My mother and father had never allowed me to participate in a Peoples’ Jury, but it was impossible to use the screen and not see them. If your card was valid, you could vote – the red button for execution, the green for a peoples’ pardon.
‘The rucksack was full of food. Powdered milk, flour, dried egg, pasta, tinned vegetables. A sponge pudding in a tin. Sugar. And with each item they took out, the red bar kept going up and up. Peter said he’d been given the food as wages, and that the bodies had been thrown into the lift after a gang fought with troops on the platform. But the screen displayed the comments people sent in, and all anyone wrote was that if Peter was telling the truth about the gang, how come the gang hadn’t taken the food? I kept pressing the green, over and over, but I only had one vote. Peter was executed, and the next day they announced that the Tube would be closed. Permanently.’
She released my hand and I watched her rocking gently on my bed.
‘What happened?’
‘I had—’ she clutched at her stomach as though she was in pain – ‘this burning rage. His face, staring down at those dead bodies, so terrified – it was all I could think of. They used him. They just wanted to close the stations so they wouldn’t have to worry about the gangs. He was set up. I had to do something.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I disabled the Dove and got on the raven routes. I knew I was risking my screen and my registration. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. At first it was just obsolete stuff – tonnes of it. Supermarkets, holidays, all that campaign stuff about saving the insects. Insurance. Everything for sale in a place where there was nothing left. But I kept at it, and when I finally accessed the restricted stuff, I was sick. Lalla, it was horrible. People – and animals – and children. And I couldn’t even close my eyes in case I missed a pop-up. I had to go through it all until I found the blogs. But I found them, and when I did, I posted and posted. Anywhere I could find. I wrote about Peter, and about the trial, and about the look on his face and the rucksack full of food that had got him executed. I told the Peoples’ Jury voters that they were cowards and fools, and that they deserved to lose the Tube. The longer the Dove was disabled, the higher the risk, but I could not stop. And then there was a knock at the door.’
‘What did you do?’
‘My screen began to burn. Some virus. It was amazing it had held out for as long as it did.’
‘Did you have another screen?’
She turned to me and her eyes were huge and shining. Her face was pale; she reminded me of my mother, and I stopped listening for a moment. I was thinking about my mother’s face, frowning with impatience, or pale with determination, and finally, purple and strangled with pain.
‘Do you think I had a stack of screens behind the door?’ Emily demanded. I said nothing. We had had a stack of screens. ‘My screen was dead,’ she told me, her eyes dry and blazing. ‘Peter was dead, killed by the people who were supposed to protect us, and our dream of a family was over. I’d lost everything. Can you understand that? Of course not,’ she continued before I could speak. ‘You got given everything you wanted, didn’t you?’
‘I want my mother,’ I said.
Emily’s face softened again and she put her hand to my cheek. ‘I want a child.’
I pushed her hand away from my face. I didn’t care about her story anymore. Emily was not my mother and never would be. I wanted my mother. I wanted something of her, something she had touched, worn, owned. I pulled my clothes from the cupboard, tossing them across the room while Emily hopped about, flapping her hands and begging me to stop, but there was nothing of my mother left. My orange dress had never been returned. Even the marks on the broken button had been made by someone else. I called up books we had read together on my screen, but they flashed across the screen exactly as they had the first time, the second time, every other time. There were no pencil marks, no crumbs or stains, none of the million telltale creases and folds we had made in the pages of our paper books. And our paper books were still in London. Was my mother with them, a collection of crumbs and creases? A crumb or a crease was all I wanted.
I ran to the lower deck, ignoring the pain. Emily’s voice followed me, calling, ‘It was your father at the door. Your father, Lalla, come to save me.’ But it might as well have been the troops she’d feared for all I cared.
I stood where I had stood when my mother’s body was released into the sea. I watched the part of the sea where she had gone under for a moment, then floated back to the surface, her dress swirling around her in mockery of my father’s plans. But as long as I stared, I could not see the swirls and eddies repeated. There were no scars on the water. My mother was dead. The water had covered her over. That was our existence on board ship. It was what my father meant by time no longer. A life of the moment, a life of now, with no yesterdays and no tomorrow. There would be hunger and tears, even death, but the water’s surface would never be marked.
What was I to do? Return obediently to my cabin? To accept that this was my life now, and take what sweetness from it I could? To take my place, love Tom, and let Emily love me?
Or to take all the pink pills I could find and hope that my mother would take me to the fourth deck once more, where I could choose a door, and shut it behind me?
Footsteps came up behind me. ‘Lalla?’ said a voice, and it was my father’s voice, and Emily was tripping along behind him, worry written all over her face. But the hands that were placed on my shoulders were his hands, and the face that looked into mine when I turned around was his face.
‘I want my mother,’ I said.
‘She’s dead.’
‘But I can’t feel her. I can’t hear her.’ My voice wobbled out of control. ‘I can’t even remember what she looks like.’
‘Darling girl. Darling, darling girl.’
I rested my swollen face on his shoulder. ‘I broke my apple,’ I sobbed. He kissed my cheek. ‘It was made of wax. Wax and plaster.’
‘Oh, Lalla. I never imagined you’d think it was real.’
I stopped crying. ‘How do you know about it?’
‘It came from a museum, before we sailed. I was going to give it to Anna – have an apple, Michael, she used to say, do you remember? But she died, and when Tom came to see me, asking if I could suggest a present for you, of course I thought of the apple.’
‘You gave it to Tom? To give to me? It was your idea?’ He nodded and I felt my stomach drop to the deck.
‘Where is Tom now?’ I asked.
‘He’s probably busy. The ship carries on, you know. We can’t just stop everything because one person gets hurt. Have a shower. Choose something pretty to wear. Don’t just sit and wait for him.’
The pain was creeping back. My eyes were watering and my nose pulsating under the dressing. I could feel blood seeping through the bandages and trickling down my face.
‘Why can’t I find my mother?’ I whispered.
‘Because you’re looking in the wrong places. You should think of the things you loved most in her, and find them in other people.’
But what I had loved most in my mother was the way she stood up to my father. And that was the one thing I could not find in any other person on the ship.
My father led me back to my cabin and I consoled myself by imagining Tom longing for me, missing goal after goal because he wanted me so much. I dreamed up scenarios in which he got into trouble and had a trial like Helen’s, where he stood up and told everyone that the ship could sink for all he cared, because he loved me, and he was going to help me take the ship to land.
Emily brought my supper on a tray. Mashed potato and gravy, carefully selected so that I would not have to chew. I gave the tray back to her untouched, and she rolled her eyes and went away.
Grow up, Patience had said. So had my father. Even Alice had told me to try and be happy, which meant the same thing. But we were speaking different languages. To them, growing up meant acceptance of the world around me. I did not
yet know what it meant to me.
What was on the other side of my door that I wanted, anyway? Food made me feel sick. I had no desire for book group, or football, or tennis, or swimming, no urge to learn to knit, or embroider, and no reason to sit quietly and count my blessings as the others did. The ship had taken my mother and my father from me, and although it had given me Tom, the balance would not be even until Tom and I were together, and on our way somewhere. It didn’t have to be London. I would not have my children be alone, my father had said, and yet here I was, alone. I could not trust him. I had my portal, but there was no facility on it for sending messages now that the mast was gone. We were all flesh and blood friends, my father said; if we wanted to tell someone something, all we had to do was knock on their cabin door.
But Tom clearly thought the football was more important.
I turned my portal on and wandered the galleries of the British Museum, but the photographs were meaningless. I wanted to press my hands against the glass; to be tantalised by the possibility of touch. I tried to read, but my screen wasn’t working properly – Ballet Shoes had frozen at Petrova longing for a moving staircase and I could neither read on nor load another book.
Emily came back with a mug of warm milk and some biscuits on a tray. It was getting dark, and I wondered if she had left it so late on purpose, so that she would not have to stay with me.
‘I want Ballet Shoes,’ I said.
‘Ballet?’ she said eagerly. ‘I’m sure …’
‘No, the book. Ballet Shoes. I can’t get my portal library to scroll.’
‘Take it to Christopher,’ she said. ‘He’ll sort it out. Do you want me to do it for you?’
And suddenly, I was gripped by a panic so real that I struggled to breathe. The room swam around me, and I forgot about Tom, about being shut up, about not being allowed to work. I drew breath to scream, but instead found myself sobbing.
‘What’s the matter, Lalla?’ Emily said, putting down the tray on my desk and coming to me. ‘Lalla, talk to me. Let me help you.’ But I was crying too hard for words, and my breath came in gasps.
‘Is it your mother?’ she asked, putting her arms around me. I found myself clinging to her. Salt tears set my cut face stinging. What if Ballet Shoes was gone for ever? I tried to explain, but fear made me inarticulate, and I found myself sobbing, gulping for breath, until I wore myself out. As my sobs subsided, I became aware of Emily’s arms around me and wriggled away.
‘Drink your milk,’ she said as I hugged my knees. ‘If you dip the biscuits in, they’ll be soft enough for you to eat.’ She went to my desk and fetched the tray. ‘Shall I send Tom to visit?’ she asked.
‘No.’ I looked at Emily and wanted to hurt her like I was hurting. ‘He’ll come if he wants to. You only come because my father makes you.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. None of you care about me. You just want me to be like you. Forgetting what’s gone. Forgetting the dead. All of you just want me to be what you want. Not one single person on this ship gives a damn about me or what I want.’
Emily threw the tray. Milk splashed across the wall; biscuits, mug and plate shattered together. The tray fell with a flat crash. The light of my desk lamp caught the fragments of plate as they exploded from the wall. Almost immediately, she knelt and began to gather the pieces together. She held one up for a moment; it was pointed and sharp. If she drives that into me, I thought, I will not flinch. I will bear the pain, and my scars will tell my story.
But she did not stab me. She put the pieces on the tray and spoke slowly and carefully. ‘Lalla,’ she said, then took a breath. ‘Love works both ways. It’s not enough to love someone. You have to let them love you, too.’ She brushed the biscuit and china crumbs from her hands onto the tray and spoke as though she were reciting a lesson. ‘Love is patient,’ she said. ‘Love is kind. But all you’ve ever done with our love for you – Tom’s, mine, Patience’s, even Michael’s – is to turn it into some kind of weapon. Tom doesn’t know what you want. None of us do. Michael told me to bring you round with love, but my goodness, you don’t exactly make it easy.’ She nodded towards the milk, its translucent tear tracks marking the wall. ‘I’ll have this cleaned up. Get some sleep and sort yourself out, Lalla, because I can’t take any more of you.’ She took the tray in both hands, stood up, and walked away.
The night was black, but I knew Emily would find her way. She would not be left to fall in a storm, to break her face on the ship. She was loved; she let people love her, and neither the ship nor my father had anything to prove to her.
NINETEEN
Oranges panna cotta subversives on the ship
That night, my thoughts circled and clashed and made noises I could not bear. Tom and my father, and Emily, and Roger, all tumbled around in my aching head until I didn’t know what to think. Less than three months ago, my biggest challenge had been to remember the code on our keypad. Now my mother was dead, my father had adopted five hundred other people and my lover said he wanted to marry me, then walked away. When the first rays of sunrise came through my porthole, there was a knock on the door. I lifted my head to see, not Tom, but my father, standing in the doorway. He looked at the milk marks on the wall, the blood on the floor, and at me, crumpled and bruised on the bed. I expected sympathy, but he was not sympathetic.
‘Emily was in tears most of last night,’ he said. ‘You can’t go round upsetting people just because you’re angry.’ He sat down. ‘You were lucky, compared with other people.’
‘I know.’
‘I think you forget. Do you know what Diana was doing when I rescued her for the ship, for example?’
‘No,’ I said, resisting the temptation to say that I didn’t care.
‘She was standing over her brother’s dead body with an iron bar.’
‘Why?’ I asked, interested in spite of myself.
‘She was fighting off poachers. People who came for the freshly dead.’ I felt sick. ‘There’s a lot of meat on a human being. We spared you a lot. Cannibalism. Chlorella.’ I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s an algae. You grow it in human urine and eat it to keep yourself alive. Anna never taught you that, did she? It’s time for you to stop wallowing and wake up. I’ve spoken to Gerhard and you’re going to the kitchen. You will work there for a while, and as you work, you will look at the food that is provided for you here. You will eat it, and you will stop obsessing about apples. Of course there are things you don’t have. But there is so, so much more that you do.’
‘You never ate chlorella.’
‘How would you know? You have no idea. Literally no idea of what I went through to keep you and your mother safe. Of what the world had become.’
I left him in my cabin and stalked off to the kitchen immediately, so that Tom would not find me if he came. Accept things for what they are, he had said. But to do that, you had to know what they were. Otherwise, you would accept something, and then find it was something else, and then you’d have to accept that, and no one would ever know what anything was. How could that be life?
Gerhard nodded as I walked in. He told me to take over making up the orange juice. He and Emily brought up concentrate from the freezers after dinner and put it into plastic buckets to thaw overnight. He showed me the jugs and the proportions and I began. As I did so, I watched the people through the kitchen doors. They drifted in, and I watched the patterns of their groupings. I watched Helen. She had been reabsorbed, forgiven for the photograph album. I saw Diana, and thought about the people who would have eaten her brother. Frozen orange juice didn’t seem so bad, when that was the alternative.
Tom came in. I watched him smiling at people who were not me. Was he looking for me? Was my father keeping him away from me, or did he simply not want me anymore? I couldn’t tell. Gerhard and Emily hugged him, warm, encouraging touches for which they were rewarded with sighs. This is an orange now, I thought, poking at the ice rock as it turned into slush. This is what an orange
means. It is all an orange means.
‘This is an orange,’ I said, jumping as my words bounced back at me from the walls. Gerhard looked around from the bucket of egg powder. Scrambled eggs for breakfast. Scrambled eggs and orange juice. Those were eggs, these were oranges. Eggs, oranges, eggs, oranges, Eggsoranges.
Tom, I love you. I stared into the bucket. Was it true? If I forgave him for the apple, I would be accepting this world.
‘Are there any oranges left?’ I asked suddenly, my heart pounding. ‘Real ones?’
Gerhard stared at me. Please, I begged silently, please please don’t tell me that these are oranges. I leaned towards him, feeling sick with a struggling maggot of hope inside that, even now, refused to die.
Gerhard looked over his shoulder. We were alone in the kitchen, and he sighed.
‘Tom loves you, you know, Lalla. We all do.’
I refused to answer. He looked over his shoulder again, but we were alone, and I stared at him until he said, ‘I had oranges once. Long, long ago.’
‘Did you have the last orange? The last ever orange?’
‘I don’t know.’
I hesitated over the enormity of what I was about to say, then pointed at the slush and said it anyway.
‘This is not an orange.’
Gerhard looked sharply at me. Then he shrugged. ‘Oranges were a nuisance. Most of the orange went into the bin and the rest you had to wash off your hands.’ He pointed at the plastic bags of concentrate, the cartoon oranges on its label round and bright. ‘This is the way to eat oranges. No skins, no pith.’
‘Pith?’
‘The white, bitter part under the skin.’
I could no more stop than I could produce a fresh orange from the sea. I remembered the petrolheads on the streets. I can stop any time I like, they used to yell at us as we passed. Any time I like. ‘An orange had white parts? It wasn’t just orange all the way through?’
The Ship Page 23