I sat on the hard floor and closed my eyes. The place smelled of new plastic, chemical and unyielding. Once, there must have been a package in my mother’s name. At some point since her death, someone had taken it and put it … where? The ship was finite. There were only so many places it could be. But if it was finite, it was also vast, so vast that I could well spend my life searching for it. For them – for if there were eleven in my name and five in my father’s, how many would there have been for my mother? There are clothes, you know, my father had said before the funeral. If you wanted to wear something else. And here they were. Clothes. Clothes for everyone, for a lifetime.
‘Lalla.’ Tom was coming closer, pushing the packages aside.
What if my mother had not died? Would I have come to the fourth deck with Tom? Would I have kissed him? What if I had stayed downstairs? Would I feel so restless, so dissatisfied? I had never asked what if? before. My father had asked the what ifs for everyone, so that no one else would have to.
What if I am attacked when I go outside?
What if I become ill?
What if I have nothing to feed my child?
I had just taken, taken, taken. My questions had not been what ifs but simply whats.
What am I doing here?
What is my father?
What is going to happen to us all in the end?
I became methodical. I started at the beginning and I walked the rows. I looked at every name on every package. I thought she might have been filed out of order, that her clothes might have been moved rather than taken away. When the names ran out, the packages carried on; the remaining labels bore the names, not of people, but of ceremonies. Birth. Naming. Coming of age. Funeral. And at every turn, Tom pursued me, calling my name.
I reached the last rail, and when I found the wall behind the plastic packages, I saw twelve flat boxes, all identical, each bearing a small label printed with a black and white picture of a baby’s cot.
And that was where Tom found me.
‘You see?’ he said, coming up behind me.
‘See what?’
‘All this. Everything on the fourth deck. This is just the start. This is what I wanted to show you.’
‘Why? Because you thought my mother would be here?’
Tom looked startled. ‘Your mother’s dead, Lalla. Anna’s dead. We gave her to the sea, remember?’
‘But is that all? She’s dead, and she vanishes without trace? Gone? Look,’ I said, pushing back through the clothes, ‘she should be here. It’s all alphabetical. She should be just here.’
‘It’s all right, Lalla,’ he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. He began to stroke my collarbones with his thumbs. ‘Everything we’ll ever need is here. And we’ve got each other. Haven’t we?’
Everything, he said. This was it. I thought of London, of the cracks in the walls, the yellowing paint in our flat, cement wearing away between the bricks, so that the bricks themselves could be prised out and taken away. Of rust, and buildings falling. Everywhere bearing the marks and scars of the passing of time. That house had a balcony once, with plants in pots. Or, That was when we had the blue plates with white flowers, remember? Or things so obvious that there was no point in speaking, such as the fact that the house on the corner would fall if people kept chiselling out the bricks and stealing them. Tom’s hands were on my neck, his fingers tracing the contours of my chin, my lips, my cheekbones.
Here on the ship, yellowing paint would be covered with new paint. Rust would be sandpapered into oblivion. A plate broken? Here was the means to replace it – not only to replace it, but to create the impression that the breakage had never happened. I thought of Tom wiping the walls the day we’d met, and realised how blind I had been.
‘Get me out of here,’ I said to Tom, my skin flaming trails where he’d touched me. I ran away from him, pushing past the fifteen million plastic bags to the corridor, looking for a way out. But there was only the corridor, with its round skylights and the storerooms leading from it. I walked its length, searching for ladders or hatches. I remembered how the ship had appeared to me on that first day, the day we came on board, looming over the quay like an old-fashioned wedding cake. Was I walking the top tier now? The small one. The one that people once put away in a box until their first child was born. And even as I was struck at the strangeness of the whole idea of baking an enormous cake and keeping bits of it, and of covering it in sugar and stuff that looked like embroidery, and wondering what that had to do with marrying someone, and what indeed marriage was and why, I suddenly knew that one of these rooms held a white dress and a plastic figurine of a man and a woman. I knew that, if I searched through all the boxes, I would find garlands of artificial flowers and bolts and bolts of white fabric; I’d find green silk leaves wired into long wreaths; I’d find dresses in the same colours as the little cakes we ate after dinner. Pink. Lemon yellow. Sky blue. Lilac.
I didn’t bother to look. I didn’t need to. I saw my father, his hands tight upon the ropes by which he drove his people. And at the ends of those ropes, I saw, not Emily and Patience and Gerhard and Helen and Daniel and Gabriel, but the things we had left in the broken world. Weddings and funerals and childbirth and books and music. Birthdays and dancing and football and graduations and qualifications. Because all these were milestones that belonged in the place behind us. Not only behind us in space, but behind us in time. My father had reached back, back, past the squatters in the British Museum, past the thefts from the display cases, past the oil drums on the streets and the rats and the wild dogs and children and market raids, and pulled things onto the ship from the life that had been his before the crash. We were not creating, we were simply existing, building lives upon the flotsam and jetsam of something that had gone. We were not finding new ways to live. We were living in accordance with some ideal of a former age, which we saw in films, read of on our screens, but no longer knew or understood.
I pushed open door after door, door after door, and in every room, there was nothing but boxes and smooth ceilings. No trap doors, no ladders, no way up. The ship was a tin can, hermetically sealed to preserve us all. The corridor went on and on, unravelling before me until I had indeed lost all sense of time. Tom followed me, looking worried. His lips were moving but I paid no attention to what he said. I needed to get out, not onto the deck but out, right out, to where there was air and sky and nothing surrounding me. My body was crying out against this sterile safety. I was hungry for danger and dizziness. I wanted mess and sensation; I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.
I looked again at the fourth deck, so featureless that I felt utterly lost. I knew that, if we did not go to dinner when the gong rang, my father would come looking, and that, were we to hide, he would find us. He would find us without effort, just as Gerhard’s practised hands automatically fell upon the very thing he needed in the kitchen. My father had created this place. He had conceived it, filled it, ordered it. He knew where everything lay; he knew what everything was, and if I were to disappear myself within his provisioning for the future, he would see what had been disturbed, and where lay the irregularity of me in hiding. He would see it as surely as I would know if anyone had interfered with the marks in my cabin, or with the things I had collected for my museum.
‘Let’s go back downstairs now,’ Tom said nervously. ‘I just wanted to show you, that’s all. To stop you from worrying.’ I flapped a hand at him to stop him talking and looked up at the skylights. The glass circles had shone white when we had arrived; now they were a yellow gold. This meant that the circles, which I had assumed were electric lights, were actually frosted windows. Where there were windows, there was access to the outside. I thought, if I can get up there, I could prise away a pane, crawl out, even climb up the outside of the ship to the top if I had to. The golden light meant that the sun was setting, and soon it would be dark.
I looked into Tom’s anxious green eyes. ‘Pile up some boxes and take off one of those skylights,’ I sa
id.
‘But why?’ I was already hauling boxes. ‘Lalla, there’s no need for this. Michael wouldn’t like it. Anyway, there’s no time. Look, the light is almost gone. We’ll miss dinner.’
‘I have to get out, now and now and now. I can’t breathe.’
‘If you couldn’t breathe, you would be dead.’
‘I am dead,’ I said. ‘We’re all dead.’
My breath came in short, shallow sobs and my head was spinning. I wondered how the wall had fallen, then realised I was lying on the floor. My lungs contracted; hot metal bars snapped around them and gripped so tightly that I gave up trying to draw in air. And then I felt a sting on my cheek, as sharp and painful as if someone had slapped me. My physical body registered its living presence in pain, and I heard my mother’s voice. Stop this at once, Lalage. If I had wanted drama, I would have gone to the theatre. You are perfectly alive. You are also about to faint. Do think things through.
I shuffled to the wall and pressed my back against it, hard, so that the metal bars gave slightly and I could force air into my lungs. And again, Lalage. And again. The voice grew fainter, and was replaced by Tom’s anxious fussing. ‘Are you all right, Lalla? Lalla?’
‘I am not dead,’ I said, and the echoing of my voice down the corridor told me I had spoken out loud.
‘No,’ said Tom, nodding eagerly. ‘No, you’re not. Let’s go down. I’ll help you. We could walk on deck if you want air.’
I stumbled to my feet; my lungs were released, and my mind began to clear. I went over to him and stood squarely in front of him. All the hand-holding and the heart-pounding and the watching him in the sports hall came together in the now. I reached for his hand, and he pulled me up, and I stood so close to him I could feel his breath on my cheek. And then I kissed him, and as I kissed him, he put his arms around me, and he ran his hands down my arms and over my back and I felt my blood rising to meet his hands wherever they touched me. ‘No,’ I said as he began to tug at my dress.
‘But I thought …’
‘Not here. Up there.’ I pointed up at the skylight. I could see screws holding it up. ‘Find a screwdriver.’
‘But Lalla …’
I started to climb onto the boxes I’d piled up. ‘Find a screwdriver or go to dinner, Tom.’ I looked down and saw concern mixed with the desire in his green eyes.
‘What if you fall?’ he said. But I was determined and excited and the danger was all part of it; if I fell off the boxes and hurt myself, I’d know I was alive. And if I got into the open and fell into the sea, maybe I’d find my mother there. I wanted to pull Tom through with me into the open air, and then I wanted to kiss him so hard that I could feel his teeth; I wanted him to crush the breath from my body. I wanted us to cast off all the provision my father had made and set each other alight under the unconstricting sky. I watched Tom, my father pulling him one way, me pulling him the other. The golden light made a circle around me. It would be the difference between learning something at the museum and learning it in the research room.
‘You look like an angel,’ he said.
‘I’m not an angel,’ I said grimly. And then, suddenly, he made up his mind. He pulled boxes together. He fetched two screwdrivers. He climbed up beside me. And together, balanced precariously on our future lives, we took the twelve screws from the skylight and worked on its grey metal rim, pulling on it, using the screwdrivers as levers, until it surrendered with a screech and a crunch, showering us in plaster dust and debris.
‘I can get through there,’ I said, coughing. ‘I’m sure I can.’ I reached through with my hands; he pushed me, grunting with effort, his hands on my bottom while I scrabbled for his shoulders with my feet. I pushed against him, hard, and as I pulled myself up to my waist and hung on my forearms, I heard a crash below me and Tom’s voice crying out in surprise and then, with a final effort that tore my dress and scraped the skin from my knees, I was standing on the top of the world.
‘Are you all right?’ I called, but I didn’t really care. I could not tear my eyes away from the last sliver of the setting sun, laying out a pathway of fire across the sea. And above and behind and all around me stretched the sky. I closed my eyes and reached my arms up as high as I could, standing on my toes and feeling my muscles cry out in celebration of their freedom. And then Tom’s head appeared at my feet, covered in dust, a piece of ceiling stuck in his hair, and I laughed.
‘The gong will have gone,’ he complained, and as he wriggled his awkward way through the skylight, fighting off debris and muttering about madness, he became mine. Not a boy with green eyes, but a friend, an intimate. Someone I could talk to, for whom I could be Lalla. Not my father’s daughter, but a young woman all her own.
‘Come here,’ I told him. I beat the dust from his thick blue shirt. I ran my fingers through his hair and threw the piece of ceiling towards the sunset. I pulled him towards me and pressed my lips against his, and then I pressed my body against him, feeling the buttons of his shirt marking circles on my chest and my stomach, and the flap of his shirt pocket pressing a line against my breast. And there was fire, spreading from my nipples to the palms of my hands, and when he stood back to take off his shirt, a cold wind spread goosebumps across my arms and my chest. ‘Lalla,’ he said, the gong and the ship forgotten, ‘Lalla.’ And he tried to put his hands under my dress, but the skirt was too long and he ended up tangled in crumpled cotton. I laughed, but he seemed annoyed, and so before he could change his mind, I pulled my dress over my head. When he undid his jeans, I could see that his hands were shaking. I unbuttoned his shirt, and he took it off and spread it out so that I could lie on it.
He lay on top of me, and all the breath was squeezed from my body, and he was pushing against me and whispering, ‘Does that hurt?’ And it did, but it was pain I wanted, the pain of something opening and expanding and reaching up to the stars that were appearing overhead, and suddenly he cried out, his back arched, his body tensed. And then he simply lay, his body limp against mine, his head on my shoulder, and I thought, whatever it is, we have just done it, and wondered whether it would always hurt like that. Under his shirt, the top deck was cold metal, and it began to bite through the fabric as night fell. The hairs on my arms and legs stood up and I shivered, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Was this rebellion or just a way of catching pneumonia? I wondered if I was bleeding; certainly I was sore. What was I now? A girl? A woman? Tom was staring out, out over the dark sea; I put my hand on his arm and he came back from wherever his thoughts had taken him.
‘I’m cold,’ I said, and he jumped up and pulled on his jeans, and then he wriggled through the skylight and came back with blankets. I put my dress back on, and he tucked one blanket around my shoulders and another around his, and we sat a little way apart from each other. All the diamonds the world had left had been ground like flour and spilt across the sky; if I reached up, I could write my name in them. I remembered searching for a blanket to cover my father once, and a button that had fallen from a coat.
‘What do you think would happen if we stayed up here all night?’ I asked.
I waited for him to say, I don’t think Michael would like it, and braced myself to send him away. But he didn’t. ‘We’d get hungry,’ he said.
‘There’ll be breakfast.’
‘I can wait till breakfast.’
I moved closer to him, and we wrapped both the blankets around both of us. It was warmer that way. He stroked my hair, and I rested my head on his shoulder, and we fell asleep. As I drifted off, I heard Helen saying, ‘It’s hardly subversion, is it?’ But this was subversion. I had found a place of my own, a way to get to it, a way of being with someone way beyond my father’s control. There’s a conversation we’ll need to have when the time comes, my mother had said the first time I bled, but the time had never come. Now I had grabbed it and dragged it to me. It was mine now. My time. I had found my freedom with a pair of green eyes. Perhaps it wouldn’t always hurt – and oh, the wanting
. The wanting had been sweet.
When we woke up, the sun was rising. It was rising in front of us, exactly where the path of fire had been the night before. We put the blankets back into their plastic wrapping, then squeezed through the skylight. We didn’t replace all the screws, just six of them, enough to hold the skylight in place, and we put all the boxes back. I put the spare screws in the pocket of my dress, where once I had kept my card. There were only five; I could not find the last one.
‘We’ll find a ladder next time,’ Tom said. Only the dust on the floor and a little tiny crack in the glass of the skylight showed that we’d been there. I liked looking at that dust. The ship was so clean. But dirt told stories, too. I liked that I could smell Tom on my skin as we climbed back down to the main deck, and that the smell was not of soap, but of sour milk and the warmth of the iron.
We said goodbye by the infirmary stairs. And as I walked to my cabin, I held the precious secret of my freedom inside myself. Where there had been only me, now there was me and Tom. And the sunrise showed that, wherever we were going, we were on our way. We had provisions enough to last until we arrived, and to give us a good start when we got there. Tom was happy. I could be happy, too.
The spare screws were for my museum. I put them in the jewellery box with the button. The apple was there too, still shining as brightly as the day Tom had left it for me. It showed no signs of withering, and I was glad. We were on our way. My mother was dead, but I was no longer travelling alone.
TWELVE
My secret shell eggs the mystery of the missing sunset
There is nothing like having a secret to make you see secrets in others. As I walked to the dining room – I was extremely hungry by this time – I saw people talking in corners, walking to breakfast tables together, or slipping away from them, or catching other people’s eyes and then smiling and looking away, in a way I had never noticed before. I remembered Tom pushing himself inside me and caught my breath. A trickle of warm fluid oozed from me and dripped down the inside of my thigh. I could feel a new story traced all over my body; surely these people could see it? Did everyone have a secret? What other thoughts were going on in all these people around me? For a moment I felt almost sorry for my father, with all this subversion going on under his nose. But there he was, eating an omelette and smiling, and my pity was drowned out by elation when I met Tom’s eyes across the dining room. I wondered what my father would say if he knew, and whether he was going to tell me off for missing dinner last night. But he just waved at me across the dining room. It was Emily who frowned, Emily who raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips.
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