ‘I drink to Tola, my daughter, lost in the burning lands. May she find me here.’

  One by one, the people stood.

  ‘To my child Sanjeev, gone without trace in the drowning of Bangladesh. May he, too, find a new father.’

  ‘To my grandparents, who ran to escape the second pandemic.’

  ‘Tripp, my friend, arrested under the Nazareth Act.’

  And the list continued. The faces the people had searched for in the bulletins were all given names. The sun set; Emily and her team quietly cleared the plates and the tables. Sounds of crockery being cleaned underscored the recitation.

  ‘Mia, who missed her re-registration.’

  ‘Sam, my brother, made homeless by the Possession of Property Act.’

  ‘My twin Gill, who went to trade our books.’

  The moon rose clear and full through the windows; the earth had moved out of her way. The children’s eyes became heavy; the grown-ups held them, or settled them in on the carpet with pillows of cardigans and jumpers as the names rolled on.

  ‘Lynde, who lost her card.’

  ‘Victor, who went to school.’

  ‘Rebecca, arrested in a market raid.’

  The people had already said goodbye to their dead; in the course of that long night, they let go of their missing. Some, like me, had nothing to say, but like everyone else, I stayed awake all night and listened to the story of the collapse of the world told through a listing of names. Only when the sun had risen again, and the children began to stir, rubbing their eyes and asking what was for breakfast, was the last name committed to the air and set free.

  ‘Let this be the end of longing for what is gone,’ my father said. ‘Let our children grow up in safety, knowing that the people who are with them now will always be with them. Think about any mementoes you have brought on board. Do you need them? Or are they holding you back from becoming part of the free, loving family of the ship? Think about why you were invited on board. Think of why you chose to accept. Be worthy. And let us eat!’

  Breakfast was curved bits of melting pastry and sweet dark jam. The baskets emptied as fast as they were put onto the table.

  ‘It’s a croissant,’ I heard Helen tell Gabriel. ‘They used to eat these in France.’

  ‘So what?’ the little boy said, sticky with pastry flakes and jam, and my father smiled. ‘Are there any more?’

  ‘Are there any more?’ I echoed, wondering how long this bounty could continue. One day, surely, someone would ask the same question and the answer would be no. Where were we going? Would there be croissants there? My father stretched out a hand and stopped Emily in her path.

  ‘Emily,’ he said, ‘Lalla wants to know whether there are any more.’

  ‘Any more?’ Emily laughed. ‘Any more? Lalla, you could eat croissants every day for a year and there’d still be more. And more.’ My father’s hand was still on her arm and she looked at it, her cheeks going slightly pink. ‘Would you like to come, Lalla, and see for yourself? Michael, would that be all right?’

  ‘Of course. Unless she’d rather go and help Tom with the football?’

  ‘Football?’

  My father smiled. ‘I’ve moved Tom to new work. He’s going to teach the children to play football. Up in the sports hall.’

  No wonder Tom had looked so happy. I shook my head, and Emily looked pleased. ‘I’ll tidy away here, then we can go.’

  ‘You two go,’ my father said. ‘I’ll manage here.’

  ‘But Father,’ Emily protested. ‘I can’t let you do my work. I’ll take Lalla later on.’

  ‘I have to be in the laundry later,’ I said, with an obscure feeling that I was losing a competition I did not know I had entered.

  ‘There,’ said my father with amusement in his eyes. ‘Lalla needs to be in the laundry later. You’d better go now.’ He turned Emily around slowly and pulled the ties of her canvas apron loose. As he lifted it over her head, I heard him speak softly into the back of her neck. ‘Emily. Take Lalla, and help her lose the last of her doubts and fears.’ I saw Emily’s hands trembling as she folded the apron and surrendered it to him.

  And so, as the people finished their croissants, and stood up from the tables and made their way out of the dining room, Emily and I went through the wooden doors into the white and steel realm of the kitchen. I looked back through the round window and saw my father holding Emily’s apron, gesturing to the tables to be cleared. Emily stood beside me, her hands clasped under her chin.

  ‘It must have been wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘To have lived with him all your life. Just think. There’s never been a time when you didn’t know him.’ I stared at her, but she was staring at him. Had I ever known him? He had brought home diamonds and guns and strangers, but he had found tinned peaches, too, and shoes, and had never, ever forgotten to tell my mother to keep me s
afe. Now he belonged to five hundred people I had never met, and their children were to call him Father.

  Somebody tried to take Emily’s apron; my father held it out of reach with mock warning in his eyes. The woman – Alice, her name was, an old lady with grey hair and bright eyes – looked disappointed. From nowhere, my father produced a second apron and bestowed it on her, and she took it, beaming, and began to clear the plates.

  ‘Look, Lalla. Michael won’t let anyone else touch my apron,’ Emily breathed.

  All I’d seen was that he didn’t touch a single dirty plate himself.

  ‘He’s my father,’ I burst out. ‘Mine. What does he want a load more children for? What did I do wrong?’

  ‘I think it’s more a question of what you did right,’ Emily said softly. ‘Why would he want more, unless he loved the one he had?’ And with that she turned, and I followed her, through the kitchens and down, down, down to the stores.

  When Emily said she would show me the stores, I’d expected to see something like my mother’s larder in London, with its modest piles of tins and packets neatly arranged. But when Emily pushed open the storeroom doors, the comparison melted away. This was no larder, but a warehouse, as big and bigger than the atrium of the British Museum. The tins in my mother’s larder could be comfortably lifted between a thumb and a finger. Here, the tins were bigger than my head. They were piled upon great pallets, their black lettering repeated over and over again, to the sides, up, down and back to the distant walls like an optical illusion or a game of mirrors. We walked and walked; the black lettering gave way to pictures of red tomatoes; we walked some more. I stepped backwards and craned my head to see to the top but, like the wind turbines, they were constructed on a scale that one person standing alone could not comprehend. My mother had had bags of dried rice the size of my hand; now we were passing sacks the size of a small child, stacked twenty high and twenty across in layered towers. Like tiny dolls in a giant’s larder, Emily and I walked the stores.