I could not help wondering how many of the books I was reading, how many of the works of art I looked at, would have been created in a life of such pleasant and easy luxury. Here on the ship, the button I had given my mother truly was nothing more than a button. On the ship, Jane Eyre would not have had to escape her evil aunt and cruel cousins by going to a terrible school, or have gone to work in a strange country house, because there would have been no cruelty and no need to escape. The Fossil sisters would never have had to learn to dance, because they would never have needed to earn a living. Macbeth would never have murdered Duncan, because on the ship, Macbeth would have had everything he wanted.
I did not want anyone to be cruel, but I wanted a reason to get up every morning.
I found myself saying less and thinking more, and the girl who had once stood on a deck rail and addressed a mob shrank away, leaving only a person unsure of what and who she was in a world she had not asked to join. And although I never lost my conviction that we should turn around, I stopped saying so, and once I had stopped saying so, I began to understand that it would never happen, and to think more closely about where we were, and where we might be going. My father and Patience had both told me to grow up. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I felt older.
‘Why do we need the net?’ Gabriel asked me, when he wanted to swim but the net had not been lowered. ‘There aren’t any sea creatures left.’
‘Maybe not,’ I answered, ‘but if there are, you can bet they’ll be hungry.’
‘But I’m bored,’ he said, and so I took him to the research room and we looked up sea creatures. We found out about sharks that could eat you with a single bite and jellyfish that could wrap you in their tentacles and poison you through your skin and fish that shot darts into your feet that could paralyse you in an instant. But the carbon the generations before us had burned had turned the water into acid, and the coral reefs were gone.
‘Isn’t it awful?’ I said to Gabriel. ‘Isn’t it awful that so many kinds of animals and things have died out?’ And when he looked at me puzzled and I said, ‘Gone. Extinct. Like the dinosaurs,’ he looked at me anxiously.
‘Dinosaurs aren’t gone,’ he said.
‘They are.’
‘No, they’re not. I held a dinosaur bone once.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did. I found this big bone in the road, and I took it to mum, and she said that it came from a dinosaur and I was never, ever to leave the holding centre in case the tyrannosaurus rex got me.’ His eyes took up his whole face.
‘But that wasn’t real,’ I said, ‘it was just a story to keep you safe,’ and I started to explain about fossilisation the way my mother had explained it to me, about rainwater seeping through the ground and dissolved minerals precipitating in the honeycomb of buried bones, but Gabriel ran off to play football with Tom. I sat alone and thought, and the more I thought, the more I felt that everything was balanced against everything else, and that no one had the right to sail over a dead sea and say, I am not responsible for this.
I began to listen in the goodnight meetings. I knew my mother would have done so, and as I emerged from my grief older, I found that people’s stories were a way of connecting with her. Each evening, the people took it in turns to tell their stories, and when they’d finished, my father would tell them to consign their sadness to the past and never look back. It was a kind of ritual. Testimonies, my father called them. I heard my mother say, Testimonies, or, How Michael Paul Saved My Life, and could not help smiling, even when the tales were of loss and death and despair.
‘I was sentenced to thirty years in prison,’ Finn said softly, the night he was asked. ‘Because of the Thursday Project.’
‘You were the Thursday Project?’ someone said, incredulous. ‘The Thursday Project saved my life.’
‘It made so much sense,’ Finn said, the people drawing around him as the moon shone through the ballroom window. ‘This was decades ago, remember. Before the crash. Before the Dove. The big supermarket near where I lived threw away food every single night. There were people starving in doorways right outside, but the supermarket threw what hadn’t sold into these big bins in the car park.’ I saw Emily nodding her head. ‘So every Thursday, I took that food from the bins to the people who needed it. And I organised other people to do the same in other places. When they started locking the bins, I started using bolt cutters.’
‘They gave you thirty years for that?’
‘We started raiding farms as well,’ Finn said. ‘The industrial ones that supplied the supermarkets in the first place. They threw out all the vegetables that weren’t right – crooked carrots, rusty potatoes, all that, they just threw them out. And Thursday Project volunteers used to break in and take all that stuff, and give it away. Because people were starving, weren’t they, even then?’
My father said, ‘But it was already too late, wasn’t it?’
Finn nodded. ‘The soil was already dead. All those chemicals, they were all that was making that stuff grow. Ironic, really. Making stuff grow and killing off all the insects.’ He paused, then carried on. ‘Anyway. After a bit, the big supermarkets stopped using the bins. Army trucks came to take the food straight to landfill, and three of us got shot when we tried to break into one of the trucks. I was arrested.’
‘For theft?’
‘No. For threatening national security and undermining the economy. That’s why my sentence was so long.’
‘No,’ my father said. ‘Your sentence was long because you started something with power and passion and momentum. Because you were right, and there was no way the government could argue otherwise. But mostly, they gave you thirty years because you brought others with you. Your goodness made you a threat.’
‘Are you bitter?’ Emily asked.
‘I’d only done twenty years before the Prisoner Release Act,’ Finn grinned. ‘Prison was full of social criminals by then anyway. The real murderers were all on the outside, running gangs and joining the government troops and that. There wasn’t any food left anyway. That’s why they set us free, so they wouldn’t have to feed us.’ He turned serious, and as his smile faded the lines on his face smoothed slightly. He looked a little younger, a little less certain. ‘It didn’t feel like much at the time,’ he said, rubbing at his grey beard, now neatly trimmed. ‘It was only what anyone could have done.’
‘But they didn’t, and you did,’ my father said. ‘And that is why you are here. Now, Finn, consign your story to the past. Move forwards with the ship. Don’t look back.’
‘Don’t look back,’ the people murmured in response. Finn opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something more, but my father held up his hand and Finn bowed his head.
‘I won’t look back,’ he said, and the goodnight meeting was over. As I stood up, I looked at Tom, and he looked at me, and I remembered how he had held my hand as we watched the last bulletin, and I thought of the way the first star appeared over the horizon when the sun set, and that maybe, just maybe, happiness was something I would have to go out and find.
TEN
The people settle I spend time in the cinema the boy with the green eyes again
We could hear nothing of the land, and the land could know nothing of us. I began to wonder what was real and what I had made up, and whether, if the gassing of the museum existed only in my head, that meant it did not exist at all. People sat with their screens reading, or looking at the instructions for some forgotten activity. Alice, the old lady with grey hair and gentle eyes who helped out in the dining room, went to my father, and he disappeared and came back with a bag, which she opened with a kind of surprised and fascinated delight. Whenever I saw her after that she was sitting holding a wooden circle with fabric stretched over it, making patterns in coloured threads with a tiny silver needle, an admiring audience around her.
Tom ran his football games on the second deck and, when I wasn’t in the laundry, I wandered up to the sports hall. If the d
oor was ajar, I watched him with the children, teaching, playing, comforting them when they fell over and then giving them water that they gulped down, red from exercise and laughter. I saw him with my father, too, the two of them talking earnestly as they walked along the deck. You’ll make friends on the ship, my mother had said. And I had – but Tom had thrown the mast into the sea and turned his back on London. My mother had taught me all about fossilisation, but she had never taught me how to disagree with someone who was wrong, and now I was here, and she was not, and when I tried to think of something to say to Tom, I felt myself crumble with missing her.
I spent a lot of time in the cinema. I could hide there; it was dark and you didn’t have to talk to anyone. And I loved the films. In them, monsters terrorised ordinary people, eating them, attacking them, driving them to live in underground caves or remote mountains. I found the noises satisfying; I liked the violence, which seemed to answer something in me I had not known was there. I liked the way my heart and lungs seemed to suspend themselves as a head was torn off here, a body torn apart there. In the cinema, and on my screen, I worked my way through the listings for Horror, for Disaster, for Apocalypse, film by film, and counted the forms the monster came in. There were Gabriel’s dinosaurs, and men who had been turned evil by power, and aliens from other planets set to take over the world. There were diseases, and people coming back from the dead. There were walking plants and creatures that could change to look exactly like things that were not evil, so that they could win the trust of the innocent masses. There were asteroids about to crash into the earth. But always, always, there were many, many people who died, and a handful who survived. And one day I realised why I was watching these films.
The museum dead were the masses and we were the survivors on whom the future of the world depended.
Perhaps it was because I had so little else happening in my life, or because I had so little control, or because I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but I began to love them, watching my favourites over and over again alone on the screen – the portal – my father had given me. They made sense; they gave me a context in which to understand what was going on and permission to stop worrying. The more I watched, the more I felt that the films were what was real, and that the day-to-day ship life of meals and smiles and clean water was nothing more than a story. After all the trials and the threats and the deaths, someone wise and elderly, one who had been sagely watching events unfold, would eventually sacrifice himself to save the young hero, who himself would have already tried to sacrifice himself for the young heroine, and they alone would survive, ready to replenish the world. And the earlier in the film you met the character, the more certain they were to survive.
I began to look at the people of the ship differently. When Godzilla rose from the sea, or the evil ruler of the Galactic Empire attacked, I thought of the black-clothed troops, the screens, the re-registrations. We were the good people who had escaped from the bad people. It was a comforting way of looking at things. Don’t look back, my father told us at every goodnight meeting, and with the films to think about, I did not have to. I could think quietly and place myself in the framework of the story. I had been part of the ship from the very beginning. And I was young. So whatever threat came to us on the ship, I would survive. Finn would be eaten, because he was old. Emily would be eaten, because she was happy. Gabriel would either be eaten to show the ruthlessness of the beast, or left behind for me to adopt and bring up as my own, but either way, Helen would be eaten, because otherwise no one would cry and Gabriel would never have to grow up. I had a context for my mother’s death, too. She was the prologue victim, the one in the opening scenes who died mysteriously in order to show that there was a threat, before anyone had understood that there was a threat at all.
And my father. Strong, valiant, truly good, my father would rush in during the final moments, when the young man was about to throw himself into the beast’s jaws in order to save me, and use his knowledge and power to defeat the beast, rescue the young man and die nobly in the process. And the young man and I would always remember him, perhaps with a giant photograph on our wedding day, or his wedding ring, pressed at the last moment into the young man’s hand as he whispered, Look after her.
And if I was the young woman, I knew that Tom was the young man. The films, the swimming, Alice and her embroidery, came further and further forward in my mind, and the question of our responsibilities receded. I ate my dried eggs scrambled and my tinned apples baked in pies without thinking where they had come from, never doubting that they would be replaced. I trusted that we’d get where we were going and stopped asking where that was. I stopped dreaming about the gassed thousands in the museum; my lovely apple was more real, still shining greenly on the shelf in my cabin. And as I made more and more sense of the ship, and of my place in it, so my courage grew, and it made less and less sense to avoid Tom.
And so, one day, when the cinema had filled me with pink mist and kissing and brave rescues and a sense that the ship was, after all, a right and proper place in which I had a home, I went up to the sports hall while the football was going on, and I waited, my heart pounding. The outer doors stood wide open but the inner ones were shut. I heard people running and laughing; I heard Tom’s voice raised above the others, shouting instructions, and I heard a long whistle blast that meant the game was over. Then the inner door slid open and out they came – adults, which surprised me. I hadn’t realised that the grownups were learning too. Finn and Luke and Gabriel, Helen, Jamila who had lost her home in the Indian floods, Ingrid who had lost hers in the Dutch ones. They all looked at me and smiled as they passed, and I felt that they knew something I did not, and that they had known it for a long time, and that they would be glad to see me learn it too. My father passed at that moment, flushed with victory.
‘Come for the football?’ he said, raising his eyebrows. He kissed me, and although I smiled for him, I waited until he’d gone before I went to the door. It wasn’t his kisses I wanted anymore. I stood and watched Tom stacking coloured cones and carrying them to a cupboard. Hello, I said in my head, and the very thought of speaking made me blush. What could I say? You shouldn’t have thrown away the mast, but I wanted to be your friend. And yet I wanted to talk to him. What’s the worst-case scenario? my mother used to say when I wanted to go out on my own, or walk through the park. In those days, the worst-case scenario was being attacked, killed, catching a fatal disease, and ending up dead. It was her way of saying no. Now, the worst that could happen would be that he laughed at me, or ran away, or never spoke to me again, and suddenly these possibilities seemed like a death in themselves. I turned to leave, but my hard-soled red shoes clicked on the walkway and he looked up. And there it was: hope and apprehension and joy, all shining through those green eyes as he saw me, and I knew that I was welcome.
‘Lalla,’ he said, dropping the cones and running towards me. ‘I knew you’d come. I knew you would.’
And something about his certainty made me almost wish I hadn’t. Almost, but not quite.
‘You could have come to find me,’ I said.
‘You kept running away,’ he replied, and his face was so close to mine that I felt his breath on my nose, and I saw that when he smiled, his left eye creased up more than his right eye. And suddenly, I stopped wanting to turn the ship around. The tips of his ears went red and little fires started under my skin all over me. ‘And I did try,’ he said. The fabric of his shirt brushed the hairs on my arms, and they stood up as I shivered. ‘I brought you the apple.’
‘You gave me the apple?’ I asked. ‘That was you? Why?’
‘I wanted to give you something.’
‘So why did you just leave it by the door? Why didn’t you give it to me yourself?’
‘I didn’t know what to say. I only knew what I felt.’
We stood staring at each other and my heart started to beat more loudly. ‘Would you like to come to the cinema with me?’ I asked at last
, and my voice was far too loud in the echoing space. He would laugh at me now, I knew it, and I wished I hadn’t come.
But he didn’t laugh. ‘I’ve just got to tidy up here,’ he said.
‘I’ll help.’
‘You don’t have to.’
But it didn’t take much to tidy up. A few black and white balls put into a cupboard, the stacked-up coloured cones put with them and it was done. I couldn’t help contrasting it with the work of the laundry; I had ironed seventy-five sheets that day and my arms were still aching. I told myself that this was why I was trembling when he went to the doors; I imagined him shutting them and leaving the ship outside so he could kiss me, here, in the hall where he played his games. But he went out. He doesn’t want to kiss me, I thought, blood rushing to my face in shame.
He beckoned me out onto the deck, then slid the inner door shut behind us, and pressed a button in the wall. The main doors began to close. I had not expected them to be so thick, or to move so slowly. ‘They’re hermetically sealed,’ Tom explained, watching my face. ‘They have to be left open when we’re playing.’
‘Why?’
‘So that we get enough air. You use more oxygen when you’re exercising. If these doors were shut we’d all suffocate inside.’
We walked together down the stairs to the main deck. Where had he found an apple? Were there more?
It had been my father’s suggestion that the people of the ship should watch films together at the cinema instead of alone on our screens, and so Tom and I were not alone when we settled down on the velvet seats. But I didn’t see who the others were. Everything I had learned at the cinema seemed to be concentrated on Tom’s hand, his fingers curled softly around the armrest between us. Would he take mine? Was I going mad, to think that he might like me? That he went to sleep thinking of our fingers touching at the bulletin? There were thirty-seven marks on my cabin wall. Thirty-seven wasted days.
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