The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  And I understood, suddenly, that it was this hope that had allowed me to leave food on my plate for the walnut-faced man to finish, this hope that had kept me apart as others had wept at my father’s speeches. Hope that there were still choices to be made, that my future was not set out in tiny stitches in Alice’s tapestry. Hope that whatever miraculous agency had connected Tom and I existed somewhere beyond the ship, and that by being together, we would find it. Hope was the danger. If I threw hope overboard, there would be certainty. Without hope, oranges and eggs would become historic curiosities, like jade axes. Apples would not bother me, and I would never have to worry about where the sun rose. With hope gone, I would have space in my mind to wonder about the glories my father had hidden away in the storerooms, and to dream of the people of the ship all looking at me with love and pride as I fulfilled my father’s plans for me.

  To give up hope would be to give up Tom, because Tom was my hope, and I could not live without him, no matter what I owed to my father. I’ll go back to London with you, Tom had said once upon a time, if it’s really what you want. Tom, not my father, was where my trust resided now. For all his talk of death, my father had not died. It was my mother who had taken a bullet and had her body invaded by poison from the infected wound. My father was alive, adored, standing before me, and he knew nothing of the woman I had become. But Tom did, and together, we would work out what to do with the truth I had discovered.

  My father switched the overhead light on again. He stood before me, tall and powerful and smiling, his torso outlined by his rain-soaked shirt, stained with my blood. Only surrender hope, and I would have the universe at my feet. The world beyond the ship would no longer exist, and therefore no longer matter. I could ask my father for deck shoes, throw my old shoes into the sea and consign them to a fantasy world that may never have existed. Hope. The cruellest thing in Pandora’s box. Disease, death, destruction, misery, pain, loss; terrible though they were, hope was the worst. Because it was hope that made humanity bear the rest.

  And that was what the ship was. A life without hope.

  I looked down at my cracked red shoes, felt them press against my feet. My mother had given them to me. They were a part of the life I had lived before, and if I threw them away, they would still exist, and become shoe-shaped coral beneath the sea. For as long as there were my red shoes, for as long as I could remember the British Museum, for as long as my mother’s voice still sounded in my head, for as long as I loved Tom, I would have hope, and my life would be hard. The pain of my broken nose reasserted itself and my father’s cabin began to swim.

  ‘Lalla,’ he said, coming towards me with his arms outstretched, ‘I love you.’

  But it was too late for that.

  SEVENTEEN

  My broken nose the doctor’s tale stupidity

  I had wanted to know, and now I did. We were going round and round in circles, stimulated, loved, learning, too dizzy on plenty to see. Part of me was aghast that I had not realised what was going on. And yet how could I have realised? My father claimed to have created the ship for me. His chosen people had brought their children on board. They were not cruel, or selfish, or unkind. I could not hate them for their decision; indeed, when I concentrated on today, or tomorrow, or even the day after that, I could understand. Already I was so used to the motion of the ship that I didn’t notice it. But we would grow old. We would stumble about, scraping the remains of the preserved foodstuffs into each other’s mouths, throwing each other’s bodies into the sea with the rubbish as old age or illness claimed us. And when we lost the strength in our arms, the bodies would lie on the deck as they had lain in the streets of London, and those who were just little children now would step over them as they went to the stores, anxiously calculating how long the food might hold out. How different would life on the ship be from life in London then? The passing of time would return us from whence we had come, for as long as we chose to do nothing. How the children would curse us. My father held out the sealed sports hall as some kind of last resort, but slow suffocation seemed a poor sort of future to me, no matter whose hand I might be holding.

  My father left me in the infirmary, in the company of the doctor once more. The doctor set about cleaning the blood from my face and injecting my face with something that made it go numb. He pressed white tape over my nose with a grinding crunch that I sensed rather than felt. He stroked cotton wool over my hands and put some cream from a tube onto the cuts. He did not ask how I had come to be injured.

  ‘Michael wants you to stay here until your face has healed a bit.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I could not bear to think of the last time I had been in the infirmary. ‘Take me back to my cabin.’

  ‘I need to keep an eye on you.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ There was a tingling sensation around my nose; it would become painful as the anaesthetic wore off.

  ‘You need to lie still. You can’t traipse across the ship every time I need to check up on you. And the infirmary certainly can’t come to you.’

  ‘I’m not staying in the infirmary on my own.’

  He picked up the clean sheets. I had delivered those sheets only the day before, when I had been a different person. ‘All right,’ he said. He held out his arm and helped me off the bed. I was aching all over – my hands and nose had been the main casualties of my encounter with the ship, but I had bruises all over me. ‘It’s time you and I had a talk anyway. My cabin’s next door. I’ll make tea.’

  I had never seen the doctor’s cabin before; his clothes and sheets went to the infirmary and he collected them from there. It wasn’t like my cabin, or like Tom’s, or like any of the cabins I delivered laundry to. The doctor had two big leather armchairs and an infirmary bed instead of a bunk; the floor was covered in red carpet, and there was an intricately patterned rug between the chairs. I leaned on the back of the chair nearest to the door, trying to look as though I belonged.

  ‘You can sit down.’

  I sat.

  He put teabags into two mugs and poured water onto them from a kettle. They weren’t the white mugs from the dining room. One was red and one was blue, and they had gold patterns on them, swirling over and over, like the swell of the sea. These mugs had not come from the fourth floor. Was this man, whom I had avoided for so long, to be my ally? Was this why he had brought me here?

  ‘Have you always been a doctor?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘It was all I ever wanted to do.’

  ‘Why?’

  He stirred the tea. ‘I thought that people were essentially good. I thought I could help us all to stay alive, stay sane, keep it together so that we could get through. Because humanity’s been in crisis before. And it’s always survived.’

  ‘Even Regent’s Park? The British Museum?’

  He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t the first time bodies have been flung into handcarts.’

  ‘So why didn’t you stay behind and help?’

  ‘The thing is.’ He stopped and stared out of his porthole, as though the thing might be floating in the sea. I willed him to say, I was waiting for you to come and find me, because I knew I could not turn the ship alone. But he didn’t. What he did say, though, was the next best thing. ‘In the past …’

  ‘I thought you weren’t allowed to talk about the past.’

  He gestured dismissively and my heart raced. ‘In the past,’ he continued, ‘no matter how terrible the atrocities, no matter how many lives were lost, there was always a group doing the inflicting, ready to be toppled or challenged or assassinated, or even just to die out and be replaced by someone else. Time goes forward and things change. But that’s not true anymore. This wasn’t a dictator pounding a people into dust.’

  ‘What was it then?’

  ‘Stupidity, mostly.’

  ‘Stupidity?’

  I remembered one of the very few times my mother was angry with me. We’d been to the museum, looking at the mummified cats in the Egyptian galleries. I can only have b
een eleven or twelve, maybe even younger, because the cases were still quite full. We had just finished eating lunch, and I said, ‘Why can’t we have a dog? Or a cat?’

  My parents both looked at me, eyes wide, a mirror of each other’s surprise.

  ‘A pet?’ my mother said. Normally her voice was like a soft hand. This time it was a fist and it hit me in the stomach. The pain was sharp and as it faded, I felt the desire for a dog blossom in its place, until I wanted one so badly that I could feel its fur, wiry under my hand, and its breath hot against my skin. I was a lonely child.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A dog. It could be my friend. I could take it for walks and look after it. You wouldn’t have to do anything. It could sleep on my bed.’

  ‘Lalla,’ my father began, but my mother interrupted him.

  ‘A dog,’ she said. It wasn’t even a question. It was a statement, a flat, bald statement of impossibility.

  ‘Yes.’ I could see it. It had big dark eyes, and it was looking at me, wagging its tail against the floor. A shaggy brown and white tail, the length of my handspan.

  My father spoke with reason and authority. ‘We can’t have a dog, kitten. Someone would eat it. It might get sick. And there aren’t any dogs around anymore, except the ones that have gone wild.’ His voice tailed off as the futility of explaining the obvious overtook him. ‘You’re being silly, Lalla.’

  ‘She’s being stupid.’ My mother was shaking.

  ‘OK, she’s being stupid.’

  ‘It was a stupid thing to say. What was she thinking about, to ask such a thing? What are we working for, to have a daughter who understands so little? A dog?’

  ‘She didn’t mean it.’

  ‘That’s even worse. Why ask for what you don’t want? We give you everything, everything, and you understand nothing.’ Her face was quite white, and I knew that the little brown and white dog with loving eyes I had conjured up in the face of her anger would never return. I had pushed my mother far enough; more than anything, I feared being the reason that she cried.

  ‘She was stupid. That’s all. There’s no charge. It’s all right, Anna.’

  ‘It is not all right. There is a price for stupidity. And it is never the stupid people who pay it. They lumber about like elephants, trampling all over the things other people have planted, then complain when the plants don’t grow. But they don’t go without. Oh no. They want what they want, no matter what has gone before or what will come after.’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘And that’s what stupidity is. Wanting something because you want it. It’s not enough, Lalla. It’s not enough to want something. You have to need it. To need it with your whole heart and soul, and with every last atom of your being, because everything you get is at a cost somewhere. If people had stuck to that, we’d still be living in beautiful places, surrounded by trees, eating food from the earth.’ The image calmed her; her breathing was easier now, and I knew that if she cried, it would not be because of me. The dog retreated across the room and the door closed behind it.

  The doctor passed me the red mug, its handle towards me. ‘Careful,’ he said, ‘it’s hot.’

  ‘Did you talk to my mother about stupidity? When you were interviewed for the ship?’

  He nodded. ‘Anna and I agreed that the only thing to do with stupidity is to escape from it. To get away, somewhere where the decisions it makes cannot affect you. She knew it, but she could never make up her mind to go. We were all sorry about that. We talked about Anna in the holding centre, often. But Michael refused to force her. He is a truly great man, your father, and you are a very lucky young woman.’ He pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch. A watch. He had a watch.

  ‘I’ll have to go soon,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There are some people I said I’d meet.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re doing something,’ I retorted. I thought of all the times I’d watched him in the dining room. ‘You and Abigail and Vikram. And that man with the grey hair down to his ears and lots of stubble. Luke. You meet up secretly.’ There. I had said it now, and my little piece of hope drew breath and shook out its wings. I watched it fly, sparkling and golden, to the doctor, and willed him to give it a home in which to grow. I plunged on. ‘You do know what’s happening, don’t you? We’re sailing round in circles and that’s all we’re going to do for ever. There’s no island waiting for us. But you’re trying to take the ship somewhere, aren’t you? To land somewhere. I can help you.’

  The doctor stared at me and I felt the tape across my nose, the tenderness around my eyes, the scrapes on my palms. The room seemed to turn grey. He closed his eyes and put his forehead in his hands. ‘Little girl,’ he said into his palms, shaking his head. ‘Don’t do this to yourself.’

  ‘Do what?’

  Hope folded its wings and settled on the desk to wait. The doctor lifted up his head. ‘Do you know how I came to be here?’ he asked.

  ‘You had a wife called Sarah and a baby who died,’ I said. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘Then listen,’ he said. ‘I knew the baby might die. I knew the moment that I told my Sarah to push, and she said that she was pushing, and I felt the bump and it was hard and frozen and the head was in the wrong place. I had to get our baby out quickly. Really quickly. Don’t talk,’ he said as I drew breath. ‘You need to stay still, so that dressing can set properly.’

  I put my grazed hands around my hot tea mug and focused on the pain.

  ‘I needed to cut her open. It was routine once, back in the days when there were proper medicines and all doctors had to do was call for them. But my Sarah was too late for that. Hospitals didn’t have anaesthetics and clean blood anymore.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I waited. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Some miracle, I suppose. Anaesthetic to fall from the sky. But it didn’t. Sarah was screaming, and when I finally got on with it, she passed out with the first cut. The hospital generator was working for once, so I put her on the ventilator. I rummaged in her belly. It was like looking for a working pen in a drawer full of junk. And the baby I pulled from her – a girl, blue and purple, covered in a layer of white wax and her mother’s blood – made no sound. I took her, I held her, I breathed for her. I told her I loved her. But I’d waited too long. I couldn’t save her. I laid my baby on her mother and left the room, so that they would not hear me howl.’

  I sat absolutely still.

  ‘There was a monitor and when I went back in, I could see Sarah’s heartbeat growing weaker and weaker. I took our daughter in my arms and sat beside my dying wife, watching. And then Sarah opened her eyes and stared at the baby, and I saw that she was terrified.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told her not to worry. I told her that the baby was fine.’

  ‘But that wasn’t true.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And then I turned off the ventilator.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that the last thing Sarah knew before she died was love and not despair.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because you’re looking for something, Lalla, and you won’t find it in me. Or in anyone here. I was truly sorry I could not save your mother. And Lalla – think of this. If I’d acted more decisively, I could have saved my baby, if not my wife. And if I’d had the infirmary and all its resources, I could have saved them both …’ He let his sentence trail away and I hung onto it with all my might. But he didn’t finish it. He took a breath and started again. ‘Your father and I …’ An agonised look crossed his face. ‘Try and understand, Lalla. Try and understand what the ship cost, and what it means. I thought I would die with missing Sarah and my baby. But now – now that all time is the same time, the world in which I could have saved them is the same as the world in which they died. So when I look at the ship and all that we have here, I don’t see a prison. I
don’t see a trap. I see love.’

  ‘So do I,’ I protested, but he took no notice.

  ‘I see a place where Sarah and my child are with me. Not where they could be with me, or where they might come to me, but where they are. And I love it for that. I love Michael for bringing me here, to live out my days with my family, in comfort, with purpose. And I know what it cost, and that it was a price worth paying.’

  ‘What did it cost?’ I asked, but he ignored me.

  ‘Think of the ship as humanity’s last song,’ he said. ‘I’ve found what I’m looking for, and as far as I know, so has everyone else on this ship. I’ve told you my story. Everyone else’s may be different, but they all come down to this. We are where we want to be. And we thank Michael for that.’

  It was a warning. My nose was pulsing and my eyes beginning to droop. But I could not let go. ‘What about your secret meetings?’ I said.

  He pressed down the tape on my nose a shade too firmly; my eyes widened and watered. ‘You have secret meetings too, Lalla. You keep yours and I’ll keep mine, and we’ll respect each other as Michael asks. Now, will it be the infirmary or your cabin?’

  The message was clear. I could hide where I liked, but I would not find what I was looking for in the doctor, and I would not be welcome in the community of the ship until I had properly surrendered to it.

  We walked to my cabin in the dawn light. The doctor turned his back while I changed into my nightdress, then helped me into my bunk. He held out a couple of pink pills for me, and when I did not take them, he pulled a vial from his pocket, put the pills into it and put it on the shelf above my basin. As he left, he stood in the doorway and said, ‘Take some advice. Skip the bit of your life where you have to rebel and go straight to the part where you embrace what your parents have done for you. Skip the part where you throw everything away and cut straight to being happy. I mean it, Lalla. Especially now.’

  ‘Why now?’

  ‘You and Tom need to come and see me. Together. You need to listen to me, and to yourself, and you need to eat. Will you do those things, Lalla? Do you promise?’