The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  What I wanted from Tom changed too. I loved his body, but I wanted more. I wanted him to take my hand and lead me to some rust, or dust, or a worn-out cushion he had saved from the ballroom. He wanted me to stop making the marks on my cabin wall, but I wanted him to watch them mounting up. I wanted him to show me something – anything – and say, yes, Lalla, of course there is time, and however much of it passes, I will stay with you and love you as I do now.

  Oh, the ship was a busy place! So much joy and hope and anticipation that there really wasn’t any space for the grumbling cloud I carried around. Gerhard had small teams going into the kitchen, learning how to bake. My father produced tins in different shapes, and for a while we ate crescent moons and ellipses decorated with tiny stars in pink and blue and green and yellow, and hats and shoes and coats of shaved chocolate and swirled cream. Something different, people said delightedly, while my father smiled on. But they weren’t different. They were the same things in different shapes. The same flour, egg powder, fat pellets, sugar, mixed to make the same cake. Whether it was shaped like a hat or a shoe, or a cone or a chair or a dinosaur, it tasted the same. It was the same. There was nothing new, and while everyone in the ballroom exclaimed delightedly and laughed as though something extraordinary had happened, I wondered what was missing in their minds that they thought these cakes were anything to be pleased about. What is being alive if it is not to grow? And what is it to grow, if not to make something new? But they ate the cakes and left nothing to show for the time that had gone into their making.

  Patience began to knit. My father gave her needles and wool, and soon she had a circle around her, learning to follow patterns. No one except me ever seemed to wonder why, when Gabriel was the youngest child on board, they made toys and baby clothes. They knitted and knitted and knitted, and as I watched the booties and sleepsuits growing on their knitting needles, I wondered whether Patience might be my ally after all. Because if there were four pairs of booties where once there had been none, there was proof of the passing of time. But before I could speak to her, they all unravelled the little clothes and wound the balls of wool up again to be knitted into something else. Whenever anyone wanted to join in, my father gave them knitting needles, and the unravelling meant that there was always wool. ‘The point is the process, not the product,’ he said, offering me knitting needles as I walked away.

  The weather grew warmer and the winds grew less. My father gave us clay. We all made little models, then left them to go hard. I looked at them – a cat, a fish, a pot that looked like something from the British Museum, and the shapeless lump that I had intended to be a copy of my button – and thought, now there is a time before we made these models and a time after. But after a while, they were all put into a bucket of water, soaked into shapelessness and made back into clay for others to use.

  I heard a plate break in the kitchen when I went in to dinner, but there were no fewer plates at the table when we sat down.

  I called up the library list on my screen. There was more material there than I could read in my lifetime. Was this the answer? Could time be measured in the books you had read and the books you had not read? I took my screen and scrolled through every single book title available in the library, the titles passing down the screen so quickly I could not read a single one.

  But after three hours, during which Tom knocked twice and went away without an answer, the titles came to an end. The library was a vast, stagnant pond. I might as well just sit and re-read Ballet Shoes until the day I died. The only fresh and unexpected thing was Tom, and even so, I was beginning to know exactly where he would put his hands, and when, and to feel less desperate for him to do so.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked, again and again.

  ‘Why does it matter so much?’ Tom answered, every time. ‘We’re here, now. Isn’t that enough?’

  But it wasn’t enough, and for three days I punished Tom by avoiding him, angry that he would not share my anger. But I missed him. When I lay in my bunk at night, I thought of him. My fingers were not his hands, and without the weight of his body against me, I could not lose myself as I longed to be lost. I kept my tally of the days, hating him for wanting me to stop, yet hating the marks too, which could not love me as he did. Patience looked at me with pity, but I did not talk to her. I did not talk to anyone, and I tried not to notice them staring at me as I went about my work.

  ‘It’s a process,’ I overheard my father saying to Emily on the way to dinner, and I shrank into a doorway. ‘Tom will explain it better to her than I can. She’ll catch us all up, and then she’ll overtake us. You’ll see.’ I didn’t see, and I didn’t follow them into the dining room. I lay on my bed and listened to my stomach growling, and imagined the house I would build for myself when we arrived, and how far it would be away from everyone else’s. It was hot – I found myself thinking of a book called Robinson Crusoe, of a picture of a beach and a tree that only had leaves at the very top. I would collect branches and build a hut.

  On the third day – the seventy-fourth mark – I went out onto the deck in the hope of a breeze, and as I stood staring into the warm sky, Tom came to me. His hair was floppy over his eyes; he brushed it back and his forehead was damp. ‘Lalla,’ he said, and his face was so serious and his hands so still that I knew something was about to change. He’s going to tell me where we’re going, I thought, and my heart began to beat faster. The fear is part of the love, my mother had said. Looking at Tom, and looking through him to the rest of my life, I felt that I was touching the edge of what she meant. Would we be going back to London and hunger and pain and chaos and yes, maybe death? Would it be Robinson Crusoe’s island, and this heat? Whatever it was, it would be us, together – and that would be life. I burst into tears and clung to him as though he was the one who’d been running away.

  ‘Lalla,’ he said simply. ‘Why are you so angry?’

  ‘Are we going back to London? Are we looking for an island somewhere? Has my father sent you to tell me?’

  He shook his head. ‘We’re never going back to London.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Listen to me, Lalla. Michael says that we shouldn’t think about time anymore. That if we let time go, then everything happens together. Like the knitting wool and the baby suits. They’re the same. The wool is the sleepsuit, and the sleepsuit is the wool. And I didn’t really understand. But when we went up, when you pulled me through that skylight and we did – what we did – I did understand. I understand every time we’re together.’ He took my hands in his and we stood facing each other on the deck. ‘I’m everything, Lalla. My parents, my grandfather, the Land Allocation Act. Michael saving my life and coming here and meeting you and being with you. It’s all concentrated here, in me, whether I’m wiping the walls on the deck or teaching football or wanting to be with you.’

  ‘And tomorrow? And the day after that? And the day after that?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s already happened. That’s the point. Nobody’s frightened anymore, because everything is here. Why won’t you see? It doesn’t matter how long the journey is, if we’ve already arrived.’

  I tried to pull my hands away, but he held them tighter and pulled me close. ‘What do you want, Lalla?’ he said, and his breath was urgent against my ear. ‘I want you. I want to stop hiding, and be with you, openly and for always. I want us to tell Michael, and to get his blessing.’

  ‘I want …’ I began, but I did not know what I wanted, and before I could find any words his arms wound around me, more confident than before. He kissed my lips, my cheeks; he swept my damp escaping hair from my face and kissed my ears. He pressed the length of his body against me and I could feel him growing hard. I felt my face burning. The cracked skylight and the pile of dust beneath it appeared in my mind like the answer to everything, all surrounded by light. The dust. I wanted the dust.

  ‘Come upstairs with me,’ I said.

  ‘Now?’ He smiled. ‘Your cabin’s closer.’

  ‘Upstairs. Now,’ I said,
and took his hand.

  We ran to the infirmary stairs. The thought of the skylight drove me on; I barely noticed that the photograph album had gone. Tom ran behind me, setting staircase after staircase clanging. My work had made me fit, for this time I took the stairs with ease. There would be a pile of dust, and a cracked skylight, and we would fetch a ladder and go out onto the top of the ship, and wherever the sun set, we would see it without having to ask.

  That would be freedom. And if we were free, we could choose each other, and that would be love. And then Tom would be right; it wouldn’t matter how long it took us to find our island and start again.

  I burst onto the corridor of the fourth deck and stopped. Tom followed so eagerly that he ran into me. We fell onto the floor and he lay on top of me, kissing my face, stroking my hair so hard it felt like he was trying to wipe it off. I pushed him away and went to the skylight.

  ‘It can’t be this one,’ I said, ‘there’s no crack.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ He stood firmer now, his feet planted solidly on the floor. He was undoing the buttons on his shirt.

  ‘Where’s the dust?’ I demanded. He walked towards me. ‘Where’s the skylight with the crack in it?’ I walked along the corridor, looking up, walking in and out of the pools of light.

  ‘Stop it, Lalla,’ he said, and his voice sounded older, less hesitant. But all I could see was the clean floor.

  ‘The dust,’ I said, starting to run, ‘the dust. I want the dust.’

  ‘Dust?’ he said, catching up with me. ‘Life, Lalla. That’s what we want. And it’s what we’ve got. All of us. Life. Come on.’ He grabbed my hands and pulled me around, breathing hard. Where was his softness, his hesitancy, his uncertainty? ‘What’s dust got to do with us? Have I got to fetch a ladder, Lalla?’

  I jerked my hands free and faced him squarely. Everything about him that had made him a boy had gone. Here was a man, a man like my father. Telling me what to do. So certain of himself that there was no room for anyone else to breathe.

  He looked at me. ‘What’s wrong with you, Lalla?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you? With all of you?’

  He laughed then, and it wasn’t a kind sound. ‘We’re happy,’ he said. ‘We all enjoy our food and our work, and we play games and care for each other. You’re the one who skulks around, avoiding the people who love you.’

  ‘But you’re all mad. Nobody cares about where we’re going, or how long it’ll take us to get there.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t matter! Don’t you listen to anything Michael says? Or me? We’re here, together, you and me. Why are you forcing us to hide? You act as though we’re doing something wrong.’

  He was pleading now, and reaching for me, and the trouble with love is that it shuts off the part of your brain that wants to understand, because there is nothing to understand about the burning under skin that longs to be touched, and your lips and your stomach going soft and the centre of the universe gathering to be exploded under his hand.

  I pulled away. ‘Tell me something you miss,’ I demanded.

  ‘I miss you when we’re not together.’

  ‘No. That doesn’t count. Something you miss from before. From before we sailed. That’s not on the ship. That can’t be hidden behind one of these doors.’

  He looked over his shoulder. I heard the humming of the solar panels, sending the sun to the desalination unit, the ovens, the engine room. I thought I felt the throb of the engines through my feet, but they were in the bowels of the ship and we were on the fourth deck. It must be my blood, then, I thought. It must be my blood.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing.’

  My blood pounded harder. ‘Not your father?’ I was goading him now, willing those blazing green eyes to burst into flame. ‘Not your mother? Your home? Come on, Tom. There’s something you miss. Something you’d go back for. Something you’ll never, ever have again. Like Helen and her husband.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to hit me, and I almost wished he would. But as I pushed harder, the tension went from his body and he leaned against the wall.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he said, and his eyes were soft again. ‘We all miss things. People. But it doesn’t matter anymore, because all those things, everyone we’ve ever loved, are part of where we are now. We don’t need to go on about them. Or show our children photographs of them.’

  I didn’t say a word. I sat in silence, wishing I had a photograph of my mother. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember what she looked like; when I closed my eyes and concentrated I could see her eyes, her skin, the pale blue veins that pulsed over her collarbones, the thousands of different smiles that betrayed her true feelings, whatever her actual words. But a photograph would have let me show her to other people. I suddenly wanted to go to my father. Not to talk, not to ask where we were going, but simply to breathe the same air as someone else who had loved her. Who could see her face as clearly as I could. I stood up, but Tom grabbed my hand.

  ‘My mum had relatives in Shanghai, in China,’ he said. ‘She used to message them all the time before the borders closed. And then one day, right out of the blue, they sent her all these pictures. Bodies lying in the street. Bodies piled in factories. Hundreds, thousands of them, like they’d just fallen where they stood.’

  ‘I never saw that on the bulletins.’

  ‘No. Almost as soon as she’d opened the pictures, all communications from Chinese servers were deleted. Gone. And there was a Dove warning that anyone retaining messages from China would be in contravention of closed borders. That was a death penalty, Lalla. We deleted everything. Even the message her parents sent when I was born. My dad said that all the Chinese people must have lain in the streets to make everyone think they were dead, so that China could just get on. But my mum cried. Oh, Lalla. She cried and cried. I couldn’t get anything on the bulletins. It was like China never existed. But I’d saved one of the pictures onto my own screen.’

  ‘Wasn’t that illegal?’

  He nodded. ‘I thought it would be all right. They weren’t de-registering minors then. I waited. And after a couple of days, when nothing had happened, I put the picture on my blog. And the stats went wild. Hundreds of thousands of hits. After a couple of hours, I got scared, and I took it down. But it was too late. The troops came on the same day.’

  ‘The troops? Did they de-register you?’

  He shook his head. ‘They de-registered my parents. Said they should have controlled me.’ I stared at the floor, as though I could make the dust reappear if I looked for it hard enough. De-registered. I remembered the way my parents looked at each other when they said the word, the fervour with which the people on the quay had scrambled for our cards.

  ‘My grandfather said it was time to use the Land Allocation Act. He remembered growing things in the ground. He talked about apple trees and carrots, and planting clover in the first year to make the soil safe again and bring back the insects.’

  ‘What’s clover?’

  ‘Something you plant, I suppose. I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘My grandfather got his allocation code. We left my parents with the last of our provisions and promised we’d go back for them. My grandfather and I walked out of the city, and what we saw … oh, Lalla, what we saw. It was frightening. You don’t know who anyone is. We hid more than we walked. And no matter how far we walked, there was nothing green. Nothing growing at all. And we were so hungry. My grandfather got slower and slower. He just kept saying, tomorrow we will find a garden. I was so scared. We got to a shelter, and when we signed in, Michael was there, waiting for me. He’d been tracking me through my screen, ever since the blog. I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life, never.’

  I leant on the wall next to him and we slumped down side by side, our backs against the wall, our legs making four mountains, our toes pointing at a storeroom door.

  Tom spoke to the floor. ‘Michael told me that my
parents had been executed. They’d tried to use their cards at a food drop. He said he wanted me for the ship.’

  ‘And your grandfather?’

  ‘Michael told me I had to decide. He said that a man in love with the soil would always long for the soil. He said that my grandfather could never be happy on the ship. We were still citizens then, so we were allowed to sleep one night in the shelter, and in the morning …’ He looked at me as though he was trying to make up his mind about something, and then took a small piece of paper from the pocket of his shirt. ‘In the morning Michael gave me this.’ I unfolded the paper. The writing on it was small, faint and shaky, and by the end, the words were so close together it was hard to read them at all.

  Dear Tom, it said, I give you to Michael Paul, who will be your father now. I am going to find a garden for I am sure one is there. I will tend my garden knowing you are safe and happy and that one child on this broken planet we called earth may live to see his family’s prayers for him answered for this is no place now and you are so young this is no time in your young life to die or see such deaths. I hold you in my heart and let you go. Your loving Granpa.

  Tom took the note back and held it between his fingers, turning it around and around, a soft, regular rustle of a beat, counting seconds, minutes, time itself until we spoke again. Such a simple thought, to place a seed in the soil and watch it grow.

  ‘I shouldn’t have kept it,’ Tom said. ‘Michael said to get rid of our mementoes. I can hardly blame Helen for keeping hold of those photographs when I’m just as bad.’ He looked down at his hands. Strong hands. I could see his tendons moving beneath his skin as he turned the note.

  ‘You’re not bad,’ I said. ‘Or if you are, I am too. If I had a letter from my mother, I’d never let it go.’

  ‘But that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Not letting go. That’s why you make those marks in your cabin.’

  ‘I’m scared of stopping.’

  ‘If you stop making the marks, I’ll give up my grandfather’s letter. We ought to be raising each other up, Lalla, not holding each other back. I love you. I love you so much.’