The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  He drew breath, then leaned close to me and said quietly, ‘Lalla, I remember the first day I saw you, hiding behind the door of your father’s house when I came for interview. When Michael was talking to me, all I could think of was you and the fact that, if he chose me, I would get to see you every day for the rest of my life.’

  I looked at my hand, now held between both of his, and tried to remember to breathe. His words were hot against my ear. I turned and pressed my lips to his, and felt myself get smaller and smaller at the centre of the picture, as the camera pulled away and our kiss became the centre of the cinema, the ship, the sea itself. And then, with our hands locked tightly together, I think we watched a film. I don’t remember. All I remember is my hand in his, the warmth of his skin, the feeling of flesh against flesh and the thought that here, surely, I had found whatever it was I’d been looking for.

  ‘Sit with me at dinner?’ he said. I nodded, disappointed. Not because he’d asked me to sit with him – where else would I want to sit, now? But I had sat at dinner a thousand times. My heart was out of control, my body and my blood crying out for more – I did not know what of, but I knew I would not find it in Gerhard’s cooking, in the neat place settings of Emily’s dining room, in my father’s after-dinner speeches.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, on the verge of tears. The cinema had emptied. He lifted his hand to my face and stroked his fingertips along my cheekbone, and although I felt his touch there, it was my palms that burned, my diaphragm that suddenly melted away so that my insides seemed to shift. It was impossible that anyone else had ever felt this way – it was so new, so unexpected. So absolute. It felt like my assertion of my self in this world of my father’s creation.

  ‘Do you know?’ I managed to whisper, although my breath was coming short, ‘do you know where we’re going?’

  He bent his head to hear me; he touched his lips to where his fingers had been, then breathed, ‘I think we’ve arrived.’

  ELEVEN

  I want to go back the fourth deck and what I found there Tom and the skylight

  We had not arrived at any geographical place – there was no quay, no harbour to receive us. But I had certainly arrived somewhere new. I sat with Tom at breakfast; I met him at lunch, and we always sat together for dinner. I moved away from my father’s table, and people arrived earlier and earlier every day in an effort to be the one who took my old seat next to him. We both had our work, but I could usually plan my route through the ship with the clean laundry so that I saw him in the sports hall at least once during the day. He was patient with the children and the grown-ups who were only just learning. But with those who had played before, he was challenging, tough, setting them ever harder goals until they all stopped, panting, with their hands on their knees and their sweat dripping onto the sports hall floor. They looked up at each other, grinning, and I was envious of their connection. After dinner, and before the goodnight meetings, we went to the cinema, or walked on the deck, and although I hadn’t exactly forgotten about the people we had left behind, they became less and less important. When Tom held my hand, I didn’t want to say anything or do anything that might make him let go.

  I could have learned football with him, but the sports hall was his territory, just as the laundry was mine. If he had come to help me fold sheets, the sheets would never have been folded. And if we’d been together in the sports hall, the football would have been left rolling around like tumbleweed. We needed to be in the same space, because when we weren’t, there was a cold gap. But when we were, everything was complete, and the laundry and the football weren’t important. There were thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty marks on the wall in my cabin. Time was stretching in our minds, whole lifetimes passing in single moments. An age. A few weeks. Forty days. What did it matter anymore? We sat quietly in the goodnight meetings, and he stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. I was no longer alone; I had a friend, a friend who would listen. A friend the world felt cold without.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I would say sometimes, ‘don’t you think we should go back?’

  And he would say, ‘I’ll come with you, wherever you want to go.’

  And the thought that I had an ally made it harder and harder to remember why I wanted to go. I knew I was right, and yet when I tried to explain, the reason bobbed away, like the old days with my mother, when we tried to catch the soap in the bath. And instead of trying to catch it, I would ask again, ‘Would you really come with me?’ and he would say, ‘Of course. If it’s honestly what you want.’

  But my thoughts about London were changing. Whereas before, I saw the homeless gratefully receiving the food we gave out, now I remembered the mob on the quay and thought of what would have happened to us if we had not given them our cards. I had been so sure; now I had an uneasy feeling I could not explain, like trying to sleep on my bunk when the sea was rough. I had a friend. Was London what I really wanted now?

  ‘You’re kind,’ Tom said. ‘But don’t forget to be kind to the people here, too. What would little Gabriel do back in London?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and it was a relief to let go of something so heavy, that I had been carrying all alone. ‘It’s not so much that I want to go. But I think we should.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to Michael?’

  ‘I barely see him. He keeps saying that the ship was created for me, but if that’s true, why won’t he turn it around when I want to?’ I was starting to cry. ‘He’s all I’ve got left and I don’t even see him anymore.’

  Tom took my hand and said, ‘He loves you, Lalla, more than anything in the world. Just look around you, and you’ll see how much. And don’t forget that you’ve got me.’ Tom hesitated, then added, ‘Your mother, too.’

  I pulled my sleeve over my hand and wiped my eyes. ‘I know she’s gone,’ I said. ‘But I can’t feel her anymore. I don’t know what she would say. What she would want me to do. It’s like I walk the ship, and she’s nowhere. I had one single thing of hers – a dress – and it’s gone. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can’t even remember what she looked like.’

  He held my hand in silence for a moment, then said, ‘Can I show you something? Something that might help?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Follow me.’

  I had not been up the infirmary staircase since my mother died. It was near my cabin and I’d never been aware of anyone using it. It was a silent place, half-forgotten, the way we do forget things we no longer need. But when Tom and I got there, we saw Helen with Gabriel, tucked behind the staircase as though they were trying to hide. Tom squeezed my hand and we stepped as silently as we could.

  They were busy with something; at least, Helen was. She was holding Gabriel on her lap and he was fidgeting. In front of them, they had a thick book. Not a screen, but a book, like the manifest, only smaller. When they turned the pages, I could see that they were stiff and thick. There were photographs taped to them, photographs of a man.

  ‘Can you see his eyes?’ Helen was saying. ‘They’re just like yours. Look.’ She held up a little mirror, and Gabriel squinted into it. Helen held him more tightly. ‘He loved us. He helped me to make you, and he was there when you were born.’

  ‘I’ve seen them before,’ Gabriel said, wriggling away. ‘Can’t we go swimming? You said Michael was my father now. You said Daniel could be my brother. I want Daniel to be my brother.’

  My shoe caught the walkway. Helen jumped to her feet and put the book behind her back. As I got closer, I saw that she was trembling. She did not say hello.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re looking at my father.’

  Helen bit her lip and closed her eyes, and Gabriel looked at her with a concerned expression. ‘Have I been naughty?’ he asked. ‘Am I in trouble?’

  ‘Oh, no, darling,’ Helen said, trying to kiss him. ‘No. Not you. Never you.’ But Gabriel shrank from her, and Tom knelt down a
nd put his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders.

  ‘Want to play football later?’ he asked. Gabriel nodded, his furrowed little face smooth again. ‘Remember,’ Tom continued, ‘remember that Michael gave you the football? Hey? And the sports hall. And the food that gives us the energy to play. All right?’ Gabriel nodded, and Tom ruffled his hair. Helen tucked the book into the gap between the staircase and the wall. I wondered how long she had been keeping it there.

  ‘Why don’t you keep it in your cabin?’ I asked. But even as I asked the question, I realised what the answer was. I was in and out of the cabins all the time, delivering the laundry. She didn’t trust me.

  ‘What was that all about?’ I said as they left.

  Tom stared after Helen. ‘She shouldn’t be showing Gabriel photographs. It’s not on, and she knows it. Michael told us to let our missing go.’ I shrugged. I couldn’t see the harm in a few old photographs, but if there wasn’t any harm, why had Helen been hiding? And if Helen was hiding one thing, maybe she was hiding more. If I could get her to trust me, maybe she would tell me where we were going. If she knew. Then Tom said, ‘Race you, Lalla,’ and started running up the stairs.

  ‘Where to?’ I called after him.

  ‘Fourth deck,’ he shouted. He ran, and I ran and Gabriel and Helen and photographs and London, even the dead in the museum, fluttered away in my wake and the staircase rang like bells. Like wedding bells, from the time before.

  He got there first; I was panting by the time I caught up.

  ‘Look,’ he said, pushing open the door onto a dark corridor, lined with doors on either side. The corridor was illuminated with frosted glass circles shining white in the ceiling, shedding regular pools of soft light on the floor. I slipped my hand into his and he squeezed it, and together we stepped from pool of light to pool of light, looking at one another with wide eyes in the dark places in between. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, and I turned to him, and he bent down and kissed me.

  My mother told me that all life was contained in the display cases of the British Museum. But now I realised that she had been wrong. What was happening to me now was not about cold stone and history. This was warm and glorious and alive. So alive. Every vital sign – blood flow, beating heart, breathing, sensation – was here, doubled because there were two of us, then trebled, quadrupled, because it felt so good. His breath was so hot, and came so fast. I pressed myself against him and lay my hands flat against his back, pulling him in closer. His body was firm beneath his shirt; I wanted to take the shirt from him and feel his skin, touch it all at once. This wasn’t about tomorrow or yesterday. It was about now, this moment, this glorious moment of knowing that Tom liked me as much as I liked him, of my flesh against his.

  And then he pulled away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean – this isn’t why I brought you here.’

  ‘But …’ I began, then stopped. If he wanted to stop, I wasn’t going to tell him that I didn’t. I turned back to the staircase and smoothed my dress. My hair was pulled back into an elastic band; I took it out, wishing I had a hairbrush. I gathered it all back up and secured the band tightly, to prove I didn’t care, and walked back the way we had come.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said.

  I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want him to think I wanted to stay. I turned aside and pushed open one of the doors, and what I saw made me forget I was annoyed. The room was full of great rolls of carpet, propped against each other like the columns of the Parthenon just before the last pieces fell. Behind the next door was a room of tins of paint and varnish. Brushes. Sandpaper. Tools in boxes. Another room, larger this time, full of crockery – endless duplicates of the plates and dishes we used at every meal. I picked up a plate and held it up, white and whole, like a full moon. ‘What’s all this for?’ I asked.

  Tom was following me. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This is what I wanted to show you. And there’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  He tugged at my elbow, but I was still holding the plate. ‘It’s all white,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The plates and everything. They’re all white.’

  ‘What’s the matter with that?’ he asked. He had found a new supply of energy from somewhere and was striding towards the next door.

  I stayed where I was. I was still staring at the white plate when he came back. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘Come on.’

  I looked up at him. ‘Do any of the plates have pictures on them?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They’re all the same. Isn’t that the point? Does it matter?’

  But it did matter. Here on the fourth deck, away from the activity of the galleries and the ballroom and the dining room and the laundry and the cinema, there was silence, and in the silence, my childhood came back to me. I looked at Tom, and he stopped fidgeting and looked back at me. ‘When I was little,’ I said into the stillness, ‘I had a small plate with a picture of lots of little rabbits picking red and yellow apples on it. I loved that plate. And then one day it broke. It must have had a crack we’d never noticed or something, because it just fell apart in my mother’s hands. I was really upset. I wouldn’t eat from any other plate. My parents were really worried.’ I remembered my mother and father arguing about it over my head. I’ll find another one, just the same, my father declared. And my mother. Don’t be ridiculous, Michael. We’ve got plates. She’s got to learn.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got hungry, I suppose. I don’t remember. I just wish …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wish I’d known I was eating from that plate for the last time.’

  I looked at the storeroom, at the plates the same as all the other plates, the cups, the saucers, the bowls, all the same as each other. Gabriel would never stare at the details of a favourite plate, fascinated by tiny paws closed round an apple. Gabriel would never look at the coloured ribbons on the dresses, the many shades of green on the trees, and wonder whether rabbits really did wear clothes and how they cooked the pies with which the checked cloth in the foreground was spread. Our apple pies came ready-made. I wondered whether Helen had thought of this, and whether it would matter to her if I pointed it out.

  Tom took my hand and led me into the next room. It was full of deck shoes, the entire population of the world reduced to twenty-three sizes. Fabric uppers, man-made soles, it said inside every single shoe. Most people were wearing them now. But I still clung to the shoes I had worn on land – dark red, hard leather, very scratched, with a bar across and a little silver buckle. I slipped sometimes on the walkways, and everyone could hear me coming, but I didn’t want to let them go. Part of me felt that if I were to surrender my red leather shoes and start wearing the blue canvas deck shoes with the white soles and the blue stripe and fabric uppers and man-made soles, I would forget about my life on land entirely. I would forget my mother anxiously buckling the bar across my foot, making me stand straight and walk to and fro across the drawing room while she tried to tell whether they were rubbing my heels. And my father laughing and saying, Anna, she’s got shoes, and that puts her ahead of most of the population these days.

  Where did you get them from, Michael?

  It doesn’t matter. The point is that she’s got them.

  (To me) Do they fit? (To my father) Where, Michael? Who wore them last? (To me) Do you like them? (To my father) Because if they used to belong to someone else, I want to know who, and exactly how you came to have them.

  I would wear them until they fell apart.

  But Tom had dropped my hand and was already in the next room.

  I followed him. My reverie was giving way to panic; there was too much here I did not understand. I pushed past him, into a room the size of the ballroom, with rails suspended from the ceiling, rows and rows of them, hung with clear plastic envelopes the length of a man, swollen with colours. Each one bore a name, marked on the plastic in heavy black letters. The first six were marked for Diana
Aabri. She had dark eyes; I had never yet seen her smile. Then two for Solomon Asprey, the man who’d eaten my dinner when I could not. I wondered whether he had missed me at the dinner table once I’d started sitting with Tom. Five for Garth Britten, who sat on the bench to the left of the stairs down to the galley staring out to sea for so many hours of every day that other people simply never sat there, even when Garth himself was somewhere else. I pushed through to more distant rails. Here were eight for Roger Spencer, the doctor. People I saw every day, lined up in vacuum packs of clothes, arranged in alphabetical order.

  Suddenly it struck me. My mother would be here. Was this why Tom had brought me here? I walked through the stiff, heavy packages, pushing them aside as I forced a path between the rows searching for her.

  ‘Lalla,’ Tom called behind me. ‘Lalla?’

  Here was Hiro Oka. Here was Harry Oz. Here was Lalage Paul, then Michael Paul, then Mercy Perkin. Frantically I went back on myself. There was no Anna Paul. Nothing stood between Harry and me, and for the first time since my mother’s death, I felt the chill wind of complete exposure. Buffered on both sides by my parents, I had grown up immune from the cruelties of the alphabet. When we were required to present ourselves for biometric re-registration, to get new food purchase authorisations, or renew our permit to remain in the flat we owned, I would be sheltered between my mother before me and my father behind me. My mother would entrust my card to me for the few moments it took to present it to the officials, but she and my father were there all the while, anchoring me on either side, so my little foray to the tiny opening in the glassed-off window was nothing more than the slight stretching of an elastic band.

  And now she was gone. Hiro Oka, Harry Oz, Lalage Paul, Michael Paul, Mercy Perkin. And that was all.