‘You wanted to know,’ he said. He leaned over and kissed me on my temple, where there was no blood and no bruising. ‘Are you ready, Lalla? Are you ready to learn?’
I was tired. I wanted my mother. I wanted Tom. My face hurt. My eyes burned with the pain in my nose and I could feel the cuts in my mouth with my tongue. I sniffed, then coughed as the warm metal taste of blood oozed into the back of my mouth. The blood dripped onto my clothes, onto the carpet, and I dabbed stupidly at it with the towel, which clung to me damply. My father produced a handkerchief and I sat holding it to my nose.
Then he reached for a switch and the overhead light went out, and with the blackness came clarity.
In the darkness, leaving seemed possible, because everything was one. If infinite is truly infinite, then it is as close as it is distant, and as far away as it may be, you can reach out and touch it with nothing more than an outstretched hand.
A green light flashed on a screen as a green line swept over it. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. ‘There we are, Lalla. That’s us, that dot. You’re always asking, and now you know.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Didn’t Tom tell you? I told him to tell you. We’ve arrived. This is the ship, my darling. When you get to where you are going, you stop.’
‘What’s that?’ A solid green patch appeared in one corner, with an uneven edge, like torn paper. ‘That’s land, isn’t it? Is that where we’re going?’
‘Keep watching.’
I watched, leaning forward and using the handkerchief to stop the blood dripping on the instruments. The green dot went bleep, bleep, bleep. And as I watched, the solid green corner receded until the little dot was once more bleeping in a circle of nothingness.
‘Why are we sailing away?’ I asked. ‘That was land. What are you doing?’
‘Look at the charts, the radar, the patterns of the sunrise and sunset. Look at the compass. You know what I’m doing. You only have to look.’ He paused. ‘Your mother would have worked it out weeks ago.’
‘You’re turning the ship,’ I said at last. ‘You take us so far, and then at night you turn the ship around and go back the other way. That’s why the sun never rises and sets where it should. We’re going round in circles.’ I paused for a moment. ‘The people will kill you when they find out.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because they think we’re going to a place where we can make a new start, where we can leave the misery behind …’
‘Which is exactly where we are.’
And I thought, and my thoughts all ran into each other like toppling dominos. The gangway, released to the sea, never to be used again. My mother, so reluctant to leave the land. Alice’s tapestry. And Tom. I know where I am, Lalla. I’m right here, right now. The stores. The readiness with which the people knitted and used clay, all the while knowing that their work would be undone. Photograph albums.
‘The ship is where we’re going?’
‘The ship is where we’re going.’
‘The people knew?’
‘The people knew.’
‘We’re not heading to an island somewhere, or a place that still works?’
‘There are no such places. There is nothing left.’
‘It’s madness,’ I said, the enormity of the truth breaking at last. ‘You’ll kill us all.’
I expected him to be angry, but he simply cocked his head as though he found me interesting. ‘How so?’ he said.
‘The engine parts will give out. They’ll wear away and stop working, and then you’ll have no control at all over where we’re going. The solar panels will break off and fall into the sea. The bolts under the water will rust through, and they’ll fall away, and the sea will pour in and the ship will sink. Like the Sinkers back in London, remember? Or that village Jamila lived in, that ended up under water. Or else someone will get ill and it’ll spread. We’ll run out of food.’ I stopped, astounded at having to explain. ‘It’s just not sustainable,’ I concluded lamely, and even in the darkness I could hear my father smile.
‘The Sinkers were deliberately scuppered by troops. And Jamila’s village was at the mercy of a world that didn’t care about it, that could barely be bothered to acknowledge it existed. Her village was under water once a year for decades and nothing was done. The warnings were all there. But they weren’t acted upon, and that was it. One year, the waters didn’t recede. That was the end of her village and everyone in it.’ He paused for a moment, then added, ‘It was the end of most of Bangladesh, actually.’
‘I know.’
‘But the ship isn’t Bangladesh. The ship is cared about. Maintained. If something is wrong, it is sorted out. If there is a problem, it is solved. What do you think the engineers do all day? The world was destroyed by blind eyes. We of the ship will never be blind to her needs.’
‘It’s a machine. A machine. It’s not a person, it’s not a country. It’s not organic.’
‘Listen to yourself,’ said my father. ‘Sustainable. Organic. You should have been born fifty years ago.’ He paused. ‘What was your next thing? Illness?’
‘The people will get sick,’ I said, remembering Tom’s parents and China, feeling the pain in my face. ‘There’ll be a virus and it’ll spread through the ship.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said slowly. ‘The pandemics. The warnings were all there too. New strains of bacteria, new viruses, vaccines made from the very sources of the infections and pumped into populations across the globe. People visiting places thousands of miles away and bringing the new strains home, taking antibiotics like sweets. How did they think it was going to end?’
‘I suppose they thought they’d make a new antibiotic.’
My father nodded. ‘They didn’t, though, did they? Science had come to the end of what it could do.’ He nodded towards my nose gravely and spoke in a doom-laden voice. ‘If we don’t get that cleaned up, it’ll get infected and you could die.’ I cried out – I could not help it – and he laughed at me. ‘It’s all right. This isn’t some poverty-stricken tent city. There’s no new strain of disease waiting to unleash havoc upon us here.’
‘Your radar will stop working and we’ll drift to land.’
‘There’s the compass and the maps. And the stars haven’t gone out yet.’
‘You stole that compass,’ I said, suddenly certain. ‘Just like you stole the people.’
‘Better to fulfil your purpose than to rot behind glass.’
‘The food will run out, or the freezers will stop working.’
‘You’ve seen the stores. Or some of them. You could eat and eat and eat and not make a dent in what there is. If we all ate like you, we wouldn’t need the food at all.’ I think I was meant to laugh, but the green line kept up its bleep, bleep, bleep as it swept across the green dot, and in the green light my father’s smile looked ghoulish.
‘The football will fall to pieces,’ I said. ‘The knitting needles will break. Alice will run out of thread.’
‘There are other footballs. Other needles. More thread.’
‘The people will get bored and end up fighting against you.’
He laughed out loud then, and the next bleep showed me green teeth and the green whites of his eyes. ‘You don’t even believe that yourself.’
‘They meet in secret,’ I said in spite of myself. ‘I’ve seen them, giving signals to each other after dinner.’
‘You have?’ he said, faintly amused. ‘You don’t think they might be – I don’t know – discussing something they’ve read? I trust my people. What else do you have for me? You’ve threatened pestilence, famine and war. Isn’t there another one?’
‘Death,’ I said.
‘Oh, death.’ He sounded impatient. ‘We are all going to die. We were always all going to die. No one has ever lived who has not died. Death is …’
‘I know, I know. Death is the only thing all living things share. That doesn’t mean we have to go out and invite it in.’
‘How
else would you suggest we live? Cowering away from death as we did in the time before? Thinking we were immortal because we had seven hundred channels on our televisions and thousands of friends we’d never even met?’
‘You wouldn’t have found all these people without all that.’
‘That’s what I keep saying. That’s what I’m trying so hard to make you understand. The ship is where human life has been leading, ever since mankind walked upright. It doesn’t matter what happens now.’
‘It’s just a thing,’ I said impatiently. ‘And things wear out.’ I thought about the dresses my mother had cut down for me, my red shoes.
‘Perhaps. But this is all new. This is a new way of working, a new way of being. We no longer simply exist, waiting for the next new thing to come and replace the previous thing. We’ve found rightness. And when something is truly pure, nothing can taint it. It heals where it touches. The ship is healing, Lalla. It has healed the wounds of the people, and the people care for and maintain it. It’s perfect, in concept and execution, and nothing will ever need to supersede it.’ He paused, and as the green line swept across the dot again, I saw how much he was enjoying himself. There was a spark in his eye and I remembered how he had argued with my mother. Her opposition had helped him, given life and substance to his plans, helped him grow and be purposeful, just as playing football kept Tom’s body fit and taut. She had been his discipline and he had loved her for it. But I was not my mother. I lacked her intelligence, her courage, her restraining hand.
Even so, I felt a tiny fluttering of power in my stomach. My secret love, my woman’s body. No, my father did not have it all his own way. How could he, when I had Tom?
‘I’m not a child,’ I said.
‘You are. I’ve lived forty years longer than you have. I remember things you have never even heard of.’
‘And I am looking at a future you won’t be a part of. You’ll be dead and I’ll still have forty years to go.’
‘Why do you think that I show you all these things? Why do you think I talk to you, allow you to speak to me in this manner? I recognise youth. I recognise idealism. I see myself in you, and I’ve done everything I can to give you a future.’ He stopped and looked around. The screens, the maps. The bleep, bleep, bleep, louder in the silence. The little green dot in the middle of the blank screen. ‘You cry about things running out as though it’s news. But it’s not news. Of course things will run out. But we’re stocked for at least twenty years, probably more. And that’s twenty years for you, Lalla. Twenty years for you to learn and create and decide your own future. The future of the next generation.’
The green light on his face. The blood on my hands, the searing pain behind my nose, which struck me anew each time I took a breath.
‘I don’t know what you’ll do,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there’ll be fish again. Or you’ll work out how to make cultures in which you can grow proteins. You haven’t even started to explore the resources on the fourth deck.’ He smiled. ‘You could build a rocket ship and fly to the moon to harvest green cheese.’
I drew breath but he cut me off. ‘The point is this. You need to think. You need to take responsibility and stop waiting around for everyone else to solve things for you. I’ve given you at least two decades. I got the ship together in less than half that, with no help at all, in a world that worked against me at every turn. But you are not alone. You’ve got me. You’ve got scientists on board, engineers, you name it. Win the people’s trust. They want you, Lalla. They want to trust you. You are my heir.’
‘Trust, yes. But not blind trust.’
‘The people are not blind.’
‘They are. Look at Gabriel and the photographs of his father. Helen let them go, because you said she must. Look at eggs. At apples.’
‘Apples?’
‘Have you ever eaten an apple?’
‘Of course.’ He looked at me as though we had just met. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘No. I’ve had apple out of cans, in pies, sauces, things like that. But I’ve never had a real fresh apple.’
He looked pensive. ‘Time goes faster than you think,’ he sighed. ‘I knew you’d never had an orange. But I thought apples would have been in your time. It was a pity about the bees.’
‘Bees?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he said quietly. ‘What matters is this room, these displays. The compass. The people. You.’
He looked out of the round window and rested his hands on the desk. It was a beautiful desk, made of wood that glowed warm and red with polish and care. It had drawers with metal handles that looked like gold, just like the desk on the podium in the ballroom. ‘It was a lonely thing, getting all this together,’ he said slowly, and I felt sorry for him in spite of myself. ‘There were times I thought I might die from the loneliness.’ I thought of my mother, her feet tucked underneath her as she sat on the sofa saying, Not yet, Michael, not yet. ‘But I persevered. We have escaped destruction, and disease, and degeneration. We have taken on the guardianship of the things that made humanity beautiful. Friendship. Peace. Love. Trust. Suppose – just suppose – that you’re right, and all you threaten comes to pass. We’ll seal ourselves in the sports hall and breathe our last together, and all these beautiful things will survive until the end.’
‘But there are people out there!’
‘Out there? There’s nothing beautiful out there.’ He gestured out across the waters. ‘If there’s any life there, it is a life of blame and hunger and misery. Anyone alive out there is dead, even if, at this moment, they still breathe. But the death I suffered has been rewarded a thousand times.’
‘What death?’ I said. Because even though I was falling into his every word, I still had a ledge I could cling to, a jutting place where I could rest my feet and keep myself from complete surrender. And it was this: Tom and I had found each other. We were young, we were in love, and we had a life of passion and desire that was truly our own. His body, my body. His heart, my heart. Together we had stood on the deck rail and thrown away our cards; together we had balanced on boxes and climbed out of the ship.
‘There are many kinds of death,’ my father said simply.
And for a moment, my certainty wavered. I saw my father as the others on the ship saw him, as he saw himself. A man for whom humanity was more important than self. A man whose love for others surpassed all else. ‘The joy of my life now,’ he continued, ‘is that I have saved you, my daughter, from all but one of those deaths, and that one is the one we all have a right to, that everyone on the ship may now anticipate, and welcome when it comes. Natural death, good death, a calm goodbye amongst friends to a life truly lived. It may never come. It may come tomorrow. But here, on the ship, we are ready.’ I felt tears coming to my eyes. Because what he was offering was so easy. Did it matter that we were all going to die? Everyone has died, always. And if death was the end of everything, what was wrong with living a life in which nothing would attack me in the dark, a life in which I knew what would happen, tomorrow and the next day and the day after? A life of which I was in control?
No one has ever lived who did not die.
My father spoke softly. ‘You’re stuck in the time before, Lalla, when the sea was the enemy, and ships used tonnes of oil to fight its currents and winds. The sea is our ally now. It bears us up. It shares with us its glorious expanse, gives us space to breathe. It and the ship are as one. There are no destinations, once you have arrived.’
‘But Helen’s husband?’ I said, struggling to hold on to my certainty. ‘Why must she forget him?’
‘So many people died. Would you have their loss – or even Anna’s – define our life on the ship? We move on. We honour our dead by living well.’
It was as though a mist was emanating from my father, a scented, warm mist that covered my skin and entered into my brain, so that his thoughts and mine became one. As I breathed, I tasted the life he had poured into the ship, so that I could be safe. And I realised that the reason
he had dedicated his life to creating the ship was because he loved me. Not my mother, who had always argued with him, but me. I was flesh of his flesh. I was made from a part of him; from that part, I had grown under his care and guidance; because of that part, he had planned and created a new world, brought it into being, made it concrete. Because of him, I could weep for the dead in the British Museum, mourn for the drowned in India, feel the luxury of horror at my recollections of the rats chewing on the homeless in Russell Square Gardens. Because of him, the crater in Regent’s Park was just a crater in Regent’s Park, neither closer nor more relevant to me than a crater on the moon.
‘And Tom?’ I breathed softly, forgetting the pain for a moment as I readied myself for his anger and gathered myself up to fight. If he denied me Tom, I would be able to hate him. I would find the energy to tell the people what was going on, and to defy him.
But there was no anger in him. He looked younger, and I saw the face my mother had loved before I was born. ‘I would not have my children be alone,’ he said softly. ‘And if a generation yet to come retreats into the sports hall and seals the door – well, it is good to know they will be together, and fulfilled. But that moment won’t come. I believe in my people. Their creativity, their ingenuity. I believe in you. I can’t tell you what the future looks like, my darling, but I know that it will be beautiful. How can it be anything else, with this as its beginning?’ I saw Tom’s green eyes looking down on me, and I saw his gentleness with the children, felt his hands upon my skin. Was there really no destination? Were we to glide along for ever, uncomplaining in a field of plenty?
But I wanted more. I wanted to be with Tom, to share everything I was with him. To hold his heart in mine and defend it; to share our stories and determine our own future. That was my hope.
The Ship Page 20