The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  I felt my eyes narrow and my face go hard. Who was the doctor, to tell Tom and me what to do? ‘Does my father know about your watch?’ I sneered. ‘And your mugs?’

  He turned his back on me and shut the door behind him.

  EIGHTEEN

  I bite the apple the fourth deck and what I found there Emily’s story

  I made a mark beside my bunk; now there were eighty-one. Eighty-one sunrises. In the time before, that would have been eleven weeks and four days. More than two months and less than three. On the ship, it meant nothing, but I would not let the counting go, no matter how uncomfortable it made Tom or how much it went against my father. We had been too quick to throw the mast into the sea; the fact that it lay there, being eaten by whatever creatures there were, or simply rusting alone in the junk and poison that had been thrown there over the decades, did not mean I could forget the bulletins it had once broadcast.

  The doctor had forbidden me to work until my face was healed. I was to lie in my bunk and rest until he gave me permission to get up. All around me, I heard the sounds of the people waking up and preparing for the day. I heard water running in the cabin to my left; that was the woman with the long grey hair cleaning her teeth. The clunk that followed shortly afterwards was the tap being turned off. Another such clunk came from the cabin to my right; subconsciously, they had synchronised their teeth-cleaning. Oh, we were all so safe, so safe, wrapped in our soft down duvets with our shining white teeth and clean clean skin, gradually becoming one.

  But the toothpaste would run out.

  We are better nourished than our forefathers, my father said. Their bread was only made of wheat; ours is fortified with vitamins and proteins. Their vegetables rotted after a few days; ours will last for ever, their flavour and nourishment locked in until we need it. We are deficient in nothing; if we were, we could take a tablet from one of the millions of little bottles with which we are equipped. We want for nothing. Nothing.

  I gripped my duvet and decided not to clean my teeth. I would never clean them again. If they rotted, the rot would give the ship a marker of time that could not be ignored or banished. My healing bruises would mark time for a while, but when my face healed, I’d smile every single day, so that the people could see my teeth turn yellow, then black, then fall out one by one. The walls might remain white and the crockery unchipped, but they would all remember that Lalage Paul once had teeth.

  My mouth was dry. I thought about getting up for water, but my head ached and I lay back on my pillow. The noises were not only those of my neighbours heaving themselves from their bunks, making their beds, slipping their deck shoes on for breakfast. No, the very ship itself seemed to wake up at this time. The rings and clangs were the metal plates of which the ship was constructed expanding as the sun rose, just as we all stretched our bodies to the new day.

  I heard Helen’s voice shepherding the children to breakfast. Helen’s school was now a regular part of the ship; my father had given her a huge touchscreen, and the children sat around it, watching as she showed them how to form letters, read words, navigate the research room and the gallery. I’d seen them going from breakfast to lessons, then tumbling out like so many bread rolls from the basket at dinner, and bouncing to the net to swim, or to the sports hall, where Tom took their football lessons.

  My father had created it, and they were happy.

  I waited for silence. My duvet was light and warm, the way I always imagined a cloud would feel when I watched them floating across the blue sky, their edges tinged with sunlight. My mother, perhaps, was sitting on such a cloud, looking down on me and wondering whether I was going to be all right. Maybe Tola was with her, laughing at the way some people worried about whether there were going to be any pink cakes left when it was their turn to choose. Maybe there was a cloud big enough for all of us, and we would climb to it slowly as the ship sank underneath us, and we would all sit there, comfortable and warm, eating fruit. Here, Lalla, my mother said, this is for you. And she put something cold and hard and round into my hands, and I smelled sweetness and sharpness and my teeth stung as I pierced its skin and juice flooded my mouth. An apple, an apple, and the eggs had shells.

  I sat up sharply. A sound, not of settling metal but of wood, hard yet forgiving, close to my head. The sound came again, a dull, dense thud, and I realised someone was knocking at my door.

  It could only be Tom. Love Tom, and let it be.

  I was naked under my nightdress. As I raised myself from my bunk, the cotton brushed the backs of my knees and my stomach and my breasts and sent blood rushing to my face. Where the cotton touched, I burned; where it did not, the skin was cold, and the hairs upon it lifted in anticipation.

  Tom had come.

  Maybe the ship could be my home. We could tell my father, have a cabin together, make a home among the boxes on the fourth deck, install a ladder and make love on the roof of the world. Love, everyone kept saying. Love. Tom had missed me at the breakfast table and run to find me when he heard I had been hurt. Love was the biggest thing after all. If we loved each other, everything else could rot.

  Except my teeth. I would clean them after all. There was toothpaste enough for now.

  I took a deep breath, steeled myself against the pain in my head, and opened the door. There, on the threshold, was my breakfast on a tray.

  I hated them all. I hated Emily and Gerhard and Patience and the doctor and Tom and his green eyes and Helen and the school. I hated my father for living and my mother for dying. I hated myself for being so sure that Tom would come to me, and for giving myself away to the doctor. And most of all, I hated this life, this death, this timeless place of plenty that I had not chosen and over which I had no control.

  I kicked the tray, scattering bread and jam and tea over the corridor, and went back into my cabin, slamming the door. I picked up the apple Tom had given me, green and shining, and I thought, what if this is the last apple in the whole world? I clung to Tom; Tom had brought me the apple. This apple is mine, I thought, and I will have it. I brought it up to my mouth; I bared my teeth; I brought them down on the apple as though it was the last thing I would ever do. My teeth cracked; my broken nose jolted under its dressing; I breathed dry dust into my lungs and choked. The apple fell to the floor with a puff of plaster dust, its shining green coat of wax cracked and falling away. For a moment I thought, if that was an apple I’m not missing much. Then pain blossomed through the anaesthetic. I held on to it, and as it receded I refused to let it go. My cabin went dark and I slipped into a place that was something like sleep, where my mother was calling me.

  I lay in a haze of pain and followed the sound of her voice, past the infirmary, past the pharmacy. It was dark, but somehow I knew what I was looking at and where I was going, because she was leading me. On the second deck I peered into the games stadium, where a line of footballs waited for breakfast to be over. No, Lalla, you must keep going. So I did, onto the third deck, where I opened doors into empty rooms while my mother called, Come further up, further up. I climbed up to the fourth deck, where a delicious smell came from behind a closed door. I pushed it open and sunlight poured over me. There was a tree, covered in little pink flowers from which petals fell like rain. I stepped in, and felt grass beneath my feet. Shut the door behind you, Lalla, and you need never go back. I could see the grey metal of the ship through the open door behind me.

  I opened the next door, where row upon row of floured rounds of dough rose gently in front of an open oven filled with logs of brightly burning wood. Behind the next door, an old woman sat in a rocking chair with a little child on her knee and a storybook in her hands. Behind the next was a garden in which rows of feathery leaves stuck out of the ground; an old man in muddy blue trousers pulled at the leaves and there, dangling from his hand in a spray of earth, was a carrot. The man held out the carrot to me; his eyes were green. ‘Are you Tom’s grandfather?’ I asked, but my mother was still calling.

  If you come far enough, you will
find me.

  The corridor stretched before me lined with doors on either side, hundreds of doors; I could not see their end. I saw a man painting in fat strokes of blue and yellow with a bandage over his ear. A woman in a long lace dress held her hair in a knot on the top of her head and gazed into a mirror; seven or eight girls floated across a wooden floor in pale pink dresses that stuck out; a whole orchestra played something that touched me below my ribcage and made me feel that I could listen for ever. Music. I would love to play music, I thought, and wondered if someone in this orchestra would teach me if I closed the door.

  A man wrote with a pen on sheets of paper that he threw over his shoulder as he filled them. Another raised an axe and cut the head off a chicken; the chicken ran around headless for a few seconds, spurting blood from its neck. And behind the next door were thousands, millions of people. At first I thought it was a riot, because so many people were gathered together, but I noticed that they were staring at a patch of green with men running about on it chasing a black and white ball.

  The football made me think about Tom. Tom, with his strong hands and green eyes and his desire for me. Tom was not behind any of these doors. Even as I tried to choose between the music and the dancing, the garden and the bread slowly rising, I knew that what I was looking at was as distant and illusory as the idea of my mother coming back. They were images from other people’s dreams. That was all I was. A part of other people’s dreams. The entire ship was a dream that my father and mother had conjured up for me.

  Only Tom was real. He had not come yet, but he would, and if I wasn’t there, he would go away. The thought of Tom pulled me back, away from the corridor and the doors, back to my cabin, where the sun was shining full through my porthole and my nose was bleeding and I felt blinded by the pain in my head and my nose and my torn cheek. My hand was being held, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Tom hovering over me, his green eyes wide with concern.

  ‘Lalla,’ he said. ‘Oh, Lalla, what have you done to yourself?’

  ‘The ship did it,’ I said, struggling to sit up. He arranged my pillows and helped me settle back. It was easier to settle when he was with me. ‘I went out in the storm. But Tom, listen. I know what’s going on. And I know what we should do. I’m sure now.’

  Tom sighed, but before he could answer me, there was a knock at the door. He jumped to open it; it felt as though he was avoiding what I had to say. Emily stood there with my breakfast tray at her feet. The tea-soaked bread and broken jam pot had all been gathered neatly together. In her hands she held another tray, this one with two bowls on it – one of soup and another of tinned pears. She gave the tray to Tom.

  ‘The doctor says Lalla needs to eat,’ she said as she stepped over the ruined breakfast tray and came in. The little cabin was crowded now.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’re hurt,’ Emily said carefully. ‘You need to rest and eat and give your body a chance to recover.’ She took the soup from the tray and offered it to me but I kept my hands by my sides. ‘Lalla,’ she said, ‘I’m trying to help you. Everyone is.’ She put the bowl back on the tray and motioned to Tom to put the tray on the desk. ‘What’s this?’ she said, as a bit of the wax and plaster apple crunched under her deck shoe. ‘Honestly, Lalla, you make more mess than everyone else on the ship put together.’ I looked at the white and green shard in her hand. She was turning it over, touching the sharp edges.

  ‘That’s the apple I gave you, isn’t it?’ Tom said. ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘It wasn’t an apple,’ I said, my voice wavering.

  ‘You didn’t try to eat it, did you, Lalla?’ Tom looked as though he was about to laugh, and then he sighed. ‘Oh, Lalla, you are an idiot. Why can’t you just let things be what they are?’ I turned away from him, but the cabin was so small I ended up looking at the wall beside my porthole.

  Emily sat beside me with her arm around my shoulders. ‘We’ve got apples, Lalla. I’ve told you before. Apple pie, apple crumble, apple pancakes, apple strudel, apple cake. Tell me what you want, Lalla, and we’ll get it for you. Won’t we, Tom?’

  Tom stood awkwardly by the door. ‘She doesn’t mean apples like that. She means, you know – a round apple, off a tree. But what’s the difference? Lalla? Really?’ I kept staring at my bit of wall, angry that he was speaking for me, angry that he was belittling something I’d cared about. ‘I’d better get to lunch,’ he said when I wouldn’t answer. ‘And then I’ve got work. But I’ll come and see you later, all right?’ I wouldn’t answer, and he was gone.

  Emily smiled after him. ‘He can’t sit still, that one,’ she said as the door closed. She stroked the hair away from my face and wiped the tears from my bruises very, very gently. ‘Your poor face, Lalla. What were you thinking of?’ She took my hands in both of hers.

  ‘We’re floating round in circles,’ I said, sniffing, tasting blood at the back of my throat. ‘No one will listen to me, and I don’t know what to do. We’re not allowed to talk about the past. We don’t know what’s going on back on land. And I’ve broken my apple, and Tom called me an idiot.’

  Emily looked around my cabin and saw the pink pills above the sink. ‘When I was a teenager,’ she said, walking over and picking up the vial, ‘I thought the world would end when the law against the manufacture of new clothes was passed.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘No, you’d have been a baby then. Maybe not even born. But the point is that the world didn’t end. We had to change our ideas of what new meant. And you need to do the same. You’ve got this idea of what it means to be alive, and you won’t even try and accept that this is it. I can’t bear it, Lalla. I can’t bear to see you turning your back on all this. On Michael. On Tom.’ She held out the pills. ‘Do you want one of these? Does it hurt?’

  ‘You all knew,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You knew we weren’t going anywhere, and you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘We all told you a thousand times. Alice. Tom. Roger. Even Michael. You just wouldn’t hear.’ She looked ruefully at me as she put the pills back, and I thought of the doctor and the way he had lost his wife and child.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m happy. I live right here, right now, and Michael is – oh, Michael’s wonderful. He’s everything. Why would I talk about the past? The ship is just … it’s like Heaven. Made with love.’

  ‘I missed your testimony.’

  ‘Whose fault was that?’ She knelt on the floor, gathering up bits of broken apple in a cupped hand. She put the apple pieces on the breakfast tray and brushed the plaster dust from her hands. ‘All right. I’ll tell you. But then I’m never going to talk about it again. Do you understand?’ I nodded. ‘Do you remember Tube trains? Before the stations were all sealed up?’

  ‘I remember the boarded-up stations. I don’t remember the trains.’

  ‘Well. This was eight or nine years before the ship, just after the Dove. People risked the Tube if they had work to get to. The gangs down there were at war with each other, after all, not with ordinary people. So when the screen said there was work in Uxbridge – a government distribution centre being built – my husband decided to go.’

  ‘You were married?’

  Emily nodded. ‘We’d just found a flat,’ she said. ‘You remember the Possession of Property Act?’

  ‘A bit,’ I said, although I didn’t.

  ‘It came in just after the Nazareth Act. Any property that had belonged to the banks reverted straight to the emergency government. If you found an empty property and stayed in it for seven days, you could live there. But if you left it, there was always the risk that someone else would take it. And we wanted to have a baby. So Peter went to Uxbridge alone. We’d saved enough food for five days; we didn’t think it would be that long.’

  ‘My mother and I went out sometimes,’ I said. But even as I spoke, I thought of the locks, the bolts, the keypad whose code we changed as regularly as
we checked the government updates on our screens.

  ‘It was a good flat,’ Emily said, ‘and I had my screen, and the next biometric re-registration wasn’t for a week. I was quite pleased to stay. I never really liked the outside. But Peter was different. Peter liked adventure. He liked challenges. Tom reminds me of him, actually. He took a rucksack and went to the Tube station. Covent Garden, it was. We used to laugh, because we’d never have been able to live in Covent Garden if it hadn’t been for the crash. It was Peter’s idea. He used to see the best about everything. Even those foul government-issue water-sterilising tablets.’

  ‘My mother used to boil my water.’

  Emily nodded. ‘Lucky you. Peter just said that at least the taste told us that the water was safe. The second night he was away, the bulletin went live to Covent Garden station. I thought it was a new act, or maybe even a feelgood story about a gang defeat or something. And then the screen showed the lift doors opening.’

  ‘I thought Tube stations had moving staircases.’

  ‘Covent Garden had these great big lifts. And on the bulletin, the lift arrived in the station, and the doors opened, and the floor was covered in dead bodies. One man stood alone in the middle, still alive.’

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘I could see the terror on his face. And blood – oh, the blood. Shining on the floor, filling the gaps between the bodies.’ She looked at the floor, where the blood from my nose was congealing. ‘The troops arrived and I was glad, because I thought they’d help him.’ I held my hand out to her and she gripped it without looking at me. ‘I thought they’d bring him home. We had an oil stove for emergencies and I lit it to make him a hot drink, even though I knew he’d tell me off for wasting the oil.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The troops arrested him.’

  ‘Arrested Peter?’

  Emily nodded. ‘When the bulletin was repeated the next hour, they said he’d been found guilty of exploiting the instability of the transport infrastructure to murder fellow travellers for food. They unpacked his rucksack live on air and put the case to a Peoples’ Jury.’