She opened another door. Drums. Bigger than the oil drums the street people had used for their fires. ‘Cooking oil and fat pellets,’ she said. ‘Hermetically sealed, fresh until we need to use it.’ I started to calculate how many there were and gave up. Further on, I recognised the squat white buckets of dried egg, the taller ones that held milk powder, the blue paper sacks of sugar.
‘But why is there so much?’ I said, feeling more and more like the king who tried to turn back the tides. My feet were aching.
‘We’ve not even finished one of these drums of oil yet, Lalla,’ Emily said. ‘Not one.’
Another door, more sacks. My legs were tired and I wanted to sit down. More tins, more pallets, more drums, more sealed buckets. I felt dazed. We went down another steel staircase and I sat on the bottom step and rubbed my feet. I had asked a simple question; this heavy artillery of reply was bewildering and exhausting. But one thing I learned – that whatever else happened on the ship, we were unlikely to starve.
‘This level is the same again,’ Emily said, and my mouth fell open. ‘Want to walk it?’
I shook my head but she had already set off. ‘Biscuits,’ she said, gesturing to the left and pointing forwards. ‘And on this side, cooking chocolate. Milk chocolate. White chocolate. Dark chocolate. Syrup. Crackers. And I can’t remember what this is; I forgot to bring the catalogue. I think it’s marshmallows. We haven’t opened any yet. Do you remember marshmallows?’
I shook my head. ‘What’s the catalogue?’
‘It’s like the manifest, but for the stores. There’s a map in the front and it shows us where everything is. I’m beginning to find my way around now. Sometimes I feel like I’m going down into the depths of the mountains and bringing up gold. At the moment, Gerhard and I manage alone, but one day we’ll need a whole team. Do you want to walk to the end? Or shall we go down now?
‘Down?’
‘Yes, down. All this is just the dry stuff. There’s more.’
At the foot of the stairs, beside a heavy white door, hung two padded bodysuits, with gloves and hats and face masks. There was a shining silver handle on either side, each one the length of my forearm. Emily felt in the pocket of her dress and produced two keys.
‘Here,’ Emily said, holding one of the keys out to me. ‘We put on the suits, then unlock and turn the handles at the same time. That’s to make sure no one goes into the freezers alone. Ready?’ she asked, her eyes dancing. ‘The freezers are bigger than the storerooms upstairs.’
I had had enough. My stomach was rumbling. I thought of the day we had sailed, of Commander Marius threatening to take the ship’s stores and distribute them over the city. My father had said that there was no more food than we needed. And I had felt that our stored food wouldn’t have made any difference to the city. But Emily said it took one sack of rice to make a meal for the ship. So just the sacks I had seen would have fed the museum dwellers for weeks, let alone the layers of sacks behind those, and the layers behind those, and the layers behind those. We had missed lunch and I had no idea where my father was. But to walk away from the chance to see what the freezers contained seemed to me to be insulting to the people who were still in London, de-registered and dying.
I pulled on one of the suits, and Emily pulled on the other, and as I turned my key and wrenched at the handle, I felt like the Antarctic explorers in my mother’s old picture books, back in the days when there was an Antarctic. Lights blinked into shuddering life as Emily and I entered, and my breath rose in a mist. We were in a narrow corridor of wire crates. The ceiling was lower than in the warehouses, but still high enough to need ladders and pulley systems.
‘It’s smaller than I thought,’ I said when I realised I could see the back wall from where I was standing.
‘Really?’ said Emily. She opened another door, which led into another frozen room, and another, and another. I counted seven before I realised I could no longer feel my nose. ‘Michael partitioned the freezer stores,’ she explained. ‘It’ll be more efficient when the fuel’s completely gone and we start relying on the solar panels.’
‘So what’s all this?’
‘Concentrated orange juice, I think. And the next chamber is my favourite.’
‘Why? What’s in it?’
‘Look.’
I looked, but the racks of wire crates didn’t look any different to me.
‘It’s dough,’ Emily said. ‘Cookie dough. You get a great long sausage of dough, and you slice it and put the discs in the oven, and fifteen minutes later there are fresh cookies for everyone.’ The word sounded out of place, light and frivolous in a serious world. No one was going to die if they didn’t get cookies. I couldn’t imagine turning up in London and offering cookies to the homeless.
‘I’ve never had a cookie,’ I said.
‘Poor Lalla. They’re lovely. Warm and sweet, and when you bite into them the melted chocolate chips ooze into your mouth.’
‘When did you have cookies?’
‘Oh, decades ago. When I was much younger than you are now. And then the other night Father came down and got some dough and we tried it out in the kitchen with Gerhard and Tom and some of the others.’
‘Tom?’ Why hadn’t I been there? Why hadn’t someone come to get me?
She nodded. ‘Oh, they were good. I’d forgotten how good. Oh, Lalla, you have so many treats in store for you. Cookies are just the start.’
‘What about apples?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes. Dried, tinned, even some frozen – and there are some biscuits upstairs with apple pieces in them.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘apples. Real apples. Like in books.’
Emily looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language, and for the first time I noticed that she had lines around her eyes. ‘Lalla, sweetheart,’ she said gently, ‘apples grew on trees, didn’t they?’ And for a moment we stared at each other, and the soil sickness seemed to creep right inside me. I thought of the stores I had already seen, their landscape of provision waiting to be mined, and of the ship sailing away from the barren country. And I remembered the film of the last polar bear, swimming and swimming in the empty ocean, in search of a mass of ice that had finally melted away. The freezer chamber felt smaller and smaller and I found myself looking around anxiously for the door.
‘What about seeds?’ I asked.
‘Seeds?’
‘Has my father brought seeds? Things we can plant?’ I was walking around the chamber but the door seemed to have gone.
‘Where would we plant seeds?’ Emily asked, bewildered. ‘Not that way, Lalla, if you want to go back. That door goes to bagels and crumpets.’ She put her silver padded arm around my shoulders and led me back the way we had come. I didn’t protest. I had seen enough, and could barely find the energy to toil after her, back through the freezer chambers and up, up, up through the vertiginous mountains of our future meals.
Emily gave me some biscuits, and I took them to my cabin. I lay on my bunk to eat them and ran my fingers over the scratches I was making to mark the days. Twenty-three days had passed – almost a month, not counting the time I had lost in mourning – and yet five hundred people had not even made a dent in the food stores. I closed my eyes, replaying the sleepless night of goodbyes. How many of those missing people might have been saved if this food had gone to the city instead of into the ship? Tins and sacks and drums rising in great walls, solid and substantial, nourishment for thousands upon thousands for weeks, days, even years.
We have left hunger behind, my father said, and I knew now that he was right. But even as I admired the extent of his preparations, I felt that they had altered the world’s balance – that the ship was not so much an escape from hunger as the cause of it. I thought about the women who had been swept into the sea by the flailing gangplank of the departing ship. My father had killed those women, and nothing had been said. Had he also killed others by his actions? His concern for our safety? His longing to get away? I remembered somethin
g about a man who’d died the night before we sailed and wondered what had happened. Why had my mother been so reluctant to board? I fell into an uneasy sleep. Then I heard a voice and I froze in earnest.
‘Have you ever eaten an apple?’
I could not see. I had slept for longer than I thought, and my cabin was dark. The voice was familiar, but I could not place it. It was musical and confident; it put the question urgently, as though much depended upon my answer. It was not my mother, who would not have needed to ask. It was not my father, who now only asked questions that contained their own answers – Do we want to return to a life of terror? Who is there among us who does not care, above all, for his fellow man? What are we here for, if not to take humanity to its natural, unfettered destiny? He would not have wasted a word on an apple, especially now that there was no such thing.
‘Have you even eaten an apple?’ the voice asked again, and this time there were breaths snatched between some of the words, as though its owner had been running fast.
‘Mother?’ I called, but the dark night was silent.
I felt a sudden pain under my ribs, as though my lungs were being forced upwards, and I could not get my breath. I tried to raise myself from my bunk but could not move. I had never eaten an apple, never even seen or held one. She’s here, I thought, and the words carried such conviction that I knew they were true. I lay clutching my sheet, not daring to move, telling myself that if I stayed completely still, time would not be able to move forwards, and I would not have to live without her anymore.
Mother, I shouted silently, how could you leave me? What did you want? If the ship was what you wanted, why didn’t you come on board when you were well, so that you could have looked after me still? At least in London, I had you. Now I have lost everything, everything. I don’t even believe in the ship.
Child, she said, child. Good things are happening. But I could not listen. I lay trapped by my numb and motionless body, and inside I screamed and yelled and stamped my feet until the walkways and the staircases and the metal hull were ringing with my grief and anger. I do not want to be here. I did not ask for this. Who are you, that you forced me to come here? How dare you leave, when you have not told me who I am? Who am I, Mother? Who am I, and what am I here to do?
I smelled the fresh, tingling scent of an apple I must have dreamed of in my childhood. Cool, sweet flesh burst over my tongue; my teeth ached at the pleasure of piercing its skin. It was pain, yes, but it was also wanting more, more, and overlying that was the feeling that I would never, never taste that sweetness outside of my dreams. I wanted my mother, and that was impossible, because she was dead flesh tucked around with silk, still floating somewhere beyond the horizon. I wondered if every sensation I would ever have now would be a yearning for something that did not and could not exist.
Have an apple, Lalla.
I ran to my cabin door and pulled it open. The walkway rang, a distant echo of a disappearing footstep. A door closed. I went to follow but there, at my feet, was an orb of bright, vivid green with shining skin. A small stick of a stalk. A springy brown leaf still attached.
An apple.
NINE
The beginnings of my museum goodnight meeting dinosaurs
I brought the apple into my cabin and turned on the light. It sat in my palm, lighter than I had imagined, its green skin smooth, unblemished and cold to the touch. The little leaf bounced slightly when I touched it. I didn’t want it to break off and so I put the apple down on my table. I went to my cupboard and took out the velvet jewellery box containing the button my father had given me when my mother died. How many objects make a museum? Eight million? Two? There, on my desk, were the beginnings of a new British Museum, a museum for the ship.
Safe on the ship, I looked at the button, nestled in its velvet box, and I saw how my parents’ words to each other were translated in the air, as a beam of light bends when shone through clear water. My mother dismissed diamonds; my father heard ingratitude. My father refused to wait until the people of the museum had formed a plan, and my mother heard him condemn his fellow human beings to death. They were both right, and both wrong. When things fall apart, you cannot save everything. That was the button’s story. The man wanted to save his companion from the cold. He wanted to love her, to keep her safe. And the little worn button couldn’t cope with the pressure of his expectations. It cracked and fell away. It could have been ground to dust. Instead, it was caught on a tide that brought it to me.
An apple and a button.
Our museum, my mother had said. Our museum.
There it sat on the shelf of my cabin. A worn relic of the life before; a shining miracle of life on the ship. I put them together and the sight pleased me. I’d keep these things for someone. And when we got to wherever we were going, I’d build a home for them, and people would come and see them and ask questions and I’d say, I don’t have any answers. Only questions. That’s how you learn.
I was learning now, and the night of the last news bulletin taught me two things. It taught me that, if we were to turn around and go back to London, I would have to find people on the ship who agreed with me, and get them to help me persuade the rest. And it taught me that holding someone’s hand can turn them into a stranger. I had not spoken to Tom since the night of the last bulletin. But I watched him move around the ship. I learned him until his face was as fixed in my mind as my mother’s. I knew his voice, his eyes, the lines that ran from the edges of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth and deepened when he smiled. The children ran after him all the time, laughing as he demonstrated kicks and turns and bounced the football from knee to knee while they counted and cheered. I began to eat toast and chocolate spread, and to say no to coffee.
But just as real in my mind were the suffocated museum dwellers. Someone, I knew, would say, Yes, Lalla, you are right. We must go back to London and do what we can to help. It would be like the moment I threw my card away – just one person speaking the truth would bring everyone else along with them. We could set the ship up as a clinic, a rescue centre. We could all stay on it, living our happy lives, and no one would have to leave. It was too late for the British Museum. But there were other public buildings. Maybe a community had been formed in one of them. Maybe another mother and another daughter took food from their own stocks and shared it when they visited. We could not have been the only ones in the whole of London. And there were other cities too; who knew what was happening in those? We could save those people.
It was so simple that it was bound to happen. I waited for a while, watching for the resolve I’d expressed at the last bulletin to take hold and spread. But the ship had been invaded by a blissful content. Patience was walking taller, laughing more, even singing as we folded the clean clothes. Doctor Spencer’s walk had developed a bounce and the very lines on his face seemed to have smoothed. Helen played with Gabriel, and adults began to join the children in the sports hall as Tom’s green eyes flashed among them, chasing his football. There was a small group who met each other in corners, looking over their shoulders, but whenever I approached them they separated and melted away until I convinced myself I had imagined their connection.
In desperation, I defied my father’s request that we should not look back. At a goodnight meeting, I talked openly about the sealing of the museum, the pumping in of poisonous gas, the thousands of deaths that resulted. But my words simply energised the community on the ship. Far from depressing them, the horror of the museum gave them a common currency for conversation. It would start with two or more people trying to find a name by which to refer to the deaths. It couldn’t be called genocide, because it was not a concerted attempt to eliminate a particular race or religion. Nor execution, which implied that the victims had done something wrong. Elimination gave the impression that something undesirable had been wiped out. Murder was too small, too domestic a word for the sheer scale of what had happened, although it found favour because it was unequivocal in its statement of crime.
And as I waited for someone, anyone, to make the connection between the museum dwellers and ourselves, and to declare with me that we should return to land, I realised that they were enjoying themselves. That the people in the museum had become ciphers to the ship dwellers as much as they had ever been to the government on land, and that any doubts anyone may have had about leaving the land for the ship had vanished in the dying breaths of the dispossessed.
Once communication with the land was impossible, people began to live on the ship. Not just to eat and to sleep and to smile at each other, but to live. I was watching and listening, and I noticed the difference. Experiences stopped being calibrated in losses – homes, friends, a parent, a child – and began to be measured in gains: a book discovered, a painting understood, a film watched for the first time. I noticed, too, that my father’s way of speaking, his turns of phrases, the words he used most often, became a kind of currency. There was nothing so obvious as a manual of approved words and phrases, or instructions on the screen. Nevertheless, when I woke one morning hoping that breakfast would be croissants and jam again, I didn’t say a word. Meals meant wide-eyed gratitude for whatever my father had chosen to provide, and personal preferences were better left unspoken.
Similarly, the conversations in which life on the ship was overtly compared with life on land ceased. For example, I remembered the feeling I had when we came home from the museum having learned something new. There was something about having avoided danger, about having escaped the attentions of the wild people gathered on the streets, about having survived the journey and brought home our precious nugget of knowledge, that had made my heart race and my eyes shine. Now that the knowledge was there, a short deck stroll away, behind an unlocked door, it did not carry the same thrill. But I never said so out loud.
The Ship Page 11