‘No. The very outside was the brightest part. It was filled with tiny little sacs of oil.’
‘Sacks?’
‘Little bubbles under the skin, that burst when you squeezed them. The only way to start peeling an orange was first to pull some of the skin off with your teeth. And the oil would spray out and sting your lips. And then you tore off the skin, and you’d be left with bits of white pith clinging to the orange, and you’d have to tear each bit off, and nine times out of ten you’d go through the membrane into the orange, and the juice would start running out onto your hand and down your sleeve.’
‘Through the membrane? But you’d already taken the skin off.’
‘No, the individual segments were separated by a membrane. Oranges came in segments. The orange was spherical. But the sphere itself was made of segments – portions – separate parts, each covered in a thin skin of its own. That was what contained the flesh and the juice. You pulled each segment free of the others, one by one, and ate them.’
Any time I like. This was better than a picture. I’d seen lots of pictures. But for the first time, I felt I was learning what an orange was. ‘Did you eat the segments whole?’
Gerhard smiled. ‘My brother did. One segment, one mouthful. All gone at once, and the juice dribbling down the sides of his mouth. Me, I used to bite the end off each segment and suck out the insides. And my sister used to slide her fingernail under the segment skin and try to pull it away without bursting the little tiny globules of juice underneath, and then she’d lick the surface under the skin until she couldn’t wait anymore, and then she’d bite.’
‘What globules?’
‘The tasty bit of the orange …’ He suddenly broke off and grabbed a saucepan from the huge metal grid that took up one wall of the galley. All the utensils hung from it, on hooks shaped like the letter S, and when he snatched the saucepan, the handle caught on the edge of the hook. Gerhard yanked it free, and the whole grid started ringing, as though a hundred people in hard-soled shoes were running up the metal staircase.
‘What about the tasty bit of the orange?’ I insisted.
He slammed the saucepan onto the range. ‘It’s not important.’
‘It is to me.’
He rummaged on the racks, trying to drown me out. But if my father had not managed to drown me out with the vastness of the great seas, Gerhard and his saucepan lids stood no chance. Any time I like. But I did not like.
Apples.
Shell eggs.
Oranges.
Life on the ship meant many things. I would never be hungry. I would never be bored. I could make love with Tom for the asking. But I would never be able to decide how I would eat an orange. I would never crack an egg. I would never know how it felt to press my teeth into an apple. How could I feel such a sense of loss for things I had never had?
As though he had heard me, Gerhard said, ‘You’ll never see an orange. And okay so that’s a shame. But you’d never have had one on land either. If all that mess was so great, why did your ancestors work so hard to get rid of it? What’s the point in Michael giving us the essence of oranges if you, his daughter, cannot throw away the rubbish that has gone?’
‘My father said the same thing about pineapples.’
Gerhard did not answer. He stared at me across the galley in silence. His eyes were grey; I suddenly saw him floating in the net, with holes for his eyes and the sea showing through. There were five packages upstairs with his name on. This meant that he was forty-five years old. His hair was dark, but there was grey in it too. Then he crashed the pan lid back into the rack, then hooked the pan back onto the wall grid and set all the utensils jangling again.
My father had brought him home. That was the difference. My home had been a flat in London, near the British Museum, with a mother and a father and a plate with rabbits on it. I had lost my home in coming here, and although I had never eaten apples or oranges there, my consciousness of their one-time existence was connected to it. Everyone else on the ship had had their home wrenched away, leaving them floating, rudderless, on an ocean vaster and more terrifying than the one we were floating on now. Gerhard belonged here, feeding five hundred people on frozen concentrated orange juice, making tiny fancy cakes from sugar paste and imagination. I looked into his eyes, and the ship floated there, reflected from his heart.
‘Why are you so cross with me?’ I asked.
‘Because I love Michael.’
‘I don’t know what he wants from me.’
‘He doesn’t want anything from you. He doesn’t want anything from any of us, except that we should be happy. And if you are lucky enough to have someone in your life whose only thought is of your happiness, then you should be happy.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘I am,’ as though that simple statement would change everything for me.
And in a way, it did. I knew that I would never be able to ask questions of Gerhard again. He had gone the way of Finn, of Helen, of Patience, of Alice. Of Tom? Tom had to come to me. If he did not, I would know I had lost him too.
I looked at the rows and rows of identical white mugs, lined up on the shelf. And two mugs came into my mind. Mugs that were not white. A red one and a blue one, that could not be replaced when they broke. The doctor wore a watch. He said he was happy going nowhere, but he was still hiding something. Why else would he meet with others in secret? Suppose he, too, remembered three women who had been swept, broken, into the sea the day we sailed? Suppose the dead in the British Museum were reaching out to him, too? Maybe he sat around with the others, discussing how they used to eat oranges. And if they did, I wanted to be there.
Clover, Tom’s grandfather had said. Clover, to clean the soil and make it safe. It could be done.
I crumbled some toast onto a plate in the kitchen and sipped some orange juice. I watched the doctor through the door; I watched the people he spoke to. I observed and deduced. Vikram, Abigail. Luke. They didn’t sit together but they spoke to each other, fetching cutlery, taking a second serving, or bringing empty breakfast plates to the hatch. I was not imagining the connection between them. I was more certain of it than I was of Tom’s love for me.
I watched the kitchen team bringing in the dirty dishes and processing them through the steel washers, sliding in rack after rack, locking down the great handles and bringing out sparkling white plates and bowls. I wanted to help, but they were so efficient that, although they smiled at me, I knew I’d only get in the way. And then they were gone, and it was as though breakfast had never happened, and I was sitting in the kitchen alone, watching the white frost slowly disappear from the sides of the silver trays that held our thawing dinner.
I tipped the orange juice out of my glass and rinsed it out, and as I filled it with fresh water, I heard someone calling Gerhard’s name. The door crashed open. ‘Can we have some biscuits?’ Tom said, and stopped when he saw me. ‘Where’s Gerhard?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I helped at breakfast. I did the orange juice.’ I couldn’t help but feel a little pride as I said this, but it soon turned to bitterness. ‘I’m to stay here until I’ve learned that apples aren’t important.’
He looked past me to the cupboards. ‘I wanted some biscuits. The children need something; they’ve been running around for ages.’
I got up and we opened doors and rummaged in crates until we found a hoard of bright packets. I pulled one out.
‘Not those,’ Tom said. ‘Emma likes the ones with the smiley faces on them. The others don’t mind, so we might as well go with Emma.’ I knew Emma; she was one of the younger children, with a row of tiny, white, even teeth and freckles. She worshipped one of the older boys, a boy called Fillipo, who was slightly older than Gabriel. And Fillipo, in his turn, wandered around after Tom, his face tilted up to catch Tom’s every smile. I looked through the cupboard again, and sure enough, there was a red cardboard packet with a cartoon picture of a smiley-faced
biscuit on it. It had arms and legs; it seemed to be dancing. I handed it over and turned away, but Tom put his hand over mine and wouldn’t let go.
‘Come with me,’ Tom said. ‘Come with me now and see their faces. You never saw children smile like this in London.’ I hadn’t seen many children in London at all. But I remembered the ones on the bulletin, being held up to the windows of the British Museum.
‘Where have you been?’ I asked.
Tom looked over his shoulder and spoke quietly and very fast. ‘Michael said I should give you some space. He said to stop crowding you. He’s cross with himself. Angry for making your life so easy that you can’t see how lucky you are. I don’t like seeing Michael angry with himself. I wish you’d just let yourself be happy. I wish that you could be happy with me. But Lalla, if it’s me, if I’m the one making you unhappy, I’ll leave you alone, I promise, even if it kills me. You need to decide.’
I pushed aside my glass of water. ‘You’re the only reason I want to be here,’ I said.
He stroked my bruises so gently that it didn’t hurt. He kissed my forehead. ‘Be with me, then. Let me look after you. It’ll be all right, I promise.’
‘Is the ship really all there is?’ I asked him.
‘You’ve heard the stories,’ Tom said. ‘You saw what you saw in London. It’s not just London either. The ship is our universe, and it’s a good one. Let’s guard it together, you and I. We can, you know.’
I let his arms surround me. My body began to melt. If I was wrong – if the doctor had no secrets and this was all there was – then there were worse things than being with someone you loved, for ever.
‘Can I come to you tonight?’ he whispered. ‘You won’t tell Michael? He told me to leave you alone.’ I shook my head. I wouldn’t tell my father. He had tried to keep Tom from me, and I was never going to tell him anything, ever again. Tom was mine again, and the day went faster in the excitement of knowing he was waiting for me.
Dessert that night was a thing Gerhard called panna cotta, which I had watched him ease out of tall tins with a long knife – a thick, fat snake of opaque white jelly that gave a monstrous sucking sound as it slid from the tin. He cut it into slices and I put a frill of red jelly around each one with a giant toothpaste tube as the kitchen team whisked the plates into the dining room. Gerhard had let me empty one of the tins, but the white snake would not ooze out for me. I had to dig it out with a spoon, and when Gerhard saw what I was doing, he rushed to me in consternation.
‘No, Lalla, no. You are ruining, ruining dessert.’ And he cut the other end of the tin open, and the snake slimed out, whole and perfect except for the concave part where its flat head should have been. ‘You see, Lalla,’ he said, ‘this is why I am the chef and you should go back to the laundry.’ But he was smiling when he said it.
When the panna cottas went out to the tables, everyone gave sighs of appreciation, but I could only think of the fat snakes and wonder if being a chef had always meant knowing the most efficient way of getting stuff out of a tin. I couldn’t eat it, and while I was busy not eating it, I looked out of the kitchen into the dining room. And I saw Luke raise his eyebrows at Roger, and I saw Roger raise his hand to Abigail, and I saw Abigail turn and look over her shoulder at Vikram, and my breath came faster and my heart beat in my ears, because I knew that if I watched them now, I would find out where they were going.
Vikram left first, going towards the doors that led to the toilets. I could not follow him without being noticed, because the men’s toilets were on one side of the dining room and the women’s on the other. Abigail left through the main doors into the ballroom. I moved away from the doors as Emily came in. She looked disapprovingly at my untouched plate, and by the time I had shrugged at her and smiled, Abigail was gone.
‘Lalla,’ Emily said, ‘you’ve got to eat. You know you’ve got to eat.’ I looked back into the dining room but Luke had gone. Only Roger was left.
I walked slowly towards the women’s toilets. I could feel Roger watching me. He was waiting for me to go, but I couldn’t follow him if I left before he did. Then I saw Vikram, walking past the dining-room doors. Roger’s shoulders relaxed as he watched me; I glanced over my shoulder as I opened the doors and saw him pushing back his chair. I almost laughed. Vikram was walking fast and I was behind him. Emily was nowhere in sight. I was safe.
I ducked behind pillars and hid behind cabin doors as Vikram went up the infirmary stairs and doubled back, down a cabin corridor and through to the research room. This was clever, I realised, because anyone watching him leave the dining room would have assumed he was going to his cabin. I saw Abigail approaching the research room from the other direction, and heard voices coming from inside. I waited until she’d gone in, then ran down the corridor and threw open the door, expecting to see them all gathered together. But the research room was empty.
I stood still and listened. I heard footsteps and hid under a table; Roger came in. A door opened and shut and I crawled back out. I scanned the wall with my eyes and saw a door set into it, not steel or shining wood but painted, the same colour as the wall. I had never noticed it before, although I could not say it was exactly hidden. I had simply never looked. I walked over and put my ear to it. Yes, there were voices. I had tracked them down at last.
I pushed open the door. There were no windows, no lights, and all I could see were faces illuminated by the revolving colours of a screensaver. As I edged in, I heard Roger’s voice say, ‘No, no. Regent Street went all the way down to Piccadilly Circus, and then Leicester Square was just beyond that.’
‘That can’t be right,’ said Luke. ‘I used to walk that way all the time. Piccadilly Circus was where the statue of Eros used to be. Right in the middle. And there was a theatre on the opposite side.’
‘And Leicester Square was just down from there.’
‘You’re thinking of Trafalgar Square,’ someone else said, and then they all noticed me and fell silent.
‘Hello,’ I said, because I could not think of anything else. There were six of them. The five I had followed for so long, and one whose presence surprised me so much that I couldn’t say anything else. She looked at me through her red snake-hair fringe and paled.
‘I just …’ I began, but the words dried in my mouth and I did not know how to continue. I was there, they were there, and neither party had the slightest idea what the other was doing. But the fear was tangible. Emily was white and Abigail’s hand shook as she withdrew it from the table. Roger’s eyes were the only ones that met mine, and they seemed to be burning from the inside.
‘How much did you hear?’ he asked finally, his voice rasping and dry.
‘Piccadilly,’ I told him, ‘and Leicester Square. That’s all.’
They looked at each other, and at the lace tablecloth on the desk, which I supposed to be another fourth-deck novelty introduced by my father. I wanted to reassure them that I had heard nothing they did not want me to hear. But that would not be enough. If there was nothing going on, why did they all look so afraid? I wanted to know what they were doing so that I could become a part of it, because I needed to be a part of any activity on the ship that was not being dictated by my father. I wanted them to have something to hide.
‘Does my father know you’re here?’ I asked Emily.
‘Does he know you are?’ she retorted, staring at me.
‘Sit down, Lalla,’ Roger said. There was no spare chair and so I moved towards the desk. ‘Not there,’ he said, but it was too late. I had already touched the tablecloth, and I recoiled at a strange sensation on my hands – something dry and soft which made my skin crawl with its unfamiliarity. I could see their faces clearly in the light from the screen; they were exchanging desperate looks. I moved away from the desk; the dry softness came away on my fingers, and when I looked at them, I could see by the light of the screen that they were covered in white powder. The entire surface of the desk was covered in it. There was no lace tablecloth, only narrow line
s traced painstakingly through a dusting of white, with a great dark emptiness where my hands had been.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked in a whisper, not daring to raise my voice in case I disturbed more of the pattern. They were all staring at my hands, and as the revolving coloured patterns of the screensaver changed from white to red, they became one great wound, with someone else’s lifeblood staining them. I held them out and they all shrank away. My palms were sweating, and little clumps of powder fell to the floor as the red turned to green. No one spoke.
‘What have I done?’ I asked, scarcely able to hear my own voice.
‘That,’ Roger said in a voice devoid of any emotion, ‘was the National Gallery.’
‘And most of Trafalgar Square,’ added Emily bitterly. I turned to the desk and looked more closely. And as the colour on the screensaver changed from green to yellow, and from yellow to a bright, turquoise blue, I studied the lace tracery. The delicate patterns resolved themselves slowly into streets, squares, buildings. If I had obliterated the National Gallery, then this was Oxford Street. I remembered it so well, thronged with desperate people trying to secure supplies from people with things to sell, hundreds tightly packed around little folding tables, grasping with outstretched hands, then spreading like an explosion when the sirens came, only to regather as the sirens passed on. Crossing it was Baker Street, which figured in the stories on my screen about a detective called Sherlock Holmes. From your hands, Lalla, I can see that you have intruded into a place where you have no right to be. And Baker Street led up to the vast expanse that was Regent’s Park, which my mother swore had once been green and open, but which I had only ever seen covered in tents. Blue and purple and green and black and orange, some big enough for families, some so small that only one person could ever have crawled inside.
There was a time when life was an adventure. When the springing up of tents in Regent’s Park made walks with my mother more interesting. When eating tinned peaches for tea was exciting, because it was different. When the horrors of other lives falling apart happened somewhere else, on the screens, or in whispered conversations between my parents that I was not supposed to overhear. As I stared at the powder tracings that marked out Regent’s Park, what I remembered most was the way the tents had been arranged in streets, the way some people had even put little fences around the front of their tent, like a garden.
The Ship Page 24