The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  Tom turned to me. He never could sit still for long. ‘Come on, Lalla. Alice wants to get on. We’ve disturbed her enough. And I bet people are waiting for football.’

  ‘Michael has taught us to wait, Tom,’ Alice said. ‘I am enjoying your company, and Lalla is enjoying mine. Michael would tell you to leave if you want to, but don’t put the responsibility for your actions on the shoulders of others.’

  Tom bowed his head and said, ‘Thank you, Alice. Please excuse me.’ Alice nodded a benediction, and I stared at them, amazed.

  ‘Are you coming, Lalla?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘See you at the gong, then.’ He went to the door, grinning as though he had done something clever.

  ‘Alice hasn’t answered your question,’ I said, but Tom left the room and closed the door behind him.

  Alice picked up her needle again. ‘We are too quiet here to contain such energy,’ she said. ‘Let us be thankful for Michael’s provision, that Tom and I may both be happily occupied.’

  ‘What will happen when you’ve finished?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you, Lalla. I’ll be dead before that happens.’

  ‘But I won’t be. And neither will Tom. What will happen to us?’

  Alice smiled at me, a warm smile right from her eyes. ‘Tom, is it?’ she said. ‘I did wonder. Well, Lalla, mankind has been asking that question for millennia. The first moment that there was man, there were questions. Who am I? Where am I going? What happens when I’m gone?’

  She was working on a figure now. It wore blue deck shoes, so it could have been anybody. She selected some deep red and rethreaded her needle.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They told stories that explained what was going on around them. They said that the dark was a dragon that ate the sun every night, that the sun itself was a flower that grew when his back was turned.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘As true as that the world was created when a god sneezed, or that winter came when the king of the underworld took the goddess of the harvest’s daughter away with him. Or that thunder was because of a god who worked as a blacksmith.’

  ‘A blacksmith? Like from the olden days?’ My mother had told me about men who, once upon a time, had heated metal until it glowed red hot, so that they could bend and shape it. She had said they made gates, fences, tools. She’d also said they made shoes for horses, an idea so unlikely I’d never bothered to ask for details.

  I asked now. ‘Did horses really have shoes?’

  ‘Yes. Horses had quite soft feet, so they used to make curved pieces of iron and nail them to the feet so that the horses would be comfortable walking for long distances.’

  ‘Is that true? Or is it like the god sneezing thing?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I went to school, remember. I read books.’

  ‘You didn’t have a screen?’

  ‘There were two. In the corner of the classroom. Fixed to the wall. We used to take it in turns to use them. But it was better to read a book.’

  ‘There aren’t any books here.’

  ‘No.’ She took her scissors and snipped off the red thread, and I thought, well, no one will ever use that thread again. Then she chose a new colour, a lighter, golden orange, like a tinned peach. She cut a length, then unravelled it, so that instead of one thick thread, there were six thin ones. Her needle threaded with one bright strand; she made tiny knots with the point of her needle against the silk, each knot so close to the next that the stitches became a living, shimmering mass of curls, catching the sunlight as they moved. Emily. Emily with red hair, who was never still.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Yes, Lalla?’

  ‘The way you’ve done my father, with the sun on the rope like that. Do you really think that’s true, like the horse shoes, or is it like the dragon eating the sun?’

  Alice put down her needle and looked at me. ‘What is it that you see, Lalla? Where does the sun rise in the morning? Where does it set at night? Who made that happen? Look, Lalla, and decide for yourself.’ She bent her head over the embroidery threads and I knew that I had been dismissed.

  I could not resist. I went close to her and whispered, ‘You know it’s not true, Alice. Help me tell the others. Help me to get us to our destination.’

  She spoke softly, moving her hands through the colours.

  ‘My hands have work. My body is nourished. I sleep, and I am not afraid.’

  ‘But Alice …’

  ‘I will be dead before I have finished, Lalla. Before your father found me, I was finished, but I was not dead, and it was hell. Now, I look out of my porthole in the morning and I see the sun. I look again in the evening, and I see it again. It is a better world, Lalla. Let it be. What harm?’

  So, I thought, here it is. My father stands on the deck of the ship, holding the sun by a golden rope. He swings the rope over his head, and the sun arcs over the ship. He transfers the rope to his left hand and rests. Once we have all slept and restored ourselves, he swings the rope back. And the sun passes over us all once more, and his right hand resumes control, and we rest, and he brings forth the sun once more. Our world was not sneezed out, or created in six days to end an eternity of loneliness. Ours was salvaged from decay and destruction by one who was part of it, and saw where it was leading. And he chose those who were worthy and carried them with him, and thus birthed life from death, hope from despair, love from fear.

  And the sun shifted to illuminate the new centre of the universe and submitted itself to my father.

  And the evidence was there, every single day. Twice a day. As long as people like Alice could look out of their portholes and say, This is what I see, I would be unable to say, Yes, but it is not what you think. Because they knew. They already knew.

  At dinner that night, I watched Alice cut her food with the same grace as she made her stitches. What harm, she had said. What harm. But to me, the harm was clear. If there were eighteen thousand tins of pineapple in the stores, then they would one day be gone, the same as if there were a hundred thousand, or a hundred, or only one. Alice would reach out her hand for a skein of coloured thread and it would not be there. First the blue, then the grey, then the gold would run out, and there would be nothing left but the outlines of a child’s colouring book, made of the shadows of thoughts and ideas that could never be brought to life. The longer we took to get to land, the fewer resources we would have to start our new lives.

  Tom’s green eyes danced in front of me, and I knew that if I were Alice, and the tapestry she was stitching was the story of my life and thoughts, it would be the green thread that would run out first, because everywhere I looked, all I could see was the green of his eyes. It was for him I had to act. For him, so that we could know time, know ourselves, and be truly together. We could not lose ourselves in each other until we knew where we were. After all, if you do not know where you are, you are lost already, and how can you ever hope to find anyone else?

  For Tom, because I loved him.

  I went over to her table. ‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said, and I kissed her soft, wrinkled cheek. She put down her knife and fork and squeezed my hand.

  ‘Try to be happy, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s much the best thing.’

  I would go to the goodnight meeting and I would listen with all my heart. And then I would go back to my cabin and wait for the dark.

  It was time to talk to my father.

  SIXTEEN

  My plan to save the ship I go to find my father, but my father finds me I fall

  I sat in the goodnight meeting and looked from face to face. At last I had a plan, a way to prove to the people that things were not as they thought. My father did not control the sun. It rose in the east and set in the west. That was the truth, and whether they admitted it or not, they knew it. I would force them to admit what they knew to be true. Helen, I thought, when I bring my evidence, you will be free to teach Gabriel as ma
ny truths as you please. Patience, you will knit for a purpose. I will find out where we are going, and when we are going to get there, and that knowledge will set you all free.

  And Tom. Tom. When we know where we are going, we can marry. Make plans. I had come to the goodnight meeting intending to listen, but I had been so lost in my own thoughts that the discussion was underway before I realised it had started.

  ‘Of course we should write,’ my father was saying. ‘But let us consider why. In the time before the time before, any words that were to be heard by more than a few people had to be written down and published in a book, printed on paper. And because this was a process that cost money, the mere existence of a book meant that someone, somewhere, thought that what was in it was worth reading. That is why only pre-published works were authorised by the Dove. A reminder of a nobler time.’

  ‘But, Michael,’ Finn said, ‘without the raven routes, you would never have known of me.’

  ‘Or me,’ Tom agreed.

  ‘For every one Finn Johnson,’ my father said, ‘for every one Tom Mandel, there were hundreds of thousands of people pouring words into the ether, words that meant nothing. An hour with a book expanded understanding; an hour with the screen contracted it. Since you had the strength and the wisdom to cast away the mast, the danger of suffocating yourselves with irrelevances is significantly diminished. The portals I gave you are tools. Just tools. A way to access important things that have stood the test of time. Cast aside ephemera. And before you dare to write, make sure your words are worthy of standing alongside those that have gone before you. Read. Before you write, read.’

  ‘Read everything? All the books on the screen?’ Finn asked, his face reflecting his struggle to understand. He owed his life to the very thing my father was dismissing – an unrestricted flow of words, pouring from him to anyone reckless enough to access them, unfettered by paper and ink and someone else’s controlling mind. Unreliable, uncensored and illegal as the raven routes were, they were the only way of circumventing the Dove. People like Finn had hacked, decoded and tampered to pass on what they had to say. Now there was no Dove, there was no risk, or danger either.

  But I was going to find my evidence, and then talk to my father. In the morning, we would be on our way; the risk and danger would be back and Finn would be free to write again.

  My father smiled and he held out his hands, just as he did in Alice’s tapestry. I had never seen him stand like that before; now, he drew himself up and held his hands out with his palms towards us. It was as though he had seen an idealised version of himself in Alice’s work, and decided to become it.

  ‘You are my books,’ my father said, and I knew that this would be all I would hear from anyone for the next few marks on my cabin wall. We are Michael’s books. I am a precious book, belonging to Michael. I am a glorious book that Michael has written. He continued, ‘You are my library of the best of twenty-first-century man – of all man, across all time, all ages. What need have we of more books, when we have each other?’

  Your mother will always be a part of you, Lalla, so what need I weep when you are with me?

  That night, I did not change into my cotton nightdress. I stayed in my clothes, and when the night noises of running water and creaking bunks had subsided, I slipped out of my cabin door. The dark was more than dark; it was black in a way London nights had never been. It made no difference whether my eyes were open or shut. I could see nothing. I felt my way forwards, along the corridor of cabin doors, until I reached the bigger doors that led out onto the deck. When I pushed them open, the thick air took me by surprise. The days had been cooler since the rain. But the dark seemed to have brought back the heat, and in any case, the night was a strange place to me. There was a wind too, a hot stifling breath that brought no relief. I blinked as air blew into my eyes. I felt tears forming, swelling, spilling onto my face and I celebrated them as a purely physical reaction to a purely physical thing. My body had a reflex with which to protect my eyes from wind. Self-preservation, not preservation by the father.

  And the night had a different smell, too. In the day, the smells were of food, washing powder, the warmth of an iron on rumpled cotton. Soup. Soap. Now, those smells were gone, and there was only salt and emptiness, with a warm dank undertone of neglect. After all, when had any of us really acknowledged the presence of the sea? If there was anything still living there, it would not come in the daytime, when everyone was busy, but in the night, when we slept. I felt for the metal wall and stood with my back to it. In the dark, there was no horizon. The ship, the sea and the sky were one expanse of black, less than an arm’s stretch away, or miles and miles beyond me. It was impossible to tell. And because I could not see its edge, the sea ceased to be a vast barrier, a cage without bars, and became one with the ship and the sky and the land.

  I could leave just by putting my foot over the side.

  I thought of going back to my cabin and trying again when there was a moon, or at least replacing my clothes with my cool cotton nightdress. But I had no way of knowing whether there would ever be a moon, and it had taken me long enough to inch my blind self this far. It had to be now. A fat drop of water fell on my hand and I heard thunder, far away. I felt like yelling, You didn’t see this coming, did you, Father? I left the security of the wall and took a step towards the deck railings opposite. I could not see my feet upon the deck or my hands stretched out in front of me; I was blind, and the sense of possibility made me dizzy. I took another step, and another, following the smell of the sea, expecting at any moment for my fingertips to meet the deck rail. Warm, heavy drops splashed onto my reaching arms and the thunder rolled closer. But the further I travelled, the more remote the deck’s edge seemed to become, until I was surrounded by nothingness, turning this way and that, groping above the unsteady deck for a fixed point from which I could navigate. Then the rain came in earnest, great sheets that were draped over me by the winds. It felt as though the sea itself was pouring onto the deck; I was soaked in an instant, as thoroughly as though I had fallen in. The infinite union of the ship, the sky and the water enfolded me, and in that infinite and terrifying blackness, I heard my name.

  ‘Lalla.’

  The walls and bars sprang back into being. I turned towards the voice, but I had no idea where it was coming from, or whether to seek it or hide from it. The thunder was all but drowned out by the noise of the downpour, hammering on the deck, the walls, the window. Through the chaos the voice came again. Lalla, it said, Lalla, and I panicked. I ran towards the dissolved edges of my world. My hard soles slipped on the water-coated deck; I fell, and cried out as my face hit something cold and hard. White lights exploded inside my head; my mouth flooded with warmth. I put my hands to my face then got to my knees, struggling for breath. A flash of lightning ripped through the sky. I saw my hands red and shining, with bits of them dripping onto my shoes. I saw a figure in the doorway, silhouetted by the light, its shadow falling so close to me that only a shard of light separated us

  ‘Lalla.’

  My father had called me; now he had come for me. I scrabbled along the wall, my bloody hands slipping, trying to find a hook or a handle I could use to pull myself up. The metal was smooth, and the rivets had been beaten into perfect hemispheres. My legs refused to act. I crawled away from his shadow as though it would burn me if it touched me, but my strength was gone. I was wet and shaking, and when hands closed around my ribcage and pulled me up, I could not break away.

  ‘What do you want?’ I demanded, but the words were slurred and indistinct in my damaged mouth.

  ‘You came looking for something, Lalla, and you have found me. So the question is not what do I want, but what do you want?’

  What did I want? I remembered my mother, lying in the infirmary with her green and blue dress tucked over her.

  ‘I want to know,’ I shouted over the rain, while the wind whipped my sodden hair around my face.

  ‘Then you had better come with me.’ I cou
ld not move without his help. I pulsed and throbbed where my skin had broken, and I wondered how I could possibly have done myself so much damage. It was as though the ship itself had slammed into me, the full force of its tonnage crashing against my fragile human frame. I am bigger than you are, it said. I have been created by a brilliant mind, a mind that saw the future; I am knit together, not of metal and rivets, but of dreams and ideas. Mine is the power; you are a mayfly, a gnat, a minor irritation. You are rusting; I am eternal.

  I limped beside my father, dependent on his arm. The next flash of lightning showed me the deck rail, strong and silver, the sea and the sky beyond still as black as each other. I tried to remember that, for a fleeting moment, the sea had been, not an insuperable eternity of dead water, but simply so much space, at one with the land. For a moment, the darkness had been my friend; now I could only feel pain and trembling.

  ‘It’s all right, Lalla. I’m here. Feel me. Everything is all right now. You know it is.’

  Did I? Did the fact that I was stumbling alongside the man who had brought me into the world mean that everything was all right? His arm was strong, his flesh beneath the soaked shirt warm; as I surrendered to its support, tiredness stole over me. My aching body was no longer my own. The pain receded as I leant upon him, glad to feel that he had strength enough for both of us. What was thought, after all? Only a means for self-torment, self-doubt.

  ‘Lalla,’ he said into my hair. ‘My Lalla, at last.’

  I heard the sound of a key in a lock, and my father passed before me into a room full of screens, lights, control panels. I saw books. I saw maps. I saw something that looked like a clock, but it had only one hand and just four numbers. I looked more closely and realised that they were not numbers, but letters. N, E, S, W. North, East, South, West. A compass. I had last seen this one in a museum, inside a glass case, and wondered how it had come to be here. I saw two chairs, padded in dark blue, on wheels. My father led me gently to one, then sat on the other, his right arm leaning on the arm rest, his shirt stained with my blood. I wondered how long it would take me to get the stain out. He disappeared briefly and came back with towels, soft white warm towels, and wrapped one around me. He closed the door behind him and the noise of the storm ceased completely.